Growing your own food is a delicious experience. There is nothing quite like slicing into that first summer tomato, still warm from the sun, or cutting some fresh herbs to add to a dish. A kitchen garden makes for great meals, a sense of joy, and a modicum of food security. Don’t overthink it: now that spring is here, find the sunniest spot where you live–maybe in the yard, a raised bed, a big pot on the patio, or a sunny kitchen window—and plant some seeds or seedlings from your local nursery in good, organic soil. With at least five hours of sun per day, the right plants, and a few tips, it’s about that simple.

The two of us run a small urban farm in Los Angeles and a company called Edible Gardens LA that has designed, built, and maintained vegetable gardens for countless families over the past 16 years. Here are the five best things for beginners to grow.

Herbs

Herbs are a perfect starting point, because you can grow them year-round: outdoors in warm climates and on an indoor windowsill in regions where winters are cold.

First, buy some organic seeds. Some of our favorite online sites that sell seeds are ,Ìę,Ìęand . You can also purchase seedlings at your local garden nursery for a faster and easier start. Get the basic ones that you use regularly in your kitchen: rosemary, sage, parsley, thyme, oregano, chives, and basil. All are easy to grow.

Find a terra-cotta pot at least six inches deep or, if space allows, 18 inches deep so you can grow multiple plants in one pot. (Tip: mint needs its own pot, as it’s super invasive.) Never grow food in plastic or fiberglass or treated wood, because the toxins from those materials will leech into the soil and into your food.

Fill the pot with organic potting soil, and sow the seeds following the instructions on the packet. If your plants are indoors, put a plastic tray under them to catch any water that runs through. If you’re growing outdoors in the ground or in a raised wooden bed, water deeply three to four times per week, depending on the weather. (Check out our book, , for blueprints and instructions on building raised beds.) On the hottest days of summer, your garden will need it daily. If you are growing in pots, water deeply every day. Be sure to feed your plants by using seaweed extract every couple of weeks to replenish the nutrients in the soil. Chives can be harvested by cutting straight across, at the base of the plant, but for all other herbs, cut just what you need, taking a few leaves or a few stems, and they will keep growing and you can enjoy them all season.

Tomatoes

Yes, we all love that big heirloom tomato, but do yourself a favor and grow cherry tomatoes instead. The Sun Gold or Sweet 100 varieties mature faster, and you’ll be eating delicious tomatoes all summer instead of waiting until late August or September. Buy these seeds and start them indoors now. Yes, now! You can use seed-starter trays or a good ol’ cut-off cardboard milk carton full of fresh soil. Give each seed a couple inches of space. After about six weeks, they’re ready to transplant. (Important: Tomatoes and the other vegetables mentioned here, except the herbs, cannot continue to grow indoors. Eventually, they will fizzle; they need that summer sun.)

To figure out when to transplant your tomatoes, consult a planting online to determine what growing zone you’re in: this sounds complicated, but it’s not. At the right time, move them to a big pot (at least 18 inches deep) or raised bed or the ground. If you’re using a pot or raised bed, be careful not to put too much weight on a balcony or roof. If you’re planting in the ground, turn the soil and mix in plenty of compost.

Even a big pot dries out fast, so you’ll need to water daily; in a raised bed or the ground, however, you can water every few days. Don’t forget a little seaweed extract for nutrition every couple months. You’ll be eating cherry tomatoes in three months; others take longer. But they’re all worth it!

Beans

Beans come as snap varieties (such as the classic green bean) and shelling beans (think black beans) and are either bush or climbing varieties—climbers require a trellis or fence or porch post to climb; bush beans do not. Good ones to try include haricot vert, Blue Lake, Hidatsa red, or dragon tongue.

Whether in a pot, raised bed, or the ground, plant these directly in the soil; no seed starting is necessary. Water and feed them as we described with the tomatoes.

Bush beans come into harvest faster, after about three months, and once they begin producing, be sure to pick them three or more times per week: the more you harvest, the more the plant will produce.

Cucumbers

These are so easy to grow that they’re going to crowd your fridge. Some of our favorite varieties that offer sweet flavor for slicing and eating fresh are Armenian, Suyo long, salt and pepper, and telegraph.

Like beans, follow the seed-packet instructions and put them directly in the soil, no seed starting necessary, whether in a big pot or raised bed. To save space, give them a trellis of some kind to climb, otherwise the vines wander all over the place.

Water and feed your cucumbers the same way you do with tomatoes and the other veggies listed here. In about 70 days you’ll be chopping these for salads or juicing them to enjoy over ice or in a summer cocktail.

Peppers

Growing your own hot peppers will change your cooking. They produce from early summer until the weather cools, and we use them in everything from guacamole to curries to pickling. You can start peppers from seed, but our favorites are easier to grow if you buy them as seedlings at your local nursery. We especially like jalapeño, serrano, habanero and Thai hot peppers. For less spice, try mild habanadas, shishitos, and baby bell peppers, which are much easier to grow than the standard-size bell varieties.

If you live in a place with real seasons, start your peppers indoors just like you would with tomatoes, then transplant them after six to eight weeks into your big pot, bed, or in-ground garden. They need water and food just like the other vegetables mentioned here.

Get Cooking

Now that you know how to grow, let’s talk cooking. Suzanne Goin, the James Beard Award–winning chef whose restaurants A.O.C., Caldo Verde, and Cara Cara are standouts in the Los Angeles dining scene, says her favorite ingredients to grab straight out of the kitchen garden include tomatoes, fava beans, peas, and herbs, especially rosemary, basil, cilantro, parsley, and sage. She also likes cutting fresh greens, such arugula, lettuce, Swiss chard, and kale. These plants require a little more space in the garden but can keep on producing all summer.

“Those greens and other garden harvests go into everything,” she says. “I love arugula salad with eggs for breakfast. Or Swiss chard and mustard greens sautĂ©ed with garlic and olive oil with grilled fish and lemon, or in pasta with bread crumbs. The best is to make a big salad for dinner, sometimes a giant Nicoise-style salad with Spanish tuna in olive oil.”

Goin adds that having these ingredients right in your backyard adds a level of freshness and brightness that’s just hard to duplicate. “It’s also inspiring,” she adds. “The garden will lead you to decide what to cook and eat. I think fresh herbs in particular just give your cooking another layer.”

The bottom line is: it’s not hard to grow some great tastes. The time to start seeds indoors is now. Get out there and get growing.

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It makes perfect sense that the pandemic has seen a . We all want to bring more life to our homes, to feel the beauty and hope of another intelligence. Plants remind us that we are part of nature and, despite all we’ve done, that nature still works. Or can work, with a little care.

“It’s a total relationship,” says Mickey Hargitay, Los Angeles’ go-to expert, whose shop, Mickey Hargitay Plants, has been booming unlike any other period during in its 42 years in business. “In the last couple years, it’s been refreshing to see so many people experiencing it. Once you get to know your plant, you can definitely learn to speak the language.”

As a couple of urban farmers, we’ve found that our relationships with plants, both outdoors and indoors, has helped us maintain our sanity over the last couple years. But there’s something special about living with a plant in the home. It’s easy, inexpensive (even fancy shops sell small plants in 6-inch pots for about $20), and it really does make you feel good to be in daily communication with another living creature.

Much like the plants we grow outdoors, the basic elements  you need for indoor houseplant care are sun, water, and food. Hargitay says the place to start planning your indoor garden is with the sun. Most popular houseplants are jungle dwellers that grow in the understory, adapted to dappled or filtered light, which means they want plenty of sun but not direct sun. So start by thinking about where your new companion will live. Will it be front-and-center in a sunny kitchen window? Hanging from a hook in the bathroom? Standing tall in a dim corner?

Here are some of the easiest and most popular plants for different scenarios. Charissa Seloadji, a houseplant specialist at Sunset Nursery in Los Angeles, also helped us select some of the tropical beauties on this list. They are sold all over the U.S. and can thrive in anybody’s house.

Houseplant Care: How Much Sunlight Does Your Plant Need?

For placement in a sunny window or in bright reflected light:

Wax plant (Hoya carnosa)

“They are gaining a lot in popularity, but they do need decent light and have beautiful blooms,” says Hargitay. These make great hanging vines near a bright window, where they will erupt with loads of star-shaped flowers.

Snake plant (Dracaena trifasciata)

Clean and elegant, this plant features clumps of upright, swordlike leaves up to three feet tall that first became popular in mid-century modern homes. These do great in the sun but can also tolerate a move to the interior of the room, so long as it’s not deep darkness.

Lipstick plant (Aeschynanthus radicans)

A beautiful vine with short, pointed leaves and gorgeous bright red blooms, this one loves good light and won’t do well in a dark corner.

Monstera

This genus of shrubs and vines have huge leaves with deep lobes and fascinating fenestrations, or holes, in them. They can be small table-top plants or large outdoor trees that bear fruit, where they will need a lot more water.

For placement in lower light, away from a window and in shade some of the day:

ZZ plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia)

The ultimate beginner plant, they adapt to light or dark. “You can put them anywhere in your home,” says Seloadji. “If you have them in a really dark area, we tell people to only water about every three to four or weeks.”

Philodendrons and Pothos

These are two different genera of vines with heart-shaped leaves that make great hanging plants, and can tolerate being further from a window. Golden and green pothos are good for low light, and the popular light-colored marble queen variety wants to be in brighter light.

Dracaena

These are from a vast genus of trees and succulent shrubs like Dr. Seuss trees with palm-like trunks and long, pointed leaves. Hargitay says, “They’re very forgiving and pretty bulletproof. They take a lot of abuse. In low-light, they don’t like a lot of water; they will take a drink every other week.”

Chinese evergreen (Aglaonema)

These feature wonderful, variegated swordlike leaves growing off of a central stem. Seloadji adds, “Ags just want to dry out completely, so that’s another one that you don’t need to water very often, and they’ll do well.”

Not for Beginners

Choosing a plant is a matter of aesthetics. But notice that we did not put the super-popular fiddle-leaf fig tree on the list. That’s because they’re finicky about the sun, and hard to care for. We also left prayer plants off the list, despite their mesmerizing leaves, because they require closer monitoring to make sure they are getting enough water.

After optimizing your plant’s sunlight, you need to provide appropriate water and food. Here’s our best advice on how to do that.

Houseplant Care: Water 101

Here’s the thing: most of us kill our houseplants by overwatering them.

“That’s the biggest thing with house plants, generally, is letting them dry out,” Seloadji adds, meaning that you should let the plant use up all the water before adding more. “That’s true for most house plants. There are a few exceptions like ferns, and some plants like prayer-plants; they like to stay moist.”

A ZZ plant in a dim room, for instance, will only need water every three to four weeks. Most of us can hardly stand to wait that long—we want to do something! If the plant wilts noticeably, water it. But if the leaves turn yellow or the stems turn black, you’re overdoing it. You can check the soil by sticking a finger in, or, if the pot is deep, use a chopstick. If you want to get techy, grab the Mosser Lee Soil Master ($17: all prices from Sunset Nursery), which will tell you dry from wet.

Another clue about sun and water: the lighter-colored your plant’s leaves are, the more sun and water it will probably need. Dark green indicates chlorophyll, the active food-making part of the plant, so if the leaves are more emerald, they are better-equipped to live in low light and normal water. That Marble Queen Pothos, parts of which are white, has less chlorophyll so it needs more light and, since more light means it dries out faster, more water.

Houseplant Care: Food 101

Most of us never feed our plants, and that’s why they eventually start looking sickly. Our plant friends need food, or fertilizer, applied to the soil every couple weeks. Every plant will have its own specific regimen. Good liquid fertilizers include Espoma Organic Indoor! (8 oz,, $11) and Agrothrive Organic (32 oz., $22). Dry pellet fertilizers release food every time you water, and a good organic one is Osmocote Plus (1 lb., $11). Again, don’t overfeed. Adding more food won’t make your plant grow more, but might actually burn the plant with too much nitrogen.

Additional Tips for Houseplant Care

Don’t let your kids or your pets chew the houseplants. None of them are safe for people to eat, and most will make your dog sick, too.

Bugs, however, love to eat your plants. You’re likely to get a few. Some of the most common ones are fungus gnats, spider mites, mealy bugs, and a tiny but oddly prehistoric-looking armored insect called scale. Fungus gnats are about the size of a fruit fly—to deal with these, Seloadji says her customers buy a lot of a product called Mosquito Bits (8 oz., $15), which is a beneficial bacteria that kills the larvae in the soil. There are many organic or natural remedies for mealy bugs and spider mites, including neem oil and pyrethrin, and one of the most effective ways to get rid of scale is to simply wipe your plants with a cotton ball or Q-tip full of rubbing alcohol, and then rub them off.

Hargitay recommends that you regularly spend a little time wiping your plants down anyway, to keep them free of dust and grime.

Lots of people feel the need to transplant their new plants out of the plastic nursery pots they came in, because they think the plastic pots are ugly and they want to put them in something nicer. Resist this urge, as its stressful for the plants. We like to put the plants, inside their original nursery containers, in a favorite pot that we have lined with a plastic insert (available at nurseries and hardware stores) that catches the water so it won’t drain through the pot, causing water stains and puddles in the home.

Remember that plants are living things and like us, they will respond to good care.

“It’s something I think about a lot,” says Hargitay. “I think we’re just all living in this world that’s so plastic and fake and we want to get back to nature, get back to things that are real. Bringing a live plant into the house is one way to do that. Providing care is fulfilling. It gives people a lot of good feedback, you know?”

Maybe a new relationship is just what you need, and there’s a plant out there waiting for you, with its own story to tell.

The post The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Houseplant Care appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I pushed through the screen door of our cabin, worried about what I might find. It was the first fine week of spring 2004, and a warm wind off Lake Michigan gently raked the pollen out of the oak catkins. The redbuds and cherries were in bloom. It was heaven, and I wasn’t ready for this to be the last time I’d ever visit.

But I knew it might be. Over the 15 years we’d had this place, life with Dad had been a series of increasingly bitter battles, and we’d just been through the worst yet. We found no peace here. The previous summer had been excruciating, and during the year that had passed, we had stopped talking about it. I was in Michigan on a reporting trip and swung by the cabin to see whether we even had a family anymore.

All we had done was cut some trees.

My father, Bruce Kuipers, had bought these 95 acres as our deer-hunting camp and built a cabin on it, hoping it would be a place where he could hang out with me and my two brothers, Brett and Joe. The camp was a worn-out farm halfway up Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, a spit of blow sand and trees between the swamps near the North Fork of the White River. All around us were other hunting properties, wet federal land, farms, and U.S. Department of Agriculture pine plantations. The land was remote and beautiful and damaged, and it was in need of some habitat improvements.

But Dad didn’t want to touch anything. His rules included: no walking in the woods or making trails, no planting anything, no sitting in an undesignated spot, no dogs, no friends, no smoking, no drinking, no music unless it was Christian, no bonfires, no shoes in the house, and on and on. I was 40 years old, and I had to ask him if it was OK to go outside or open the curtains. (He didn’t like the deer to see us.) No changing anything.

And then we’d sawed down his trees. A forester had recommended that we create more of the young browse that grouse, woodcock, and deer love by logging off a gnarled old Scots pine plantation and a few acres of aspens. After we all threatened to never come back, Dad had finally relented. But we paid for it emotionally: he bitched and moaned and said we’d “wrecked the place” and that the sand would just dry out and turn into a dune. If no trees came up, he announced, he would probably sell the camp, and then we’d never see each other anymore.

So here I was, to look at those cut-over fields. As I put my bag down, Dad came in from the porch through the sliding door. I took a deep breath. I tried to read on his face whether the sandy fields had all turned to pure bull thistle or knapweed or something. I half-expected him to punch me.

“My boy!” Dad said. Then he wrapped me in a hug.

“Hi, Pop,” I said, preparing for a brief embrace. But he wouldn’t let go. We just stood there in a clench under the taxidermied head of Aunt Sally’s old buck, the first deer killed on this place, and he said, “I love you,” and kissed the side of my face. The last time he’d kissed me was probably a quarter-century earlier, when I was 16 and he and I were both baptized before a Christian Reformed Church congregation—which, for the record, had been Dad’s third baptism, a sprinkle-dunk-sprinkle suite that had to look a little suspect on the big board where they keep track of that kind of thing.

Dad had a lot of things to be happy about in the spring of 2004, first and foremost his wedding to a woman named Diane, which I’d witnessed, and maybe it made him a little gushy. She had been coaching him on being less rigid and less controlling, because she knew, like we did, that it was crippling. Dad’s construction company, Delta Design, was at a high point, too: only a few days before, he’d attended the ribbon cutting for the 120,000-square-foot , a giant aviation museum and the most high-profile public structure he’d ever built.

But something else was happening. Dad’s face was different, his shoulders, his posture. I kept thinking it was a matter of facial hair or a more fitted shirt or something, but it eluded me. He had always been so incredibly stiff, afraid of emotion, and it was like he’d gone loose and floppy. Like he was broken.

Oh, God, I thought, we’ve done it. He’s come unmoored. The trees are dead, and it’s driven him mad.

When Dad first called me in 1989 to tell me he’d found us a deer camp, I was living in New York City,Ìęand I would tell anyone who asked that my father was dead. I told this lie to create some space to live, but his phone call made me feel terribly ashamed. I didn’t want to lie, but I couldn’t have him in my life. Despite being a hunter and a fisherman, I swore I’d never set foot on that property.

When I talked to Mom about the camp, she said, “Well, it’s the only thing he can think of that you boys will care about. If he just showed up in New York, you’d be mad at him.”

“Right, and that would be appropriate,” I said. “But he doesn’t want to face that. He wants to hide in the woods and have us come to him.”

“But it’s also how he signals that he feels bad,” Mom said. “He wants to give you something that he knows you’re going to love.”

We did love that piece of swamp. We couldn’t help it. He had taught us right from the start that wild places were where we really lived. When I was three and we lived near the Air Force base at Paine Field, north of Seattle, he hand-built me a boat, a two-seater wooden dinghy painted forest green, so we could fish our favorite lake in the Cascades. We moved back to Michigan to fish the good rivers, the Au Sable and the Manistee and the Pere Marquette, and to hunt pheasants and deer. We spent all our time looking for green spots on the map—the “good places,” Dad called them.

Home was not one of the good places. Dad didn’t know how to live there. Even while he was building the boat, he would slip away with some other woman and be gone for months at a time, sending no word, no money, no sign of coming back. He was six foot three, slim, and handsome, a Dutch American with olive skin and black hair and a brilliant smile and always dressed to prowl. Women liked him, and for the first 15 years of my life, he just went with whoever came his way. When he did come back to his marriage, he would not tolerate one word about where he’d been, and he’d get mean if we said anything. He locked all emotions away in a place of total control and silence. I was the oldest of my siblings, and we spent our childhoods poring over maps and begging Dad to go to this forest or that river, because that’s where we had fun with him. We had to get him out of the house, because that’s where things were good.

By the time Mom finally divorced him in 1988, we’d all developed our own relationship to the woods, including her. None of us needed him anymore. And then came this camp.

“It’s good to be here,” I said, with Dad still hugging me.

“Oh, it is so good that you make the effort to get out here,” he said. “It’s so important to your brothers. And look at this place, it’s just perfect.”

It was certainly different. All the blinds were up, the drapes pulled back, and the spring wind blew straight through open windows to lift and drop the pull cords against the wall, where they rattled like someone throwing dice on a table. A strip plantation of red pines stood between the house and the logged fields, and the tips of the pines glowed yellow-white as they heaved out their pollen cones and prepared to dust the swamps to the east. The coming twilight flowed cool and sweet all over the carpet.

It hit me then that Dad had allowed the gap between him and those fields to close. As much as he loved the woods, he had always treated this place as though it were untrustworthy. It would let him down. The sand wouldn’t grow any rye for the deer. The deer wouldn’t grow trophy antlers. He claimed that our plan to cut and regrow trees would fail because the sand had been “poisoned” or “salted” by farmers who came long before us.

But now the whole cabin was thrown open. The forest pushed itself against him, and he didn’t grimace or constantly dust himself off or slam the windows shut. He was exposed, fully exposed, and he was aiming his face into a breeze out of the southwest. After a minute, he turned away from the windows to put water on for tea. Something in him had released.

“If you can stay another day, the steelhead are still running in the Manistee,” he said. “Brett’s got most of the early planting done.”

I could see sky to the west, where the five acres of Scots pines had been. The low-angle sun shot through and flared on the windows. Dad held up a finger and then pointed toward the east, and we both stopped to listen to a grouse drumming on an old log on the edge of the big swamp.

When the thumping fluttered out, I said, “Let’s go look at those cuts. Is anything coming up?”

“What?” Dad said, looking confused.

“The Scots pine cut. The aspen cuts. How’s it looking?”

“Oh, it’s great. There’s a whole new forest there.”

“What? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Oh, yeah, it all came up.”

“Well, aren’t you overjoyed? You were so worried! Shit!”

“I was never worried,” he said straight-faced. “Those cuts are going to fill in and be fabulous.”

The way he said it, it sounded like denial. I didn’t know how to take it. Dad was acting weird; he never said fabulous. Maybe the logging had broken his mind. Maybe the spring, with the big building, the wedding, the new wing he’d put on his own house for Diane, had been too much for him. I tugged open the slider, and we walked off the porch and started out.

The old relief surged through the soles of my boots. Through the glare from the west, beyond the red pines, I could make out the shapes of Joe, Brett, and Brett’s longtime girlfriend, Ayron, as they came out of the cut-over fields. A lone bullfrog whomped from a ditch. Oak pollen rained past in a sideways current, visible in the sun’s hard glow, and cottonwood seeds floated on it like tiny puffs of breath. The radiance was choked with a passing traffic of insect, spore, and seed. When we met in the red pines, there were hugs all around, but I was madly distracted by what was going on in that field.

Brett followed my gaze and said, “You better come out here and see.”

We walked across the two-track and into the Scots pine cut and Dad and Ayron were laughing together as I stopped with my mouth open. “It’s coming in pretty good,” Brett said as he bent down to examine a sapling.

One-to-two-foot-tall trees stood thick like a field of grass, thousands and thousands of them, glowing green and yellow-white and magenta where they jutted up through the bracken fern and knapweed and foxtail. The new trees were backlit by the last of the spring sun and caught midleap as they busted out of the sandy earth. The »ćŸ±ČÔČÔ±đ°ù-±è±ôČčłÙ±đ-ČőŸ±łú±đÌęČőłÙłÜłŸ±èČő were barely discernible, turned gray and brown by winter, buried under the flags of new saplings. Just about every inch of orange, pine-needled sand displayed new trees.

Tallest among them were the hand-size aspen saplings, with their heart-shaped leaves. But right beside these were new Scots pines and volunteer saplings of red and white oak, black cherry, beech, red pine, paper birch, red maple, sugar maple, yellow birch, a few white pines, even the odd Norway spruce that had migrated over from trees our Uncle Vern had planted along the road. We hadn’t planted a thing. This was all the colonizing work of bird and wind and squirrel and root sucker.

I had watched this sand from the deer blinds and wondered how it would react; now here it was, expressing itself. We had interrupted the pine plantations for the first time in more than 50 years, and the sand took advantage to press from its watery glacial heart exactly the trees that it wanted all along.

“This is unbelievable,” I said.

“Oh, it’s glorious,” Dad said. He bent down and ran his hands through the tops of the saplings like a farmer feeling heads of grain. “It’s coming in better than I hoped.”

“I didn’t know you had done any hoping,” Joe said.

“I told you it would grow!” Brett said, half-mocking Dad. “But you didn’t believe me.”

“Oh, come on,” Dad said, smiling. “I wouldn’t have gone ahead with the cut if I didn’t believe something would come back.”

“That is absolutely not true,” said Brett. “You believed the exact opposite.”

“Well, Brett, you’re really doing it,” Dad conceded. “It’s your plan.”

“All of us are doing it,” Brett said.

“With a little organic matter, our open fields will grow some grass, too,” said Joe, pointing toward the expanse of First Field, one of our cultivated areas where the winter rye had been turned under. Despite better nitrogen, it hadn’t done very well. “We’ve just got to pile on the manure or something.”

The conversation immediately turned to grass and how to improve the crops growing in First Field and another called Cabin Field. Dad and Brett started listing how much more lime we needed and varieties of grain to try and decided they’d ask the farmer next door, Joe Carter, if he had a cultipacker we could buy so we didn’t have to walk the seed in with tractor tires and feet. It was as if the forest coming up around our legs had never been in doubt, and now we were just moving on to other matters. Everything had changed. The cut that we feared would end our family was just its beginning; now we had real work to do.

We stood out there luxuriating in the new field for a while, and then we all walked back to the cabin and I had a beer. Joe indicated the vernal ditch just beyond the edge of Cabin Field, saying, “That’s where we need to put in a small orchard. Get some apple trees.”

“We need to try some berry bushes, too,” said Dad. “It probably all needs fence so it doesn’t get eaten up. The deer are going to be in here like stink.”

The spring air was cool but the low-angle sun burned my face. As we talked, we watched the last of it slosh around in the descending purple and royal blue of the night sky and finally drop into Lake Michigan behind the trees. Suddenly everyone hushed, and heads whipped toward the Scots pine cut. Joe had his finger up, waiting, as we stared through the stand of red pines at the last bits of sunlight painting the tops of the trees, and the sound came again, a piercing buzz, a strange electric cry that was half birdcall and half joy buzzer: peeeeeeennnt!

“A woodyfriller!” Ayron said. That was her word for woodcock.

Peeeeeeennnt!

was doing its mating dance in the Scots pine cut. A couple of us grabbed lawn chairs and we hustled back out into the five-acre cut talking about Ayron’s nickname for the bird. Making up names for the woodcock is practically a sport unto itself. This little brown handful of heartbeat is the most nicknamed game bird in the country, variously called the timberdoodle, the mudbat, the night peck, the snipe or brush snipe, the night partridge, or the Labrador twister. Sometimes they’re called a bogbird or bogsucker because of their feeding method, which is to plunge their long prehensile beak into the thick black humus at the swamp’s edge and pop open their uniquely hinged jaw a bit to suck up a worm or a millipede. In some parts of North America, they’re called by their French name, la becasse. Ayron called them woodyfrillers.

We swished into the field and took up positions to watch the sky, but I could hardly take my eyes off the sand and trees. In the deepening purple twilight, the saplings there looked as dense and thick as calf-high buckwheat. A black cherry that had been left standing in the southeast corner of the cut shook slightly in the breeze and showered us with white petals.

I asked Dad, “Seriously, did you know it would come back like this?”

“Not quite like this,” he said.

“Ah, you dumbasses, what else was going to happen?” Brett said. “This is how forests work.”

“Well, hardly any grass has come up without mountains of fertilizer. I am totally freaking astonished,” I said.

“Hush!” said Ayron.

Peeeeeeennnt!

I tried to focus on the dance, idly letting the tips of the saplings poke into the palms of my hands. These trees changed everything. There are few moments in your life when you are overwhelmed with the realization that all time will be measured by that moment, before and after, and this was one; it was clear that we all knew it was significant because Brett, Joe, Ayron, and I were all sneaking looks at one another. We were prepared to be wrong, but the fields all around us were singing hallelujah.

This sand wasn’t struggling; it wasn’t infertile. It was delivering up a Promethean eruption of life. It was in upheaval. The land opened itself and came forth with an outburst of cells it had held within it, latent, an entire new forest just waiting in the sand for the cosmic signal, for release into a watery sky. The forest was growing so fast that I felt the saplings beneath my chair would lift me into the last of the sun.

Dad was like a completely different person. He was beaming. He had kissed me and said “I love you.” He had been pleased in the past couple years when I’d turn up here with my son, Spenser,Ìębut it always seemed to have a limit; he was happy to pull his grandson close but hold the forest off at arm’s length. No more. That gap had collapsed. He luxuriated in the sweet forest air. He grinned from ear to ear, with cherry flowers in his hair, and looked up into the sky like he was praying.

Dean Kuipers () is a longtime contributor to °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ.Ìę©Dean Kuipers. From The Deer Camp, to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.

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Few people know more about biodiversity than . The 86-year-old Harvard biologist and two-time helped popularize the term in a groundbreaking 1988 report of the same name. So when he argues in his new book, ($26, Liveright), that species loss is a critical threat and that we need to turn fully half the planet’s land surface into biodiversity reserves, it’s more than an idle thought experiment.

“To let things continue at the present rate, we could easily be down to half the species left on earth,” Wilson told me from his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. “We could lose millions just in the next few decades.”

Like many scientists, Wilson believes that the planet is currently experiencing a “,” during which species are disappearing as much as 1,000 times faster than they did before humans were around. And we have yet to even encounter the vast majority of life-forms among us. We’ve named approximately two million species, but the best estimates are that another 6.7 million, give or take a million, have yet to be discovered.

Slowing the rate of extinction has long been a crusade for Wilson. More than ten years ago he calculated that, in order to stop or significantly slow species loss, 50 percent of the earth’s land must be protected. (Currently, only 15 percent is formally preserved.) “The only way we’re going to save the situation is by radical means,” he says.

His Half-Earth proposal is certainly that. Many of the world’s preeminent naturalists helped him compile a list of areas with high biodiversity—not just the rainforests of the Congo and the Amazon, but also little-known spots like the church forests of Ethiopia and the just-opening wildlands of Myanmar. 

Safeguarding an additional 35 percent of the earth comes with logistical challenges: Would people in preservation areas be relocated, or would they be allowed to stay? Would governments agree to such protections? Oddly, Wilson skips over these issues and instead spends a portion of the book criticizing “new conservationists,” a small group of individuals who believe that smart economic development rather than high fences is the best strategy to preserve what’s left of the wild.

Wilson lambasts people like Peter Kareiva, current director of the , who has advocated higher living standards as a way to save nature. Fearing a loss of emphasis on the nonhuman, Wilson uses his book as a club in this internecine fight. “I do believe they are dangerous,” he says. “I had to come down pretty hard on them.”

Kareiva, for his part, admires the Half-Earth idea. “Wilson has been a crusader for biodiversity unlike any other scientist,” he says. But he thinks the antagonism is misplaced. “If you sat us in a room and put a map in front of us and asked us what do we want the world to look like in 2050, we might end up with very similar maps.”

Indeed, in the second to last chapter of Half-Earth, Wilson makes the case for smart and fast development. Human population, he believes, will peak at around 11 billion near the end of the current century. (It now stands at 7.3 billion.) Technology will help transform the global economy from extensive (requiring large amounts of money, people, and natural resources) to intensive (boosting both productivity and efficiency). And energy production will continue to become less connected to fossil fuels. In short, over the coming decades, humanity will achieve a smaller footprint and leave room for other species. It’s the kind of argument a new conservationist might make.

“We’re finally seeing conservation starting to get more on point,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the , which has rattled mainstream environmentalism in part by arguing that it needs to embrace “ecomodernist” development to fix the planet. Shellenberger has his own critique of Wilson: “He doesn’t address the dirty, bloody work of conservation on the ground.”

Nor did he intend to. Half-Earth is less detailed plan than aspirational goal. Wilson is leaving it up to us to figure out how to do it, and after looking at the technological and economic trends, he believes we will. “The reason is that we are thinking organisms trying to understand how the world works,” he writes. “We will come awake.”

Wherever Wilson presents this idea, he is wildly cheered. He considers that evidence of a generation prepared to make tough decisions. “Many young people see in this something worthwhile to dedicate themselves to,” says Wilson. “This book is saying we don’t have to yield. We don’t have to plant the white flag and start setting ourselves up for the ‹destruction of the living world.”

Earth, Protected

Though the book doesn’t include a comprehensive map of proposed sanctuaries, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű assembled an approximate guide to the best places in the biosphere, according to Wilson ‹and other scientists. —Nicola Payne

Homeland Security

The redwood forests of California, the South’s longleaf pine savanna, and the Madrean pine oak woodlands of the mountainous Southwest are crucial North American ecosystems.

Under Siege

The Amazon River basin, the forests of the Congo basin, and the church forests of Ethiopia have faced unrelenting decimation by human hands in recent years.

Hot Spots

Wilson and others believe that certain countries possess such rich biodiversity that the majority of their land is worthy of study and protection. These include Bhutan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Myanmar, Madagascar, New Guinea, and South Africa.

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On a warm August day in 2004, Eric McDavid was sitting inside a house near in Iowa, talking to Zach Jenson, a guy he’d just met, about life as a roving environmental activist. McDavid was 26, Jenson 19, but Jenson was much more experienced—he’d already taken part in loud but uneventful demonstrations that summer at the G8 Summit, an economic forum for the world’s industrialized powers held on Sea Island, Georgia, and at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Eric McDavid in 2005, shortly before his arrest.

Both men were in town to attend the third annual , an invitation-only gathering for anarchists and anticapitalists eager to share ideas about political organizing. (The name is a play on “thoughtcrime,” from George Orwell’s .) Roughly 15 people who were in town for the event were staying in the same group house.

The phone rang. It was a woman Jenson knew named Anna, who said she’d hitchhiked from Florida and needed a ride in from a truck stop. Jenson, McDavid, and a few others drove out to fetch her.

Anna was 18, with hot-pink hair and a camo skirt that stopped midthigh. McDavid took one look and thought, Damn, she rode with truckers looking like that? Jenson had met Anna at the G8 protest two months earlier, where she’d presented herself as a medic who could give first aid during street demonstrations.

Anna had a sharp tongue and was quick to laugh, and McDavid was both attracted and intimidated. She dropped names of activists she knew and had obvious experience, while he was a newbie who hadn’t done anything. McDavid was an occasional student at , in his hometown of Auburn, California, a gentle, athletic redhead who’d played high-school football, had worked as a carpenter, and was interested in political protest and anarchist theory. He came from a loving family and had never experienced any particular radicalizing event other than a few sobering moments when he grasped the effects of construction sprawl on his beloved Sierra Nevada. The wildest thing he’d ever done was march against the war in Iraq.

Anna seemed interested in him, though. That night she walked up to McDavid as he stood with other people outside the house, tipped the dregs from her beer, and said, “When are we going to bed around here?”

McDavid and Jenson exchanged looks. McDavid smiled. “As soon as I finish this cigarette,” he said.

He led her into the room where he’d been crashing, but she got into her own sleeping bag and stayed there. “I was scratching my head at that,” McDavid told me years later, recalling the incident from behind bars at a medium-security federal lockup in Victorville, California. “But I let it go and went to sleep. She was pretty much by my side the whole time during the gathering.” People at the group house assumed they hooked up that weekend, but Anna later swore in court that they never had sex. McDavid told me the same thing in an interview.

Topics at an anarchist meeting range widely, from organizing child-care co-ops to planning rowdy street protests. That weekend, during a break in a session—devoted, in part, to tips on spotting infiltrators—Anna asked McDavid point-blank, “Have you ever seriously done anything yet?”

“No,” he said. “I’m just getting into this. I started traveling just a month and a half ago.”

“What about your friend?” she asked, meaning Jenson. “No,” he said, although he didn’t really know.

“I felt a shift in her perception at that time,” McDavid told me. “I realized that’s where it was at for her, sexually and in terms of the movement.”

Anna seemed to lose interest, but McDavid had just found his reason to jump into radicalism headfirst. If this guerilla girl was looking for love in the trenches, he was going to dig one as fast as he could. Did anyone warn him that she might be a plant? “No, and even if they did, I would have blown it off,” he told me. “I was blind as hell by then.”

THREE YEARS LATER, IN a federal courtroom in Sacramento, California, McDavid was convicted of conspiracy to damage or destroy property by fire or explosive, for which he was sentenced to 19 years, seven months—at the time, the longest stretch ever given to an environmental activist in the United States. He’d been charged with planning a bombing campaign against environmentally harmful targets, a plot that involved him, Jenson, another activist named Lauren Weiner, and Anna—who, it turned out, was an infiltrator hired by the FBI.

When McDavid and Anna met in Iowa, she’d been working as a paid informant for about eight months—she would eventually make more than $65,000 over a two-year span—and she hadn’t hitchhiked up from Florida: she’d flown in at government expense. Anna had been hired to work her way inside environmental and antiglobalization organizations, with the goal of turning up links to underground activists in the (ELF) and the (ALF). By 2004, people in these shadowy groups were believed to be responsible for more than 1,200 cases of property destruction throughout the U.S., causing upwards of $100 million in damages.

For Anna, though, the pickings had been slim. Most people who take part in environmental protests are nonviolent, and in nearly a year of clandestine work she hadn’t found anybody worth investigating. At first, McDavid struck her as another dud.

“At the time, I thought he was inconsequential,” she said during two days on the stand at McDavid’s trial. “I thought he was a college student and not of interest to the FBI.”

She may have been right: McDavid was inconsequential, at least until he met Anna. And then, he insists, he started acting like a radical to impress her, which eventually led to his imprisonment as a domestic terrorist.

Whether McDavid deserves to be in jail is an open question. Certainly he was guilty of being stupid, letting a crush coax him into a potential life of crime. Even though he and his group never got close to building a bomb, they believed they were experimenting with one, and McDavid talked endlessly on tape in ways that sounded like he was conspiring to commit violence. The talk was about destroying dams, power plants, cell-phone towers, and a farm for genetically modified trees. During one recorded conversation, he even sounded resigned to the possibility of killing innocent bystanders.

These days, saying such things out loud is idiotic. The past decade of terrorism and rampage shootings has fostered an era of law-enforcement intervention that many reasonable people welcome. Recent cases around the country show that federal agents might well save property and lives by lowering the boom before a plot fully unfolds. Last February, for example, two Salt Lake City teenagers, Dallin Morgan and Joshua Hoggan, were arrested after they reportedly developed plans to bomb their high school. In November 2011, four elderly members of a right-wing militia group were arrested in Georgia after an informant reported an alleged plot to kill government workers to “save the Constitution.” Both these cases appear to have involved a legitimate threat.

But such episodes can raise sticky questions about civil liberties. How do investigators who make preemptive arrests tell the difference between big talk and serious intent? What if the targets are not seasoned radicals but people who, like McDavid, don’t even know what they’re doing yet? As the use of informants grows across the country—especially those targeting American Muslims—what happens when the informants do more than just report what they see?

MANY BELIEVE THAT’S WHAT happened in the case of Bradley Crowder and David McKay, young men from Texas who were arrested for making firebombs to use at the 2008 Republican National Convention. As argued in the recent documentary , they probably wouldn’t have done anything without the prompting of Brandon Darby, a one-time radical activist who became an FBI informant and acted as their mentor.

Another controversial case involved fitness instructor Craig Monteilh, who was recruited by the FBI in 2006 to infiltrate a mosque in Orange County, California, where there were no specific targets—indeed, an FBI representative had appeared before the congregation to assure them that they were not being spied on. As Monteilh related on the radio program , he became so worried about being productive for the FBI that he began harassing mosque-goers, doing things like whispering “jihad” into their phones, until his behavior caused several community members to file lawsuits against the FBI. The claim was that Monteilh had been manipulated by the bureau to create a case where none existed, violating the Islamic community’s First Amendment rights.

More recently, in September, an 18-year-old Chicago man named Adel Daoud was arrested after FBI agents provided him with a fake bomb that he attempted to detonate outside a Chicago bar. His attorney has claimed that the agents convinced Daoud that Muslim religious leaders were urging individuals like him to wage jihad.

McDavid’s case, which his lawyer, Mark Reichel, appealed unsuccessfully in the U.S. Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court, could be an equally questionable situation. Indeed, jurors expressed doubt that his guilt had been proven, saying that they voted to convict mainly because of confusing instructions from the judge about whether Anna was working for the FBI when she met him.

“If the FBI had not been involved to sort of pull these people together through Anna, we’re not sure that anything would have come of it,” said Diane Bennett, a juror. Ten of the 12 jurors publicly stated that they felt the same way.

The courts were not impressed by such declarations. In its decision to affirm McDavid’s conviction, the Ninth Circuit ruled that it could not consider the jury statements, threw out the question of the jury instructions, and maintained that McDavid was a danger because he hadn’t shown remorse about stating his interest in destroying property. The judges reasoned that McDavid was “predisposed” to terrorism, adding, “There was ample evidence that the group could have committed the crime without Anna, even if it would have taken more time or thriftiness.”

The crime of conspiracy requires “overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy”—otherwise all you’re doing is running your mouth. In McDavid’s case, four overt acts were alleged. First, in 2005, the defendants met around a fire pit at the home of McDavid’s parents in Foresthill, California, where they discussed potential bombing targets. Second, Weiner had purchased a copy of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a do-it-yourself guidebook to making everything from soap to incendiaries to poison. Third, they performed “reconnaissance” (according to Anna) on the Nimbus Dam, near Folsom, California, and a U.S. Forest Service tree-research facility in nearby Placerville. And fourth, they purchased bleach and other alleged bomb-making materials at a Kmart.

Even so, Anna’s own testimony indicated that none of those things might have happened without her leadership and ample government-supplied funds. In its all-out battle against terrorism, did the FBI invent a radical it could catch, instead of catching radicals who already existed?

Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Oregon, says that this has happened before and that a successful appeal by McDavid would have put numerous federal cases in jeopardy of being overturned. She mentions the 2010 arrest of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Muslim 19-year-old from Portland. Mohamud was recruited to take part in a bomb-plot cell made up entirely of undercover FBI agents, who facilitated a proposed violent action during a local Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. Editorials in The New York Times and elsewhere have questioned whether this amounted to entrapment of Mohamud, who faces trial in January.

If McDavid had been freed, “the use of provocateurs and infiltrators would become much more problematic for the feds at a time when they’re screaming and yelling that they need it to protect Americans from terrorism,” Regan says. Madelynn Amalfitano, a filmmaker who is finishing a documentary about McDavid called Greenlisted, puts it this way: “Are we safer for having created a criminal where there might never have been one?”

ANNA WOULDN’T TALK TO me for this story, but I was able to learn her real name and track her down using cell-phone records. Neither she nor her parents responded to interview requests. Likewise, the FBI declined to discuss Anna or McDavid, saying it cannot comment because attorneys are still attempting to appeal McDavid’s sentence. Citing a belief that the case was riddled with errors, they filed a habeas petition in the federal court in Sacramento.

Anna wasn’t always so shy. After McDavid’s conviction, she spoke to a reporter from Elle magazine about her life undercover, posing in front of the Nimbus Dam. The article, though skeptical of Anna’s motives, granted her a certain girl-power mystique. It also described a young woman who seemed driven to deliver for her FBI handlers.

It’s impossible to know which parts of Anna’s Elle biography are factual and which are cover stories, but she describes herself as an intense patriot, a hawk who wanted to do something for her country after 9/11. At McDavid’s trial, she testified that she was recruited for undercover work in 2003.

That fall, Anna was a 17-year-old student at in Fort Lauderdale, and she wrote a paper about antiglobalization activists who were organizing to protest meetings of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), happening that November in Miami. To compile original material, Anna infiltrated the protest scene by getting into costume. “I wore camouflage fatigues,” she said during her testimony. “I wore a black long-sleeved shirt.”

According to Anna, a Florida highway patrolman in her class heard her read the paper, admired it, and asked if he could take a copy to his boss. The next day, a Miami police officer asked Anna to come in. An FBI agent was also there to meet her and asked if she would consider going undercover. She expressed interest, and just like that a confidential informant was born.

Anna didn’t do anything more at the FTAA protest, but she entered into an understanding with the FBI that, over the next few months, she would begin infiltrating radical environmental groups. A plan evolved that she would pose as a medic, but she received no training, even in first aid, just brief instructions on what to look for.

Anna came along right when the Justice Department was turning fresh attention to radicals of all types. The attacks on 9/11 had prompted the government to go hard after Muslim extremists, but the Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, also targeted environmental activists. The number of agents included in domestic Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) units across the country quadrupled under the Bush administration.

In 1998, the ELF had made a fiery statement when it burned down the Two Elk Lodge in Vail, Colorado, destroying a $12 million structure on behalf of lynx habitat. The ELF’s older cousin the ALF had been active since the 1970s, destroying labs that performed procedures on live animals, burning fur shops and farms, and disrupting sport hunting.

Like the ALF, the ELF is a loose network of individual cells with no leaders. Its members unleashed a wave of arson attacks across the U.S. in the 1990s and, in 2003, claimed responsibility for the single most expensive attack ever attributed to the radical environmental movement, a $50 million fire at an apartment complex near La Jolla, California.

In the media, Justice Department officials said the ALF and the ELF were public threats comparable to Al Qaeda. Over the years, FBI agents had tracked hundreds of actions attributed to these groups, which somehow had not resulted in a single injury. In the years following 9/11, however, the style of the attacks seemed to be getting more aggressive. In August 2003, two homemade bombs exploded at the Chiron Corporation, a biotech firm in Emeryville, California, with the second bomb timed to target first-responders. Another bomb, wrapped in nails to maximize the chances of injury, exploded on September 26, 2003, at the Shaklee Corporation in Pleasanton, California, a company that sells health and beauty products. Neither caused injury, but both were claimed by a group called and attributed to an activist named Daniel San Diego, who has since disappeared.

By deploying Anna, the government sent a teenage girl into this world of potentially deadly criminals. At the meeting with the Miami police department, the FBI agent asked if Anna could go undercover at three events in 2004: the G8 Summit and the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

Anna was still in school, and the FBI wasn’t talking yet about paying her for her services, though it would cover flights, car rentals, and other expenses. Her job was to show up at protests a few days ahead of time, learn the names of organizers, and ingratiate herself with any activists who seemed bent on violent action.

DURING MCDAVID’S TRIAL, ANNA made it clear that she was the bait in a fishing expedition. She didn’t have hard targets. She was told to zero in on male anarchists—seekers and romantics susceptible to the manipulations of a brassy young woman.

For Reichel, McDavid’s attorney, the whole thing was a clear violation of the freedom-of-assembly protections outlined in the First Amendment. “You can’t target people for their political views,” he told me. “You can’t target them for their sex, and you can’t target them for their age.”

Nonetheless, that was the strategy, and while the radical anarchist underground was coed, it was still made up primarily of footloose males. Anarchists had been on the Justice Department watch list since the 1920s, but green anarchists were at the top when Anna was deployed. Investigators were then working on a massive 2005 bust centered on Eugene—Operation Backfire—eventually naming 11 activists in a 65-count indictment that included arsons at timber companies, a car dealership, and a horse slaughterhouse. This crackdown ended with prison sentences that featured “terrorism enhancements,” the first used on eco-activists.

Anna’s 2004 summer vacation became a protest tour of the U.S., and she turned up wherever radicals seemed likely to be. From June 8 to 10, she joined approximately 30 roughshod protesters intent on disrupting the annual meeting of the Group of Eight, held that year at the swanky and sealed-off resorts on Sea Island.

Anna reported that the scene was mainly a waste of time, but she did meet a shy, thin young protester who went by the nickname Ollie. This was Zach Jenson, a dreamer from the Seattle area who fed himself with food stamps and drifted from place to place along with other untethered activists. He had no record of being violent.

Anna handed over a list of names and notes to the FBI and moved on. She turned up in Boston for the Democratic National Convention, from July 26 to 29, but as she testified during McDavid’s trial, she didn’t hear about any illegal plans. Then Anna went to the CrimethInc gathering in Des Moines, where she met McDavid.

The next month, Anna proved herself to her new circle of friends at the Republican National Convention, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in late August and early September. Unlike Boston, New York exploded in wild protests against the Bush administration, instigated by hundreds of thousands of people. More than 1,800 were arrested, a record for a political convention. And it was here that Anna first tried out a new persona: agent provocateur.

At a protest in front of the New York Public Library’s main branch in Midtown Manhattan, Anna tried to convince McDavid, Jenson, and a few others that they should take the stairs, which were off-limits to protesters. (They were using the library as a gathering point.) Unable to convince anybody to break the law with her, Anna marched up the stairs alone and was arrested. McDavid went to look for her at the 57th Street piers, where more than 1,000 activists were being detained. At his trial he learned that, only a few minutes after her arrest, Anna was already free and being debriefed by the FBI in a nearby coffee shop.

“It was a setup, even the bust,” McDavid told me. “They knew who she was.”

THAT WAS THE LAST time McDavid saw Anna in 2004: sitting in a van wearing plastic handcuffs. Soon he began barraging her with love letters. “My stuff was romantically intended,” he told me. “It had that push.” Anna told McDavid she threw the letters out, because they could link the two of them if either was arrested. In fact, she turned them over to the FBI, and McDavid kept writing.

That winter, things were popping in the eco-radical community of the Sierra foothills around Auburn. McDavid had spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with his parents and two younger sisters in their home, a beautiful place set high on a redwood ridge in Foresthill, about 30 miles northeast of Auburn. A series of ELF arsons and attempted arsons swept through nearby towns in December and January, first at an upscale subdivision in Lincoln, then at an apartment complex in Sutter Creek, and finally at a commercial complex in Auburn itself.

On February 8, federal investigators arrested one of McDavid’s friends, 21-year-old Ryan Daniel Lewis, in connection with the Auburn attack. A few weeks later, the feds turned up at the McDavids’ door, but his parents, George and Eileen—both Air Force veterans—said they trusted their son and declined to talk. Eric was called to testify before a grand jury and refused, risking a contempt-of-court charge. Later, the McDavids also refused to talk to the grand jury in Eric’s case.

The rest of spring 2005 was a time of intense study and travel for McDavid, and he turned up next in Philadelphia, in June, for a biomedical conference called BIO, an annual event on the protest calendar. He found his way to a protest gathering in northwest Philadelphia. Jenson was there, too, and they met a local woman named Lauren Weiner who was fixing bikes for inner-city kids to use. She offered to let them sleep in her apartment.

Weiner was a former snowboarding instructor from Pound Ridge, New York, a woodsy commuter town near the Connecticut border. She was studying at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and worked in an anarchist bookstore.

Anna turned up, too, after a gig that almost blew her cover. In early June 2005, in Fort Lauderdale, she had worked at a big protest against a pro-democracy forum called the Organization of American States, and she had been openly accused of being an informant. Local activist Ray Del Papa and others suspected her after she led a group in a sit-in that broke a mutual agreement with police and when she refused to use her alleged medic skills to help a woman who’d collapsed in the heat. Anna then drove organizer Sarah Seeds all the way to Philadelphia, trying desperately to convince Seeds she wasn’t a spy.

When Anna met McDavid at Weiner’s place, she claimed that she was shocked by what a year on the road had done to him. “He went from being an unobtrusive college student to a radical activist who seemed to espouse very firm beliefs in very extremist viewpoints,” she said in court. Anna said McDavid talked openly about his support for groups like the ELF, adding that he wanted to confer with like-minded people about property destruction.

Anna ended up staying at Weiner’s place, buying groceries and beer with “disposable income” she said she was earning as a stripper. On the first night, McDavid asked Anna to step out on the balcony with him. He said he had something big to talk about but that there were “too many ears around.”

That night, Anna gave her usual report to Ricardo Torres, a Philadelphia special agent who would become her main FBI handler, and she mentioned McDavid’s comment. Torres ran the name and it hit: McDavid had been called to the grand jury in the Ryan Lewis case. Though McDavid was never a suspect in that case, Anna was instructed to “follow him closely” to see if he made any comments about criminal activity around Sacramento in 2004. Anna dropped everything to investigate McDavid, having finally found someone the government considered a person of interest.

McDAVID, JENSON, WEINER, AND Anna bonded, forming what’s called an affinity group in protest politics. After they attended the 2005 CrimethInc in Bloomington, Indiana, McDavid asked Anna for a ride to Chicago. For him this was the beginning of the end.

During the Bloomington CrimethInc, McDavid had mentioned that he had a friend who was facing serious jail time. Anna, who’d been briefed, started asking questions. In her testimony, she said McDavid talked about Ryan Lewis by name, noting that Lewis had helped introduce him to anarchist ideas. He mentioned that Lewis and some accomplices had used diesel fuel to set fire to an apartment complex. Anna asked McDavid if he was involved. He said he wasn’t.

In court, Anna testified that McDavid had his own plans, that he claimed he’d been given a recipe in West Virginia for a plastic-explosive compound. Anna said McDavid was hatching a “winter bombing campaign.”

McDavid denies talking about any such campaign. He admits that he and Anna talked about explosives but says Anna spun this to make it sound as if he had definite plans.

According to Anna, McDavid got very quiet during this portion of their talk, saying he had “something to get off my chest.” Without asking whether she was an informant, he said, “If you are a cop or are working with law enforcement, I will fucking kill you.” He even described how he’d do it: by severing one of her leg arteries with an eight-inch hunting knife he carried. Flustered and scared, Anna said, “Fuck you! If I hear that you’re a cop, I’ll fucking kill you!”

“Good,” he allegedly replied.

McDavid shook his head when I brought this up. He said that part of the conversation never happened and that the government coached Anna to make him sound violent. None of it was recorded, so we’ll never know for sure, but the government failed to produce an eight-inch hunting knife after arresting McDavid and searching the cabin. McDavid said all he ever carried was a four-inch pocket knife. “That thing was a tool,” he told me. “I never threatened her with cutting her—especially not in specific places. That was extremely imaginative on her part.”

WHEN THE FOUR NEXT convened—at the McDavid home the weekend before Thanksgiving—Anna was on the FBI payroll. She apparently wasn’t in school that fall, devoting herself to the investigation. She had scarcely communicated with McDavid for months, though she had been hanging out with Weiner, whom she’d recorded as a test of a new body-wire rig the FBI had given her. To jump-start the group, Anna suggested to Weiner that everybody meet for the holiday in the Bay Area and go to the McDavid place in Foresthill. She even paid Weiner’s airfare.

“For me it was just a crazy, awesome trip to California,” recalls Weiner, who says there was no mention of a heavy political agenda. “Yeah, we were going to talk about stuff. We were going to talk about everything. We’d had this amazing summer. Anna said she was thinking about moving out to California, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to. I don’t like it here.’”

McDavid’s parents weren’t home, and as he opened the door for Anna, Weiner, and Jenson on the afternoon of November 18, he joked that they were entering “the house of a known anarchist.”

Anna’s local handler, Sacramento-based agent Nasson Walker, had instructed her to get details of a plot on tape, and before long Anna asked everybody if they were really going to talk talk this time. McDavid seemed ready to meet her head-on. He said he’d been in family therapy and had been speaking with his mother about his confused feelings toward Anna. Now he wanted to be completely open with all of them about the ideas he’d been entertaining. He showed them a print interview with anarchist philosopher Derrick Jensen, a noted critic of contemporary society whose books argue for an end to industrial civilization, calling it unsustainable.

Anna was wearing her wire, but she had trouble knowing when it was on, and both Jenson and Weiner said later that she kept asking them to speak up and repeat themselves. Her recordings missed about half of what was said. What she got, however, was enough to get everybody arrested.

As fire pit embers drifted high into the darkened redwoods that first night, McDavid said he was impressed by Jensen’s ideas. The four discussed some of the targets Jensen identified, including cell-phone towers, fish hatcheries, and transit systems. McDavid reminded the group that merely discussing these matters meant that they were, in words Anna quoted in her testimony, “broaching the area of terrorism.”

Asked which targets would be meaningful, Jenson mentioned oil trucks and tankers. Gas stations came up, and Weiner specified that Shell Oil was particularly culpable for problems in the rainforests. McDavid showed them an article about genetically modified trees, saying he’d like to visit the GMO farm at a Forest Service facility in nearby Placerville.

With the tape running, McDavid repeated his interest in making C4-style putty bombs but said he needed more information. He asked Anna if she could find more recipes for explosives. Weiner said she’d heard of a how-to book called The Poor Man’s James Bond, and McDavid asked her to get a copy.

Asked about this conversation now, Weiner, Jenson, and McDavid all give the same answer, which isn’t entirely convincing: that these ideas were presented as hypotheticals, not to be taken literally. “We talked about how we might be the ones left to fight for the end of civilization, and we should be informed,” says Weiner. “We needed to know this stuff for self-defense. We were talking, and it was good to talk.”

“Anarchists usually just talk shit,” Jenson says, “but they never really do that much.”

The four agreed to get back together in January and talk some more. To Anna they had already crossed the line into plotting, and she testified that they each agreed to the following tasks: Anna would compile bomb recipes, put together a medical kit, and find a remote cabin in California where they all could live. Weiner was tasked with buying the James Bond book. Jenson would prepare himself to train the others in the “ninja-like stealth abilities” he claimed to possess. As for McDavid—well, according to Anna, he was the leader, so they did whatever he said.

Anna went to the FBI for new bomb formulas. “We ended up sitting down with some bomb technicians from the Philadelphia FBI office, and we put together a recipe that could be sent to him that was a—basically a safe bomb,” she said on the stand. “It would make some smoke, a bang, maybe a flash, and he would think he had something that could be used as an explosive.”

On December 10, Anna sent McDavid a recipe via email, using a simple code they’d agreed upon. McDavid told me he was upset to get it. “I emailed her back and said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ It was in code, but of course I had some idea what it was. I was, like, ‘No, no, no.’” He asked that she stop. McDavid was nervous: Anna was moving too fast.

NOT LONG AFTER NEW Year’s 2006, the group moved into a cabin in the Sierra village of Dutch Flat. The place wasn’t remote—it was set amid some 100 other residences—and it was fitted with all the modern conveniences, including new appliances, electric heat, and surveillance audio and video devices installed by the FBI, which had agents positioned in a command post down the road from the cabin. Anna paid for groceries, drove everyone up there, and even handed out spending money, sometimes $100 bills. It’s almost impossible to imagine that the four of them would have gotten together like this without the FBI underwriting the whole arrangement.

On their first night in the cabin, January 8, the group started organizing themselves. Anna produced a journal that included page after page of notes about explosives and fuses—all provided by the FBI. Weiner didn’t like it, but McDavid said he thought Anna had really shown initiative. They decided to write everything down in the notebook and destroy it later. They called it the Burn Book.

Among the things they discussed the next morning, captured on tape, was the possible accidental death of civilians. “McDavid brought up the topic,” Anna testified. “And he goes on to explain … that his personal philosophy is that it’s OK if civilians are hurt or killed during this bombing campaign. That they are just, quote, fence-sitters, so just forget them.”

On the surveillance footage, McDavid can be heard saying that bystanders might become “collateral damage.” A few minutes later, he reversed his position by saying he believed there shouldn’t be any harm done to people during their action. The prosecution argued that his initial statements proved that McDavid was in no way reluctant to be part of a violent bombing action and was thus predisposed and not entrapped.

Within a few days, the group had scouted targets, including the massive Nimbus Dam and its fish hatchery on the American River. Both Weiner and McDavid started laughing when they saw the structure, because it was clearly impossible for them to blow it up.

“It was just about silly to mention it,” McDavid said of the Nimbus plan. Anna kept pushing, saying, “Yeah, but in theory, how might it be done?” Finally, Weiner said, “Are you serious? Are you seriously asking why I don’t want to do this? Besides the fact that it is impossible?” At McDavid’s trial, the government spun this nonevent into a major save by Anna, with U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott saying that destroying the dam would have made New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina look like “a Sunday pancake breakfast.”

Later that same day, the group took a public tour at the Institute of Forest Genetics in Placerville. (The staff had been warned by the FBI that they were coming and played along.) Their tour guide briefed them about the disease-resistant trees being bred there and pointed out that the staff scientists lived on-site, only about 40 yards from the labs. When McDavid got a minute alone with the others, he whipped out the Burn Book and started making sketches, muttering that they were among “evil scientists.”

Weiner, however, was swayed by what she’d seen. “I was like, ‘These are really good guys trying to make a difference,’” she told me. “So I didn’t end up agreeing with him, and in a very cowardly, mousy little way, I voiced it.”

ROMANTICALLY, MCDAVID AND ANNA were still keeping things cool. She slept on the couch; he bunked in the main bedroom with Weiner. McDavid brought up the stalled relationship during a pizza run he made with Anna. “She said she wanted to slow it down,” he told me, “in order to do what she wanted to do—the mission—and then pick it up later.”

Meaning she held out the promise that they might get together after the campaign was done? “That was the carrot, yeah.”

Anna, meanwhile, may have been feeling agitated. She thought the bomb would never materialize, and she was often on her cell phone, complaining to her “aunt” (actually Torres). One day, Weiner scared her by showing her a large spider she’d caught, and Anna’s screams prompted Torres to head for the cabin in an SUV. But Anna was able to signal a false alarm before he got there.

Another morning, while driving into Auburn, McDavid was in the passenger seat when the glove compartment popped open and a body recorder fell into his hands. He said, “This doesn’t look like a car component.” Anna snatched it and stuffed it back into the box, saying, “Stupid old car.” Asked about this later, McDavid said, “I had no idea. I just didn’t put it together.”

McDavid was eager to try a recipe that created explosive crystals using potassium chloride (commonly used as fertilizer), and he and Anna spent most of January 12 mixing it up. It didn’t go very well, and Anna was constantly on the phone while she moved furniture and repositioned people so the FBI could get clear surveillance images. For safety’s sake, they moved their other experiments outdoors, cooking a bleach mixture in a glass bowl on a hotplate. The mixture cooled too rapidly, however, shattering the bowl.

Anna flipped out, thinking she’d just lost all the evidence. She kicked the ground, growling, “Fuck! I’m so fucked!” and then started an argument with the others. The surveillance tape shows Weiner and Anna going at it, McDavid trying to keep the peace, and Jenson keeping his mouth shut.

At one point, McDavid suggested that Anna “take it down a few notches and relax and maybe come back and chitchat later.”

Anna said, “Are we still planning on doing anything tomorrow? Or should I just stop talking about plans?”

“I would love it if you stopped talking,” Weiner said.

“I would love it if you guys followed a plan! How about that?” Anna shouted.

Anna left and marched down to see Torres and Walker, telling them she was through. They talked for two hours about the situation; despite McDavid’s obvious interest in eco-sabotage, it might never happen. The agents assured Anna that they already had enough evidence to make an arrest. She left and returned to the cabin.

In the meantime, Weiner and McDavid had smoked some pot—Jenson didn’t partake—and all three had talked and realized that they didn’t like where things were going.

“We were dependent on her, and we wanted her to be happy,” Weiner said of Anna. “So you’re passionate about it purely because your friend’s passionate about it. And then it was just … scary. Once things become real, you’re like, ‘Oh wow, this is not anything I want to be doing.’”

During McDavid’s trial, Anna added another dramatic detail about that night. She was sleeping on the couch after the argument, she said, when she was awakened by her cell phone vibrating in her pocket. Torres, who was watching on a video monitor, had sent a text message that said, “WAKE UP!!!!” When Anna opened her eyes, McDavid was standing over her, waving an “eight-inch hunting knife.” After a few tense moments, he went back to the bedroom.

The surveillance tape for that part of the night is missing, as are any handwritten surveillance notes. There’s no record of the text message. Several jurors pointed to this possible concoction as the most egregious foul in the case. “There were things like that that some of us just didn’t really believe,” juror Diane Bennett told me.

“That was the most outrageous and difficult part of the trial,” McDavid says. “I had a very difficult time staying in my chair during that.”

“There was no way that happened,” says attorney Mark Reichel. “But this trial proves that they just say whatever they want.”

THE BUST HAPPENED THE next morning. The four went down to the Kmart in Auburn to buy more bleach. After the purchase, Anna left the store first and McDavid followed. She got in the car and he relaxed, sitting on the back of the car.

Jenson and Weiner were walking out with their stuff when McDavid heard Anna put the locks down. Sirens wailed all around as black SUVs and other vehicles came out of nowhere. Tactical teams poured out; officers with FBI and JTTF printed on their clothes drew weapons and shouted orders. As officials handcuffed and frisked McDavid, he noticed that they made no move to get Anna. “I looked in the rearview mirror and she was just staring at me,” he says. “That’s when I knew. It all came together right then.”

More than two years later, on May 8, 2008, McDavid’s defense team was stunned when Federal District Judge Morrison C. England handed down McDavid’s sentence: using a terrorism enhancement, he increased it from five years to 20. By comparison, several radicals swept up in the Eugene cases were convicted in 2006 of multiple arsons—and given terrorism enhancements—but the longest sentence was 13 years. In a separate case, Marie Mason, a Michigan animal-rights activist who’s now serving 22 years, confessed to 13 counts of arson and property damage.

Jenson and Weiner turned state’s evidence and got off on probation, which has expired. Though they testified against McDavid as part of their plea deals, neither thinks he would have done anything violent, with or without Anna’s influence. McDavid makes the same claim. “If there was any driving force within these relationships, it was her,” he says.

McDavid’s appeal argued that Anna’s tactics constituted entrapment. The Ninth Circuit Court affirmed his conviction, but Reichel still believes the case was improperly swung by a judge who committed a blatant procedural error.

According to Bennett, only an hour or so before coming to a decision, the jury was leaning seven to five toward a vote for entrapment. But a key instruction from Judge England made it impossible to do anything but convict. At issue was a date. The government always insisted that Anna was never an “agent,” just an informer. Whatever she was, if she was officially employed by the FBI in August 2004, when she first met McDavid, then there was the possibility of entrapment, since McDavid appeared to have no plans prior to her influence. If she was not an agent until July 2005, when the first alleged mention of explosives occurred, during the car ride to Chicago, then she was only an observer of McDavid’s premeditated plan and there was no entrapment.

Judge England ordered jurors to use the 2005 date, even though the ’04 date had been verbally affirmed in court. Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Lapham and everyone else involved in the case admitted the instructions were an error, and this was the basis for McDavid’s appeal. But the Ninth Circuit didn’t buy it. Later, the Supreme Court declined to hear McDavid’s appeal. That sealed it: if his last-ditch habeas appeal doesn’t work, he’ll serve most or all of his time.

AFTER RECIEVING THE NEWS in 2010 that the Ninth Circuit had affirmed his conviction, McDavid said he had never expected to be released. “I have something better than hope,” he said. “I have an out date: February 4, 2022.” That’s when he becomes eligible for parole. He’ll be 44.

Will 20 years in prison mean anything?

“Yeah, I want it to open people’s eyes to the tactics this government is willing to stoop to in order to ensure prosecution and maintain the cultural perception of anarchists as crazed bombers,” he said. “That’s the quickest way to nullify any honest and open discussion of the kinds of ideas these people are proposing.”

McDavid wanted to make one thing clear: he wasn’t interested in holding a grudge. Not against Weiner or Jenson, who testified against him. Not even against Anna—though, in her case, what he’d most like to do is forget.

“That’s a person that I never wish to have any kind of energetic discourse with at all,” he said, smiling. “Couldn’t care less. She’s chosen her path.” ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

is the author of , a 2009 book about eco-radical Rod Coronado. He lives in Los Angeles.

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