The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism

On July 4, 1980 several hundred residents of Grand County, Utah gathered in Moab, the county seat, to cheer on a bulldozer with “Sagebrush Rebel” bumper stickers. As county commissioners denounced federal bureaucracy, the bulldozer scraped a road up to and just over the boundary of a Bureau of Land Management wilderness study area, a violation of federal law and one of the few direct actions in the anti-wilderness movement known as the “sagebrush rebellion.” The slapdash road transgressed not just a wilderness boundary but also the broader system of environmental regulations governing public lands and even the authority of the federal government. Grand County officials organized the event in opposition to highhanded federal agencies, environmental extremists, and the misbegotten alliance between them.¹

It is tempting to think of the environmental movement as a product of midcentury liberalism and as an enemy of the late twentieth-century conservative ascendancy. That story allows historians to saddle Ronald Reagan’s administration with major shifts in environmentalism’s fortunes: the modern movement emerged in the 1960s and leapt to the top of the nation’s political agenda on the strength of overwhelming public concern and strong support in a still relatively liberal Washington, D.C., only to be hobbled when Reagan’s election signaled the end of the modern liberal era. But the Grand County bulldozer plowed into federal wilderness months before Reagan’s election. As historians have looked more closely at the 1970s and 1980s, they have found years of complicated political negotiation in which the Reagan presidency was the culmination of political, economic, and ideological trends already well under way rather than the beginning of an inchoate conservatism.2

Any attempt to map environmentalism onto the Left or the Right means negotiating the unruly terrains of both the state and the market. Conservatives from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan used government as a rhetorical foil, defining their own principles in opposition to the state and defining liberalism as synonymous with “big government.” But just as conservatives did not oppose the state as thoroughly as they sometimes claimed, liberals did not uncritically align themselves with the federal government. The historian Paul Sabin argues that public interest environmental law brought to bear “an intensifying 1960s critique of federal agencies and government power” in the name of a public good that the state did not necessarily represent. “A new kind of liberalism—skeptical and distrustful of government, yet still committed to collective action by the state—had emerged in the heart of the liberal establishment,” Sabin writes.³

Skepticism and distrust of the government emerged far outside of the liberal establishment as well. Mainstream environmentalists who had relied on state power for years began to question its effectiveness by the 1980s. Radical environmentalists went much further, calling natural resource agencies fundamentally corrupt and little different from extractive industries in their human-centered assault on the wild. Placing little faith in government or the democratic virtues it was supposed to represent, radicals appealed to a sense of order and structure beyond human design. Generally, this was a natural order of ecological relationships, but translating that natural order into policy was difficult to achieve through conventional liberal democratic processes.

Uneasy with established procedures and institutions, radicals turned to other political architectures. From its earliest days, Earth First! drew from anarchist thought to explain the pitfalls built into systems of human devising. Far less often but at times significantly, Earth First! subscribed to an economic order of market relationships, and in doing so made common cause with a New Right that was ostensibly the environmental movement’s chief adversary. That partnership remained narrow, fleeting, and difficult, but it made clear that radical environmentalists held few political commitments beyond what they considered the interests of the nonhuman world. And it suggested that environmentalism, like many other postwar political movements, was neither liberal nor conservative in any obvious and consistent way. In the 1970s mainstream environmentalists locked arms with the federal government for pragmatic purposes. In the 1980s radical environmentalists made clear the political and philosophical limits of that partnership.

The modern environmental and conservative movements were contemporaneous. Environmentalism gained broad support in the United States at the same moment as conservatism reestablished its political relevance. After several decades on the sidelines of American politics, conservatives took the field in the late twentieth century. As scholars have recently emphasized, the 1960s was as much a decade of right-wing organization as of left-wing agitation. Young conservatives grew frustrated with what was, in their view, a centrist Republican Party cowed by the New Deal and decades of liberal control in Washington, D.C. This New Right sought to take over the party both politically and ideologically, its efforts coalescing around Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Although Goldwater lost the election, he inspired a generation of conservative activists who worked to elect Ronald Reagan governor of California in 1966 and president of the United States in 1980. At the same time, conservative thinkers as disparate as Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Jerry Falwell, Irving Kristol, and William Buckley, Jr. contributed to a collective critique of liberal ideas and policies. In just two decades conservatism shifted from the margins to the center of American politics and culture.4

As the New Right defined itself in reaction to the politics of race and gender in the late twentieth century, so it defined itself against the environmental movement. But that intellectual work had to overcome the ways environmentalism and conservatism were not natural enemies. William Buckley’s National Review, by the 1960s the voice of a nascent New Right, briefly supported environmentalism. In early 1970 its editors acknowledged that “conservation” would be one of the most important public issues of the coming decade and worried that the Left would claim it. “This must not happen,” they wrote. “As the very word itself suggests, ‘conservation’ is intrinsically a conservative concern.” Equating conservation with the mythical American frontier and the “virgin land” that the magazine’s editors felt defined the early republic, they warned readers, “Conservation is likely to be a powerful, indeed an overriding spiritual issue, which it would be political suicide to concede to the Left.”5 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which Buckley had also helped found, was similarly sanguine. YAF emerged as the conservative alternative to Students for a Democratic Society, and like SDS it had paid little attention to environmental issues throughout the 1960s. But in the lead-up to Earth Day, YAF nodded approvingly, if hesitantly, at efforts to clean up the American landscape. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that pollution is potentially just as much an enemy of freedom as Communist expansionism, statist legislation, and the violent left,” YAF leaders advised. “Environmental control,” they insisted, “is not something we can allow to become a monopoly of the liberal and radical left.”⁶

Even the ultra-conservative weekly Human Events tempered its skepticism of the environmental movement with recognition of pressing environmental issues. “No question exists that the majority of the public is desperately in support of our national goal to bring pollutants under control and restore the planet to the balance of nature commensurate with the existence of mankind,” Robert Bailey said.⁷ The race between Democrats and Republicans to capitalize on environmentalism’s sudden popularity was, John Chamberlain wrote, “the sort of political competition that must help more than it can possibly hurt”; while James Jackson Kilpatrick welcomed “so much apparent evidence that the public, at long last, has awakened to the situation and is prepared to take action.”⁸

What sort of “action,” however, quickly became a point of contention. Doctrinaire conservatives could be for the environment and against environmentalism. More often than not, the wedge between the cause and the movement was federal authority and the role of the state. A YAF board member said of environmentalism, “I have heard ‘conservatives’ and YAF leaders, hopefully without too much thought, proclaiming that here really is an area where the Federal Government must play a larger and larger role. This disturbs me not only from a political and philosophical perspective, but from a factual one.”⁹ Neoconservatives, those ex-Leftists migrating steadily to the Right in the late-twentieth century, grew particularly wary of environmentalism’s relationship to state power. Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz warned that declarations of an environmental crisis sacrificed the public interest and served those motivated by “the desire to govern the rest of us.”¹⁰

More and more, conservatives associated environmentalism with excessive state power. From its New York offices Commentary railed against an imperious environmental movement and its tendency toward “extraordinary measures of political control.”11 In the West, though, the shadow of environmental regulation was coterminous with federal lands in the public imagination. Along the Atlantic Coast, conservatives worried about regulation of industry; deep in the American interior, critics of environmentalism assailed the management of public lands. Resource users—in particular ranchers—grew increasingly frustrated with federal control of Western acreage. At the political and emotional center of that frustration sat the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency whose vast holdings in the eleven westernmost contiguous states included nearly a quarter of surface lands and a majority of the subsurface mineral estate.

Western hostility toward federal land management grew in part out of the BLM’s evolving policies in the 1970s and especially the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976, a law that offered the BLM the sort of coherent policy guidelines it had long operated without. While the Forest Service and Park Service enjoyed relatively clear identities and broad constituencies, few Americans outside of the rural West knew the BLM. It was primarily ranchers who paid close attention to the public domain (a general term for BLM holdings), having enjoyed decades of grazing rights on public lands at below-market rates. FLPMA pushed the BLM onto a more public stage, mandating a multiple-use approach to management and requiring that the BLM pay heed to scientific, ecological, recreational, and historical values and consider wildlife as well as domesticated animals. FLPMA also directed that the BLM review all roadless areas over five thousand acres that possessed “wilderness characteristics,” a directive that the Carter administration took seriously and interpreted generously. The law and its application caused consternation in the rural West, stoking anger toward environmentalists and the federal government. “When Kruschev was dictator of Russia,” A. C. Wilkerson of the Uintah Cattlemen’s Association said at a hearing on wilderness designation in the Ashley National Forest, “he promised us he would bury us and with the help of the environmentalists, he probably will.”¹² Ranchers worried about the loss of grazing lands, a general shift toward more environmentally minded policies, and federal agencies’ assertion of control over lands many Westerners relied on. Like rising water, FLPMA extended government’s reach into the narrowest spaces of rural Western life.

Western anger flared most during the sagebrush rebellion. In the strictest terms, the sagebrush rebellion took place almost entirely in the legislatures of nearly a dozen Western states with a few brief skirmishes in Washington, D.C. In the summer of 1979 the Nevada legislature passed a law that declared all BLM lands in Nevada the property of the state, created a board to oversee the transfer of public lands from federal to state hands, and reserved funds for the inevitable court battle ahead. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch embraced the issue and the anti-federal sentiment behind it, introducing a bill in Congress designed to transfer all BLM lands to state jurisdiction. For the next year and a half, more and more Western legislators at the state and federal levels declared themselves sagebrush rebels, passing or proposing legislation modeled on Nevada’s. The legal basis of the sagebrush rebellion was always tenuous. None of the measures ever took effect, and by 1982 enthusiasm for large-scale land transfers began to fade away. But the rhetoric and spirit of the sagebrush rebellion lasted for another decade and beyond, framing environmental debates in the West.13

Antistatism and anti-environmentalism fit together neatly in the sagebrush rebellion, bringing into further alignment the politics of the rural West and the New Right. For movement conservatives and rural Westerners alike, public land controversies were another instance of elite liberals imposing their values on others. The Nevada State Legislature’s Select Committee on Public Lands, which helped engineer the original legislation, described the sagebrush rebellion as a reaction to “colonial” treatment by a federal government that made policies “for a so-called national constituency without regard for western problems.” Pointing to FLPMA, the Alaska lands campaign, RARE II, and the BLM wilderness review, the committee complained of an assault on Western autonomy at the behest of an environmental establishment. The Alaska lands campaign, U.S. Representative Don Young told his congressional colleagues, was by and for “special interest groups in San Francisco and New York that would like to turn Alaska into a park.” At the moment that conservatives and Western politicians made political hay by opposing Washington, D.C., the environmental movement’s flurry of activity in the capital left it a perfect target.¹⁴

Environmentalists tried to fight back by claiming that the “special interest” label better fit their antagonists, and that it was anti-environmentalists who sought their own narrow advantage. The Sierra Club described the sagebrush rebellion as “another attempt by energy, mining, and livestock interests to shuck off reasonable and lawful federal regulations and take advantage of the American public.” Debbie Sease, the Wilderness Society’s BLM specialist, told her colleagues, “The public lands belong to the nation and cannot continue to be managed for the benefit of an elite minority.”15

Both sides claimed to stand for the public good and the most democratic use of public lands. FLPMA required that the BLM honor what James Skillen has called “the new pluralism in public lands management,” in which the BLM and Forest Service had to plan for the varied ways Americans used and valued public lands rather than simply the various economic benefits those lands offered.¹⁶ But as the agencies shifted away from a focus on industry and toward a consideration of wilderness and ecological integrity, they struggled to reconcile different opinions and philosophies. In 1953 Richard McArdle, Chief of the Forest Service, had said of his agency’s multiple-use mandate, “I believe that our inability to satisfy completely each and every group of national-forest users is a definite sign of success in doing the job assigned to us.”¹⁷ Allotting equal degrees of dissatisfaction might have worked in the 1950s, but by the 1970s that ideal could not accommodate what had become not just competing uses but also competing ethical claims. Sagebrush rebels and wilderness advocates did not follow the rules of interest-group pluralism. They were not seeking a compromise that left everyone equally frustrated. They argued over the very premises of public lands policy.

Mainstream environmentalists had to make a particularly delicate argument. The alliance between environmentalism and federal agencies had always been one of convenience rather than conviction. When William Voigt of the Izaak Walton League wrote an account of grasslands management in the twentieth century, he called it Public Grazing Lands: Use and Misuse by Industry and Government, pointing to a shared culpability.18 For decades environmentalists had offered measured criticisms of federal agencies, including against the Department of the Interior over roads and dams in Yosemite and Dinosaur. David Brower amplified those criticisms in places like Mineral King and Grand Canyon.¹⁹ But during the 1970s the most influential environmental organizations grew increasingly tied to federal agencies and compelled to argue that the government served a common interest.

Radical environmentalists were less hemmed in and so distributed blame more broadly. “Only the most naïve ever believed that the true intent of the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion was to gain title to the federal public lands in the western states,” the Earth First! Journal cautioned in 1980. The actual purpose of the sagebrush rebels, the Journal claimed, was to remake the BLM into the pre-FLPMA “Bureau of Livestock and Mining”—environmentalists’ nickname for an agency they felt catered to Western industry—“to cow conservationists, the Forest Service, and Washington politicians, and to encourage local and state politicians to make stronger anti-environmental statements. They have admirably succeeded.”²⁰ From Earth First!’s point of view ranchers and mining companies wore the black hats, but federal agencies were often little better than scared townspeople. Among ranchers, politicians, land managers, and even mainstream conservationists there were few heroes.

The success of the sagebrush rebellion, Earth First! argued, was political rather than legal. While it failed in its stated goals, the sagebrush rebellion reoriented Western land management, pushing back on federal agencies’ modest steps toward environmental protections. Earth First! found sagebrush rebels and the broader New Right both exasperating and instructive. “Is the Moral Majority timid? The NRA apologetic? The Sagebrushers hesitant?” Dave Foreman asked rhetorically, urging a more militant environmental movement. “If you believe in wilderness, if you love the Earth, if you are appalled at what humankind is doing to the biosphere,” he advised, “then don’t be timid. Speak out. Act with vigor and pride in your convictions!”²¹ More and more, radicals’ convictions were less about what was popular or democratic than about what was environmentally sound. The point was to defend nonhuman nature, not any particular agency or even political process. The state did not necessarily represent a common civic good and often betrayed an ecological one. When human destructiveness overlapped with popular opinion, Earth First! had no compunctions about fighting both.

Doubts about the federal government began with doubts about the state of the environmental movement. The ten-year anniversary of Earth Day provided an opportunity for taking stock of environmentalism’s trajectory. Much of it was grim. “The environmental movement, an important political force during the 1970s, is faltering,” U.S. News & World Report said. “After a decade of spectacular success, the environmental movement appears to be headed for more perilous times,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Echoing the same sentiment, the San Francisco Examiner asked, “After a decade of turbulent activism, is the environmental movement coming to an end, going the way of previous grass-root political movements in American history?” Science described the decline as a long time coming: the 1970s had offered “a large and sobering accumulation of evidence that the environmental movement still has no tried and true strategy for success.” All of the assessments pointed to a weakening of federal regulations and, after a decade of economic uncertainty, a renewed concern for economic growth. The end of what U.S. News & World Report called “the golden age of environmentalism” began years before the Reagan Era.22 A sense of decline came from within the movement and from without, a result of both growing opposition to environmental regulation and diminishing returns as a commitment to conventional reform produced ambiguous results like RARE II.

Battle weariness was the mood at a meeting in January 1980 when two dozen environmental leaders, journalists, and federal administrators gathered in Harpers Ferry, Virginia for an “assessment and direction session” about the state of environmentalism. Brock Evans represented the Sierra Club and reported that the meeting had found “certainly evidence of slippage in our movement.” Evans described environmentalism as lacking inspiration, bogged down in minutiae, and over-reliant on apathetic federal agencies. Among the problems he identified was the failure of a strategy based largely on federal power: “We thought that we could deal with environmental problems by turning to the government as an interface between us and the industrial corporations,” Evans wrote, summarizing the Harpers Ferry discussion. That strategy worked for much of the 1970s but less so by the end of the decade, when the movement’s opponents had “seized upon such catch phrases as anti-regulation, anti-federalism, and false trade offs between their values and ours,” and those catch phrases “tapped many gut feelings of the American people.” The tenor of the meeting, Evans said, was clear: “We need to rekindle the old spark.”²³

The election of Ronald Reagan less than a year later affirmed the view from Harpers Ferry. Reagan, who had cheered the sagebrush rebellion during his campaign, demonstrated little interest in the environmental movement, and his election stirred the hostility toward environmental regulation that major organizations already encountered among politicians. “Because of the November election,” one Nevada legislator and sagebrush rebel said soon after Reagan’s victory, “it’s a whole new ball game.”²⁴ In early 1981 the Sierra Club’s Doug Scott warned his colleagues, “There is a strong indication that we will very soon be facing a ‘covey’ of anti-wilderness/anti-public lands and forests legislation,” likely including “nationwide ‘release’ of National Forest roadless areas (worse than our sufficiency language compromise).” Days later Senator Sam Hayakawa introduced a bill to immediately release for other use all RARE II roadless areas not already proposed as wilderness.²⁵

The greatest blow to environmentalists’ fortunes in Washington, D.C. came soon after Reagan’s inauguration when the president nominated James Watt for secretary of the interior. Watt had served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and more recently headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promoted private enterprise and fought government regulation. In Watt’s view federal management of public lands generally did more harm than good, and the national wilderness system was already large enough. He resented environmental organizations and opposed many of their goals, at one point calling them “a left-wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe in.”26 Within weeks of taking charge at Interior, Watt began relaxing restrictions on strip-mining, offshore oil drilling, and the use of off-road vehicles or snowmobiles on public land. Watt’s assault on environmental regulations simultaneously energized his critics and further divided, to differing degrees, mainstream and radical environmentalists from their erstwhile federal allies.

There had been, at Harpers Ferry, the possibility of a more militant environmental establishment. Participants discussed a less amenable, more strident environmentalism, one that inspired greater action from its supporters and consternation from its adversaries. Taking the Civil Rights Movement as a model, representatives at Harpers Ferry had talked about picketing, marches, and street theater as ways to express indignation at lackadaisical federal efforts. “We should get back on the cutting edge where we were ten years ago, and not accept less than the best,” Evans said. “We should elevate our issues from the back page to the front page, perhaps through these direct action tactics.”²⁷

For the major organizations, the possibility of broad-based direct action quickly gave way to a political campaign with a single figure in its crosshairs. Watt fit the role of villain in a way that both clarified and simplified environmentalists’ fears. His appointment reinforced the apprehensions mainstream organizations already felt about federal agencies while offering a narrower and much more obvious target. The new secretary of the interior posed a dire threat, and so provided an immediate means of rekindling the “old spark” that Brock Evans found flickering. The press, Scott predicted, would consider the Watt agenda “as a single big issue—basically the tangible expression of the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion,’ ” and that consolidation could invite a unified counterattack, “a really MAJOR campaign on a scale (not unlike Alaska) which can really get grassroots people excited and politically active on a grand scale.”28

Loud, brash, and unapologetically skeptical of the environmental movement, Watt came to represent federal land mismanagement in its entirety, swelling in size until he took up much of the movement’s field of vision. Environmental organizations and especially wilderness advocates depicted Watt as almost singlehandedly bending federal environmental policy away from public sentiment and toward private interests. The Wilderness Society compiled a six-chapter “Watt Book,” describing the secretary as tied to corporations and disconnected from popular opinion. Environmentalists represented the views of a majority of Americans, the Watt Book claimed, while Watt fought for the narrow interests of the mining, ranching, lumber, and oil industries.²⁹ To demonstrate the broad base of anti-Watt sentiment, the Sierra Club gathered over a million signatures for a “Replace Watt” petition that accused the secretary of “sabotaging conservation goals supported by a vast majority of the American people.” The signatures, the Club emphasized, came from “all over the country, from Republicans and Democrats, many from people who had never heard of the Sierra Club before.”³⁰ As Scott had predicted, the anti-Watt campaign galvanized concern, more than doubling the Wilderness Society’s membership between 1979 and 1983 and nearly doubling the Sierra Club’s.

For extractive industries, meanwhile, Watt’s tenure signaled a return to what they considered pragmatic, growth-oriented natural resource policies and a measured application of federal oversight. Bronson Lewis, the American Plywood Association’s executive vice president, wrote directly to Reagan about the Sierra Club’s petition drive and about environmental organizations’ “vehement media campaign” against Watt. Lewis assured the president that his “resounding public mandate” signaled “the urgent need to correct policies of the previous Administration [sic] and Congress which sacrificed multiple-use management to the overzealous creation of single-use wilderness.”31 Watt worked with broad public support, industry claimed, and against an aggressive minority. “Predictably,” a Mobil Oil ad read, “certain special interest representatives have raised a hue and cry over Mr. Watt’s proposals.” Even Newsweek suggested Watt sought principle more than profit. “He undercuts their basic claim to legitimacy,” the magazine argued of Watt’s opponents, “which is that they alone are disinterested champions of the commonweal.”³²

Earth First! agreed with industry as much as with mainstream environmental organizations. Yes, Watt was a threat to public lands and natural resources, but not in a way that made him exceptional. Although radical environmentalists never missed an opportunity to mock, disparage, and protest Watt, they insisted the secretary was little different from many other politicians and bureaucrats, and that singling him out was a mistake. “Watt accurately represents the Earth-be-damned attitude of the power establishment in this country,” Foreman wrote in the wake of the Sierra Club’s anti-Watt campaign, “but he is at least honest about it…. In contrast, men like Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus pretended to be friends of the environment but were in reality committed to the same extremist development philosophy that Watt is.” Mainstream environmentalists who found fault with Watt and Watt alone failed to see the larger picture: “The petition campaign by the Sierra Club,” Foreman continued, “demonstrates that the established conservation groups are committed merely to the reform of the existing system and cannot see that the system itself is responsible for our environmental ills.”³³ For Earth First! James Watt was not a distortion of federal management; he was its unbridled realization (see figure 4.1).

Radicals believed not only that Watt was typical in the threat he posed to public lands but also that mainstream environmentalists’ response was typically lackluster. For wilderness advocates, Watt’s greatest sin was his attempt to expand mineral, gas, and oil exploration in wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act allowed such exploration through the end of 1983 and Watt made it clear he would take advantage of that loophole in ways previous secretaries had not, even proposing an extension of the deadline into the twenty-first century. In response, the Wilderness Society went to the press with a study that showed wilderness could provide only a tiny fraction of the nation’s energy needs. Public opposition to Watt’s plan grew, and Congress began debating a Wilderness Protection Act that would withdraw all designated wilderness from oil and gas exploration.³⁴

Enthusiastic support for the proposed Wilderness Protection Act by groups like the Wilderness Society, according to Earth First!, offered “further evidence that the environmental movement has gotten too used to scrambling after Wonder Bread crumbs and pretending they’re prime rib and artichoke hearts.” What, Earth First! asked, would the act do to protect not-yet-designated wilderness left behind by RARE II, like Little Granite Creek in Wyoming’s Gros Ventre Range?35 The Gros Ventres sat astride the overthrust belt running from Canada to Utah where colliding tectonic plates had folded layers of rock on top of each other, producing spectacular mountains and rumors of abundant natural gas. In 1982 Getty Oil applied for a permit to drill at Little Granite Creek, where it held a lease, and the Forest Service accommodated Getty by planning a new road. “Traditional conservation groups…will probably sue the feds,” Howie Wolke predicted, “but the eventual outcome of this legal action is anybody’s guess. Should these legal efforts fail, Earth First! is committed to organizing and carrying out massive civil disobedience, including an occupation of the canyon and rig site, in order to stop this travesty.”³⁶

Earth First! held its third Round River Rendezvous (the group’s annual gathering) in Little Granite Creek on the Fourth of July weekend, 1982. Two of the group’s signature tactics made an early appearance: the crowd of nearly five hundred attendees formed a brief, symbolic blockade of the proposed access road, and saboteurs removed several miles of the road crew’s survey stakes both before and after the Rendezvous. Earth First! claimed that its Gros Ventre gathering, and the threat of further action, spurred the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission’s denial of Getty’s permit as well as the Forest Service’s stay on construction of its own road. Equally likely is that the agencies’ decisions originated with Bart Koehler’s administrative appeal—under the aegis of the Wyoming Wilderness Association—which pointed out that although Getty held a legal claim to the drilling site, it did not yet have the right-of-way required for an access road. Koehler’s reasoning led to a similar appeal by the state of Wyoming itself, and it revealed a tenuous alliance of environmentalists, hunters, and Wyoming politicians against outsiders. “We see a multinational corporation and the federal government come in and say they’re going to tell us how to run this state,” governor Ed Herschler said. “We take the position that Wyoming is not for sale.”37 In this case, Earth First! agreed with Herschler’s broad sentiment: extractive industries and the federal government together posed a threat to local interests. Little Granite Creek had to be protected from business and government as usual, not from a rogue bureaucrat (see figure 4.2).

“Government is a paradox, but there is no escaping it,” Andrew Bard Schmookler wrote in the Earth First! Journal in 1986.38 Schmookler questioned the coherence of anarchy as a political philosophy, and in doing so he called attention to the sometimes mismatch between radical environmentalists’ theory and methods. Earth First!’s distrust of federal management ran deep enough that the group nurtured an anarchist spirit. But Earth First! remained committed to and drew from the more traditional conservation movement enough that it often relied on federal agencies and celebrated public lands. Dubious about state power in theory, radicals nevertheless relied on state power in practice. An unapologetic ecocentrism ultimately distinguished radicals from their mainstream counterparts, a distinction that at times mattered little and at times sent Earth First! in directions mainstream groups would not follow.

Radicals looked at the record of federal conservation with bitter regret. “I have heartily supported every law, executive order, and petition to salvage the dwindling biological wealth of the earth,” wrote Charles Bowden, a close friend of Edward Abbey and Earth First! “But now I see what happens to every decent impulse in my society: they become that ugly thing, government.”³⁹ The state, radical environmentalists tended to argue, made a blunt tool for protecting the nonhuman world, one that missed as often as it struck. Even the most celebrated pieces of environmental legislation were not exempt from criticism. In 1983, twenty years after passage of the Wilderness Act, Howie Wolke judged the law “seriously and basically flawed” and the nation’s total wilderness acreage “a miserable fragment of the system for which early visionaries such as Muir, Marshall, and Leopold had hoped.” The wilderness movement’s greatest legislative success had accomplished only the bare minimum. “The ‘progress’ ” Wolke wrote, “about which many of our politicians and even some of our alleged colleagues (take note, Bill Turnage) like to brag is illusory.”⁴⁰

Earth First! balanced a dwindling faith in state efforts with an expansive view of political philosophy. Many key figures and supporters—most notably Abbey—described themselves as anarchists.⁴¹ Like the crisis environmentalists of the 1970s, radical environmentalists distrusted liberal individualism as a foundation for social policy. The theories, values, and processes that defined conventional American politics offered radicals little hope for the salvation of the natural world. Anarchism, on the other hand, offered a ready-made political philosophy that resonated both in terms of strategy and principle.

Radical environmentalists considered it axiomatic that social hierarchies resting on the concentration of power resulted in the exploitation of the nonhuman world. “A house built on greed cannot long endure,” Abbey said. “Whether called capitalism or communism makes little difference; both of these…systems are driven by the greed for power over nature and human nature; both are self-destroying.” Abbey wrote in response to Schmookler’s insistence that “Only government can restrain power in the interests of other values” a claim that made many Earth First!ers bristle.42 Radical environmentalists shared anarchists’ dim view of government as well as anarchists’ complaints about the complexity of modern technology; the compromises and corruption of representative democracy; the misguided emphasis on the individual by liberalism; and the exploitative and utilitarian use of the natural world by industrial society. Radical environmentalists thought that anarchists understood modern society’s fatal flaws.

The feeling was mutual. When Earth First!er Roger Featherstone visited Chicago’s Haymarket International Anarchist Conference in 1986, he didn’t have to build many bridges. “It was felt that anarchism may be the only hope for the environment,” he reported, “and that present structures are not adequate for the saving of Mother Earth.”⁴³ The affinity Featherstone noted in Chicago had grown during the 1970s and 1980s. The few regular anarchist publications in the United States directed more and more attention toward environmental issues and ecological theory. “The connections, I trust, are clear,” Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in 1985. “The subjects are indeed complex, but it seems obvious that the concerns of ecology, appreciated in the full…match those of anarchism, particularly in its communal strain.”⁴⁴ A year earlier John Clark suggested that anarchists were beginning “to see the ecological perspective as the macrocosmic correlate…of the libertarian conception of a cooperative, voluntarily organized society.”⁴⁵ Some anarchists developed specific theories of how anarchism and environmentalism fit together. Sale was one of the most well-known advocates of bioregionalism, an environmentally-based anarchism that stressed small-scale communities organized around ecological features like watersheds and climate. Others simply emphasized connections between environmental and anarchist thought. George Crowder speculated that in any sort of anarchist revival, “The most convincing argument would seek to establish a conceptual link between anarchism and ecological values.”⁴⁶

Unlike strict anarchists, however, radical environmentalists could never entirely divorce themselves from the state. Earth First! strategy often revealed the limits of grassroots civil disobedience, the necessity of federal authority, and the important role of even Turnage’s Wilderness Society. A few months after Gros Ventre, Earth First! blockaded an illegal road to a drilling site jury-rigged by Yates Petroleum in New Mexico’s Salt Creek Wilderness. With the well two-thirds complete and the protest attracting national attention, a federal judge issued a restraining order forcing Yates to halt its operations.47 Environmentalists declared victory. “We must have bodies, willing to take the time and energy to watch developers, oil companies, utilities, etc.” Kathy McCoy urged after her participation in the Salt Creek blockade, emphasizing the inadequacy of statutory protections. “Without watchdogs, they’ll take it all.”⁴⁸

At first the Salt Creek blockade stood as an example of bureaucratic failure and the importance of direct action. The oil company had received mixed legal signals; it was granted permission to drill from the State of New Mexico, which owned the subsurface mineral rights, but not from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which managed the surface. The Department of the Interior informed Yates that despite a temporary congressional ban on drilling in wilderness, it had “no legal objection” to the drill site, but then Fish & Wildlife charged the company with trespassing. Administrative ambiguity left room for creative interpretation. With just hours remaining on its lease, Yates decided that action meant more than regulation and started drilling. Earth First! agreed and stood in the way of Yates drill crews traveling over the illegal road.

What was momentarily a heroic demonstration of civil disobedience soon became an illustration of its limited ambit. Six weeks after the blockade, the government granted Yates a drilling permit. Congress had overturned its own temporary ban, and the Department of the Interior used the opportunity to open up Salt Creek to oil exploration. In his post-mortem on Salt Creek and its disappointing results, Foreman simultaneously criticized and made the case for mainstream environmental organizations: despite an apparent legal victory, Salt Creek suffered the drill “because the rest of the conservation groups did little.” Earth First!, Foreman explained, “is not the environmental movement. We are only a part of it. We can only fill a few roles.” The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, and National Audubon Society were necessary and absent, Foreman implied, their importance revealed by their failure.⁴⁹

From its inception Earth First! placed itself sometimes far outside of industrial civilization and liberal democratic thought and sometimes on the fringe of conventional reform. Those two positions were not always mutually exclusive; a narrow ridge connected them, and radicals often walked it. In the mid-1980s the ongoing RARE II fight shifted from a national legal battle over roadless areas to state-by-state wilderness bills. Mainstream groups like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club led this strategy, calculating that if they began with West Coast states where the timber industry sought legal clarity on what it could log—and so where environmentalists had more leverage—they could set the terms for future bills and avoid any sweeping release of public lands to industry. Earth First! saw the state-by-state bills as a “lack of vision, courage, and leadership” that would lead to weak initial proposals made even weaker through negotiation. “The forces of industrial tyranny, of humanistic arrogance, sit tall in the saddle,” Foreman wrote.50

To fight industrial tyranny and human arrogance, Earth First! used a “new weapon”: administrative appeals. Earth First! had always found mainstream environmentalists’ unwillingness to file suit against RARE II itself one of the great sins of late twentieth-century conservation, one that California Resources Secretary Huey Johnson partially atoned for with California v. Block. On Bald Mountain, Earth First! strengthened the case for attacking the Forest Service in court with its own suit, Earth First! v. Block, based on Johnson’s precedent. A national lawsuit over RARE II would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, so Earth First! advocated shelving all wilderness bills until after the 1984 elections and hoping for a more favorable political geography.⁵¹ Administrative appeals drew from the legal authority of California v. Block and Earth First! v. Block, both of which effectively ruled development activities on RARE II lands in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. The Earth First! Journal published a sample appeals form for readers to file after any announcement of timber sales or development projects in de facto wilderness. “Done at the right time,” Earth First! advised in one of the group’s milder declarations, “a little piece of paper can temporarily stop the destruction of your roadless area more effectively than anything else.”⁵²

Using a form that began “Pursuant to 36 C.F.R. §211.18…” as a weapon against modern civilization confirmed Schmookler’s description of government as an inescapable paradox. Radicals pointed to the limits of institutional reform only when they weren’t busy engaging in it. When Foreman proposed a strategy for a 1980s environmental movement, he both acknowledged and questioned the effectiveness of traditional methods: “The Sierra Club and Wilderness Society lobbyists should keep on wearing their three-piece suits or high heels while playing the game but they should ask for a little more,” he wrote. Earth First!, meanwhile, should keep “questioning the very philosophical basis of Western Civilization, and engaging in non-violent direct action to stop the industrial beast whenever necessary”; and anonymous supporters, of their own volition, should continue “spiking trees, closing roads, trashing bulldozers, pulling stakes and what-have-you when the methods of the rest of us fail.”53 Earth First! shifted nimbly between conventional methods and anarchist-inspired resistance, often during the same campaign. Radicals understood and appreciated the federal government’s role as steward of the public lands, but they also assumed the state would always fall short of its responsibilities. Federal protections were necessary but never sufficient, and where they flagged, Earth First! picked up the baton.

In American politics, to be skeptical of public agencies is, generally, to be confident about private enterprise. The Reagan administration argued that federal oversight could be replaced by market incentives and that private property yielded more benefits than did public lands. In 1982 the administration, encouraged by market fundamentalists on the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, tried to sell off tens of millions of acres of public land through long-term leases or outright sales. Environmentalists, meanwhile, put even less faith in the market than they did in the government. The Wilderness Society’s Bill Turnage called the administration’s plan to privatize federal land “pirating the public treasure for private benefit.”⁵⁴ Environmental opposition to unfettered capitalism was far from absolute, and ideological opposition to environmentalism was never a premise of market fundamentalism, but for the most part environmentalists and capitalists lined up against each other. Paradoxically, it was at their most philosophically uncompromising that they met and that the market seemed to offer environmental protections where the state did not.

An expanding economy divided environmentalists from capitalists. In 1982 an internal Republican Party committee warned colleagues of “the threat that environmental groups represent to natural resource development and economic growth.” The committee’s report lumped mainstream groups like the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society, and Natural Resources Defense Council with “a new revolutionary stream in the environmental movement referred to as ‘deep ecology.’ ”55 Earth First!, always sensitive to being unfairly associated with environmental moderates, complained that “the Republicans are a little dull when it comes to identifying the environmental ‘extremists’ they are so actively trying to discredit.”⁵⁶ But despite the philosophical differences between Earth First! and the Sierra Club, a broad view of American politics would put them side by side on the question of economic growth. The Club was, according to Michael Cohen, inherently “in conflict with the major corporate interests of modern America.”⁵⁷ In 1971 Club president Philip Berry spoke to the Atomic Industrial Forum about “an end to growth as we have too much known it—growth at the expense of the environment and associated human values.”⁵⁸

The opposition of environmentalism and big business after Earth Day was, however, as much a product of industry’s attacks on environmentalists as the reverse. At Harpers Ferry in 1980, environmental leaders discussed not just the failures of government but the success of those who worked to undermine governmental regulation. Participants spoke at length about an invigorated effort by industry to weaken federal oversight. This same concern came up at a Conservation Foundation-sponsored meeting of environmental leaders in Estes Park, Colorado three months later, as well as in plans for a series of regional conferences that major environmental groups held in 1981 and 1982. “The corporations, after being caught off guard and set back by us in the early 1970s, seem to have reasserted themselves in their former control of the power structure in the government,” Brock Evans reported. “In spite of all the good laws we passed, more and more agencies simply refuse to act to enforce what is there unless they are in turn forced by us, because of this rising counter pressure.”⁵⁹

Long before environmentalists had to contend with the Reagan administration’s attacks on regulation, they clashed with the regulated industries themselves. Even as environmental organizations celebrated Earth Day and strengthened their hand in Washington, D.C., they heard rumblings of opposition. “The backlash is here,” San Francisco’s Clear Creek reported in 1972.60 That same year Michael McCloskey talked to the Sierra Club’s board about “weathering the full force of industry’s counterattack.”⁶¹ The Wilderness Society had already warned its members of a “counterrevolution against the environmental movement,” offering as evidence a speech that Thomas Shepard, Jr., publisher of LOOK magazine, gave to the annual meeting of the Soap and Detergent Association. In its “attempts to destroy our free enterprise system,” Shepard said, the environmental movement lied about ecological harms and ignored economic benefits. “To protect some birds, they would deprive mankind of food,” he complained. “To keep fish healthy, they would allow human beings to become sick.” This “cockeyed set of priorities” was one few Americans would countenance. “So let’s start fighting back!”⁶²

“Fighting back” involved a combination of diluting and challenging environmental efforts. Industry-sponsored public relations campaigns and public service announcements shifted blame from corporations to consumers by focusing on individual behavior rather than industrial processes. People littered, left lights on, and wasted gasoline, while corporations simply and disinterestedly provided the basic elements of a modern lifestyle. In some cases, utilities advertised electricity as fueling antipollution technologies. Power plants were at once the source of and the solution to the pollution problem. Friend of the Sierra Club Jerry Mander called this doublespeak “eco-pornography.”⁶³ At the same time, those industries most directly saddled with environmental regulation fought back by pushing a cost-benefit language that assumed a zero-sum relationship between economic health and environmental oversight. Such reasoning took root in the stagnant economy of the 1970s. “How can a recession-hit town eject polluting plants at the expense of vitally needed jobs?” Time asked.⁶⁴

So successful was this rhetorical attack that the Nixon administration, to address industry concerns about the administration’s own National Environmental Policy Act, created a National Industrial Pollution Control Council composed mainly of corporate executives in order to afford industry a voice in the regulatory process. That voice spoke of economic costs, and it led to a “Quality of Life Review” program that evaluated consumer and environmental regulations against potential harm to the private sector. The review process lasted through the Ford administration and served mainly to scrutinize the Environmental Protection Agency. Several weeks before Reagan took office the New York Times was already reporting on an “anti-regulatory atmosphere” in New Jersey, where environmentalists “suffered setbacks from business interests on several fronts,” including the EPA’s decision not to enforce fees on companies dumping sewage in the Atlantic, and Congress’s weakening of the Carter administration’s “superfund” toxic cleanup act.65 By then, industry groups simply outspent environmental organizations. “When you talk about environmentalists being on the run,” a Carter administration official told the Los Angeles Times, “you have to consider that they are being chased by a very well organized, very well financed lobby of some of the biggest corporate names in the country.”⁶⁶

The corporate backlash against environmentalism was self-serving, but it was also an expression of a particular philosophy. What environmentalists failed to understand, Thomas Shepard told the Soap and Detergent Association, was that “man must settle for less than perfection, for less than zero risk, if he is to flourish.” Modern society, Norman Podhoretz explained in Commentary, echoing Shepard’s sentiment, involved “a continuing series of bargains—with nature, with the past, with the future—and to make a good life is to make the soundest and fairest bargains we can.” Driving these bargains and these balances between risk and flourishing was what Shepard called “progress” and Podhoretz called “restless growth.”⁶⁷ Material comfort and an expanding economy remained imperative, and were best achieved through market forces made manifest in the choices of consumers and the decisions of chief executives. Government regulation, when it contravened those forces, frustrated modern society’s ordered development.

Faith in the market and concern for the nonhuman world were not mutually exclusive, some economists said. No group thought harder about the philosophical relationship between markets and the environment than did a small school of economists who called themselves “free market environmentalists.” For most interested parties, the authority of the market moved in and out of environmental debates like a summer storm, dramatic but short-lived. For free-market environmentalists, that authority was a permanent feature of the landscape. Sagebrush rebels and their environmental adversaries summoned market incentives when it was convenient—sagebrushers in protesting what they considered government takings of their property, and environmentalists in accusing ranchers of living off the public dole. Free-market environmentalists’ commitment to private property and free enterprise, on the other hand, was doctrinaire and consistent. Free-market environmentalists scoffed at ranchers’ subsidized grazing permits just as readily as they complained about publicly funded national parks and forests. Applying libertarian ideas to natural resources, they argued that property owners’ economic interests in their investments made them the best conservationists of all: forest owners would always be more concerned with conserving trees and wildlife than would forest visitors and forest managers.

The sagebrush rebellion sprang from a growing partisan divide as Westerners increasingly identified with the Republican Party for a variety of cultural, ideological, and self-interested reasons. Free-market environmentalism emerged out of an intellectual movement closer to the philosophical heart of the New Right. As historian Brian Drake has explained, midcentury academic debates about “externalities”—direct costs of doing business, shouldered by those not receiving direct benefits—produced on the one hand environmental critiques of capitalism by economists like Herman Daly and on the other hand capitalist critiques of environmentalism by neoclassical economists. Libertarians in particular called on the market to solve any and all environmental problems and to illustrate the folly of public land management, claiming that private property regimes offered the best protection for natural resources and national parks. Too many environmental problems, the libertarian magazine Reason argued, arose because environmentalists “ignored the way that free markets can cope with shortages by rationing out dwindling supplies and making it profitable to develop substitutes.” The New Right’s belief in the efficiency and effectiveness of markets over governments applied to the nonhuman world as much as to anything else. “It is the absence of the profit system and private property,” Libertarian Review insisted, “not their existence, which causes environmental problems.”68

Montana State economist John Baden gave institutional form to free-market environmentalism by founding a series of think tanks, beginning with the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources in the late 1970s and the Political Economy Research Center (PERC—later renamed the Property and Environment Research Center) in 1980. A steady flow of papers and proposals yielded a modest political response when the Reagan administration tried, unsuccessfully, to privatize public lands in 1982. Baden continued to develop his ideas, founding the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment in 1985. Never considered part of the recognized environmental movement, free-market environmentalists’ views could occasionally accord with those who were. Garrett Hardin’s classic essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” one of the canonical examples of 1970s crisis environmentalism, questioned the wisdom of informally shared resources and pointed, ambiguously, toward either greater state control or else privatization. Crisis environmentalists gravitated toward the first choice, but Hardin and Baden gave room to both possibilities in a co-edited volume called Managing the Commons. In the book’s preface, Hardin and Baden questioned “obsolete sanctions” on the one hand and “independence of individual action” on the other. Aldo Leopold, they pointed out, said that people treated their own property carelessly. Aristotle, they suggested, said the opposite: “What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care,” Aristotle wrote in Politics. “Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common.”69

Despite the ambiguities of ownership, the rhetoric remained clear. In the same way that large industries tried to convince Americans that economic well-being was as much a common good as environmental well-being, Western resource users argued that private property was a public interest, and they questioned whether environmentalists were in fact champions of the commonweal. The New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau urged ranchers to support the sagebrush rebellion-aligned Mountain States Legal Foundation in its lawsuits against federal land management agencies, warning members of the odds stacked against them. “Over one hundred so-called ‘public interest’ law centers have been created in order to represent the ‘public’ in our country’s Judicial System,” the Bureau explained. Environmental groups, in particular, had “completely ignored private property and individual rights.”70

In fact, Western livestock was one of the few issues for which environmentalists raised the importance of private property and free enterprise (although not individual rights) as a counterweight against compromised government agencies. When arguing about ranching, everyone became a free-market environmentalist. “We are increasingly convinced that both the environmental and the economic costs of bureaucratic management of natural resources are excessively and unnecessarily high,” Baden and PERC co-founder Richard Stroup wrote in 1981. “These social costs are generated by perverse institutional structures that give authority to those who do not bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions.”71 The below-market cost of grazing on the public domain, environmentalists Denzel and Nancy Ferguson wrote two years later, “invites overgrazing and makes profitable the grazing of degraded public lands that could not support grazing in a free-market economy.”⁷² Baden and Stroup pointed their fingers at federal managers and the Fergusons pointed at ranchers, but all appealed to the logic of the market as a standard against which to judge public programs.

Protecting grasslands from ranching was one of the least glamorous conservation causes of the 1980s but, according to Earth First!’s Don Schwarzenegger, one of the most urgent, “only eclipsed by the threat of a nuclear winter.”⁷³ Denzel and Nancy Ferguson agreed: “Public resources are seldom managed in the public’s interest,” they wrote in the Earth First! Journal in 1984, “and the dismal results are nowhere more evident than in the use of public lands by private stockmen.” Cattle ran roughshod over the Western landscape because the ranchers that owned them also owned the agencies managing the public domain. “The industry has held the public land management agencies hostage” the Fergusons explained, “and has dispensed intolerable abuses upon loyal and dedicated federal agencies.” In the early 1970s the Fergusons found extensive cattle damage to Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where they managed a field station. They received death threats when they tried to limit grazing at Malheur. That angry response piqued the Fergusons’ interest and a decade later they published Sacred Cows at The Public Trough, an exposé of how ranching destroyed Western public lands for little obvious benefit.⁷⁵ “For any EF!er not to read it is a dereliction,” Schwarzenegger advised.⁷⁶

Environmentalists had long been derelict in the attention they paid to the Western range, and Earth First! believed that at the heart of that myopia were anthropocentric values. People could much more easily cherish lush national forests and majestic national parks for aesthetic enjoyment than they could sparse grasslands. Any visitor knew a logged forest when they saw one, the Fergusons pointed out, while few noticed overgrazed grasslands, “yet the end results may be the same.”77 Lynn Jacobs, Earth First!’s grazing task force coordinator, warned against focusing on faraway places to the neglect of “more level, fertile, and well-watered lands…where species diversity and wildlife numbers are at their greatest.”⁷⁸ Although some scholars have accused radical environmentalists of fetishizing spectacular and remote areas, an ecocentric view could easily lead to greater appreciation of more aesthetically mundane landscapes. Earth First!’s commitment to rangelands was a measure of its commitment to an ecological rather than a romantic perspective.

From an ecological perspective ranching presented a series of dire threats to the nation’s grasslands. According to the Fergusons, cattle trampled soil and destroyed root systems, contributing to desertification; they clustered in riparian zones, removing vegetation, depositing excrement, and eroding streamsides that provided shaded habitat for fish; they destroyed nesting sites for migratory birds; and they triggered a federal predator control program that intentionally wreaked havoc on populations of coyote, bobcat, mountain lion, and wolf, and unintentionally on those of badger, beaver, fox, raccoon, deer, rabbit, and porcupine. “Suffice it to say” Foreman wrote in agreement, “that the livestock industry has probably done more ecological damage to the western United States than any other single agent.”⁷⁹

Addressing this ecological damage meant taking on the ranching industry, and environmentalists waged this fight on two fronts. The first was cultural. The luster of the ranching industry shimmered brightly, and far beyond the plains. “Like other new arrivals in the West,” Edward Abbey admitted to a crowd at the University of Montana in 1985, “I could imagine nothing more romantic than becoming a cowboy.”⁸⁰ Dave Foreman left a brief career as a horseshoer to join the Wilderness Society with his first wife, Debbie Sease. “Our dream, though,” he remembered, “was to be cowboys.”⁸¹ Challenging the heroic cowboy West was a political risk. The Sierra Club’s Brock Evans advised his colleagues against “attacks on either states or states’ rights or upon ranchers” when taking on sagebrush rebels, judging those targets “too much a part of the American mythology.”⁸²

To the Fergusons, reverence for ranching was exactly the problem and had to be revealed as such. “Seldom in history have so many been so thoroughly brainwashed by so few,” they wrote of the cowboy myth.83 Venerated as an example of Western hardihood and individualism, the cowboy was, Abbey finally concluded, “a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.”⁸⁴ The barbed wire fences that historian Walter Prescott Webb once celebrated as an innovation essential to wresting a living from a harsh environment were, for the Fergusons, “a truly alarming cause of wildlife mortality” that tangled pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and moose calves in fatal snares.⁸⁵ Ranching destroyed far more than it returned. Environmentalists rattled off the numbers: cattle grazing on public lands produced only 3 percent of the nation’s beef supply, cost the treasury twice what it contributed, and disproportionately benefited ranchers with large herds and landholdings. Ranchers were less risk-taking entrepreneurs building a market economy than mooches draining public funds to wreck public lands. “The proud, independent rancher as the paragon of the free enterprise system?” Foreman asked. “Forget it, he’s a welfare bum.”⁸⁶

The second front, related to the first, was economic. The most vulnerable point in the Western ranching industry’s political armor was the below-market grazing fees on BLM land that amounted to public subsidies. In the late 1960s several federal agencies determined that fair market value was five times BLM rates, and in the 1980s the BLM and Forest Service reviewed their fee formulas. Simply raising the rates could drive ranching off public lands, which is exactly what Earth First! wanted. Standard direct-action tactics would be little help in this fight. “Laying down in front of a herd of cows,” Schwarzenegger advised, “is just a good way to ‘git cow shit on ya.’ ”⁸⁷ Instead, Earth First!ers chose to forego blockades and ally themselves with market forces, becoming fierce advocates of either a competitive bidding process that would help establish a market-based price or, better yet, an open bidding process that would allow environmentalists to bid against ranchers and let the market determine best uses.

“Competitive bidding is the basis of a free-market economy, is democratic, and is standard practice in most federal operations,” the Fergusons wrote.88 In this range war, environmentalists embraced the idea, if only temporarily, that compromised federal agencies managed the public domain for private interests while private enterprise furthered the public interest by conserving resources. Earth First! became a grudging cheerleader for David Stockman, the director of Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, who was willing to wave his cost-cutting axe dangerously close to several political third rails. While in most arenas environmentalists aggressively fought the Reagan administration’s budget-cutting and deregulatory approach to government, when it came to ranching on public lands, Schwarzenegger suggested, “the consistent application of ‘Reaganomics’ could just conceivably bring about the demise of that industry.”⁸⁹

Even mainstream environmental groups began to discern the limits of their partnership with the federal government in the 1980s, but radical groups like Earth First! more readily explored other means of staving off industrial development, even if that meant fighting occasional allies and aligning with frequent enemies. Never partisan and rarely ideological other than in its commitment to ecocentrism, Earth First! could find common cause with some conservatives. Radicals’ deep skepticism of capitalism as a handmaiden of industrial society prevented any enduring affiliation with the New Right, but frustration with government could make market-based solutions more appealing. In the absence of federal management, markets offered an alternative source of order.

Radical environmentalists’ fury over Forest Service policy was consistent with their view of James Watt as symptom rather than cause. Unlike the BLM, Park Service, and Fish & Wildlife Service, the Forest Service fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture and so outside of Watt’s purview. And yet, Earth First! argued, the Forest Service epitomized an ethos of reckless industrial growth better than any other federal resource agency. “Although some conservationists believe the Forest Service road building binge to be largely the result of a massive Reagan Administration conspiracy,” Wolke wrote, “the fact is that it is actually the result of three quarters of a century’s bureaucratic growth,” and “an almost religious belief in the anthropocentric idea of ‘multiple use.’ ” Wolke—whose disgust with the Forest Service exceeded that of any five Earth First!ers combined—saw the agency as little more than a means of harvesting natural resources to feed an ever-expanding economy. Environmentalists would have to redefine the agency’s reason for existence. Short of that, Wolke said, “we’re merely pissin’ in the wind.”⁹¹

An ethos of industrial growth began with roads, as David Brower recognized in the mid-twentieth century when the Tioga Road fight put him on the path to militancy. Any possibility for development in wilderness started with a road, and a road multiplied such possibilities exponentially. The “road building binge” that Wolke wrote about was a Forest Service plan for 75,000 miles of roads through RARE II roadless areas by the end of the century, roads that would disqualify those areas from wilderness designation. Earth First! regularly called Forest Service employees “Freddies,” a derogatory term borrowed from rural Westerners’ disdain for all federal agents, but in this case revelations about a massive roadbuilding program came from the Freddies themselves. An anonymous group of foresters known as “Deep Root” warned major media about the Forest Service’s pronounced bias toward logging and about the roads that would result. “There’s absolutely no question that the reason for all these roads in virgin areas is to make sure the land can never be included in a wilderness,” one Deep Root forester from Montana told the Washington Post.⁹²

The Forest Service’s penchant for fragmenting wildlife habitat by building roads into de facto wilderness kept the agency at the top of Earth First!’s enemies list throughout the 1980s. Earth First!ers fought Forest Service logging roads, timber sales, and mineral leases in Oregon’s Willamette and Siskiyou Forests, California’s Stanislaus and Los Padres Forests, Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton Forest, Montana’s Gallatin Forest, Washington’s Mount Baker-Snoqualmie Forest, Texas’s Sam Houston Forest, and Utah’s Dixie Forest, among others. Despite all of these actions and despite mainstream groups like the Sierra Club pushing hard for a reduction in the Forest Service’s roadbuilding budget, in late 1986 Congress allocated $229 million for forest roads—$50 million more than the agency itself had requested. Wolke, recently released from several months in prison for pulling up survey stakes on a proposed road in the Bridger-Teton Forest, was livid. “The deeper one delves into the seething caldron of bureaucratic idiocy,” he wrote, “the more one is repelled by the stink of the iniquitous. As I continue to learn about the US Forest Service and its roadbuilding mania I am forced to conclude that the major missing ingredient in the battle against the vile agency is widespread physical resistance.”93

A little over a year later, on John Muir’s 150th birthday, Earth First! put Wolke’s suggestion into practice. Coordinated by Earth First! stalwart Karen Pickett, the “National Day of Outrage” against the Forest Service on April 21, 1988 consisted of close to one hundred protests from California to New England. Earth First! activists and their friends held rallies outside of Forest Service facilities in big cities and tiny towns. Earth First!er David Barron, dressed as Smokey Bear, offered his resignation to a San Francisco regional office along with 150 other protesters. The Forest Service hid sensitive equipment at some offices, mobilized the Federal Protective Service at others, and in Washington, D.C. put the Department of Agriculture’s headquarters on heightened alert.⁹⁴

Direct action was a way to oppose the Forest Service but not necessarily to remake it. That required addressing the presumed shortcomings of public agencies. “The Forest Service is the epitome of all that is wrong with bureaucracy, from the Bureau of Reclamation to the Kremlin,” Wolke said.95 W. Robert Brothers (also known as “Bobcat”) called the agency an “entrenched bureaucracy infected with top-level corruption.”⁹⁶ Requirements for working in the Forest Service, an Earth First!er named “Skoal Vengeance” argued, “should first include a love for the outdoors, and should not include a lust for advancement in a bureaucracy.”⁹⁷ Earth First!’s view of the Forest Service was not unlike that of free-market environmentalists’. John Baden and Richard Stroup described federal resource agencies as incentivized by little more than protecting individual jobs and agency funding, operating with a lack of accountability in the form of either profits or votes and so with enormous latitude for self-interested decision-making.

Free-market environmentalists prescribed market-based incentives as a cure for bureaucratic inertia, and radical environmentalists seriously considered this view. Wolke and Brothers dismissed the many “obvious anthropocentric analyses” at a forest symposium that featured Stroup and was put on by the forestry consulting firm Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants (CHEC); but Earth First! listened closely to Randal O’Toole, director of CHEC, persistent critic of the Forest Service, and according to Wolke, “a brilliant forest economist.”⁹⁸ Partial to technical arguments and allergic to sentimental ones, O’Toole spoke a different language than many environmentalists. But when he attacked the Forest Service—as he did in the Earth First! Journal and at a Round River Rendezvous—everyone listened carefully. “If the upper echelons of the Forest Service had any pride remaining,” Foreman said, “they would be crushed by the detailed criticism their plans receive at the hands of forest economist Randal O’Toole.”⁹⁹

The gist of O’Toole’s critique of Forest Service timber sales resembled environmentalists’ complaints about BLM grazing permits: the sales made little sense economically and a great deal of sense bureaucratically. Although the Forest Service’s timber program made money in the aggregate, many individual timber sales amounted to giveaways. The program profited from the cash register forests of the Pacific Northwest and the South while losing money nearly everywhere else. The Wilderness Society made the same argument. “These roads are being built to harvest timber in low-productivity, high-cost areas at a tremendous loss to the taxpayer,” the Society’s chairman, Gaylord Nelson, said of the Forest Service’s massive roadbuilding program.100 But O’Toole’s analysis went further. He argued that economic mismanagement sprang from “budget maximization”—the tendency of bureaucratic agencies to prioritize their own budgets above all other concerns. Because timber programs cost more than recreation and even grazing, because the Forest Service kept more money from timber receipts than any other activity, and because timber production yielded the greatest political returns for those who held the agency’s purse strings, “multiple use” meant timber sales first, second, and third. The solution, O’Toole advised, was “marketization”: decentralizing the agency, eliminating its congressional appropriations, and allowing forest managers to charge market rates for all resources from timber sales to camping permits.¹⁰¹

Earth First!ers tended to agree with O’Toole’s criticisms emphatically and with his proposals sporadically. Brothers found environmentalists’ discomfort with market incentives antiquated, insisting that because of bureaucratic cost-ineffectiveness, “dollar values have now come over to the side of forest ecology, wilderness and watershed protection.”¹⁰² Wolke remained only partially convinced. He supported much of O’Toole’s plan but regretted that it was “based on economic, not intrinsic, values” and “would not promote biocentric management in areas where logging really is economically sound.”¹⁰³

In fact, environmentalists were gradually winning the fight over forest reform in the 1980s, too gradually for their own tastes and too imperceptibly for many to appreciate. Even more than the BLM, the Forest Service slowly reined in its emphasis on industrial production. The aesthetic appreciation of forests advanced by groups like the Sierra Club, the increasing incidence of and anger over clear cutting, and Nixon-era environmental laws all served as leverage for the application of new ecological ideas about forest management in the late-twentieth century. Scientists emphasized the need for foresters to consider biological and structural diversity, wildlife habitat, and old growth in addition to the maximum sustainable yield of timber. As local and national environmental organizations used ecological insights to criticize federal forest management, foresters entered into a period of soul-searching and forestry schools trained a new generation of ecologically-minded managers. Pressure from outside and inside the Forest Service prompted whistleblowers like Deep Root, groups like Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and a 1989 forest supervisors conference in Tucson at which supervisors expressed dismay at the agency’s stubborn focus on timber.¹⁰⁴

Still, Earth First! and O’Toole were not wrong in their deprecations against bureaucratic inertia. The transformation of a fixed agency like the Forest Service took decades, the persistent agitation of several organized and vocal stakeholders, and most importantly a coherent set of ideas that could compete with the internal logic already in place. Here environmentalists and economists shared a distrust in public agencies that was the flip side of a greater faith in some larger order. “Marketization” fell several steps behind the privatization pushed by free-market environmentalists, but it rested on the same basic premise as privatization and ecocentric management: reform had to come from without. Politicians, bureaucrats, and their various constituencies often made poor decisions about natural resources and would make similarly poor decisions about structuring any agency in which they remained invested. Remaking the Forest Service depended on some countervailing force—for free-market environmentalists a system of economic incentives, and for radical environmentalists a system of ecological imperatives. In both cases, redemption lay in an order beyond that of central planners and political institutions.

“Indeed,” the writer and environmentalist Michael Pollan observes, “the wilderness ethic and laissez-faire economics, antithetical as they might at first appear, are really mirror images of one another.”105 O’Toole agreed: “Although these two groups appear to represent polar extremes,” he wrote of PERC and Earth First!, “in fact there are many similarities between them.” Both groups shunned interest-group politics, he explained, and both championed decentralization. And although PERC opposed public lands and Earth First! distrusted capitalism, “markets are the key to reforming public land management,” O’Toole said, “because they most clearly resemble a natural ecosystem.”¹⁰⁶ The free-market environmentalist M. Bruce Johnson liked to point out that the study of interconnectedness in ecology reflected similar interests in economics. “General equilibrium models are a formal way of saying that ‘everything depends on everything else,’ ” he said. Given the similarities, “one wonders why a partnership between the two was not formed in the natural course of events.”¹⁰⁷ Lack of faith in government as an expression of a shared ethic led to a conceptual instability that required, for ballast, some larger sense of order, whether of nature or of markets.

The odd correspondence between laissez-faire economic thought and environmentalism arose from a mutual distrust of liberal individualism. Libertarianism is often understood as a philosophy based on reason, individual freedom, and the realization of human potential, but it can just as easily be understood as rooted in the limits of reason and the folly of individuals. This streak of doubt within libertarianism is primarily the legacy of the Austrian School of Economics, whose main exponents—including Ludwig von Mises but in particular Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard—found in the free market an order that countered the limitations of human reason. Hayek was a libertarian not because he had complete faith in individual human freedom, but because he didn’t. The point of rules, for Hayek, was to make up for the fact that people did not know enough to make the right decisions all of the time, and the utility of any set of rules was only as sound as the limited knowledge of its authors. The state, therefore, could never regulate deliberately what the market could regulate organically. Hayek called this organic regulation “spontaneous order,” and although he believed it arose from the aggregate of choices made by free individuals acting in their own interests, he speculated, as John Gray explains, that it might be found “not only in the population biology of animal species, but in the formation of crystals and even galaxies.”108

This unease with human design and acceptance of an order beyond human estimation could bring together environmentalism and libertarianism philosophically, despite their profound differences politically. Although they disagreed on nearly all the specifics, both radical and free-market environmentalists subscribed to an order beyond the confines of the human imagination. Ric Bailey gestured toward such an order when he represented Earth First! at a hearing on wilderness held by Oregon’s Senator Mark Hatfield and said, “There is more to the scheme of life than the devices of man.”¹⁰⁹ Dave Foreman made a similar point by asking, “What right does a man with a life span of seventy years have to destroy a two thousand year old redwood to make picnic tables?”¹¹⁰ Stephanie Mills reflected more explicitly on human limits after participating in the 1985 Round River Rendezvous, writing, “Some say we are trapped in the solipsism of human consciousness and that there are no absolutes save those we choose. Yet the evidence of ecological destruction that mounts all around us suggests that we may not have infinite latitude for self-definition after all; that, in Paul Ehrlich’s mordant phrase, ‘Nature bats last.’ ”¹¹¹ Nancy Newhall summarized this sense of order most succinctly in a justification for wilderness that David Brower frequently repeated: “The wilderness holds answers to more questions than we yet know how to ask.”¹¹²

Radical environmentalists’ in betweenness was a source of both tension and advantage. Earth First!ers pilloried the Forest Service, the BLM, and even the Wilderness Act itself at the same time as they treated national forests and statutory wilderness as sacrosanct. They lay down in front of bulldozers when federal laws were a hindrance and filed administrative appeals when those laws were a help. And they argued, at turns, that wilderness was either a national inheritance or something beyond nation, law, and even the human capacity to understand. Radicals could not always explain or reconcile their inconsistencies from one case to the next but they rarely lost track of their ultimate commitment to ecocentric principles, even when those principles butted heads with democracy and the state.

Earth First!’s willingness to challenge the state’s authority and competence positioned it, at times, alongside conservatives and their own hostility toward centralized power. Environmental anarchists and free-market libertarians could momentarily put aside their considerable differences before a common enemy like the Forest Service. Both groups believed that there was a larger order that called into question a human-devised state order, and even called into question human reason itself, but the different orders to which the groups appealed—a natural one and an economic one—were finally irreconcilable. “Privitization [sic] is not some flimflam scam hatched by Marlboro men in the sagebrush of Nevada,” Foreman warned in 1982. “It is a serious thrust launched by neo-conservative intellectuals and free-market economists.”¹¹⁴