Crimes for nature.

What motivates environmental radicals? The answer may be as simple as life - or death.

Chainsaws are roaring, and ancient redwoods are crashing to the ground all around Alicia Littletree as she races tree to tree through Owl Creek Grove. Propelling her is a passion to protect the old-growth forest on the northern California coast.

"I have to do this. I'd do anything to change the way things are in the woods. If I die, I die. I don't need to ask myself why anymore," says Littletree, 24.

She is one of a growing number of activists turning to civil disobedience - even sabotage - out of frustration with the legal system they feel should be designed to safeguard natural resources. Direct action, they say, is the only way to halt the extinction of endangered ecosystems and the species dependent upon them.

Recent protests staged in the name of the environment have catapulted forest activists into the national spotlight and earned two dubious distinctions. The most costly act in the history of environmental protest occurred in October when arson fires caused $12 million in damages to a ski lodge at Vail, Colorado. A month earlier the protest movement suffered its first death when David "Gypsy" Chain, 24, Littletree's friend and fellow Earth First! activist, was killed by a falling tree while running through a redwood grove to protest Pacific Lumber Company logging.

What drives these activists to such life-threatening extremes is a combination of spiritual conviction, science, and politics, says Bron Taylor, an ethics professor and director of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Most radical environmentalists are inspired by a deeply held belief that the earth is sacred. To their dismay, scientists report that human intervention is causing an extinction crisis.

But when activists seek solutions through public input, legislation, or other conventional means, they confront a political system they perceive as incapable of response or downright corrupt, Taylor says. It is the combination of their urgency to save ecosystems - their sense that every loss is irrevocable - and their hopelessness in political solutions that prompts desperate deeds.

"Species are going down so fast they have to go for a big win," says Taylor.

The result is a series of illegal activities that, by all accounts, are escalating in number and ingenuity: graffiti, trespassing, tree spiking, equipment vandalism, blockades, arson. Ron Arnold, executive vice president for the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, calls all of it ecoterrorism, crimes committed to save nature. The victims, he says, are individuals and business owners, most of them in natural resource industries, many of them among his organization's 10,000 members.

The attacks are not just assaults on specific businesses but on the American free enterprise system and the principle of individual rights, Arnold says. His nonprofit organization, which tracks activities by animal rights and environmental groups, makes no' distinction between nonviolent civil disobedience and property destruction, says Arnold. He classifies the activities by simple criminal category - misdemeanor or felony.

"We have no interest in the motives," Arnold says. "We don't give a hoot what people think when they commit a crime."

For most protesters civil disobedience is a last resort. They turn to it only after legal actions have failed. Earth First! and most other groups that advocate illegal direct action endorse nonviolent tactics exclusively and denounce anything with potential to harm people or property. Violence hurts their cause, says Jeff Berman, a member of Ancient Forest Rescue in Denver.

Civil disobedience would be completely unnecessary if the legitimate public processes worked as they are designed to, he says. It's when "corporations and oligarchies" take control of forests "for their own ends" that people rise up in protest, says Berman.

"When government doesn't respond, we get more and more people putting their bodies on the line. Some, unfortunately, are violent," he says. Berman condemns the arson at Vail, which occurred shortly after a federal judge dismissed attempts to halt the expansion of ski runs into what many scientists have identified as the last and best habitat for lynx. Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility in a letter that said the group might take future actions "if this greedy corporation continues to trespass into wild and unroaded areas."

"Some laws need to be broken for a higher moral concern. At Vail, it was habitat," says Craig Rosebraugh, a spokesman for the Liberation Collective in Portland that released the letter.

Littletree, still shaken by Chain's death, says the most frightened she has been in eight years of environmental activism is running through the forest while loggers are felling trees. But she is committed to using this Earth First! cat-and-mouse tactic and other civil disobedience to send a message.

"I have to be a part of resisting this continued illegal logging," Littletree says just hours after she was released from three days in jail on a trespassing charge. "I've absolutely given up on the system. I'm putting my body at risk for the redwoods, the salmon, and the marbled murrelet."

Her message may be shrill and her tactics extreme, but Littletree is uncomfortably close to expressing many values held by mainstream America. Polling data indicate a growing concern over forest issues. And most Americans say they want the full natural range of species to remain and prosper.

Environmental radicals are messengers calling attention to local, national, and global issues that deserve our attention, says Taylor, the ethics professor.

"If we listen to them and scrutinize what they're saying, we may find we don't disagree as much as we think," Taylor says.

Jane Braxton Little is a freelance writer based in Plumas County, California.