For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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there was a significant shift from what historian Oded Heilbronner calls a “culture for youth to a culture of youth.”54 The culture of youth, recently empowered, would follow at least two divergent courses: those who embraced their market role and facilitated America’s economic and geographic expansion, and those who pushed for revolution against what they saw as an out-of-control industrial nation, both racist and imperialistic.
During the 1950s, teenagers increasingly came to inhabit a world of their own due at least in part to the growth of the high school and an expanding culture of teenage consumption. Their autonomy became a source of tremendous anxiety for the adults who had created high schools and the accompanying separate teen culture in the first place. With the baby boom (1946–1964), youth definitively displaced age as a source of power in the United States.55 Even though the 1950s are often seen as being family oriented (at least for the white middle class), in fact, a parallel trend during this decade was the increasing importance of “extrafamilial institutions” in socializing the young.56 For this and other reasons, teenagers were looked on suspiciously as being increasingly outside of adult control and inhabiting their own spaces.57 From their parents’ perspectives, there was reason for concern, since it was often in these autonomous teenage spaces that teenagers encountered activism and other subversive activities.
Many scholars have identified “the unique susceptibility of youth to social change” as a shaping factor in youth activism.58 According to historian Christopher Lasch, young social reformers in the early twentieth century were also in rebellion against the middle class.59 This rebellion established a pattern for later youth revolts, such as those of the 1960s, that also rejected middle-class values. Youth activists have been characterized by scholars as educated, middle class, the offspring of loving parents who fostered independent thinking, and members of subcultures who are cynical towards the larger society.60
In the 1950s, dissatisfaction with suburbia and capitalist ideals was simmering across diverse populations of American youth. The 1950s Beat movement of artists and writers and the involvement of youth (white as well as African American) in the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s are two examples.61 As anthropologist Margaret Mead explained the situation in an interview, the Beat generation consisted of young people “not interested in the kind of society we have.”62 Mead’s “uninterested” young people flourished in the 1960s, when protest movements took up many themes that remain salient to twenty-first-century activists, especially the rejection of middle-class aspirations.
By the 1960s, Americans in their teenage years and early twenties increasingly had autonomous lives and separate spaces in which to express and experiment with new political identities. Within these separate youth spaces, as in earlier eras, they also called into question structures of power and authority. Some white middle-class youth dropped out of college in the 1960s and 1970s to pursue a different kind of American dream than that of their parents. Many of them engaged in new forms of protest. The 1960s saw the emergence of environmentalism, feminism, radical politics, and unconventional expressions of religiosity, all of which were influenced and/or made possible by youth culture. These movements, with their roots in the 1960s, would later shape the concerns of radical environmentalism and animal rights activism.
The following sections offer a genealogical account of radical environmentalism and animal rights in the United States within the context of late twentieth-century youth culture. Here I focus on the emergence of radical politics since the 1960s, with a nod to earlier direct action movements, followed by a discussion of the feminist and antinuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s. I also explore later expressions of radicalism that draw from these movements, particularly anarchists’ involvement in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999. The third section explores anarchism in practice, such as Food Not Bombs and similar organizations, and its impact on environmental and animal rights direct action. Finally, I discuss the role of religion in youth movements since the 1960s, focusing on contemporary Paganism and radical environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s.
POST–WORLD WAR II ANTECEDENTS
OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY RADICAL ACTIVISM
After watching a documentary on the radical 1970s antiwar group the Weather Underground, in which one of the members explained he was so obsessed with Vietnam that he thought about it every waking moment, animal rights activist Peter Young realized that he felt the same way about caged and slaughtered animals. In a letter he wrote me from prison, Young recognized Weather as an important antecedent and inspiration for the animal rights movement of the 1990s.63 In the 1960s and 1970s, rebellious youth, especially college students, flocked to the antiwar movement and serve as exemplars to late twentieth-century activists like Young. The 1960s helped to shape the course of radical activism in the 1990s and 2000s by providing models for action, often explicitly invoked, as in Young’s reference to Weather.64 A 2005 book on the anticapitalist movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, makes this connection explicit in a preface by former Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn. One of the volume’s co-authors is Chesa Boudin, son of two Weather members.
Like 1960s youth movements, contemporary animal rights activism and environmentalism act as “the conscience of society,” attending to ethics and justice issues, rather than “bread-and-butter ones.”65 Activists in the 1960s rejected the careers their parents saw as respectable. They believed that the social values of their parents’ generation were becoming increasingly irrelevant and irrational.66 In this way, while youth-led political movements may involve a minority of the national population, they tend to be representative of more widespread sentiments.67 Like Weather Underground, radical activists are the extreme wing of broader societal trends around environmental commitments and animal rights. And, like Weather, contemporary radicals link their issues of special concern with other struggles: feminism, antiracism, antiauthoritarianism, egalitarianism, moral purity, and anti-institutionalization.68 Weather organized as collectives and made decisions by consensus, confronted “white privilege,” was adamantly opposed to racism, and supported gay rights and equality for women, at least in principle. All of these remained important concerns of activists I met in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Weather Underground was a largely (though not entirely) white middle-class youth movement of self-proclaimed “freedom fighters” challenging the U.S. government’s policies, especially those concerning the Vietnam War and African Americans. They modeled themselves after revolutionaries like Che Guevara, the Argentinian Marxist.69 Weatherman Bill Ayers remembers that they “imagined that the survival of humanity depended on the kids alone . . . We wanted to break from the habitual and the mediocre, to step into history as subjects and not objects. We would combat the culture of compromise, rise up and act decisively on what the known demanded—we could think of no basis on which to defend inaction, and so our watchword was simple: Action! Action! Action!”70 Weather Underground members were frustrated after petitions, demonstrations, and other above-ground strategies failed to bring about any real change. Some members came from the larger SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, founded in the early 1960s), but they thought SDS nonviolence modeled on the civil rights movement was ineffective. In order to “step into history,” they believed that more confrontational tactics were needed to resist American involvement in the Vietnam War and the oppression of African Americans.71
Weather was characterized by a tension common among contemporary radical activists: Weather members rejected dominant American values and institutions, but placed themselves within an American tradition of resistance going back to the Boston Tea Party. “In Weatherman,” recalls Bill Ayers, “we had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide.”72 And yet, they identified with an American activist lineage. They had read Malcolm X and their heroes and models were “Osceola and Cochise, Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey, Emma Goldman and the Grimke sisters.” According to Ayers, “We located ourselves in history and found a way at last to have a little niche at home.”73 Looking back, claims Ayers, most Americans now “accept the importance of the Boston Tea Party, Shay’s Rebellion, Nat Turner’s uprising,