In the summer of 1999, during my first-ever visit to the North Coast of far-northern California in the United States, her name was still fresh on people’s lips and her memory alive and well.

Judi Bari had passed away two years before, but the local people still seemed to be speaking and writing about her with a sense of reverence, respect, humanness and humor — in the way that you would go on talking about a dear friend or family member who had died in the present tense, as if they were still alive. I didn’t know a thing about the well-known environmental activist Judi Bari, but I was soon to find out that summer in California.

I learned that Judi Bari had made her home in Mendocino County, the county just south of Humboldt, where I was staying, and that she was a carpenter, musician and nonviolent social activist, especially in protection of the dwindling redwood forests of that part of the state. She was a member of Earth First!, a forest-protection group of activists whose slogan was “No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth,” and she was a labor leader and feminist. And with Judi, they all seemed to blend together.

I found out that in the summer of 1990, Judi was one of the organizers of a nonviolent, direct-action campaign called “Redwood Summer,” intended to raise public awareness of the increasing destruction of the redwood forests in California and to get ballot measures passed by the public that would keep the timber-logging companies in check.

The campaign got its name and guiding spirit from the “Mississippi Summer” (Freedom Summer) campaign of the 1960s, which drew nationwide support in the U.S. for Black voting rights in the American South. Judi and other organizers hoped to do the same kind of thing with Redwood Summer in 1990. (You can watch the official Redwood Summer recruitment video here.)

I learned also that on May 24, 1990, while Judi had been driving in the city of Oakland, California to perform at a gig in support of Redwood Summer, a bomb that had been secretly hidden under the driver’s seat of her car exploded, severely injuring Judi and her passenger, Darryl Cherney, who was her partner and fellow Earth First! activist.

I learned that the two of them were immediately placed under arrest at the hospital, with the FBI and the Oakland police announcing to the local media that Judi and Darryl were suspected of carrying explosives in the car with the intent of using them in some violent protest action. The two activists were being accused of so-called “eco-terrorism” yet they were never formally charged with any sort of crime.

And I learned that Judi and Darryl had later filed a lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police for violating their constitutional rights in the case, and that the lawsuit was making its way through the courts. Judi had passed away from cancer in 1997, but Darryl was carrying on the lawsuit in both their names.

In the summer of 2001, when I had come back to Humboldt County for a few years during a second stay on the North Coast, Judi’s legacy still seemed alive and well. Her and Darryl’s lawsuit was moving slowly but steadily through the bureaucratic court system, and the local media were increasingly reporting on the court case as the final judgment day neared in 2002.

I listened intently to the local radio station news on the North Coast that day, June 11, 2002, and heard that a 10-member court jury in Oakland had awarded Judi and Darryl $4.4 million in damages against the FBI and Oakland police, effectively siding with the two activists in their claim that they were bombing victims, not terrorists. In doing so, the jury acknowledged that the bombing of Judi Bari’s car appeared to have been done by some unknown party with the aim of shutting down the massive protests being planned as part of the Redwood Summer campaign.

“The American public needs to understand that the FBI can’t be trusted,” Cherney told the press, following the court victory. “Ten jurors got a good, hard look at the FBI and they didn’t like what they saw.”

As part of the court settlement, as I understand it, the city of Oakland in 2003 officially named May 24, the anniversary of the car bombing, as “Judi Bari Day”, commemorating her as a “dedicated activist, who worked for many social and environmental causes, the most prominent being the protection and stewardship of California’s ancient redwood forests.” It was a major turnaround for a city whose police officials had formerly branded her an eco-terrorist, and an acknowledgment of what many forest defenders had long known: that Judi Bari was a force to be reckoned with, even in death.

Just recently, May 24, 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of Judi Bari Day. I thought a lot about her that day. I wondered how different the world might have been, for her and for us, if she had lived and continued defending Mother Earth, specifically in the redwood rainforests of northern California. She had died tragically at the young age of 47 from cancer, caused by the severe injuries she had suffered in the car bombing. It was a miracle that she had survived the bombing in the first place. When she died, a single mother who had been raising two young girls on her own, she had been in a lot of physical pain and emotional distress. I wondered on the 10th anniversary of Judi Bari Day just how much her life and work was really being kept alive in people’s hearts after all this time.

I got my reply, thankfully, in the form of a newly released documentary film, co-produced by Darryl Cherney, titled Who Bombed Judi Bari?. The film follows Judi’s activism, the car bombing and the lawsuit, and appeared to get a warm public reception wherever it was shown in the States. I made a small donation to the film during the production stage, and was delighted to recently receive a DVD version of the film and see my name listed along with so many other supporters in the film’s closing credits. I always wished that I had had the honor of meeting and supporting Judi Bari while she was still alive, and now, in a humble way, I felt I had.

What made Judi Bari so dangerous while she was alive? I’ve thought about that a lot. Why would someone would resort to an act of extreme violence to possibly kill an activist-type like her who was nonviolent? The simple answer is that she was good at bringing people together. Give her a megaphone and a crowd of people, and she was in her element. She had been an experienced activist, especially with labor unions, in her earlier years and knew how to organize, inspire and move large groups of people in a certain direction — in this case, saving the redwood forests.

But much more importantly, at the time of her death she had been bringing together two perceived enemies: the "hippie" tree-hugging environmental activists who were trying to save the redwood trees and the "redneck" logging company employees who were cutting them down. Judi saw the fight to protect the last of the redwood forests and the fight to protect jobs and support families on a livable wage as being one and the same fight. The common enemy of both sides, she said, were the big multinational corporations who were taking over the small logging companies — corporations who didn’t give a damn about either saving trees or saving their own low-paid timber workers. And Judi was right.

Judi Bari seemed to have no fear of confronting authority or those in power. And when you get someone fearless like her who is good at bringing all sides together for a common cause, then it is easy to see why she would become a target of the corporate and governmental powers-that-be in the United States. She had become too dangerous and too effective as a social organizer, and she had to be stopped.

From time to time here in Japan, even now, whenever I open my morning newspaper (the International Herald Tribune, published by the New York Times) and happen to see an article written by Gina Kolata, a Times reporter and Judi Bari’s sister, I remember the North Coast and the fight to save the redwoods. Judi has long been gone, but the forests are still in danger in California, just as they are everywhere else in the world. And activists in the U.S. and elsewhere are still being wrongly targeted as “eco-terrorists” for daring to stand up to governments and corporations to say: “No more — not one more forest destroyed in the name of progress.”

So, the question remains: Who did bomb Judi Bari? Who had tried to assassinate and silence her back in 1990? The case has never been solved, since the FBI has never really investigated and tried to find out. We may never know who devised and planted the car bomb that nearly killed her. But at the very least, as the film points out, the FBI itself cannot be ruled out from having played some role in the car bombing of Judi Bari.

I will close here by encouraging you to buy the DVD yourself directly through the film’s official website and watch it and understand who Judi Bari was, and what she lived and died for. Buying the DVD would be a good way to not only support what environmental activists are doing to protect the last of the redwood forests of California, but also to help keep alive the memory of a person who lent her voice, her passion, her spirit and her body to the cause of a better world. This is her story — and, in the end, our story as well.

Viva Judi Bari!