Earth First! brought civil disobedience into the ancient forests — tree-sits, road blockades, and the mass trespasses of the 1990 Redwood Summer campaign against liquidation logging of California's redwoods. Its organizers paid in arrests by the hundred and worse: on May 24, 1990, a pipe bomb exploded under the car seat of Redwood Summer's lead organizer Judi Bari, shattering her pelvis. Within hours the FBI and Oakland police arrested Bari and Darryl Cherney — the victims — for transporting the bomb, and fed the press the movement-as-terrorist story while making no serious effort to find the bomber.

Charges were dropped for the absence of any evidence, and in 2002 a federal jury awarded Bari's estate and Cherney $4.4 million, finding FBI agents and Oakland officers had violated their civil rights — the environmental movement's own COINTELPRO verdict, delivered five years after Bari's death.