work of religious studies scholar Bron Taylor has been invaluable to my understanding of radical environmentalism. He saw a richly lived spiritual world in radical environmentalism when others labeled these activists “terrorists” or dismissed them as “tree-huggers.” I am deeply indebted to Bron’s work. Much of the territory I explore here echoes themes and ideas he has written about in many books and articles over the past twenty-five years.
Mentors and friends who have been important in my personal and professional life read and commented on parts of this manuscript. The care and support of three of them has been essential. David Haberman, my fellow lover of forests, has been urging me for years to finish this book and was the first person to read it all the way through. Bob Orsi has always read my work like no one else and has shaped my scholarly life in more ways than I can possibly put into words. Ron Grimes has inspired and pushed me in the right ways, both compassionate and challenging. Reading for U.C. Press, Adrian Ivakhiv and Evan Berry provided excellent critiques and questions on the entire manuscript. To the other colleagues and friends who read and commented on portions of the book—Jason Bivins, Graham Harvey, Lisa Sideris, Robert Jones, Heather Altfeld, Gretel van Wieren, and Sarah Fredericks—I am grateful for the insight and sensitivity with which you read (and edited in Heather’s case) my work, even if I did not always follow your good advice!
I was fortunate indeed to be able to write Chapter 3 at Sally and Rich Thomason’s cabin in Montana and edit chapters 3 and 4 at Laird Easton’s dining room table. Thanks to the changing personnel of the Chico writing group and my colleagues at Chico State in addition to Laird who joined me in various venues around Chico when I was working on early versions of some of these chapters: Vernon Andrews, Jason Clower, Daniel Veidlinger, Heather Altfeld, and Troy Jollimore.
My parents, Thomas Howell Pike III and Lucy Grey Gould, always met my reports on the progress of this book, and all my other adventures, with curiosity and encouragement. They nurtured my love of the outdoors when I was a child by leaving me alone to roam outside and taking us hiking in many beautiful places around Louisville, Kentucky. I am truly blessed to have had parents such as these!
Thanks to my husband Rob for his easy toleration of long separations due to my forays into the field and for not minding the many hours I spent in my study reading and writing. Our life together gives me much pleasure, and his presence in the days and nights since this book began has been a great gift.
Much of the writing of this book took place while my three children, Dasa, Jonah, and Clara, still lived with me, before they left home to make lives of their own. Their existence has enriched my life and given me more joy and delight than I can ever say. This book is dedicated to them, with all my love.
Introduction
For All the Wild Hearts
In July 2000, federal agents raided an environmental action camp in Mt. Hood National Forest that was established to protect old-growth forests and their inhabitants, including endangered species, from logging. High above the forest floor, activists had constructed a platform made of rope and plywood where several of them swung from hammocks. Seventeen-year-old Emma Murphy-Ellis held off law enforcement teams for almost eight hours by placing a noose around her neck and threatening to hang herself if they came too close.1 Murphy-Ellis, going by her forest name Usnea, explained her motivation in the following way: “I state without fear—but with the hope of rallying our collective courage—that I support radical actions. I support tools like industrial sabotage, monkey-wrenching machinery and strategic arson. The Earth’s situation is dire. If other methods are not enough, we must not allow concerns about property rights to stop us from protecting the land, sea and air.”2 Murphy-Ellis speaks for most radical activists who are ready to put their bodies on the line to defend trees or animals, other lives that they value as much as their own.3
For the Wild is a study of radical environmental and animal rights activism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. I set out to explore how teenagers like Murphy-Ellis become committed to forests and animals as worthy of protection and personal sacrifice. I wanted to find out how nature becomes sacred to them, how animals, trees, and mountains come to be what is important and worth sacrificing for. This work is about the paths young activists find themselves following, in tree-sits and road blockades to protect old-growth forests and endangered bird species, or breaking into fur farms at night to release hundreds of mink from cages. These young people join loosely organized, leaderless groups like Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), coming to protests from contexts as different as significant childhood experiences in nature and the hardcore punk rock music scene. Various other experiences also spark their commitments, such as viewing a documentary about baby seal hunts or witnessing a grove of woods they loved being turned into a parking lot. What their paths to activism have in common is the growing recognition of a world shared with other, equally valuable beings, and a determined certainty that they have a duty to these others.
In their accounts of becoming activists, emotions play an important role in shaping their commitments. Love for other-than-human species, compassion for their suffering, anger about the impact of contemporary human lifestyles on the lives of nonhuman species, and grief over the degradation of ecosystems—each of these emotions are expressed through and emerge out of what I describe as protest rites. This is a study of how radical activists make and remake themselves into activists through protests and other ritualized activities. It is at the sites of protests that activists’ inner histories composed of memories, places, beings, and emotions come together with social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, anticapitalism, and anarchism, to provide these young people with the raw material out of which they fashion activist identities and communities. For the Wild is concerned with fundamental questions about human identity construction in relation to others, human and nonhuman. It investigates the role of childhood experience and memory in adult identity and the contours and meanings of our multiple relationships with the more-than-human world. It attempts to understand the connections between individual worldviews, collective ritual, and social change. I explore what the case of radical activists tells us more generally about memory, ritual, commitment, and human behavior, about how the lives of other-than-human beings come to matter, and especially about young adult behavior, since most activists first become involved with activism during their teenage years or early twenties.
Radical activists may be living out their most deeply held commitments, becoming heroes to each other in the process, but to outsiders they are often seen as “eco-terrorists.”4 Cable Network News reported in 2005 that in the view of John Lewis, an FBI deputy assistant director and top official in charge of domestic terrorism, “The No. 1 domestic terrorism threat is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement.”5 A few years earlier, Rolling Stone reported that FBI director Louis Freeh testified before a Senate subcommittee that “the most recognizable single-issue terrorists at the present time are those involved in the violent animal-rights, anti-abortion and environmental-protection movements.”6 According to the FBI, groups like the ALF and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) have “committed more than 1100 criminal acts causing more than $100 million in damage.”7 Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, environmental and animal rights activists have been aggressively pursued by the FBI, as journalist Will Potter illustrates in his account of the persecution of “eco-terrorists,” Green Is the New Red.8 In 2005 the federal government made highly publicized arrests in what FBI agents dubbed “Operation Backfire,” the largest round-up of eco-activists in American history. Two years later, ten defendants were convicted on federal arson and vandalism charges, receiving sentences ranging from three to thirteen years. Although no one was hurt or killed in any of the acts, federal prosecutors had argued for life sentences. Even with the threat of prison time, after Operation Backfire radical environmentalists and animal rights activists continued to operate both clandestinely and through aboveground protests. The two movements increasingly converged during the second decade of the twenty-first century. However, the primary focus of this
