For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
Читать онлайн книгу.
groups brought together this older generation of former antiwar activists and participants in the 1960s counterculture with young urban activists. Although Clamshell was short lived, it served as a powerful model for later direct action campaigns. In the couple years of its existence, Clamshell trained thousands of activists in consensus decision making and nonviolent direct action, practices that spread across the country to other antinuclear struggles.107
On the opposite coast from Clamshell, Abalone Alliance was one of the largest and most successful antinuclear campaigns. Abalone was formed in 1976 to protest the opening of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo, California. Like Clamshell, Abalone was composed of former peace activists as well as “radically ecologically oriented activists” from Northern California who had been part of the 1960s counterculture. Although Clamshell included prominent women leaders and a commitment to feminism and egalitarianism, Abalone was shaped by even stronger strains of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism. “Anarcha-feminism,” inspired by the work of anarchist writer Murray Bookchin and his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, was particularly important in Abalone’s development. The anarcha-feminists developed a movement culture that was very much like the culture of radical environmentalist gatherings of the 1990s and 2000s. They insisted that any anarchist revolutionary politics must also be feminist and sometimes referred to themselves as “ecowarriors.” Abalone also promoted leaderless resistance, a characteristic of radical environmental activism in the 2000s.108
Like Abalone, twenty-first-century Food Not Bombs, infoshops, barter networks, tool lending libraries, community gardens, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement, and hardcore punk rock have been anarchist at heart. They have tended to be organized horizontally rather than vertically and have stressed grassroots communities and mutual aid. These anarchist expressions have perpetuated the stream of anarchist thought and practice running from the 1960s antiwar movement through the 1970s women’s movement and the nonviolent direct action antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
Radical environmentalists in Earth First! were part of this mix and some of them were significantly influenced by the anarchist Wobblies (International Workers of the World).109 Activist Panagioti Tsolkas claims that the journal Green Anarchy (2001–2008) “reshaped” Earth First!: “The GA movement and its magazine contributed significantly to developing the theory that surrounded EF!’s basic tenets.” The green anarchy movement was one of many “frequent crossovers” between Earth First! and the anarchist movement that led to young activists moving beyond the tactics of mainstream environmental groups.110 For all these reasons, by the end of the 1990s, anarchism had become the most influential political view among radical activists who linked environmental and nonhuman animal issues with social justice concerns and critiques of capitalism and the state.
THE NEW ANARCHISM IN PRACTICE
In addition to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and the 2011 Occupy movement, Food Not Bombs and street medics are two examples of anarchist networks that have played a role at radical environmentalist protests and gatherings. Several activists I interviewed were involved with Food Not Bombs, an anarchist organization that helped organize the logistics of the Seattle protests.111 Since 1980 when it was founded by anarchists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Food Not Bombs has spread across the United States, feeding homeless people and protesters with vegan food from dumpsters and food banks. A mainstay at Occupy and other protests as well as some Earth First! gatherings, Food Not Bombs also helped arrange food for displaced people after Hurricane Katrina.112 During Occupy Wall Street, Food Not Bombs, along with other anarchist mutual aid organizations, provided support for protesters. The Food Not Bombs Boston chapter, for example, served hot meals every day at the Occupy Boston encampment.113
Some activists became involved with radical environmentalism and animal rights activism through Food Not Bombs and other anarchist projects. In 2014 I spoke with Rabbit, an activist and Earth First! Journal editor, about his experience working with Food Not Bombs. Rabbit grew up in Los Angeles and was active in animal rights protests after graduating from high school. He was a part-time activist at first, what he called a “weekend warrior,” joining protests against Huntingdon Life Sciences. While in college at California State University, Long Beach, he volunteered with Food Not Bombs for four years. It was not until this period of his life that Rabbit came to a realization: “It shouldn’t have taken me twenty-three years to realize that if there’s food in a dumpster and there’s hungry people, that I can give it to them, but because of the way I was raised in society, it took me that long to realize.” As well as being involved with Food Not Bombs, Occupy, and animal rights demonstrations, Rabbit spent a year working on homesteads and organic farms, and visited the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas. After college, he volunteered as a canvasser and fundraiser for Greenpeace following the 2010 Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill.114 Like other activists, he traveled through these networks of affiliation, many of which were shaped by anarchism, before he became involved with Earth First!
Food Not Bombs is one of many direct links between radical environmental/animal rights activism and the Occupy movement. Like a number of young activists I met, Rabbit also credits Occupy with having a significant influence on his and others’ radicalism: “It got a lot of people off their asses, many people who had never protested. Since then I’ve done nothing but activism and know so many people for whom that is the way it is.” For Rabbit, Occupy was an “awesome way for people to learn skills: how to march, how to chant. I learned how to break into foreclosed homes and open up squats.” Aaron, another Earth First! activist previously involved with Occupy, had worked on the 2008 Obama campaign as a teenager. He was disillusioned by what he saw as “Obama selling out,” which led him to radicalism. Although he was in college, he would go to class during the day and then spend the night with the Occupy encampment at a park in his Midwestern college town. After his time with Occupy, Aaron became active in Earth First! and involved with the 2012 Tar Sands Blockade in Texas.115
In a similar fashion to Food Not Bombs volunteers, anarchist street medics serve protests like those of the Occupy movement and Earth First!, as well as helping in disaster-stricken areas. They also have links to earlier streams of radicalism. Street medics originated in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and were also involved with the American Indian Movement in the 1970s.116 Many of the early twenty-first-century street medic collectives formed to meet a need felt during the 1999 Seattle protests.117 Some medics have formal medical training and are nurses, physicians, or EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) but others are lay people who had been through street medic training. Street medics ran a training I participated in at the Wild Roots, Feral Futures gathering, and they staffed the medic tent and supported a protest action at an Earth First! Rendezvous I attended. But they also traveled to New Orleans to volunteer their services after Hurricane Katrina and to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Others worked in free community clinics in large U.S. cities. In 2015, some street medic collectives supported antiracism protests in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri.118 Activists circulate through these various anarchist sites of learning and practice, sharing information and connecting each other to like-minded communities.
In all of these examples—Food Not Bombs, street medics, Occupy, Seattle—anarchism serves as a worldview that allows radical activists to create meaning out of their lives by linking activist practices to a broader movement for social and political change. Environmental activism in the late twentieth century was shaped by the confluence of anarchism and deep ecology just as animal rights was shaped by anarchism and critiques of anthropocentrism. But religious and spiritual movements also played a part, even while most anarchists were suspicious of institutional religious expressions and particularly of Christianity.
YOUTH MOVEMENTS AND AMERICAN RELIGION
SINCE THE 1960S
So how might we situate religion within this story of youth-led direct action movements since the 1960s? Because adolescents are no longer children but not yet adults, their religious commitments are usually not fully formed, which allows them to be open to new ways of understanding the world. Moreover, young people feature prominently in a number of developments on the post–World War II American religious landscape, such as the growth of Asian religions, new religious movements, evangelicalism,