following sections offer a genealogical account of radical environmentalism and animal rights in the United States within the context of late twentieth-century youth culture. Here I focus on the emergence of radical politics since the 1960s, with a nod to earlier direct action movements, followed by a discussion of the feminist and antinuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s. I also explore later expressions of radicalism that draw from these movements, particularly anarchists’ involvement in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999. The third section explores anarchism in practice, such as Food Not Bombs and similar organizations, and its impact on environmental and animal rights direct action. Finally, I discuss the role of religion in youth movements since the 1960s, focusing on contemporary Paganism and radical environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s.
POST–WORLD WAR II ANTECEDENTS
OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY RADICAL ACTIVISM
After watching a documentary on the radical 1970s antiwar group the Weather Underground, in which one of the members explained he was so obsessed with Vietnam that he thought about it every waking moment, animal rights activist Peter Young realized that he felt the same way about caged and slaughtered animals. In a letter he wrote me from prison, Young recognized Weather as an important antecedent and inspiration for the animal rights movement of the 1990s.63 In the 1960s and 1970s, rebellious youth, especially college students, flocked to the antiwar movement and serve as exemplars to late twentieth-century activists like Young. The 1960s helped to shape the course of radical activism in the 1990s and 2000s by providing models for action, often explicitly invoked, as in Young’s reference to Weather.64 A 2005 book on the anticapitalist movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, makes this connection explicit in a preface by former Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn. One of the volume’s co-authors is Chesa Boudin, son of two Weather members.
Like 1960s youth movements, contemporary animal rights activism and environmentalism act as “the conscience of society,” attending to ethics and justice issues, rather than “bread-and-butter ones.”65 Activists in the 1960s rejected the careers their parents saw as respectable. They believed that the social values of their parents’ generation were becoming increasingly irrelevant and irrational.66 In this way, while youth-led political movements may involve a minority of the national population, they tend to be representative of more widespread sentiments.67 Like Weather Underground, radical activists are the extreme wing of broader societal trends around environmental commitments and animal rights. And, like Weather, contemporary radicals link their issues of special concern with other struggles: feminism, antiracism, antiauthoritarianism, egalitarianism, moral purity, and anti-institutionalization.68 Weather organized as collectives and made decisions by consensus, confronted “white privilege,” was adamantly opposed to racism, and supported gay rights and equality for women, at least in principle. All of these remained important concerns of activists I met in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Weather Underground was a largely (though not entirely) white middle-class youth movement of self-proclaimed “freedom fighters” challenging the U.S. government’s policies, especially those concerning the Vietnam War and African Americans. They modeled themselves after revolutionaries like Che Guevara, the Argentinian Marxist.69 Weatherman Bill Ayers remembers that they “imagined that the survival of humanity depended on the kids alone . . . We wanted to break from the habitual and the mediocre, to step into history as subjects and not objects. We would combat the culture of compromise, rise up and act decisively on what the known demanded—we could think of no basis on which to defend inaction, and so our watchword was simple: Action! Action! Action!”70 Weather Underground members were frustrated after petitions, demonstrations, and other above-ground strategies failed to bring about any real change. Some members came from the larger SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, founded in the early 1960s), but they thought SDS nonviolence modeled on the civil rights movement was ineffective. In order to “step into history,” they believed that more confrontational tactics were needed to resist American involvement in the Vietnam War and the oppression of African Americans.71
Weather was characterized by a tension common among contemporary radical activists: Weather members rejected dominant American values and institutions, but placed themselves within an American tradition of resistance going back to the Boston Tea Party. “In Weatherman,” recalls Bill Ayers, “we had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide.”72 And yet, they identified with an American activist lineage. They had read Malcolm X and their heroes and models were “Osceola and Cochise, Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey, Emma Goldman and the Grimke sisters.” According to Ayers, “We located ourselves in history and found a way at last to have a little niche at home.”73 Looking back, claims Ayers, most Americans now “accept the importance of the Boston Tea Party, Shay’s Rebellion, Nat Turner’s uprising, Denmark Vesey’s revolt, John Brown’s attack, the Deacons for Self-Defense, the Freedom Riders, the theft of the Pentagon Papers . . . most of us can imagine ourselves throwing tea into Boston Bay or even throwing ourselves in front of that fateful bullet flying toward Martin Luther King Jr.”74 In this understanding of an American tradition of radicalism, Weather and other earlier revolutionaries are all part of a legacy often invoked by contemporary activists who see themselves as heroes of a history not yet told.
After the Vietnam War ended and members of Weather surfaced from their underground lives, the group disbanded. Many of the activists who had protested war and racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s had by the mid-1970s turned to the women’s and environmental movements, including the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which I take up in the next section.75 Two decades after the Weather Underground, radical environmentalists like the ELF would revisit some of Weather’s tactics: organizing into cells, emphasizing solidarity with oppressed minorities, issuing communiqués, building explosive devices, carrying out symbolic property destruction, living fugitive lives underground, and identifying with resistance movements in Latin America.76
RELIGIOUS RADICALISM
Religious radicalism is also part of the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s that shaped the context out of which late twentieth-century radical environmentalism and animal rights emerged. Religious radicalism from the 1960s on includes Jews and Christians involved in the civil rights movement, radical Catholics like Philip and Daniel Berrigan protesting during the Vietnam War (while they were not young, their tactics of resistance were influential among young antiwar protesters), and Quakers and Neopagans in the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s.
Religious radicalism based on issues of conscience and social justice concerns has a long history in the United States, from nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionists to twentieth-century Pagan antinuclear protesters. The 1960s was a crucial time for the joining of religious commitment and radical action in the antiwar movement, alongside secular movements like the Weather Underground.77 Catholic antiwar activists were among the most prominent 1960s religious radicals. For instance, radical Catholics in the Catonsville Nine engaged in a famous act of antiwar property destruction. They risked time in prison because they had to act; their moral commitments gave them no other choice. The compulsion to act would continue to echo through direct action movements of the 1970s and into the 1980s as similar moral concerns were taken up by environmental and animal rights activists.
In 1968, the Catonsville Nine (nine Catholic protesters, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan) took six hundred individual draft files from the Catonsville, Maryland, Selective Service office and burned them with napalm. Daniel Berrigan, who was also famous for pouring blood on the Pentagon steps, explicitly placed the protest in an American tradition of civil disobedience, including the Boston Tea Party and “abolitionist and anarchist traditions.” During the trial of the Catonsville Nine, Berrigan told the court that “From the beginning of our republic good men and women had said no and acted outside the law” and would be vindicated by time.78 Another of the protesters, Thomas Lewis,
