Julia Butterfly Hill

Julia Butterfly Hill (born February 18, 1974, Mount Vernon, Missouri, U.S.) is an American activist known for having lived in a tree for 738 days in an act of civil disobedience to prevent clear-cutting of ecologically significant forests. From December 10, 1997, to December 18, 1999, Hill lived in a 1,000-year-old California redwood tree named Luna and drew media attention to the environmentally destructive logging actions of the Pacific Lumber Company (Palco) under its new owner, Maxxam Corp., controlled by Charles Hurwitz.

(Read E.O. Wilson’s Britannica essay on mass extinction.)

Hill was homeschooled in a deeply religious Christian family that settled in Jonesboro, Arkansas. She began college courses at age 16 and opened her own restaurant at 18. After a near-fatal car crash in 1996, she began to reassess her life’s purpose. Traveling west, she had a spiritual epiphany in California’s redwood forests and redirected her energies, joining the environmentalist movement to curb the destruction of the world’s remaining ancient redwoods.

Her 1997 protest in Humboldt county—which broke world records for tree sitting—sought to prevent deforestation, draw media attention to PL’s disregard for the environment, and educate the public about the role forests play in stabilizing hillsides. PL repressed employee whistle-blowing. Therefore, Hill publicized their new clear-cutting policy that reversed PL’s previous environmental sensitivity. Supported by supplies from Earth First!, a coalition of radical environmental activism groups, Hill lived on a 6-by-8-foot platform sheltered by tarps high in the tree and communicated by cell phone. She faced extreme weather, susceptibility to illness, and numerous attempts by PL to force her down, including the use of floodlights and loudspeakers. After more than two years in the tree, her vigil achieved a settlement that protected Luna’s immediate surroundings and included a $50,000 donation to Humboldt State University for forestry research.

Hill cofounded the Circle of Life Foundation (CILF), committed to transforming human interactions with nature, in 1999. She published a book about her tree-sitting experience, The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods, in 2000. In 2002 she was deported from Ecuador while protesting Occidental Petroleum Corporation’s plan for a new pipeline through the indigenous communities of the Mindo-Nambillo Reserve. Hill joined the war tax resistance movement in 2003 to protest the use of her federal taxes in the Iraq War. In 2006 she participated in a tree-sit at a community farm in South Central Los Angeles to protect working-class immigrant farmers.