Earth First! Elliott Forest blockade bipod. Photo: Margaret Killjoy. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

      In many cultures there are clearly defined steps that bound adolescent liminality, but in contemporary American culture, these bounds are anything but clear. As Grimes puts it, “we know so few authentic and compelling rites,” that adolescent rites of passage in the West often take a “postmodern, peer-driven form” that can be vague or uncertain.⁴⁹ But for many activists, there is nothing vague about the life-changing transformations they undergo when they become committed to activism. Their initiation into activism is an irreversible change that effectively divides their lives into a “before” and “after,” a common feature of initiation rites.⁵⁰ While I use “conversion” and “initiation” interchangeably here, initiation might be seen as more of a public process during which a community of others, human and nonhuman, work on activists’ lives. On the other hand, conversion is more of an internal process during which the shaping forces of human and nonhuman others are taken “deeply into the bone,” to borrow Grimes’s phrase.

      Activists’ accounts of how they became committed to activism tend to fall into two categories. For some, becoming an activist was a gradual process of being more true to themselves, confirming what they had always believed. For others, activism marked a critical point in their lives when they rejected many aspects of their upbringing or social status and chose activism. Both types of conversion involve a before and after, and different understandings of self-identity. The activist self is either completely different, or a new version of someone who was “always there.” Throughout this book, I discuss both processes in detail, drawing attention to the different forces working on youth as they become activists. During their young adult years, activists-in-the-making do not become successfully socialized into what they describe as capitalist, anthropocentric American society. Instead, they experience conversion to a contrasting set of values and beliefs that shape their activist commitments. They reject many aspects of the culture around them in favor of anarchism, animal rights, and environmentalist commitments and they choose to break human laws in favor of what they consider a higher morality. I argue that their developing commitments to activism are a kind of internal revolution that marks a conversion to or initiation into activism.⁵¹

      Rites of passage into activism are not entirely dissimilar to the rites activists have rejected from their pasts and criticized in the broader society. Activist conversion stories may incorporate the language of conversion common to some forms of Christianity, such as being “baptized” or “born again.” Accounts of how they became committed to radical activism suggest that they express their conversion through the ritualized actions involved with protests.⁵² Although activists typically move away from Western religious traditions, conversion to activism nevertheless sometimes includes the return and reincorporation of the language of Christian rites of passage such as “baptism,” even when there are no accompanying ritual actions such as immersion. American Evangelicals are more typically identified with the born-again experience, but activists who reject Christianity redefine being born again in an unexpected context in which nature and animals, rather than God, become the sacred centers of their lives. Being born again as activists is a fundamental reorientation of meaning in which the lives of other-than-human beings come to be as valuable as their own.

      The notion of a second chance or new life after conversion in which one’s old ways are left behind is such a pervasive metaphor in American cultural history and American religion that it lends clout to conversion stories. At the animal rights conference in Los Angeles I attended in 2007, plenary speaker Alex Pacheco, one of the founders of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), told the audience that he was “baptized” into animal rights through his involvement with Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd (a direct action organization of activists formed to protect marine mammals and featured in the series Whale Wars that premiered in 2008 on cable station Animal Planet). He went on to describe his “second baptism” working with the underground ALF as a further stage in his initiation into activism. Another participant in the Los Angeles conference, who said she grew up as a “born-again Christian” and later left Christianity, also described being “born again” into the animal rights movement as beginning a new phase of her life.⁵³ In various sessions and workshops, other conference-goers identified a “tipping point” that set them moving towards their commitment to nonhuman animals, often the final stage in a series of experiences that had already prepared them for such a commitment.

      These activists, while painted as extremists, might also be seen as expressing concerns that cut across a broader swathe of the U.S. populace. Activism is one of many possible ways that young Americans, who experienced the greatest growth in the category of “spiritual but not religious” or “unaffiliated” in the early twentieth century, express spiritual and moral values outside religious institutions in unexpected places.⁵⁴ The widespread and surprising support among American youth for Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2015–2016 speaks to young people’s dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo, including attitudes toward the more-than-human world. For instance, in September 2014, over 300,000 people converged on Manhattan for the peaceful People’s Climate March that included mainstream environmental and animal rights activists, a large contingent of interfaith groups, and politicians such as former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, secretary general of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon, and New York mayor Bill de Blasio.

      By the second decade of the twenty-first century, concerns about climate change were not only the purview of environmentalists, just as the rights of sentient creatures were no longer only the concern of animal rights activists. These activists are the radical wing of a broader cultural shift in understanding humans’ place in a multispecies world and a planet in peril. Their actions express trends in contemporary American spiritual expression and moral duties to the nonhuman at the turn of the millennium. Their beliefs and practices reflect a way of being in the world that decenters the human and calls for rethinking our appropriate place in the world vis-à-vis other species. They further our understanding of how younger Americans, in particular, situate the needs of human beings within a world of other species that they see themselves as closely related to and responsible for. I read radical activism as an important expression of social and political trends in the beginning of the twenty-first century that call into question American government and social institutions, as well as fundamental assumptions of what democracy means in the United States in this era and what it might mean in the future.

      A READER’S MAP

      Chapters 1 and 2 provide introductory material and context for the other chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to activists’ lives and work as well as background on the communities I most often interacted with. Chapter 2 lays out some historical context for the other chapters by charting the convergence of youth culture, North American spiritual and political movements, and environmental and animal rights activism. Radical activism among young adults emerged from the conjunction of a number of historical forces. These forces shaped the particular ways activism has come to be expressed within the radical environmental