The late-1990s forest-defense campaigns — Warner Creek's eleven-month blockade, Julia Butterfly Hill's two years aloft in Luna, the Fall Creek and Headwaters actions — made the occupied tree the movement's signature and the county jail its common experience. Police answered lockdowns with "pain compliance": in 1997 Humboldt deputies swabbed pepper spray directly into the eyes of locked-down Headwaters protesters, video that shocked the country and produced a federal jury verdict against the county in 2005.

The era's martyr was David "Gypsy" Chain, killed in 1998 by a tree felled by an enraged Pacific Lumber logger — no charges were brought. The forest campaigns' veterans, criminalized in the woods, supplied both the aboveground movement's organizers and, when legal routes seemed exhausted, the clandestine cells whose story is told in this section's ELF pages.