in poor communities affected by polluted water are as important as ruined mountains plowed over for the coal beneath them.23 For these beings and places, activists must act; they have no other choice. Theirs is a politics of intimacy with these others that emerges from direct encounters with a living, multispecies world. For the Wild uncovers and explores the deep experiential roots of activists’ political commitments as a reaction to the profound reconfiguration of planet Earth and its beings by industrialized civilizations.
My exploration of the role of ritual and emotion in the commitments of radical activists pushes towards a broader understanding of the stream of American thought and practice historian Catherine Albanese has called “nature religion.”24 Like many of the examples Albanese discusses, activists are more interested in this-worldly than otherworldly concerns, or as activist Josh Harper put it when explaining his disinterest in religion: “this world is primary.”25 They are likely to say they are agnostic or atheist, yet approach activism as a sacred duty, putting into practice a nonanthropocentric morality. Animals and the natural world are what they care about most, although they link environmental and animal issues to struggles for social justice.
As a study of spiritually informed activism, among other things, this book investigates activists’ lived experience of nature and nonhuman animals as central to their worlds of meaning. I draw especially on Robert Orsi’s definition of religion as “a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures together.”26 In what follows, I will suggest some of the ways that radical activists make special, and even sacred, relationships between human and nonhuman earthly others, including not only nonhuman animals and trees but also other activists who have become comrades and martyrs in a holy crusade to save the wild. While some activists may see the Earth’s body as Gaia or trees as gods and goddesses, they are more likely to emphasize the sacred relationships we have with other species and the sacred duties and responsibilities we consequently owe them. Trees and nonhuman animals, or even the Earth itself in a more abstract sense, are regarded by activists with awe and reverence. And what these activists set apart from the sacred as profane are the human actions and machines that threaten these beings and places. In the context of activism, “sacred”—a sacred crusade to save the wild or the sacredness of a forest—designates those for whom activists will sacrifice their own comfort and safety.27 These beings and special places are worth the discomfort of many days in tree-sits and the risk of long prison sentences. It is the meanings and origins of these sacred relationships and duties that I focus on in this work.
A number of activists told me they do not like the term activist for various reasons, but I have chosen to retain it because I am most interested in actions that express their commitments and desires. This study is practice centered and focuses on what activists do and how they came to do it, as well as the beliefs behind their actions. For the purposes of this book, I define radical activists as those who reject anthropocentrism and speciesism and practice direct action.28 Through direct action they challenge assumptions about human exceptionalism and boundaries between species used to exclude nonhuman species from moral consideration. They also think of themselves as “radicals” in ways I will explore at length, but that include identification with anarchism and the strategies and beliefs of earlier radical movements like the Black Panthers and gay rights. Animal rights activists and radical environmentalists are also closely affiliated with contemporary anticapitalism radicals, such as the Occupy movement. For some radical environmentalists such as Earth First!ers, being radical is about getting to the roots of environmental destruction: our very ways of thinking and acting as human beings on a planet where we coexist with many other species.29 Being radical separates these activists from more mainstream environmental groups—the Sierra Club, for example—and animal rights organization such as the Humane Society (HSUSA). They critically point to the compromises made by mainstream environmental and animal rights organizations and highlight their own refusal to compromise. They engage in direct action and promote an “every tool in the toolbox” approach to environmental and animal issues. Such a toolbox includes illegal acts of property destruction such as arson, occupation of corporate offices, sabotage of machinery, and animal releases, differentiating them from organizations that eschew illegal and confrontational tactics. The refusal to compromise is a hallmark of radical commitment: if eco-activism is a sacred crusade for the wild and for the animals, ideally, then, nothing should prevent activists from acting for them.
THE ROOTS OF RADICAL ACTIVISM
Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century radical animal rights and environmental activism’s origins are complex, the background of participants is diverse, and the two movements have somewhat different genealogies that I trace in more detail in Chapter 2. Radical environmentalism draws on seven main sources that have contributed to expressions of activism seen in Earth First! and the ELF:
1.What historian Catherine L. Albanese has described as “nature religion”: ideas and practices as diverse as those of Native Americans and New England Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, that make nature their “symbolic center.”30 Religious studies scholar Bron Taylor further specifies a strain of American nature religion that he calls “dark green religion,” that includes radical environmentalists and is characterized by adherence to the view that “nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.”31 Taylor discusses the nature religion of radical environmentalists in a number of articles where he argues among other things that ecotage itself is “ritual worship.”32 This view is shared by sociologist Rik Scarce, who characterizes tree-sitting as a “quasi-religious act of devotion.”33 Historical studies by Evan Berry and Mark R. Stoll broaden this tradition of nature religion by suggesting that nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American environmentalism was shaped in important ways by Protestant forms of Christianity.34
2.The secular environmentalist movement that emerged in the 1960s, built on earlier activities, and was expressed in initiatives such as the Wilderness Act (1964) and Earth Day (1970).35
3.Deep ecological views, particularly the work of Arne Naess, Bill Devall, and George Sessions, that have shaped and been shaped by nature religion and the environmental movement. Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Naess coined the term “deep ecology” in 1973, as a contrast to the “shallow” ecology movement. Deep ecologists promote an ecological self and eco-centric rather than anthropocentric values.36
4.The fourth source is a related set of social and political movements that also emerged out of and were significantly shaped by the 1960s counterculture and include the antiwar movement, feminism, and gay rights, as well as environmentalism.37
5.Contemporary Paganism/Neopaganism. While many activists do not consider themselves religious or Pagan, nevertheless, contemporary Paganism had a significant influence in the 1980s and 1990s on forest activism in the Western United States, and on important activist organizations like Earth First!38
6.Indigenous cultures. Activists are also influenced by their understanding of Native Americans’ relationships to other species. However, they tend to be sensitive about appropriating these views for their own use in fear of perpetuating European colonialism and a mentality characteristic of “settlers” who are not indigenous to North America. Activists’ appropriation of indigenous beliefs and practices as well as their desire to support indigenous people’s struggles has been a significant but contested subject in the history of radical environmentalism, which I discuss at length in Chapter 6.39
7.Anarchism, especially global anticapitalist movements like Occupy Wall Street and green anarchism, or anarcho-primitivism, especially the writings of John Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, and Kevin Tucker.40
Radical animal rights activism developed in the United States alongside
