In the late 1970s, after moving to Mendocino County, Anna Marie set up a daycare center in Fort Bragg for forty-six families, including loggers, millworkers, doctors, lawyers, shop workers, and Native Americans--a cross-section of the community. Her activism began when she and Judi Bari helped a local mill worker expose the toxic PCB spill at the Georgia Pacific mill. This began  a five-year battle with Georgia Pacific, GP's sweetheart union the IWA, the City of Fort Bragg, Mendocino County, and the state and federal governments. 
     The fight for justice for workers contaminated in the PCB spill launched Anna Marie on a life of community activism including the creation of People for Clean Air Now (with her teenage son and his best friend), a group that collected over 2,000 signatures and succeeded in bringing Mendocino County's Air Resources Board up to standard; six years of work on the politics of "garbage," organizing opposition to the county's plans to enlarge local landfills, organizing Dump Boogies, community protests, and civil disobedience at the Casper and Laytonville landfills aimed at closing the leaking dumps, co-founding the Association for Mendocino Recyclers and CART (Citizens Action on Recycling and Trash), and helping with a study to form a Market Development Zone to help small business use recycled products; and assisting the homeless gain emergency shelter on the coast. 
     Anna Marie was a key organizer of Redwood Summer--the mass protests in 1990 against "liquidation logging." She fought Louisiana Pacific's logging of old-growth redwood trees in Osprey Grove (Navarro Ridge) and Enchanted Meadow (Albion River). LP filed a S.L.A.P.P. suit (strategic lawsuit against public participation) against Anna Marie and more than a hundred other community members for protesting LP logging. The suit against Anna Marie cost her four and a half years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees--but she finally won. LP ended up dropping all charges against her, and settled the lawsuit by doing a forestry restoration project with her in Greenwood Creek.  Anna Marie is currently employed as a paralegal for the First Amendment attorney who successfully represented her in the suit (Mark Goldowitz, Esq.). With little formal education, Anna Marie recently passed a college level examination program and now has enough college credit to become an attorney and to take the bar without having attended law school--a plan she intends to follow through in about five years.

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I'm Romany, a gypsy; that's my nationality, my race. I grew up very poor--homeless and a street urchin some of the time. We lived in inner cities and sometimes in parks and Greyhound bus terminals. We were migrant farm workers in New York and California. There was danger where we lived; it wasn't an easy life; it was a scary life. 
     I hardly ever went to school--only when the truant officer would drag me. The minute the authorities found out about us, we moved on. We spoke Arabic and Romany so I wasn't very good at English. By age eleven, I'd gone to school about three weeks total. Then I ended up in a foster home in Ohio, and went to school maybe two or three months a year. The Catholic high school I went to didn't want me to graduate because I'd missed more days than I had attended. I said, "I've got As and Bs; what do you want?" So they made me take a GED, which I passed 
     When I was about nine we were living in Oakland and Catholic Welfare Services sent us to summer camp. Because I'd hardly been to school I wasn't used to being around a group of kids and having to be on a schedule. My family didn't live that way. We mainly hung out at night and slept for part of the day because that's when things were cheaper and streets were safer. 
     So I was really scared at camp, I didn't know what to do. All these kids talked about things I didn't understand. 
     My brothers weren't with me, and I wasn't used to being separated from them. These were nice people, but I was in a foreign world. I was freaked out and wanted to get out of there. The third day I just started walking--going west and south to get back to Oakland. I had to go through the forest. As I got deeper and deeper into the forest, it got stranger and stranger. It was a pleasant feeling, a wonderful feeling, but I didn't know what it was. I was in an old growth redwood forest. I sat down and leaned up against a big tree to figure out what was going on. I figured out that I felt safe, and it was the first time I'd felt safe in my life. So I sat there all afternoon. I ended up going back to camp, because I didn't want to leave the forest. I wanted to be there as much as I could. 
     I carried that redwood forest with me through the rest of my childhood, and whenever I felt really, really scared, I would remember how I felt there. The forest would protect me. I had that connection. I grew up believing that everything is alive and everything is equal. That's part of my culture too. Everything is here for your enjoyment. You help other people enjoy. You help animals and trees enjoy. It's supposed to be a good place to be. Life is supposed to be good. 
     Since, in my world, everybody is equal, you talk to everybody as a friend, a neighbor. There isn't any hierarchy in my culture; you attain respect by being a good person and helping your community, not by how much you own or what your family background is. I don't have any respect for "authority." I respect people for how they treat themselves and others. I respect them whether they have a badge, or a broom, or a briefcase. 
     I like the challenge of making things better and I love to work with different kinds of people. I have been an agitator and organizer, but I couldn't have done anything without really incredible people from all walks of life stepping forward, or sometimes me dragging them in to help. I'm good at organizing a broad cross-section of people. 
     Gypsies have been without a homeland for a thousand years, but we still have a very strong culture. We're spread throughout the world. We were finally recognized by the United Nations in 1979. As a gypsy, I'm a survivor. I don't accept this culture's rules about what should and shouldn't be done and what can and can't be done. If there's a proble, and people are being hurt or animals are being hurt or the forest is being hurt, you take care of it. You do everything you can to make it better. That's how you have a good life--by doing good things, by healing, by helping. 
     You ask where I get my strength. There's a prayer that I say in all intense or scary situations--before I go into court; before I go into the woods for a protest; before I go into a meeting, when I'm writing a paper on a deadline, or doing a legal brief. I say it every day. It goes like this: "Dear Spirit, we dedicate our work to you today. Imprint your mind upon it. Fly with it onto the heavens, use it to shower your love and protection onto the Earth. Thank you for your faith in us, that such a glorious and healing mission has been placed in our hands. May your will be done. Amen." 
     The prayer is from Marianne Williamson. I changed it a little bit. She says "Dear God" (I say "Dear Spirit")--and I added "May your will be done." I think that's really important--not to push for my own will. You can't save the planet with your ego. And you can't save the planet through violence. It is violence to forget that someone else is also a person. All of us make mistakes. Nobody has a blueprint for this--for activism. You just try to do what's best for the common good. To trash somebody else or say they're stupid or evil--I don't want that in my life. 
      I think we are still clan people. That's what my daycare was; most of the moms and dads would eat dinner with us. I always made sure there was plenty of food because I knew what it was to go home and have to cook dinner. The real work is building community. If we aren't building community when we're trying to do good work, we don't build something good. Saving the trees isn't good if in order to do that we treat other human beings badly. 
     Whether your're working to save the forest or to help other working people or the homeless--the most important part of it is forming community. It doesn't matter what issue you take on if you're looking at it from that vantage point. I don't go looking for issues. They come to my doorstep. I'm not Anna Marie Stenberg, the activist. I'm just Anna Marie Stenberg. I do a lot of different things. I raise my children. I work in my garden, I work for the First Amendment, I work for the trees. 
     You ask, how do I keep going?  During these last ten years of intense activism, my life has been on the line a lot of the time. Judi Bari and I were best friends when she got bombed. And we thought, "Who is next?" During Redwood Summer stuff was thrown at my house. The night before the Fort Bragg rally I had twenty-eight death threats by phone. 
     During my work on the garbage issue--trying to close the Casper and Laytonville dumps, fight the incinerator, regional landfill and monopolization, we did a lot of public education. The media was receptive for the first two or three years. Then, all of a sudden, we were being portrayed as the "the garbage gang" and "garbage crazies"--because we were winning and shaking the powers that be. Most of the time I don't read that kind of stuff, but it still hurts. 
     Four years ago, I went through a serious depression about my activism. I crashed. I didn't get off the couch for several months. I couldn't talk on the telephone. Very few friends even knew that was happening. What I realized was that it was time to heal myself. I came out of that depression with a resolve to balance my life, to not do anything that I didn't want to do, to take care of myself better--and always, to stay focused on the greater good.  
     Lately, I've been working really closely with a very diverse group of people on saving the last of our coast redwood forest. I've found that the people I've had problems with in the past, or who have had problems with me, are people who don't have a spiritual foundation. It's not that they're not good people. They just don't seem to be aware of the connectedness of everything. We work together very well up to a certain point. Then something happens and I become the bad guy--for no reason that I can ever figure out. I'm careful now not to be so vulnerable to becoming a scapegoat. 
      I came out of the depression a different person. I learned that if I wanted to stop the abuse in the world, I had to stop the abuse that was happening to me. My relationships with people have changed. I don't take what people say and do personally so much. I have stopped wearing that button that said "push me, trash me, abuse me." I get my strength to go on from the Great Spirit. That doesn't mean I don't get mad. It doesn't mean I don't do what appear to be stupid things and make what appear to be mistakes. Our love has to come from a full cup. 
 
I had been trying to heal myself from outside myself but I found that when you fill up your own cup, then the overflow is what is given out. I don't have a name for who I am. I don't get personal fulfillment from a title or an identity. If we all change our own energy, it changes the energy out there. That's the key. 

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We thought Save the Redwoods League had bought Osprey Grove, but one day LP started cutting.  Several of us went down to see if we could stop it.  We were going to get a  temporary restraining order (TRO) to make them stop, but we had to keep the trees standing until then.  The loggers were in a frenzy to cut down as many trees as they could before the TRO got there.  I was sobbing because there was nothing I could do. 
     There was a huge grandmother tree that Earth First!ers had stayed inside of until LP negotiated. One of the people with me wanted to get one last video of that tree and started walking into the grove. I went with her. The loggers started running toward us from every angle, and I jumped into the grandmother tree. It felt like I was in my mother's womb. 
     Five of them came to get me out. I decided I was going to stay inside that tree. I could not let it come down.  My son Zack came down and found out I was in the tree and convinced the loggers to let him talk me into coming out.  He asked the guys to step back so he could talk to me. He asked if I was coming out and I said "No", I was going to take my stand.  He said, "I can't talk you out?"  "No."  "Ok, I'll come in with you." 
     As they tried to get us out, we sang.  It was Zack's 21st birthday and the day before my 42nd birthday, so we sang the "Internationale" and "Happy Birthday." We talked and stayed in there waiting for the TRO.  A guy with a chainsaw said he was going to cut the tree next to us which was very close, and we'd better get out because the tree could fall any direction.  I looked at Zack and said, "I'm staying; if they murder this tree, they'll have to murder me."  He said, "Me too." They put that tree down really close to us. 
     We got the temporary restraining order and saved the grove, but only thirteen out of fifty-five trees were left by the time that massacre was done.