For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp
and terrible eyes.
—H. L. Mencken
Youth as menace symbolizes both the collective fear
and the changing face of America. . . . They represent
the emergence of new forms of community, national identity,
and postmodern citizenship.
—Henry Giroux
INTERSECTING PATHS
The paths activists took to arrive at the Earth First! Rendezvous in western Pennsylvania in 2012 were varied and circuitous: from childhood love of the wild to hardcore punk rock scenes. Many of these activists shared the feeling of being at odds with society and the experience of finding a sense of belonging with like-minded young people in activist circles. They rejected the typical goals of the majority of their high school and college peers and developed critiques of capitalism, predictions of societal collapse, and a desire to work for change. In this chapter, I trace some of the ways in which young adults in the 1990s and early 2000s became involved with animal rights and environmental direct action through various networks of affiliation. Nettle, who was an editor at the Earth First! Journal for six years, arrived at the Rendezvous by way of feminism, anarchism, Paganism, tree-sitting in Scotland, and a tour of the United States with a jug band in a vegetable oil–powered van. I met Nettle at the first Earth First! Rendezvous I attended in Oregon in 2009, talked with her at subsequent gatherings, and visited her in Lake Worth, Florida, in 2014. First at the Earth First! Journal office and then at her home, Nettle spent several hours with me, describing in detail the path she took to activism. While no one person’s story is typical of radical activists’ lives, Nettle’s reveals some common themes in activist biographies. Her account offers a starting point for understanding the convergence of historical trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that created a milieu in which radical activism thrived.
Nettle grew up the youngest of three children in a nominally Jewish family in Chicago. Her mother was Canadian and her father Israeli. Her family recycled and composted, and her parents were avid gardeners. As a child she “enjoyed being in nature,” camping with her family or exploring forests outside the Chicago area, especially by bicycle. Her older brother and sister were politically active and exposed her to environmental causes, gay rights, feminism, and critiques of capitalism. Not only did her brother support Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, but he also organized buses for a gay rights march in Washington, DC, in 1993. Most of Nettle’s high school friends were “jocks,” and she remembers being the “weirdo” in the popular crowd. She felt as though she did not fit in and saw her high school years as “years of departure” and depression: “I was an angsty teenager . . . internalizing all sorts of bad things that were going on in the world . . . I would go in and out of depression, I painted my room dark purple, listening to Nirvana.” When she went to college, she took courses on feminism and especially feminist art, decided to study abroad, and ended up at an art college in Scotland.1
While studying in Scotland, Nettle began a journey into activism that was shaped in part by her family background. Young Americans like Nettle reject common notions of what it means to become a successful adult (making money and owning a house, for example) and convert to radical activism as a kind of subversive rite of passage. Activists often describe their conversion to activism in relation to a protest march or an illegal act of sabotage that expresses their commitment to forests and nonhuman animals rather than to U.S. legal codes and lucrative careers. For them, conversion is a threshold experience, a movement from one existence (the taken-for-granted one) to another (countercultural activism).2 For many environmental and animal rights activists, conversion takes place during adolescence or young adulthood, which is itself a liminal, threshold-like experience. During this transitional time, young people move from a world that was carved out for them by parents and their social context into a world that they have chosen for themselves, a world in which other species are as important as other humans.
In Scotland at the beginning of her journey to activism, Nettle decided to be a “blank canvas” and start over, so she cut off all her hair and got involved with a collectively run vegetarian art café in Edinburgh. Through the café she was exposed to contemporary Paganism, anarchism, antiwar activism, and environmentalism. Discovering Paganism was for her like finding something she “always believed. Just like finding feminism and anarchism, things I internally already was.” Although she liked the communal and ritual aspects of Judaism and some of the Christian churches she had visited as a child, she could not relate to their theology: as a feminist she “was not connecting with this white male god.” Paganism resonated with her concerns because she already believed “we are all divine, no hierarchy among individuals, plants and animals.” Armed with this affinity for Pagan perspectives, she went into the woods to join an antiroads tree-sit.
Although she had helped organize a protest against the 2005 G-8 summit in Auchterarder, Scotland, Nettle really came home to environmentalism when she “fell in love” with the Bilston Glen tree-sit, one of the world’s longest running tree-sits. Bilston Glen changed her life.3 At the tree-sit she rediscovered her “inner child and this really sacred connection to nature that had been suppressed through the school system, through my own teenage angst and depression.” She felt at home in the woods, reconnecting with “the raw and the animalistic part of the human psyche that craves nature and to really be immersed. The thing that I really connected with the most was that I could live here, I could live in the woods and I didn’t have to pretend that I had to have a car and a house.” She started living at the tree-sit in her own treehouse and taking a bus to her college classes.
From then on, Nettle embraced her “weirdness”: “At twenty-one I was waking up from the nightmare of trying to be normal. In high school I was trying to be normal, but I was never normal, I’ve always been weird. I have to love that and accept that, that’s what fuels depression, when I try to fit into society’s box.” Life at the protest in the forest offered a community in line with her interests in Paganism, anarchism, and feminism. At the same time, her experiences there eased her inner struggles with depression and belonging.
Nettle first encountered the U.S.-based Earth First! Journal at Bilston Glen and attended her first Earth First! gathering in the United Kingdom. After graduating from college, she moved back to North America and began to tour with a jug band. During the tour she visited the Earth First! Journal collective and not long afterwards was hired there. She thought, “This is what I want to do forever,” and was a mainstay at the Journal for six years, which was when I got to know her at Earth First! gatherings.4
Nettle’s story reveals some common themes in activists’ accounts of how they became involved with environmentalism or animal rights. Some of the most important influences on radical environmentalism and animal rights during this time included anarchist anticapitalist movements, contemporary Paganism, and understandings of gender shaped by feminism, gay rights, and transgender activism. Nettle’s account of her attraction to anarchism and powerful connection to the forest points to the important convergence during the 1990s and 2000s of the anticapitalist movement with strains of deep ecology and biocentrism.
Radical activists charged and sentenced during the first decade of the twenty-first century for actions committed from 1996–2001 (during the FBI’s Operation Backfire) came of age at a particular moment in the history of Americans’ relation to nature and nonhuman animals, as well as to earlier liberation struggles, so I want to place their actions in a broader historical context. Young activists are influenced by books and films, lovers and friends, anarchist collectives like Food Not Bombs, ecology clubs and volunteer work for the Sierra Club, college courses on deep ecology and gender studies, contemporary Paganism and American Indian worldviews, the Occupy movement and social justice struggles, veganism and hardcore punk rock. Through these disparate activities and interests they find their way to gatherings and direct action campaigns in forests and on fur farms. In this fashion, activist movement through various gatherings, campaigns, and communities traces lines of affiliation and influence across regional, national, and international boundaries.
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