For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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urban protests, and other kinds of public disruptions existed on one end of the direct action spectrum, with hidden night-time lab raids and sabotage by hooded and masked activists on the other.
The ELF was founded in the United Kingdom in 1992 by Earth First!ers and the first U.S. action claimed publicly by the ELF took place in 1996.39 Some Earth First!ers and other activists involved with forest campaigns on the West Coast, borrowing tactics from the ALF in England, began to engage in underground actions, including arson, during the late 1990s.40 Around the same time that ELF emerged as the most extreme direct action wing of the environmental movement (using arson for property destruction, for instance, not a tactic adopted by most Earth First!ers), animal rights was becoming more militant as well. Many of the radical animal liberation actions of the 1990s were claimed by the ALF or by those who adopted ALF-like tactics of working alone or in small anarchist cells.
The ALF, founded in England in 1976 by Ronnie Lee, garnered media attention for acts of sabotage and animal releases and spread in popularity in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.41 From 1979 to 1993, the ALF was reportedly responsible for 313 incidents of break-ins, vandalism, arson, and thefts associated with animal liberation.42 Although law enforcement agencies and animal researchers see activists as dangerous, the ALF has explicit guidelines about taking precautions during actions to avoid harming humans and other animals.43 The ALF typically functions as a decentralized, anonymous movement organized around informal and temporary cells, often as small as two people. As a leaderless movement, it has no offices or directors, no fundraising initiatives, and no employees. As one activist puts it in the film Behind the Mask (2006), “ALF only exists in people’s hearts and minds.”44
During the 1990s, the hardcore punk rock subculture influenced radical animal rights and environmental activists, as bands like Earth Crisis and Shelter stressed the urgency of environmental and animal issues. Many young activists came out of this scene with its focus on anarchist anticapitalism critiques and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approaches to music, art, and social change.45 These concerns were partially driven by a movement within hardcore referred to as “straightedge,” which advocated veganism and discouraged drug use, drinking, and promiscuous sex.46 Many aspects of the straightedge scene helped to create an audience receptive to the message of animal rights. It was inspired by punk rock’s anarchistic critique of consumer capitalism and imperialism, the physical intensity of hardcore shows, and bands’ and fans’ desire to change a flawed world, especially a world characterized by the existence of animal suffering. These influences coalesced in hardcore scenes across the country during the 1990s at the same time that ALF’s message began to spread. I explore these developments in detail in Chapter 5.
The influence of hardcore on radical animal rights and environmentalism in the 1990s is just one example of the ways in which radical activism during and since the 1990s has largely been a youth movement, even though activists of all ages participate in protests. Most of the activists serving prison sentences at the turn of the twenty-first century were sentenced for actions committed when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. A large number of activists in the 1990s and early 2000s were introduced to activism through youth subcultures like straightedge, high school clubs, and friends, or during college through campus environmental and animal rights groups. As parental and family influences became less important in these extrafamilial contexts, young people were more likely to be exposed through friends and lovers to activist groups and campaigns. The personal and historical trajectories of young activists in the 1990s exemplify an ongoing dynamic in American culture of the societal marginalization of youth on the one hand and teenagers embracing marginalization and acting as agents for social change on the other.
MISFITS AND REBELS
Like Nettle, whose story I began with, many activists recall being teenage misfits or rebels who were seen and saw themselves as outsiders. Rod Coronado wrote to me from prison that during his teenage years he did not fit in and had “little interest” in what was popular with other teenagers: “Not a lot of teenagers thought it was cool to want to ‘save the whales,’ so I struggled with wanting to fit in . . . I simply could not focus on wanting things or a career while I knew whales were being slaughtered and baby seals clubbed.” Coronado heard about the ALF and became even more convinced that “the only career for me was as this sort of person.” During high school he recalls “simply biding my time until I was done with school and could join the struggles.” At seventeen, he left home and moved to Seattle to start working with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society, an activist organization focused on protecting marine mammals.47 Like Coronado, many activists felt like outcasts until they found activist organizations, the vegan straightedge subculture, a school’s ecology club, feminism, contemporary Paganism, or other causes and movements that gave meaning to their ostracism and nurtured their activism.
Even when they felt at odds with other students, high school offered some activists a separate space away from parental influence in which activist identities could emerge. Chelsea Gerlach, who was sentenced in 2007 to eight years in prison on twenty-five charges, including arson at a Vail, Colorado, ski resort, joined her high school’s ecology club and was only sixteen when she experienced her first arrest for civil disobedience. In a 1993 South Eugene (Oregon) High School yearbook, her sophomore picture depicts her wearing a black T-shirt with white letters reading “RESIST.” In a short article about the school’s environmental organization she is quoted as saying, “Our generation was born to save the earth . . . if we wait until we’re out of school it might be too late.”48 Between 1996 and 2001, Gerlach’s ELF cell was supposedly responsible for setting fire to more than twenty lumber companies, a wild-horse corral, and genetic engineering facilities.49 For teenagers like Gerlach who find a high school niche and embrace their own identities as outsiders, who become involved with animal rights or environmental issues with teenage peers, high school and its associated extracurricular activities may serve as an important space in which activist identities are forged.
Like other social movements before them, radical environmentalism and animal rights in the United States have been significantly impacted by the historical contingencies of middle-class white high school and college-age youth at the turn of the millennium, even though not all activists come from white middle-class backgrounds. Post–World War II radical youth movements like the antiwar movement of the 1960s and the animal rights movement of the 1990s were in part made possible by a separate youth culture that developed in the United States during the decades after World War II. This separate youth culture developed not only as a market force, but also as a space in which the forces of capitalism could be questioned and challenged. In this historical trajectory, “teenager” and “youth” became charged and ambiguous categories. Youth culture made possible by high schools provided opportunities for young people to identify with their own visions and values.
The emergence of “teenage” as a special stage of life with symbolic and economic importance did not come about until the nineteenth century, even though urban youth groups appeared in America as early as the 1770s. The term juvenile delinquent was coined in the 1810s, a foreshadowing of what would become a difficult assumption to shake: that youth gathering in groups and/or outside adult supervision were socially and politically dangerous.50 Representations of vulnerable and threatening youth from at least the nineteenth century on tended to identify teenagers as quintessential liminal or boundary figures. Cultural critic Henry Giroux argues that young people are “condemned to wander within and between multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness and difference. This is a world in which old certainties are ruptured and meaning becomes more contingent, less indebted to the dictates of reverence and established truth.”51 In this way, the demonization and othering of some youth created a space for dissent and protest in which taken-for-granted truths such as human exceptionalism could be questioned.
Teenagers accumulated economic and cultural power throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Although “teenager” as a category had emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was introduced in the popular lexicon only in 1941.52 Sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the term “youth culture” in a 1942 article; the magazine Seventeen aimed at teen girls was launched in 1944; and in 1945,