For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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theft of the Pentagon Papers . . . most of us can imagine ourselves throwing tea into Boston Bay or even throwing ourselves in front of that fateful bullet flying toward Martin Luther King Jr.”74 In this understanding of an American tradition of radicalism, Weather and other earlier revolutionaries are all part of a legacy often invoked by contemporary activists who see themselves as heroes of a history not yet told.
After the Vietnam War ended and members of Weather surfaced from their underground lives, the group disbanded. Many of the activists who had protested war and racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s had by the mid-1970s turned to the women’s and environmental movements, including the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which I take up in the next section.75 Two decades after the Weather Underground, radical environmentalists like the ELF would revisit some of Weather’s tactics: organizing into cells, emphasizing solidarity with oppressed minorities, issuing communiqués, building explosive devices, carrying out symbolic property destruction, living fugitive lives underground, and identifying with resistance movements in Latin America.76
RELIGIOUS RADICALISM
Religious radicalism is also part of the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s that shaped the context out of which late twentieth-century radical environmentalism and animal rights emerged. Religious radicalism from the 1960s on includes Jews and Christians involved in the civil rights movement, radical Catholics like Philip and Daniel Berrigan protesting during the Vietnam War (while they were not young, their tactics of resistance were influential among young antiwar protesters), and Quakers and Neopagans in the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s.
Religious radicalism based on issues of conscience and social justice concerns has a long history in the United States, from nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionists to twentieth-century Pagan antinuclear protesters. The 1960s was a crucial time for the joining of religious commitment and radical action in the antiwar movement, alongside secular movements like the Weather Underground.77 Catholic antiwar activists were among the most prominent 1960s religious radicals. For instance, radical Catholics in the Catonsville Nine engaged in a famous act of antiwar property destruction. They risked time in prison because they had to act; their moral commitments gave them no other choice. The compulsion to act would continue to echo through direct action movements of the 1970s and into the 1980s as similar moral concerns were taken up by environmental and animal rights activists.
In 1968, the Catonsville Nine (nine Catholic protesters, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan) took six hundred individual draft files from the Catonsville, Maryland, Selective Service office and burned them with napalm. Daniel Berrigan, who was also famous for pouring blood on the Pentagon steps, explicitly placed the protest in an American tradition of civil disobedience, including the Boston Tea Party and “abolitionist and anarchist traditions.” During the trial of the Catonsville Nine, Berrigan told the court that “From the beginning of our republic good men and women had said no and acted outside the law” and would be vindicated by time.78 Another of the protesters, Thomas Lewis, “was not concerned with the law” but with the “innocent”; like the others, he believed that “a person may break the law to save lives.”79 These protesters told the court that they could not rest, knowing that innocent people in Vietnam were suffering because of U.S. military actions. They argued to the jury that they answered to a “higher law” that took precedence over human laws.80 These antiwar protesters felt that peaceable protests had failed and imperatives had been placed on them by the ongoing suffering of American soldiers and innocent people in Vietnam.
If there is one theme that unites many different forms of religious radicalism, it is the idea of “moral passion” that drives commitment to justice for other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. Animal rights and environmental activists belong in the context of this morally passionate American lineage of resistance to injustice. It is a lineage that runs through the antislavery movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar and Black Power movements of the 1960s, and the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s. On websites, at protest marches, and at animal rights and environmental gatherings, imprisoned activists’ numerous supporters have praised them as “warriors” and “abolitionists,” explicitly placing them in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, and other revolutionary leaders.
Social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement serve as important models for twenty-first-century activists. Henry Spira (1927–1998), an early animal rights activist who organized direct actions against animal testing, explains that “We wanted to adapt to the animal movement the traditions of struggle which had proven effective in the civil rights movement, the union movement and the women’s movement.”81 In a 2015 talk on “Purity Politics: How Animal Liberation Is Keeping Us from Animal Liberation” at the International Animal Rights Conference, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) activist Jake Conroy described the Black Panthers as the “most important social justice movement in the history of the United States.” When Conroy was released from prison (he was sentenced to four years for his role in SHAC), he sought out activists from the 1960s, including one involved with the Weather Underground. He spoke with them to better understand his own experience and the historical context for his work with the twenty-first-century animal rights movement.82 By emphasizing their place in an American lineage of social change movements, radical animal rights and environmental activists argue that their activism is on a historical scale with other liberation movements. They believe that decades from now, instead of being remembered as terrorists, they will be seen as freedom fighters, ahead of their time.
“OUR ENEMIES AND THEIRS ARE ONE AND THE SAME”
Politically motivated radical environmental and animal rights activists at the turn of the twenty-first century are committed to a far-reaching program of social change, as well as a future where animals and wilderness have rights and protections. They argue that their concerns intersect in important ways with racial justice and gender equality. Intersectionality was emphasized in activist communities I participated in, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6. Activists’ critique of American environmental policies and practices concerning nonhuman animals goes hand in hand with a denunciation of consumer capitalism, racism, imperialism, and gender and economic inequality. As the author of a “Report Back” from Earth First!s Rendezvous puts it, “Remember that our enemies and theirs are one and the same.”83 For this reason, the biographies of many radical environmental and animal rights activists are characterized by involvement, often from an early age, with a variety of social change movements and social justice campaigns.
In 2000–2001, Lauren Gazzola became involved in SHAC, the campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences.84 Three weeks before she planned to take the LSAT, she was arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” for her participation in SHAC. In 2006, Gazzola was sentenced to four years and four months in prison for “Conspiracy to Violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, Conspiracy to Stalk, three counts of Interstate Stalking, Conspiracy to Harass using a Telecommunications Device.”85 The website she contributed to supported animal liberation, even though she herself was not involved in these actions. As she points out, “The speech on our website was indeed controversial. When anonymous activists liberated 14 beagles from the lab, we cheered. When protesters demonstrated outside lab employees’ homes, we applauded.”86 After forty months in federal prison, Gazzola was released in 2010.
While in prison, Gazzola completed most of the work for an interdisciplinary MA in the “Law, History, and Philosophy of Free Speech and the First Amendment,” through Antioch University. After her release, she became involved with the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, working in the position of communications associate for publications, drafting press releases, writing newsletter articles, and managing the Center for Constitutional Rights blog. She continued to be outspoken about free speech issues around animal activism and the unconstitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) that allows for protesters to be prosecuted as “terrorists.”87
Radical environmental and animal rights activism draws on a range of political currents, usually from the left of the political spectrum. Like Gazzola, Darryl Cherney, one of the leading radical