Nettle decided to be a “blank canvas” and start over, so she cut off all her hair and got involved with a collectively run vegetarian art café in Edinburgh. Through the café she was exposed to contemporary Paganism, anarchism, antiwar activism, and environmentalism. Discovering Paganism was for her like finding something she “always believed. Just like finding feminism and anarchism, things I internally already was.” Although she liked the communal and ritual aspects of Judaism and some of the Christian churches she had visited as a child, she could not relate to their theology: as a feminist she “was not connecting with this white male god.” Paganism resonated with her concerns because she already believed “we are all divine, no hierarchy among individuals, plants and animals.” Armed with this affinity for Pagan perspectives, she went into the woods to join an antiroads tree-sit.
Although she had helped organize a protest against the 2005 G-8 summit in Auchterarder, Scotland, Nettle really came home to environmentalism when she “fell in love” with the Bilston Glen tree-sit, one of the world’s longest running tree-sits. Bilston Glen changed her life.3 At the tree-sit she rediscovered her “inner child and this really sacred connection to nature that had been suppressed through the school system, through my own teenage angst and depression.” She felt at home in the woods, reconnecting with “the raw and the animalistic part of the human psyche that craves nature and to really be immersed. The thing that I really connected with the most was that I could live here, I could live in the woods and I didn’t have to pretend that I had to have a car and a house.” She started living at the tree-sit in her own treehouse and taking a bus to her college classes.
From then on, Nettle embraced her “weirdness”: “At twenty-one I was waking up from the nightmare of trying to be normal. In high school I was trying to be normal, but I was never normal, I’ve always been weird. I have to love that and accept that, that’s what fuels depression, when I try to fit into society’s box.” Life at the protest in the forest offered a community in line with her interests in Paganism, anarchism, and feminism. At the same time, her experiences there eased her inner struggles with depression and belonging.
Nettle first encountered the U.S.-based Earth First! Journal at Bilston Glen and attended her first Earth First! gathering in the United Kingdom. After graduating from college, she moved back to North America and began to tour with a jug band. During the tour she visited the Earth First! Journal collective and not long afterwards was hired there. She thought, “This is what I want to do forever,” and was a mainstay at the Journal for six years, which was when I got to know her at Earth First! gatherings.4
Nettle’s story reveals some common themes in activists’ accounts of how they became involved with environmentalism or animal rights. Some of the most important influences on radical environmentalism and animal rights during this time included anarchist anticapitalist movements, contemporary Paganism, and understandings of gender shaped by feminism, gay rights, and transgender activism. Nettle’s account of her attraction to anarchism and powerful connection to the forest points to the important convergence during the 1990s and 2000s of the anticapitalist movement with strains of deep ecology and biocentrism.
Radical activists charged and sentenced during the first decade of the twenty-first century for actions committed from 1996–2001 (during the FBI’s Operation Backfire) came of age at a particular moment in the history of Americans’ relation to nature and nonhuman animals, as well as to earlier liberation struggles, so I want to place their actions in a broader historical context. Young activists are influenced by books and films, lovers and friends, anarchist collectives like Food Not Bombs, ecology clubs and volunteer work for the Sierra Club, college courses on deep ecology and gender studies, contemporary Paganism and American Indian worldviews, the Occupy movement and social justice struggles, veganism and hardcore punk rock. Through these disparate activities and interests they find their way to gatherings and direct action campaigns in forests and on fur farms. In this fashion, activist movement through various gatherings, campaigns, and communities traces lines of affiliation and influence across regional, national, and international boundaries.
Like Nettle, Tristan Anderson exemplifies the ways in which many activists are situated within international, as well as American, networks of affiliation. In 2009, Anderson was critically wounded in Palestine during a campaign for Palestinian rights. Previous to his time in Palestine, he had traveled to war-torn Iraq with a circus to entertain traumatized children. He was involved with the Headwaters campaign to save redwood trees, Food Not Bombs, Nevada nuclear weapons test site protests, and a tree-sit in Berkeley to protect oak trees from being bulldozed for a new football stadium.5
The loosely organized national and international networks that activists move through also include street medics from mass protest marches in urban areas, Rainbow Gatherings, non-Native people who worked on reservations with Native organizers on a number of issues, other activist groups like Greenpeace, and guerilla gardeners from New York City who grow food in vacant lots.6 These networks consist of social justice as well as environmental and animal rights communities and organizations. The 2012 Earth First! Rendezvous, for instance, featured a workshop presentation by activists working with No More Deaths in Arizona. No More Deaths is a social justice coalition, composed of both Christians and non-Christians, providing water and food for illegal immigrants along the southern border of the United States. These activists presented a workshop that explored the convergence of environmental and social justice issues in this context.7
As these intersections suggest, radical activism of the 1990s and early 2000s emerged within a particular configuration of constructions of youth, feminism, global anticapitalism critiques, social justice concerns (including prison issues), Paganism, deep ecology and other biocentrist approaches within environmentalism, and changing understandings of the appropriate relationships between humans and other animals. Animal rights and environmentalism thus belong to a lineage of radical movements in North America, spearheaded by young people and dating back at least to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.
REGARDING THE NONHUMAN: A BRIEF HISTORY
OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
IN THE UNITED STATES
The historical trajectories of radical animal rights and environmentalism in North America are distinctly different, even though twenty-first-century activists often bridge both movements. Radical environmentalists emphasize “the wild,” while most animal rights activists are seeking “animal liberation,” which includes domesticated nonhuman animals. Radical environmentalists, for example, often sign their letters and communiqués “For the Wild,” while animal rights activists are more likely to invoke the slogan, “For the Animals.” The animal rights movement in the United States did not emphasize protecting wild animals until late in the twentieth century. Hunt sabotage, for instance, was not common in the United States among animal rights activists until the 1990s, although it was in Britain. A notable exception was Greenpeace, an environmental organization founded in 1971, which focused on direct action against whaling. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, activists in both movements were emphasizing the necessity of working together. During the period of my research (2006–2016), most issues of the Earth First! Journal, the most widely read radical environmentalist publication, included articles on animal rights issues and actions.8 Animal rights activists have been slower to encompass both struggles and combine efforts.
Although it has often shared common cause with the animal rights movement, radical environmentalism has a distinct lineage in the United States. It is particularly indebted to early influences such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism and the writings and lives of Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and naturalist John Muir (1838–1914).9 Like later environmentalists, Transcendentalists included Buddhist and Native American understandings of nature in their writing.10 Muir and Thoreau were sensitive to the “interdependence of all life,” rejected Christianity and anthropocentric views of nature, admired Native Americans, and underwent
