The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism

“I believe that any movement immune from criticism, especially from internal evaluation and analysis, will become uncreative, stodgy, bureaucratic, and undemocratic,” Dave Foreman wrote in 1987 with what would prove to be unintended irony.¹ That year, fault lines within Earth First! became unmistakable, and at the end of the decade they began to rupture. The enthusiasm of Earth First! supporters derived from the power and the clarity of the group’s animating idea: that protecting wild nature should take priority over all other concerns. By the late 1980s, that idea shifted from an article of faith to a subject of intense debate. Increasingly, dissident voices within Earth First! informed by anarchism, feminism, and a broad sense of social justice insisted on the importance of taking into account social difference, and highlighted the risks of a strictly ecocentric perspective.

Among the greatest risks of an ecocentric perspective was holism, and in particular the view that human beings and nonhuman nature stood across a growing divide. To understand wild nature as existentially threatened by human presence was to understand the two as mutually exclusive. William Cronon has called this view the “central paradox” of the idea of wilderness, “a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural.”2 Radical environmentalists could easily fall into this trap, judging nature pure and humans profane and the two forever at odds. “In this era of humanity’s suicidal brutality,” an Earth First! supporter from Utah said, “any attempt to love Nature by loving mankind is like jumping off a cliff in order to save one’s life. Philanthropists ask us to side with the villain in a worldwide conflict. I’ll stick with the only side that has any hope of winning in the end.”³ The notion of environmentalism as a “worldwide conflict” between humans and the natural world remained a persistent undertone in Earth First!’s rhetoric, sometimes veering into misanthropy. Like crisis environmentalists, radical environmentalists of the 1980s too often placed the blame for environmental destruction on an undifferentiated human species, refusing to consider relative culpability and the ways that social justice and environmental protection might inform each other. At its worst, this sort of dualism led radicals to advocate reducing the human population through any means and with little regard for who should be left to die.

Critics of Earth First! tended to assume that radical environmentalists embraced this dualistic view always and without qualification, but as readily as radicals spoke of nature’s virtues and humanity’s vices when they decried environmental destruction, in their own circles they wrestled with how, as Earth First!er W. J. Lines put it, “humans are both inextricably of, and separate from, nature.”⁴ Behind the occasional declarations of humanity’s fundamental corruption was the more common Earth First! view that humans in the modern, industrial world had fallen away from a close and vital relationship with nonhuman nature. “For over 99 percent of our history,” Jamie Sayen of Earth First! and Preserve Appalachian Wilderness wrote in 1989, “we have been a part of the wild.”⁵ In this sense, radical environmentalists differed only in degree and not in kind from more established environmentalists like the Wilderness Society’s Howard Zahniser, who said in 1951, “We are a part of the wildness of the universe. That is our nature”; or the Sierra Club’s David Brower, who wrote in 1969, “It may seem strange to link a love of the human condition with the wilderness experience, but the two are only different aspects of the same consciousness.”⁶ At times radical environmentalists dismissed the human species as a purely destructive force. Much more often they struggled to reconcile industrial society’s insatiable appetite with humanity’s place in the nonhuman world.

The late 1980s were a period of intense political and intellectual conflict for Earth First! As the group enjoyed its greatest renown and influence, antagonists from within the broad environmental movement pointed to the serious limitations of radical environmentalism’s perfunctory consideration of social justice. That critique fractured and then changed Earth First! into a group less exclusively dedicated to ecocentrism. Throughout it all, Earth First! and its critics contended with what Cronon calls “the old dilemma about whether human beings are inside or outside of nature,” the same dilemma that runs and shifts through all environmentalism.7

Edward Abbey novels bookended Earth First!’s tenure as the nation’s most controversial environmental group. The Monkey Wrench Gang, a story of eco-sabotage throughout the Southwest, gained fame just a few years before a band of disaffected conservationists traveled to the Pinacate Desert and imagined a new, more militant environmental group. A sequel, Hayduke Lives!, came out in 1990, the year Earth First! began to reorganize and redefine its message and the year after Abbey himself died. Edward Abbey’s life and writing intertwined with Earth First! through direct participation and equally direct inspiration. Looking back on his career with Earth First! soon after he left the group, Dave Foreman described one of the initial goals of its founders as “To inspire others to carry out activities straight from the pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang.”⁸ Abbey’s novels delineated a view of the relationship between people and their communities, their governments, and their natural environments. In that view, people stood collectively apart from nature, separated by a line between civilization and wilderness. But as individuals they could cross that line and begin to commune with the wild, and to defend it.

Abbey was not a naturalist or “nature-writer” in any conventional sense. “The only birds I can recognize without hesitation are the turkey vulture, the fried chicken, and the rosy-bottomed skinny-dipper,” he wrote. “If a label is required say that I am one who loves unfenced country. The open range.” It was not just the absence of taxonomical knowledge that distinguished Abbey from more conventional nature writers but also what was present in his work: attitude, opinion, and an argumentative personality. While others concerned with the natural world tried to step out of their readers’ way and offer a quiet and unobstructed view, Abbey always remained within sight and within earshot. He was probably the only environmental hero who could get away with writing about tossing empty beer cans out of the window of a moving vehicle (and, by implication, opening full beer cans in a moving vehicle); contemplating wilderness while blasting across a stream in a pickup truck; and disdaining in equal measure tourists, hippies, and park rangers.9

“If Abbey is not a naturalist…then just what is the place of the environmental theme in his writing?” Donn Rawlings asked Wilderness Society supporters in 1980.¹⁰ The place of the “environmental theme” was at the very center of Abbey’s dispute with the modern world. He wrote about nature to make a point. Abbey could write as floridly as John Muir and as contemplatively as Thoreau, but he usually chose not to. Unlike Muir and Thoreau, Abbey relied on humor in his writing, and more than Muir or even Thoreau, he expressed anger. Abbey’s fictional characters, as well as the persona he adopted for his personal essays, spoke bitter and profane words. They had little respect for authority of any kind and were generally looking for a fight. Abbey did not concern himself with subtleties and details; he was an advocate of “big nature”—large, wild spaces, the open range—and this gave his writing the sort of clarity that comes from a point of view uncomplicated by any concession to nuance. He enjoyed nature on a scale that allowed for an obvious distinction between the civilized and the wild, and he did not spend time exploring the ways that the human and nonhuman worlds ran together, as did nature writers like Edward Hoagland and Wendell Berry. “As I said to Hoagland: ‘It is no longer sufficient to describe the world of nature. The point is to defend it,’ ” Abbey wrote in his journal in the late 1970s. “He writes back accusing me of trying to ‘bully’ him into writing in my manner. Which is true, I was. He should.”¹¹ Abbey saw a clear line between the modern, industrialized world and the wild places about which he wrote, and he patrolled that line without apology or ambivalence.

That clear line meant that Abbey took an interest in wilderness above all else. Wilderness for Abbey, and later for Earth First!, stood as the clearest example of not-human, not-technology, not-civilization. This was not an absolutist view. Abbey understood how complicated and subtle an idea wilderness was, and even that it owed a great deal to the human imagination, but to him that made it no less vital or wild. “The boundary around a wilderness area,” he wrote, “may well be an artificial, self-imposed, sophisticated construction, but once inside that line you discover the artificiality beginning to drop away; and the deeper you go, the longer you stay, the more interesting things get.”12

Abbey first drew his line in the sand between wilderness and civilization in Arches National Monument in southern Utah, where he worked for several scattered seasons over the course of a decade as a ranger with the National Park Service. He described his experiences and his thoughts in Desert Solitaire, the book that gained him recognition before The Monkey Wrench Gang made him famous. Desert Solitaire established a set of ideas, principles, and complaints that reappeared in most of Abbey’s writing. “There is a cloud on my horizon,” he wrote. “A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.” Progress, in the immediate sense, took the form of the development of national parks, with roads, power lines, and designated campgrounds. Behind that specific version of progress, though, were a series of assumptions. The starkest and the most explicit was the unquestioning embrace of industrial development. Subtler and more insidious was the view that Abbey attributed to the Park Service: “that although wilderness is a fine thing, certain compromises and adjustments are necessary in order to meet the ever-expanding demand for outdoor recreation.” At the base of that view lay the assumption that national parks should be user-friendly, and that an infrastructure built for cars was friendliest to users. “Is this assumption correct?” Abbey asked. “Perhaps. Does that justify the continued and increasing erosion of the parks? It does not.”¹³

The essential points Abbey made in his case against “industrial tourism” were the same that David Brower and those closest to him began to make in the 1940s, and that later inspired Earth First! Those points were that unquestioning support of industrial progress was an untenable position; that those government agencies which claimed to protect natural resources and natural places inevitably compromised their principles; that compromise led to the destruction of nature; and that the most popular views were not necessarily the best. Taken together, those principles led to a single conclusion: if development was wrong, if federal protection was weak, and if only a significant minority understood this, then wilderness could be lost forever, “despite the illusory protection of the Wilderness Preservation Act [sic], unless a great many citizens rear up on their hind legs and make vigorous political gestures demanding implementation of the Act.”14 Passive reliance on democratic processes and public agencies would not protect the wild. Only active efforts by dedicated individuals could slow the advance of industrial progress.

Abbey’s distrust of federal agencies came as much from personal philosophy as from personal experience. He relied on legal protections for public lands but believed those protections emerged despite rather than because of the normal operations of government. Like many in Earth First!, Abbey was a casual anarchist. Anarchist ideas animated the essays and opinion pieces that populated the Earth First! Journal alongside action reports and campaign updates. Earth First!’s principles and beliefs, which justified its tactics, grew mostly out of deep ecology but also out of anarchist thought. Although sometimes obscured from view, anarchism provided a crucial framework for the discussions that nourished radical environmentalism early in the 1980s and for the disputes that fragmented it later in the decade (see figure 5.1).

The most fundamental tenets of anarchism are that human freedom is paramount, that institutionalized authority represses that freedom, and that a society without institutionalized authority—in particular, without government—is both feasible and desirable. Government does not foster social harmony; it stifles it. Social harmony is the natural tendency of people left to order their own communities, and formal government takes that initiative, and that tendency, away from people. “Man is born free,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “and everywhere he is in chains.”15 As soon as a community cedes its decision-making power to a distant government, even a democratic one, it has resigned its members to being governed as abstractions rather than as complete people. The belief that the authority of the government derives from the consent of the governed assumes that such consent is granted by every citizen, every minute, regardless of whether citizens were present at the government’s founding. According to anarchists, this belief, and the moral authority that it claims, is a fiction.

Whether radical or not, environmentalists had no inherent interest in championing freedom, decrying authority, and dismantling government—the crisis environmentalists of the 1970s found themselves arguing for the exact opposite, at least in the short term—but many of the corollaries to the central tenets of anarchism overlapped with the ethics of radical environmentalism. Most immediately, anarchism offered a cogent critique of conventional democratic procedures. Anarchists found the principle of majority rule baffling. They believed that reason and experience, not the weight of popular opinion, should determine outcomes. The aim should be overwhelming agreement through direct participation rather than a simple show of hands. For radical environmentalists frustrated with the federal agencies in charge of managing public lands and natural resources, anarchism’s insistence on more local and more grassroots forms of control were appealing. Although their views of decision-making and especially of human reason differed considerably, anarchists had long made the same complaints about representative democracy that environmentalists began to make in the 1970s: that it granted authority to far-away bureaucrats, that it remained vulnerable to corruption, and that it tended to satisfy no one.¹⁶

Because they objected to the rule of the majority and to being directed by any institutionalized authority, anarchists often relied on direct action to achieve their ends. Direct action centered on personal decision-making, not on rules from above, and could encompass anything from violence to civil disobedience to cooperative enterprises. The point, for anarchists (as for environmentalists), was to allow individuals and small groups to advance a political position on their own and through their own methods. Whether a sit-down strike in a factory or a tree-sit in a redwood forest, direct action worked on the basis of individual initiative or group consensus, and it avoided immediate participation in the political system it was meant to disrupt.¹⁷

The most meaningful and the most complicated overlap between anarchism and radical environmentalism, however, was the notion of a natural order. A great deal of distance stood between anarchist and environmental conceptions of it, but that distance shrank considerably when seen from a height that could take in liberal individualism’s deep skepticism of natural order. Liberal thinkers generally saw government as a necessary protection against the perils of a state of nature. Anarchists saw government as an obstacle to people’s inherent tendency toward social harmony. Rejecting government without eschewing order, anarchists were left in need of a source of structure outside of human invention, one without the authority and hierarchy that inevitably accompanied religion. Many turned instead to an immanent order that included but did not originate with people. “Society,” for anarchists, was a product of nature, of the natural order that people were part of when uninhibited by human institutions. Society predated government, and was corrupted by it. “Underlying the perfectionist view,” writes George Crowder, referring to the anarchist faith in the human capacity for reason and morality, “is an assumption of ultimate harmony in the universe.”18

Anarchists’ idealized views of a social order rooted in nature have had them perpetually looking over their shoulders at what has already gone by. Despite the reasonable association of anarchists with revolution and with wiping clean the slate, they have often been fixated on long ago. Anarchists’ affinity for a natural order, though, is at once focused on the past and also ahistorical. The anarchist conception of long ago is, George Woodcock writes, “a kind of amalgam of all those societies which have lived—or are supposed to have lived—by co-operation rather than by organized government.”¹⁹ And this sort of political nostalgia has lent anarchists a kind of “primitivism,” an often romantic affection for communities further from the industrial revolution and seemingly closer to nature. The anarchist call for decentralization and for society on a smaller scale has usually been coupled with a call for simplification in terms of technology, social structure, and politics. Generally, the simpler the society the greater the virtue anarchists have found in it. Looking forward, for anarchists, has always meant looking back.

Environmentalists, too, held the distant past in high regard—if not the explicit past then contemporary cultures that suggested to them historical alternatives to modern society. Abbey took the side of Navajo and Hopi traditionalists against the industrial development of reservation land, at least rhetorically. Foreman enthused to Earth First!ers about a speech by American Indian activist Russell Means at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering in 1980. Means criticized the European intellectual tradition—linear, rational, abstract thought, or what Means called “the despiritualization of the universe”—in terms similar to radical environmentalists’ own critique. Rationality, Means said, “is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order.” Against the European mind, Means offered the wisdom of cultures opposed to industrial civilization. “Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people, and of other correct peoples.”20 This cyclical view, in which a better future means a return to tradition and so to the natural order, is as persistent in environmental thought as it is in anarchist thought. Because of this, radical environmentalists embraced traditional cultures, in theory if not always in practice.

Bookchin grew up in New York surrounded by radical politics; his parents were Russian immigrants and members of the Industrial Workers of the World. As an adolescent he joined the Communist Party, but disillusioned by Stalinism and the Popular Front, he slowly moved away from communism and toward anarchism. At the same time, Bookchin grew interested in the effects of capitalism on the natural and human environment, writing about chemicals and industrial pollutants under the pseudonym “Lewis Herber.” In 1962 he published Our Synthetic Environment, a study of the environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Although well received, Our Synthetic Environment was overshadowed six months later by Rachel Carson’s less far-reaching but more pointed and eloquent Silent Spring. At the end of the decade Bookchin founded Ecology Action East in New York City, inspired by the radical politics of Berkeley’s Ecology Action.²²

For years before and after Earth Day, Bookchin’s interest in environmental issues grew as a part of his interest in anarchism and social freedom. In 1982 these various tributaries came together in The Ecology of Freedom, his major work. The book’s central premise was that the domination of nature by humans was a product of the domination of humans by humans. “Indeed, like it or not,” Bookchin said, “nearly every ecological issue is also a social issue.” The essential problem, according to Bookchin, was not class structure, or impersonal technology, or unjust laws—although these were all part of the problem—but rather the existence of hierarchy. Systems of hierarchy, he believed, structured the way that people thought about each other, about themselves, and about the natural world. Hierarchy nurtured the complementary assumptions that only through authority by some over others could society function, and only through authority of people over nature could society exist. At the root of modern environmental and social problems was the unequal distribution of power among people and between species.²³

Human society and the natural world, for Bookchin, were in many ways distinct: people had achieved a degree of separation from wild nature that no other species had. But Bookchin also believed that society and nature were not inherently opposed; whatever opposition existed between the human and the natural worlds emerged from hierarchical thought. Much of The Ecology of Freedom took up the history and prehistory of this opposition. One of the great conundrums of anarchism was the question of how and why people structured societies along lines of authority and domination if that was not their natural tendency. Bookchin had little new to say about why, but he had a great deal more to say about how.

Like radical environmentalists and his fellow anarchists, Bookchin idealized the distant past. In The Ecology of Freedom he celebrated the Neolithic period, or late Stone Age, an era of hunter-gatherer peoples and early agricultural communities. Bookchin called this world “organic society” and praised Neolithic peoples’ egalitarianism and rich sense of the natural world. Communal ties guaranteed that all members of a community were provided for, and nature was understood as abundant rather than “stingy” and so something from which sustenance could be coaxed and carefully drawn forth rather than heedlessly and urgently extracted. Neolithic agriculturists did not establish rank or status among each other, Bookchin explained, nor did they assert their own superiority over their surroundings. A sense of mutual benefit within the community encouraged a sense of mutual benefit between the community and its environment. Gradually, however, this balance shifted. “And thence” Bookchin wrote, “came the long wintertime of domination and oppression we normally call ‘civilization.’ ”24

How did civilization happen? According to Bookchin, in stages so gradual as to be noticeable only between rather than within generations: Hierarchy first emerged in the form of gerontocracy, a deference toward elders that at least afforded all members of a community the opportunity to achieve superior status. Stratification by gender was more exclusionary and more influential. Conflict between societies led to warrior cultures that privileged men and elevated the civic sphere over the domestic. Not all men joined the warrior class but few if any women could, and so the growing importance of warriors and civic leaders meant the growing subjugation of women. The final and greatest break from organic society was the decline of “the blood oath,” an affiliation based on clan, tribe, or village rendered obsolete as urban life minimized familial bonds. The city eclipsed the village, and civic relationships replaced ancestral ties. Communal use of resources declined as private property arose and a system of economic and class relations redefined social life. In the absence of the blood oath, impersonal, economic relations produced the state, “the institutionalized apex of male civilization,” and finally capitalism, “the point of absolute negativity for society and the natural world.”25

So deep set was modern society’s domination of nature that simple reform was little more than fool’s gold. The moderate tone of environmentalism and its tendency toward compromise irritated Bookchin enough that he chose “ecology” rather than “environmentalism” to identify his own philosophy. “Environmentalism, conceived as a piecemeal reform movement,” he wrote later, “easily lends itself to the lure of statecraft, that is, to participation in electoral, parliamentary, and party-oriented activities.” The mainstream environmental movement participated in the politics of the state and in all of the inherently corrupt and authority-driven practices that such participation meant to an anarchist. Those who succumbed to this temptation were “obliged to function within the State, ultimately to become blood of its blood and bone of its bone.”²⁶ Bookchin, in other words, voiced much the same criticism of mainstream environmentalism as did Earth First! and writers who identified as deep ecologists. Earth First!, in turn, frequently pointed to Bookchin as a canonical environmental thinker.

This made it all the more surprising when in the summer of 1987, Bookchin publicly attacked deep ecology, Earth First!, and anyone associated with either, branding them as the most dangerous elements within the broad environmental movement. His keynote speech for the National Green Gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts was largely a denunciation of deep ecology. Bookchin began by applauding the environmental movement’s increasing skepticism toward the “shopworn Earth Day approach” of conventional politics. Then he warned that any genuinely radical perspective could not accept the premises of deep ecology. Never one for rhetorical restraint, Bookchin called deep ecology “a black hole of half-digested, ill-formed, and half-baked ideas,” an “ideological toxic dump.” Its adherents were “barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones, and outright social reactionaries,” and David (Bookchin insisted on the more formal version of his name) Foreman was an “eco-brute.” Deep ecology and Earth First! offered one possible road for the environmental movement, Bookchin argued, at the end of which was reaction, xenophobia, and misanthropy.27

Earth First! brought Bookchin’s anger down on itself. At the Amherst conference, Bookchin responded particularly to public remarks by Foreman and Abbey and to several controversial pieces in the Earth First! Journal. In a 1986 interview with Bill Devall, Foreman had suggested that U.S. aid to relieve starvation in Ethiopia was counterproductive and would simply delay the inevitable, leading to even more suffering. The best thing, Foreman said, was to “let nature seek its own balance.” In the same interview he advocated immigration restriction because immigrants amounted to “more pressure on the resources we have in the USA.”²⁸ Abbey was famously hostile to immigration from the south as well, not only because of its supposed environmental impact but also its attendant “alien mode of life which—let us be honest about this—is not appealing to the majority of Americans.”²⁹ Most controversial, however, was an article in the Earth First! Journal about the AIDS epidemic. “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS,” wrote the pseudonymous “Miss Ann Thropy.” AIDS, the author wrote hopefully, “has the potential to end industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crisis.”³⁰ In Bookchin’s mind, such remarks captured the callous disregard that was the essence of Earth First!’s uncompromising view.

The controversy highlighted the overlap between crisis environmentalism and radical environmentalism. Both started from the premise that there existed a planetary environmental crisis, and both found a clear path from that premise to various solutions of last resort, including totalitarianism and starvation. Of particular concern was population pressure. The fear of surpassing the planet’s carrying capacity had sparked crisis environmentalism in the 1970s and sat at the center of radical environmentalism in the 1980s. This “new Malthusianism” was, to Bookchin, “the most sinister ideological development of all.”31 He had long been wary of the holism that it promoted. Even as he lamented the misguided reformism of mainstream environmentalism in the 1970s, Bookchin made clear that Paul Ehrlich and Zero Population Growth spoke an accusatory language that conflated victims and perpetrators and ignored the role of capitalism in environmental destruction. “This ethos,” Bookchin wrote, “already crystallized into the ‘life-boat ethic,’ ‘triage,’ and a new bourgeois imagery of ‘claw-and-fang’ called survivalism marks the first steps toward ecofascism.”³² Throughout his career, Bookchin remained committed to the idea that the late twentieth century was a post-scarcity era. In the 1960s this idea buttressed his claim that Marxism was outdated and should make way for a revolutionary politics unbounded by class interest. Two decades later he used the idea of a fecund nature to counter the concept of overpopulation. In the first instance he pointed to technology as the source of abundance and in the second to the cornucopia of nature, but his point remained the same: fear of scarcity was a chain that bound people to a limited set of ideas. In this sense, Bookchin was a rarity in the 1980s—an optimistic environmentalist.

The Amherst speech touched off two years of heated exchange between supporters of Earth First! and supporters of social ecology that poured onto the pages of the mainstream and alternative press. The recriminations flew back and forth. Bookchin repeatedly used the term “eco-fascist” to describe elements within Earth First! R. Wills Flowers of Earth First! called social ecology little more than “a restatement of the old Left/Liberal/Marxist/Progressive social reform ideology,” and Bill Devall complained about the “verbal assaults, personal attacks, nonsense, and rubbish” coming from Bookchin and his allies, before stressing the importance of “cordial relationships.”³³ The Utne Reader quoted Bookchin as saying Garrett Hardin, Edward Abbey, and Earth First! promoted racism. Abbey suggested Bookchin consult a dictionary. Bookchin again called Abbey a racist and a fascist (this time without the modifier), and Abbey called Bookchin a “fat old woman.”³⁴

Into this already messy fray jumped the editors of Fifth Estate. Created in the 1960s as an alternative newspaper based in Detroit, Fifth Estate reinvented itself in 1975 as an explicitly anarchist publication. The paper’s writers and editors, like earlier anarchists, considered Marxism little better than capitalism in its focus on production, “a rigid fetter on the mind that can only make us shrink from the real potentials of a human existence.” Skeptical of the premises underlying both capitalism and Marxism they questioned society’s relationship to technology, government, and the natural world.35 As Fifth Estate contributor David Watson wrote in 1981, “The state is only one structural element—albeit an integral one—in a totality which is the bureaucratic-technological megamachine.”³⁶ That “megamachine,” an idea borrowed in part from Lewis Mumford, occupied Fifth Estate’s attention for many years.

Fifth Estate rode a growing wave of frustration with Earth First!’s neglect of social justice. Although Bookchin and the Fifth Estate collective frequently clashed, a shared distaste for deep ecology made them intellectual allies. Under the pseudonym “George Bradford,” Watson published an extended essay in 1989 summarizing his views on deep ecology. The rhetorical title of Watson’s essay, How Deep Is Deep Ecology?, left little suspense as to the answer. From the beginning, Watson followed the social ecological critique. Like Bookchin (and Earth First!), he dismissed the mainstream environmental movement as hopelessly compromised. Like Bookchin, he found deep ecology an unacceptable alternative because it ignored social difference and offered “no really ‘deep’ critique of the state, empire, technology, or capital, reducing the complex web of human relations to a simplistic, abstract, scientistic caricature.” Like Bookchin, he viewed Foreman’s and Abbey’s statements about immigration as possibly “fascist,” and he rejected crisis environmentalists’ belief that overpopulation rather than inequitable distribution caused resource shortages. Much of How Deep Is Deep Ecology? in fact refuted William Catton’s Overshoot, a classic work of crisis environmentalism and a favorite of Earth First! Although more sympathetic to Earth First! than was Bookchin, Watson nevertheless felt that the poverty of the group’s ideas outweighed the enthusiasm of its followers.³⁷

The forces that set apart people from nonhuman nature were, for radicals, historical rather than absolute. Earth First! in fact insisted on a fundamental affiliation between humans and nature. Foreman listed “an awareness that we are animals” as a defining principle of the group, and Earth First! saw one of its greatest obstacles as “the bizarre utilitarian philosophy that separates one specie (Homo sapiens) from its place in the biosphere and from its relationship with the land community and the life cycles of the entire planet.”38 It was modern society and its attendant beliefs that had wrenched humans away from the nonhuman. The split having taken place, however, radical environmentalists tended to blame a collective “humans” for all of the planet’s environmental harms. The sense that people and nature were at odds, even if not inherently, led Earth First! to make the same sort of sweeping accusations against a collective humanity that the crisis environmentalists of the 1970s had leveled. People and nonhuman nature were not sundered forever, but at a great enough distance that radical environmentalists made few distinctions when they cast blame.

Deep ecology, its critics complained, had little to say about class or race or the inequality that global capitalism wrought. And it had little to say about gender, as feminists increasingly pointed out. Lending social ecology’s basic argument a more specific valence, “ecofeminists” claimed that the destruction of nature and the oppression of women mirrored each other. Ariel Kay Salleh wrote, “The master-slave role which marks man’s relation with nature is replicated in man’s relation with woman”; and Ynestra King said, “Deep ecology ignores the structures of entrenched economic and political power within society.”39 Because the purported proximity of women to nature through procreation and childrearing had long been used to restrict women’s lives, feminists claimed that any connection between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of people had to be understood in terms of gender. By associating women with natural cycles, men had historically imagined themselves as rational and disciplined, and women as emotional and instinctual, assumptions that determined men’s and women’s relative roles in the home, in the community, and in society. Across different eras and different cultures, the closer women were to nature the further they were from autonomy and freedom.

Complicating the feminist critique, another branch of ecofeminism problematically embraced the association of women with nature. Feminists like Mary Daly and Starhawk claimed that women were more directly connected to the natural world and less likely than men to engage in warfare, exploitation, and environmental destruction.⁴⁰ If culture and nature stood opposed, women represented the best that nature had to offer against the worst that culture perpetrated. Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s longtime companion and intellectual partner, broke with ecofeminism over what she considered its untenable embrace of social categories based in natural processes.⁴¹ But ecofeminists were not alone in wrestling with this problem. Other radical ecological thinkers also turned to nature for moral meaning, if less explicitly. Anarchists spoke of society as natural and spontaneous and stifled by excessive human planning and design. Deep ecologists praised early societies for living in accord with natural cycles and harbored an acute distrust of modern notions of progress. All three groups granted the natural world some degree of order, meaning, and wisdom. Anywhere theories of the human and the nonhuman overlapped, the ground sloped toward essentialism.

In the 1980s and 1990s Bookchin slid down that slope, even as he tried to walk away from it. He moderated his celebration of preindustrial societies and his skepticism of human instrumentalism as he grew more and more frustrated with some ecofeminists and all deep ecologists. He became a defender of human reason. Although Bookchin had always found a central place for people in any conception of an environmentally sound society, his battle with the deep ecologists pushed him into a more robust advocacy of humanism and of people’s distinct role as manipulators of the natural world. “Above all,” he wrote, “antihumanists deprecate or deny humanity’s most distinctive hallmark—reason, and its extraordinary powers to grasp, intervene into, and play a guiding role in altering social and natural reality.”⁴²

Reason was not just a product of nature, Bookchin suggested, but the product of nature. Human reason, he implied, might be the manifestation of nature’s voice, direction, and meaning, and the product of evolution. “What we today call ‘mind’ in all its human uniqueness, self-possession, and imaginative possibilities is coterminous with a long evolution of mind,” Bookchin wrote in The Ecology of Freedom. To one degree or another, the subjectivity of the rational mind always inhered in the natural world, culminating in human thought. Nature, then, moved with purpose. “The fact that the natural world is orderly…has long suggested the intellectually captivating possibility that there is a logic—a rationality if you will—to reality that may well be latent with meaning.” And, Bookchin suggested, that logic and meaning might be readily apparent: “To render nature more fecund, varied, whole, and integrated may well constitute the hidden desiderata of natural evolution.”43 Although he rarely led with this idea, Bookchin often mentioned in his writing at least the possibility that the natural world had a distinct set of goals—fertility, diversity, unity—and that people could be nature’s most developed means of achieving those goals.

Bookchin countered deep ecology’s calls for a return to wilderness not by claiming human superiority but by claiming that people were nature’s means of achieving its own ends and so responsible for improving it. The distinction was lost on Earth First!, and even on Earth First!’s critics. As concerned as those critics remained about Earth First!’s disregard of humans, they also recognized the threat to the nonhuman world posed by conflating people and nature. When Bookchin described people as “literally constituted by evolution to intervene in the biosphere,” David Watson cried foul, calling such views “a kind of anthropocentric manifest destiny” and Robyn Eckersley read Bookchin’s equation of people and nature as the arrogance of humanism in another guise, asking, “Are we really that enlightened?”⁴⁴

Like many environmental thinkers, Bookchin tried to steer a course between the permissiveness of judging people a part of nature and the cynicism of judging them apart from it. The former could lead to inaction, or even anti-environmentalism. Some early twentieth-century wilderness advocates embraced progressive evolution and compromised their own activist spirit by believing, as historian Susan Schrepfer writes, that “technology was not a violation of nature but a fulfillment of natural history.”45 Thomas Shepard of LOOK magazine took this argument much further. “Man is part of nature,” he told a roomful of industrialists, explaining the senselessness of the environmental movement. “Anything we do we do as card-carrying instruments of nature.”⁴⁶ The latter could lead to a poisonous misanthropy, as Bookchin feared and Earth First! demonstrated. “Man has absolute dominion over the earth until he finally will destroy it,” one Earth First!er said in a neat summary of the radical environmental view of humanity.⁴⁷

Bookchin struggled to reconcile his fierce loyalty to human freedom and achievement with his deep concerns about environmental destruction. Simply commingling the human and the nonhuman, though, left both constrained. To argue that human beings should follow the dictates of nature was to invite a debate about what those dictates might be, a debate in which the terms “natural” and “unnatural” would be brandished like cudgels. For anyone committed to social justice or human freedom, this would be a debate with no winners. Conversely, to argue that human actions were by definition part of nature was to sanction the very forms of abuse that Bookchin had dedicated himself to fighting. “The fashionable view is that humanity’s disruption of the environment is somehow (we know not how) ‘natural,’ ” Earth First!’s Christopher Manes wrote disapprovingly, “since by definition we evolved into the kind of rapacious animals we are.”⁴⁸ As Joel Kovel suggested, the debate pulled in directions that cut against the grain of what most people believed about human beings: “That is, humans are very much part of nature, but there is also something in us that is never content with nature.”⁴⁹

Were people the antithesis of nature or its highest expression? Bookchin and his fellow social ecologists tried to reconcile a commitment to restraining human use of the natural world with a commitment to social justice and human freedom. Social ecologists wanted to satisfy two principles that were in many ways in tension with each other, and so ended up satisfying neither completely. Earth First! tried to ignore one and champion the other, and so ended up supporting positions that most found despicable, like Foreman’s solution to starvation, Abbey’s statements about immigration, and “Miss Ann Thropy’s” comments about AIDS and overpopulation. The logic of social ecology led to impasse; the logic of deep ecology as practiced by Earth First! led to too-simple solutions for complex issues. Earth First! embraced anarchism’s critique of modern society but ignored the long-held anarchist commitment to human freedom, a commitment that Bookchin tried for decades to pair with ecological health.

But there was for many an elegance in the simplicity of Earth First!’s politics, and a power in the forthrightness with which the group fought single-mindedly for one cause, never troubling itself with competing moral claims. Because the group had no membership rolls, it is impossible to say how many Earth First!ers there were, but some estimates ran as high as fifteen thousand. By the mid-1980s the group had an international following and reputation and stories about Earth First!’s bravado proliferated in print and on television.50

Meanwhile, Murray Bookchin and social ecology remained little known even among environmentalists. There were those who, consciously or not, worked with Bookchin’s basic ideas and toward at least his intermediate goals. Most of these people, however, did so within a conventional framework that Bookchin explicitly rejected. They wanted social justice and environmental protection together, and without a fundamental restructuring of society, ignoring Bookchin’s view that one depended on the other. Among the radicals to whom Bookchin addressed himself, his many and thoughtful ideas never caught fire. Bookchin’s complaints about radical environmentalism were fundamental, prescient, and underappreciated; he anticipated not only some of the particular issues that would divide Earth First! several years later but also the broad issues that would cause concern within mainstream groups. An unconventional anarchist in almost every other way, Bookchin was typical in that his diagnoses rang truer than his prescriptions.

Several months later the Washington group published a pamphlet explaining their position under the title “Alien-Nation,” and the Earth First! Journal reprinted the pamphlet for its readers. The Alien-Nation anarchists explained that they attended the Rendezvous with an open mind but left convinced that Earth First! anarchism was libertarian rather than communalist and that Earth First! espoused a “wild west” image, “extremely right wing, if not decidedly fascist in its orientation.” Deep ecology had become “human hating and finally a racist ideal for advanced capitalist countries to maintain their dominance over the rest of the world and its resources.” The anarchists’ own philosophy was “eco-mutualism, that is, that human society and the natural world are not mutually exclusive.” In case it was not entirely clear, the anarchists announced they would no longer associate themselves with Earth First!51

The impassioned response to Alien-Nation in the Earth First! Journal came quickly. Most readers and contributors stridently objected to Alien-Nation. One of the most conciliatory letters was from “Lone Wolf Circles,” who described himself as both a deep ecologist and an anarchist. “There will not be any social equality until we are once again small populations of spiritually-aware Earth warriors,” he wrote, “conscious of our impact, artisans in lifestyle, spread thin across a globe diverse and wild once again.” One of the least conciliatory letters was from Paul Watson, who more than fifteen years earlier had been on the losing side of arguments within Greenpeace over how militant the organization should be. “This is the kind of bullshit that drove David Brower out of Friends of the Earth and hundreds of other people out of groups and movements they founded,” he wrote. Watson had no interest in the issues that Alien-Nation raised. “My heart does not bleed for the third world,” he wrote. “My energies point toward saving the one world, the planet Earth which is being plundered by one species, the human primate.”52

Mitch Friedman, one of the coordinators of Washington Earth First!, warned Foreman that the clash between the Washington anarchists and Edward Abbey was symptomatic of greater dissonance within the radical environmental community. Friedman knew and worked with the Alien-Nation anarchists, and although he disagreed with most of their criticisms he recognized that competing views within Earth First! could not be ignored for long. Many local groups handled differences of opinion and approach amicably, but Earth First! had garnered a national reputation, and Friedman understood that on a larger stage personal relationships mattered less. “I’m only concerned that by delaying the problem on the national level,” he told Foreman, “it may reach a crisis stage and cause deep rifts.”⁵³

The rifts opened gradually but steadily. West Coast anarchists came from a younger generation of radicals with their roots in antiauthoritarian politics rather than the conservation politics of Earth First!’s founders. They were deeply committed to preventing environmental destruction, but not exclusively. In 1989 Mikal Jakubal—the original tree sitter—and a group of West Coast anarchists published the first issue of Live Wild or Die, a zine that would push past the Earth First! Journal’s focus on narrowly construed environmental issues. Like Bookchin, Jakubal and his peers saw environmentalism not as an end in itself but as one of the clearest windows onto essential structures of hierarchy and control. “There is an incredible amount of knowledge about the nature of power, revolt, how the system co-opts, organization & the like” Jakubal wrote to Foreman, “that has been developed (& practiced, by the way) by the ‘anarchist intellectual’ community…that hasn’t even been touched by most of EF!” Jakubal had corresponded with several noted anarchists, including David Watson at Fifth Estate. “These folks—though you may not believe it—actually have an almost identical worldview (‘deep ecology’ if it must be labeled) to us but they’ve come at it from a completely different direction,” he told Foreman.54

The group behind Live Wild or Die emerged from Earth First! but strained against what they perceived to be philosophical limits. “We grew to a certain point under the name Earth First!,” Live Wild or Die editor Gena Trott wrote to Foreman that summer, “but we won’t stop growing if we start to disregard the name—anymore than a baby will stop growing if she stops using the (once beneficial) diaper.” The diaper, in fact, had become restrictive. “Surely the battle that Earth First! is fighting is laudable and many of us have learned from it,” Trott wrote. “But what was once supposed to be a movement has become self-limiting in its scope.”⁵⁵ Like Jakubal, Trott had corresponded with the Fifth Estate crowd and decided that Earth First!, for all its many strengths, could no longer contain the evolving radical environmental scene on its own (see figure 5.2).

As was the case in the Bookchin/Earth First! debate, questioning environmentalists’ most basic goals became a matter of questioning where people ended and nonhuman nature began. Lev Chernyi, pseudonymous editor of Anarchy, the magazine that called itself “a journal of desire armed,” criticized deep ecology as a moral system that stifled individual freedom. At the center of deep ecology’s rigid morality was “nature,” Chernyi said, yet another false idol used to control human thought and behavior. Nature could not act as a source of authority. “It is not something to be worshipped,” he wrote, “nor is it something for us to serve.” Lone Wolf Circles again took up the cause of deep ecology and responded, “Wilderness is the negation of control—it is ultimately radical.” Chernyi and Jakubal countered that deep ecology was “false consciousness” and “ideological.” Like Bookchin, Chernyi and Jakubal tried to bind human and nonhuman interests in order to reconcile justice and ecology. Nature, they argued, did not constitute a stable reality separate from humanity but rather something each individual defined for herself. “Our own perspectives open out on a natural world, but directly because of this fact we thus cannot possibly really see the world from any ‘higher’ point of view than our own,” Chernyi wrote. Any authority external to the individual suppressed that individual’s will, Jakubal agreed, whether that authority be Marxism, deep ecology, or “an abstracted idea of Nature itself. These all kill our unruly, natural wild humanity.” For Chernyi and Jakubal the only “nature” worth following was an internal one, shaped by an individual’s imagination and free will. Like Bookchin, they wondered if the wildest places on the planet might be human minds.56

Once the moral authority of nonhuman nature and the objective reality of wilderness lost their moorings, some of environmentalism’s most basic claims began to float away. “What a bizarre circumstance,” Jakubal wrote, “to be risking injury or imprisonment to defend an idea of nature while killing the real living nature in ourselves!”⁵⁷ Trees, mountains, forests, and rivers became ideas, while internal thoughts, impulses, and drives remained real. The new green anarchists, Foreman lamented, were “more interested in the wild within than the wilderness without.”⁵⁸ Lone Wolf Circles pointed out the risks Jakubal ran: the absence of shared values or an organic order could be used to justify or excuse a great deal. “Is the desire to help someone no greater than the desire to hurt them?” he asked. “The desire to defend the natural world against all odds no ‘higher’ than the desire to constrain, demean, and destroy it? The bleak and violent history of civilized humanity is all a product of someone’s ‘armed desire.’ ”⁵⁹

Deep ecology remained just as ethically problematic. Denying human beings a privileged moral position exposed people (and some more than others) to the same disregard as granting human beings moral superiority exposed nature. David Watson pointed to this dilemma in an exchange with “Miss Ann Thropy.” “If we are ‘one’ with nature,” he wrote, “then we are no different than starfish or protomammals, and nature is doing this strange dance with herself, or is chaos. If we are a uniquely moral agent, then not only will our intervention reflect some kind of stewardship…but the question of the configurations of power, domination and alienation within human development are key.”60 In all of the debates around Earth First!, the question just out of reach was about the objective and moral limits of people and nature. If nonhuman nature provided an order and stability that humans could violate, environmentalism was an urgent matter of living with restraint. If people were as natural as starfish, environmentalism became primarily a philosophical question about what sort of world the majority of humans wanted.

Radical environmentalists were not averse to working for social justice as long as environmental goals came first. When radicals aligned their cause with social movements, the strict terms of partnership made clear how provisional such alignments were. Environmentalists often found it easiest to affiliate themselves with Native Americans, assuming environmentalism and Native rights to be complementary. Both groups, it was thought, fought to protect and conserve a natural heritage. “What we need to do,” Earth First!er Art Goodtimes said in 1986, “is build bridges between natives struggling for sovereignty and deep ecologists struggling for a biocentric paradigm shift away from industrialism’s exploitation and desecration of the Mother.”⁶¹ Goodtimes saw such bridges as short and sturdy, connecting sister causes against a common enemy. In some cases the connections existed, and environmental and Native groups worked together. But Goodtimes’s assumption of shared interests overlooked the ways that environmentalists often considered Native Americans exemplars of a sustainable relationship between people and the nonhuman world, ignoring the more complicated political and social context in which Native peoples fought for sovereignty and for control of their lands.

Radical environmental efforts in the Southwest emerged, in part, from the perception of common ground between environmentalists and Native Americans. That common ground was initially Black Mesa, a coal-rich plateau straddling the Navajo and Hopi reservations in northern Arizona. The fight over Black Mesa coal demonstrated both the powerful rhetoric as well as the risks of political oversimplification in assumptions that Native American sovereignty and environmental protection stood adjacent. In the 1960s a consortium of energy utilities called Western Energy Supply and Transmission (WEST), with plans to build six coal-fired power plants in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, convinced the Hopi and Navajo tribal councils to lease sixty-five thousand acres of Black Mesa to the Peabody Coal Company. The new power plants would feed energy consumption far beyond northern Arizona, turning Black Mesa coal into electricity for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and much of Southern California. Peabody’s plans to strip mine Black Mesa grew more secure late in the decade when the federal government gained a strong interest in Arizona coal. After the Sierra Club helped defeat the Department of the Interior’s proposed Grand Canyon dams, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall began to negotiate for a portion of the electricity from WEST’s Navajo Generating Station near Page, Arizona. In order to guarantee a steady supply of energy for its Central Arizona Project (CAP), Interior helped WEST construct the legal infrastructure for the generating station and for a railroad to carry Black Mesa coal.62

Peabody’s Black Mesa and Kayenta mines occupied tens of thousands of acres of the plateau, but their potential environmental effects stretched much further. The rain and snowmelt in drainages that started on the plateau’s rim passed through the strip mines, collecting sulfuric acid and then running to nearby farms. Black Mesa Mine used a 275-mile slurry pipeline from the plateau to the Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, Nevada, carrying 5 million tons of crushed coal a year by pumping 1.4 billion gallons of water through the pipe. That water came from the Navajo Aquifer deep under Black Mesa, a primary source of water for the arid region. Because Black Mesa sat above a basin, lowering the water table there could drain farms and communities for many miles around. Each of the six proposed plants would pump hundreds of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air each day, and several plants would be within just a few miles of each other in a region subject to inversions that trapped warm air and pollutants and kept them stationary for days at a time.⁶³

With both public and private interests poised to mine Black Mesa, only Abbey’s “citizens on their hind legs” stood in the way. In northern Arizona, at first, these citizens consisted of traditionalist factions within the Navajo and Hopi at odds with their tribal councils, and a handful of amateur conservationists from the Four Corners region. One of those amateurs was Jack Loeffler, a close friend of Abbey’s. Loeffler started the Black Mesa Defense Fund in 1970, and both present and future environmental activists moved through its Santa Fe office, including Abbey, the advertising consultant Jerry Mander, and Dave Foreman, who volunteered to stuff envelopes. Black Mesa Defense Fund fought Peabody’s plans for the next two years through publicity, public hearings, and occasional clandestine mischief.64

Black Mesa Defense Fund made little distinction between environmentalism and traditional Native American culture. “Traditional Indians still live in the Southwest—people who regard themselves as stewards of the Earthmother,” Loeffler wrote. “They live by a system of ethics which we seem to have forgotten.” Loeffler did not group all Native Americans under a single banner. He sided with the traditionalist factions of the Hopi and Navajo against tribal councils who he believed had betrayed their people. But he and other environmentalists understood Native politics largely through the categories of traditional people and modern, industrial society. “To the Bureau of Reclamation and the power companies, the Southwest is a momentary answer to the energy needs of the West,” Loeffler wrote. “To the traditional Indians, to many non-Indians who live there or visit there, the Southwest is the last refuge of peace, beauty and natural balance.”⁶⁵

“Natural balance” was not the only issue in the Black Mesa fight, however. Central too was “Navajo nationalism,” which historian Andrew Needham calls “the main language by which Navajos sought to alter the dynamics of energy development in the Southwest.”66 The Navajo expressed as great a concern as environmentalists about how Peabody’s strip mines would pollute the air and water of northern Arizona, and confronting the ecological consequences of industrial development was an important part of Navajo nationalism. But Navajo nationalism included social and economic dimensions. When voiced by members of the tribal council, Navajo nationalism argued that Native Americans should reap more direct economic benefits from energy development on their land. When articulated by Native activists who doubted their council’s leadership, it meant fighting energy development that threatened not just the environment but Navajo culture and political sovereignty. The antidevelopment version of Navajo nationalism lined up well with environmentalism, pitting both Native Americans and environmentalists against extractive industries. Still, when armed members of the American Indian Movement blocked Peabody mining equipment in 1974, they stood their ground to protect Navajo sheep herds and economic autonomy as much as the plateau itself. In some ways, antidevelopment Navajos and antidevelopment environmentalists even opposed each other. As Navajo activists embraced an anticolonial analysis, Needham explains, they rejected any strict distinction between “civilized” and “primitive” nations, the sort of distinction that radical environmentalists embraced romantically just as easily as developers embraced it disparagingly.⁶⁷

Radical environmentalists’ interest in Black Mesa revealed more about their expansive view of nature and environmentalism than about their interest in social justice. A strip mine, like a ranch, was a working landscape and not a wilderness. Needham argues that the Sierra Club’s vigorous defense of the Grand Canyon against the threat of dams in the 1960s and less energetic defense of Black Mesa against the threat of mining in the 1970s showcased the Club’s tacit categorization of landscapes as either “sacred” or “productive,” the one inviolable and the other expendable. The hazard, he suggests, of defining some places as particularly scenic and hallowed was to write off other places to the dirty necessities of industrial production and to ignore the plight of the people who suffered harm. In that case, radical environmentalists held a broader view of what was worth protecting and why.⁶⁸ Abbey called Black Mesa “the chief current battleground” in the fight between industrial development and the West.⁶⁹ As selectively as radicals sometimes valorized wilderness, their belief in a planetwide fight against the forces of industrialization meant that battles might be fought anywhere. Wilderness areas remained the places most worth protecting, but coal mines and cattle ranches were more immediately threatened, and so they were where activists could most directly engage their opponents.

If the Sierra Club’s willingness to cede places like Black Mesa to the imperatives of modern society also meant looking away from the attendant harm to humans living there, radical environmentalists could claim to be the greater populists as well. But that populism remained narrow. The generalizations about people that radical environmentalists relied on meant they shared the cause of traditionalist Native Americans only partially. When Earth First!er George Wuerthner questioned Alaska Natives’ relationship to their natural environment in 1987, Lewis Johnson responded, “Since it is my racial group he’s attacking, I am on guard and recognize both in his tone and his arguments the kinds of racist statements that are usually made in other contexts, but are made here in defense of ecology—an issue we should be on the same side of.”70

At times that same side was more obvious, if still conditional. In the mid-1980s Energy Fuels Nuclear proposed several uranium mines near the Grand Canyon, some of which threatened Havasu Canyon on the Havasupai Reservation. In late 1986 Earth First!, the Sierra Club, Canyon Under Siege, and members of the Havasupai held a demonstration at the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park. Several dozen environmentalists and Havasupai then drove thirteen miles to where Energy Fuels Nuclear had begun removing vegetation for its proposed Canyon Mine. The Havasupai offered a prayer and environmentalists replanted sagebrush. “This land which was cursed is now blessed,” Earth First!er Roger Featherstone said.⁷¹

The temporary partnership between Earth First! and the Havasupai arose largely from circumstance. Earth First!ers had been monkeywrenching Grand Canyon mines for months and, along with Mary Sojourner’s Canyon Under Siege, fighting federal bureaucracy in general and the Forest Service in particular. “Once again,” Earth First!er Ned Powell wrote of the environmental assessment process for mines on Kaibab National Forest land, “the legal process is just a parody of public servants listening to the wishes of the American people.”⁷² In this case, the American people included Native Americans similarly opposed to uranium mining, and environmentalists welcomed that alliance. Foreman insisted such alliances work primarily on Earth First!’s terms, however. “I would like to see a natural and honest working together between Earth First! and Indians—in mutual respect, without guilt, and with a firm commitment to Earth,” he wrote in 1985.⁷³

Environmentalists tended to funnel their commitment to Native sovereignty through either romantic generalizations or moral absolutes. In the Southwest, neither environmentalists nor the Navajo could look at Black Mesa without seeing streetlamps and air conditioners in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. But Navajo activists also saw political and economic inequality, as well as imperialism. Edward Abbey, the Black Mesa Defense Fund, and later Earth First! used fewer and starker categories than did the Navajo to explain energy infrastructure in the Southwest. Those categories were never entirely limited to the human and the nonhuman; radical environmentalists took into account different people’s differing relationships to development and Western lands. But radical environmental thought rested on a clear divide between the modern, industrial world and what Loeffler called “the Earthmother,” with people lined up on one side or the other.74

In the midst of internecine conflicts that pit eco-anarchists and radical and mainstream environmentalists against one another, and that underscored Earth First!’s circumscribed view of social justice, it took the FBI to remind all parties involved that they shared at least some basic aims as well as antagonists. In 1989 federal agents arrested several Earth First!-affiliated activists in Arizona operating under the name EMETIC. Prosecution at the hands of the state bought Earth First! credibility from some of its anarchist critics, and Earth First!ers themselves rallied around their comrades. Attacks from the outside only momentarily muffled what were steadily growing differences within the movement but nonetheless alerted radicals and environmentalists of various stripes to the high stakes for which they fought.

The Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy (EMETIC—the name poking fun at Arizona’s recently impeached governor) claimed responsibility in the late 1980s for several incidents of sabotage. In 1988 EMETIC damaged or felled several dozen poles supporting power lines that fed Energy Fuels Nuclear’s Canyon and Pigeon Mines north of Grand Canyon National Park, temporarily shutting down the mines. In 1987 and again in 1988, the group used acetylene torches to cut ski-lift poles at the Fairfield Snowbowl resort near Flagstaff, writing to the resort to warn of the damage and make clear that repaired poles would be dismantled again.⁷⁵

EMETIC emerged in part from two characteristics of Earth First! activism in the Southwest. The first was a focus on industrial infrastructure. By the time of the 1987 Round River Rendezvous near the Grand Canyon, Earth First! had increased its activities in Arizona significantly, waging battles against a proposed Cliff Dam on the Verde River, a Phelps-Dodge copper smelter in Douglas, and uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.76 During the same weekend that Alien-Nation confronted Abbey, one hundred Earth First!ers invaded Pigeon Mine just a few miles away, halting the mine’s operations for several hours and landing twenty-one protesters in jail.⁷⁷ Focused especially on the energy infrastructure spreading throughout the state, Arizona Earth First!ers hoped eventually to take on the Palo Verde nuclear plant and the Central Arizona Project (CAP) itself.

The second development was the presumed association of environmental activism in the Southwest with Native American rights. The Snowbowl resort sprawled across the San Francisco Peaks and, as EMETIC noted in its letters to the resort’s owners, the Hopi and Navajo had long objected to the development of sacred mountains. “The use of this mountain to entertain rich white people by allowing them to slide down without bother of walking up is inappropriate,” EMETIC scolded.⁷⁸ The eco-activists echoed the Sacred Mountain Defense Fund, a Native group organized to protect the San Francisco Peaks as well as to oppose “colonialism, corruption, waste, rampant unplanned development and nuclear power.”⁷⁹ Native activists had nothing to do with the Snowbowl sabotage and made no public statements in support or in opposition. EMETIC nonetheless claimed to fight for Native rights, just as it pointed to the rights of the Havasupai in its attacks on the Canyon Mine. The group warned of birth defects and illness from uranium mines and chided Energy Fuels Nuclear, writing, “Perhaps the fact that the victims have mostly been dark skinned children on reservations makes it easier for you to ignore this.”⁸⁰ Peg Millet of EMETIC said later that she and her fellow activists “were all doing it as a spiritual exercise. Our targets were all sacred lands.”⁸¹

EMETIC was not the same as Earth First! but neither was it entirely distinct. The group emerged from the 1987 Round River Rendezvous. Millett, an Earth First! regular who lived in Prescott, Arizona, volunteered for the Rendezvous organizing committee. Mark Davis, who also lived in Prescott, attended the Rendezvous to learn more about Earth First! and to find some partners in environmental sabotage. He found Millett. She was arrested for the first time at the Pigeon Mine protest and was ready to take even greater risks when Davis revealed his plans for Snowbowl. The pair recruited Ilse Asplund, a close friend of Millett’s, as well as a Prescott botanist named Marc Baker.

In late May 1989 Millett, Davis, Baker, and Mike Tait—whom Millett met at the 1988 Round River Rendezvous in Washington—approached a power-line tower feeding energy to a pump station outside of Salome, Arizona, two pieces among thousands that made up the CAP. As they gathered around the tower with a cutting torch, flares suddenly arced above them, illuminating several dozen approaching FBI agents who quickly arrested Baker and Davis. Millett ran into the dark, evading the agents, their tracking dogs, and the searchlight of a Blackhawk helicopter that was scanning the desert. “I did not have an adversarial relationship with the natural world and all of the people who were chasing me did,” she explained later.82 Millett walked sixteen miles through the night, then hitchhiked back into Prescott to the Planned Parenthood office where she worked and where the FBI finally caught up with her. Mike Tait was never arrested. His real name was Mike Fain, and he was an undercover agent who had been infiltrating EMETIC for over a year.

Several hours after Millett eluded capture in the desert, FBI agents burst into Dave Foreman’s Tucson home and placed him under arrest. The government charged various combinations of the activists for the attacks on Snowbowl, the uranium mines, and the CAP tower, as well as with conspiracy to destroy an energy facility. The case rested on hundreds of hours of taped conversations gathered by Fain, several paid informers in Prescott and Tucson, and listening devices planted in houses, telephones, and in at least one instance operated by FBI agents in an airplane circling above Foreman and Fain. Among the recorded conversations were discussions between Davis and Fain about the possibility of simultaneously toppling power lines to the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona and the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, as well as to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado. The prosecution claimed the CAP action was just practice for the attacks on nuclear facilities, and that although Foreman had not participated in any EMETIC actions he was the group’s mastermind and source of funds. Several weeks into the trial the defendants agreed to a plea bargain. The court finally sentenced Davis to six years in prison, Millett to three years, Baker to six months, and Asplund—whom a grand jury indicted on related charges over a year after the initial arrests—to one month. The government’s comparatively weak case against Foreman allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor after five years’ probation.83

The arrests, trial, and sentencing of the “Arizona Five” formed, in many ways, a brief moment of cohesion for an Earth First! that confronted criticisms from within and from without. Friends like David Brower showed up in Prescott to raise support. Gary Snyder, a monkeywrenching skeptic, nevertheless donated money to the activists’ legal defense fund.⁸⁴ Even recent antagonists pledged their loyalty. “Political differences make little matter to us when the state victimizes those fighting to destroy the megamachine,” the editors of Fifth Estate wrote. “You are to be congratulated for your efforts, not prosecuted.” When the New York Times described Murray Bookchin as an Earth First! adversary, he responded, “Whatever my differences with Earth First! and Mr. Foreman, I believe the organization’s membership is generally high-minded and deeply concerned with the destruction of the environment. I have contributed to the legal defense fund for the three [sic] who were arrested and urge others to do so.” The Sierra Club, which had long kept a safe distance from Earth First!, inched closer. “In its obsession to tie the issue of monkeywrenching to nuclear sabotage,” Sierra magazine reported, “the FBI had to invent a conspiracy where none existed; whatever ‘message’ it intended to send was lost along the way.”⁸⁵

Earth First!ers urged resolve rather than retreat after the FBI crackdown. Mark Davis, who received the strictest sentence, spoke for himself, refusing to disavow what he had done. “I acknowledge the necessity of courts and laws, and accept my prison term,” he said from jail. “But I am not sorry.” In fact, he continued to sound an alarm. “We humans are collectively killing this planet and dooming our own children by indulging in an orgy of consumption and denial,” he warned, reminding activists of all that he believed remained at stake.⁸⁶ Other radicals tried to find in EMETIC inspiration rather than fear. “As I pound away on these keys,” Myra Mishkin wrote in a special edition of the Earth First! Journal, “it seems that people are carrying on. There are people sitting in Redwoods, others are blockading roads, and meetings go on across the country. The reasons why we each got involved in the first place are still with us.”⁸⁷ But those reasons—strict ecocentrism or something broader and more capacious—remained at issue, as did Earth First!’s strategy, tactics, and culture.

“Earth First! is alive and well. Earth First! is alive and wild,” several of the group’s key figures declared in late 1991. “And we must unite as we organize, educate, agitate, and yes, monkeywrench, to defend this Earth.”88 The “statement of solidarity & unity” was an explicit response to the Arizona 5 trial and an implicit acknowledgment of changes arising from Earth First!’s own inner turmoil. Alien-Nation and Murray Bookchin had signaled a larger transformation within Earth First! that would eventually shift the group’s philosophy away from deep ecology and toward a more humanistic brand of radicalism; shift the group’s tactics away from monkeywrenching and toward civil disobedience; and shift the group’s center of gravity away from the Southwest and toward the West Coast. None of these shifts was new. Deep ecology had always been a subject of debate, many of Earth First!’s actions involved sitting in front of bulldozers in the middle of the day rather than sabotaging them at night, and Earth First!ers had always hailed from Oregon and California as much as from New Mexico and Arizona. But by the early 1990s these different approaches had evolved from friendly disagreements to serious doubts about the group’s original premises. Despite its decentralized structure and resistance to official hierarchy Earth First! did have a public identity, and a few of its most active chapters moved to redefine that image.

Some of the voices questioning Earth First!’s founding principles were new and distant; others were familiar and close at hand. No voice was more familiar than that of Mike Roselle, who signed the “statement of solidarity & unity” and welcomed a reimagined Earth First! One of the group’s founders, Roselle gradually became a stern critic. He came from a different background than the rest of the original Earth First!ers. At the end of the 1970s Roselle had far less exposure to establishment conservation but more experience with radicalism, having spent the early part of the decade as an antiwar activist. He anchored some of the early Earth First! campaigns on the West Coast and remained an active participant throughout the 1980s. By the end of the decade, though, he was increasingly uncomfortable with Earth First!’s sweeping critiques of all people and was interested in building bridges to other progressive movements. In 1990 The Nation’s Alexander Cockburn found Roselle during an anti-logging action in California and asked him about the infamous remarks on immigration and starvation by Foreman and Abbey. Roselle complained about Foreman’s “dirty laundry” and insisted that most local Earth First! groups were “part of this more progressive movement toward social justice and economic justice as well as environmental sanity.” Roselle also discussed his work on a committee charged with overhauling the Earth First! Journal. “Discussion of anarchy, animal rights, vegetarianism, racism, and feminism (to name a few) are felt by many to be vital to the health of the movement,” the committee’s report read.89 The Earth First! Journal had long claimed not to represent any comprehensive view of Earth First! as a movement. Now many felt that it should.

The insurgent feelings within Earth First! coalesced around Judi Bari, who was relatively new to the movement but nonetheless one of its most important figures by the time she signed the statement of solidarity and unity. Originally from Maryland, Bari moved to Northern California in 1979. By the late 1980s she lived in Mendocino County and worked as a carpenter. Her activist background was in organized labor, not environmentalism, but after building houses with thousand-year-old redwood trees, she began thinking and reading about the coastal forests that surrounded her community. Her friend Darryl Cherney, who had moved to California from New York in 1985, convinced her to join Earth First! Very quickly, Bari became one of the most active organizers and key strategists for Earth First! in Northern California. She joined the movement as the logging of old-growth tree stands garnered more and more attention in California and nationwide, and the issue defined her activism (see figure 5.3).

Bari’s personal philosophy drew from several influences, and her ease in talking to people with different political commitments made her an especially effective organizer. She was a dedicated environmentalist and considered herself an ecocentric one, although she implied that her ecocentrism differed substantively from that of Earth First!’s old guard. Bari’s years as a union organizer gave her a strong sense of loyalty to workers and their communities. During the campaign to save redwoods she tried to ally environmentalists and loggers, constantly reminding both groups that they shared a common enemy in the large corporations profiting off of Northern California lumber. Bari also considered herself an ecofeminist, arguing that violence toward nature echoed violence toward women. Her local Earth First! group became gender-balanced while she was part of it and regularly elevated women to leadership positions in its campaigns, a process Bari called “the feminization of Earth First!”90 And although she never identified as a social ecologist, she often articulated the core claim of social ecology: that social injustice and environmental destruction were bound up with each other, and that neither could be addressed adequately on its own.

Few issues more pointedly captured the differences between the old Earth First! and Bari’s Northern California “Ecotopia Earth First!” than the debate over tree spiking, one of radical environmentalism’s most controversial tactics. At the core of that debate was the question of whether Earth First! should engage in the sort of sabotage that risked harming people, and whether doing so meant minimizing not just social justice but human welfare. A halting shift away from ecotage and toward civil disobedience was a movement backward along the path Abbey had described at Glen Canyon in 1981: first oppose, then resist, then subvert. Ecotage was—always in symbol and at times in fact—an act of subversion. Civil disobedience was a means of resistance, designed to augment more conventional forms of opposition and to trigger changes in law and public opinion. One tactic sidestepped established institutions; the other at least in part relied on them. Earth First! had long used both tactics, but in Northern California it leaned more and more on civil disobedience alone.

Earth First! civil disobedience in Northern California looked much as it did elsewhere, only more so. Although tree-sits initially grew out of wilderness campaigns in Oregon, the tactic became ubiquitous in California’s coastal forests. Starting in 1988, Northern California Earth First!ers climbed trees relentlessly to hang banners over freeways, to attract media attention, and to delay logging. The strategy persisted for the next decade, growing larger in scale and longer in duration. On the ground, activists continued to mount blockades of timber roads. Because blockades were within easy reach of sheriff’s deputies, radicals who once simply stood shoulder-to-shoulder now devised increasingly complicated ways of “locking down.” Blockaders would, for instance, handcuff themselves to each other after inserting their arms into metal tubes running through concrete-filled barrels half-buried in the ground, a configuration known as the “sleeping dragon.” Removing the blockade meant digging up the barrels, breaking apart the concrete, and sawing through the tubes.91

While blockades and tree-sits spread as hallmarks of Northern California forest activism, a third tactic—tree spiking—receded. The end goal of tree spiking was the same as tree sitting and blockading: delaying, inconveniencing, and discouraging logging. By driving large nails into trees scheduled to be logged and then informing loggers that an area was “spiked,” activists forced the Forest Service to spend time and money walking the forest with metal detectors and removing spikes or else risk breaking expensive mill equipment when saws hit nails. The means, though, were different. Blockading and tree sitting were civil disobedience, publicly staged and demanding recognition. Tree spiking was ecotage, surreptitious and anonymous. Done correctly, tree spiking advocates argued, the risk was minimal. If spikers notified the proper authorities, if those authorities took those notifications seriously, and if the Forest Service or logging companies thoroughly swept the spiked area, then the metal-on-metal hazards of spiked trees could always be avoided. But any missteps in that string of qualifications could lead to a nail striking a mill blade, sending pieces of machinery flying.

Earth First!’s use of tree spiking had always been both tactical and philosophical. Foreman and Bill Haywood recommended non-ferrous hammers for quiet spiking in Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. The manual also discussed when and where to spike, how high up the tree spikes should be placed, how to enter and exit the forest, and the best types of nails to use. Ecodefense’s narrow focus on specifics was in the service of broad ideas. “Representative democracy in the United States,” Edward Abbey wrote in the book’s “Forward!,” “has broken down.” Even civil disobedience relied too heavily on an established system of reform, he suggested, while ecotage provided a means of directly and immediately confronting industrial development when other means failed. “It is time for women and men, individually and in small groups,” wrote Foreman, “to act heroically and admittedly illegally in defense of the wild.”⁹²

Women and men, individually and in small groups, did exactly that in Earth First!’s early years. In 1983 the “Bonnie Abzug Feminist Garden Club”—named after one of the members of Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang—spiked a stand of trees in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, and the following year the “Hardesty Avengers” notified the Willamette Forest supervisor that a proposed timber sale in the Hardesty Mountain roadless area contained sixty-three pounds of spikes.93 In both instances the Forest Service spent time and money de-spiking the sales. Over the next seven years, tree spikers struck repeatedly in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Gradually the practice spread to other states too. In 1989 there were a dozen incidents in Northern California alone.⁹⁴

Tree spiking was the most unequivocal statement of Earth First!’s militancy. By booby-trapping the forest, Earth First! edged toward an armed defense of wilderness and seemed willing to risk human well-being for the sake of trees. The backlash came quickly. In the late 1980s tree spiking became the easiest way to turn public opinion against Earth First! In Oregon, the Forest Service offered $5,000 for information about tree spikers.⁹⁵ Oregon congressman Bob Smith described tree spiking as “a radical environmentalist’s version of razor blades in Halloween candy.”⁹⁶ Hal Salwasser, a Forest Service researcher, called Earth First! “criminally insane.” Louisiana-Pacific’s managers began calling tree spikers “environmental terrorists.”⁹⁷

In May 1987, a Louisiana-Pacific band saw at a mill in Cloverdale, California hit a spike in a redwood log and shattered. Pieces of the saw flew across the room, one of them hitting a mill worker named George Alexander in the head, shattering his plastic shield. Alexander ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw, missing teeth, and major lacerations. It was the first injury attributed to tree spiking. There was evidence that the Cloverdale incident had nothing to do with Earth First!, but it nevertheless demonstrated the possibility of what spiking trees could lead to, scaring loggers and giving some Earth First!ers pause.⁹⁸ Criticism of radical environmentalism from politicians, the timber industry, the Forest Service, and the public grew louder. One year later senators from Idaho and Oregon attached a rider to a drug enforcement bill that made tree spiking a felony. A year after that, FBI and Forest Service agents in Montana subpoenaed several Wild Rockies Earth First!ers for a grand jury regarding a tree-spiking incident in Idaho.⁹⁹

Tree spiking put mainstream environmentalists in an awkward position, at a distance and yet never separate from radicals. The easiest response was simple condemnation. Doug Scott, the Sierra Club’s associate executive director, said, “Action in the night is on a slippery slope down toward terrorism, and that is a slippery slope that I abhor.” And yet the tactic was on a slope and not off of a cliff; even established groups could see a winding path from lobbying to some forms of ecotage. “Boy, I could probably put cement in a bulldozer,” one “high-ranking staffer at a Washington environmental group” told a New York Times reporter under cover of anonymity. More forthrightly, the National Audubon Society’s Brock Evans told the Los Angeles Times, “I honor Earth First! for having the guts to do the things they do.”100

In late 1988, at the height of the tree-spiking controversy, Wilderness Society staffers felt pulled in two directions. Pointing to the increasing association of established conservation groups with “more fringe and radical activist groups,” a staff member distributed a memorandum recommending a clear public statement of disapproval and a small contribution to a tree-spiking fund in Oregon that the Bureau of Land Management used for information leading to arrests. One staffer responded, “Before we attack another environmental group in such an aggressive way, we’d better be damn sure it’s a good idea.” Another agreed. “The time to talk about tree spiking is if we are asked or if someone tries connecting us to this practice,” she wrote. The tree-spiking fund, she pointed out, was associated with the local timber industry, and it was likely that “the same companies who have practiced their own form of violence against people engaged in peaceful civil disobedience are contributing to the fund.” Reminding the other staff members of a recent incident in which a logger almost felled a tree with a protester on it, she concluded, “If this logger or his employer is contributing to the tree spiking fund, I for one would not want [the Wilderness Society] on record in support of the effort.”¹⁰¹

Radicals themselves never shied from debating the merits and failings of tree spiking. Earth First! recognized that many within its own ranks remained uncomfortable with ecotage, whether for moral or strategic reasons. Public attacks by a U.S. congressman led some Montana Earth First!ers to distance themselves from the tactic. “Neither I nor anyone else that I know of affiliated with Montana Earth First! has ever spiked trees,” insisted Montana Earth First! coordinator Gary Steele.102 In Oregon, Earth First!ers created the Cathedral Forest Action Group in part to deemphasize ecotage. “The dignity of people outside CFAG is recognized by following a nonviolent code,” explained Mary Beth Nearing and Brian Heath, two stalwarts of the old-growth fights. “For us, that eliminates tree spiking and survey stake pulling—either individually or as a group.”¹⁰³ But through many fierce arguments about ecotage—one of them leading to the resignation of the Earth First! Journal’s editor—Earth First!’s basic stance remained the same. The group did not explicitly endorse ecotage but celebrated the efforts of those who engaged in it on their own initiative. “We are not terrorists,” Foreman insisted. “But we are militant. We are radical…. We will not officially spike trees or roads but we will report on the activities of those who do. They are heros [sic].”¹⁰⁴

That basic stance began to falter in 1990 when Judi Bari and Ecotopia Earth First! disavowed tree spiking more forcefully than had any Earth First!ers. Tree spiking, Bari argued, didn’t work. Despite dozens of recorded instances of spiked tree stands, most of those stands ended up cut. Those that remained were more likely saved by legislative activity or public pressure than by sabotage. If the goal of tree spiking was to cost timber companies money then the reasoning behind it was flawed, Bari pointed out, as it was the tax-funded Forest Service that generally absorbed the cost of removing spikes. In addition, spiking trees stoked the anger of loggers and sheriffs and put activists engaging in civil disobedience at risk of retribution. Finally, it was inherently dangerous. Although it was likely that no Earth First! tree-spike had ever hurt any person, the risk remained. “The point is,” Bari wrote, “that if you advocate a tactic, you had better be prepared to take responsibility for the results.”¹⁰⁵ Was Earth First!’s commitment to ecocentrism firm enough to put human life at risk?

At the heart of Bari’s rejection of tree spiking was her sense of social justice and her desire to build an alliance with loggers. Bari tried to reconcile her ecocentric views with her background in labor organizing, and Northern California forest activism offered her an opportunity. Because Earth First! had operated almost entirely on public lands in the 1980s it tended to view the Forest Service as its main antagonist. Pacific Lumber, Ecotopia Earth First!’s longtime adversary, was a private company logging private land, where trees were a capital investment and so the imperative to log them was much greater. Here, Bari’s experience targeting corporate management rather than public agencies proved especially useful. She worked toward partnerships with timber workers by telling them that Pacific Lumber executives were their real enemies. Loggers remained unconvinced by Bari’s overtures as long as they felt threatened by spikes, so spiking had to end. Gene Lawhorn, a timber worker and environmentalist from Oregon who first challenged Bari to speak out against tree spiking, insisted that the practice was dangerous for loggers, bad publicity for environmentalists, and an effective wedge issue which timber companies could use to prevent environmentalist-logger alliances. “Renouncing tree spiking is not a compromise,” Lawhorn said, “but a move forward.”106

Many within Earth First! remained unmoved. Some simply resented what they considered a compromise, telling Ecotopia Earth First! to “go back to the Sierra Club.”¹⁰⁷ Paul Watson was as usual the most strident, and he zeroed in on Bari’s core concern. “Those anthropocentric socialistic types—whose hearts bleed for the antiquated rights of the workers—were won over,” he wrote of Ecotopia Earth First!’s stance. Loggers, Watson believed, were guilty by association. “Certainly they are being exploited by the companies,” he wrote, “but they have made the decision to be exploited. The trees have not.” Civil disobedience, meanwhile, was of only limited utility. “Redwood Summer is not an Earth First! type of action,” Watson said of Bari’s 1990 old-growth campaign. “The establishment loves CD. The authorities are trained to deal with it. There are no surprises.”¹⁰⁸

Nonetheless, Ecotopia Earth First! had reached a decision. In its public announcement it called its renunciation “not a retreat, but rather an advance that will allow us to stop fighting the victims and concentrate on the corporations themselves.”¹⁰⁹ In a memo to the broader Earth First! Movement, Bari claimed that in Northern California, “Earth First! has been so successful in working & strategizing with timber workers that the alienation caused by tree spiking, not to mention the danger, be it real or imagined, was harming our efforts to save this planet.”¹¹⁰

The tree-spiking debate changed Earth First! and radical environmentalism, although not decisively. The abandonment of tree spiking and eventually of ecotage by Earth First! did not fundamentally transform the group or its relationships with allies and antagonists. Bari’s attempts at logger-environmentalist alliances never fully materialized.111 And mainstream organizations, although they publicly disparaged tree spiking, continued to hold some sympathy for radical activism and for the risks that radicals took to defend forests. Within Earth First!, arguments about strategy and tactics raged on. A year after Ecotopia Earth First!’s moratorium on spiking and days before he began a weeks-long jail sentence for protesting the construction of an astronomical observatory on Arizona’s Mt. Graham, Erik Ryberg posed the same questions about civil disobedience that Bari had about tree spiking. Echoing Abbey, Watson, and other proponents of ecotage, Ryberg asked whether civil disobedience had become “nothing more than a ritual of dissent which raises no questions, a game which holds no surprises, a compulsive societal twitch that confuses no one, subverts nothing, and which in practice does as much to legitimize power as it does to undermine it?”¹¹²

Nevertheless, after Judi Bari’s declaration Earth First! became increasingly committed to traditional civil disobedience, while monkeywrenchers carried out their activities without the Earth First! stamp. Bari’s critique had suggested the limits of ecotage to the point that even Foreman began to express doubts. “But is tree spiking really effective?” he asked in 1991. “Is it of significant value in stopping the logging of our forests? Probably. In some cases. But…I dunno. It’s like a tough piece of jerky being chewed around the campfire. You chew and you chew and you chew and nothing much happens. You work up a lot of spit, but you still have a big glob in your mouth. I dunno.”¹¹³

Foreman’s opaque analogy considered tree spiking’s effectiveness as opposed to its morality, but the two could not be separated. Earth First! was willing to try many tactics of dubious utility, but few produced the sort of soul-searching that tree spiking did. If tree spiking was in fact explicitly violent, it was for many a bridge too far. Advocating violence to achieve political ends meant rendering a final judgment on the legitimacy of the liberal democratic procedures that Earth First! criticized and circumvented but never entirely gave up. Further, it meant declaring the battle against not just institutions but the modern world itself, and drawing a bright line between people and nonhuman nature. Earth First! let others take up that fight. “It’s time to leave the night work to the elves in the woods,” Bari advised in 1994.114 The “elves in the woods” were anonymous members of the Earth Liberation Front, an Earth First!-inspired group of saboteurs who in the 1990s began using tree spiking and arson to combat logging, recreational development, suburban sprawl, and genetic engineering.¹¹⁵ Even more radical, ELF took up where Earth First! left off. Tree spiking represented the horizon of Earth First!’s willingness to judge nature above all human interest.

Bari spent less time than many other prominent Earth First!ers spelling out her views in detail. She was primarily an activist, and her actions spoke clearly and consistently. In 1989 she assisted employees at a Georgia-Pacific lumber mill as they filed claims with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after a dangerous chemical spill, and later she helped workers at a Pacific Lumber mill publish an underground newsletter, Timber Lyin’, challenging the official company newsletter, Timberline. Her organizing around redwoods culminated in an event called “Redwood Summer,” which brought over three thousand people to the hills and mountains of Northern California in 1990 for a series of marches, rallies, and direct actions from early June through August. Ecotopia Earth First! organized blockades, tree-sits, picket lines, and demonstrations at corporate offices. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Ecotopians held impromptu discussions between activists and loggers. Although many staunch Earth First!ers viewed any cooperation with loggers, miners, or dam-builders as a form of capitulation to industrial society, Bari argued that the modern world could only be changed from the inside out.¹¹⁶

Bringing several thousand activists into the woods and logging towns of Northern California for weeks of marches and direct actions was a dangerous proposition for all involved, and Bari tried to defuse the possibility of violence through her tree-spiking moratorium. But violence was already a part of old-growth activism. In 1989, outside of Whitehorn on the Humboldt-Mendocino border, a group of Earth First!ers confronted the Lancasters, a family that ran a small logging company that had been violating its timber harvest plan. The confrontation erupted into a fist fight. A fifty-year-old activist named Mem Hill tried to intercede and got knocked unconscious. A shotgun blast into the air finally sent the environmentalists running.117 In 1991, near Boonville in Mendocino County, two Earth First! activists chained themselves to a cattle guard to blockade a road until a court order took effect halting nearby logging. A local man and his wife nearly ran over the activists, stopping their truck only when a sheriff’s deputy reached through the window and grabbed the keys.¹¹⁸ Soon after the Whitehorn incident, Bari, Cherney, a friend, and several children skidded off the road when a logging truck hit Bari’s station wagon from behind, slamming it into a parked vehicle. Bari assumed the collision was an accident until she realized that she and Cherney had blockaded the same driver and truck a day earlier.¹¹⁹

Bari was both the Earth First!er most associated with opposing potential violence and the most notable victim of it. On May 24, 1990 Bari and Cherney drove from Oakland to Berkeley to pick up their musical equipment for an afternoon show in Santa Cruz promoting Redwood Summer. They had stopped in the East Bay to meet with Seeds of Peace, a group helping Earth First! prepare for the summer’s actions. As Bari’s Subaru station wagon approached Interstate 580 at Park and Thirty-Fourth Street in Oakland, a ball bearing rolled into place and completed an electrical circuit, triggering the detonation of an eleven-inch pipe bomb under the driver’s seat. The explosion warped the front end of the car, blew out the windshield, and collapsed the passenger compartment. Cherney suffered minor injuries, while Bari took the brunt of the blast and had to be extracted from the car by emergency responders. Within an hour, a dozen FBI agents began an investigation. Normally the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms would have jurisdiction in a bombing case, but because Earth First! was on the FBI’s list of domestic terrorist groups, the ATF handed the case over to the special agents on the scene. The FBI briefed the Oakland Police Department on Bari and Cherney, explaining that they were part of a terrorist organization, some members of which had recently been arrested in Arizona for attempting to destroy a power line and plotting to cut off power to several nuclear facilities. Later that afternoon the police arrested both Cherney and Bari on charges of illegally transporting a bomb. The police moved Cherney to the downtown jail and posted several officers outside of Bari’s room at Highland Hospital.120

Bari remained in the hospital for the next two months before moving back to Mendocino County to further recuperate. She never regained the full use of her right leg. Gradually, mainstream environmental organizations rallied to Bari’s and Cherney’s defense. Greenpeace, which had suffered its own bombing in 1985 when French commandos attached mines to the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, put up one million dollars in bail for Bari and Cherney. Along with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace helped convince the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society to publicly question the FBI’s investigation.¹²¹

Although Bari spent Redwood Summer in the hospital, she insisted that it should continue without her. Cherney remained involved in the summer’s activities and several other Northern California Earth First!ers stepped into Bari’s place. Redwood Summer and the bombing made Ecotopia Earth First! one of the most talked about Earth First! groups in the nation. Bari, however, remained skeptical of radical environmentalism’s culture and politics. She embraced the idea of ecocentrism and the strategy of direct action, but she rejected blanket attacks on humanity along with the single-minded defense of wilderness despite any social costs. Bari’s criticisms were not new, but she did more than just voice them; she inculcated activists in one of the most dynamic Earth First! regions to her way of thinking. By 1990 Earth First! was stretched to the point of breaking between the intermountain West and the West Coast.

The break came as Redwood Summer wound down. The Earth First! Journal devoted its September issue to what some considered the splintering of Earth First! and others considered the group’s maturation. Most of the journal’s staff announced their respective resignations, and several prominent articles discussed the battle between the “new guard” and the “old guard,” the place of social context in wilderness campaigns, and the growing influence of California Earth First! groups. Howie Wolke expressed his dismay at the infighting and wondered if he was still a part of Earth First!. “Wilderness is the real world,” he wrote, making clear his fundamental concern, “and its importance dwarfs all human demons, real and imagined.”¹²²

Dave Foreman and his professional and personal partner, Nancy Morton, wrote what they called a “Dear John” letter to Earth First! “We feel like we should be sitting at the bar of a seedy honky-tonk,” they began, “drinking Lone Star, thumbing quarters in the country-western jukebox, and writing this letter on a bar napkin.” They emphasized their pride in the group’s accomplishments and their confidence that it would continue to do good work. “But we cannot escape the fact that we are uneasy with much in the current EF! movement,” they wrote. In particular they worried about “an effort to transform an ecological group into a Leftist group.” Earth First!, they explained, was always a wilderness preservation group before and above anything else, and its proponents followed that principle: “We are biocentrists, not humanists.” Calling their departure a “no-fault divorce,” they declared their separation from what Earth First! had become.123

“I feel like I should be sitting around base camp listening to Bob Marley, smoking a hooter, and writing this on the back of a rolling paper,” Bari responded, emphasizing the cultural distance between the Southwest and the West Coast. She made clear her respect for Foreman, “for introducing me and many others to the idea of biocentrism, and for the decentralized, non-hierarchical non-organization he helped set up in EF!” But she also expressed her approval of Foreman’s departure, because of his unwillingness to support the changes within Earth First! A narrow focus on wilderness preservation to the exclusion of any other forms of activism could not last, she felt; Earth First! had to concern itself with changing the way people thought and behaved, so that wilderness preservation would become a priority for society as a whole. “In other words, Earth First! is not just a conservation movement,” Bari wrote, “it is also a social change movement.”¹²⁴ With those words Bari neatly summarized what was for some in Earth First! an obvious statement and for others a betrayal of the group’s most essential principle.

Ecocentrism’s great weakness was that it risked advocating simplistic and myopic ideas. The same sort of holism that could focus a collective effort on a single goal could also reduce complicated questions to deceptively easy solutions. Painting all people with a broad brush was not only counterintuitive but often counterproductive. As Bari pointed out, sabotaging bulldozers did little to hurt large lumber corporations, which contracted out logging operations to smaller companies that actually owned the equipment. More fundamentally, Earth First!’s broad condemnations ignored profound social differences and glossed over the divergent roles that different people played in the transformation of the natural world. “While the split is truly a multiple fracture,” Estelle Fennell wrote of Earth First!’s travails in Fifth Estate, “the major conflict can be boiled down to a difference of opinion over whether radical environmentalism can be effective without supporting social justice issues.”¹²⁶ Too often ecocentrists began conversations by pointing an accusatory finger at everyone in the room, uninterested in their particular stories.

Anarchism provided an alternative to the complete rejection of liberal humanism. Disavowing unqualified individualism, anarchists instead advocated small-scale, decentralized communities, a careful regard for natural order, and an end to industrialization. In these ways anarchists and radical environmentalists were allied, and Alien-Nation, Murray Bookchin, and Earth First! could speak the same political language. But anarchists held a strong faith in human nature as well, and sought various forms of social justice. Although they readily admitted the persistence of human folly—most notably in the form of the state—they believed a desire for freedom and justice ran like a current through history, ready to be released in the service of a better society. People always stood at the center of the anarchist ideal, and here anarchism and radical environmentalism parted ways.

Radical environmentalists had few satisfying answers for the criticisms that Bookchin, Bari, ecofeminists, and green anarchists voiced, but radical environmentalism’s critics did not have entirely satisfactory answers themselves. In part the ongoing argument was the familiar one about radicalism and reform. Soon after Redwood Summer, one of the Fifth Estate’s readers complained about the paper’s favorable coverage of Bari’s signature campaign. “The Redwood Summer cover story refers to the summer’s actions as the ‘environmental equivalent of the 1964 voter registration campaign in Mississippi,’ ” wrote J.B. “Since when do anti-industrial anarchists support either voting or environmentalism or reproductions of ‘60s liberal reform?”127 The same crucial questions that Bari asked about monkeywrenching’s effectiveness could be applied to her own strategies. Redwood Summer almost certainly affected the debate over reform of forest management in California, but many complained that in immediate terms it did not save a single tree.

More fundamentally, Earth First! and its critics contended with the distinction—if any—between human beings and nonhuman nature. Recoiling from environmental misanthropy, some critics of radical environmentalism risked muddying the waters so much that it became hard to know what counted as a wrong committed against nonhuman nature. Radical environmentalists at times erred in the other direction, blaming an abstract “humanity” for anything that wild nature might not somehow sanction. Connecting these two extremes was what the biologist Stephen Jay Gould once called “an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness.”128 Earth First! never stopped struggling with that tension. “We are creatures of the earth and we participate in the great mysteries of the earth,” Earth First!er James Berry said of humans. “While we are each different we share an identity.”¹²⁹ The overly generalized “we” led radicals in many troubling directions, but it also led to a sense of communion with the natural world and an appreciation of people’s place in it.

Edward Abbey depicted the internecine fights at Earth First! gatherings in a chapter of Hayduke Lives! The scene is a Round River Rendezvous, at which a single character—“Bernie Mushkin,” a social ecologist from Berkeley—represents both Murray Bookchin and Alien-Nation. As Dave Foreman speaks to the crowd, Mushkin calls him a “fascist,” “racist,” “terrorist,” and “eco-brutalist.” Then Mushkin takes the stage and delivers a screed against all assembled, accusing them of setting the environmental movement back several decades. Mushkin is a comical character, and although Abbey allows him a reasonable approximation of Bookchin’s actual criticisms, Abbey generally leaves him flustered and ineffective.¹³⁰

But even Abbey could not completely discount Bookchin’s respect for human dignity. Abbey, amid all his complaints about people, and his claims to prefer deserts to human society, was given to rare moments of reverence for the human. In Desert Solitaire, Abbey describes finding the dead body of a tourist at the edge of the canyonlands. He notes how easy it is to joke about the anonymous death, and how a dead person is simply an example of natural cycles that keep the planet habitable. And then he points out how insufficient this impersonal perspective is. “A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it,” he writes, searching out the limits of his own radical beliefs. “A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity.”¹³¹