Gutsy and audacious, Jane Goodall was the first scientist to ever live as a member of a chimpanzee society, revealing how similar chimpanzees could be to humans: loving, caring, and intelligent; irascible, brutish, and cannibalistic. Guided by a philosophy of what she says is her “curiosity” and “passion” for “all animals,” she’s dedicated her life to wildlife conservation in Africa. Seemingly indefatigable, in 1957 at the age of twenty-three she left London to live in Kenya, and then later Tanzania, before heading to Cambridge University to complete a PhD in ethology in 1965. Twelve years later she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to advocate for great apes and the value of tropical ecosystems. In the early 1990s she started up Roots & Shoots as a global network to empower and educate young people to respect—and protect—natural systems as integral to improving community life. A few years later she launched a program to support “community-centered conservation” in Kigoma, Tanzania (called TACARE, or the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education program). In recognition of her service, in 2004 she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire.
From 1998 to 2008 Goodall was president of Advocates for Animals, an animal welfare organization headquartered in Edinburgh. A vegetarian, in 2011 she became a patron of Australia’s Voiceless: The Animal Protection Institute. Taking on this new role she publicly condemned “factory farming, in part because of the tremendous harm inflicted on the environment, but also because of the shocking ongoing cruelty perpetuated on millions of sentient beings.” If this was not already a busy life, along the way she has published more than 25 adult and children books.
Is Dame Jane a radical? Some people certainly think so, seeing her as an animal rights fanatic. Others see her biocentrism—with a belief in the intrinsic value of all life on earth—as sacrilegious. Radicalism in wealthy countries is diverse and fragmented, a characteristic that in recent years security agencies have been exploiting to crack down on more confrontational activism by portraying all direct-action environmental groups as violent extremists and terrorists. As we’ll see in this chapter by comparing the acts and beliefs of some of those involved over the years in Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the Animal Liberation Front, and the Earth Liberation Front, deep divisions exist across so-called radical organizations on what are necessary—and acceptable—tactics and reforms, with sharp differences in understanding of what even constitutes a radical act. And as generations collide and individuals age, nasty, bitter disputes have torn apart past alliances of radicals, further undermining the power of more radical environmentalists to challenge the growing dominance of environmentalism of the rich as well as weakening the power of environmentalism as a whole to act as a counterforce to the political and economic forces of unsustainable development.
Today, for instance, very few environmentalists would see Goodall as radical. In 2008 one group even pressed her to resign as president of Advocates for Animals after she described the Edinburgh Zoo’s chimpanzee enclosure as “wonderful.” Some environmentalists would even say she’s a conformist, seeing her philosophy of nonviolence and her ongoing call for little changes to solve global problems as propping up the exploitative structures and institutions that are causing social inequality and biodiversity loss.1
Would a dame of the British Empire ever deserve the title of radical? Wouldn’t a true radical reject the pomp and imperialism of the British monarchy? Describing anyone as radical is always problematic. Was Germany’s Petra Kelly—a peace, women’s rights, and environmental activist who went on to cofound the West German Green Party in 1979—a radical? What about Japan’s Yoichi Kuroda, who in 1987 helped to establish the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network (JATAN), and who for many years coordinated a campaign to end Japan’s role in the illegal logging and deforestation of Southeast Asia and Melanesia? Or what about Canada’s Patrick Moore, who in the 1970s and 1980s sailed the high seas under the banner of Greenpeace to oppose nuclear testing as well as commercial whaling and sealing?
In some ways Moore is the easiest to classify. In his twenties and for much of his thirties he was most definitely a radical, arrested multiple times as he fought the ruling elites of his day. Sporting a beret atop his long bushy hair, he was on the first “Greenpeace” voyage that left Vancouver in 1971 to “bear witness” to American nuclear tests off the coast of Alaska. Four years later he was on Greenpeace’s first anti-whaling voyage, where, off the coast of California, Soviet whalers fired a harpoon over the heads of activists riding in an inflatable dinghy, striking and killing a female sperm whale.
In 1977 Moore became president of the Greenpeace Foundation (renamed Greenpeace Canada when Greenpeace International was established in 1979). Moore did not support sabotage, violence, or damaging property, despite his many scrapes with the law. In the spring of 1978, trying to obtain a government permit to go to the seal hunt on the ice floes off Newfoundland, he was arrested for “loitering” in an office of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and the Environment. Later that spring authorities arrested him for obstructing Newfoundland’s seal hunt. His crime? Shielding a startled pup between his legs as a sealer strode over to club and skin it.
For some Greenpeace activists, however, Moore wasn’t radical enough. Moore in turn found elements of the hippie counterculture exasperating. Don’t “get totally bunkered out on dope and booze as there are complex things to work out,” he lectured the board of directors of Greenpeace America at a meeting in San Francisco in 1978. Few on the board seemed impressed. “I have a solid commitment to see that Greenpeace is really revolutionary,” Moore added, trying to confirm his radical credentials and convince the directors to help out with the mounting legal costs of Greenpeace’s anti-sealing campaign. “I housed draft resisters and deserters. I’m from a radical background. I don’t want creeping revisionism or liberalism in Greenpeace. We have to stay peacefully hard line.” Still the directors were unwilling to support Moore, vaguely calling on Greenpeace to stay “pure” and “democratic.” In the end Moore lost his temper, hollering and storming away empty handed.2
In 1979 Moore became a director of Greenpeace International. It was in this capacity that he was visiting New Zealand in 1985 when French secret service agents bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor to prevent it from heading to Moruroa (an atoll in the southern Pacific Ocean) to protest French nuclear weapons tests. This espionage scandal would captivate the world, and, as an organization, Greenpeace would emerge even stronger from the publicity. Yet this did not matter for Moore. By then relations between Moore and other Greenpeace leaders had gone from prickly to nasty, and in 1986 Moore and Greenpeace went separate ways.
Since then Moore has most definitely not been living as a radical environmentalist, but has instead been advancing his own form of anti-environmentalism. Now an industry consultant, he portrays environmentalists as emotional and irrational and unscientific. He questions the science of climate change and backs nuclear power, industrial mining, and the chemical and plastic industries. On top of this he advocates for the planting of genetically modified crops, the clearing of tropical rainforests, and the farming of salmon. “At the beginning,” explains Moore, “the environmental movement had reason to say that the end of the world is nigh, but most of the really serious problems have been dealt with. Now it’s almost as though the environmental movement has to invent doom and gloom scenarios.” Today, Moore is a fierce critic of Greenpeace, calling the organization “antiscience, anticorporate, and downright antihuman” on the opening page of his 2010 book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout. For its part, Greenpeace dismisses Moore as a “paid lobbyist” and “a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging industry, and genetic engineering industry.”3
The lives of radical environmentalists have twisted and turned in many directions over the past half century. Another early Greenpeace activist, Captain Paul Watson, became more militant over time. Like Moore, he was piloting one of the Zodiac boats during the 1975 clash with the Soviet whalers. That day, watching the slaughter of the sperm whales, and knowing the Soviets would use at least some of the whale oil to lubricate machinery to make intercontinental ballistic missiles, he had a “flash” of insight: “We’re insane. We’re just totally insane. And from that moment on, I decided that I work for whales, I work for seals, I work for sea turtles, and fish, and seabirds. I don’t work for people.”
In 1977 Watson cofounded the Earthforce Environmental Society to sail the world’s oceans to not only disrupt, but also sabotage, whaling and sealing fleets. Two years later Watson piloted a trawler (which he named the Sea Shepherd) to the ice flows off the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence where every spring harp seals birth their pups. Here, the crew of the Sea Shepherd spray painted a thousand white pups with red dye to ruin the commercial value of the pelts. (Harp pups molt within a few weeks, so spraying red dye on their birthing coat did not hurt their chances of surviving in the wild.) Later that year in Portuguese waters, Watson rammed his first whaling ship, the Sierra, which he declared a “notorious prolific pirate whaler” and a “scourge of the seas.” The following year, after the Sierra’s owners had spent more than $1 million to repair the ship, Earthforce activists slipped into Lisbon harbor and sank the Sierra with limpet mines.
In 1981 the Earthforce Environmental Society was renamed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. By the early 1980s the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was also campaigning to save dolphins and sharks, as well as occasionally fighting for animal rights more generally. In 1983, for instance, the crew of the Sea Shepherd II broke into Grenada’s St. George’s zoo to free all of the monkeys. Roundly criticized, Watson was flippant: “These primates cannot possibly do more damage than the primate Homo sapiens already has to this island.”
During more than 200 voyages, Watson has had many run-ins with coastguards and police. Time and again he and his crew have been arrested. The list of charges is long: scuttling whaling and fishing boats; tossing stink bombs and boarding ships; disrupting seal hunts and shark finning; disabling boat propellers and damaging property; and destroying driftnets and deep-sea fishing lines. To date, however, no Sea Shepherd activist has ever been convicted. And, although minor injuries among Sea Shepherd crew are common, no one has ever been killed. Backing the “outlaw” Watson as he skillfully sails around prosecutors is a company of actors and rock stars—Sean Penn, Daryl Hannah, Mick Jagger, Uma Thurman, Brigitte Bardot, Martin Sheen, Pierce Brosnan, and Christian Bale, among many others over the years. Farley Mowat, the Canadian author of the bestselling book Never Cry Wolf, was one of Watson’s biggest fans. In 2002 Watson named his flagship the Farley Mowat (which the Canadian Coast Guard would seize six years later), and until passing away in 2014 Farley Mowat served as the international chairman of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.4
In recent years the law has been closing in on Captain Watson. In 2012 Watson skipped bail while in Germany facing Interpol notices for extradition to Costa Rica and Japan on criminal charges for obstructing shark-finning and whaling. For the next 15 months he sailed the high seas as a fugitive, before returning to the United States in 2013 and settling in Vermont. Japan and Costa Rica are still pursuing him, however—as of early 2016 Interpol still listed him as a “wanted person”—and Watson is now concentrating on trying to resolve his legal status, reportedly living at times in Paris. Although no longer at sea, he remains proud of his deeds, and continues to confront his critics head on. Typical is his rebuke of the Canadian Navy for questioning his competence to operate a small submarine that the Sea Shepherd Society had bought. “Since World War II, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has boarded more ships, rammed more ships, engaged in more high seas confrontations, and sunk more ships than the Canadian Navy. They are hardly in a position to presume to judge what we are competent or capable of doing.”
Like Moore, Watson has been at war with Greenpeace for decades, belittling the organization for being rigid and ineffective, for lacking true commitment (Watson and his crews are vegan), and for being content to accomplish nothing of real consequence. Greenpeace activists are “the Avon ladies of the environmental movement” with “a gigantic self-perpetuating bureaucracy,” bristles Watson. “They spend millions of dollars every year on advertising and direct-mail campaigns simply to raise more money. People feel good about giving money to Greenpeace. But holding up protest signs, taking pictures, and ‘bearing witness’ while whales are getting killed in front of you doesn’t achieve anything at all, which is why I abandoned those tactics more than 30 years ago.” Greenpeace in turn denounces Watson and, as with Moore, is working hard to purge his presence from the telling of the history of Greenpeace.
Even in the 1970s Watson and Moore never could agree on what was an acceptable act of protest, and shortly after Moore became president of the Greenpeace Foundation, Watson was voted off the board of directors. Today, although Watson still refers to Moore as “Pat,” both seem to loathe each other even more than they do Greenpeace. “You’re a corporate whore, Pat, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money,” Watson emailed Moore in 2004.5
The lives of Jane Goodall, Patrick Moore, and Paul Watson remind us of the need to keep in mind that radical environmentalists hold diverse opinions, deploy a wide range of tactics, and over time may become more militant or more moderate. The lives of Kalle Lasn (Adbusters and the Buy Nothing campaign) and Bruno Manser (the Penan campaign) illustrate further the great diversity of views and concerns among radicals. Perceptions of what is an “acceptable” radical act differ widely, too. To some people Watson is courageous and nonviolent, as he targets property, not people; to others he’s a dangerous extremist.
Some radical environmentalists are willing to go much further than Watson in risking casualties and collateral damage. According to a 2013 briefing for the US Congress, the two gravest threats are the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), emerging in the UK in the mid-1970s, and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), emerging in the UK in the early 1990s. ELF formed as more militant activists broke away from Earth First!—a movement of civil disobedience against capitalism founded in the US in 1980. Earth First! began to turn away from direct-action tactics after the FBI arrested five members in 1990, including cofounder Dave Foreman, for conspiracy to sabotage nuclear power and weapons facilities. “I’m not an anarchist,” Foreman would later declare, pleading for leniency during his sentencing hearing. “I’m not a terrorist. I’m not a revolutionary. What I did was an attempt to wake people up.” Today Earth First! still functions across 20 or so countries. But it’s ALF and ELF, with tentacles across dozens of countries, which most worry antiterrorist agencies (the 2013 US congressional briefing, for example, portrays them as fanatical, lawless, and exceedingly dangerous).6
The Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front organize in secret cells and urge individuals to “join” by taking direct action to oppose industrial farming, animal testing, and animal cruelty. Such leaderless and underground structures can attract lone-wolf zealots, and differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate acts is nearly impossible. Both movements, however, claim to be “nonviolent,” urging followers to take precautions to try to avoid harming any life. At the same time both groups assume that actions will be “illegal,” and serving jail time is a badge of honor. Liberation acts include sabotage (commonly called “ecotage”), tree spiking, fire bombing, and harassment.
Since the 1970s ALF followers have “rescued” animals and damaged laboratories, zoos, and fur and factory farms. And since the 1990s ELF followers (who call themselves “elves”) have torched ski resorts, hunting lodges, suburban housing developments, condominiums, fast-food restaurants, and sports utility vehicles to liberate nature from ever-encroaching humans. ELF was launched in the UK in 1992 and by the mid-1990s was spreading across Europe. Its first acts in the United States came in 1996. That year in Oregon ELF claimed responsibility for vandalizing several McDonald’s restaurants, a Chevron station, and a PR firm working for Weyerhaeuser and Hyundai; soon afterward a US Forest Service pickup truck and Ranger Station were set alight.
For ALF and ELF such acts are not theft or vandalism, but rather liberation. ALF contends that it’s fighting against “speciesism,” a prejudice as bad, if not worse, than racism and sexism. Only vegans or vegetarians can act in the name of ALF. And in ALF’s view no one has the right to own animals as property, a practice ALF sees as akin to slavery. The Earth Liberation Front was named in 1992 to express solidarity with ALF, and followers interact and overlap. Like the Animal Liberation Front, ELF opposes speciesism, but also more explicitly fights capitalism, industrialization, and globalization as forces killing mother earth.7
Security agencies have long treated radical environmentalists as potential threats to national security, as we can see from the French secret service bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 and from the FBI’s crackdown on Earth First! after 1990. Yet, as the crackdown on the Occupy Movement in 2011 shows, many governments are going even further now, increasing surveillance, infiltrating radical groups, arresting peaceful demonstrators, and deploying military weapons to subdue mass protests.8 The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking an especially hard line, and considers ALF, ELF, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to be “eco-terrorists.” The FBI defines eco-terrorism as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.” Under this definition Watson is an eco-terrorist, and in testimony to the US Congress in 2002 FBI Section Chief James Jarboe singled out the cutting of driftnets by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as an example of eco-terrorism.
According to the FBI, “eco-terrorists and animal rights extremists” are “one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats in the US today.” Animal rights activist Daniel Andreas San Diego, alleged to have bombed a cosmetics/nutrition company and a biotech company in San Francisco in 2003, is on the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” (with a $250,000 reward, as of 2015). Arrests and heightened surveillance by the FBI have kept militant environmentalists in the United States largely in check in recent years. In 2007 ten people identifying with ELF and ALF were sentenced to between 3 and 13 years for conspiracy and arson. Other ELF and ALF followers have gone into hiding, such as Rebecca Jeanette Rubin who, after six years on the run in Canada, eventually surrendered and in 2014 was sentenced to 5 years in prison and ordered to pay $13.9 million in restitution.
In 2008 the FBI estimated that since 1979 environmental extremists had committed more than 2,000 crimes in the US, with damage exceeding $110 million. Sporadic attacks do still occur in the United States. In 2013, for instance, saboteurs destroyed genetically modified crops in Oregon. Animal rights and earth liberationists are the main ideological sources of such acts in the US, although now and then environmental sabotage occurs as well in the name of anarchism, eco-feminism, anti-globalization, anti-capitalism, anti-technology, and biocentrism.9
Militant environmentalists have committed similar acts across Europe as well as in countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Agendas and tactics range widely. Three people, for instance, were arrested in 2010 for conspiracy to bomb an IBM nanotechnology plant in Switzerland. Swiss police would later link them to Italian anarchists who claimed responsibility for bombings in Switzerland, Italy, and Greece. A loose collection of environmental extremists and anarchists—sometimes expressing allegiance to Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation—seems to be linking across Europe. The group first hit the UK in 2012. And actions are ongoing. In 2014, for example, websites for the Informal Anarchist Federation and the Earth Liberation Front took credit for arson attacks on mobile phones towers in Bristol, England.
Violence and sabotage gain headlines and trigger harsh state responses. Yet such acts comprise a tiny fraction of what most environmentalists would call radical environmentalism. Breaking the law is acceptable for most radicals—say trespassing or sleeping overnight in a public park—but the vast majority would never support bombs, violence, or sabotage. Most eco-radicals, as we see with frontline activists for Greenpeace or the Rainforest Action Network, categorically reject such acts, understanding “nonviolence” as never risking the lives of others. For most environmentalists, radicals are men such as Daniel Hooper, who at the age of twenty-two earned the nickname “Swampy” after tunneling under a highway excavation site in southwest England, eluding police and delaying construction for a week. Radicals are women such as Julia Butterfly Hill, who at the age of twenty-three climbed a thousand-year-old California redwood where she would live for two years to keep the chainsaws at bay. For most environmentalists, radicals should bear witness and stand in the line of fire. They should chain themselves to bulldozers and occupy city squares. They should “reclaim the streets” with throngs of cyclists and throw “road parties” to delay highway construction. And they should “guerilla garden” public lawns and boulevards with native flowers and local vegetables.10
Just about every day, radicals of this kind come out in force somewhere in the world. Passions run deep for saving wildlife and preserving wilderness. So does sympathy for chimpanzees, whales, dolphins, and seals. Yet much of what more militant environmentalists oppose—speciesism, industrial farming, suburbs, highways, and automobiles—rarely ignite large-scale uprisings. Nor are many people in any culture inspired to revolution by pleas for biocentrism, animal rights, less consumption, or the valuing of all life equally. On occasion concerns over exploitation and inequality—and slogans such as Occupy’s “We are the 99%”—do resonate globally. Even then, however, the vast majority of people do not seem willing to change their lifestyles fundamentally, let alone live for two years in a tree to fight for global justice.
Jane Goodall accepts this. But as we saw she also sees a critical mass of young people willing—indeed, even eager—to make little lifestyle changes in the name of environmentalism. For her this trend holds the potential to generate real and lasting change in the way firms exploit natural resources and supply consumer goods. This is why, like so many environmentalists these days, she’s putting so much hope in the environmentalism of the rich. Certainly, NGOs such as Greenpeace continue to challenge the interests of big business with daring acts of protest and targeted media campaigns. Yet, as we’ll see next, even Greenpeace is now embracing eco-consumerism in many of their campaigns, a strategy that is producing some minor reforms to industry practices, but is doing little to advance global-scale sustainability and runs the risk of legitimizing the very political and corporate processes that are causing the overall rate of unsustainable consumption to escalate.