emerged in and around these nineteenth-century organizations between those who advocated more humane treatment of animals (welfarists) and those who focused on the rights of nonhuman animals (liberationists). These debates would continue through the history of animal rights activism into the twenty-first century.32
Although wilderness protection and animal rights were political and moral issues in the early part of the twentieth century, the late 1970s were watershed years for American environmental and animal rights campaigns. This development was due in part to increasing standards of living in the United States, more opportunities for contact with nature, a growing tendency to see nature and animals as having intrinsic value, and a sense of ecological precariousness described in widely read books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962).
Environmental and animal rights concerns sometimes converged in the 1970s, as in the founding of Greenpeace in 1971, an organization that campaigned against whalers and sealers as well as nuclear power and deforestation. Greenpeace engaged in direct action, putting activists’ bodies at risk for nonhuman animals and creating public spectacles, continuing the legacy of nineteenth-century animal rights movements.33 After 1975, both animal rights and environmental activists became increasingly confrontational, or “radical,” largely out of frustration with above-ground activism that did not seem to be effective: animals continued to needlessly suffer and old-growth forests continued to be logged.
Radical animal rights and environmentalist organizations in the United States, gained significance in the early 1980s: both People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Earth First! were founded around 1980.34 Factory farming and fur industries joined vivisection as central concerns of late twentieth-century animal rights activists. During the 1980s, PETA emerged as the radical face of animal rights in the United States, although other more radical groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) would appear on the scene a decade later and see PETA as too willing to compromise and not radical enough.
In its early years, PETA focused attention on primate experimentation and cosmetic testing at the same time that Earth First! engaged in direct action tactics to defend roadless areas in national forests. Both organizations sometimes created spectacles to attract news media attention during protests, dressing as animals or throwing pies at industry officials. For instance, the “Biotech Baking Brigade” threw a dumpstered chocolate cake in the face of a GM scientist at conference dinner.35 An Earth First! gathering in 2007 ended with an action during which protesters stormed a store owned by a company building a dam in Mexico, with protesters dressed as clowns, otters, and beavers chanting outside the store.36 For Earth First!ers engaged in these protests on the behalf of other species, forests and waters had inherent rights, while for PETA activists, primates in laboratories did as well. In their parallel histories, both Earth First! and PETA sought to decenter humans and broaden moral and political interests concerning the more-than-human world.
In the early 1980s, some Earth First!ers were dedicated exclusively to protecting wilderness in the United States, while others were fighting against the World Bank and fast-food restaurants that used rainforest beef, linking environmental and nonhuman animal concerns. The Earth First! Journal, published in various formats since the first years of Earth First!, became a central resource for networking and sharing information about environmental and animal rights struggles across the United States and internationally.37 In the late 1980s, Earth First! was a substantial presence in struggles against logging in northern California, Oregon, and Washington, especially in campaigns to safeguard old-growth forests. Earth First!ers voiced concern for trees as well as the many nonhuman animal species that lived in and around them. Tree-sits and road blockades emerged as the most effective tactics during the forest campaigns of the 1990s. Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year tree-sit in a redwood called Luna brought tree-sits and threatened redwoods to national attention. After considerable coverage by local and national news media, Hill’s tree-sit eventually won modest protection for an area of old-growth redwoods.38
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, most radical activists I met did not consider PETA to be radical, although Earth First! with its anarchistic organization continued to fit that moniker. PETA has a centralized organization, a significant budget, and celebrity sponsors while, true to its anarchist roots, Earth First! is decentralized, organized through collectives, and uninterested in celebrities. By the 1990s, more radical and clandestine movements (the ALF and the Earth Liberation Front [ELF]) that concentrated on property destruction and used tactics such as arson emerged from within and alongside PETA and Earth First! By the twenty-first century, pie throwing, theatrical urban protests, and other kinds of public disruptions existed on one end of the direct action spectrum, with hidden night-time lab raids and sabotage by hooded and masked activists on the other.
The ELF was founded in the United Kingdom in 1992 by Earth First!ers and the first U.S. action claimed publicly by the ELF took place in 1996.39 Some Earth First!ers and other activists involved with forest campaigns on the West Coast, borrowing tactics from the ALF in England, began to engage in underground actions, including arson, during the late 1990s.40 Around the same time that ELF emerged as the most extreme direct action wing of the environmental movement (using arson for property destruction, for instance, not a tactic adopted by most Earth First!ers), animal rights was becoming more militant as well. Many of the radical animal liberation actions of the 1990s were claimed by the ALF or by those who adopted ALF-like tactics of working alone or in small anarchist cells.
The ALF, founded in England in 1976 by Ronnie Lee, garnered media attention for acts of sabotage and animal releases and spread in popularity in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.41 From 1979 to 1993, the ALF was reportedly responsible for 313 incidents of break-ins, vandalism, arson, and thefts associated with animal liberation.42 Although law enforcement agencies and animal researchers see activists as dangerous, the ALF has explicit guidelines about taking precautions during actions to avoid harming humans and other animals.43 The ALF typically functions as a decentralized, anonymous movement organized around informal and temporary cells, often as small as two people. As a leaderless movement, it has no offices or directors, no fundraising initiatives, and no employees. As one activist puts it in the film Behind the Mask (2006), “ALF only exists in people’s hearts and minds.”44
During the 1990s, the hardcore punk rock subculture influenced radical animal rights and environmental activists, as bands like Earth Crisis and Shelter stressed the urgency of environmental and animal issues. Many young activists came out of this scene with its focus on anarchist anticapitalism critiques and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approaches to music, art, and social change.45 These concerns were partially driven by a movement within hardcore referred to as “straightedge,” which advocated veganism and discouraged drug use, drinking, and promiscuous sex.46 Many aspects of the straightedge scene helped to create an audience receptive to the message of animal rights. It was inspired by punk rock’s anarchistic critique of consumer capitalism and imperialism, the physical intensity of hardcore shows, and bands’ and fans’ desire to change a flawed world, especially a world characterized by the existence of animal suffering. These influences coalesced in hardcore scenes across the country during the 1990s at the same time that ALF’s message began to spread. I explore these developments in detail in Chapter 5.
The influence of hardcore on radical animal rights and environmentalism in the 1990s is just one example of the ways in which radical activism during and since the 1990s has largely been a youth movement, even though activists of all ages participate in protests. Most of the activists serving prison sentences at the turn of the twenty-first century were sentenced for actions committed when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. A large number of activists in the 1990s and early 2000s were introduced to activism through youth subcultures like straightedge, high school clubs, and friends, or during college through campus environmental and animal rights groups. As parental and family influences became less important in these extrafamilial contexts, young people were more likely to be exposed through friends and lovers to activist groups and campaigns.
