The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism

“I heard that you are a bunch of radical, crazed environmental lunatics!” a reader wrote to the Earth First! Journal in the summer of 1983. “That your methods are unorthodox, destructive, and extreme! That you take matters into your own hands with pragmatic—even vengeful—action! I’ve heard also that all the proper environmental organizations look down on you with disdain and often anger! That you are setting back years of proper environmental progress!! So how the hell can I join?! Where do I sign up!”¹

The zeal of Earth First!’s supporters was a function of not only the group’s uncompromising politics and daring actions but also its unforgiving critique of mainstream environmentalism’s sober gradualism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, environmental advocacy had been a matter of influencing legislators with reasoned arguments and the measured application of public pressure—what the Sierra Club’s Michael McCloskey called “the theory of lobbying.” Professionals who understood legislative procedure and accepted the necessity of negotiation performed this work in offices and conference rooms in Washington, D.C. By the mid-1980s, environmental advocacy might involve barricades, heated confrontations, and occasional acts of sabotage. Grassroots activists who possessed a fervor that bred near-total dedication carried out this work in the forests of the Pacific Coast and intermountain West.

This shift involved a tiny fraction of those Americans who called themselves “environmentalists” and, for most of the mainstream groups, remained an isolated phenomenon that had little to do with their larger campaigns. But radical environmental groups like Earth First! exerted an influence over popular perception, political climate, and philosophical debate that far outweighed their numbers. What radicals perceived as the failures of mainstream environmentalism by the late 1970s, stemming from the major groups’ overreliance on conventional methods of reform, led to a breakaway faction of conservationists who sought to reenergize the movement with new ideas and new strategies.

Three elements in particular structured this radical break, all of them intertwined and justifying one another. First, frustrated activists subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that placed nonhuman nature on an equal moral footing with people, a philosophy they believed distinguished their work from that of mainstream groups and explained mainstream environmentalists’ shortcomings. Second, radical environmentalists focused on wilderness preservation, the clearest and most vital example of ecocentric environmentalism because wilderness—as radicals conceived it—meant the absence of people. And third, radicals bypassed the incrementalism of liberal democratic processes through direct action, both because they prioritized natural over political processes and because they believed that where lawsuits and injunctions failed to stop bulldozers, human bodies could succeed. The clarity of Earth First!’s principles and the militancy with which it advanced them was, for environmentalists who were discouraged by the half-steps of conventional reform, irresistible. “Please send your newsletter” wrote one supporter from California. “I wait with baited breath [sic]…has the eco-revolution begun?”2

No major environmental organization ever embraced ecocentrism, but many environmental groups with a background in conservation worked with the basic tools of ecocentric thought, even if they never built a lasting structure.3 At the Sierra Club’s mid-century wilderness conferences, interest in the ecological significance of wilderness began to replace discussions of aesthetics and recreation. According to Michael Cohen, Club director Bestor Robinson uncomfortably recognized “two contradictory philosophies underlying wilderness preservation—philosophies that came to be called anthropocentric and biocentric,” the one centered on people’s enjoyment of wilderness and the other unconcerned with what people wanted or felt.⁴

Few issues better tracked the emergence of this bifurcation in the Sierra Club than the organization’s shifting positions on the Mineral King Valley in the southern Sierras. The Mineral King debate grew out of the Mount San Gorgonio controversy of the late 1940s in which David Brower had fought against a ski resort that would mar the mountain’s wilderness characteristics. Not yet an enemy of reflexive compromise, Brower fought against the location rather than the construction of a ski resort and undertook an aerial survey of Southern California mountains to find an alternative site for skiers. He recommended Mineral King, a scenic valley nestled against Sequoia National Park. In 1949 the Club’s directors, while not advocating a resort, declared their willingness to tolerate one at Mineral King, should one be proposed.⁵

A proposal materialized in the early 1960s in the form of a plan by Walt Disney, Inc. for a massive ski resort. In the decade-and-a-half since San Gorgonio, the Sierra Club had put itself on battle footing in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon, and even before Disney submitted its plan the Club’s Kern-Kaweah chapter formally recommended protection of Mineral King from all development. The collision of the Kern-Kaweah recommendation with the Disney proposal triggered a four-hour debate during one of the Club’s board meetings, at which some directors argued for consistency and for accepting the inevitability of skiing while others claimed that “in view of a new appraisal of the conflicting values involved,” Club policy should be reversed. Change won the day, and the board passed a resolution overturning the 1949 decision and opposing any development that might threaten “the fragile ecological values” of Mineral King.6

Having switched its position, the Club filed suit against the Disney development in 1969 and won a temporary restraining order. The Forest Service appealed, and both an appellate court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Club lacked standing to sue because its members did not hold any “direct interest” in Mineral King. By then the National Environmental Policy Act offered another means of blocking development: Disney and the Forest Service would have to file an environmental impact statement (EIS). Completing a satisfactory EIS under the scrutiny of conservationists proved too arduous for Disney, which eventually shelved its plan (see figure 3.1)

The Mineral King fight stretched over several decades, during which environmentalists considered and reconsidered their justifications for protecting undeveloped places. In the 1940s, conservationists focused on the scenic qualities of San Gorgonio and Mineral King. By the 1960s, the Club grew increasingly concerned with Mineral King’s ecological integrity. In the 1970s, new arguments emerged. Among the many flaws Michael McCloskey found in the Sequoia National Forest’s draft EIS was an almost exclusive focus on economic and recreational concerns. “A statement is made that Mineral King in a natural state provides little or no benefits, has no value in and of itself,” McCloskey wrote. “Does the USFS believe that the natural environment has no ecological benefit or is of no scientific value?”7 Several years earlier, the Club’s own Proclamation on Wilderness had called for a new land ethic to make clear how “it is essential that wilderness be preserved for its own inherent value.” The Forest Service EIS and the Supreme Court’s decision assumed that public lands policy should prioritize use by people. The Sierra Club increasingly disagreed with this view. So did a law professor named Christopher Stone, who followed the Mineral King case and in 1972 published an article called “Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” in which he considered how the interests of the nonhuman world might gain an independent voice within the legal system.⁸

Why grant the nonhuman world legal status? Stone listed several advantages for people, including a more pleasant environment, a greater sense of empathy and interconnectedness, and a more developed moral sense. But the question of what purpose his idea served was an “odd” one, he said, because “it asks for me to justify my position in the very anthropocentric hedonist terms that I am proposing we modify.” Stone implied that there were nonutilitarian, non-anthropocentric reasons for granting legal protection to the natural world—reasons beyond any benefits gained or interests held by people.⁹

Stone wrote with Mineral King in mind, knowing that the question of the Club’s standing would soon come before the Supreme Court. He published his article in a special issue of the Southern California Law Review on law and technology for which Supreme Court Justice William Douglas had agreed to write a preface. The ploy worked: Douglas read Stone’s essay, and the most influential part of Sierra Club v. Morton was not the decision itself but Douglas’s dissent, in which he cited Stone and suggested the case would be more properly titled Mineral King v. Morton. Those parts of the natural world subject to “the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life,” Douglas argued, had their own interests. “The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”10

Stone’s article, and Douglas’s dissent, spoke to a broader discussion about the prerogatives of humans and the integrity of the nonhuman world, about ecocentric thought and liberal humanism. It was a fragmented discussion whose participants did not always know of each other but nonetheless addressed some of the same concerns. Soon after Sierra Club v. Morton, the San Francisco Ecology Center held a “news ceremonial” at which several people—dressed as a ponderosa pine, an Arctic loon, and a tan bark oak—gathered to dance, make bird calls, and praise the “genius” of Douglas’s dissent. The tan bark oak told assembled reporters that “non-human species have not been afforded dignity…. The only way to preserve your democracy is to extend it to us.”¹¹

Behind the news ceremonial was Living Creatures Associates, a media group operated through the Ecology Center and founded by Keith Lampe, who by the 1970s called himself Ro-Non-So-Te. In the summer of 1970, just two months after Earth Day, Lampe wrote to a friend, “Seems to me that by autumn or winter there needs to be a second generation of radical eco-rhetoric & eco-actions in order to keep things moving. But I have little idea what it should be except probably it should stress a post-humanist perspective, ie, protection of all beings, habitat thought, human logic gone.”¹² A year later, Lampe started Living Creatures Associates in order to shift public perceptions “from thinking in human-centered terms (anthropocentrically) to thinking in life-centered terms (biocentrically).”¹³ In the late 1970s he organized an All-Species Rights Day parade down San Francisco’s Market Street, “a sort of spectacular of the biocentric focus.”¹⁴ By the 1980s he had started a new group, “All-Species Projects,” whose slogan was, “Let us join together to end human-centered behavior.”¹⁵

Lampe combined ecocentric thought with crisis environmentalism. Crisis environmentalists rarely subscribed to ecocentric values, but nearly all ecocentric activists thought in terms of crisis. To avoid anthropocentrism was, potentially, to avoid catastrophe. After the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1971, “The public…simply drove its ostrich head deeper into the sands,” Lampe wrote to Tom Hayden in 1975 as Hayden prepared to run for a U.S. Senate seat. Lampe recommended that Hayden make “biocide” central to his campaign and that he encourage students to think in terms of the planet rather than themselves: “Hey, that trip you’re about to major in can’t possibly be out there in 1987 because it has such a gross negative environmental impact we’ll all have blowing sands by then.”16

Hayden did not take Lampe’s advice, but while Lampe occupied the radical edge of Bay Area environmentalism he was not the only one advocating nature-centered thought. Biocentricity, Debra Weiners reported for the Pacific News Service in 1975, was not only “the latest trend” but also an underlying ethic of environmentalism. Weiner noted the views of Ponderosa Pine (Lampe’s third name), and described recent direct actions to prevent whaling.¹⁷ But she also interviewed movement stalwart Jerry Mander, who had worked with David Brower and the Sierra Club on the Grand Canyon battle ads and several other campaigns in the 1960s. “Biocentricity is really a very simple idea,” Mander said. “There is no reason to believe there is something better in humans that makes up [sic] superior to other species.”¹⁸ The idea of biocentricity, or ecocentrism, came not just from people on the outer fringes of the movement but from those near its established center.

Environmental philosophers of the 1970s and 1980s traced the principles of ecocentric thought back to Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and an amalgam of Native American cultures. But it was a Norwegian philosopher named Arne Naess who most successfully placed the concept into a modern political context and articulated a philosophy based on that context, a philosophy he called “deep ecology.” Most of the environmentalists who later called themselves deep ecologists did not closely follow the seven-point outline that Naess proposed in 1973, which he described as “rather vague generalizations, only tenable if made more precise in certain directions.”19 The ideas that did stick, and which became characteristic of deep ecology, were “biospherical egalitarianism,” the “equal right to live and blossom” of forms of life other than human beings; “local autonomy and decentralization,” an acknowledgment that governing or managing from afar tended to jeopardize local stability; and the claim that the modern environmental movement consisted of two strains, one of which was “shallow,” professionalized, and anthropocentric; and the other “deep,” grassroots, and ecocentric.²⁰

Few Americans outside of academic philosophical circles had heard of Naess, and he owed his sudden rise to prominence among environmental thinkers late in the decade to the efforts of his greatest American proponents, two northern California professors named Bill Devall and George Sessions. Devall and Sessions began discussing Naess’s ideas in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, through a series of conference papers, journal articles, and newsletters, they had established deep ecology as an essential subject in any discussion of environmental ethics. In 1983 a Canadian philosopher named Alan Drengson started The Trumpeter, a journal of environmental philosophy with a strong interest in deep ecology; and in 1985 Devall and Sessions published Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, a summary of the philosophy and a description of its intellectual context.²¹

Ecocentric thought came in milder and harsher forms. The Sierra Club tended to adopt the language and ideas of ecocentrism even as it never accepted its furthest implications. When John Tanton testified on the Club’s behalf before the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, he complained that the Commission’s interim report was “an anthropocentric document” that “regards man and his institutions, recent though they may be, as the most central and important feature of the natural scene.” The Club preferred to ask what was best “for the welfare of the bio-physical world.” Tanton’s testimony made clear, however, that the Club understood human and nonhuman interests as aligned rather than opposed: “If the farmer will take care of his land,” Tanton quipped, “the land will take care of the farmer.”²²

An ecocentrism rooted in tension rather than cooperation was a harder sell. Few environmentalists were comfortable with deep ecology as a legitimate ethical stance when it posed people and nature as set against each other. Many activists already struggled with the antidemocratic and illiberal sentiments that sprang from crisis environmentalism’s talk of “coercion.” Disavowing those sentiments, they tried to frame environmentalism as a fundamentally humanistic movement. Well-known environmental thinkers like Barry Commoner and Frances Moore Lappé already accused Paul Ehrlich and other neo-Malthusians of ignoring social inequality.23 Lesser-known environmentalists made the same point. “By and large,” wrote two contributors to the Canadian journal Alternatives, “it is man who is the concern of the ecologist.”²⁴ The project of environmentalism, wrote another, was to protect human habitat. “This is not a rejection of the concept of human rights,” he wrote, “but its extension.”²⁵

Founded in 1970 by activists, students, and faculty at Trent University, Alternatives would by the end of the decade become the official journal of Friends of the Earth-Canada. Its contributors called crisis environmentalists like Garrett Hardin “counter-productive” and “dangerously wrong.”²⁶ Like the mainstream movement, Friends of the Earth-Canada hoped to bridge the ethics of environmentalism with the principles of liberal humanism and social justice. Alternatives advocated a “conserver society” that would minimize waste and pollution while remaining committed to “social justice and political democracy.”²⁷ In the 1970s, the environmental movement’s growing clout in matters of public policy gave it all the more reason to situate its ideas in the broadest and most inclusive frame. For many activists, environmentalism was an idea that went with the grain of liberal humanism.

Deep ecology could cut against that grain, and from the beginning it made many environmentalists wary. In 1983 the philosopher Richard Watson claimed deep ecology’s internal contradictions were “so serious that the position must be abandoned.” Watson made what would become a common and important criticism of deep ecology: that its adherents complained about the notion that humans deserved separate moral consideration, and then treated humans as morally distinct by demanding they restrain their behavior, their population, and their impact on the planet. Deep ecologists could not decide whether people were a part of nature or nature’s antithesis.28 In a response to Watson, Arne Naess explained that deep ecology was less a matter of strict rules and prescriptions than of broad principles and attitudes. Certainly, Naess granted, humans must be treated differently than the rest of the natural world; that, in many ways, was the point of environmentalism. But people were nonetheless capable of considering the degree to which they privileged their own interests over others’ or set aside their interests for the good of the natural world and the planet as a whole.²⁹ Deep ecologists tended toward the latter more than did other people and even other environmentalists.

For most people it went without saying that human interests and human life were paramount political and philosophical concerns. And most people, the biologist David Ehrenfeld claimed in The Arrogance of Humanism, put a near-absolute faith in reason, technological innovation, political planning, and the long-term viability of human civilization. Where others saw the steady advance of material comfort and social stability, Ehrenfeld saw a series of haphazard attempts to address narrow problems, attempts that nearly always produced unintended consequences that injured people and the nonhuman world. The greater the ambition to plan for the future and to control the conditions of human life, the greater the distance would grow between expectations and results. “There are no navigators on this humanist ship,” Ehrenfeld wrote, “and the few steersmen we have are caught in the same system of lies and pretense that enfolds us all.”³⁰

Ehrenfeld’s critique was notable less for its complaints about reason and technology than for its fundamental distrust of the most basic human motivations, and for the fact that Ehrenfeld found environmentalism as much to blame as anything else. Conservationists, he said, operated within a humanist framework that rendered their work almost meaningless. The standard justifications for the protection of nature—recreation, beauty, scientific interest, stabilization of ecosystems, etc.—were all “anthropocentric values.” The dilemma for conservationists, Ehrenfeld explained, was that in order to make a case in humanist terms they labeled everything a “resource” of one kind or another, diluting the meaning of the term and rendering their arguments less and less convincing. All of the anthropocentric claims for the value of nature were subjective, speculative, or so long-term as to be easily ignored. “There is no true protection for Nature,” Ehrenfeld wrote, “within the humanist system—the very idea is a contradiction in terms.” The only way around this dilemma was through honoring “the Noah Principle.” Noah’s Ark, which Ehrenfeld called the greatest conservation effort ever described in Western culture, made an implicit argument for the equal importance of all animal species. Ehrenfeld believed that such a non-discriminating approach should ground the ethics of environmentalism. “Long-standing existence in Nature,” he wrote, “is deemed to carry with it the unimpeachable right to continued existence.” Countering the humanist tendency to judge nature in purely utilitarian terms required countering the standards of judgment themselves and insisting that the natural world had value independent of human reckoning. “For those who reject the humanistic basis of modern life,” he said, “there is simply no way to tell whether one arbitrarily chosen part of nature has more ‘value’ than another part, so like Noah we do not bother to make the effort.”31

To reject the humanistic basis of modern life was to reject liberal individualism, a stance made clear, ironically, by radical environmentalism’s general distaste for animal rights. “The Noah Principle” and ecocentrism more broadly focused on species and ecosystems rather than individual beings. Because they had little concern for human interests, ecocentric environmentalists distanced themselves from a mainstream, “anthropocentric” environmentalism. And because they had little concern for individual rights—whether of humans or non-humans—ecocentric environmentalists distanced themselves even from animal liberationists, their likely allies. Animal liberationists insisted that only the capacity to suffer should matter in considering a particular being’s interests. Animal liberation, the environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott explained, offered little more than a “humane moralism” (moral standing to any sentient beings) against the “ethical humanism” that characterized most philosophical thought. Environmental ethicists, meanwhile, did not limit their concern to individuals or bound it by sentience. Aldo Leopold, the prototypical philosopher of a “land ethic” and also a lifelong hunter, showed little interest in the welfare of individual animals. For Leopold, the integrity of the “biotic community” was of paramount importance and the individual lives of all its members of secondary concern. Callicott went further, arguing that the stability of the community and the lives of its inhabitants could easily be at odds; overpopulation of any particular species diminished the value of its individual members and threatened the community as a whole. As Callicott suggested, “humane moralism” was only a small step beyond conventional liberalism; animal liberationists’ concern for particular beings and their interests put them in line with modern liberal thought and its focus on individual liberties and protections. The humane moralism of animal liberation, he wrote, “centers its attention on the competing criteria for moral standing and rights holding, while environmental ethics locates ultimate value in the ‘biotic community.’ ” For environmentalists like Callicott, animal liberation was the same individualistic liberalism with fur and feathers, and it similarly ignored the sense of interconnectedness that lay at the heart of environmentalism.32

For ecocentric environmentalists, liberal individualism and the “arrogance of humanism” were of a piece and had for too long occupied a privileged position above nonhuman communities. Ecocentrics’ willingness to upset that hierarchy followed a sort of moral gravity. As value and concern flowed toward biotic communities, they flowed away from individual beings, and especially humans. Deep ecologists’ abundance of regard for the nonhuman world could mean a poverty of consideration for humans. “The extent of misanthropy in modern environmentalism,” Callicott explained, “…may be taken as a measure of the degree to which it is biocentric.”³³ Few were as misanthropic as Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a radical environmentalist who held little respect for any of the supposed achievements of human civilization. Music, architecture, and art were “vanity,” Watson wrote in the 1990s. A Van Gogh painting was little more than “a bit of coloured hydro-carbon splattered on canvas,” and human cultural achievements were “worthless to the Earth when compared with any one species of bird, or insect, or plant.”³⁴ Arne Naess never suggested that valorizing the nonhuman world demanded a proportional denigration of human civilization, but for those who most passionately championed deep ecology, defending the one often meant attacking the other. Ecocentric thought lent environmentalism an intellectual energy and a political fervor that roused old-timers and newcomers alike, and it pit radical environmentalists against human civilization in ways that became increasingly difficult to maintain in both thought and practice.

Wilderness protection prefigured the conservation movement itself, and by Earth Day it was an old idea. In the swirl of new issues that constituted the modern environmental movement, the Sierra Club’s Michael McCloskey worried that “wilderness preservation appears to many as parochial and old-fashioned.”³⁶ But wilderness advocates reinvented the meaning of their work every few decades: wilderness was a refuge from industrialization at one point and from unrestrained recreation at another, it was solitude and escape for some and a heightened aesthetic sensibility or a repository of democratic values for still others, and increasingly it was a storehouse of biological diversity.

The decline of democratic justifications presaged the rise of ecocentric thought. Early on, the democratic argument could be made in at least two ways that tended to contradict each other. On the one hand, early Wilderness Society leaders like Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall appealed to the democratic concern for protecting minority interests from a dominant and flattening popular culture. On the other hand, the Society’s longtime executive director Howard Zahniser described wilderness as a national interest and a public good. Wilderness advocacy swerved between pluralism and populism. These tendencies did not always fit neatly into the small offices of a single organization like the Wilderness Society. For early Society leaders, Paul Sutter writes, “there would be a nagging tension between wilderness as a democratic ideal and wilderness as a minority preference.”37 During the campaign for the Wilderness Act in the 1950s and 1960s, James Morton Turner notes, an “emphasis on the interests of the minority…was overwhelmed by a focus on the nation’s collective interest in protecting wilderness as a national good.”³⁸ In the 1970s democratic arguments for wilderness both crested and splintered. The notion of wilderness as a national good plateaued in the fight over Alaskan public lands, where ecological arguments began to eclipse it. At the same time, a more pluralist approach to wilderness fragmented in the aftermath of RARE II, a process more heavily dependent on grassroots support. In the 1980s radical environmentalists largely abandoned democratic claims as they gave wilderness one of its most powerful and troubling meanings, finding in it an order and a set of values beyond—and often at odds with—those of human society.

There was no more powerful example of wilderness in the United States than the wild lands of Alaska. The Sierra Club’s John Muir extolled the state’s vast public lands, as did the Wilderness Society’s Robert Marshall and Olaus Murie, Adolph Murie, and Margaret Murie. Among those lands were the valleys of the Koyukuk, Alatna, and Hammond Rivers in the Brooks Range, straddling the southern edge of the Arctic Circle; the vast northeast corner of the state between the Yukon River and the Beaufort Sea, home to one of the nation’s largest caribou herds and nesting grounds for migratory birds; the sprawling point of convergence for the Wrangell, St. Elias, and Chugach mountain ranges; and, on Alaska’s southernmost tip, a collection of islands and coastal strips that together made up the Tongass National Forest. The remoteness and the scale of these places both set them apart from and made them symbolic of all other American public lands. Alaska was, in many ways, the wilderness movement’s greatest prize.

Wilderness politics in the late 1970s converged on several approaching legislative deadlines. One of the most important would determine the final disposition of federal lands in Alaska, lands that contained the nation’s greatest concentration of de facto wilderness. The slow process of deciding jurisdiction began with the Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 and gained greater urgency after the discovery of oil deposits at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. It accelerated in 1971, when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act designated forty-four million acres for Native Alaskans, withdrew tens of millions more as “national interest lands” and “public interest lands” managed by the Department of the Interior, and gave Congress until December 1978 to accept or reject Interior’s designations of those lands.39

By the middle of the 1970s environmental organizations had committed themselves to Alaska lands as the movement’s top conservation priority. Protecting tens of millions of acres of Alaskan lands as wilderness, parks, or refuges would require unprecedented cooperation between a collection of large and small environmental groups. Those groups banded together under the Alaska Coalition, led by the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the National Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the National Parks and Conservation Association, and encompassing many smaller organizations. The Coalition’s efforts stretched from grassroots work in Alaska to over a dozen staff members working full-time in Washington, D.C. Edgar Wayburn, the most tireless advocate of Alaskan wilderness on the Sierra Club’s board of directors, would later call it “the conservation battle of the century.”⁴⁰

The seven years between the Native Claims Act and the deadline for designation of public lands were marked by political trench warfare as conservationists and their opponents fought to a standstill. By December 1978, Congress remained deadlocked. As a stopgap measure President Jimmy Carter, who had been heavily lobbied by both sides, used a patchwork of environmental laws and agencies to temporarily protect 110 million acres—more territory preserved by a president than at any single moment since Theodore Roosevelt’s final days in office. A year later Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), permanently protecting 103 million acres of Carter’s temporary withdrawals and more than tripling the total acreage of the National Wilderness Preservation System.

The Carter administration celebrated Alaskan lands as a national interest, treasured by all Americans. “Alaska is a reflection of our national spirit,” the White House Press Office explained to reporters. “It is the only place left in the United States where the vast open spaces, unmarred scenery and free roaming wildlife that shaped early America can still be found.”41 The administration’s supporters echoed the notion that Alaska belonged to the American people. Over 150 members of Congress signed a letter to the president that stressed “the strong desire of the American people who want their natural heritage in Alaska protected.”⁴² The Alaska Coalition itself, powered by national organizations based in Washington, D.C. and doing battle with Alaska’s own congressional delegation, reflected the idea that a New Yorker had as great an investment in Alaska’s public lands as did an Anchoragite.

But the campaign for Alaskan lands also advanced a newer language for defending wilderness. In 1978 the Wilderness Society said of the proposed Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, “The issue is clear: whether the boundaries of our largest national park will embrace the full ecological richness of this choice mountain region…or little more than ice and rock heights.”⁴³ Just after passage of the final Alaska lands bill in 1980, Wayburn praised it for protecting wild territory “in an ecological manner with boundaries that we hope will sustain the land and its wildlife.”⁴⁴ Wilderness Society conservation director Chuck Clusen agreed, writing, “Nowhere else in the free world can one find such majesty, vastness and ecological diversity which for the most part has escaped the impact of industrial civilization.”⁴⁵ More than in any previous wilderness campaign, the arguments in favor of protecting Alaskan lands focused on an undisturbed natural world where people rarely made an appearance. The Alaska campaign championed a form of wilderness advocacy less concerned with preserving grand vistas for visitors to enjoy and more concerned with protecting the natural processes that took place in people’s absence rather than in their presence.

While the Alaska campaign brought the environmental movement together in a grand coalition, RARE II revealed its points of fracture. RARE II involved another approaching deadline, this one triggered by the Wilderness Act of 1964. The Wilderness Act stipulated that only Congress could designate wilderness, and it immediately set aside nine million acres of public land and directed the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior to determine the suitability of their roadless lands for wilderness and to make recommendations to Congress within ten years. The Forest Service managed the bulk of potential wilderness in the United States, and the agency followed a multiple-use mandate that required it balance the competing interests of industry, recreation, and agriculture. Because of its wide jurisdiction—in terms of both geography and use—the Forest Service sat in the very center of wilderness politics.46

In the initial fight over roadless areas in national forests, legislation and litigation proved a winning strategy for environmentalists. In the early 1970s, RARE I (the Forest Service’s first attempt at classifying its holdings) examined fifty-six million acres of roadless area and promised either a massive addition to the wilderness system or an enormous loss of potential wilderness.⁴⁷ “We face both our greatest opportunity and crisis now,” McCloskey told the Club’s board.⁴⁸ Rather than issuing environmental impact statements for each area under review, the Forest Service designated the review itself as a single, sweeping EIS. In 1972 the agency announced it would recommend 274 areas comprising just over twelve million acres as wilderness study areas (potential wilderness). Environmentalists considered this a paltry recommendation, especially because a third of the acreage recommended was already well on the way to wilderness classification. Further, they charged that the Forest Service used overly narrow definitions of wilderness in order to limit the number of sites under consideration, and that the entire RARE process had been rushed. The Sierra Club sued, accusing the Forest Service of submitting an insufficient EIS and therefore violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it allowed logging on nonrecommended sites. As was the case with Mineral King, the EIS requirement of NEPA offered environmentalists their most expedient tool. The chief of the Forest Service agreed to issue instructions to all foresters directing them to comply with NEPA—generally, drafting an individual EIS—before developing any roadless area. This new policy effectively overturned and ended RARE I.

Five years later, wilderness remained a point of contention both for environmentalists who claimed the Forest Service dragged its feet on wilderness recommendations and for timber companies that complained the Forest Service did not open enough land to logging. Rupert Cutler, the new Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, hoped RARE II would address the concerns of both the environmental movement and industry by making final recommendations for 62 million acres of roadless area by 1979. Over the next two years, even as the Alaska campaign dominated the major environmental organizations’ agendas, the Forest Service examined close to three thousand sites, held hundreds of public hearings, and tabulated hundreds of thousands of public comments.49

In theory, the Wilderness Society was the group best suited by its mission and its structure to take charge of the RARE II fight. Stewart Brandborg, executive director of the Society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, believed in the protection of wild places through grassroots citizen involvement. A charismatic leader in the mold of David Brower, Brandborg took special interest in grassroots training programs that would shape the next generation of field organizers. “In the early 1970s,” James Turner writes, “the Wilderness Society’s emphasis on citizen organizing reflected Brandborg’s faith in participatory democracy.”⁵⁰ While the amateur tradition of the early twentieth century Sierra Club had relied on relatively affluent conservationists working in San Francisco, Brandborg’s grassroots wilderness activism involved a cadre of conservationists who spent their time in the field and cultivated local support.

But the Society overextended itself under Brandborg, who spent money on current campaigns with little thought as to funding future endeavors. By 1974 the Society’s finances dipped into the red. Brandborg began firing employees to reduce costs, tarnishing his once sterling reputation among the Society’s staff. This was especially the case in the Denver office headed by Clif Merritt, which absorbed much of the downsizing. In the summer of 1975, with staff morale plummeting and staff resignations climbing, the Society’s governing council spent four days hearing from the skeleton crew remaining. On the advice of a management consultant, the council fired Brandborg at the beginning of 1976.⁵¹

Between early 1976 and late 1978, the Wilderness Society managed to put its finances back in order and to remain involved in the ongoing Alaska campaign. But Brandborg’s replacement, George Davis, lasted barely a year, and so the governing council turned to one of its own longtime members, Celia Hunter, while it searched for a permanent director. The council hoped to point the Society in a new direction—one that emphasized the sort of structure and professionalism that council members thought befitted a major environmental organization. The administrative turmoil, Hunter explained to the Society’s members, grew out of “our rapid growth from a fairly small, close-knit organization featuring easy camaraderie between staff and management…to a large enterprise with two major offices and widely dispersed field representatives.”52

The Society found itself pulled between its grassroots efforts and its determination to streamline and professionalize. Even Hunter, beloved by field staff and in possession of more backcountry bona fides than almost any other Society director, fought against longtime staff members to consolidate the organization. When Hunter tried to shut down the Denver office and move its field representatives to Washington, D.C., she collided with Clif Merritt. “We want to make use of Regional Reps for lobbying in Washington on issues with which they are familiar…,” she explained to Merritt in 1977. “In all of this, the role and function of the Denver office is uncertain.”⁵³ Merritt responded by stressing how important—and, he claimed, underappreciated—Western issues like RARE I and RARE II were for the Society, and how essential the Denver office had been and continued to be in coordinating those campaigns.⁵⁴ “It could make a thinking person wonder,” Merritt complained the following year, “whether the objective [of] The Wilderness Society was to promote more centralization of authority and bureaucracy or to save wilderness.”⁵⁵

Merritt offered a view from the field, where staffers worked close to the roadless areas at risk in the RARE II fight but far from the upheaval at the Society’s headquarters. Throughout the mountain West, the conservationists who would later found Earth First! organized local participation in Forest Service hearings and pushed for the maximum inclusion of wilderness in each state and forest district. “The bulk of my time was involved in researching and worrying about RARE II,” Bart Koehler wrote in a monthly activity report for late 1977.56 Koehler, a Wilderness Society regional representative in Wyoming, dedicated even more of his time to RARE II the following year, doing interviews for Wyoming News and Rapid City television, writing pieces in Wyoming Issues and Wyoming Wildlife Magazine, and even speaking before the American Petroleum Institute. Bob Langsenkamp, a Society field consultant in New Mexico, described his RARE II work in mid-1978 as “Hectic.” Langsenkamp set aside work on the Bureau of Land Management’s already neglected wilderness review because “RARE II & Ak [sic] taking most of my time.” October, he reported, “was a month of ‘cooling my heels’ and regrouping from RARE II,” after having responded to the Forest Service’s draft EIS. Langsenkamp cleaned his office for the first time in six months.⁵⁷

Future Earth First!ers in other organizations also sought to expand national forest wilderness as much as they could. Late in 1978, Friends of the Earth’s (FOE) Washington, D.C. office asked its staff members to file inventories listing which issues gained most of their attention. “Alaska—This goes without saying,” wrote Howie Wolke, FOE’s Wyoming field representative, before offering an unsolicited opinion: “Perhaps this is a regional bias of mine, but I do feel that FOE has not put enough emphasis on wilderness and public lands issues in general (except for Alaska). With RARE II due to be completed shortly, there will soon be a whole bunch of Administration wilderness proposals…which will need action.”⁵⁸ Wolke was right about his regional bias; the Alaska campaign and the RARE II fight both involved national and grassroots work, but “Alaska” brought to mind clear images of mountains and glaciers for most Americans while “national forest wilderness” remained an abstract idea until rendered in local terms. All conservationists followed the Alaska fight, but east of the Mississippi fewer kept close tabs on RARE II. Most Forest Service roadless lands sat in the American West, where RARE II would be fought and from which Earth First! would soon emerge.

The Wilderness Society found new leadership just as it entered the final stage of the RARE II process. William Turnage, a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry who spent several years as photographer Ansel Adams’s business manager, assumed the directorship in November 1978. Turnage was an aggressive administrator who wasted no time overhauling the organization by cultivating new sources of revenue and centralizing operations in Washington, D.C. During his first few months as executive director the Society lost a quarter of its staff to termination or resignation. Turnage finally closed the Denver office for good, after which Merritt declined Turnage’s offer of a position at the Society’s headquarters. For years the Society had tried to keep at least one field representative in each Western state in which it worked. Celia Hunter, during her tenure as executive director, centralized that network of field staff by bringing several key field representatives—including Tim Mahoney, Debbie Sease, and Dave Foreman—to Washington, D.C. to live in a bunkhouse in Virginia and help with lobbying. Turnage went a step further, paring down the field staff to a handful of regional representatives. When Turnage closed the Wyoming office, Bart Koehler left, complaining of the new administration’s “complete absence of respect for the regional representatives as professionals and as human beings.” When Turnage closed the Utah office and fired Dick Carter, upsetting many Western conservation leaders, he explained that despite Carter’s good work, “He is not philosophically committed to the idea that the central organization needs to make decisions.”59 Turnage’s plan for the coming decade, according to the executive committee’s recording secretary, was “an augmented staff capability in economics and in forestry…on a highly professional basis. This would not include so-called ‘high-spirited’ people, as there was of course not an automatic conflict between professionalism and dedication.”⁶⁰ Foreman, certainly one of the “high-spirited” people Turnage had in mind, later described the new executive director as “the businessman” who “replaced virtually the entire experienced and grassroots staff…with ‘professionals.’ ”⁶¹

In one view, the Wilderness Society’s administrative transformation came many years late. “The shift to managerial executives has been an inevitable one,” Michael McCloskey wrote three years after the Sierra Club fired David Brower and three years before the Society fired Brandborg, “but it has marked the passing from the scene of charismatic, beloved, and esteemed figures.”62 In another view, the Society held out longer than the Club had managed against an enervating focus on lobbying, efficiency, and political negotiation: “Since the Sierra Club’s firing of David Brower,” Earth First!’s Dave Foreman wrote in 1984, “…the environmental movement has been slowly co-opted by the concept of professionalism to the detriment of the vision, activism, ethics and effectiveness of the cause.”⁶³ The professionalization of the Society was never a simple matter of MBAs managing from flow charts. Esteemed figures like Brandborg and Hunter either refused to acknowledge fiscal and organizational imperatives or else acquiesced to the changes those imperatives necessitated. But the Society’s turn toward professionalization was a sharp one, too sharp for some of its most experienced field representatives. For them, the governing council’s answer to the Society’s management concerns solved technical problems by abandoning core principles, putting the interests of the Society ahead of the wilderness the Society pledged to protect. To already disgruntled field representatives, the aftermath of RARE II provided the most damning evidence that mainstream environmental groups could no longer stand firm.

At the very moment the Wilderness Society adopted a more professional approach in the mold of the Sierra Club, RARE II demonstrated the potential limits of that approach to environmental work. Major lobbying campaigns depended on the cultivation of delicate alliances with senators, representatives, and agency officials. The Alaska Coalition had already committed the bulk of its staff time and its political capital to the fight over Alaska lands and had little left for RARE II. By 1979 a handful of field organizers and national staff had already been working toward a RARE II endgame for years, but the full weight of the environmental lobby seemed unlikely to materialize. Brock Evans warned the Sierra Club’s board of directors that it remained unclear what sort of congressional support existed for a fight with the Forest Service given that most environmentally friendly legislators had already invested themselves in the Alaska campaign. With the Alaska fight approaching a climax and battle lines forming around hundreds of RARE II sites, environmentalists’ congressional to-do list had grown uncomfortably long.⁶⁴

More importantly, while the Alaska campaign was an ideal issue for a powerful Washington lobby, RARE II was not. As an idea and as a political entity Alaska constituted a single issue that wilderness advocates could debate with a single set of terms. RARE II was a fight that encompassed several industries, many landscapes, and dozens of states. An internal memo from early 1979 for the Environmental Study Conference (a collection of senators and representatives organized in part by the Sierra Club to confront environmental issues) noted that although RARE II tried to determine the fate of sixty-two million acres of public lands at once, “that goal may well be thwarted by the wide sweep of the proposal—ninety-two congressional districts in thirty-eight states. And environmental, timber and energy interests all have problems.” The Carter administration hoped to address the RARE II lands with an omnibus bill, the memo explained, but was unlikely to succeed because “the bill is just too unwieldy to deal with in a package.” Regardless of pressure from both environmentalists and industry representatives to reach a speedy decision about the RARE II lands, the Interior Committee would likely “handle the entire Alaska lands issue right away, including Alaska’s RARE II areas, and then deal with the other controversial RARE II areas one by one.” The comprehensive, unified approach that defined the Alaska campaign—and that had shaped the Wilderness Act itself—was one that centralized political organizations tended to favor but that did not fit the RARE II process.65

The Sierra Club, which prided itself on both its influential Washington, D.C. office and its nationwide network of chapters, generally tried to coordinate these two assets. In the lead-up to the RARE II recommendations, the Club and the Wilderness Society sent regular bulletins and updates out to their collective membership, stressing the importance of local efforts but also reminding members that national coordination remained crucial. “It will be most effective to make a single, comprehensive national challenge through the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society network,” a bulletin from late 1977 emphatically advised. “This comprehensive approach will allow us to organize the challenge most effectively, direct it to the proper officials, and follow it up on a day-to-day basis in Washington, D.C.”⁶⁶ Because RARE II involved site-specific reports, recommendations, and hearings for hundreds of potential wilderness areas, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society benefited greatly from their active base of members. Still, both organizations worked hard to funnel all information and planning through their Washington offices and to choreograph a single, nationwide strategy.

The Carter administration announced the RARE II results in April 1979. The Forest Service recommended 15.4 million acres for wilderness, 10.6 million acres for further study, and 36 million acres for nonwilderness. Environmentalists expressed deep disappointment. The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, and FOE jointly called the RARE II recommendations “an imbalanced and shortsighted decision,” and Turnage described the outcome as “among the most negative decisions in the history of public land management.”67 RARE II, which environmentalists had followed with guarded optimism, quickly became a major environmental defeat.

The tricky question of how to respond to RARE II revealed lines of fracture among wilderness advocates. Well before some of the Society’s organizers broke away to start Earth First!, even moderate staffers struggled to balance professionalism with a strident response. The Society approached RARE II with caution, wary of alienating Carter and congressional moderates with Alaska lands still at stake. Soon after Carter’s announcement, Tim Mahoney, one of the Society’s RARE II experts, wrote to Turnage and conservation director Chuck Clusen to report on how the Society’s delicate response to the Forest Service recommendations played out on Capitol Hill. Two of the environmental movement’s greatest congressional allies—Ohio’s John Seiberling and Oregon’s James Weaver—sprinted ahead of environmental leaders. “Weaver is calling Eizenstat [Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor] today,” Mahoney reported. “Sieberling is calling again and will threaten new oversight hearings on disputed RARE II areas. Weaver himself and Weisner are asking how they can go out on a limb if [the Wilderness Society] and [the Sierra Club] will not.” The situation, Mahoney wrote, amounted to “the worst of all possible worlds with forestry, mixed with bad Alaska timing. Our congressional friends are sticking their necks out and [Wilderness Society] lobbyists have their hands tied.”⁶⁸

“This is B.S.—when have we been unwilling to go out on a limb,” Turnage wrote in the margin of his own copy before forwarding it to Clusen. “I really do not agree with the thrust of this memo—a lot of allusions & innuendoes adding up to hysteria,” he wrote at the top. “I do not feel—I really emphasize this—that our lobbyists have ‘had their hands tied.’ ”69 Environmental leaders like Turnage had a hard time understanding those who criticized the environmental movement rather than the industrial interests it fought against. The movement, after all, had just completed a decade of stunning successes and stood on the cusp of passing a monumental Alaska lands bill. Political negotiations involved give-and-take, and the major environmental organizations had fared well according to their own particular goals.

Those limited goals were, for the most militant wilderness advocates, exactly the problem. Dave Foreman wrote to sympathetic activists about the need for a new, more radical group. “Conservation groups,” he said, “have been especially co-opted by the Carter presidency: for the one sweet plum of Alaskan National Monuments, they have failed to sue over the illegal RARE II process—the greatest single act of wilderness destruction in American history.”⁷⁰

For years Foreman nursed a grudge over the Society’s failure to sue in response to RARE II. After Carter announced the Forest Service recommendations, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society leaders began working with other environmental groups to salvage RARE II. One obvious tactic was a lawsuit. Given the similarities between RARE I and RARE II, and the Sierra Club’s successful lawsuit after the original inventory, it stood to reason that the courts would find RARE II wanting as well. But environmental leaders worried that a successful lawsuit might trigger a backlash in Congress and ruin any opportunity to improve on RARE II’s minimal protections.

Huey Johnson, the California Secretary of Resources and a strong proponent of wilderness, felt differently. The Forest Service recommended 2.4 million acres of federal lands in California for nonwilderness, slightly more for further study, and less than a million acres for wilderness. Johnson, who had said of RARE II, “A proper approach would start with the objective of producing the greatest possible returns to society in perpetuity, not simply the immediate profits of cutting, digging or drilling,” thought that the Forest Service favored industry and slighted posterity. Despite personal visits from Wilderness Society and Natural Resources Defense Council staffers urging restraint, Johnson filed suit. In early 1980 a district court ruled in Johnson’s favor, and in 1982 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling. Echoing the decision that ended RARE I, the courts decided that RARE II did not demonstrate an adequate consideration of public sentiment and the potential impact of development on wilderness areas and so did not satisfy the National Environmental Policy Act.⁷¹

California v. Block insured that the RARE II fight would stretch into the 1980s and beyond. By the time Johnson sued, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society had embarked on a state-by-state strategy, shepherding through Congress state-specific wilderness bills in order to circumvent RARE II and pressure wilderness opponents. The state-by-state strategy quickly became a complicated set of negotiations—made even more complicated by Johnson’s lawsuit—that hinged on the fate of the acres left to “further study.” Fearful that the Johnson suit opened the door to innumerable legal challenges by environmentalists, the timber industry pushed for statutory release—also called “hard release”—that would definitively designate certain lands not wilderness. Environmentalists fought the concept, arguing that Congressional review of wilderness already contained “sufficiency language” that effectively released nonwilderness to logging. They advocated “soft release” language that indicated nonwilderness while leaving open the possibility of future wilderness designation. Occasionally, the need for soft release led the Club and the Society to advocate state bills that recommended even less acreage than did RARE II.72

The final disposition of roadless lands in national forests remained a subject of negotiation for decades, and for radical environmentalists those negotiations were evidence of the mainstream groups’ culture of compromise. Years later, Foreman described RARE II as a decisive moment that convinced him of the modern environmental movement’s ineffectiveness. “We didn’t want a lawsuit,” he wrote, “because we knew we could win and were afraid of the political consequences of such a victory. We might make some powerful senators and representatives angry. So those of us in Washington were plotting how to keep the grassroots in line. Something about all this seemed wrong to me.” Soon after the initial RARE II announcement, Foreman left the Wilderness Society and helped found Earth First!⁷³

Earth First! was a question before it was an answer. The question was how to avoid the compromises of RARE II and the political process more generally. The wilderness movement, as James Morton Turner makes clear, was for most of the twentieth century a reform movement that worked comfortably within the bounds of conventional political institutions. Even as social protest movements took a radical turn in the 1960s, for wilderness advocates “a liberal faith in the federal government and the legislative system remained an animating force.”74 Turner considers wilderness a political process as much as a place, a process that involved people who lived near wilderness, national groups that lobbied for it, and congressional representatives with the power to designate it. When Dave Foreman and Bart Koehler left the Wilderness Society in 1979, they questioned that process and that liberal faith, and the Society’s increasing commitment to professionalization, centralization, and a political culture marked by the failures and compromises of RARE II. Earth First!ers never abandoned conventional reform, but they never stopped criticizing it and insisting that it succeeded only so far as it was spurred by radical thought and action.

To the degree that the word makes any sense applied to Earth First!, “officially” the group’s founding took place at a ranch in Wyoming in the summer of 1980. But the group was born several months earlier, when Dave Foreman, Ron Kezar, Bart Koehler, Mike Roselle, and Howie Wolke spent a week in and around the Pinacate Desert of northern Mexico. Most of the five were either current or former staffers of major environmental organizations: Wolke of FOE, Kezar of the Sierra Club, and Koehler and Foreman of the Wilderness Society. Their long association with mainstream groups insulated them from charges of not giving conventional methods a chance. They had tried convention and found it insufficient to the task. On the way back from northern Mexico to Foreman’s home in Albuquerque, the conservationists began to imagine a new group based both geographically and culturally outside of Washington, D.C. and committed to a no-holds-barred form of environmental advocacy. They chose the name Earth First. Later they would add a mandatory exclamation mark as radical ecocentrism increasingly punctuated their actions.⁷⁵

The group drove all the way to northern Mexico in part because the environmental writer Edward Abbey called the Pinacate “the final test of desert rathood.”76 A few years earlier Abbey had finished The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel about a band of eco-saboteurs who traveled throughout the Southwest disrupting or dismantling development projects. Earth First! drew inspiration from the spirit and the form of Abbey’s fictional group. Like the Monkey Wrench Gang, Earth First! would fight against industrial society directly. And like the Monkey Wrench Gang, Earth First! would avoid professionalism whenever possible. Although it eventually established a journal, a nonprofit foundation, and a modest publication business, Earth First! never maintained offices, membership lists, formal chapters, or salaried employees. Earth First!ers considered themselves part of a movement rather than an organization. To be part of Earth First!, all an aspiring radical had to do was show up (see figure 3.2).

If there is a particular reason that so much environmental activism in the twentieth century sprang from the American desert, it is probably the character of industrial development there. Aridity defines not only the desert’s geographical identity but also its industrial infrastructure. Agriculture and human habitation in the American desert require water, and water requires large-scale engineering. The arid West is crisscrossed with aqueducts, siphons, and tunnels carrying water, with empty riverbeds where water used to be and full riverbeds where water never flowed before. Water in the West is impounded in hundreds of reservoirs and contained by thousands of dams. The energy to move all of that water, and to electrify the cities and farms that consume it, comes from generators within dams or from coal mined in desert mountains and fed to power plants throughout the region. The industrial base of human civilization is more apparent and glaring in the desert West, where it is thrown into relief by not only the stark, open space but also the monumental effort required to establish cities and towns in such an unforgiving environment.⁷⁷

But amid that network of pipes and pump stations, strip mines and sluices, one single structure came to represent the ethos of industrialization in the desert more than any other: Glen Canyon Dam. Glen Canyon Dam was not the biggest dam in the West; it was not even the biggest dam on the Colorado River. It was not the most expensive or the most obtrusive, and it did not contain more water than any other dam. But it was the most despised. In the early twentieth century, conservationists in California regretted few projects more than the O’Shaugnessy Dam, over which John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had their greatest battle and which, in the end, held back the Tuolumne River and inundated Hetch Hetchy Valley. Glen Canyon Dam, which checked the Colorado and flooded Glen Canyon with a reservoir called Lake Powell, produced an equal sense of despondency but even greater anger among late-twentieth century conservationists in the West.⁷⁸

In David Brower’s own estimation, Glen Canyon was his greatest mistake, the canyon he sacrificed sight unseen for the sake of political expediency, “the place no one knew.” The dam remained for the rest of Brower’s career a reminder of what compromise could lead to. For Edward Abbey, it was a symbol of industrial civilization’s disregard for wilderness and the natural world. In his more measured moments he recommended systematically dismantling the dam and letting nature reclaim the drained reservoir. More often, he fantasized about blowing it up. The cover illustration for his 1977 collection of essays, The Journey Home, showed the Colorado breaking through a crumbling Glen Canyon Dam.⁷⁹

Earth First! adopted Abbey’s attitude, acknowledging Glen Canyon Dam’s place at the top of any list of industrial offenses in the desert. The group staged its first action, or prank, at the dam in March 1981. “The finest fantasy of eco-warriors in the West,” Dave Foreman wrote soon after, “is the destruction of the dam and the liberation of the Colorado.” With dozens of sympathizers watching, Foreman and several others unrolled a three-hundred-foot strip of black plastic down the front of the dam, creating the illusion of a crack in the solid concrete barrier and, by implication, in the entire industrial infrastructure of the West. Abbey himself addressed the crowd soon after, telling them to oppose the development of the region by corporations and public agencies. “And if opposition is not enough,” he said, summarizing his own philosophy and that of the new group that had embraced it, “we must resist. And if resistance is not enough, then subvert.”80

Subversion, for Earth First!, followed from the ecocentric ideas that distinguished its own view of wilderness advocacy from that of mainstream organizations. Earth First! considered the wilderness bills of the early 1980s nothing but half measures, and said so in letters to the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, FOE, and National Audubon Society, as well as in personal visits to the offices of the Oregon Natural Resources Defense Council and the Idaho Conservation League. When Montana’s congressional delegation tried to determine the disposition of the state’s RARE II lands with the Montana Wilderness Act of 1984, Earth First! slammed the Wilderness Society for supporting a version of the bill that would release millions of acres from wilderness designation, asking whether the Society—and in particular lobbyist Peter Coppelman—“is now supporting the destruction of defacto wilderness.”⁸¹ Coppelman defended the Society’s position. “In my view the coalition proposal is a strong proposal which will be taken seriously in the legislative process,” he explained. “That distinguishes it from the Earth First! proposal to designate as wilderness every single acre of forest roadless area remaining in Montana.” Earth First!’s position, Bill Devall responded, might be less realistic but it advanced a set of views that compromise would undermine. “For supporters of a deeper ecology movement,” he told Coppelman, “it is important to work within the political process but to always remember that our values are very, very different from the dominant social paradigm.” To abandon those values, Devall insisted, was to “provide more legitimacy for the existing political system.”⁸²

Wilderness preservation could be as much a critique of “the existing political system” as an example of it. Even more: it could be a critique of modern society itself and what David Ehrenfeld called “the arrogance of humanism.” This was true in both a philosophical and a material sense. For Earth First!, wilderness and ecocentric thought aligned. “In a true Earth-radical group,” Foreman wrote in 1981, “concern for wilderness preservation must be the keystone…. Wilderness says: Human beings are not dominant, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession.”83 To respect wilderness was to recognize the ethical limits of human activity. Wilderness constituted a moral boundary as much as a geographical one.

As much as wilderness was morally freestanding, though, it was also materially connected to a much larger collection of environmental harms and potential catastrophes. When radical environmentalists talked about the erosion of wilderness, crisis environmentalism never strayed far from their minds. For most radicals, wilderness degradation acted as both a sign and a cause of much broader environmental disaster. Pollution, extinction, overpopulation, and the disruption of planetary cycles all intersected with the plight of wilderness. This was not a new view; it had been percolating at the Sierra Club’s wilderness conferences in the 1950s, and the Club’s Proclamation on Wilderness of 1970 stated, “Portions of this planet must be protected from that impact of man which is now producing ecological catastrophe.”⁸⁴ The following year David Brower—by then head of Friends of the Earth—spoke before a congressional subcommittee about population stabilization. Brower turned immediately to the topic he considered most vital to questions of planetary survival. “It is wilderness, and what it stands for,” he told the subcommittee, “that taught conservationists the folly of the idea of numbers without end.”⁸⁵

Earth First! took that lesson to heart. Although wilderness remained the political and philosophical focus, a much broader assault on nonhuman nature constituted the crisis at hand. “Clearly, the conservation battle is not one of merely protecting outdoor recreation opportunities, nor a matter of elitist aesthetics, nor ‘wise management’ of natural resources,” read an Earth First! pamphlet explaining the group’s purpose. “It is a battle for life itself, for the continued flow of evolution.”86 For Earth First!, wilderness made up the philosophical bedrock of ecocentric thought and the material base of the nonhuman world. It also sat, stated or unstated, at the center of any environmental crisis.

Earth First!’s fixation on wilderness as the antithesis of modern human civilization and as the source of all balance in a roiling world earned it criticism in the 1980s and for long after. According to critic Emma Marris, a “high opinion of pristine wilderness and low opinion of human changes to the landscape” marked the guileless views of wilderness absolutists, views that devolved from the “pristineness approach” of the Wilderness Act to the “purist conservation” of Earth First!⁸⁷ Skeptics have pointed out the particular, romantic, and often exclusive premises of wilderness valorization; the ways that wilderness parks have catered to a white, middle-class visitorship while both marginalizing and dispossessing longtime users and inhabitants; and how supposedly pure wilderness has always been at least in part the product of human action and intention. There is, William Cronon writes, “nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.”⁸⁸

These were and remain essential questions about the idea of wilderness, so essential that Earth First! could never answer them to even its own supporters’ complete satisfaction. But wilderness enthusiasts were never as naïve nor as reductive as some of their detractors have suggested. The debate about what can be classified as “wilderness” and whether human changes rule out such classification began within the environmental movement itself. While wilderness advocates spoke to the public in sometimes soaring language, in their own private discussions with each other and with legislators they inevitably dealt in the practical details that rendered wilderness management a series of human choices. At the Sierra Club’s third wilderness conference in 1953—more than a decade before passage of the Wilderness Act—a panel on “the wilderness idea” dealt not with absolutes but with degrees of wilderness, including buffer zones, accommodation of livestock, and the use of built structures. Olaus Murie grouped wilderness protection with gardening, both part of a shift toward “appreciation of natural things”; and Howard Zahniser said, “The concept of wilderness is something man has thought of; its values are human values.”⁸⁹

As James Morton Turner has explained, by the 1970s the Forest Service, not conservationists, insisted on a strict definition of wilderness that ruled out most human activity. The agency’s “purity policies” were a way of limiting wilderness designation by defining it as narrowly as possible.90 During the Alaska campaign Pamela Rich of Friends of the Earth wrote to Harold Sparck of Bethel, Alaska, to assure him that FOE supported limited use of snowmobiles by Native Alaskans in wilderness areas while the Forest Service might “interpret the Wilderness Act in a very ‘puristic’ sense” in order to restrict such use.⁹¹ Several years later the Wilderness Society’s Bill Cunningham told the Owyhee Cattlemen’s Association that the Forest Service “has used impossibly strict grazing management in wilderness areas to turn ranchers against future wilderness designations.”⁹² In 1983 when Howie Wolke criticized the Wilderness Act as too weak, one of the few qualities he found praiseworthy was the act’s flexibility and its strategic ambiguity in defining wilderness as an area “which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.” That loose definition with its many modifiers, Wolke noted, allowed for consideration of even places that had suffered mining or clear cutting. In drawing boundaries around wilderness, the environmental movement was more often agnostic and the Forest Service dogmatic.⁹³

Within the Earth First! community wilderness served more as a general orientation than as an absolute. From the beginning, Earth First! advocated “rewilding”—the remaking of wilderness through the removal of development and infrastructure, including even roads—so pristine, “untouched” nature was never a fundamental concern. In 1984, the year after they celebrated some of Earth First!’s early forest actions, the editors of southwest Oregon’s bioregional journal Siskiyou Country wrote, “Our bioregion no longer exists in a pristine ‘natural’ state. We find ourselves inhabiting a place which has a history: millenia upon millenia [sic] in which people have lived with, on, or against the land.”⁹⁴ Some Earth First!ers agreed. “Many recent wilderness management plans exemplify a tendency to view human presence in wild places as unnatural,” George Wuerthner wrote years later. “This philosophical assumption is based on a mythical and sentimental view of pristine wilderness.”⁹⁵

That mythical and sentimental view had a place in Earth First!, but moral certainty could also demand rather than preclude subtle distinctions. To pine for pure wilderness was to understand that it had disappeared long ago and so to accept whatever remained. “Earth has been so ravaged by the pox of humanity that pristine wilderness…no longer exists,” said Earth First! stalwart Reed Noss. “A place may feel wild and lonely, but it is injured.”96 Noss echoed what Aldo Leopold once suggested in a more measured tone: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”⁹⁷ In that wounded world conservationists had to fight for what they could, including rewilding places profoundly transformed by human activity. Sometimes they dreamed big: Howie Wolke insisted that wilderness meant “multi-million acre chunks that represent all major ecosystems complete with all known biological components.”⁹⁸ At other times their dreams were more modest. “Yes, let’s battle for wilderness,” Earth First!er Tony Moore replied to Wolke, “but let’s fight equally hard to protect this planet in every way we can. Wilderness is not removed from Earth, it’s part of Her.”⁹⁹ Protecting big wilderness remained the ultimate form of respect humans could pay to the nonhuman world, but never the only one.

“In my view, Earth First! means direct action,” Mike Roselle wrote in 1987. “In fact, it is because of direct action that EF! exists.”100 Radical environmentalists’ use of their own bodies to protest whaling, logging, and roadbuilding signaled a deep suspicion of what James Morton Turner calls the wilderness movement’s “liberal faith in the federal government and the legislative system.”¹⁰¹ To engage in physical protest was to circumvent established political processes. By harassing whalers or blockading logging trucks, radicals expressed their opposition not only to the plundering of the natural world but also to what they considered the protracted and ineffective methods of the mainstream movement. Direct action constituted a political position as much as a tactical choice. Roselle, who woke up practically every day ready to be arrested, was the kinetic center of civil disobedience for Earth First! and believed in “letting those actions speak for our philosophy.” He threw together actions and ideas until they became completely entangled.¹⁰² So did Doc Sarvis of Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, who advised his fellow eco-saboteurs, “Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.”¹⁰³

In one form or another direct action had always been a part of the modern environmental movement. Well before Earth Day, the alternative press regularly reported on environmental sabotage. In 1968 the Express Times described how a saboteur called “the Wasp” blew up a Pacific Gas & Electric tower in California’s Bay Area, hoping to stop factories from polluting by cutting off their power.¹⁰⁴ In 1971 Harry related the exploits of “the Fox,” a Midwest “ecoguerilla” who sealed an industrial smokestack, clogged a factory’s drainage system, and dumped a jar of effluent in the offices of U.S. Steel. “The eco-guerilla movement is growing,” Harry observed, “as patience with the ‘proper authorities’ wears thin.”¹⁰⁵ The Ann Arbor Argus told of a group of “billboard bandits” who targeted roadside advertising throughout Michigan.¹⁰⁶ And Northwest Passage described how Florida’s clandestine “Eco-Commando Force ’70” dropped seven hundred pre-addressed cards in sealed bottles into sewage outlets that discharged near the ocean, over a hundred of which ended up on the desks of the Miami News and the governor’s office, mailed from towns and cities all along Florida’s east coast.¹⁰⁷

Direct action on behalf of the environment in the 1970s was usually anonymous and covert, and often limited to isolated incidents. Some of the acts targeted particular projects or companies, and others implicated modern industry more generally. Most were one-time actions designed to promote awareness or to inspire others. When the perpetrators communicated with the public, they tended to describe themselves as catalysts trying to trigger a chain reaction. Their deeds, if they worked, would make sparks that could ignite a popular and sympathetic response.

The first environmental group to successfully adopt direct action not just as a tenuous gambit but as an organizing principle was Greenpeace. As Frank Zelko has made clear, Greenpeace excelled at drawing attention to dangers and injustices by staging audacious encounters. Neither furtive nor shy about its actions, Greenpeace confronted its industrial enemies in broad daylight. Instead of focusing on single escapades the group garnered enough support to organize long campaigns of persistent agitation that generated controversy and produced political pressure. Greenpeace was less a single spark than a steadily burning fuse.108

When Greenpeace began it was not really an environmental group, and it was not called Greenpeace. In 1969 a group of peace activists in Vancouver, most of them Quakers, formed a group to oppose U.S. testing of atomic bombs underneath the island of Amchitka, near the western end of Alaska’s Aleutian chain. They were too late to stop a one-megaton explosion in October 1969, but they vowed to fight the next blast. The group—initially called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, in reference to fears of a tidal wave from the underground nuclear tests—decided to sail a boat close to Amchitka during the next explosion. This tactic, arrived at largely because so few other options were available, was designed to illustrate the threats posed by nuclear tests and to give the military some pause. It was also an extension of the Quaker philosophy of “bearing witness” to injustice, a silent condemnation that became a hallmark of Greepeace.¹⁰⁹

The boldness and, for some, foolhardiness of sailing toward an atomic explosion demonstrated not only the sense of urgency within the Don’t Make a Wave Committee but also the limitations of more mainstream peace and environmental organizations. Those organizations took Amchitka seriously, not least because of the island’s status as a national wildlife refuge. But the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission’s claims to “national security” and the rapid pace of events worked against conventional tactics like lobbying and litigation. The Sierra Club had been following the AEC’s plans since 1965, publicly opposing the tests alongside several major environmental groups. Quickly, however, environmentalists realized the limitations of their influence as they confronted a powerful and determined Cold War state. An internal Sierra Club memo from 1969 advised, “Alaskan conservation groups should not go out of their way to pick a fight with AEC. We are already against ‘progress’ and can’t afford to be against national defense too.”110 Just a few days later, James Moorman, one of the Club’s lawyers, submitted a report on Amchitka strategy that pointed out loopholes allowing the AEC to circumvent the Department of the Interior and the Endangered Species Act. Given the competing claims to national as against environmental interest, he guessed that federal courts were unlikely to grant a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction. When the time frame was not years but months, and the stakes were not the siting of a dam or the designation of a park but the conduct of nuclear war, the legal system on which environmental groups relied turned sharply against them. “Unless we have some solid evidence of serious damage,” Moorman concluded, “we would be in the position of trying to stop a $200,000,000 defense expenditure for the principle of the thing. Under the circumstances, I would not recommend a suit.”¹¹¹

What Moorman did recommend were “legal guerilla actions.”¹¹² Leading up to the initial test, environmental groups flooded federal agencies with requests for complete documentation of the possible effects of a nuclear blast at Amchitka. When the requested information came slowly or not at all, the organizations threatened lawsuits.¹¹³ These tactics failed to stop or even slow the AEC’s plans. When the AEC announced it would stage another test in 1971, environmental and peace groups banded together to form the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility and promptly filed suit against the AEC for an insufficient environmental impact statement. Suing over an EIS, a tactic that had worked in environmentalists’ favor so many times, in this case achieved only brief delays.¹¹⁴

The strongest legal weapons the environmental movement wielded were no match for an atomic bomb. Major environmental organizations knew this, as did the AEC. The Don’t Make a Wave Committee suspected this as well, and so it chartered a fishing boat, the Phyllis Cormack, which left Vancouver for the treacherous North Pacific seas in the fall of 1971 amid considerable press coverage. After a temporary AEC cancellation, a ship change, and inclement weather, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee was still several hundred miles from Amchitka on November 6 when the United States detonated a five-megaton blast several thousand feet underneath the island.

The Amchitka blast did not cause the earthquake or tidal wave that many environmentalists feared and there was little evidence of leaked radiation, but it created a half-mile wide impact crater, killed hundreds of sea otters and an unknown number of fish and birds, and sent a shock wave measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale through the island, the nearby ocean, and a small, spring-mounted concrete bunker on the far side of Amchitka where James Schlesinger, the chairman of the AEC, sat with his family in a risky bid to reassure the public of the test’s safety. The blast also propelled the Don’t Make a Wave Committee to international recognition and lent it a reputation for brash, confrontational actions.

The Don’t Make a Wave Committee soon changed its name to Greenpeace and changed its focus to whaling and ecological concerns. Even as the group’s founding members sailed toward Amchitka, they had begun to move toward more specifically environmental issues. Robert Hunter later described a formative moment when the Phyllis Cormack docked at Akutan, Alaska, the site of an abandoned whaling station, and the crew discussed how few whales they had seen on their voyage across the Gulf of Alaska. One of Hunter’s disgusted companions asked, “Who wants to save the human race anyway?”115 Greenpeace’s founders lived and worked in a coastal city that lay along the migratory routes of gray whales, humpback whales, and orcas. The group drew from the city’s countercultural community, and it took little to convince its members that whales were part of a “planetary consciousness” threatened by the modern world. Greenpeace activists began using fast and maneuverable inflatable boats called Zodiacs to position themselves between whales and the harpoon guns of whaling fleets in what would become the organization’s signature tactic. “Since 1975,” Greenpeace explained to its supporters after a confrontation with Spanish whalers in 1980, “Greenpeace has conducted direct action campaigns against commercial whaling fleets operating in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These peaceful non-violent confrontations are based on the belief that it is useless to wait for governments to act while the last of the great whales die.”¹¹⁶

Greenpeace’s commitment to peace and nonviolence was absolute. Despite its best intentions, though, the group opened the door to a more aggressive style of activism, and Paul Watson walked through it. One of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee’s earliest members, Watson’s penchant for confrontation led to his ouster from Greenpeace in 1977. He would go on to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a close ally of Earth First! and a group known for mining whaling ships in port and ramming them at sea. “Sometimes the only way you can stop outlaws,” Watson said in 1981, “is by becoming an outlaw yourself.”¹¹⁷

The year Earth First! was born was the year direct action seemed to grip the environmental movement. In January 1979 the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society set sail on its first ship, the Sea Shepherd. By the end of the year the Sea Shepherd lay at the bottom of a Portuguese harbor after its crew rammed an illegal whaler, surrendered to the Portuguese Navy, and then scuttled their own ship rather than risk its falling into the hands of whalers. In May a ragtag conservation group called Friends of the River (FOR) took on the Army Corps of Engineers in Northern California. FOR had spent years battling the construction of New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River, a dam that would tame a spirited river and flood a canyon treasured by whitewater rafters. FOR tried rallies, legal actions, an appeal to the Historic Preservation Act, and a ballot initiative to protect the Stanislaus under California’s Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. None of those efforts worked. Finally, as the recently completed New Melones Dam slowly flooded the river canyon, FOR’s Mark Dubois walked to the river’s edge and chained himself to a rock. A few close friends knew where Dubois was and where he had hidden the key. The Army Corps of Engineers knew only that filling the reservoir would mean killing him. Dubois remained hidden for a week until the Corps agreed to designate a temporary fill-level limit. “I always knew I would have to make a personal statement at some time,” Dubois said of his risky act.118

By the end of the 1970s the door that Greenpeace had cracked was wide open. “Now, according to some—a growing number—it is time to mutiny,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1981. “Nature’s bounty, they believe, is on the brink of disaster. Normal channels lead nowhere. Ecological activism, a movement of mutineers, has been born.”¹¹⁹ Greenpeace’s Robert Hunter, long an advocate of nonviolence, began to question that inflexible principle in the wake of his old comrade Paul Watson’s militance. Sensing a moment of crisis, he wrote about eco-radicalism for New Age, saying of nonviolence, “so far history has not shown much evidence that the strategy is inevitably going to triumph. It is nice to think it must, but the trouble is, even if the meek do finally inherit the earth, there may not be much of it left to enjoy.”¹²⁰

“It is past time for this discussion,” Dave Foreman wrote approvingly to the editor of New Age. “I think that the basic problem, however, goes beyond merely the question of whether violence (directed against either machines or people) is justified in protecting the earth. The real question is that of radicalizing the environmental movement.” The answer to that question, Foreman made clear, was aggressive action in defense of the wild and a de-centering of human beings politically, geographically, and philosophically. “The only hope for Earth and her millions of residents (besides humans) is to declare vast areas of the globe off limits to industrial civilization,” Foreman wrote. The answer, then, was an ecocentric, direct-action wilderness movement. The answer was Earth First! (see figure 3.3)¹²¹

The trees that environmentalists hoped to protect could only exist on the Pacific Coast. Over many millennia of competition, conifers lost out to more adaptable broad-leaved trees throughout North America, but on the steep mountains and hillsides of the Pacific Northwest a temperate climate that mixed dry periods with rain and fog allowed the conifers—spruces, cedars, hemlocks, redwoods, and Douglas firs—to thrive. While the rugged conditions supported fewer species of life overall than some other forests, the size of the trees produced a greater mass of life, per acre, than even the tropical rainforests. Within this idiosyncratic forest environment was an even more unusual place: the Siskiyou Mountains in northern California and southern Oregon. Never breaching eight thousand feet and lacking a view of the ocean, the Siskiyous might have been overshadowed by the towering Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges to the east or the more scenic Coast Range to the west had they not distinguished themselves as one of the greatest storehouses of biological diversity in the United States, a result of having started as a string of volcanic islands before gradually migrating to the mainland to make an east-west bridge linking nearby ranges.122

Some of that biological diversity already enjoyed protection as the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. But the Kalmiopsis sat amid many thousands of acres of “de facto wilderness,” roadless and undeveloped land lacking the Wilderness Act’s thick armor. Each logging road was another chink in a de facto wilderness’s shield. The Forest Service—the greatest roadbuilding agency in the world, its network of logging roads far longer than the interstate highway system—started to penetrate the area around the Kalmiopsis soon after passage of the Wilderness Act. During the 1970s, as the Forest Service began and completed RARE II only to have it mired in legal challenges, environmentalists in Oregon worked with Senator Mark Hatfield on a statewide wilderness bill. Especially at issue was the area directly to the north of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, an area that included old-growth trees treasured by both environmentalists and logging companies, although for different reasons. An ally of environmentalists except when it came to forests and the timber industry, Hatfield defeated several legislative attempts to create a northern addition. Then in the early 1980s the Forest Service began to build a road to Bald Mountain that would run just north of the Kalmiopsis, effectively cutting the established wilderness off from any potential additions and opening up a large portion of the remaining de facto wilderness to logging.123

Earth First! wed itself to direct action—and specifically to civil disobedience—on Bald Mountain. First drawn to the region in 1982 to fight the Gasquet-Orleans (G-O) Road in Northern California, Earth First! quickly shifted its attention to Bald Mountain when a court halted construction of the G-O Road for violating the religious protections of several Native American peoples. Volunteers from Oregon and Northern California, introduced to Earth First! through the G-O Road fight or during one of the group’s “road show” tours through the region months earlier, mounted blockades on the still incomplete Bald Mountain Road in late April 1983. A half dozen or fewer people would stand across the road, arms linked, preventing bulldozers from moving any further. Local sheriffs and deputies took several hours to reach the remote site, so each blockade shut down construction for at least half a day. By early May, activists were locking themselves to roadbuilding equipment with chains and handcuffs, costing the construction crews even more time. The blockades wavered unpredictably between long periods of quiet standoff and brief moments of angry confrontation. On May 10 a bulldozer charged a group of activists with its blade down, burying them in a pile of dirt. On May 12 road workers drove a pickup truck straight into Dave Foreman, knocking him down and then dragging him for dozens of yards. In June Earth First! took the fight to the courts, joining the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) in a lawsuit against the Forest Service modeled after Huey Johnson’s challenge to RARE II years earlier. A U.S. district court judge granted a temporary restraining order that halted the road’s progress. Earth First! held its fourth annual gathering in the Siskiyous, bringing together hundreds of supporters for what was to be the largest direct action yet. The swift decision by the court left Earth First!ers celebrating rather than blockading.124

The Bald Mountain fight ended up in front of a judge, but Earth First!ers believed their blockades played a key role. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund had failed when it sued to prevent a road over Bald Mountain a year earlier without challenging RARE II. After Earth First! stirred up renewed interest, the ONRC found locals willing to fund a more aggressive suit. Perhaps even more important in shaping long-term efforts to protect and expand wilderness in Oregon, the Earth First! actions radicalized those who participated. “I no longer have doubts about my commitment to action NOW for the wilderness,” Molly Campbell wrote of her experience in the blockades. “If we wait and go through the ‘proper channels’ one more time, there will be no forests left…the strength of my beliefs and convictions grew after facing the angered bulldozer driver.” Ric Bailey explained, “We feel in our hearts that we have contributed to a great cause, and helped with the advent of a new tactic in the protection of wilderness in America: Direct Action.”¹²⁵ And Karen Pickett told a judge after her arrest that if her dedication to wilderness and species diversity was sincere, “then it is my responsibility to act when I see things being destroyed.”¹²⁶ Earth First! paired particular campaigns for wilderness protection with the greater goal of convincing others that the interests of the natural world were no less important than those of humans, and worth great risk.

Because participants often found their own convictions either confirmed or strengthened, Earth First! actions tended to produce further Earth First! actions. When legal measures failed, activists quickly took matters into their own hands. The year after the Bald Mountain blockades, protesters launched actions around the proposed Middle Santiam Wilderness, drawing bigger crowds and producing more arrests than the year before. The Middle Santiam sat in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon’s Cascade Range. At less than nine thousand acres, its size left it especially vulnerable to industrial activities nearby. For years the Forest Service allowed logging in Pyramid Creek, just upriver from the wilderness. To avoid landslides the Forest Service had moved Pyramid Creek Road several times, inadvertently rendering the steep hillside slopes unstable and showering silt into creeks and rivers. Local activists, who organized as the Middle Santiam Wilderness Committee, filed lawsuits and requested restraining orders against timber sales and roads in the Pyramid Creek area, although the Middle Santiam was only de facto wilderness. In June Congress passed an Oregon wilderness bill, protecting hundreds of thousands of acres as wilderness and releasing millions of acres to potential logging. In the Middle Santiam, the bill protected 7,500 acres, a fraction of what environmentalists had hoped for. Even before final passage of the Oregon wilderness bill, activists associated with the Middle Santiam Wilderness Committee and Earth First! formed a new outfit, the Cathedral Forest Action Group (CFAG). CFAG declared that it would fight for a complete moratorium on logging and roadbuilding in; for protection for an eighty-thousand-acre area the group dubbed the “Santiam Cathedral Forest”; for an end to construction of the Pyramid Creek Road; and for a restructuring of Forest Service policy away from logging and toward wilderness protection.127

The summer of 1984 saw more traffic than usual on Pyramid Creek Road, much of it protesters heading in to block logging trucks and sheriffs heading out to take protesters to jail. At the end of the summer, about a hundred activists gathered at a park in Portland before marching to the Region 6 Forest Service main office. The regional forester slipped out of the building before the protesters arrived, but a handful of Earth First!ers and Greenpeace members managed to slip in before police surrounded the office. The group emerged on the fourth-floor balcony and unfurled a banner that read, “Stop The U.S. Forest Service/Save Our Old Growth/Earth First!” Eventually a deputy regional forester agreed to a meeting with two activists. When that meeting produced no results, two members of CFAG chained themselves to the office’s doors. The Portland Police called in a SWAT team to clear the office and place the two chained to the doors under arrest.128

Direct action, because it demonstrated an unusual degree of commitment and conviction, served as an implicit statement of the basic Earth First! philosophy that people could and should care as much about nature’s interests as about their own. As such, it was also an implicit statement of the difference between mainstream and radical environmentalism. Direct action made clear the belief—righteous to some, naïve to others—that the urgency of environmental destruction demanded an immediate, uninhibited response, and that the larger environmental movement had failed to provide it.

The riskier the action, the more resonant the statement. In the Middle Santiam, Earth First! pioneered one of the riskiest tactics used to prevent logging: the tree sit. It quickly became one of the archetypal actions employed by radical environmentalists, the land-based version of Greenpeace’s placing their Zodiacs between whales and harpoons. Tree sitters on platforms high in not only caught the attention of reporters but also forced loggers to choose between sparing the occupied trees or risking a human life. The original Earth First! tree sitter was Mikal Jakubal, an experienced rock climber who had heard of Australian activists occupying trees and experimented with the idea early in June 1985. Several months later Earth First! perfected the tactic and managed over a month of consecutive tree sits in the Squaw Creek watershed of the Middle Santiam. For decades after, tree sits persisted as a standard feature of environmental battles in the Pacific Northwest, involving on one side more and more elaborate platforms and strategies for resupplying sitters, and on the other side stakeouts, cranes, and eventually professional tree climbers trained in dismantling the platforms.¹²⁹

Earth First!’s use of increasingly audacious direct actions made mainstream environmentalists wary. Even before the Oregon tree sits, radicals had caused enough of a stir that established organizations felt moved to comment or else remain conspicuously silent. “They’re sort of a parody: they don’t do anything,” one Sierra Club staffer told a reporter, contrasting Earth First! with those environmentalists “who are actually out there slugging away, putting on their neckties, going into offices, writing legislation, turning up at the hearings, filing comments on EISs, doing all that grungy work that actually produces results.” The Wilderness Society’s William Turnage worried that Earth First! reinforced an image of environmentalists as “irresponsible and rather bizarre characters.” Cecil Andrus, the former Secretary of the Interior, called Earth First!’s tactics “extremism that is irresponsible, illegal and totally unacceptable to responsible conservationists in America.” The Club’s deputy conservation director, Doug Scott, agreed: “I don’t think you can be a monkeywrencher and still expect to be taken as a serious player in the political process,” he said. Michael McCloskey, the Club’s executive director, refused to talk about Earth First!.130

Critics who considered direct action more flash than substance made an important point: the protection offered by blockades and tree sits lasted only so long as activists did. For that reason, Earth First! had to pair its tactics with a philosophy that bred commitment and devotion. “Thus,” Bill Devall and George Sessions wrote in 1984, “the process of ecological resistance is both personal and collective.”131 Despite the blockades of 1983, the 1984 Oregon wilderness bill left the de facto wilderness north of the Kalmiopsis open to logging. In 1987 the Forest Service began planning timber sales there. In the intervening years, Earth First! had maintained not just an interest but a physical presence in the north Kalmiopsis. Earth First!er Lou Gold, a retired law professor from Brooklyn, kept a sporadic vigil from a campsite near the Bald Mountain Road every summer from 1983 to 1987. With the north Kalmiopsis threatened again, Earth First! activists returned to the area to rejoin Gold. By then Mike Roselle had organized Earth First!’s Nomadic Action Group, a rapid response team ready to use direct action to halt imminent threats. In 1987 Earth First! initiated several years of blockades, lockdowns, tree sits, and at one point a group of protesters sitting in the road with their feet encased in concrete. Although the Forest Service took advantage of a fire to allow salvage logging in the north Kalmiopsis, well over a decade of Earth First! actions helped prevent any significant roadbuilding and kept alive the hope of enlarging the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. After his arrest for blocking a bulldozer outside the Kalmiopsis in 1987, at the same time as four other Earth First!ers began a two-week jail term for occupying a log yarder, Roselle insisted that the arrests and imprisonments couldn’t shake activists’ resolve. “They haven’t stopped Earth First! from protesting old growth cutting,” he said. “In fact, we’re now even stronger.”¹³²

The radical break that cleaved Earth First! from the mainstream environmental movement was a political one that quickly became tactical and philosophical too. Radicals grew frustrated with conventional liberal democratic reform of the sort so many environmental organizations had come to rely on. Conventional reform, they believed, could never be a proportional response to the planetary crisis at hand. The professionalization of the movement and the culture of compromise that radicals believed it bred, represented especially by RARE II, convinced some disgruntled conservationists that environmentalism needed an infusion of energy and ideas. The key idea radicals embraced, believing that it had always animated what was most powerful about environmentalism, was ecocentric thought: a rejection of the humanism that underlay so much of the modern world. The most vital manifestation of that idea was the protection of wilderness. The energy came from direct action, from no longer depending on partial and incremental change and instead demanding, urgently and emphatically, that species and ecosystems should be spared from destruction.

The theory and practice of ecocentric, radical environmentalism raised questions about what was central and what was marginal to the environmental movement. Earth First!ers believed they were returning to the basic premises of early conservation, to the ideas that had always given environmentalism its most piercing cries. Its critics, throughout the 1980s, asked to what degree such ideas bred reaction and misanthropy and ignored social justice.

Even before Earth First! gained wide notoriety, Eugene Hargrove, the editor of Environmental Ethics, worried about its ideas. Earth First! had been inspired by Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hargrove wrote, and was at risk of moving from legitimate protests to violent and immoral acts, acts which might “create a terrible backlash undoing all the good that has been done” by the environmental movement. Environmentalists had often talked about “extending moral consideration in some way to include nature,” but for Earth First! “nature, rather than being included, is given priority.” That combination of an extreme philosophy and a willingness to act on it was, for Hargrove, cause for concern. “In the twentieth century,” he reminded readers, “terrorism…has been the last resort when normal political action was frustrated,” but such measures were uncalled for in protecting the natural world, as environmentalism “has been an immensely successful political movement.”133

“Let’s have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence…carried out against people and other living things…. Sabotage, on the other hand, means the application of force against inanimate property,” Abbey wrote in response. Bulldozers tearing up hillsides and dams flooding canyons and valleys were acts of terrorism, he said, and the characters in his novel—as well as, by implication, the activists those characters inspired—“engage in industrial sabotage in order to defend a land they love against industrial terrorism.” Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, let Abbey defend direct action and in a separate letter took up the cause of greater limits to industrial civilization. “You say the environmental movement has been immensely successful…,” he wrote. “It appears to be successful because it asks for so little and actually threatens the corporate state to such a minor extent.” For both Abbey and Foreman, Hargrove’s warnings about Earth First! epitomized exactly what was wrong with the modern environmental movement. Too concerned with political niceties, that movement would never risk serious confrontation with those in power in order to defend the natural world. Too satisfied with token victories, it would never present a significant challenge to the basic values of industrial civilization. When Hargrove responded to Abbey and Foreman by asking how anyone could support acts “both criminal and morally reprehensible by normal moral or ethical standards,” Hargrove confirmed his opponents’ most fundamental complaint: conventional ethics was exactly what they objected to. For them, effective environmentalism rested on countering the anthropocentric values that were at the very center of industrial society.¹³⁴