A growing number of radical environmentalists are literally using guerilla warfare to defend our planet.
Even Then, The Environment
On the chill spring morning of March 21, 1981, 75 people drove into the visitors-center parking lot of Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam. They were not part of the usual crowd of tourists and boat owners come to marvel at the huge waterworks, ponder statistics on metric tons of concrete, or admire the vast power-plant reservoir, inaccurately, if not disingenuously, named Lake Powell by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. On the contrary, they were more interested in what had been here before the dam, what the dam had in fact taken from them. Under 500 feet of reservoir water lay what had once been one of the most beautiful stretches of the Colorado Gorge, the golden heart of the canyonlands, with tamarisk and willow thickets, waterfalls and plunge pools, hanging gardens of orchids and maidenhair ferns that found refuge in the pink sandstone recesses while mastodons still walked the continent during the Ice Age. There had been egrets and ibises wading in the shallows, beaver, deer, and coyotes in the cotton-wood glades. There had been that abundance of life only possible, or perhaps only fully appreciated, along a desert river. It was for the sake of this submerged, half-forgotten natural world under the bone-white monument to progress that these people came to demonstrate their displeasure.
Among the crowd were Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, and Howie Wolke. Less than a year before, during a hiking trip to the remote Pinacate Desert of Mexico, these three environmental activists had decided to form Earth First!, a self-proclaimed radical environmental group with an obligatory exclamation point and a motto: “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.” It was, in fact, directly after this meeting that Roselle and Wolke stopped by the dam on their way home to wonder if this might not be the place to put their motto into practice for the first time.
Their choice was inspired in no small part by another member of the crowd: Edward Abbey. Writer, raconteur, amiable misanthrope, and eminence grise of the environmental movement in the Southwest, Abbey had written a novel in 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which told the story of a group of raucous, environmentally minded saboteurs who rollicked through the Desert Southwest burning bulldozers, tearing down billboards, and above all else dreaming of blowing up Glen Canyon Dam. The fictional aspirations of Abbey’s characters were about to come to fruition — of a sort.
The dam occupied a special place not only along the Colorado River, but also in the history of the American environmental movement. Anxious not to appear “unreasonable,” the large national environmental organizations, and the Sierra Club in particular, reached a compromise with the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 1960s, in essence preventing construction of a dam in Dinosaur National Monument in exchange for allowing one to be built in Glen Canyon. To acquiesce in the destruction of the world’s most magnificent system of red-rock canyons without a fight stuck in the craw of many grass-roots environmentalists and began an estrangement that culminated in the rise of more militant groups like Earth First!.
As if to rub salt in the environmental movement’s wounds, the Bureau of Reclamation celebrated its victory with a media campaign that included the publication of a book in which the bureau breathlessly described the reservoir as the “jewel of the Colorado.” The book was filled with snipes at environmentalists and poetic expostulations on the mastering of nature by man, including this sub-Tennysonian stanza by the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner himself, Floyd Dominy:
“To have a deep blue lake Where no lake was before Seems to bring man A little closer to God.”
“In this case,” wrote Abbey in mock response a few years later, “… about 500 feet closer. Eh, Floyd?”
Thus, to many grass-roots environmentalists Glen Canyon Dam was more than just an ugly mass of concrete and steel profaning the stark majesty of the canyonlands; it represented what was fundamentally wrong with the country’s conservation policies: arrogant government officials motivated by a quasi-religious zeal to industrialize the natural world, and a diffident bureaucratic leadership in the mainstream environmental organizations who more or less willingly collaborated in this process.
With howls and banners, but without permits or permission, the people in the parking lot began a demonstration calling for the dismantling of Glen Canyon Dam. The National Park Service officials overseeing the recreational facility were visibly nervous: They had never heard of any environmental group supporting the removal of a dam, and nothing in their agency’s philosophy had ever prepared them for such a demand. From their perspective it was madness, pure and simple, to undo a technological “improvement” of the landscape.
The police had somehow gotten word that there might be trouble from a new environmental group, and therefore they were already present at the scene in force. Most of the security, however, was prudently concentrated in the belly of the dam, where the generators and other vulnerable machinery were housed.
While the police were preoccupied with monitoring the demonstration, six of the protesters made off undetected onto the top of the dam, carrying a heavy black bundle on their shoulders. Foreman, Wolke, and four other members of Earth First! hurried onto the concrete rampart of the dam. When they reached the mid-point of the dam’s arch, they stopped, flushed with adrenaline and the fear the police might arrest them at any moment.
Seven hundred feet below over a small parapet lay the Colorado Gorge, the river squeezed into white plumes of water from the sluiceways. They lashed the corners of the bundle onto the parapet as best they could, and with the cry “Earth First!” pitched it over the side.
A 300-foot black polyethylene banner slowly unfurled down the unblemished face of the dam, looking from afar like an enormous crack opening in the super-structure. It was a simple and graphic gesture of protest against the destruction of nature by the artifacts of industrial society: a symbolic “cracking” of Glen Canyon Dam.
Before the police arrived, all six activists hurried off the dam and rejoined the demonstration. The police made no real attempt to find out who was responsible for the embarrassing plastic “crack.” They were more eager to meet Abbey, who, from the back of an old pickup truck, was giving a speech that included this echo from Churchill: “Surely no man-made structure in modern American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason.” Of course, they had no way of knowing that Abbey had himself contributed $200 to purchase the crack.
All that was left to do was cut the plastic from the dam, which fluttered to a grassy area below called “Dominy’s Football Field.” Ever diligent, the F.B.I. took possession of the crack and hauled it off as evidence. They dusted it for finger-prints, apparently with no results. The F.B.I. would later label Earth First! a “soft-core terrorist” group. And just a little over five years after the cracking of the dam, it would devise an elaborate and expensive scheme — initiated by the scandal — shrouded attorney general under Reagan, Ed Meese — to use infiltrators and electronic surveillance to arrest Foreman for allegedly conspiring to cut power lines around nuclear power plants in three western states.
All this, however, lay in the future. For now no charges were brought and officialdom considered the matter closed.
As would soon become customary when dealing with radical environmentalism, officialdom could not have been more wrong. The symbolic cracking of Glen Canyon was the first Earth First! action to catch the public’s attention. Many more would follow. Not content with merely cracking the dam, Earth First! immediately began a petition campaign to raze it, hoping to “march up to the Capitol with 20 million signatures.” (The radicals almost got their wish from a higher source than Congress when the 1983 floods seriously damaged the structure.)
While the cracking of the dam was symbolic, it seemed to let loose the very real floodwaters of a new kind of environmental activism: iconoclastic, uncompromising, discontented with traditional conservation policy, at times illegal, always motivated by a vision of the world that rejected the premise held by government, industry, and mainstream environmental groups alike, that mankind should control and manage the natural world. Just as Glen Canyon Dam held back the Colorado, this grass-roots commitment to a more militant and uncompromising environmental movement had been pent up and frustrated by the cautious bureaucratic machinery of the mainstream environmental organizations. Now Earth First! was inventing a style of ecological confrontation that would give direction to this discontent.
The protagonists of the Earth First! movement realized the significance of their action even at this early stage. “We knew we were making history,” said Roselle years later. “The cracking of the dam was not just a media stunt, it was the real birth of the radical environmental movement — a movement all of us felt had to be born if the natural world was going to survive.”
For years after the event, Earth First! was known as the group that cracked Glen Canyon Dam. It has moved on to be known as the group that spikes trees or burns bulldozers or, for the more unsteady, like Sue Jorger, former executive vice-president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association, the group that “is a real threat to the American way of life.”
Nevertheless, the Glen Canyon protest remains an important event in the iconography of the radical environmental movement, dramatizing what a growing number of grass-roots activists believed: that our technological culture with its intrusions on the natural world had to be curtailed, perhaps even undone, to keep the ecology of this planet and our role in it viable. It marks a shift from a rearguard strategy to protect wilderness to an affirmative attempt to roll back the artifacts of civilization, to restore the world to the point where natural processes such as the flow of rivers could continue. It was the opening shot in a battle between radical environmentalists and the foundations — concrete and spiritual — of industrial society.
If at the time it was a shot not exactly heard around the world, it was at least very much part of an expanding zeitgeist of ecological militancy rising up to resist the destruction of the natural world. Radical environmentalists now exert a growing influence on public lands decisions and environmental policy —to the dismay of timber companies, government agencies, and, not infrequently, the main-stream environmental movement, which many perceive as being out of touch with people’s deep concern with environmental degradation. Increasingly, it is grass-roots activist groups like Earth First! that are setting the environmental agenda and bringing national and international attention to such critical ecological issues as the destruction of tropical rain forests and of our own temperate rain forests in the Pacific Northwest. The means they use are often both dramatic and drastic.
“We knew we were making history. It was the real birth of the environmental movement — a movement al I of us felt had to be born if the natural world was going to survive.”
Over the past few years, major timber companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Louisiana-Pacific have suffered an estimated $10 million in damages to road-building and timber equipment at the hands of “vandals” — the resource industry’s pejorative for radical environmentalists who have taken direct action to keep mining, logging, grazing, and any other kinds of development out of America’s wildlands. The radicals call their actions “ecotage” or “monkey-wrenching,” in homage to Abbey’s novel. Some of the companies’ bulldozers, graders, and trucks had their hydraulic hoses slashed, their electrical wiring cut, or were simply set afire. Most of the damage was caused when abrasives were poured into the crankcases of road-building vehicles, destroying the engines over a period of a few days and allowing the monkey-wrenchers to be far away when the problem was finally discovered — a technique called “siltation.” As one Earth First! member wrote, siltation is a way “to turn any internal-combustion engine into an expensive boat anchor.”
Ecotage against heavy equipment in national forests has become so prevalent that timber and mining companies now have to hire guards or use some other security measures to protect their machinery. The days when timber companies could punch roads into wild areas unopposed, except perhaps in court, are long gone.
No precise statistics on the total cost of ecotage have been compiled, not even by the law-enforcement division of the U.S. Forest Service — the agency in charge of our national forests — which until recently had also lumped ecological sabotage with acts of vandalism. In 1987 the Forest Service commissioned Ben Hull, a special agent in Region 6 (Oregon and Washington) to carry out a nation-wide survey of Forest Service personnel in order to get some idea of the amount of ecotage being carried out. The results were kept confidential, despite several attempts by radical environmentalists to get the information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Good estimates already exist, however, and they are high, ranging from $20 to $25 million a year. To give some indication, in just one incident in Hawaii in 1985, a wood chipper worth $250,000 was firebombed by environmentalists to prevent one of America’s last remaining tropical rain forests, dominated by 100- foot-tall ohia trees, from being ground into fuel for the sugar industry. Jim McCauley, forest-policy analyst for the Association of Oregon Loggers, says that the average ecotage incident in Oregon involves about $60,000 in damages, with many single incidents going as high as $100,000. There have been literally dozens of such incidents reported in the Pacific Northwest this year alone and, according to Dave Foreman, at least one authenticated act in every state west of the Mississippi, with others beginning to appear in East Coast states. Many more are never reported, since the resource industry is anxious not to give insurance companies another reason to raise rates in an industry already beset by safety problems.
Just keeping track of ecotage may involve millions of dollars annually, making it a very cost-effective proposition for the radical environmentalists, whose costs are typically no more than $100 or so and the loss of a night’s sleep. According to Eco-media Toronto, an organization that monitors government and corporate reaction to the environmental movement, at least six “Pinkerton-like” private agencies are investigating, and in some cases attempting to infiltrate, radical environmental groups.
The precipitous rise in monkey-wrenching incidents began in the early 1980s. Soon after the cracking of Glen Canyon Dam, in the Gros Ventre road-less area south of Yellowstone, radical environmentalists destroyed seismographic equipment and pulled survey stakes on a road under construction in a successful attempt to prevent Getty Oil from drilling in the area. In the Pacific Northwest, roads under construction to timber sales and mines are so routinely “de-surveyed” — that is, the survey stakes are pulled up — that the Forest Service now uses a fluorescent powder on the stakes in the somewhat forlorn hope of catching ecoteurs among the millions of square acres of wildlands that constitute our national forest system. Not surprisingly, the ecoteurs have taken to wearing gloves.
The only monkey-wrencher to be convicted of de-surveying a road was incriminated not by fluorescent powders, but by a hatchet-wielding Chevron employee who made a citizen’s arrest in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1985. The environmentalist with this dubious honor was Howie Wolke, one of the six who cracked Glen Canyon Dam. He later told reporters, “I did it and I’m damn proud.”
In 1984 the most effective and provocative technique in the radical environmentalists’ repertoire appeared: tree-spiking, the practice of driving large nails into the trees scheduled for cutting. Tree spiking had apparently been going on quietly on a small scale for a number of years, but in October 1984 the Eugene Register-Guard received a letter, immediately brought to the Forest Service’s attention, saying that 63 pounds of spikes — about 1,000 20-penny nails — had been driven into trees of a proposed sale in the Hardesty Mountain wilderness area. The letter also claimed that Smokey the Bear had been taken hostage. To its dismay, the Forest Service found the claim was true (regarding the trees, not Smokey) and had to spend thousands of dollars removing the spikes.
There have been scores of tree-spiking incidents since then, at least a dozen in Northern California in 1989 alone, according to Forest Service Special Agent William Derr. Harmless to the trees, the spikes can damage chain saws and expensive band saws in the mill. The idea could have come straight from the Chicago school of economics, with an environmental twist: If the cost of removing the spikes is high enough, the cut will not be made, or at the very least a decreased profit margin will discourage future logging in areas controversial enough to mobilize this type of ecological resistance.
Public attention was focused on tree-spiking and the radical environmental movement on May 13, 1987, when a spike shattered a band saw and seriously injured a worker in Louisiana-Pacific’s mill in Cloverdale, California. Seemingly primed for the event, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a front-page headline reading “Tree Sabotage Claims Its First Bloody Victim.” Another paper’s front page read, “Earth First! Blamed for Worker’s Injuries.” At a highly publicized press conference, a Lousiana-Pacific spokesman faulted radical environmental groups “like Earth First!.”
Earth First! representatives replied to the charge by claiming that tree-spikers always inform timber companies when and where a spiking has taken place, the point being not to harm workers but to prevent logging. There had been no notification in the Cloverdale incident, and moreover the spiked tree was a second-growth redwood, not virgin timber of the type Earth First! seeks to protect. Many radical environmentalists suggested that Louisiana-Pacific itself put the spike in the tree to gain public sympathy. If so, the tactic was at least a partial success, since there is rarely any public discussion of radical environmentalism without some reference to this now infamous 60-penny nail. Nevertheless, from his hospital bed, the injured mill worker, George Alexander, unexpectedly expressed his agreement with Earth First!’s demand that Louisiana-Pacific stop clear-cutting redwood forests.
The resource industry has mounted a strident political and legal campaign against tree-spiking. In 1988 the congressional delegations from several northwest timber states under the habitual leadership of Idaho Senator James McClure and Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield — “the senator from Timber,” according to his environmental detractors — successfully attached a rider to an anti-drug bill making tree-spiking a felony. Still unsatisfied, the pro-resource industry McClure continues to clamor for stricter laws and has even suggested, in a moment of rancor unbecoming of an elected official, that for every acre of trees spiked by radical environmentalists, a hundred acres of wilderness should be clear-cut to teach them a lesson. The F.B.I. has repeatedly been called out in Oregon to investigate tree-spiking incidents, and the Forest Service, along with industry groups like Prevent Ecological Sabotage Today (PEST), have posted substantial rewards.
To no avail. No tree-spiker has ever been caught, and the practice continues to spread. Since 1984 it has increased tenfold, with incidents reported from the Plumas National Forest in California to the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. And as if to add insult to injury, in November 1988 a delegation of Oregon’s congressional aides touring a mill in southern Oregon to study the problem was treated to the sight of a $2,000 band saw shattering in a shower of metal and sparks after hitting a spike.
The Forest Service is loathe to talk about it, but sources in the agency and activists in the field say that at least two timber sales — in Washington State and Virginia — have been withdrawn due to tree-spiking. There have probably been many more. The Forest Service’s reticence on this matter is understandable, since the withdrawal of timber sales due to tree-spiking suggests that through ecotage radical environmentalists can sometimes have more influence on public-lands policy than mainstream environmentalists or even the Forest Service itself.
To some extent this is exactly the case. For example, it was the media-oriented agitation of radical environmentalists using tree-spiking, road blockades, and demonstrations that made a national issue of the spotted owl’s slide toward extinction due to the logging of its ancient coniferous forest habitat in the Pacific Northwest. This embarrassed national environmental organizations — which had been dragging their feet on the issue for fear of incurring the wrath of Senator Hatfield — into pressuring a recalcitrant Fish and Wildlife Service to hold hearings on listing the owl as an endangered species. In September 1989 Congress passed a compromise bill giving limited protection to the owl and its habitat. In the long run, the compromise is inadequate to protect either the owl or the forests, but there would have been no legislative action at all had it not been for the fact that radical environmental protests began appearing in the news, lending passion to the otherwise arcane subject of forest management.
The spotted-owl controversy is an example of how radical environmentalists have used not only ecotage, but ecological civil disobedience to challenge government and resource-industry plans to develop public lands. This often involves blockading timber roads. In 1983 four radical environmentalists placed their bodies in front of a bulldozer punching a road into the pristine Kalmiopsis forest of southern Oregon. They were arrested, but others soon took their place. Altogether, 45 protesters were thrown into prison over a three-month period. The blockade delayed construction long enough to allow Earth First! to file a lawsuit against the Forest Service and have the road declared illegal.
Since then there have been literally dozens of road blockades against the oil, mining, and timber interests that have purchased access to our public lands: on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, where a uranium mine is being operated by Energy Fuels Nuclear; in Northern California, where the giant Maxxam Corporation is cutting the last of the unprotected redwood forests in order to pay off the debt from a hostile takeover of the local timber company that owned the trees; in the Siskiyou National Forest of Oregon, where a number of timber companies are logging the lucrative old-growth stands (ancient, virgin forests that contain unique species, such as the spotted owl and Pacific salamander).
In 1985 radical environmentalists set their sights higher by developing a new form of civil disobedience that has been a thorn in the side of the timber industry ever since: tree-sitting. Using rock-climbing gear, six protesters ascended 80 feet into the canopy of old-growth trees in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, scheduled for clear-cutting by Willamette Industries. By attaching grappling hooks to nearby trees, the tree-sitters were able to prevent loggers from cutting the stand for over a month. When the last protester was brought to the ground by police in a construction crane, his tree was finally cut down — at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars in lost production time and increased law enforcement. As the tree-sitter later said after engaging in several other similar incidents: “I figure I’ve done about a million dollars worth of damage in the last two years. They can sue me — I don’t care, I don’t have any money!”
This scenario has been repeated over and over again, so much so that the Forest Service routinely closes areas to the public where protests against old-growth logging are expected. Forest Service officials claim it is for reasons of “public safety,” but environmental activists charge it is a blatant attempt to stifle dissent, a kind of wilderness martial law. They are considering the possibility of a law-suit against the Forest Service closures.
The situation has been made more volatile by Forest Service use of so-caIIed “pot commandos” to enforce the closures and bring the protesters down from the trees. The pot commandos are a paramilitary force of 500 law-enforcement officers, created by a 1986 drug bill, charged with the goal of preventing marijuana cultivation on public lands-hence their name. But Earth First! spokespeople say that fully half of the pot commandos may have been diverted to help the Forest Service combat environmental protesters. A suit over misappropriation of funds is also being considered over this issue.
The conflict turned particularly ugly in July 1988 when pot commandos trained high-powered rifles on tree-sitters in the Kalmiopsis road less area of southern Oregon. A law-enforcement officer at the scene was quoted as saying that if the protesters had made any hostile moves against the arresting officers, the pot commandos “would have shot the asses out of the trees” anatomy was spared, a tree-sitter in the Four Notch area of east Texas did suffer serious leg injuries when law-enforcement officials actually allowed loggers to cut down the tree he had occupied in protest.
“I tell you, someone’s going to die,” said Greg Miller, executive vice-president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association. “That’s what I fear most.”
Physical resistance to wilderness destruction in this country is a fact that can no longer be disregarded by government, the resource industry, or the mainstream environmental movement. And as has already been suggested, it is a very costly fact, running into the tens of millions.
This expense is often precisely the re-suit radical environmentalists desire. To quote Foreman: “If enough damage is done to the industrial tools of the incursion into wild places, then insurance rates are going to go up. The Forest Service won’t be able to both build new roads and keep their old network intact if it’s being torn up. Monkey-wrenching is basically a means of self-defense.”
It is a defense not limited to the American wilderness. Radical environmentalism is an international phenomenon. In 1979 the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a radical offshoot of Greenpeace operating out of Canada, took to the high seas in defense of marine mammals. On July 16 the 206-foot-long ship Sea Shepherd, under the command of its flamboyant captain, Paul Watson, rammed and disabled a pirate whaling ship off the Portuguese coast. Watson’s ship was confiscated, and rather than let ting it fall into the hands of the whalers, he reluctantly scuttled it himself. But he got the last laugh a few months later when the pirate whaling ship was mysteriously bombed and sunk.
Several years later, funded mainly by English schoolchildren who raised $25,000 in a save-the-whale walkathon, the Sea Shepherds took on whalers from the Faeroe Islands, a small Danish protectorate north of England, by interfering with their hunt. The incident culminated in a sea battle between the Sea Shepherds’ vessel — ringed with barbed wire to prevent boarding — and shotgun-toting Faeroese police in inflatables and a gunboat.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society struck again in November 1986, this time against Iceland for violating the International Whaling Commission moratorium on whaling. Two members of the society scuttled two whaling vessels in Reykjavfk Harbor and ransacked a nearby whaling station with a fury appropriate to that Nordic country’s violent Viking past.
On May 31, 1982, five members of a group called Direct Action made Earth First’s Glen Canyon Dam efforts look pale by comparison when they blew up the $4.5 million British Columbia Hydro Substation on Vancouver island.
Over the last few years, Australian ecoteurs have caused over $1 million in damages to dozens of bulldozers and other heavy equipment, causing some timber contractors to close down their operations. In 1986, saboteurs in Thailand, for environmental reasons, burned down a chemical plant producing the high-tech metal tantalum, causing $45 million in damages.
Ecoteurs are particularly active in Europe. Scandinavian environmentalists have destroyed drilling equipment at one potential radioactive disposal site. West German Greens have repeatedly vented their rage against nuclear power plants, toppling 165 electrical towers leading to these plants in 1986 alone.
The problem is so bad that the Bundestag (West German parliament) recently expanded anti-terrorist legislation specifically to include the destruction of electrical towers. It appears that ecotage has even made its way to the Soviet Union, where a Russian version of Earth First! is said to be carrying out monkey-wrenching Soviet-style.
“Four radical environmentalists placed their bodies in front of a bulldozer punching a road through an Oregon forest. They were arrested, but others soon took their place.”
This catalog of ship sinkings and dam breakings is not intended to suggest that the groups involved in ecotage share a common ideology or even a common goal. On the contrary, there are distinct ideological differences between Germany’s Greens, animal-rights activists, Earth First!, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
But the extent of radical environmental resistance proves that the battle for the world’s ecology is being joined on a broad front, with ecotage as the common center of the conflict. “As the earth’s condition gets worse,” says Darryl Cherney, an Earth First! activist, “radical environmentalists will become more aggressive in defense of the planet.”
Needless to say, mainstream environmental organizations reject these tactics. Jay Hair, president of the National Wildlife Federation, has denounced Earth First! as a terrorist organization, saying he sees “no fundamental difference between destroying a river and destroying a bulldozer.”
Even Greenpeace, an organization that is no stranger to controversial direct action, suggested that members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society were acting like terrorists when they sank the Icelandic whaling ships. Leaders of other national environmental organizations, while not quite so vituperative, also consider Earth First! to be the bete noire of the environmental movement.
Most radical environmentalists remain unfazed by this criticism. “It doesn’t even bother me whether people call us terrorists,” says Barbara Dugleby, a Texas activist who has been arrested numerous times for ecological civil disobedience. “We are still getting our message across to those who are sympathizers, and the more sympathizers we reach, the stronger we become, and in the end I think people will realize that the terrorists are really the people we have been fighting, the destroyers of the earth.” Behind the unmannerly rhetoric, however, the national leadership is in some instances perversely happy Earth First! exists.
“Frankly, it makes us look moderate,” says Bob Hattoy, the Southern California representative of the Sierra Club. “When Earth First! is out there demanding 100 million acres of wilderness and we know we can only get ten million, I can turn to a congressman and say, ‘Look, we’re the voice of reason.’”
The founders of Earth First! apparently had something like this role in mind for their new environmental activism — at least at the beginning. “When I helped found Earth First!…” writes Wolke, “I thought that it would be the ‘sacrificial lamb’ of the environmental movement; we would make the Sierra Club look moderate by taking positions that most people would consider ridiculous.”
Up to now, radical and moderate environmentalists have lived in this kind of surly symbiosis. Through ecotage and civil disobedience, groups like Earth First! have focused public attention on environmental issues, often while lambasting traditional environmentalists for being “wimps.”
The large environmental organizations, while denouncing the radicals’ confrontational activities, have then been able to use their ample finances to take the campaign to Congress or the courts with the impetus of public support the radicals generated. The recent controversy over the spotted owl is being played out along these lines.
Whatever the attitude between them, in some ways the mainstream is becoming less relevant to the agenda of radical environmentalists, as their various successes have won them some notoriety and funding. Earth First’s Biodiversity Task Force, for instance, under the aggressive leadership of Jasper Carlton, has been able to bring its own successful lawsuits on endangered species issues independent of the traditional and more cautious sources of environmental litigation such as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
Despite its growing influence, size, and independence, there have been very few principled attempts to understand the radical environmental movement. Those who have written on the subject have been uninformed at best and malicious at worst.
In Playing God in Yellowstone, retired academician Alston Chase exemplifies the former failing. According to Chase’s revisionist history, radical environment a I thought came out of a “swirl of chaotic, primeval theorizing” about Buddhism, Heidegger, and psychotherapy. The central problem, concludes Chase, is that radical environment a Iists desire to return to the Garden of Eden when humanity lived in bliss — a yearning that must come as a shock to the likes of Foreman, an ex-marine; Roselle, an ex-oil field rough-neck; and Wolke, an ex-bar bouncer and wilderness guide in some of the roughest country in the lower 48 states.
Being a professionally trained philosopher from the right, Chase can probably be excused for misunderstanding the facts about a new social phenomenon. The left, however, should know better. But where the politically conservative Chase sees nothing but chaos, the left discerns a conspiracy lurking behind the radical environmental agenda. At the July 1987 Green Conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, philosopher and social critic Murray Bookchin laid down the first brush strokes of this representation, painting radical environmentalists as “eco-brutalists” and “nature worshipers” with ties to fascism through a “crude biologism.” For Bookchin, radical environmentalism is not truly revolutionary, since it does not follow the typical leftist interpretation of the environ mental crisis as the result of capitalism. Bookchin was soon joined by a chorus of East Coast leftists displeased with the perceived anti-humanism of Abbey and Foreman, variously labeled as sexist, racist, and fascist.
Both Chase and Bookchin, whose positions are representative of the critical literature on radical environmentalism, are simply incorrect in their description of the movement, mostly because their ideas come from reading a few articles in the popular press rather than actual knowledge of the environmental movement and the radicals’ role in it.
Neither of them even attempts an interpretation of ecotage, the activity that more than anything else defines radical environmentalism. More importantly, both men see radical environmentalism as a monolithic doctrine, a system of beliefs structured like their own, and hence a failure by that standard.
It would be more accurate, however, to describe radical environmentalism as a sensibility, that elusive word the English language has all but lost during the twentieth century. The radical environmental sensibility is not attempting to create a “new” philosophy to displace the dominant ideas of industrial society.
If radical environmentalism has a watchword, it is probably its oft-repeated imperative, “Let your actions set the finer points of your philosophy.” An ecological sensibility, according to most radical environmentalists, abides in one’s actions to defend nature, not in ideological exactitude.
Another way to put this is that radical environmentalism is responding to a particular social context, a culture dominated by technology, and its relationship to that society defines it, not a series of propositions.
Certainly there are specific ideas and themes that have arisen out of radical environmentalism’s confrontation with technological culture — the notion that man-kind is not the center of value on this planet, the conviction that the other species on earth have just as much right to exist as humans, the belief that wilderness, not civilization, is the real world.
But their validity cannot be ascertained by philosophical analysis so much as by the role they are playing in a culture facing a period of ecological up-heaval. As one Earth First! activist put it, “It is the character of movements to move.” This kinetic aspect of radical environmentalism has been lost on many commentators, who understand this new cultural force as a body of ideas rather than a body in motion.
The significance of radical environmentalism does not lie in some jaundiced history of environmental philosophy, nor in the dark urge for political power. Rather, it is based on our understanding of one simple but frightening realization: that our culture is lethal to the ecology that it depends on, and has been so for a long time, perhaps from the beginning.
If, as many scientists are now saying, our global industrial society is unsustainable, then the words and deeds of radical environmentalists today may be a window to the future state of the world. And to the chagrin of those who now control the earth’s ecology, whether that window shows a living green world or a wasteland may very likely depend on the success or failure of the radical environmentalists’ activism.
