Mr. Ruckus
John Sellers climbed the Sears Tower to protest nukes and unfurled an anti-logging banner over the Golden Gate. The left's Merry Prankster talks.
Editor's note: In his new book, "Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out," Bill Katovsky interviews 20 Americans who have dared to speak out. A wildly varied group, they include federal whistle-blowers, peace activists, military veterans, members of the media, former government officials and practitioners of nonviolent civil disobedience. What they share is a dedication to defending this nation's civil liberties, a passion for justice -- and a dogged streak that is as American as apple pie. Salon will run five excerpts from "Patriots Act" in the coming weeks, starting with this profile of Ruckus Society leader John Sellers.
By Bill Katovsky
Read more: Books, Seattle, Oakland, Protests, WTO, Books Features
March 27, 2006 | John Sellers is a master of the larger-than-life political gesture. He's climbed the Sears Tower, unfurled a giant banner over the Golden Gate Bridge and sneaked onto the roof of the World Bank building, all to get media attention for various progressive causes. Sellers, 39, is the executive director of the Oakland-based Ruckus Society, which offers disciples of nonviolent direct action state-of-the-art training in blockading, urban-building climbing, radio communication, and other skills. In 1999, Ruckus achieved international notoriety as one of the key organizers behind the anti-World Trade Organization demonstration in Seattle where 50,000 activists surrounded the WTO meeting site. Sellers blames the violence on the Seattle police, saying, "When people talk about the riots in Seattle, it was the cops who had the riot. It was a full-on cop riot. They just completely lost their shit." For his part, Sellers sees himself as following in the footsteps of such civil disobedience heroes as Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks -- with an updated, media-savvy spin. Sellers met his wife, Genevieve, during the Golden Gate Bridge protest; they have twins who were born on election day, 2004. He has lost exact count of the times he's been arrested during his career, but he estimates it's between 30 and 40.
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I grew up in a little town in Pennsylvania called Phoenixville -- old steel town, probably one of the first. Made the steel for the Brooklyn Bridge. The steel mill closed when I was a little kid. My mom was a fourth-grade teacher, and my pop made tires in a rubber mill for Goodrich Tires.
I remember this one big family road trip we took to the Everglades. I had an environmental epiphany there. I was eight or nine years old. This beautiful park ranger was giving us an ecology tour. She took us out in this marsh and had us all take our shoes off and walk into this marsh. The mud was squeezing between our toes as she talked about how this ecosystem was dependent on the water that flowed. The Everglades was this giant, wide, slow-moving river. This marsh supported the darter snail, which was the staple food for the whooping cranes, these unapologetic, uncompromising birds that wouldn't eat anything else. They flew across the planet when they migrated, and this was an important stop for them. Because industry was carving up the Everglades, the darter snails were getting fewer and farther between, and that was impacting these whooping cranes. I guess a light bulb went off in my head. My sister was also inspired by what she was hearing. When we got home she totally shamed me by writing to our senator. A couple of years afterward, I was lying on the floor of the den and watching 60 Minutes and there was this piece on Greenpeace. I watched these crazy hippie commandos put themselves in front of grenade-tipped whale harpoons in their little boats and hang from oil rigs and sail in nuclear-test zones. I could feel the hair standing up on my arms and the back of my head. And that is when I decided what I wanted to do when I grew up.
During my first couple of years in college, I had the zeal of the recently converted. I was such a self-righteous shit. My dad once took me out for a nice prime rib dinner, and I was such a little smartass as I tried to break down capitalism for him. I wanted to make him understand how he was a puppet of the system by working in the tire factory. Yet here was my dad working twelve-hour days from midnight until the afternoon and busting his ass to get me to college, and I gotta tell him that he was part of the exploited proletariat. We definitely had some awkward years there for a while.
After graduating from college and working in Australia, Sellers returned to the United States, where he got a job canvassing for Greenpeace.
After about two or three months in the Philadelphia office, I got fast-tracked and became a field manager. I was now driving a van full of canvassers. They were mostly white kids. One of the women in the office was an Amish girl who had defected from Pennsylvania Dutch culture. There was a Quaker girl who practiced witchcraft. There was a lot of turnover in this canvassing world. Lots of drinking and partying. The whole reason that I was willing to canvass was that I wanted to do direct actions for Greenpeace. I wanted to sail with their ships.
Greenpeace at that time had a nonviolent action team. Still does. There was this cement kiln facility in Bath, Pennsylvania, which was not too far from Philly. They were using toxic flammable waste to fire the kiln. They had actually received a commendation from the U.S. government for creatively disposing toxic waste. They had expanded their permit so they could burn chlorinated compounds. Our toxics campaign targeted this place, but in order to scout the facility, Greenpeace asked me and another guy to drive out there and pose as documentary filmmakers from Temple University. We told the company that we were making a documentary on the re-emergence of industrialism on the East Coast. We actually got the company president on film. He took us inside, bragged about his government award. The guy was just totally delighted and honored to be in the film. We mapped out the whole facility, drove around it, filmed it, looked at all the entrances where the actual waste trucks were coming in. Really dialed it in. I think we did a real thorough job. Greenpeace's East Coast action coordinator was so impressed with our scouting job that I was invited to be in the actual action itself. So that became my first action.
We went to a farm in upstate Pennsylvania and trained for three or four days. Our plan was that we would deploy a cargo truck at the most important entrance where the toxic waste came into the facility. We'd block that entrance and jump out of the truck and cover it with banners explaining the toxic-waste issue. We'd then chain ourselves up under the truck. I was working with another woman who was a toxics campaign intern from New York. She was going to be my partner. It was late fall and we wore big padded union suits. We cut sleeping bag pads to fit inside our suits so that we could lay on the cold ground for hours. We were wearing diapers. We also had a long steel tube to lock our arms in. It was cut at a right angle and welded together so that it could go over the axle, and we would each place one of our arms inside the tube from opposite directions.
Next page: "As the banner fills with wind, I literally start to sail off the building"