Jacobs, his wife and the man's wife were overcome by shock and grief as they waited for the county sheriff's department to answer their call. "When the deputies arrived, they looked around a little and noticed he had a waterbed and proceeded to sit down and bounce on it, commenting to themselves about it as if they had forgotten about my friend laying there on the floor with a bullet in his brain," Jacobs says.
Jacobs moved his family to Arizona and made one more stab at homesteading, on land near Cornville in the Verde Valley, before his marriage began to unravel under the pressure of unresolved emotional and psychological problems.
At the same time, he began to compile a long manuscript, later titled "Save Our Public Lands," from essays he'd written during his years of travel. The essays were sometimes angry, sometimes poignant, often rambling and, at other times, witheringly pointed. He researched facts about the cattle industry to bolster the emotionalism of his arguments against grazing.
Jacobs, after years of searching, finally knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. In 1985, he laid out the manuscript like a newspaper and paid $30,000 to have 100,000 copies of it printed and distributed. He did much of the distribution himself, taking bundles of copies with him wherever he traveled through the Southwest.
Impressed with his passionate commitment, Earth First! leaders in Tucson asked Jacobs to head the group's "Cattle Free by '93" campaign. He also maintains a separate project, called "Save Our Public Lands," aimed at banning all grazing from public lands, and is writing a book. "I think the reason more people are not involved is because they don't realize what is going on," Jacobs says. "I've seen buffalo ranches with the same problems as cattle ranches. It happens because you're trying to manage the land for a monoculture. The only answer is to return it to a natural state."
Jacobs says that is his goal for himself and his two sons, ages twelve and fourteen. "They've always been raised counterculture," he says. "I home-school my kids here so they aren't so strongly exposed to the influences they would be in school. They aren't as sucked in by the mainstream culture; they can watch TV and know half of what they are seeing is bullshit."
Currently, the family lives in a mobile home on the fringes of southwest Tucson, though Jacobs yearns to find a place deeper in the wild. "I want to balance my activism with natural living," he says. "I'm still struggling to find that balance."
Jacobs is beginning to sound as mellow as a Sierra Clubber curled up with this month's issue of Smithsonian magazine until the subject of grazing reform comes up. "Cattle raising is like growing bananas in Minnesota," he says, his voice rising in irritation. "How are you going to justify it when it's not inherently justifiable? Cattle are justifiable where cows normally live, in Eurasia.
"I'm basically into educating people," Jacobs says of his activities now. "I quit monkeywrenching." Yet he steps gingerly around questions about his group's flirtation with violence, saying that "society has got a very narrow definition of violence."
If the antiwar movement demonstrated anything, it is that Americans get much more upset about damaged private property than they do at the sight of a police baton upside a kid's head. But Jacobs is unwilling to concede that ecotage damages his own efforts to sway public opinion.
"What the public thinks of monkeywrenching depends on how much they understand of why it's being done," he says. "How can you get around this powerful establishment and do what needs to be done to protect the Earth when the whole system is structured so you can't be effective?
"What happened to Darryl and Judy should be recognized as a reflection on the violence that's being done to the Earth, but it seems to be rubbing off on Earth First! instead," Jacobs says of the Oakland bombing. "The whole reaction [by police and the media] to it is geared wrong.
"They're just gentle people," he says. "I can't imagine they would have a bomb for any reason. I could see them pouring sand into a bulldozer crankcase, but not a bomb."
Words like "gentle" echo eerily in the aftermath of what happened to Jacobs' two friends; the prospect of their martyrdom recedes before the insistent image of a Greenwich Village townhouse in which a misapplied electrical wire ended the lives of a group of Weathermen, martyrs in another holy war, nearly two decades ago.
The group coined the phrase "ecotage" to describe acts of vandalism in the cause of environmental protection.
Pullquotes for jump pages
Jacobs thinks his dog died as a warning to him, because he challenged the century-old right of local ranchers to run cattle on public lands.
"The livestock industry has probably done more basic ecological damage to the western United States than has any other single agent."
"In high school, I was afraid of people, nature seemed more friendly."
"The cattle came in and ate all our garden, our fruit trees. When I tried to talk to the rancher about it, his attitude was `If you don't like it, move back to the city.'"
"Cattle are justifiable where cows normally live, in Eurasia.
