with the social and political status quo, including attitudes toward the more-than-human world. For instance, in September 2014, over 300,000 people converged on Manhattan for the peaceful People’s Climate March that included mainstream environmental and animal rights activists, a large contingent of interfaith groups, and politicians such as former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, secretary general of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon, and New York mayor Bill de Blasio.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, concerns about climate change were not only the purview of environmentalists, just as the rights of sentient creatures were no longer only the concern of animal rights activists. These activists are the radical wing of a broader cultural shift in understanding humans’ place in a multispecies world and a planet in peril. Their actions express trends in contemporary American spiritual expression and moral duties to the nonhuman at the turn of the millennium. Their beliefs and practices reflect a way of being in the world that decenters the human and calls for rethinking our appropriate place in the world vis-à-vis other species. They further our understanding of how younger Americans, in particular, situate the needs of human beings within a world of other species that they see themselves as closely related to and responsible for. I read radical activism as an important expression of social and political trends in the beginning of the twenty-first century that call into question American government and social institutions, as well as fundamental assumptions of what democracy means in the United States in this era and what it might mean in the future.
A READER’S MAP
Chapters 1 and 2 provide introductory material and context for the other chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to activists’ lives and work as well as background on the communities I most often interacted with. Chapter 2 lays out some historical context for the other chapters by charting the convergence of youth culture, North American spiritual and political movements, and environmental and animal rights activism. Radical activism among young adults emerged from the conjunction of a number of historical forces. These forces shaped the particular ways activism has come to be expressed within the radical environmental and animal rights movements of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. In this chapter I suggest that activists travel through networks of affiliation, including the Occupy movement, hardcore punk rock, gender studies classes, veganism, anarchist infoshops (bookstores, rooms, and/or meeting areas where radical literature and other information is shared), and Food Not Bombs. I place these networks within the historical trajectories of social, religious, environmental, and political movements, including anarchism, feminism, gay rights, deep ecology, contemporary Paganism, and youth cultural movements. More than anything else, the radical activist communities I explore in this book are composed of young adults grappling with the realities of the present and imagining a different kind of future in an era of global environmental change. In this chapter I argue for thinking about youth conversion and commitment in ways that avoid demonizing youth. To do so will involve understanding the deep historical roots of young adults’ concerns about the plight of other species as well as their own.
Chapters 3 through 7 cover a lifespan of activism, beginning with childhood experience and ending with mourning the deaths of human and other-than-human beings. Each of these chapters also considers the ways in which particular kinds of emotional experiences shape activist commitments. Chapter 3 focuses on the experience of wonder within the landscape of childhood and introduces the notion that activists’ inner histories composed of memories and childhood experiences are brought to and emerge during activist gatherings and direct actions. The extent to which the remembered childhood landscape is imbued with wonder may affect the intensity of activists’ grief over destroyed landscapes and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. At activist gatherings and direct actions, activists revisit and reconstruct childhood experiences. Rather than severing their lives from childhood, some of them engage in a creative reworking of childhood experiences by creating a deep ecological politics of action.
Chapters 4 and 5 present two possible ways that young people might undergo a rite of passage in the process of becoming activists: one in forest action camps and the other through participation in urban straightedge/hardcore punk rock scenes. Chapter 4 describes the ways in which some activists’ deepening commitments to other species are shaped by love and feelings of kinship in the context of forest activism. In this chapter, I suggest that tree-sits and other actions act simultaneously as rites of passage and rites of protest. Activists travel to forests and experience a sense of belonging in these separate spaces away from a society most of them have rejected. They create action camps and protests as spaces apart, as the larger-than-human world becomes more real to them and the human society they were born into becomes more distant. In these spaces apart they often seek to decolonize and rewild what has been domesticated and colonized. Through complex relationships of intimacy and distance expressed in rites of identification and disidentification, they draw closer to the wild and farther away from other humans outside activist communities. Their vision is one of a feral future in which the wild takes over cities and suburbs, as well as their own bodies and souls, reversing what they see as the relentlessly destructive movement of a doomed civilization.
Chapter 5 explores the interweaving of music, Hindu religious beliefs, and activism motivated by anger in the context of hardcore punk rock. In this chapter, I describe the unlikely convergence of hardcore punk rock, Krishna Consciousness, and animal rights in youth subcultural spaces in order to understand how the aural and spiritual worlds created by some bands shaped the emergence of radical animal rights in the 1990s. At times these music scenes nurtured the idea of other species as sacred beings and sparked outrage at their use and abuse by humans. Bands made fans into activists who brought moral outrage and the intensity of hardcore to direct actions in forests, at animal testing labs and mink farms, and against hunting and factory farming. In this chapter I also explore the extremism sometimes associated with radicalization that can emerge from oppositional stances as activist and hardcore communities negotiate a variety of tensions concerning gender and ethnicity.
In Chapter 6 I explore conflicts within activist communities more intently by considering how activists both soften and sharpen the bounds of inclusion through ritual and spatial strategies, the ways in which they include and exclude self and other as they make and remake sacred and safe spaces within their communities. Chapter 6 analyzes the efforts of activists to create community among people with different agendas and backgrounds and the resultant tensions and conflicts that come about in the process. I look closely at activists’ work to build communities that bring together environmental and animal rights activism with concerns about social justice, especially with regard to people of color. Activist gatherings are imagined as free and open spaces of inclusivity and equality, and yet they set up their own patterns of conformity and expectation. This chapter looks closely at how putting the “Earth first” comes in conflict with “anti-oppression” efforts and vice-versa, as activists work hard, drawing on empathy and compassion, to “decolonize” their communities and “dismantle patriarchy” and transphobia within their movements.
Finally, Chapter 7 describes activists’ grief and despair over loss and extinction. Through the study of grief over lost places, tree friends, whole species, and human comrades, I suggest that protests can be understood as rites of mourning. Memories of childhood wonder, feelings of love and kinship for other species, empathizing with oppressed human communities, raging at injustice with hardcore bands, all make the loss of friends and other species even more keenly felt as activists face the realities of mass extinction and climate change. I explore their experience of environmental devastation and species loss as a kind of perpetual mourning from which they cannot escape. And yet, in all this loss, many of them find hope for a primal future, beyond the human. This chapter looks at how they make losses visible to each other through their own ritualized vulnerability and martyrdom and to the public through ritualized protest and media exposure.
In
