For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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of warfare, these years found environmentalists increasingly framing environmental issues as urgent, even on an apocalyptic scale.23
Environmentalists from Henry David Thoreau to Earth First!’s Dave Foreman have also freely borrowed from and been inspired by indigenous cultures. The influence of Native American orientations to nature runs throughout radical environmentalist thought and practice, even when troubled by concerns about colonialism and cultural appropriation. Moreover, environmental and animal rights activists have sometimes fought side by side with indigenous people, as when activists supported Navajo and Hopi people at Black Mesa, a sacred mountain that was also the site of controversial strip-mining. As Gary Snyder described the coalition of Native and non-Native activists in Turtle Island, “defense of Black Mesa is being sustained by traditional Indians, young Indian militants and longhairs [hippies].”24 Supporters of the Black Mesa Defense Fund, founded by Jack Loeffler in 1970, engaged in monkey-wrenching during the 1970s when a sabotage campaign was directed at the mine. Dave Foreman, one of Earth First!’s founders, was involved with the campaign at Black Mesa during the 1970s, before the founding of Earth First!25 In other instances, activists and Native Americans have been at odds, as in the case of animal rights protests against members of the Makah (a northwestern U.S. tribe), whose cultural revival included traditional whaling practices.26
Since the 1970s, there have been many cases of radical environmentalists joining Native Americans to protest threats to tribal lands, such as the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protest that began in 2016. RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountains’ and People’s Survival, organized to fight coal mining in Appalachia) members and friends traveled from Appalachia to North Dakota to work with Red Warrior Camp, a direct action camp at the Standing Rock protest.27 I discuss issues of solidarity as well as tensions with Native people in more depth in Chapter 6.
In contrast to Earth First!’s campaign for wilderness protection, early animal rights struggles in the United States tended to be urban and focused on domesticated and lab animals. American animal activists inherited these emphases from British animal protection and animal liberation movements. From at least the eighteenth century on, animal rights activism in Britain coincided with other expressions of political and religious radicalism that were already present in towns and cities. The early twentieth century antivivisection movement in Britain appealed to feminists, labor activists, vegetarians, spiritualists, and other radical activists who posed alternatives to the social (and species) order.28 Like contemporary activists, they saw themselves as the vanguard of social change, advancing a moral crusade. Animal rights was just one of many causes to be addressed in order to usher in a better, more civilized (and for some, more godly) society.29
In a similar fashion, mid-nineteenth-century American “animal defenders” often held other radical political and social views and were inspired by Britain’s RSPCA (founded in 1824), the antislavery movement, and Darwin’s views on evolution set forth in The Origin of Species (1859).30 As was the case in other nineteenth-century reform movements, women played prominent roles in animal rights advocacy during this period.31 Alongside other nineteenth-century reform causes, such as child welfare and temperance, a variety of organizations were formed in American cities to take up the plight of nonhuman animals. This included addressing slaughterhouse conditions, cruelty to urban workhorses, animal experimentation, and homeless animals. After the end of the Civil War, with the abolition of slavery on their minds, activists began a new campaign of rights advocacy, this time for nonhumans rather than human slaves. Not long after the end of the war, New York’s American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was founded in 1866, the American Humane Association (AHA) in 1877, and the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) in 1883. Debates emerged in and around these nineteenth-century organizations between those who advocated more humane treatment of animals (welfarists) and those who focused on the rights of nonhuman animals (liberationists). These debates would continue through the history of animal rights activism into the twenty-first century.32
Although wilderness protection and animal rights were political and moral issues in the early part of the twentieth century, the late 1970s were watershed years for American environmental and animal rights campaigns. This development was due in part to increasing standards of living in the United States, more opportunities for contact with nature, a growing tendency to see nature and animals as having intrinsic value, and a sense of ecological precariousness described in widely read books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962).
Environmental and animal rights concerns sometimes converged in the 1970s, as in the founding of Greenpeace in 1971, an organization that campaigned against whalers and sealers as well as nuclear power and deforestation. Greenpeace engaged in direct action, putting activists’ bodies at risk for nonhuman animals and creating public spectacles, continuing the legacy of nineteenth-century animal rights movements.33 After 1975, both animal rights and environmental activists became increasingly confrontational, or “radical,” largely out of frustration with above-ground activism that did not seem to be effective: animals continued to needlessly suffer and old-growth forests continued to be logged.
Radical animal rights and environmentalist organizations in the United States, gained significance in the early 1980s: both People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Earth First! were founded around 1980.34 Factory farming and fur industries joined vivisection as central concerns of late twentieth-century animal rights activists. During the 1980s, PETA emerged as the radical face of animal rights in the United States, although other more radical groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) would appear on the scene a decade later and see PETA as too willing to compromise and not radical enough.
In its early years, PETA focused attention on primate experimentation and cosmetic testing at the same time that Earth First! engaged in direct action tactics to defend roadless areas in national forests. Both organizations sometimes created spectacles to attract news media attention during protests, dressing as animals or throwing pies at industry officials. For instance, the “Biotech Baking Brigade” threw a dumpstered chocolate cake in the face of a GM scientist at conference dinner.35 An Earth First! gathering in 2007 ended with an action during which protesters stormed a store owned by a company building a dam in Mexico, with protesters dressed as clowns, otters, and beavers chanting outside the store.36 For Earth First!ers engaged in these protests on the behalf of other species, forests and waters had inherent rights, while for PETA activists, primates in laboratories did as well. In their parallel histories, both Earth First! and PETA sought to decenter humans and broaden moral and political interests concerning the more-than-human world.
In the early 1980s, some Earth First!ers were dedicated exclusively to protecting wilderness in the United States, while others were fighting against the World Bank and fast-food restaurants that used rainforest beef, linking environmental and nonhuman animal concerns. The Earth First! Journal, published in various formats since the first years of Earth First!, became a central resource for networking and sharing information about environmental and animal rights struggles across the United States and internationally.37 In the late 1980s, Earth First! was a substantial presence in struggles against logging in northern California, Oregon, and Washington, especially in campaigns to safeguard old-growth forests. Earth First!ers voiced concern for trees as well as the many nonhuman animal species that lived in and around them. Tree-sits and road blockades emerged as the most effective tactics during the forest campaigns of the 1990s. Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year tree-sit in a redwood called Luna brought tree-sits and threatened redwoods to national attention. After considerable coverage by local and national news media, Hill’s tree-sit eventually won modest protection for an area of old-growth redwoods.38
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, most radical activists I met did not consider PETA to be radical, although Earth First! with its anarchistic organization continued to fit that moniker. PETA has a centralized organization, a significant budget, and celebrity sponsors while, true to its anarchist roots, Earth First! is decentralized, organized through collectives, and uninterested in celebrities. By the 1990s, more radical and clandestine movements (the ALF and the Earth Liberation Front [ELF]) that concentrated on property destruction and used tactics such as arson emerged from within