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EMBRACE INTERCONNECTEDNESS
Disaster is often addressed piecemeal. Experts are convened to enact the smallest and most precise of interventions. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, the US Army Corps of Engineers was brought in to recommend fortifications for the city’s failed levee system. After the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, and continued spilling for eighty-five days, its owner, the oil and gas behemoth BP, developed a cap to plug up an oil leak.
Such targeted and incremental change is also the response to the larger disaster of climate change, which Katrina was a product of and which the BP oil spill exacerbated. Recall that in the early 2000s, carbon credits—government-issued permits that allowed all corporations to emit greenhouse gases up to a certain point, popularized by former Democratic vice president Al Gore—were in vogue as the best market incentive for big polluters to minimize their carbon footprint. Today, futuristic carbon-sucking machines that turn greenhouse gas into usable fertilizer are fashionable. Should we ban plastic straws or recycle more? Compost or reuse? Plant more trees or clean up trash in our neighborhoods?
None of these solutions come close to the scale of intervention needed to avoid further catastrophe. Bold, large-scale revolutionary thinking is urgently needed as the earth becomes more uninhabitable. When you think boldly, remember that everything is interconnected. Environmental justice is racial justice is economic justice is gender justice. Nonhuman life matters too. Dwindling in size and diversity, nearing extinction and finding itself plundered, sentient beings must also be saved from ever-expanding global capitalism that puts obscene profits above all else.
This was one message of the radical environmental movement in the 1980s. After years of pushing for meager reforms, they were exhausted by the snail’s pace with which mainstream environmentalists lobbied congressmembers during business lunches on Capitol Hill. Radical environmentalists Dave Foreman, Ron Kezar, Bart Koehler, Mike Roselle, and Howie Wolke spent a week in the Pincate Desert of Northern Mexico to discuss mounting a militant response to wilderness degradation. By the end of the week, Earth First! was born. Without question, Earth First!ers were emboldened by what came before them. The Sierra Club, fresh from its success of preventing dams from being built in the Grand Canyon in 1968, organized Earth Day on April 22, 1970. In the 1980s, it protected 157 million acres of public lands in Alaska from oil drilling and stopped Reagan from dismantling the Clean Air Act. But these victories, Earth First! insisted, were nothing against the might of industrial capitalism, which continued slaughtering billions of animals for mass consumption yearly, fired up coal plants in major cities, and axed Pacific Northwest forests. This led to an unprecedented increase in dirty greenhouse gases that made global temperatures rise.
Unlike other national lobbying organizations like Friends of the Earth or the Wilderness Society, which were growing in ranks, Earth First! didn’t start national chapters or furnish corporate offices. Instead, they sabotaged environmental destruction through wild acts of civil disobedience. “I think that the basic problem,” Foreman later wrote, “goes beyond merely the question of whether violence (directed against either machines or people) is justified in protecting the earth. The real question is that of radicalizing the environmental movement.”1 Foreman’s view caught on among young activists who, in April 1983, descended upon Bald Mountain in Idaho to block the construction of a road. Some stood with arms linked to prevent bulldozers from digging the earth. Others chained themselves to heavy machinery. Now construction crews couldn’t dig as efficiently and quickly as they wanted. Another widely used tactic was the tree sit. In 1985, professional rock climbers ascended trees in an old-growth forest in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest to force loggers to take human lives if they were willing to cut down majestic Douglas firs. A less visible but more controversial move to discourage logging in Northern California in the late 1980s was tree spiking, in which large nails were driven into trees. The US Forest Service and logging companies were notified about which trees were spiked and, so, had to choose whether to risk cutting them down and damaging their chainsaws. Their profit incentive had to be assessed against the potential of flying shards of metal that could injure their workers and destroy large, expensive machines.
These tactics aren’t for everyone. You may question their efficacy. But Earth First!’s suspicion of anthropocentrism is undeniably important for this reason: placing human and nonhuman life on equal moral footing makes you critical of hierarchy. “Wilderness says: Human beings are not dominant,” Foreman said. “Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession.”2 When you begin to think like this, you can’t as readily buy into the tired arguments. Progress. Economic development. Globalization. A food chain is natural. The earth is to be plundered. Other nations are doing it; we should too.
Equipped with Earth First!’s ecocentrism, you think about social injustice. But as with most political philosophies, when taken to the extreme of devaluing human life and treating social injustice with apathy for the sake of wilderness preservation, it can be reactionary. This is what the radical environmentalist Murray Bookchin said about Earth First! in his 1987 address at the National Green Gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts, when he denounced elements of the movement as “barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones.”3 Bookchin was correct. How else to explain a 1986 interview in which Foreman advocated immigration restriction on the US-Mexico border? As Foreman said, migrants put “more pressure on the resources we have in the USA” and bring an “alien mode of life which . . . is not appealing to the majority of Americans.” Another article in the Earth First! Journal was explicitly homophobic in arguing that AIDS, given its destructiveness, could successfully lower the population and “industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crisis.”4
Such rhetoric isn’t just ugly. It’s puzzling. If anything, it’s a betrayal of Earth First!’s greatest insight: the critique of hierarchy. All movements can forget their roots. But luckily, there are always some who remember them. The anti-racist ecofeminist Judi Bari didn’t want Earth First! to be sabotaged by misogynistic racists. So, as she became one of the organization’s most visible figures, she explicitly advocated for “the feminization of” Earth First! Bari elevated women to leadership campaigns in her local chapter in California, and she equated the capitalist assault on nature with the misogyny of patriarchy. Under Bari’s leadership, tree spiking, which began to draw incredible amounts of negative publicity and was routinely described by the media as ecoterrorism, was abandoned in favor of civil disobedience. Bari created common cause with timber workers, whom she didn’t see as enemies but as people looking to feed their families while trapped in a capitalist system. She also started a local chapter of the IWW union affiliated with Earth First! But being in the spotlight and advocating for reform aren’t easy. They put you in the crosshairs of those who perceive you as an existential threat. On May 24, 1990, as Bari was driving her Subaru station wagon with a fellow activist, Darryl Cherney, from Oakland to Berkeley, an eleven-inch pipe bomb exploded under her seat, nearly killing her. It’s still unclear who planted it. The government or disgruntled Earth First!ers? In the aftermath, the FBI took over the crime scene as part of a counter-terrorism investigation, alleging that Bari and Cherney were transporting explosives. This, as you can see, was an effective strategy to undermine the environmental movement by affiliating it with violence. Ultimately, however, neither Bari nor Cherney was charged with a crime.
Bari, having survived the FBI smear campaign and the assassination attempt, died seven years later from breast cancer in 1997, at the age of forty-seven. You see the ghost of Bari and Earth First! in advocates of the Green New Deal, which is about transitioning the US energy economy to clean, renewable sources. This means dismantling the fossil fuel industry. You see Bari in Extinction Rebellion, which was founded in the UK in 2018 but has since spread globally. Extinction Rebellion’s tactic of occupation and its decentralized network is meant to bring awareness to what it describes as the sixth mass extinction. Activists block traffic, stage die-ins, and lay down together in the Rockefeller Center ice rink, positioning their bodies to form the movement’s emblem, an extinction symbol, which features two facing triangles within a circle. It’s a performance and an attack on institutions, shaking citizens awake to do something. Now!