influenced by Romanticism and Transcendentalism, as well as personal experiences in wilderness areas. Like other Americans in the late nineteenth century, Muir appreciated nature for being everything that civilization, and urban life in particular, was not. He recognized the intrinsic value of wilderness and the dangers human interests posed to its integrity. Like later radical environmentalists, Muir was devoted to wilderness protection, and his concerns were often in opposition to those of the U.S. Forest Service. Along with Thoreau, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), and Edward Abbey (1927–1989), Muir is considered by many activists to be one of the “grandfathers” of radical environmentalism.12 Yet Muir, like other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wilderness lovers, viewed wild places as pristine and devoid of humans, especially indigenous people who had roamed and shaped the land long before the arrival of Europeans.13
Americans’ concern for “wilderness” untrammeled by civilization, and especially agriculture, grew during the nineteenth century and led to the creation of Yellowstone Park in 1872, the first time Congress put limits on the spread of agriculture.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, the fear and hostility many European Americans had felt towards nature in earlier eras was now leveled at cities.15 Nature appreciation became more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans began to react to disturbing consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanization. With more people living in cities at a distance from the wild, attraction to nature as a place of respite from urban life grew, as did urban dwellers’ support for national parks.16
Radical environmentalists share this attraction, while at the same time appreciating wild places and beings for their intrinsic value. A tendency of radical environmentalists to view opponents of wilderness protection as “desecrating agents” became a strategy from Muir on, according to religious studies scholar Bron Taylor.17 Taylor identifies a radical environmental lineage running from Muir and Thoreau through a number of early twentieth-century figures such as Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), David Brower (1912–2000), Ansel Adams (1902–1984), and Rachel Carson (1907–1964), who held somewhat pantheistic views of nature, even though their spiritual beliefs were not as explicit as Muir’s and Thoreau’s.18
By the 1950s, a more militant and anarchist version of this lineage appeared in the West, most significantly in the figures of poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder (1930–present) and writer Edward Abbey (1927–1989). Snyder’s back-to-the-land anarchism and Abbey’s pantheism and support for antidevelopment direct action were important precursors to later radical activism. The decade of the 1970s was key for the convergence of these important figures with conservation biology, deep ecology, and other shifts in the new discipline of environmental philosophy. Some of these developments came about in response to the publication of historian Lynn White Jr.’s famous argument identifying developments in medieval Christianity as “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967).19 Not long after the publication of White’s essay, the term deep ecology was coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, further developed by Bill Devall and George Sessions in their book Deep Ecology (1985), and adopted by Earth First!ers in the early 1980s.
Due to the spread of these and other views challenging anthropocentrism and promoting wilderness protection, American environmentalist organizations experienced rapid growth in the 1970s. They also became increasingly professionalized, hiring managers rather than activists. Some activists reacted against this trend, which they saw as diluting their cause, and chose more radical tactics. One of Earth First!’s founders, Dave Foreman, quit his job lobbying in Washington, DC, in 1979, and co-founder Howie Wolke was a disenchanted former forestry student.
Foreman and Wolke practiced tree spiking and other direct action, drawing inspiration from Edward Abbey’s fictionalized account of ecotage, The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975. Deep ecologists like early Earth Firsters! believed nature had intrinsic value regardless of its benefits to human beings. For them, preserving wilderness for its own sake became a moral matter, even a “religious mandate” in the words of Dave Foreman.20 They adopted the language of holy war, or as journalist Joe Kane put it, “waging guerilla warfare in the name of Mother Nature.”21 Dave Foreman described their monkey wrenching tactics as “a form of worship towards the Earth” and his own role as “a religious warrior for the Earth.”22 In addition to the language of warfare, these years found environmentalists increasingly framing environmental issues as urgent, even on an apocalyptic scale.23
Environmentalists from Henry David Thoreau to Earth First!’s Dave Foreman have also freely borrowed from and been inspired by indigenous cultures. The influence of Native American orientations to nature runs throughout radical environmentalist thought and practice, even when troubled by concerns about colonialism and cultural appropriation. Moreover, environmental and animal rights activists have sometimes fought side by side with indigenous people, as when activists supported Navajo and Hopi people at Black Mesa, a sacred mountain that was also the site of controversial strip-mining. As Gary Snyder described the coalition of Native and non-Native activists in Turtle Island, “defense of Black Mesa is being sustained by traditional Indians, young Indian militants and longhairs [hippies].”24 Supporters of the Black Mesa Defense Fund, founded by Jack Loeffler in 1970, engaged in monkey-wrenching during the 1970s when a sabotage campaign was directed at the mine. Dave Foreman, one of Earth First!’s founders, was involved with the campaign at Black Mesa during the 1970s, before the founding of Earth First!25 In other instances, activists and Native Americans have been at odds, as in the case of animal rights protests against members of the Makah (a northwestern U.S. tribe), whose cultural revival included traditional whaling practices.26
Since the 1970s, there have been many cases of radical environmentalists joining Native Americans to protest threats to tribal lands, such as the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protest that began in 2016. RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountains’ and People’s Survival, organized to fight coal mining in Appalachia) members and friends traveled from Appalachia to North Dakota to work with Red Warrior Camp, a direct action camp at the Standing Rock protest.27 I discuss issues of solidarity as well as tensions with Native people in more depth in Chapter 6.
In contrast to Earth First!’s campaign for wilderness protection, early animal rights struggles in the United States tended to be urban and focused on domesticated and lab animals. American animal activists inherited these emphases from British animal protection and animal liberation movements. From at least the eighteenth century on, animal rights activism in Britain coincided with other expressions of political and religious radicalism that were already present in towns and cities. The early twentieth century antivivisection movement in Britain appealed to feminists, labor activists, vegetarians, spiritualists, and other radical activists who posed alternatives to the social (and species) order.28 Like contemporary activists, they saw themselves as the vanguard of social change, advancing a moral crusade. Animal rights was just one of many causes to be addressed in order to usher in a better, more civilized (and for some, more godly) society.29
In a similar fashion, mid-nineteenth-century American “animal defenders” often held other radical political and social views and were inspired by Britain’s RSPCA (founded in 1824), the antislavery movement, and Darwin’s views on evolution set forth in The Origin of Species (1859).30 As was the case in other nineteenth-century reform movements, women played prominent roles in animal rights advocacy during this period.31 Alongside other nineteenth-century reform causes, such as child welfare and temperance, a variety of organizations were formed in American cities to take up the plight of nonhuman animals. This included addressing slaughterhouse conditions, cruelty to urban workhorses, animal experimentation, and homeless animals. After the end of the Civil War, with the abolition of slavery on their minds, activists began a new campaign of rights advocacy, this time for nonhumans rather than human slaves. Not long after the end of the war, New York’s American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was founded in 1866, the American Humane Association (AHA) in 1877, and the American Anti-Vivisection
