Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint just when the game got ugly. Maybe on a sunny Arizona morning in 1989, when Dave Foreman was awakened in his bedroom by three FBI agents pointing Magnums at his head, charging him with conspiracy to topple nuclear-plant power lines at several locations in the southwest. Or it could have been several years earlier, when Foreman was dragged by a pickup–suffering permanent knee damage–along a logging road he and other environmentalists were trying to blockade. Or perhaps it was as long ago as 1980, when Foreman helped form a feisty little environmental group called Earth First!, whose role would be to act, well, kind of ugly.
Foreman’s book is perhaps the best general guide to radical eco-thought. It is certainly enlivened by his accounts of his own experiences and his vigorous talk: he writes of “the gang of thugs running human civilization” and calls for “raw, rank, brawling, and boorish” activism. And he provides a good overview of the threats to wilderness in the U.S. and of the Earth First! strategy to defend it. Wolke’s book is also colorful, but less accessible to the general reader; it will be of interest primarily to activists who want to understand the details of political and bureaucratic pressures against wilderness preservation. Manes’s book offers the best explanation of the larger historical and philosophical underpinnings of this movement, which goes well beyond Earth First! Scarce’s book is a journalistic overview of the people involved in radical environmentalism and what they believe. He relies heavily on interviews with the movement’s key players; his work will probably be valuable to future PhD candidates writing on the history of the environmental movement, but the depth of detail sometimes makes for tedious reading. (However, the connections he draws between Earth First!, animal-rights groups, and environmental movements abroad are interesting and controversial.) The four books have different emphases, but they still amount to a lot of paper from people who believe that far too many trees are being cut down.
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In preventing development, Earth First!ers would be willing to use almost every conceivable tactic. The group’s founders figured that the pressures against wilderness–especially the economic muscle of the U.S. timber and mining industries, and the willingness of federal officials to kowtow to those businesses–were so great that environmentalists needed to go beyond the traditional tactics: letter writing, lobbying, lawsuits. Killing people? No, that wouldn’t wash. But every legal means should be used, and civil disobedience should be practiced, in the great tradition of Thoreau and Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Demonstrations should be held, blockades of logging roads set up, banners hung.
The authors of these four books write of Earth First! as a “warrior society” whose members are willing to sacrifice themselves to a higher ideal. Indeed, much of the criticism of monkey-wrenching from within the movement has come from those who see sabotage as an expression of the same destructive mentality that has led to so much environmental harm. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that all four authors are men–certainly, they speak with a greater unanimity than has characterized the movement as a whole.)
At first Manes’s argument might seem a way to avoid facing complex issues by declaring that most everything most people do is mostly bad. In practical terms, how do you get a society just learning to recycle its newspapers to face the idea that the last 10,000 years or so of Western civilization were a great mistake?
