For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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situated within international, as well as American, networks of affiliation. In 2009, Anderson was critically wounded in Palestine during a campaign for Palestinian rights. Previous to his time in Palestine, he had traveled to war-torn Iraq with a circus to entertain traumatized children. He was involved with the Headwaters campaign to save redwood trees, Food Not Bombs, Nevada nuclear weapons test site protests, and a tree-sit in Berkeley to protect oak trees from being bulldozed for a new football stadium.5
The loosely organized national and international networks that activists move through also include street medics from mass protest marches in urban areas, Rainbow Gatherings, non-Native people who worked on reservations with Native organizers on a number of issues, other activist groups like Greenpeace, and guerilla gardeners from New York City who grow food in vacant lots.6 These networks consist of social justice as well as environmental and animal rights communities and organizations. The 2012 Earth First! Rendezvous, for instance, featured a workshop presentation by activists working with No More Deaths in Arizona. No More Deaths is a social justice coalition, composed of both Christians and non-Christians, providing water and food for illegal immigrants along the southern border of the United States. These activists presented a workshop that explored the convergence of environmental and social justice issues in this context.7
As these intersections suggest, radical activism of the 1990s and early 2000s emerged within a particular configuration of constructions of youth, feminism, global anticapitalism critiques, social justice concerns (including prison issues), Paganism, deep ecology and other biocentrist approaches within environmentalism, and changing understandings of the appropriate relationships between humans and other animals. Animal rights and environmentalism thus belong to a lineage of radical movements in North America, spearheaded by young people and dating back at least to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.
REGARDING THE NONHUMAN: A BRIEF HISTORY
OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
IN THE UNITED STATES
The historical trajectories of radical animal rights and environmentalism in North America are distinctly different, even though twenty-first-century activists often bridge both movements. Radical environmentalists emphasize “the wild,” while most animal rights activists are seeking “animal liberation,” which includes domesticated nonhuman animals. Radical environmentalists, for example, often sign their letters and communiqués “For the Wild,” while animal rights activists are more likely to invoke the slogan, “For the Animals.” The animal rights movement in the United States did not emphasize protecting wild animals until late in the twentieth century. Hunt sabotage, for instance, was not common in the United States among animal rights activists until the 1990s, although it was in Britain. A notable exception was Greenpeace, an environmental organization founded in 1971, which focused on direct action against whaling. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, activists in both movements were emphasizing the necessity of working together. During the period of my research (2006–2016), most issues of the Earth First! Journal, the most widely read radical environmentalist publication, included articles on animal rights issues and actions.8 Animal rights activists have been slower to encompass both struggles and combine efforts.
Although it has often shared common cause with the animal rights movement, radical environmentalism has a distinct lineage in the United States. It is particularly indebted to early influences such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism and the writings and lives of Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and naturalist John Muir (1838–1914).9 Like later environmentalists, Transcendentalists included Buddhist and Native American understandings of nature in their writing.10 Muir and Thoreau were sensitive to the “interdependence of all life,” rejected Christianity and anthropocentric views of nature, admired Native Americans, and underwent pantheistic and animistic experiences in nature.11 Muir’s biocentrism was also influenced by Romanticism and Transcendentalism, as well as personal experiences in wilderness areas. Like other Americans in the late nineteenth century, Muir appreciated nature for being everything that civilization, and urban life in particular, was not. He recognized the intrinsic value of wilderness and the dangers human interests posed to its integrity. Like later radical environmentalists, Muir was devoted to wilderness protection, and his concerns were often in opposition to those of the U.S. Forest Service. Along with Thoreau, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), and Edward Abbey (1927–1989), Muir is considered by many activists to be one of the “grandfathers” of radical environmentalism.12 Yet Muir, like other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wilderness lovers, viewed wild places as pristine and devoid of humans, especially indigenous people who had roamed and shaped the land long before the arrival of Europeans.13
Americans’ concern for “wilderness” untrammeled by civilization, and especially agriculture, grew during the nineteenth century and led to the creation of Yellowstone Park in 1872, the first time Congress put limits on the spread of agriculture.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, the fear and hostility many European Americans had felt towards nature in earlier eras was now leveled at cities.15 Nature appreciation became more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans began to react to disturbing consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanization. With more people living in cities at a distance from the wild, attraction to nature as a place of respite from urban life grew, as did urban dwellers’ support for national parks.16
Radical environmentalists share this attraction, while at the same time appreciating wild places and beings for their intrinsic value. A tendency of radical environmentalists to view opponents of wilderness protection as “desecrating agents” became a strategy from Muir on, according to religious studies scholar Bron Taylor.17 Taylor identifies a radical environmental lineage running from Muir and Thoreau through a number of early twentieth-century figures such as Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), David Brower (1912–2000), Ansel Adams (1902–1984), and Rachel Carson (1907–1964), who held somewhat pantheistic views of nature, even though their spiritual beliefs were not as explicit as Muir’s and Thoreau’s.18
By the 1950s, a more militant and anarchist version of this lineage appeared in the West, most significantly in the figures of poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder (1930–present) and writer Edward Abbey (1927–1989). Snyder’s back-to-the-land anarchism and Abbey’s pantheism and support for antidevelopment direct action were important precursors to later radical activism. The decade of the 1970s was key for the convergence of these important figures with conservation biology, deep ecology, and other shifts in the new discipline of environmental philosophy. Some of these developments came about in response to the publication of historian Lynn White Jr.’s famous argument identifying developments in medieval Christianity as “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967).19 Not long after the publication of White’s essay, the term deep ecology was coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, further developed by Bill Devall and George Sessions in their book Deep Ecology (1985), and adopted by Earth First!ers in the early 1980s.
Due to the spread of these and other views challenging anthropocentrism and promoting wilderness protection, American environmentalist organizations experienced rapid growth in the 1970s. They also became increasingly professionalized, hiring managers rather than activists. Some activists reacted against this trend, which they saw as diluting their cause, and chose more radical tactics. One of Earth First!’s founders, Dave Foreman, quit his job lobbying in Washington, DC, in 1979, and co-founder Howie Wolke was a disenchanted former forestry student.
Foreman and Wolke practiced tree spiking and other direct action, drawing inspiration from Edward Abbey’s fictionalized account of ecotage, The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975. Deep ecologists like early Earth Firsters! believed nature had intrinsic value regardless of its benefits to human beings. For them, preserving wilderness for its own sake became a moral matter, even a “religious mandate” in the words of Dave Foreman.20 They adopted the language of holy war, or as journalist Joe Kane put it, “waging guerilla warfare in the name of Mother Nature.”21 Dave Foreman described their monkey wrenching tactics as “a form of worship towards the Earth” and his own role as “a religious warrior for the Earth.”22