the law to save lives.”79 These protesters told the court that they could not rest, knowing that innocent people in Vietnam were suffering because of U.S. military actions. They argued to the jury that they answered to a “higher law” that took precedence over human laws.80 These antiwar protesters felt that peaceable protests had failed and imperatives had been placed on them by the ongoing suffering of American soldiers and innocent people in Vietnam.
If there is one theme that unites many different forms of religious radicalism, it is the idea of “moral passion” that drives commitment to justice for other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. Animal rights and environmental activists belong in the context of this morally passionate American lineage of resistance to injustice. It is a lineage that runs through the antislavery movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar and Black Power movements of the 1960s, and the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s. On websites, at protest marches, and at animal rights and environmental gatherings, imprisoned activists’ numerous supporters have praised them as “warriors” and “abolitionists,” explicitly placing them in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, and other revolutionary leaders.
Social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement serve as important models for twenty-first-century activists. Henry Spira (1927–1998), an early animal rights activist who organized direct actions against animal testing, explains that “We wanted to adapt to the animal movement the traditions of struggle which had proven effective in the civil rights movement, the union movement and the women’s movement.”81 In a 2015 talk on “Purity Politics: How Animal Liberation Is Keeping Us from Animal Liberation” at the International Animal Rights Conference, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) activist Jake Conroy described the Black Panthers as the “most important social justice movement in the history of the United States.” When Conroy was released from prison (he was sentenced to four years for his role in SHAC), he sought out activists from the 1960s, including one involved with the Weather Underground. He spoke with them to better understand his own experience and the historical context for his work with the twenty-first-century animal rights movement.82 By emphasizing their place in an American lineage of social change movements, radical animal rights and environmental activists argue that their activism is on a historical scale with other liberation movements. They believe that decades from now, instead of being remembered as terrorists, they will be seen as freedom fighters, ahead of their time.
“OUR ENEMIES AND THEIRS ARE ONE AND THE SAME”
Politically motivated radical environmental and animal rights activists at the turn of the twenty-first century are committed to a far-reaching program of social change, as well as a future where animals and wilderness have rights and protections. They argue that their concerns intersect in important ways with racial justice and gender equality. Intersectionality was emphasized in activist communities I participated in, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6. Activists’ critique of American environmental policies and practices concerning nonhuman animals goes hand in hand with a denunciation of consumer capitalism, racism, imperialism, and gender and economic inequality. As the author of a “Report Back” from Earth First!s Rendezvous puts it, “Remember that our enemies and theirs are one and the same.”83 For this reason, the biographies of many radical environmental and animal rights activists are characterized by involvement, often from an early age, with a variety of social change movements and social justice campaigns.
In 2000–2001, Lauren Gazzola became involved in SHAC, the campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences.84 Three weeks before she planned to take the LSAT, she was arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” for her participation in SHAC. In 2006, Gazzola was sentenced to four years and four months in prison for “Conspiracy to Violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, Conspiracy to Stalk, three counts of Interstate Stalking, Conspiracy to Harass using a Telecommunications Device.”85 The website she contributed to supported animal liberation, even though she herself was not involved in these actions. As she points out, “The speech on our website was indeed controversial. When anonymous activists liberated 14 beagles from the lab, we cheered. When protesters demonstrated outside lab employees’ homes, we applauded.”86 After forty months in federal prison, Gazzola was released in 2010.
While in prison, Gazzola completed most of the work for an interdisciplinary MA in the “Law, History, and Philosophy of Free Speech and the First Amendment,” through Antioch University. After her release, she became involved with the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, working in the position of communications associate for publications, drafting press releases, writing newsletter articles, and managing the Center for Constitutional Rights blog. She continued to be outspoken about free speech issues around animal activism and the unconstitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) that allows for protesters to be prosecuted as “terrorists.”87
Radical environmental and animal rights activism draws on a range of political currents, usually from the left of the political spectrum. Like Gazzola, Darryl Cherney, one of the leading radical environmentalists in the West Coast “Redwood Wars” of the 1990s, “was political right off the bat.” He worked on various political campaigns in New York City where he grew up from age eight on. He came to Earth First! with a music and theatre background, organizational skills, and an appreciation for working-class issues from living in New York. When Cherney met activist Judi Bari, an advocate of workers’ rights as well as forest protection, her combined interest in deep ecology and socialism was a natural fit.
Bari infused some Earth First! campaigns with a concern for workers’ and women’s rights. An article in Earth First! Journal describes “the second phase” of Earth First! during the early 1990s (following the original “rednecks for wilderness” phase with its emphasis on biocentrism) as a time of coalition building with loggers and other workers.88 During the 1990s there was a marked split between some radical environmentalists who wanted to stay focused on wilderness protection and others like Bari and Cherney who felt that environmentalism had to be linked with other causes, such as anarchism, workers’ rights, and feminism.89 Former Earth First! Journal editor Panagioti Tsolkas argues that “Judi Bari’s anti-capitalist analysis increased EF!’s appeal to crowds of college students and anarcho-punks.”90 In the early decades of the 2000s, a tension between these emphases characterized radical environmentalist communities.
Activists who worked to link environmentalism with other causes during the late 1990s were significantly influenced by the presence of anarchists at forest action camps in the Northwest. Their concerns were also shaped by the emergence of anarchism at the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999, as well as around the Occupy movement of 2009. At the same time, radical environmentalists were involved with Seattle and Occupy, suggesting that anarchism and radical environmentalism have had a symbiotic relationship, influencing each other in important ways. According to Tsolkas, “While Earth First! (EF!) has never considered itself to be explicitly anarchist, it has always had a connection to the antiauthoritarian counterculture and has operated in an anarchistic fashion since its inception . . . it has arguably maintained one of the most consistent and long-running networks for activists and revolutionaries of an anarchist persuasion with the broader goal of overturning all socially constructed hierarchies.”91 The anarchist influence in environmental and animal rights circles meant that social justice concerns were increasingly foregrounded in the early twenty-first century.
Late twentieth-century anarchism in the United States did not become publically visible in the mainstream news media until the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. Since then, the number of Americans, especially younger Americans, identifying with anarchism has risen.92 Activists are exposed to anarchism through college organizations, friends, infoshops, Food Not Bombs, or at protests and in hardcore music scenes. When he was in college, Marten, a former activist with the Buffalo Field Campaign, became involved with a cross-section of loosely anarchist groups.
