ABSTRACT
As the Round River Rendezvous approached, tensions mounted. The Forest Service sent an Earth First! "specialist" to warn residents of the Jemez to beware of monkeywrenching. Soon the agency was blaming Earth First! for burning a barn, wrecking a grader, poisoning cows, threatening a loader operator, sabotaging wells, and monkeywrenching a windmill. By the time the convocation started, activists were paranoid — with reason. A phalanx of uniformed police stood at the parking lot by the trail head leading to their encampment. The surrounding woods crawled with constabulary from the Forest Service, the county sheriff's office, and the state police. For one thing, academia itself was deeply politicized. Silviculturalists and economists sided with loggers, ecologists and conservation biologists with environmentalists. And as the debate continued between forest ecologists such as Chadwick Oliver and proponents of the New Forestry such as Jerry Franklin, the dialogue was ignored by the media.
