On 22 December 2005, William C. Rogers pulled a plastic bag over his head and asphyxiated himself. He had been arrested seventeen days earlier, suspected with eighteen others of involvement in the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a radical environmental group responsible for setting a series of fires and causing tens of millions of dollars in damage at logging companies, Forest Service offices, genetic-engineering research facilities, automobile dealerships, and corrals where captured wild horses were held, awaiting slaughter.1 The targets were scattered across the western United States and included an exclusive ski resort lodge that was under construction in Vail, Colorado, which was destroyed by fire in 1998. The arsonists hoped to keep the resort from expanding into habitat considered by wildlife biologists to be critical for the endangered lynx and to deter other projects that would destroy the homes and lives of ELF members’ nonhuman kin.
Before his suicide, Rogers learned that he had been betrayed by several of those once in his ELF cell. Aware that his crimes were considered terrorist acts and facing life in prison, he left these words for his comrades: “Certain human cultures have been waging war against the Earth for millennia. I chose to fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, saguaros, cliff rose and all things wild. I am just the most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have made a jail break—I am returning home, to the Earth, to the place of my origins.” He signed it “Bill” and dated it “21 December, winter solstice.”2
Since 1990 I have been researching and writing about radical environmental movements; one of my contacts supplied me with the words from this suicide note. I knew Rogers from several conversations at radical environmental gatherings and campaigns during the mid-1990s. Those who knew him recall an intelligent, quiet, and unassuming man who had a deep feeling of connection to and kinship with all life, who wished to save everything and every place that was still wild, who disliked the domestication of any living thing. I remember thinking that his suicide note resembled Muir’s musing about siding with the bears if a battle were to erupt between them and “Lord Man.” When I learned of Rogers’s death, I thought that in a tragic way it made sense: how could someone who devoted his life to the liberation of wild creatures allow himself to be incarcerated for life? His final words about returning to the place of his origins also made sense, for it was ultimately an expression of belonging to the earth.
Rogers’s life and death provides an ominous pathway into considering radical environmentalism as a form of dark green religion and as a bricolage of diverse religious, political, and scientific beliefs. That Rogers exemplifies this process is apparent from the paper trail he left behind: two photocopied compilations of essays, poetry, art, and cartoons that he prepared for activists.
The first of these compilations he distributed without reservation. He drew the title, Mountains and Rivers Compel Me: A Deep Ecology Reader for Forest Activists, from the Chinese painter/poet, Shih-t’ao. Inside the book he included the entire, animistic sentence from the poet: “Mountains and Rivers compel me to speak for them; they are transformed through me and I am transformed through them.”3 Also on the cover was a drawing inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a series of novels in which, near its climax, the massive, ancient tree-beings known as ents rose up to resist the destruction of their precious forest.4 The back cover had an image of the “green man,” a pagan symbol of connection to the earth that survived Christianization in carvings on churches and cathedrals.5 Rogers signed the introduction to his compilation using his nom de guerre, Avalon, which he took from a bestselling Mists of Avalon.6 This novel recast the Arthurian legend as a struggle between druidic, earth-revering, and goddess-worshipping pagans against an invading patriarchal, nature-destroying, Christian culture. Rogers explained that his purpose in producing the compilation was to help activists reject “human chauvinism” and cultivate a “biocentric perspective.”
Rogers gave me the second compilation in the remote Cove-Mallard wilderness in Idaho, the site of a multiyear campaign of resistance to logging. Sporadic incidents of sabotage had occurred, targeting the equipment of loggers and law enforcement officers; and many arrests had been made. During the summer of 1996, hundreds of activists arrived to join the blockade of a logging road, working arduously to make it impassible by digging trenches and building structures with the trees already cut down during the road’s construction.7 That summer, late one night after a long conversation, Rogers went to the back of his truck and returned with a copy of his second anthology. This one he did not distribute widely. I had the impression that during our conversation he had been sizing me up, deciding whether I was trustworthy.
When I saw the front cover I understood why: it was emblazoned with a howling, arched-backed, black cat, along with the anthology’s title, Beware! Sabotage!, accompanied by these words, “We never sleep . . . we never forget.” The back cover stated simply, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Inside was a primer on “monkey-wrenching,” also known as “ecotage” in movement parlance. These terms refer to the sabotage of facilities or equipment that cause environmental destruction. The manual also reprinted articles about pagan and indigenous cultures and a great deal of poetry and prose about and promoting compassion toward nonhuman beings. But it also included (1) articles challenging what some considered an anthropocentric non-violence code common in radical environmental subcultures;8 (2) practical sections describing how to procure, use, and deploy incendiary devices and firearms; and (3) additional articles pondering whether the time had come to use explosives or commit assassinations, implying that such a time was at hand, since nonviolent tactics had not halted the destruction of Mother Earth.9 If such sentiments are a form of dark green religion, then obviously, it can have a dangerous expression.
Contemplation of and debates about illegal and possibly violent tactics were certainly not new to radical environmentalism. Many of the above-mentioned practices had been introduced and contemplated by the western writer Edward Abbey (1927–1989), often through the characters in his novels, who represented a variety of perspectives, including about violence and spirituality. Abbey’s most widely read work, Desert Solitaire (1968), for example, expressed a deep reverence for wilderness in general and desert ecosystems in particular. It also cryptically referred to “rumors from the underground” of a growing, illegal resistance to the greedy and desecrating, industrial-corporate nation.10 This reference was to a number of little-publicized campaigns, beginning in the 1950s, wherein environmentalists turned to sabotage as a means to thwart enterprises destroying the wildlands they loved. In 1975, Abbey published The Monkey Wrench Gang, basing the novel’s characters on people he knew within the fledgling underground resistance. The novel was a ribald tale about environmental saboteurs seeking, ultimately, to dynamite Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam and liberate the Colorado River imprisoned behind it.11 Both Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang struck a chord with a range of nature lovers who thought that Abbey had given expression to their love of nature and outrage at its destruction. Both books had an unanticipated impact, helping to inspire the formation of Earth First! in 1980, the first radical environmental organization officially devoted to civil disobedience and sabotage as means of environmental resistance.
That Rogers was one of the many who had been influenced by Abbey was clear in both of his own collections, but especially in Beware! Sabotage! Each of its sections were introduced with passages from The Monkey Wrench Gang, which was called “absolutely essential reading for the eco-saboteur.” Seven other books were also listed, along with one by Dave Foreman, the most charismatic of Earth First!’s cofounders. With Ecodefense, Foreman had produced the movement’s first sabotage manual, describing how to destroy bulldozers, topple billboards, “inoculate” trees by driving metal or ceramic spikes into them (in the hope of making it unprofitable to log them), and avoid arrest.12 Critics assailed such tactics as terrorism.13 The second edition of Ecodefense began with a foreword by Abbey, who asserted that since wilderness is our home, defending it “by whatever means are necessary” is morally justifiable, just as it would be to defend loved ones during a home invasion. Rogers considered Beware! Sabotage! a complimentary sequel to Ecodefense but acknowledged that it was “more militant.” Beware! Sabotage! also articulated themes common in radical environmental enclaves, including that wildlands are sacred places worthy of defense, while claiming that environmentalists and Native Americans have been developing alliances to defend such places.
Although Rogers’s sabotage manual was more radical than Ecodefense, for the most part his two compendiums reflected the main tenets of the radical environmental worldview. They also illustrate why radical environmentalism is an excellent exemplar of dark green religion.
Certainly one characteristic typical of radical environmentalism is its critique of Abrahamic anthropocentrism, which is believed to separate humans from nature. We have already encountered such critiques in the elder statesmen of American environmentalism, and such views are also expressed in other venues and genres, including novels and fantasy literature. It can be seen, not only in The Mists of Avalon (and in Rogers’s affinity for it), but in the articles and images Rogers chose to reproduce and disseminate, as well as in the bricolage that characterizes the global environmental milieu.14
The sources of radical environmentalism are stunningly diverse and are further evidence of this bricolage. These sources include the following:
Environmental philosophers: Especially those promoting Leopold’s land ethic, such as J. Baird Callicott; those promoting primal spiritualities, such as Max Oelschlaeger; and proponents of deep ecology, including Arne Naess, Michael Zimmerman, Alan Drengson, George Sessions, Bill Devall, Dolores LaChapelle, John Seed, David Rothenberg, Andrew McLaughlin, and Fred Bender.
Native American scholars: Most notably Vine Deloria, who influentially accused Christianity of waging a genocidal war against Indians and nature and argued that only indigenous wisdom could save the planet.
Environmental historians: Especially Donald Worster, who contributed heft to the story of environmental decline in Western history, critiquing its legitimation by a religion-infused, imperialistic, and capitalistic ideology, punctuated by resistance from those with organicist and Arcadian visions; and Roderick Nash, whose books on the American attitudes and practices toward wilderness, and explorations of the gradual extension of “rights” to nature, subtly promoted the intrinsic rights of nature and criticized the pursuit of “progress” as inherited in the West.
Environmental scientists and conservation biologists: Especially those who built bridges with environmental activists in the cause of biodiversity conservation, such as David Ehrenfeld, Michael Soulé, and Reed Noss, all of whom were important in the founding of the Society for Conservation Biology and its journal and who expressed affinity with deep ecology and/or radical environmentalism.
Anarchistic critics, including social ecologists and bioregionalists: Such as Lewis Mumford, Murray Bookchin, John Clark, Brian Tokar, and Janet Biehl.
Critics of technology: Such as George Friedrich Juenger, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Bruce Foltz, Langdon Winner, Jeremy Rifkin, and Jerry Mander.
Ecofeminists: Such as Susan Griffin, Carolyn Merchant, Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, Vandana Shiva, Charlene Spretnak, Janet Biehl, and Carol Warren, who generally view the domination of women and nature as linked.
Anthropologists: Such as Marshall Sahlins, Loren Eiseley, and Stanley Diamond, who have influenced many movement intellectuals by urging a positive appraisal of “primitive” cultures and by arguing that foraging and small-scale societies were morally, ecologically, and even psychologically superior to modern ones.
Ecopsychologists: Including Paul Shepard, although he was surprised to be so labeled, and also Theodore Roszak, Roger Walsh, Joanna Macy, Warwick Fox, and Chellis Glendinning, some of whom have been influenced by the above anthropologists and all of whom trace environmental degradation to unhealthy and unfulfilled mental states, while emphasizing the importance of ritual and earth-based spiritualities to the healing of both people and the planet.
Contemporary pagans: Including Starhawk and Margo Adler, who through their influential books hoped to turn the neopagan movement in an activist direction.
“New science” theorists and religionists: Alternately referred to as “new physics,” “systems theory,” or “complexity” theorists, as well as “Gaia theorists”, these people represent diverse schools of thought that nevertheless, in their own ways, promote kinship ethics and a metaphysics of interdependence.
Science-infused metaphysics have often been borrowed by ecocentric environmental ethicists, ecofeminists, ecopsychologists, and deep ecology proponents, as they seek to correct what they consider to be the errors of mechanistic and dualistic Western religions and sciences, supplanting such views with perspectives that recognize the interrelatedness of reality and nature as a process or cybernetic system—a perspective said to root humans in nature rather than place them above it. Also noteworthy in this regard is the adoption of the deep ecology rubric by a number of counterculture gurus and theorists who have led the way in fusing “new science” with earth-friendly spiritualities. Many of these individuals were involved in early experimentation with hallucinogens or with ritual processes designed to create transpersonal religious experiences; and most of these people before the 1990s were involved in New Age rather than environmentalist subcultures, but are now reaching out to radical greens. These figures and institutions include Fritjof Capra and his Elmwood Institute, Stanislov Grof, James Hillman, Ralph Metzner, the Institute for Noetic Sciences, Andy Fisher, and Naropa University. These diverse streams of thought have influenced many radical environmentalists—more than is commonly recognized—which contributes to the overall diversity of the movement.
Such a robust bricolage of sources has contributed to the growth and development of dark green religion among radical environmentalists, even as many of these people and organizations are exemplars of dark green religion in their own right.15 Social contexts characterized by such hybridity are fluid in nature and thus easily shape-shift into new forms. Radical environmentalism, then, like many other expressions of dark green religion, has figures and forms that are both obviously religious and that only resemble religious characteristics without being self-consciously religious. Moreover, radical environmentalism appropriates and reflects a diversity of political ideologies and strategies, from those that are more passive and/or spiritual, to those that are politically focused and aggressive; from those that are radically leftist, to those that are radically right wing, libertarian, and even anarchistic.
Mountains and Rivers was not large enough to capture all of the diversity and influences that careful observation discovers in the environmentalist milieu and among radical environmentalists. But it did make references to many of them, including the most important movement elders, most notably Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Abbey, but also various activists and writers who expressed affinity with deep ecology and had became influential after Earth Day in 1970. Such individuals include Dolores LaChapelle, Joanna Macy, John Seed, Gary Snyder, and David Abram, several of whom were already introduced. A range of novelists and naturalists were also cited.
By reprinting in Mountains and Rivers the first chapter from Foreman’s Confessions of an Eco Warrior, which began with Thoreau’s famous aphorism, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Rogers invoked the movement’s saints and simultaneously conveyed what may be its central tenet.16 Foreman traced environmental decline to the advent of agriculture and the Neolithic revolution, explaining that this inaugurated a ten-thousand-year blitzkrieg against the earth’s foraging peoples and its biological diversity. Foreman drew this cosmogony foremost from Paul Shepard (1926–1996), an endowed professor of natural philosophy and human ecology at California’s Pitzer College, whose publications argued that foraging societies—with their pantheistic and polytheistic spiritualities, close connections with animals, and rich forms of ritualizing—promoted emotional health and were environmentally sustainable.17 Foreman continued that agriculture’s war on nature and foraging peoples was now so advanced that it had come to threaten the evolutionary process itself, a perspective he buttressed by citing Michael Soulé, a prominent and respected ecologist who cofounded the Society for Conservation Biology. This provides one example of how the strongly apocalyptic worldview common among radical environmentalists is fueled by a certain reading of the environmental sciences.
Foreman, drawing on Shepard and others, linked the devastating rise of agricultural civilizations to the emergence and spread of otherworldly and anthropocentric religions as well as to humanism, which eventually followed.18 As Foreman put it in an early Earth First! publication, “Until the paradigm of Western Civilization is replaced by another worldview”—and here he alluded to the goddess religions of the ancients and to Native American worldviews—“until children see wisdom alone on a mountain rather than in books alone,” the restoration of earth-harmonious communities will be impossible.19
Not incidentally, elsewhere in his collection, Rogers recommended Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael. In it and its sequel, The Story of B, Quinn articulated the most prevalent cosmogony found within radical environmental subcultures.20 In the initial novel, a burnt-out environmentalist was tutored, telepathically, by a gorilla named Ishmael. Ishmael taught that the fall from an Edenic state of harmony with nature was precipitated by the domestication of plants and animals and the concomitant advent of agriculture, which went hand-in-hand with world-denigrating religions. Totalitarian agricultures then spread globally, destroying biologically diverse ecosystems and animistic foraging cultures wherever they went. In Quinn’s reading, the religions of imperial agricultures, whether Abrahamic or Vedic, all promise divine rescue from this world, instead of promoting feelings of reverence toward and belonging to nature. Edward Abbey articulated a similar view about the ecologically devastating mistake represented by agriculture and otherworldly religions.21
In the excerpt reprinted by Rogers, however, Foreman then offered John Muir’s views as an antidote to destructive, anthropocentric, otherworldly worldviews: “There is another way to think about man’s relationship to the natural world, an insight pioneered by . . . John Muir and later by the science of ecology. This is the idea that all things are connected, interrelated, that human beings are merely one of the millions of species that have been shaped by the process of evolution for three and a half billion years. According to this view, all living beings have the same right to be here.” Here, Foreman (and Rogers) not only declared an ecological metaphysics of interconnection but a kinship ethic grounded in recognition that all life shares a common ancestor. To make this point Foreman again borrowed from Muir, who as shown in the previous chapter, referred disdainfully to the arrogant attitude of “Lord Man.” Foreman urged his readers to reject such arrogance—to humble themselves—and become “the rain forest, the desert, the mountain, the wilderness in defense of yourself. It is through becoming part of the wild that we find courage far greater than ourselves, a union that gives us boldness to stand against hostile humanism, against the machine, against the dollar, against jail, against extinction for what is sacred and right: the Great Dance of Life.” Foreman followed this with Aldo Leopold’s story about shooting the wolf, focusing on its climax where Leopold repented his anthropocentrism “after seeing the green fire die.” Foreman then exhorted: “Green fire. We need it in the eyes of the wolf. We need it in the land. And we need it in our own eyes.”22
The opening chapter from Foreman’s book, prominently featured in Rogers’s compendium, provides a synthetic overview of radical environmental themes. The notion that wildness constitutes the best aspects of nature and people, and that domestication must therefore be resisted, was prominent in Thoreau, Muir, Shepard, and Abbey; and such perceptions have become common among environmentalists, both radical and mainstream.
Foreman’s justifications for earth defense were based not only on an extrapolation from kinship ethics; they were also premised on the idea that humans are a part of nature and therefore nature defense is a form of self-defense. Foreman was likely influenced in this area by John Seed.23 Seed wrote that activism can promote a spiritual consciousness beyond anthropocentrism such that the notion, “I am protecting the rainforest,” could develop into an understanding, “I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking.” The idea that human consciousness is the universe reflecting on itself may have first been expressed by Pierre Teil-hard de Chardin in the 1930s in a book only published posthumously.24 Indeed, Teilhard’s thought anticipated Gaia theory and can be seen as a form of Gaian spirituality.
Foreman clearly agreed that a spirituality of belonging and connection was much needed as a means to encourage a biocentric perspective. Unlike Teilhard and Seed, however, Foreman’s approach went in a nonsupernaturalistic direction, especially after his flirtation with more spiritual forms of Paganism in the early to mid-1980s. During an interview, for example, after mentioning that he often spoke of nature as sacred and had argued repeatedly that, if humans are to live in harmony with the wider community of life, they must “resacralize” their perceptions of the earth, I asked him what he meant by sacred. He answered:
It’s very difficult in our society to discuss the notion of sacred apart from the supernatural, I think that’s something that we need to work on, a nonsuper-natural concept of sacred; a nontheistic basis of sacred. When I say I’m a nontheistic pantheist it’s a recognition that what’s really important is the flow of life, the process of life. . . . [So] the idea is not to protect ecosystems frozen in time . . . but [rather] the grand process . . . of evolution. . . . We’re . . . just temporary manifestations of this life force, which is blind and nonteleological. And so I guess what is sacred is what’s in harmony with that flow.25
This expression of Gaian Naturalism has affinities with the worldview and perceptions of Edward Abbey, who influenced a broad spectrum of environmentalists. In an essay reprinted in Rogers’s Mountains and Rivers, for example, Abbey’s pantheistic and organicist beliefs are on display, as well as some (at least youthful) perceptions about the possibility of communicating with trees and animals.26
Most of Abbey’s religion-related thoughts, however, were fully formed when he penned Desert Solitaire, which became one of the most beloved texts among radical environmentalists, at least during the 1970s and 1980s. In it Abbey called himself an “earthist,” a “pagan Gentile,” and he spoke glowingly of the “increasingly pagan and hedonistic” American population that is “learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches.”27 He also described a mystical experience of unity with nature during an extended time in canyons near Arizona’s Havasu Indian Reservation.28 But in conversations with friends and based on his own spiritual experiences and experimentations, he wondered what constituted true spiritual insight and how one arrived at it. Marveling at a favorite desert landscape, for example, he wondered:
Is this at last locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up at one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring—the leafy god, the desert’s liquid eye—but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name.
In the very next paragraph, however, he pointedly rejected such supernaturalism:
If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernatural. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves, and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of ancient dreams.29
Nearing death twenty years later, Abbey underscored the point in a new preface to the 1998 edition:
Desert Solitaire, I’m happy to add, contains no hidden meanings, no secret messages. It is no more than it appears to be, the plain and simple account of a long sweet season lived in one of the world’s most splendid places. If some might object that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships that many believe form the true and underlying reality of existence, I can only reply that I am content with surfaces, with appearances. I know nothing about underlying reality, having never encountered any. . . . Appearance is reality, I say, and more than most of us deserve. . . . Come home for God’s sake, and enjoy this gracious Earth of ours while you can. . . .
Throw metaphysics to the dogs. I never heard a mountain lion bawling over the fate of his soul.
As he put it in the original text, “The earth which bore us and sustains us [is] the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need.”30
Both in the original and emphasized as he faced death, Abbey rejected all supernatural metaphysics—but his Gaian Naturalism is evident. For Abbey, there are important teachings from all types of wilderness, but the desert speaks the paramount wilderness lesson most clearly through its indifference to humanity: that human beings are neither the apex of creation nor the only valuable creature.31 For those who are honest and willing, Gaia can speak clearly—as nature did to Muir on his walk to the Gulf of Mexico—overturning anthropocentric hubris and teaching that the world was not made for man.
Abbey sought communion not only with Gaia; he also expressed views that cohere with what I am calling Naturalistic Animism. In one poignant passage, for example, he described his eye-to-eye encounter with a great predator, a mountain lion. This occurred after he spotted and then followed its fresh tracks, hoping to see the elusive creature. After describing how he was attracted to the lion but also felt fear when he finally saw it, he wrote:
I felt what I always feel when I meet a large animal face to face in the wild: I felt a kind of affection and the crazy desire to communicate, to make some kind of emotional, even physical contact with the animal. After we’d stared at each other for maybe five seconds—it seemed at the time like five minutes—I held out one hand and took a step toward the big cat and said something ridiculous like, ‘here, kitty, kitty.’ The cat paused there on three legs, one paw up as if he wanted to shake hands.
Abbey eventually retreated, after realizing that he was “not yet quite ready to shake hands with a mountain lion,” but then he mused, writing to readers whom he assumed would share his longing for contact and communion with nonhuman others: “I want my children to have the opportunity for that kind of experience. I want my friends to have it. I want even our enemies to have it—they need it most. And someday, possibly, one of our children’s children will discover how to get close enough to that mountain lion to shake paws with it, to embrace and caress it, maybe even teach it something, and to learn what the lion has to teach us.”32
Like Thoreau on Katahdin, Abbey craved intimate contact and communion with wild nature in its various manifestations, believing that the earth and its denizens had much to teach, and that undomesticated humans were the ones most likely able to learn. Unlike some of the more spiritually animistic individuals engaged in dark green religion, however, Abbey was tentative about such communicative possibilities, even though he pursued and craved them.
As unusual as Abbey’s views might seem, even the most striking themes he articulated had been expressed earlier by the writers he praised most highly. He especially lauded Thoreau, Mary Austin, Joseph Wood Krutch, Farley Mowat, and Gary Snyder for not only seeking to understand but to save nature.33 He also articulated the central affective feeling and ethical sensibility present in dark green religion—a feeling of belonging to nature and kinship with its diverse lifeforms, and a corresponding sense of responsibility for their well-being.
To gain such perception, one must get away from the distractions of civilization, Abbey believed. He wrote in Desert Solitaire, for example, that when he could get away from the artificial lights of civilization he felt “part of the environment” and experienced, “a mighty stillness [that] embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.”34
Here is Gaian Naturalism in a form that, when considering the entire body of Abbey’s work, can be seen as tinged with a Naturalistic Animism and a deep sense of felt communion with all life. While for Abbey such perception leads to the defense of wilderness and wildlife, this does not require a vegetarian or vegan ethics. After killing a rabbit on one occasion, instead of feeling guilt, Abbey exulted, “No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey.”35
The very process of eating other organisms, and eventually being eaten by them, is a part of the reality of life that binds Abbey to it. Abbey’s spirituality of belonging and desire for intimacy with nature thus involved an attitude toward death that is uncommon among those who seek divine rescue from this world. Instead, Abbey saw death as a transformation to be appreciated and embraced, in part for the new life it gives, in part for the reality of belonging it inescapably conveys.36 As shown earlier, the embrace of a natural death and the life-renewing transformations it brings has been a recurring theme since Thoreau and Muir, and has even been discussed explicitly as a sacrament by Gary Snyder.
Many individuals or groups can have perceptions of the kind attributed to these radical environmentalists without a similar political radicalism, of course. What often makes religions politically rebellious and sometimes violent is a millennial or apocalyptic expectation, which is often combined with a belief that it is a religious duty to resist or usher in the impending end, or to defend sacred values in the face of an unfolding cataclysm. Thus, what separates radical environmentalism from many other forms of dark green religion is apocalypticism. But it is an apocalypticism that is radically innovative in the history of religion—because it is the first time that an expectation of the end of the known world has been grounded in environmental science.37
An apocalyptic perspective was certainly central in Rogers’s compilations. In Mountains and Rivers he introduced one section with these words: “We are in the midst of a crisis. . . . But has the reality of mass species extinction really sunk in? . . . It is not enough to acknowledge the severity of the situation on an intellectual level. We must continually allow ourselves to feel grief and to feel rage. Emotions are the source of one’s empowerment and the gateway to a deeper connection with other beings. . . . let down your emotional armor and allow yourselves to feel.” Much of the compendium assumed that cataclysmic decline of the earth’s ecosystems was already unfolding. It also promoted “compassion for all beings” and expressed anger at, and resistance to, those responsible for the destruction.
There are differences, complexities, and ironies in radical environmental apocalypticism. While all the nuances cannot be teased out here, an article published in Earth First! by James Barnes exemplifies the movement’s apocalypticism. His perspective is based on population science and the idea of carrying capacity, that the population of an organism will collapse if it grows numerically such that its individuals cannot find enough calories to survive or reproduce, or if it produces lethal amounts of toxic waste. Radical environmentalists (and many scientists) think this process is already underway, reducing human numbers in many regions. “There is hope—but not for us,” wrote Barnes, as a pithy way to express the impending doom. Barnes acknowledged that a global human population crash is not inevitable but thought it unlikely that humans will “gracefully reduce” their numbers. So for Barnes and many radical environmentalists, pessimism and optimism are two sides of the same tragic coin: “We’re going to have to get used to the idea that, for us at least, everything is not going to be all right. . . . One way or another . . . humans will be far less numerous than at present. The rest of the biosphere, what’s left of it, will take a quick breather.”38 For those who most value the diversity and resilience of the earth’s living systems, like Barnes, this is a hopeful expectation, that nature’s laws will eventually reduce the numbers of organisms, like humans, who consume too many calories or produce too much waste.
The inseparability of pessimism and optimism, and ambivalence about the coming catastrophe, can be found in the earliest of radical environmental elders. Indeed, from early on, the movement’s hope, its ironic and fragile optimism, was forged in despair. As Edward Abbey put it in Earth First! in 1986:
I predict that the military-industrial state will disappear from the surface of the Earth within fifty years. That belief is the basis of my inherent optimism, the source of my hope for the coming restoration of higher civilization: scattered human populations modest in number that live by fishing, hunting, food-gathering, small-scale farming and ranching, that assemble once a year in the ruins of abandoned cities for great festivals of moral, spiritual, artistic and intellectual renewal—a people for whom the wilderness is not a playground but their natural and native home.39
Radical environmental apocalypticism, then, is deeply ambivalent about catastrophe. Disaster is imminent, it involves the desecration of a sacred world, and it must be resisted. Yet the decline of ecosystems and the collapse of human societies may pave the way back to an earthly paradise.
This kind of thinking, as Barnes intimated, would be difficult to swallow for those he calls “exceptionalists,” by which he means people who think that Homo sapiens is somehow exempt from nature’s laws. Certainly, radical environmentalists have been denounced as uncompassionate social Darwinists who are unconcerned about human beings. Whether these criticisms have merit, however, turns on the facts, for there is nothing necessarily uncompassionate about observing that negative consequences follow from believing one is exempt from natural laws. Those engaged in carrying-capacity analysis argue that the compassionate path is to warn humankind of the suffering that will intensify if fertility rates are not reduced.40
The scientifically based apocalypticism of radical environmentalism is also sometimes fused with or supplemented by religious prophesy, which often offers hope. Rogers’s first compendium, for example, revisits a Native American prediction that multiethnic “Warriors of the Rainbow” would arise to “make the Earth green again . . . and create [a] New Eden.”41 It also mentions a Tibetan myth regarding Shambhala warriors who would arise during a time of great danger, averting a cataclysm. Both of Rogers’s compilations end with poetry that anticipates a reharmonization of life on earth after a period of great darkness, suffering, and struggle. Such prophecies and narratives, as well as other “ecotopian” (environmentally utopian) literature, are often drawn into the radical environmental milieu. They function to inspire activists and provide hope that somehow life might flourish, despite the present difficulties and long odds.
The analysis in this chapter thus far has focused on naturalistic forms of radical environmentalism and the science-based apocalypticism common within it. For a more complete picture of radical environmentalism as an exemplar of dark green religion, however, its experiential dimension requires more attention. Some radical environmentalists have extraordinary experiences and perceptions, which are also characteristics of dark green religion in other contexts.
Rogers certainly presented the work of radical environmentalists who fit both naturalistic and more spiritual or supernaturalistic forms of nature spirituality, both Gaian and animistic. He included prose and poetry from Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, and John Seed, for example, whose nature-related spirituality and innovative ritual practices are particularly good examples of the more overtly spiritual manifestation of dark green religion. Moreover, these authors all have expressed sympathies for radical environmentalism, share many of its perceptions, and have influenced its participants. Rogers quoted, for example, from Macy’s “Bestiary,” a poem she included in the book introducing the Council of All Beings; the council itself is a process that can be understood as a “ritual of inclusion,” designed to evoke or deepen kinship feelings with nonhuman organisms.42 But other writers and poets that Rogers featured wrote of mystical experiences encountering a divine life-force in the earth, or of animistic encounters with the spiritual intelligence of nonhuman beings or entities.
Rogers quoted a poem by Mark Davis, for example, which drew on Buddhist themes and promoted “compassion for all beings.” Davis had been arrested along with four others in 1988 and charged with several acts of ecotage. These included an effort to thwart the expansion of a ski resort in Arizona’s San Francisco Mountains—an area considered sacred by many Hopi and Navajo Indians. Writing from a federal penitentiary, Davis explained what precipitated the ski-resort sabotage: “Certainly there was some outrage involved at the blatant disregard of agreements with the Hopi and Navajo tribes, anger at the destruction of hundreds of acres of irreplaceable old growth forest for the new ski runs, and indignation that the Forest Service was subsidizing a private company with public dollars. But the bottom line is that those mountains are sacred, and that what has occurred there, despite our feeble efforts, is a terrible spiritual mistake.”43 The religious motivations behind Davis’s extralegal activities are illuminated in his poem and this statement, motivations Rogers found inspirational. Indeed, just like any other religious tradition, radical environmentalism has its heroes and saints. Davis became one. So now has Rogers.
Of all of those featured in Rogers’s compilation, none got more ink than David Abram. Abram, as a slight-of-hand magician, used his skills to facilitate encounters with indigenous magic practitioners in Indonesia and Nepal in the early 1980s. These experiences decisively shaped his thinking and later scholarly work (he earned a doctorate in cultural ecology and philosophy in 1993). In the mid-1980s Abram encountered radical environmentalism by chance, when he happened to camp near an early Earth First! rendezvous. Abram appreciated their earthly spirituality and biocentric ethics and soon was reporting in the pages of Earth First! on the meetings of the North American Bioregional Congress, a kindred movement expressing dark green religion that he had been deeply involved with from its inception. About this time he also began publishing a number of articles that would influence radical environmentalists and many others in the environmentalist milieu.44
The articles Rogers included were two of Abram’s most influential. They explained how he had come to an animistic perception and provided theoretical grounding for his belief that the entire world was alive and seeking relationship and communion. In “The Perceptual Implications of Gaia,” Abram championed James Lovelock’s Gaia theory.45 After summarizing the hypothesis, Abram argued that, upon further analysis, this atmosphere-focused theory shows that humans are inside of Gaia and belong to her, and that such perception, at variance with most Western philosophical and scientific thought, can provide a basis for a deep sense of communion and identification with nature and even with the universe itself. As Abram put it: “Perception is communication. It is the constant, ongoing communication between this organism that I am and the vast organic entity of which I am a part. In more classical terms, perception is the experience of communication between the individual microcosm and the planetary macrocosm. . . . Perception, then—the whole play of the senses—is a constant communion between ourselves and the living world that encompasses us.”46
To substantiate his idea of an ongoing, reciprocal relationship and communion between human and nonhuman entities, Abram drew on his experiences with indigenous shamanism and understandings of their ecological roles, enhanced especially by the work of the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the American perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson. According to Abram, they viewed the “surrounding physical world as an active participant in our perceptual experience.” Abram argued that their research into perception undermined “the traditional mind-body” dualism that prevents us from recognizing (as indigenous shaman generally do) that everything is alive. When we overcome dualistic perceptions and cultivate a sensitive awareness of relationships with all of our surroundings, Abram averred, “birds, trees, even rivers and stones begin to stand forth as living, communicative presences.” Moreover, such epistemology is “consonant with the Gaia hypothesis, and with the Gaian implication that perception itself is a communication, or communion, between an organism and the living biosphere.”47
Abram concluded this remarkably innovative essay by linking Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis with the perception common in many religions, that the holy is manifest in wind or breath:
[Gaia is] a reality that encompasses us, a phenomenon we are immediately in and of . . . it is our own body, our flesh and our blood, the wind blowing past our ears and the hawks wheeling overhead. Understood thus with the senses, recognized from within, Gaia is far vaster, far more mysterious and eternal than anything we may ever hope to fathom. . . . The most radical element of the Gaia hypothesis . . . may be the importance that it places on the air. . . . In Native American cosmology, the air or the Wind is the most sacred of powers. It is the invisible principle that circulates both within us and around us, animating the thoughts of all breathing things as it moves the swaying trees and the clouds. And indeed, in countless human languages the words for spirit or psyche are derived from the same root as the words for wind and breath. Thus in English the word spirit is related to the word respiration through their common origin in the Latin word spiritus, meaning a breath, or a gust of wind. Likewise our word psyche, with all its recent derivations, has its roots in the ancient Greek psychein, which means to breathe or to blow (like the wind).48
This is an example of Gaian spirituality that hints at the kind of communication and communion involved in animistic spiritualities.
The second Abram article reprinted by Rogers, “The Ecology of Magic,” made Abram’s understanding of animism more explicit, which is particularly interesting because it coheres with perceptions increasingly articulated by religion scholars, ethnobiologists, and anthropologists (especially specialists in ecological anthropology). Abram asserted that shamans are the ecologists of tribal societies. Contrary to early anthropological assessments of them, shamans were not encountering “supernatural” entities; they were simply engaging the mysterious powers, beings, and forces of nature itself. The shaman’s “magic,” which for Abram was really about animistic perception, involved “heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations—songs, cries, gestures—of a larger, more-than-human field. . . . Magic, then in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of living in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every natural form one perceives—from the swallows swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations.”49
Abram wrote of living with indigenous people in Bali, where his hosts presented food to the “spirits” on the ground around the corners of their buildings, and he observed ants arriving to receive the gifts. This seemed to encourage the ants to not enter the building, Abram commented, adding that “my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the ‘spirits’ of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form.”50 Abram then gave examples of how he came, during that time in Bali, into a deep awareness of the animate earth and intelligence of all of the things in it. In a passage reminiscent of the eye-to-eye epiphanies described previously, but with a new, communicative twist, Abram wrote:
Gradually, other animals began to intercept me in my wanderings, as if some quality in my posture or the rhythm of my breathing had disarmed their wariness; I would find myself face-to-face with monkeys, and with large lizards that did not slither away when I spoke, but lean forward in apparent curiosity. In rural Java I often noticed monkeys accompanying me in the branches overhead, and ravens walked toward me on the road, croaking. While at Pangandaran, a peninsula jutting out from the south coast of Java . . . I stepped out from a clutch of trees and discovered I was looking into the face of one of the rare and beautiful bison that are found only on that island. Our eyes locked. When it stared, I stared back; when it shifted its shoulders, I shifted my stance; when I tossed my head, it tossed its own in reply. I found myself caught in a nonverbal conversation with this Other, a gestural duet with which my reflective awareness had very little to do. It was as if my body were suddenly being motivated by a wisdom older than my thinking mind, as though it were held and moved by a logos—deeper than words—spoken by the Other’s body, the trees, the air, and the stony ground on which we stood.
Shortly after this, Abram noted with anguish that upon his return to North America it was difficult to maintain the intimate relationships and animistic perceptions he had established while in Asia. Yet he continued to cultivate such consciousness both personally and for others through his writings and other activities, including by founding the Alliance for Wild Ethics in 2006 and creating a website for it.
The entry to this remarkable website begins with a phrase first published in Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, a book that became popular within the North American environmentalist milieu: “We are only human in contact, and conviviality, with that which is not human.”51 This sentence, which so succinctly expresses Abram’s animistic spirituality, then floats as if magically across the screen. Then, as one enters the site, an image inspired by shamanism and the rock art of ancient aboriginal people appears. In nimble computer animation, a human form merges with a tree, upon which a bird alights. These words then appear: “The Alliance for Wild Ethics: Awakening to Wonder.” With its evocative words, images, and music, this creative web art is designed to evoke worldly wonder. Exploring the website further reveals that Abram’s intention was not merely to promote wonder but also animistic perception. In a section that describes the animistic mission of the society, Abram is shown in a video clip in a “conversation” with a river, waving his arms as if in ecstatic relation to it. The video ends with Abram bowing to the river with hands in a “prayer pose” or “namaste,” which in South Asian culture signifies at least deep respect if not reverence for the divine essence in the one faced. Indeed, in an interview, Abram explained that he considers everything to be alive, even a rock, although “its pulse may move a lot slower than yours or mine.”52
Not incidentally, the interviewer was Derrick Jensen, a radical environmentalist who has written some of the movement’s most apocalyptic and anarchistic books, as well as ones that promote the kind of animistic perception that some radical environmentalists consider endemic within indigenous cultures and available to all who cultivate their innate communicative abilities. In A Language Older than Words, for example, Jensen described experiences communicating with nonhuman animals, tracing the perceptual ineptness of most Westerners to Cartesian dualism and instrumental science. He then contrasted Western obliviousness to the intelligences in nature with the kind of perception common among Native Americans, quoting Jeannette Armstrong, whom he described as a friend and traditional Okanagan Indian: “Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between Western and indigenous philosophies,” she told him. “Even the most progressive Western philosophers still generally believe that listening to land is a metaphor. [But] it’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.” Jensen replied, discussing his experience of hearing a tree: “I noticed an old pine tree on the corner, as I had noticed it many times previous, and I thought, ‘That tree is doing very well.’ Immediately I heard a response that did not pass through my ear but went directly to the part of my brain that receives sounds. I heard a completion of my sentence that changed its meaning altogether: ‘for not being in a community.’ I looked around, and though there were other trees nearby, this was not a full tree community.” After describing various experiences of interspecies communication, Jensen then told Armstrong that he was learning that communication with nonhuman beings was easy. She answered, referring to the hundreds of years since European arrival in the Americas, “Yeah. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you now for 500 years.”53
Along with critics like John Zerzan, Jensen was promoting “anarcho-primitivism,” a type of radical environmentalism that, like most forms, considers foraging societies superior to agricultural and pastoral ones; but it adds an anarchist and primitivist ideology that envisions and seeks to hasten the collapse of nation-states and all industrial civilizations.54 In two related volumes titled Endgame, Jensen promoted this ideology: he argued that modern civilizations destroy indigenous peoples and nature but that they will soon collapse because they are ecologically and therefore socially unsustainable. Reciting the radical cry also voiced by Abbey and Rogers before him, that the resistance to ecocide must deploy “whatever means necessary,” Jensen justified violent resistance, even quoting Ward Churchill, whose argument that pacifism is “pathology” was previously discussed: “We must seek nothing less than the dismemberment and dissolution of every statist/corporate entity in the world. All of them. No exceptions.”55 Despite his apocalypticism, or perhaps because of it, Jensen expressed hope for the future of the earth—as well as his conviction that the quicker the collapse the less suffering there would be for all living things. This was, as well, a part of his rationale for violence—in the long run, effective violence would yield less suffering. Meanwhile, he repeatedly urged his readers to listen to the land and its denizens, even in planning revolutionary strategy. To reinforce his belief that this was important strategically, he often quoted Native Americans as they expressed their own animistic perceptions. A good example appears near the end of Endgame, where he urged his readers, “If you want to know what to do, go to the nearest mountain, the nearest native tree, the nearest native soil, and ask what it needs. Ask it to teach you. It knows how to live there . . . it will teach you.56
Jensen’s form of radicalism has affinities with Rogers’s as well as with Abram’s. The discussion between Abram and Jensen made it clear that, although Abram has not issued a clarion call to violent ecological resistance as did Jensen, he agreed with the declensionist cosmogony, which links ecological degradation to agriculture, with its social hierarchy, technological fetishism, sky gods, and repression of pagan animism. Abram also introduced an innovative theory: that alphabetic language was a critically important factor, if not the most important precipitating variable, in the decline of animistic perception and the increasing disconnection of humans from nature.57 But in responding to Jensen’s question about what motivates his writing and speaking, Abram clearly articulated a feeling common among radical environmentalists: “My work is motivated in great measure by my sense of loss, by the spreading destruction and desecration of so much earthly beauty. By the accelerating loss of other species—the extinction of so many other styles of sensitivity and sentience . . . I’m trying to understand how it’s possible that a culture of intelligent critters like ourselves can so recklessly and so casually destroy so much that is mysterious and alive, and in the course of it destroy so much of ourselves and our own capacity for wonder.”58
This is an excellent example of dark green religious sentiment. But more than suggesting that radical environmentalism is a good exemplar of dark green religion, I can show that there is a permeable border between this sort of radical environmental spirituality and that which appears in the wider environmental milieu; for Abram’s animistic writings struck not only a chord among Rogers, Jensen, and radical environmentalists. The “Ecology of Magic” article was initially published in Orion magazine, which itself promotes reverence for life through nature-related essays, poetry, and art (especially photography). In 2008 the magazine included on its board of directors one of the leading figures in religious environmentalism, the scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker, who has devoted herself to facilitating the greening of the world’s major religious traditions. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry, two figures who have urged people to understand the scientific narrative of cosmological and biological evolution as a sacred story inseparable from God himself, were very influential on both Tucker and her husband John Grim, a scholar of indigenous traditions, who partnered with her in creating the Forum on Religion and Ecology.59 Orion’s board of advisors and regular contributors include a long list of nature writers who promote through their writing and lives various versions of dark green religion: Gary Snyder, William Kittredge, Barry Lopez (whose work Bill Rogers also included in his compendium and who wrote a remarkable essay that fits the “naturalistic animism” type introduced in this book),60 Peter Matthiessen, Bill McKibben, W. S. Merwin, Gary Paul Nabhan (an ethnobiologist who has argued that indigenous traditions and religions are, generally speaking, reservoirs of ecologically beneficent perceptions and practices),61 Richard Nelson (a scholar of Native American cultures), Scott Russell Sanders, Mitchell Thomashow, Terry Tempest Williams (whose essays Rogers included in one of his compendiums), Edward O. Wilson, and Ann Zwinger. These names would be familiar to anyone immersed in nature writing since Earth Day in 1970.
The origin of Orion is equally telling: it was created in 1982 by a nonprofit foundation that sought to “change environmental consciousness” and affirm “the contribution [that American] Indian culture can still make to our understanding of nature and ourselves.”62 The magazine’s first editor even asserted that its goal was to help people develop a “personal bond with nature.”63 This spiritual goal and Orion’s conservationist agenda became all the more clear when an environmentalist Orion Grassroots Network was established in 1997 to promote personal and ecosocial transformation. So, when Rogers selected Abram’s essay from Orion, he was drawing from a deep well of dark green spirituality that had long been flourishing in North American nature writing. An entire scholarly discipline of “ecocriticism” has emerged to explore this literature, which could certainly be analyzed in depth for expressions of dark green religion.
It is not just theorists of radical environmentalism who have the kinds of experiences and perceptions involved in dark green religion; so do many frontline activists. Sometimes such experiences occur even while activists are engaged in direct-action resistance to those they believe are desecrating the earth.
One example can be seen in the longest antilogging occupation/trespass of a tree in the history of direct-action environmentalism. On 10 December 1997 a young minister’s daughter climbed a giant redwood that had earlier been occupied and named “Luna” by Earth First! activists. Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who took her middle name from her childhood connection with butterflies, intended to extend their desperate effort to prevent Luna and the surrounding trees from being logged. Hill soon felt a connection with Luna and ended up more than two years aloft in her branches, enduring winter storms, frostbite, and a broken toe before descending. She did so only after negotiating an agreement with the logging company that left Luna standing as well as a two-hundred-foot buffer of surrounding trees.
The photogenic Hill and her arboreal campaign became a global media event as, in scores of interviews with reporters from around the world, she spoke of her spirituality and reverence for life. Hill also explained that, although she had grown up in Arkansas, she had been sent “by the spirit” to the redwoods via a wilderness vision quest, which she took after a life-threatening injury convinced her of the meaninglessness of her prior existence. Hill’s greatest epiphany, however, came immediately after arriving in the redwoods: “The first time I entered into a redwood forest . . . I dropped to my knees and began crying because the spirit of the forest just gripped me.”64 She became even more connected during her tree sit. As the San Francisco Examiner reported:
Julia “Butterfly” says she is so attuned to her host that she believes she has felt its tears with her bare feet and body. Butterfly [reported], “I was scared at first, and then I just started paying attention to the tree, drawing strength from the tree,” she said. “I could see all her scars and wounds, from fires and lightning strikes. I was making a spiritual connection. . . . Eventually, I took my shoes off so I could feel the tree and started free climbing around,” she said. When Pacific Lumber started logging the steepest part of the ridge and hauling logs out by helicopter, “I found myself crying a lot and hugging Luna and telling her I was sorry. . . . Then, I found out that I was being covered by sap pouring out of her body from everywhere, and I realized, ‘Oh, my God, you’re crying too.’ ”65
This article included Hill’s animistic assertion that trees “know how to communicate feelings.” The reporter also noted that Hill, with the exception of wearing wool, was a “vegan,” consuming neither meat nor other animal products, in order to reduce animal suffering. In the years after her famous tree sit, Hill continued her work, blending activism with a fervent belief that activists must come from a loving place if they are to be effective.66
Hill was far from the only activist to report personal connections to nature during direct-action protests. Five years before Hill’s experience, Alisha Little Tree told me of bonding with a redwood that she occupied during an eleven-day tree sit to prevent logging. Sitting on a massive redwood tree stump along a river in Northern California’s Sinkyone Wilderness, she explained how her perceptions changed as a result of that experience:
I stopped being a vegetarian after that tree sit because I connected with that tree so intensely . . . it has really changed my whole reality. Now I’m thinking of beings not as conscious creatures, but as life-force. There’s a really strong life-force in all of us, and in this forest in these trees. Connecting to the tree is not [hesitating], it’s like just being [pausing], it’s not like you talk to the tree, because it can’t hear, but there’s this feeling, I don’t know how to describe it, [it is], like a deep rootedness, very powerful, not superior to us, but certainly not inferior to us and more primitive or less evolved than us.67
When asked why this experience led her to renounce vegetarianism, she replied, “Because I just started to appreciate the incredible life-force in plants . . . and the line between animal and plants blurred. It’s all just different forms of life-force.” Little Tree and many other activists speak of epiphanies in nature, of feeling intensely the life-force that infuses and imbues all living things with value and that evokes feelings of awe and reverence.
Graham Innes, an Australian radical environmental activist, while buried up to his neck in an Australian logging road during a campaign to prevent logging there, had an experience that he felt connected him directly to the earth. He reported later “a slow dawning of awareness of a hitherto unknown connection—Earth bonding [when the Earth’s] pulse became mine, and the vessel, my body, became the vehicle for her expression . . . it was as though nature had overtaken my consciousness to speak on her behalf.”68
Other activists report experiencing the earth’s sacred energies or life-force, or communication with nonhuman beings, during environmentalist campaigns. Some even engage in what they call “magical direct actions,” where the goal is to seek, explore, and direct the sacred energy of the forest (itself an expression of the earth’s energy) toward specific ends. In marked contrast to Jensen’s angrier expressions, such action may involve activists even reaching out to their most bitter adversaries through a kind of prayer-as-energy-manipulation that seeks to focus, in an ecologically positive and healing way, what some of them consider to be the loving energy of the universe.
During the summer of 1997, for example, I spoke with three men involved in the direct-action defense of the Headwaters redwood forest in Northern California. A young man calling himself Reverend Fly spoke about some intense conflicts in the woods, asserting that “because we’re unpredictable,” the cops and loggers “are really scared of us. We walk and get there before they do in their trucks. They know how strong we are. . . . They know our motives come from another energy level. They don’t grock [understand] that [we act] from love.”69
In describing the spirituality of their activism, the men recounted conflicts in the woods as well as ritual circles at their activist encampments and how these helped them get in contact with the spirit or consciousness of the forest. Reverend Fly explained, “What we know about redwoods is that they sprout; they hold on to each other.” Redwoods are “part of this continuous, sprouting, living being, or consciousness, that once covered millions of acres. And all of this knowledge has been chewed up and chased into small pockets.” He then described experiences with other activists, including how during a meditative circle in the redwoods among “the tall ferns” the forest “echoes like a cathedral.” On one such occasion, he recalled:
I don’t know what kind of woo [movement parlance for spirituality, in this case spiritual practice] we’d been engaged in at the time, but suddenly, this cold, icy breeze came through the camp, washed over our knees, and we heard a long rolling moan, and every one stopped talking—then afterward—we said—“did you hear that? That was no breeze.” I didn’t try to give it a name. There’s lot of old energies, old pain, there, that I can’t name. Their memory is fucking old. And lots of the spirits that have dwelled there a long time—they have a lot to say.
Another activist in the small circle that day went by the earth-name Goat. He used to be a Greenpeace direct-action expert but left that organization to pursue a more spiritual approach. Responding to Fly, he said, “I felt such [deep, forest] consciousness in that group—heavy consciousness. We were addicted to it. Talking about conjuring about things—we were even praying for [Charles] Hurwitz,” referring to the Texas tycoon who controlled Maxxam Corporation and Pacific Lumber, the logging company they were fighting. Their activism was all about love and healing, Goat elaborated. “In the circle we’d sing out, ‘We love you Hurwitz—we’ll take you in here any time.’ It was amazing, there was a pretty pure love and intent.” Clearly, for these forest defenders, redwood forests are transformational and time in them is sacred. They believed that if they could somehow get their adversaries into the forest, they would be changed forever. As Fly put it, “Nobody can go in there and not be transformed.”
For these activists, cultivating and promoting such spirituality is not narcissism, as some radical environmentalists have claimed—it is activism. Goat asserted that in Europe, spirituality changed consciousness fast enough to save the whales. When asked what he meant by spirituality, he answered, “It is honoring the universal power, the flow, the power far beyond me, [the power] that I exist in.” Asked for his understanding, Fly replied that spirituality is “when I know what the trees are saying, when I know what my friends are thinking [its when] I and the people I’m with open ourselves to other energies or to a higher vibrational level. People call them all sorts of things, Ghosts. Fairies. Telepathy. It has [convinced me we are not] separate from each other, and from the rocks, and everything else.”
Like all good mystics, Fly cautioned, “The more words I put on this the farther we can go from the reality I refer to.” He then offered his spiritual prescription: what we need to do is “just sit down, shut up, breathe, have eye contact, touch . . . ,” and falling silent, he put his hands on the earth.
A concluding example underscores that radical environmentalism has sympathizers around the world among people who could never imagine lawbreaking to defend nature.
Paul Watson cofounded Greenpeace in 1972, leaving it in 1977 to create the more aggressive Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which campaigns to defend marine life and ecosystems by trying to directly thwart those who hunt whales, dolphins, seal pups, and other marine creatures. Watson and his comrades sometimes use risky tactics, placing their bodies and boats between hunters and the hunted and otherwise interfering with the whalers, sometimes even sinking the whaling ships (while docked) or trying to disable whaling vessels by ramming them with their own ships.
Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950, as a youth Watson felt his closest friends were the animals who lived nearby, and he has written that by age fifteen his earth consciousness was so intense that he “pledged allegiance not to Canada, the Church, or humanity, but to nature.”70 But one adulthood experience, during a confrontation with a Russian whaler in 1975, is especially noteworthy. After failing, in rolling seas, to prevent the harpooning of a huge sperm whale, Watson would later recall:
The whale wavered and towered motionless above us. I looked up . . . into a massive eye the size of my fist—an eye that reflected back intelligence, an eye that spoke wordlessly of compassion, an eye that communicated that this whale could discriminate and understand what we had tried to do. . . .
Ever so slowly, the whale fell back into the sea. As I watched the massive head sink beneath the swells, the flicker of life extinguished in the whale’s eye. . . . On that day, I knew emotionally and spiritually that my allegiance lay with the whales first and foremost, over the interests of those humans who would kill them.71
Watson’s version of the story is reminiscent of the experiences others, including Aldo Leopold, who report being transformed through empathic, eye-to-eye contact with animals.
Roaming the seas to prevent the slaughter of marine life is an expensive endeavor. To mount his campaigns, Watson has garnered donations from around the world as well as volunteers who pay their own way to be crew on his dangerous voyages. Watson attributes his success to his strategy of generating massive media coverage by engineering and recording confrontations, and using celebrity supporters to help publicize campaigns. He even became a celebrity himself when, in 2008, the cable television station Animal Planet began broadcasting Whale Wars, a series chronicling his ongoing antiwhaling campaign.72 Watson believes, however, that he must do more than gain media attentions or prevail in specific confrontations; he must contribute to the kind of dramatic transformation of consciousness that radical environmentalists generally believe must occur if we are to reharmonize life on earth.
I once asked Watson to elaborate on his moral and religious beliefs, about which he had spoken from time to time but never expressed in writing.73 His response in “A Call to Biocentric Religion” provides an excellent summary of the kind of dark green religion prevalent in radical environmental subcultures. Watson began by urging people to abandon the world’s dominant religions, claiming that they promote and justify violence, bigotry, and anthropocentrism and focus “exclusively on the superiority and divinity of the human species.” On the contrary:
What we need if we are to survive is a new story, a new myth, and a new religion. We need to replace anthropocentrism with biocentrism. We need to construct a religion that incorporates all species and establishes nature as sacred and deserving of respect.
Christians have denounced this idea as worshipping the creation and not the Creator. Yet in the name of the Creator, they have advocated the destruction of the creation. What is true however is that we can know the creation; we can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it and experience it. We can also nurture and protect it. . . .
I reject the anthropocentric idea of custodianship. This is an idea that once again conveys human superiority, and quite frankly, we have always been lousy custodians.
Religions are based on rules, and we already have the rules in place for the establishment of a religion based on nature. These are the basic Laws of Ecology. . . .
The first is the Law of Diversity. The strength of an ecosystem is dependent upon its diversity. The greatest threat to the planet’s living species in the present is the escalating destruction of biological diversity. The primary reason for this can be found in the next three laws.
The second law is the Law of Interdependence. All species are interdependent upon each other. As Sierra Club founder John Muir once said, “When you tug on any part of the planet, you will find it intimately connected to every other part of the planet.”
The third law is the Law of Finite Resources. There are limits to growth in every species because there are limits to carrying capacity of every ecosystem.
The fourth law of ecology is the Law that a Species must have Precedence over the interests of any individual. . . . This means that the rights of a species to survive must take precedence over the right of any individual or group to exploit the species beyond the law of finite resources.
What does this mean for humanity? . . . [That] the protection, conservation, and preservation of the Earth should be the foremost human concern. We must look upon the Earth, her ecosystems and species as sacred. . . .
We must develop a philosophy where a redwood tree is more sacred than a human-made religious icon, where a species of bird or butterfly is of more value and deserving of more respect than the crown jewels of a nation, and where the survival of a species of cacti or flower is more important than the survival of a monument to human conceit like the pyramids.
With the laws of ecology as a foundation for a new biocentric, ecocentric worldview, we can then look at providing a sense of identity. Religious identity has been primarily tribal, dividing people into groups or cults at odds with each other. A biocentric identity is something completely different because it is all encompassing.
An acceptance of interspecies equality allows a sense of planetary belonging. To be part of the whole is to be free of the alienation caused by an individual species like our own becoming divorced and alienated from the biospheric family of life.
With this revolutionary approach to forming a new religion, we have rules and we have a sense of belonging. Since the membership is multi-species and encompasses all ecosystems, there is no need for a church. The planet becomes its own church and the philosophy is uncontainable.
Watson continued by saying that a new story, “a reason to live and create and nurture” is needed as a ground for such a biocentric religion, and he asserted that many indigenous nations have such stories. The common thread in them is an “understanding of the connectedness of all things” and that all “the living beings of the past remain connected to the living beings of the future through the living beings of the present.” This understanding of “Continuum,” he said, is the key to a biocentric religion:
Born of the Earth, we return to the Earth. The soil beneath our feet contains the material reality of the ancestors of all species. Without the collective, expired lives of the past, there would be less soil. For this reason, the soil itself is our collective ancestry, and thus the soil should be as sacred to us.
The water of the Earth is the blood of the planet and within its immensity will be found the molecules of water, which once enlivened the cells of our ancestors of all species. The water you drink once coursed through the blood of the dinosaurs, or was drunk by Precambrian ferns, or was expelled in the urine of a mastodon. Water has utilized the lives of all living things as part of its planetary circulatory system. All life contains water. Therefore water is sacred.
The air that we breathe has passed through countless respiratory systems and thus has been chemically stabilized by plants and animals. Without the lives that have gone before, there would be no air to breathe. The life of the past has nurtured the atmosphere. Therefore the air is sacred.
In fact, the air, the water, and the soil form the trinity of sacredness in a biocentric perspective.
Our lives in the present should be sacred to the living beings of the future.
Watson concluded that by rejecting tribalism and anthropocentrism, and adopting a biocentric religion that understands and lives within the laws of ecology, “we will find ourselves on a planet living harmoniously with millions of other species who we can, and should, call fellow Earthlings.”
This was a truly remarkable statement, first of all, because Watson recognized that religion is invented for specific purposes, something few religious practitioners themselves ever realize. It is also noteworthy as perhaps the best extant insider-penned summary of radical environmental religion. Watson’s statement represents, moreover, another example of a self-conscious effort to ground religion and ethics in nature, both in one’s personal experience of nature and in an understanding of its laws through science. It is also worth noting that Watson quoted John Muir in his statement, writing at the very time he was serving on the Sierra Club Board of Directors. This suggests that dark green religion, which finds perhaps its most fervent proponents in deep ecological and radical environmentalist subcultures, enjoys support in politically moderate sectors of the global environmentalist milieu as well.
Of course, radical environmentalists have been both feared and harshly criticized, and these critiques have religious, secular, and ethical dimensions. In the culture at large it is not uncommon to hear devotees of Abrahamic religions denouncing the environmental radicals and others engaged in nature-focused religion, casting them as spiritually dangerous and heretical, idolatrous in their worship of the creation rather than God. Politicians, law-enforcement officials, scholars, and many ordinary citizens decry what they judge to be illegal, violent, and antidemocratic tactics. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have asserted that radical environmentalists and animal rights activists (which they conflate) pose the foremost threat of domestic terrorism. Some antiterrorism researchers, novelists, and screenwriters ponder whether ecoradicals will deploy weapons of mass destruction to precipitate the collapse of civilization and reduce human numbers to a carrying capacity the earth can support. Still others fear that nature religions, including radical environmentalism, are ultimately misanthropic and harbor fascistic designs.74 Given the incendiary tactics and rhetoric sometimes deployed by such activists, these fears are understandable. Yet given mounting evidence of the precipitous decline in earth’s life-support systems, the apocalyptic expectations that fuel environmental resistance are also understandable.
The heart of dark green religion does not lie, however, in the tactics and strategies engaged in or supported by its various participants; among radical environmentalists and others engaged in dark green religion, there are diverse views about what is permissible and impermissible with regard to whether and when lawbreaking or violence should be risked and is morally acceptable.75 The heart of dark green religion is to be found in the belief that everything in the biosphere is interdependent, intrinsically valuable, and sacred.
By now it should be clear that dark green religion exists, has many forms, and is increasingly global. But is it only found within environmentalist and conservationist subcultures? Or is it escaping such enclaves and providing a religious and ethical alternative more widely? Whether one is sympathetic toward dark green religion or fearful of it, these are important questions. Posed differently: how long is the shadow of dark green religion?