Keith Mako Woodhouse - The Ecocentrists - A History of Radical Environmentalism-Columbia University Press (2018)

The Ecocentrists
The Ecocentrists
A History of Radical Environmentalism
Keith Makoto Woodhouse
Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1. Ecology and Revolutionary Thought 11
2. Crisis Environmentalism 54
3. A Radical Break 95
4. Public Lands and the Public Good 143
5. Earth First! Against Itself 183
6. The Limits and Legacy of Radicalism 235
Conclusion 283
Notes 291
Index 349
Preface
The year before I began graduate school, I spent a summer as a Forest Ser-
vice ranger in the Weminuche Wilderness, a half-million acres straddling
the Continental Divide in southwestern Colorado. I hiked dozens of miles
each week, checking backcountry conditions and making visitor contacts.
Other rangers enforced Forest Service regulations by issuing citations. Still
others sat at desks in Creede, Durango, or Pagosa Springs, overseeing the
administrative work of wilderness management according to guidelines set
by foresters in Golden, Colorado or Washington, D.C. Even my brief and
limited view of the Weminuche made clear how much human effort went
into keeping this piece of the country wild.
The trail crews best demonstrated this incongruity. Winter in the
mountains of Colorado brought blowdown: wind-felled trees that often
obstructed hiking trails. In the spring and throughout the summer, trail
crews cut through the dead trees to clear a path. In the forest at large the
crews used all-terrain vehicles and chainsaws. As soon as they reached a
wilderness boundary, they abandoned their motorized equipment, saddled
horses and mules, and continued up the trail with handsaws and axes.
Cutting through a downed tree with a handsaw is strenuous work; what
might take minutes with a chainsaw can take over an hour without one.
viii Preface
The Forest Service’s commitment to using livestock and hand tools inside

wilderness was both noble and odd. Thanks largely to a very human political
process, the forest on one side of an administrative boundary was subject to
roaring chainsaws and motor exhaust and on the other side free from both.
That summer I read William Cronon’s “The Trouble With Wilderness,”
an essay that had sparked an ongoing debate among academics and envi-
ronmentalists. “The Trouble With Wilderness” describes the paradox that
I encountered high in the Rockies: wilderness is both defined by human
absence and also “quite profoundly a human creation,” a creation shaped
by administrative policies that are themselves the product of deeply rooted
assumptions.1 Even when wilderness is thousands of miles away and almost
never visited—in fact, especially then—it remains culturally and socially
situated. The lone hiker escaping into a nature devoid of human influence
is beguiled, stirred by a set of preconceptions packed in along with water
and sunscreen.
Like many readers, I found the essay as disconcerting as it was compell-
ing. Even more nettlesome than the idea of wilderness as artifice was the
claim that just as human influence streams into wilderness, so artifice trick-
les out. Wilderness, Cronon writes, “serves as the unexamined foundation
on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmental-
ism rest.” The idea of wilderness sits within and informs a larger idea called
“nature,” which in turn frames the political movement called environmen-
talism. That movement’s critiques often assume that people have wandered
away from nature-as-it-should-be. As “the ultimate landscape of authen-
ticity,” wilderness offers a baseline against which to measure how far the
human world has strayed. If wilderness is a false beacon, then the environ-
mental movement as a whole may be misled.2
In graduate school I learned that Cronon’s wilderness essay was an inci-
sive and provocative statement of a larger trend within the field of environ-
mental history. That trend involved questioning basic categories and was
part of what the environmental historian Richard White in 2004 called
“the cultural turn.” One of the most significant consequences of this turn,
according to White, was an emphasis on “hybrid landscapes rather than
the wild, rural, and urban landscapes that were once treated as pure types.”
Environmental historians smudged whatever clear lines they once thought
Preface ix
existed between city and country, and between human landscapes and natu-
ral ones. They recognized that urban places never lacked in nature, and that
apparently wild spaces were in fact profoundly shaped by human activity.
Natural and human worlds did not stand apart on either side of city limits.3
This smudging erased more than an imagined boundary between bou-
levards and fields. Cronon’s own Nature’s Metropolis, in demonstrating the
inextricable connections between a city and its hinterland, commingled
geography with philosophy as easily as it did Chicago with the plains
beyond. Cronon described his “deepest intellectual agenda” as not simply
to remove lines on a mental map but “to suggest that the boundary between
human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic.”
Part of the cultural turn in environmental history was a willingness to ques-
tion the category of “nature” itself.4
The cultural turn had deep implications for environmental history as
well as for environmentalism. The implications for environmental history
were overwhelmingly salutary. First and foremost, the cultural turn led
to a welcome reconsideration of timeworn narratives. An untethering of
the field from its most familiar renderings of “nature” produced innova-
tive scholarship that corrected myopic views. Long-cherished subjects, like
the conservation movement, received a newly critical treatment. Historians
began to describe how conservationists’ fixation on an unpeopled nature
allowed them to disregard the established practices—and sometimes even
the existence—of already marginalized groups, privileging recreation and
sightseeing over subsistence hunting or Native American treaty rights. The
decentering of wilderness as an idea, meanwhile, reflected the decentering
of wilderness as a place. Historians found in cities and suburbs stories about
how people related to the natural world, and even about the origins of the
environmental movement. Since the cultural turn, environmental histori-
ans have better resisted narrow assumptions about how people understood
and used natural resources, and have avoided too-easy morality tales about
the innocence of nature and the danger of human influence.5
In the era of climate change and accelerating human impacts on the
planet, it is worth revisiting the cultural turn and its place in environmen-
tal history. Paul Sutter began to do so several years ago. “Hybridity has
challenged declensionist narratives and pushed American environmental
x Preface
historians into new terrain,” Sutter wrote, “but those scholars have found
this world, without Eden or sin—without a pure nature or universal human
transgression against it—a disorienting place.” Acknowledging the many
insights that arose from the cultural turn, Sutter nevertheless suggested
that as much as hybridity fueled environmental history’s conversations
and debates, its limits grew more apparent in a time of intensifying human
influence over nonhuman nature. “Environmental historians,” Sutter wrote,
“have not done a great job of reengaging metanarratives of environmental
decline after the hybrid turn.”6
It is easy to understand why not. Metanarratives of decline are less com-
pelling when the idea of “nature” is less stable. Scholars have argued force-
fully that a too-fixed definition of nature—and maybe even more impor-
tantly of the word “natural”—leads to exclusionary systems and practices,
and to essentialisms that can be used to marginalize people as much as to
explain the nonhuman. The concept “nature” has served to calcify and
delimit as much as to enlighten, and so its meaning has to remain fluid and
subject to reinterpretation.7
What does this mean for environmentalism, a movement that is in many
ways predicated on a nature that exists, at least in part, beyond human con-
ceptions of it? As a graduate student I tried to think about that question
by examining a group of environmentalists who proclaimed, more than
any others, that nature held meaning and value regardless of what people
thought, and who insisted that a felled tree made a sound and subtly altered
a forest whether or not people heard the crash or understood its ecological
implications. These radical environmentalists wanted above all to challenge
human preeminence. They argued that people were no more important
than any other living things on the planet or than the ecosystems those
things inhabited. They claimed, ultimately, that human beings and human
society held no greater moral value than did nonhuman species and eco-
logical systems, a philosophy called “ecocentrism.”
Ecocentrism was a leveling philosophy in that it claimed a moral equal-
ity for all of the planet’s inhabitants, but it grew out of a sharp distinction
between people and nonhuman nature. Radical environmentalists were not
beatific egalitarians. They were angry. They believed, fundamentally, that
as modern human society gradually destroyed wild nature it veered toward
Preface xi
catastrophe, and that its self-destruction would take much of the planet
with it. That belief assumed an oppositional relationship between the
human and the natural. To reject ecocentrism, radical environmentalists
argued, was to embrace anthropocentrism—human-centeredness. Beyond
those two positions lay only equivocation.8
It is easy to dismiss such extreme ideas. They lead in many troubling direc-
tions. Chief among them is the way in which the idea of an autonomous
nature reinforces one of environmentalism’s most problematic impulses:
the tendency to group all people into a single, homogenous category called
“human,” a tendency Cronon has criticized as “an oversimplified holism.”9
Environmental holism risks ignoring social and cultural difference and sug-
gesting that all people are equally culpable in modern civilization’s effects
on the natural world despite unequal distribution of resources and vast
inequities of economic and political power. Environmentalists have often
criticized “humanity” in the singular without recognizing the unending
diversity to which that term refers.
But as easy as it is to dismiss radicals’ ideas, it is less easy to define an envi-
ronmentalism without them, or at least without some semblance of them. A
world without Eden or sin, Sutter worried, could produce “a haze of moral
relativism” in which the basic claim that humans might harm nonhuman
nature becomes more and more tenuous.10 In the recent past environmen-
talism’s critics have produced such a haze, one that has grown more opaque
in the era of climate change. As a presidential candidate in 1980, Ronald
Reagan downplayed concerns about air quality by claiming that nearly all
nitrogen oxide pollution came from plants, and he discounted fears about
oil drilling off of the West Coast by comparing spills to naturally occurring
oil seepage.11 Years later similar arguments proved just as useful. After the
1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the libertarian writer Llewellyn Rockwell said,
“Oil is natural, it’s organic, and it’s biodegradable.” Ozone holes, Rockwell
claimed, “open and close naturally.” A Mobil Oil ad from 1995 described
the nonhuman world as “resilient and capable of rejuvenation,” insisting
that “nature itself has produced far more devastating changes than any
caused by man . . . and the environment has survived.”12 The literary scholar
Rob Nixon notes a similarly cavalier attitude among politicians and man-
agers who tried to minimize fallout over the BP Deepwater Horizon spill
xii Preface
in 2010. The blowout was “a natural phenomenon,” BP’s defenders argued,

comparable to regularly occurring oil seeps in the Gulf and just as easily
cleaned up by ocean filtration. The endpoint of this logic is the claim that
climate change should cause little concern, because changing climates are
natural and the planet has survived countless instances. As early as 1990,
Rockwell suggested that global warming could “lengthen growing seasons,
make the earth more liveable, and forestall a future ice age”—by now famil-
iar talking points for climate change apologists. “The recent turn within
environmental studies toward celebrating the creative resilience of ecosys-
tems,” Nixon writes, “can be readily hijacked by politicians, lobbyists, and
corporations who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollu-
tion liability.”13
The challenge for environmental historians, and for environmentalists, is
to insist that humans should carefully consider their impact on nature even
as terms like “humans,” “impact,” and “nature” lose much of their ballast.
“Hybridity may be a source of hope,” Sutter wrote, “but at this moment
of unprecedented human influence over the global environment—what
many call the Anthropocene—environmental historians must better con-
tend with and communicate the cultural, material, and moral complex-
ity implicated in the term.”14 The notion of a geological age of humans,
“the Anthropocene,” captures a tension between urgency and complexity.
“Anthropocene” is primarily descriptive but can easily tip in one of sev-
eral prescriptive directions. In one of those directions is acute anxiety over
the ways that people are more and more rapidly refashioning the planet.
In another direction is the celebration of an earth made over by human
design, or a complacent insistence that there remain no meaningful differ-
ences between people and nonhuman nature and so less reason to worry
about one’s effects on the other.
Radical environmentalists believed very strongly that a planet domi-
nated by humans should be a source of anxiety rather than complacency or
celebration, and that environmentalism without anxiety and even anger is
less meaningful. Their ideas deserve more of a hearing today. In the Anthro-
pocene, when the human and the natural are more and more of a piece, envi-
ronmentalism can become a narrower and more technical matter of simply
measuring risk and reward. That narrow version of environmentalism loses
Preface xiii
what Jedediah Purdy calls “the prophetic strain of environmental politics,

which has always been a part of its power, and is more important than ever
today.”15 In the Anthropocene, environmentalism must be a view from
somewhere.
An environmental point of view is not necessarily an ecocentric one that
draws distinctions between people and nature. There are many reasons why
it shouldn’t be. But an environmental point of view must wrestle with the
vital questions that ecocentrism raises. The more I learned about radical
environmentalists the more I understood them as serious thinkers, engaged
in conversations that held great relevance for the broad environmental
movement and for the way that anyone might think about climate change
and the Anthropocene. Their ideas were sometimes deeply wrongheaded,
but their conversations were often thoughtful and even urgent. And their
false turns came from confronting issues that were and are complicated,
distressing, and maybe even irreconcilable.
Critics of radical environmentalism confronted the same issues, and
the same irreconcilability. It is easy to forget, after the influence of “The
Trouble With Wilderness,” just how carefully that essay made its points.
Although many writers who have used Cronon’s arguments have done so
single-mindedly, Cronon himself remained painfully aware of what might
be lost along with romantic views of wilderness. He admitted a “deep
ambivalence” about what wilderness meant for environmentalism, and was
uneasy not only about the binaries that wilderness advocacy could encour-
age but also about diminishing the power of an autonomous nature to act
as “an indispensable corrective to human arrogance.” However much peo-
ple shaped wilderness, they did not finally control it. Always beyond com-
plete human understanding, wilderness provided an unmistakable encoun-
ter with “something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other
than yourself.” And that encounter could unsettle as many assumptions as it
might reinforce. Whether a false beacon or not, the idea of wilderness con-
tinued to point toward what Cronon called a “critique of modernity that is
one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and
political discourse of our time.”16
The Weminuche Wilderness and “The Trouble With Wilderness”
unsettled and reinforced many of my own assumptions. Since hiking the
xiv Preface
one and reading the other, I have kept asking questions about what wilder-
ness means for environmentalism and what environmentalism might mean
in the twenty-first century. This book is an attempt to answer them.
The subject of this book has made me think about human beings as a
species; the writing of it has made me deeply appreciative of people as
individuals. No one has inspired this project more than Bill Cronon.
As much as Bill’s scholarship shaped my thought and my writing, his
mentorship has been even more meaningful. Through countless conver-
sations and through his own example, he helped me understand what sort
of thinker I wanted to be.
Many other faculty members at the University of Wisconsin taught
me what historians do. Particularly important were the members of my
dissertation committee: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Lou Roberts, Bill
Reese, and Gregg Mitman. At Amherst College, Kevin Sweeney and
David Blight made being a historian look exciting long before I actually
decided to do it.
At Wisconsin, I joined what I am sure is one of the best and certainly
one of the most fun communities of graduate students in the country. I
suspected this before I even arrived because I had already met Jim Feldman.
I knew it beyond doubt after I met Marc Hertzman, and spent the better
part of the next decade becoming his close friend. I met many more people
in Madison who became intellectual companions and good friends, includ-
ing Cydney Alexis, Lauren Bresnahan, Emily Brown, Scott Burkhardt,
Liese Dart, Elizabeth Feldman, Laura Haertel, Marian Halls, Jenn Hol-
land, Tim Lenoch, Marilen Loyola, Dan Magaziner, Adam Malka, Adam
Mandelman, Jen Martin, Brittany McCormick, Nic Mink, Alissa Moore,
Ryan Quintana, Tom Robertson, Kendra Smith-Howard, Courtney Stein,
Zoe Van Orsdol, Tara Waldron, Erica Wojcik, Tom Yoshikami, and Anna
Zeide. At Northwestern I have gotten to know a warm and supportive
group of colleagues with whom it is a pleasure to work. During my first
few years, Ken Alder served as department chair and Mike Sherry acted
as a mentor. Both were and are full of generous wisdom. Paul Ramirez in
particular has become a great friend.
Preface xv
A Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship proved crucial in completing my

dissertation, and I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellow-
ship Foundation for its generous support. I spent several semesters as an
adjunct instructor during and after graduate school, and I worked with
smart and friendly colleagues at both the University of Wisconsin-Ste-
vens Point and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. In a very difficult
job market that leaves far too many stellar applicants adrift, I was lucky
enough to find harbor in a postdoctoral fellowship with the Huntington
Library-University of Southern California Institute on California and the
West (ICW). Before arriving in Southern California I was likely one of
the last people in the world not to have met ICW director Bill Deverell.
Now I consider myself fortunate to count him as a friend. I had the chance
to return to Southern California, and to put the finishing touches on this
book, during a fellowship year at the Huntington Library. The Huntington
runs a remarkable fellowship program that attracts an extraordinary group
of scholars, and I was extremely lucky to have been a part of both.
While researching radical environmentalism, I had the chance to work
with several excellent library staffs. The State Historical Society of Wiscon-
sin served as a second home in graduate school, and the librarians in spe-
cial collections, in the periodicals department, and in the microform room
shared their expertise time and time again. The Denver Public Library is
one of the great public libraries in the United States, and its special col-
lections staff patiently helped me navigate its excellent conservation col-
lection. I also relied on the friendly professionalism of librarians at North-
western University, the University of California-Davis, the University of
California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Southern California. Most
of all, however, I worked with the staff of the Bancroft Library at the Uni-
versity of California-Berkeley. I spent hundreds of hours at the Bancroft
and find it hard to imagine a nicer library or a more competent, knowledge-
able, and welcoming group of librarians.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to four Earth First! founders. I spent
several hours on the phone with Howie Wolke and Bart Koehler, both of
whom talked to me at length despite the fact that Bart was busy with family
matters and Howie hates long phone calls. I visited Mike Roselle in West
Virginia and talked to him for the better part of an afternoon. Mike was
xvi Preface
generous with his time and with his opinions, and I learned a great deal
from our conversation. Most of all I owe thanks to Dave Foreman. I spoke
with Dave on several occasions at his home in Albuquerque, and he let me
look through many boxes of documents stacked in his garage. A historian at
heart, Dave told me stories about Earth First!’s early years and encouraged
me to look through the papers he’d kept, never once questioning what I
intended to do with any of it. I have tried to approach Earth First! critically,
but I hope that the group’s founders recognize the admiration I hold for
their spirit and dedication.
Andie Tucher and the Society for American Historians guided my dis-
sertation to Columbia University Press, and Philip Leventhal received
it there. Working with Columbia has been a pleasure, thanks largely to
Bridget Flannery-McCoy and her team. I did not really understand what
editors do—and how essential their work is—before working with Bridget.
Receiving her extensive comments on drafts was at first daunting and at last
revelatory. She did far more work than I could reasonably expect, and the
final product is much, much better for all of her suggestions and insights as
well as her uncanny sense of argumentative structure. Several other people
did me the great favor of reviewing drafts. The editors and readers of the
Journal for the Study of Radicalism helped me work through some initial
ideas. (Some material originally appeared as “The Politics of Ecology:
Environmentalism and Liberalism in the 1960s” JSR 2 (Fall 2008) and is
reprinted here with permission of Michigan State University Press). Mark
Stoll read an early version. Derek Hoff and Michelle Chihara offered tren-
chant feedback on individual chapters. Steve Hahn graciously took time out
of a leave year to read several chapters. Tom Robertson provided thoughtful
comments on the manuscript as a whole that guided crucial revisions. Alex
Moisa spent a summer helping me with research. And anonymous read-
ers for Columbia University Press provided important feedback. Whatever
you might like about this book is thanks in part to these careful readers;
anything you don’t like is my responsibility alone.
I lived with an assortment of people during the many years I spent
researching and writing. In Madison I lived for two years with Scott Bur-
khardt and for two years with Tom Yoshikami (including a brief overlap
with Ryan Quintana), years that deepened already dear friendships. I spent
Preface xvii
my last year in Madison on East Johnson with Jonny Hunter, Sarah Chris-
topherson, Matt Robertson, Jamie Duffin, and Mia Cava, all of whom I was
happy to run into in the kitchen. In Berkeley I spent a year with two old
friends: Nick Collins and Micah Porter. In Los Angeles I lived with Tim
Lenoch and then with Ray Chao, and spent hours on the phone talking
politics with Adam Malka. Daniel Immerwahr generously provided room
and board for three crucial days of apartment hunting. There were others
who hosted me for days or weeks, including Max Nanao, Ben Bloch, and
Zana Ikels. I spent my last year of writing in Pasadena with Jessica Biddle-
stone, who more than anyone else endured the hardships of living alongside
an all-consuming project. I hope that, much more, she lived with all of my
love and affection and continues to do so.
Finally, I lived on and off with my family. I spent time with my sister
Miya, who looks out for me even from far away; with my brother Leighton
and sister-in-law Carolina, who made living in Los Angeles a real joy; and
with July, the sweetest if not the most energetic dog in the world. And I
spent many weeks with my parents, who have given me much more than I
can ever repay and to whom this is dedicated.
The Ecocentrists
Introduction
“It is environmentalism gone mad,” John Benneth of the American Forest

Institute told a reporter in 1986. Benneth was talking about “tree spiking,”
an act of sabotage by radical environmentalists who inserted metal spikes
into trees designated for logging. To cut down spiked trees was to risk dam-
aging chainsaws and mill saws, as radical environmentalists made clear, and
to risk the safety of the loggers themselves, as the forest industry pointed
out. Tree spiking explicitly threatened expensive equipment and implicitly
risked the safety of forest workers in order to protect ancient trees, an equa-
tion that struck Benneth, and many others, as morally despicable.1
Benneth’s comment suggested that tree spiking took the logic of envi-
ronmentalism and twisted it into something different, something wicked.
But radical environmentalism was not an inversion of mainstream envi-
ronmentalism. Although radicals made claims and took actions that most
environmentalists disavowed, they were not operating from entirely dif-
ferent principles. Radicals took basic beliefs that many environmentalists
subscribed to—that the natural world was in a state of crisis, that modern
society was often to blame, and that people should change their behavior
accordingly—and extended those beliefs beyond what others found accept-
able. Radicals were an example of extremism, not madness.
2 Introduction
Because tree spiking targeted industrial equipment but also threatened

human life, the tactic forced a reckoning with radical environmentalists’
core belief, a philosophy called “ecocentrism.” That philosophy—also
called “biocentrism” or “deep ecology”—ascribed an equivalent value to
human beings and nonhuman nature, and rejected the premise that people
should occupy a privileged place in any moral reckoning.2 Ecocentrism was
the defining feature of the radicals under consideration here. These radicals
considered industrial society’s accelerating transformation of the natural
world a crisis, not just because of the threats such a transformation posed
to people and resources but because of the damage it inflicted on nature
regardless of human well-being or even survival. Seeing catastrophe on the
horizon, radicals held a dark view of the world, and that pessimism spurred
their activism.
Because radicals cared first about the integrity of the nonhuman world,
they worried about wilderness especially. They considered the existence of
natural places defined by human absence to be the best measure of plan-
etary health. Potential wilderness disappeared every day as logging compa-
nies felled trees, governments built roads, and cities sprawled into suburbs,
exurbs, and beyond. Industrial manipulation of natural places was so
immediate and so constant, radicals believed, that conventional reform did
little to slow it, and so mainstream environmental groups that bided their
time and relied on political compromise abetted the forces they claimed
to oppose. Radical environmentalists refused to wait for the outcome of
negotiations or the possibility of new legislation. Instead, they sat in roads
as bulldozers approached and ascended trees before loggers arrived. Over
time laws and lawsuits might save a forest, they understood, but in the
moment only direct action backed by fierce commitment could.
By pushing environmental principles as far as they might go, radicals
emphasized the differences between environmentalism and humanism.
Radical environmentalists questioned beliefs that most late twentieth-cen-
tury Americans considered beyond question—the necessity of economic
growth, the soundness of human reason, and the inviolability of individ-
ual freedom—and ignored debates about inequity and social justice that
marked the same period. Their controversial views revealed the powerful
Introduction 3
critique as well as the selective shortsightedness of environmental thought

at its most obdurate.
Despite a diversity of beliefs and goals in the broad sweep of environmen-

talism, radicals maintained that their own ecocentric doubts about human
virtue pointed to something essential in the environmental movement. For
radicals, the central concern of environmentalism was always with limits:
to natural resources, to industrial expansion, and to human population.
Most contentious and in some ways most basic of all was what radicals
understood as environmentalism’s interest in limiting individual human
freedom. Radicals believed that mainstream environmentalists, whether or
not they admitted it, were similarly at odds with individual freedom and
with the basic liberal commitments such freedom anchored.
“Liberal” is a slippery term. Relative to environmentalism it has several
valences, three of which are crucial here. The first is liberal individualism,
what Alan Wolfe calls liberalism’s “core commitment to individual auton-
omy.”3 For liberals, the individual is the fundamental unit of politics and
governance. Liberal political thought is rooted in individual liberty and
committed to the belief that people should reach their own definitions
of the good life, as long as those definitions do not violate another’s free-
dom. The authority of the state should be used for procedural purposes, to
facilitate individual opportunity rather than to dictate particular values or
perspectives. Environmentalism, however, tends to focus on collective ends
and shared conditions, often to the point that individual freedom is subor-
dinated to a perceived common good. Environmentalists worry that, left
to their own devices, most people would choose to act in ways detrimental
to the natural world. Even fully aware of the consequences, people might
act in their own short-term interests, whether those interests involved
something as innocuous as using a disposable bottle or as consequential as
bulldozing a forest. Because of their concern for the nonhuman world and
for the systems that sustain it, environmentalists have a particularly strong
preference for sacrificing some degree of individual freedom in order to
safeguard a greater good.
4 Introduction
The second valence is liberal humanism: a prioritizing of human inter-

ests and a faith in human reason. Environmentalists’ conviction that people
should restrict their actions in order to minimize their impact on the natu-
ral world, and by implication that unrestricted human freedom is a threat
to nature, is constructed from different building blocks than those that
compose liberal political thought. Liberalism is fundamentally human-
istic in that it advocates human reason as the best means of achieving a
desirable world. Environmentalism is generally skeptical of humanism in
that it suspects limitations to human reason and so proposes limitations
to human behavior.4 Liberal humanists tend to place a great deal of faith
in the capacity of rational thought to solve most problems, while environ-
mentalists tend to believe that the natural world is far more complicated
than people can reasonably understand. Environmentalists insist that the
planet in all its complexity is beyond the scope of human comprehension,
and they stress the importance of humility, a virtue rarely associated with
liberal humanism.5
Liberal individualism and liberal humanism are ideas that have been a
part of liberal political thought for several centuries. The third form of lib-
eralism relevant here, what some scholars have called “growth liberalism,”
is more particular and more contextualized. Especially after World War II,
Americans thought of economic expansion as the surest path to democracy
and social equality. Material production and consumption fed political ide-
als, tying lofty principles to everyday wants and needs. For modern Ameri-
cans economic growth became the great leveler. Production, consumption,
economic expansion, and social reform all made up a virtuous cycle that
offered more things and more freedoms to more and more people. Growth
liberalism braided economic expansion with social progress and national
identity.6 Environmentalists worried about the implications of this associa-
tion, questioning not only the centrality of economic growth in American
life but even whether the social benefits of growth liberalism were worth
the environmental costs.
The points of tension between environmental and liberal commit-
ments are easy to miss. Mainstream environmental organizations have
operated through conventional liberal democratic procedures, appealed
to broadly shared values, and often framed their cause as little more than
Introduction 5
common sense. The widespread (although fragile) support that environ-

mental policies have enjoyed since the 1970s is a testament to the success
of this political strategy.7 But the notion that environmentalism is a simple
matter of prudence belies the degree to which strong environmental pro-
tections can require abstention and even abnegation. Radical environmen-
talists had no illusions about what robust environmental commitments
might demand, and radicals’ ideas and campaigns made clear just how dif-
ficult such commitments could be—and perhaps should be. Long before
climate change activists insisted that confronting global warming meant
confronting an entire way of life, radical environmentalists protested
industrial civilization itself.
Radical environmentalists have more often been objects of derision than

subjects of serious study. Rob Nixon calls radical environmentalism
“shallow” and “hokey,” its average follower easily caricatured as “a whiter-
than-white, hippy-dippy-tree-hugging-dopehead deep ecologist from an
overprivileged background.”8 That caricature is not wholly inaccurate.
Environmentally minded scholars and activists have exposed the many ways
an ecocentric environmentalism, originating in and privileging the United
States, can gloss over social difference, cultural complexity, and economic
inequality, and how it can draw a too-stark line between the human and the
natural. By pushing green ideas to their extremes, radical environmental-
ists risked stripping those ideas of the sort of nuance and malleability that
might help them fit into a diverse and complicated world.
Why study a movement with such a narrow and unyielding point of
view? Environmental historians have often chosen not to. The few broad
histories of the modern environmental movement tend to mention radical
environmentalism only in passing and to treat it as an isolated phenom-
enon. Whether because they considered radicals’ views to be marginal or
overly simplistic, historians have dispensed with them quickly, offering
little more than a brief explanation of radical doctrine and its limitations.
Historians have for the most part placed environmentalism within conven-
tional American political thought rather than outside of it or even strad-
dling its edges. That tendency is diminishing, as a growing literature on the
6 Introduction
modern environmental movement complicates an older view of environ-

mentalism as an ideological extension of modern liberalism or a pragmatic
consequence of postwar affluence. As some scholars have pointed out, even
at the far edges of belief and principle are substantive debate and conflict.
Sometimes that is the best place to find them.9
A history of modern environmentalism that includes radical ideas starts
with the rise of mainstream environmental politics in the 1960s, as well
as the sense of planetary crisis that gripped the movement in the 1970s.
It especially involves telling the story of Earth First!, the premier ecocen-
tric, radical environmental organization of the 1980s and 1990s. A small
group of renegade conservationists founded Earth First! in 1980, frustrated
by the increasing professionalization and, they believed, the decreasing
effectiveness of mainstream groups. The acquiescence of mainstream envi-
ronmentalists to moderate reform was, for Earth First!, an abandonment
of the ecocentrism that had constituted at least a tacit part of American
environmentalism since John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Earth First! claimed
that mainstream organizations, by emphasizing the interests of people and
accepting the limitations of conventional politics, shirked environmental-
ism’s basic commitment to the nonhuman.
Freed from the strictures of lobbying strategy, the imperatives of nego-
tiation, and a frustrating cycle of compromise, the original Earth First!ers
began to engage in a radical form of environmentalism that rejected con-
ventional democratic methods in favor of direct action and even sabotage.
Earth First!ers fought to protect wilderness not only as an end in itself but
also as the best means of preserving biodiversity and opposing a crisis fed
by rampant industrialism. Championing ecocentric principles, Earth First!
tried to model what an uncompromising environmental group looked
like: it insisted that disaster was imminent and even unfolding, refused to
negotiate politically or philosophically, and challenged the humanism that
radicals found arrogant and destructive. This uncompromising view, Earth
First!ers claimed, remained true to the principles that made environmental-
ism significant and urgent in the late-twentieth century.
Ecocentric thought was the heart of Earth First!’s political vitality and
the inspiration for its dedicated activists. It gave radicals a piercing voice.
Ecocentrism also encouraged the sort of holism in radical thought that
Introduction 7
could quickly slide into a sweeping antihumanism. The simplicity of radical

environmentalism’s claims made them elegant and inspiring if taken as ral-
lying cries, but dangerous and malevolent if taken as unqualified truth. The
great shortcoming of the radical environmental movement was a neglect
of social issues, a denial that social difference had anything to do with the
human relationship to the natural. Increasingly misanthropic statements by
some Earth First!ers drove several wedges into the radical environmental
community. Earth First!’s most important internal and external critics tried
to reconcile radical environmentalism with social justice—among them the
social ecologist Murray Bookchin, the Northern California Earth First!
leader Judi Bari, and a disparate community of Pacific Northwest anarchists
who took Earth First!’s tactics in new directions. Different stripes of anar-
chism coursed through these debates, giving radical environmentalists a
language with which to critique liberal democratic reform and even human
society without abandoning any sense of political order and direction. The
late 1980s and the 1990s tested some of Earth First!’s most uncompromising
views of nature and of people, and pointed to fundamental and persistent
philosophical debates within the broad environmental movement. Those
debates concerned the limits of democracy and of individual freedom, the
effects of the state and of the market on environmental policy, the role of
inequality and difference in environmental politics, and the relationship
between humans and the nonhuman world—questions that are ever more
vital in an era of people’s expanding influence over the planet.
Radical environmentalists focused on what mainstream groups too eas-
ily lost sight of: that doubt is at the center of environmentalism. They cast a
wary eye on much that humans thought and did, and that wariness guided
their politics. Environmentalists at their most useful have been skeptics,
and groups like Earth First! highlighted one of the environmental move-
ment’s most enduring critiques: a questioning of material progress for its
own sake and a mistrust of the presumed wisdom behind it.
Not all environmentalists embrace skepticism. Since at least the early
2000s, a growing number of optimistic environmentalists have argued
that what was once understood to be a cause of environmental decline may
in fact be a solution.10 New technology and market-based fixes, from this
perspective, can not only heal the planet but also save environmentalism
8 Introduction
from itself, since the environmental movement’s problem is that it has

always lacked a hopeful and enthusiastic view of the future and has fought
against the forms of innovation best suited to confronting environmental
crises. Solving these crises will not require great sacrifice or radical change,
optimists claim, but only a purposeful application of the very forces that
environmentalists have long tried to restrain. The most enthusiastic envi-
ronmental optimists point to the conceptual malleability of “nature” in
order to justify more intentional efforts to remake the natural world.
There is certainly a great deal to learn from this point of view. Adapt-
ing to climate change will demand significant manipulation of habitats and
ecosystems, and technology and markets have a crucial role to play. But an
environmentalism that enthusiastically embraces this new dispensation
is an environmentalism that has lost much of what makes it most signifi-
cant. This is partly because there is a lack of proportion in the arguments
of environmentalists who, as Naomi Klein puts it, “paint a picture of global
warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buy-
ing ‘green’ products and creating clever markets in pollution.”11 Mostly it is
because one of the environmental movement’s most valuable contributions
to political thought is a check on deep-seated assumptions about human
ingenuity and economic growth. Caution, and even pessimism, is what
makes environmentalism vital.
Radicals insisted that doubt and pessimism remained key tools in all
environmental thought. At the same time, they advocated a more pure
version of environmentalism. “More pure” is an important oxymoron. As
much as radicals reached for pure qualities and categories, they never fully
subscribed to them. In reaching, though, they pushed the boundaries of
the conversation. It is easy to depict radical environmentalists as little more
than bitter misanthropes or naïve idealists. They were hardly that simple.
They doubted human wisdom and fulminated against human arrogance,
but they also insisted on a basic connection between people and the natural
world and they believed that within every modern person lay a dormant
piece of the wild. They revered and glorified wilderness and nonhuman
nature, but they also understood them pragmatically. Many radicals worked
at one point in the political trenches of the conservation movement and
were used to negotiating for parcels of land in practical and technical terms
Introduction 9
rather than with sweeping declarations. And even sweeping declarations

functioned as a useful sort of idealism. “Ideals are real: they direct our
striving, our plans, our legal processes,” writes Martha Nussbaum.12 Radi-
cal environmentalists could lament the last ten thousand years of human
history and then talk about how to preserve space for wilderness and wild-
life alongside modern civilization. One cleared a path for the other. Only
by stating their views in the most extreme terms, radicals believed, could
they nudge human interests from the very center of political decision mak-
ing. Some radical environmentalists did step off of this path and wallow in
nihilistic antihumanism, reactionary authoritarianism, or simple bigotry.
Most, however, wrestled with the environmental movement’s place in a
democratic society, confronting some of the difficult questions about indi-
vidualism and material progress that environmentalism, at its worst and its
best, seeks to ask.
1
Ecology and Revolutionary

Thought
Because radical and mainstream environmentalism have the same intel-

lectual roots, they have a common history. Both grew in part out of
twentieth-century conservation and its commitment to moderating
industrial society’s effects on natural resources and amenities. At the center
of the conservation movement was the Sierra Club, at various points the
most recognized and most politically influential conservation organiza-
tion. The Club was also in many ways the most democratically structured
conservation group, so its point of view shifted with its membership rolls.1
The Club’s evolution over the course of the twentieth century tracked the
development of key ideas about conservation and environmentalism that
would structure the environmental movement and its relationship to the
social politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Spurred by its executive director,
David Brower, the Club focused increasingly on ecological ideas that
described an interconnected world without human beings at its center and
in which nonhuman nature might be worth protecting for its own sake.
Those changes and ideas set the terms under which some environmental-
ists in the 1970s walked away from the movement’s mainstream and toward
more radical thought and action.
12 Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
EARLY YEARS OF THE SIERRA CLUB
The oldest and most storied of all conservation organizations, the Sierra
Club was founded in 1892 as a regional outdoors association with mod-
est political ambitions. John Muir served as its first president and like
every other officer of the Club he drew no salary. In its early decades,
the Sierra Club represented what Stephen Fox has called the “amateur
tradition,” in which those interested in natural places carried out conser-
vation work in their spare time. Because they had little to risk economi-
cally or professionally, Fox explains, amateur conservationists benefited
from “time and taste to consider intangibles,” championing aesthetic
and even spiritual enjoyment of forests and mountains against the more
utilitarian views of professional conservationists such as the chief for-
ester of the United States, Gifford Pinchot.2 Sierra Clubbers had no
direct material interest in the places they worked to protect, a fact that
would define the organization politically and legally for decades and
which meant they fought more out of passionate enthusiasm than prac-
tical expedience.
The same amateur standing that would become synonymous with
grassroots activism by the late twentieth century meant nearly the oppo-
site during the Progressive Era. To be an amateur was to have money.
At a time when leisure was a privilege of the wealthy, the same was
true of politics as avocation. Even among career conservationists like
Pinchot, concentrated wealth was important; among amateurs, it was
essential. “Conservation and business are natural enemies,” Fox writes.3
But despite the larger truth of that claim, early Club leaders were over-
whelmingly professionals and businessmen—“the prime movers,”
according to Michael Cohen, “in what one might call the philanthropic
tradition of conservation, where business provided the individuals,
progressivism provided the ideology, and American industrial growth
provided the economic power.”4 There were other conservation organi-
zations that represented even higher social strata, like the Save The Red-
woods League, but few that reached lower. By mid-century this began to
change as conservation groups relied more heavily on lobbying backed
Ecology and Revolutionary Thought 13
by popular support. As late as the 1960s, though, the Club’s work still
took place in private rooms at San Francisco steak houses, the banquet
hall at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, and meetings at the Bohemian or
Pacific Union clubs.5
In the early days of the Sierra Club, private wealth shaped not only
public lands but also particular views of democracy. The Club may have
had somewhat democratic goals—in its first few decades it was dedicated
to opening the Sierras to the public in a way it was not later—but early
twentieth-century conservationists generally had mixed views of popular
support. On the one hand, they rallied the public to their causes; on the
other, conservationists like Rosalie Edge in the 1930s and Paul Sears in
the 1960s insisted that independent wealth with fewer strings attached
was the most effective means of protecting natural resources.6 Early con-
servationists often worked behind the scenes rather than in the public
eye. This could produce a heroic sense of the exceptional point of view.
In the 1950s, Harold Anderson of the Wilderness Society predicted that
conservationists would always make up “a very small minority” but also
thought “there is no good reason why our influence should not be out of
all proportion to our numbers.”7 Initially, the wilderness movement cham-
pioned this argument from the margins. “One of the dominant strains of
early wilderness thought,” writes historian James Morton Turner, “was
the role of wilderness in forging American independence and respecting
the rights of the minority.”8 The intellectual commitment to a perspective
shared by a relative few could lead to an affinity for business conducted
by a select group rather than for a broad base, done with a handshake
instead of through a mass appeal. “The amateur pioneers of the move-
ment hated politics and doubted the people could appreciate what they
were doing,” Fox writes of Muir’s battles with “consummate politician”
Pinchot.9 When the Sierra Club expanded purposefully beyond Cali-
fornia’s borders in the mid-century, director Marjory Farquhar resigned
from the board. Fellow director Richard Leonard believed it was because
the Club had sacrificed intimacy and close-knit control for breadth and a
larger membership. “Her Club is lost,” Leonard said. “It is now a power-
ful, impersonal political force.”10
The shift from one Club to the other—from a group of relative intimates
and fellow enthusiasts to an organization national in scope—followed
nearly a half century during which the Club engaged in only one major
political slugfest on the national stage, over the damming of the Tuolumne
River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. That fight spanned the first dozen years
of the century and involved several mayors, the national press, Congress,
and three presidential administrations. By 1913, the Club was defeated: the
O’Shaugnessy Dam held back the Tuolumne River, and the Hetch Hetchy
Valley disappeared under a reservoir that provided municipal water to San
Francisco. A year later the Club lost Muir himself to pneumonia. For sev-
eral decades after, the Sierra Club limited itself to little-publicized political
efforts and much-publicized trips into the Sierra Nevada Range. Limited in
both its goals and its constituency, it defined itself as a regional organiza-
tion dedicated to the protection and appreciation of the Sierras.
THE CLUB AT A CROSSROADS
The Club found a newly combative and expansive spirit in the 1940s and
1950s when a new generation of conservationists advanced different ideas
about the relationship between people and nature and took a more con-
frontational stance toward those agencies and industries that would exploit
the nation’s scenic places. The Club grew combative in fights with federal
agencies and grew expansive in its geographical reach and philosophical
discussions. In particular, its shifting views on the purposes and the poli-
tics of national parks led to the organization’s reappearance on the national
stage. Its views were simultaneously more democratic in methods and less
democratic in goals, appealing to a wider base in order to further restrict
park use. It became more populist at the same time as it grew more critical
of people. In Yosemite and Grand Canyon national parks and in Dinosaur
National Monument, Club leaders found cause to fight with the federal
government and with each other, and to reconsider what the Club stood
for and against, as well as how it went about its business.
There was no place more closely associated with the Sierra Club than the
Yosemite Valley region on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Range.
Born of fire and ice, its walls originating as magma deep underground and
sculpted by glaciers over several million years, it was John Muir’s favorite.
He called it “the incomparable Yosemite.” Protecting Yosemite National
Park may have been the main impetus behind the Sierra Club’s founding
in 1892; much of the Club’s energies in its first two decades went toward
park management, up to and including the battle over Hetch Hetchy. That
initial sense of purpose informed the Club for much of the twentieth cen-
tury. Its mission was shaped by the twin beliefs that scenic places should
be protected as parks and that people rallied around the parks they most
enjoyed. Muir spent many years popularizing the Yosemite area, extolling
its beauty under the assumption that greater public appreciation would
provide a defense against industrial development.
Muir’s assumption was reasonable during the Progressive Era but
became less and less so in the decades after. During the interwar years,
outdoor recreation spread at the speed of a Model T as more and more
Americans owned automobiles and used them to find pretty locales. Pri-
vate businesses aided this trend by creating a commercial infrastructure
of shops, motels, and advertising, all part of a celebration of consump-
tion and middle-class American life. The federal government promoted
car camping too, primarily as the nation’s largest road-builder. Quickly,
the most immediate threat to the quiet and contemplative parks of Muir’s
heart was no longer loggers or ranchers but the very Americans that Muir
had been calling to the parks for decades. Popular outdoor recreation, and
the roads that facilitated it, compromised the sanctity of the remote out-
doors more than did private industry.11
The mass consumption of the outdoors by the 1940s did not alarm most
Sierra Club leaders, many of whom viewed recreational infrastructure and
conservation as aligned. Their membership agreed. Most Sierra Clubbers
“were not refugees from civilization,” Susan Schrepfer writes, and “rarely
challenged the nation’s economic interests.”12 Others, including the younger
generation of Club directors led by David Brower, Richard Leonard, and
Ansel Adams, felt differently, and this difference of opinion emerged dur-
ing two fights in the 1940s: one over the possibility of building a ski resort
on the San Bernardino National Forest’s Mount San Gorgonio, just east of
Southern California’s Inland Empire, and the second over plans to develop
the road that crested Yosemite’s Tioga Pass.
The Club’s board divided over San Gorgonio both in its meetings and in
the Sierra Club Bulletin, which published articles for and against. Brower
laid out the opposition to a ski resort, and Bestor Robinson, at the time
the Club’s new president (and later remembered by Brower as “the devel-
oper”) wrote anonymously in favor of it. Robinson considered skiing every
bit as legitimate an outdoor activity as hiking and camping and stressed
the sport’s growing popularity.13 He made a democratic appeal: parks had
roads, after all, to allow more people to enjoy them. “Our club purposes,” he
noted, “include ‘rendering accessible.’ Any other policy would confine the
use of the wilderness to the aristocracy of the physically super-fit.”14 Brower
argued for the “absolute” value of wilderness even against the adventuring
of tourists, vacationers, and thrill-seekers. He ducked accusations of elitism
by referring to a “relatively small number” of skiers, and claiming in a side-
bar that “wilderness for all should take precedence over its development for
any special group.”15
Two years earlier Brower had even more directly challenged Robinson’s
populist sentiments. Still stationed in Italy, where he fought with the Tenth
Mountain Division in the last months of World War II, he wrote an article
for the Sierra Club Bulletin called “How to Kill a Wilderness,” with Euro-
peans’ misuse of their remote mountain valleys and peaks in mind. There
were two basic steps to killing a wilderness, Brower explained: “Improve
and exploit it,” and “Rely always on the apparently democratic argument
that you must produce the greatest good for the greatest number.” Here
Brower took issue with straightforward utilitarianism and also with
democracy being understood as whatever most people wanted. He asked
whether anyone could reasonably think of dividing Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel frescoes into bits so that more people could see them. Satisfying
the immediate whims of many, he suggested, risked destroying the world’s
irreplaceable treasures, and attending to contemporaries risked ignoring
posterity. Brower may have been arguing that majoritarian democracy was
not the only kind, or that democracy should take into account future gen-
erations, or that democracy of whatever variety might lead to regrettable
choices.16 He was certainly wrestling with what historian Paul Sutter has
called “an increasing confusion and conflation of democratic politics and
consumer choice” in the mid-twentieth century, as a culture of mass con-

sumption traveled out of cities on newly paved roads and arrived at the
forest’s edge.17
Paving the roads was the first step in bringing people to the mountains.
For many decades, getting city people outdoors had been part of the Sierra
Club’s mission. Brower later complained that the long-held view of the
Club’s older generation was “that roads were just peachy, that we must get
more roads into the Sierra to get more people there.” The road over Tioga
Pass tested this view.18 The Tioga Road in 1915 was a steep, rugged, pri-
vately owned route that ran from the eastern to the western slope of the
Sierras and bisected Yosemite. Stephen Mather, the energetic new assistant
secretary of the interior and a Sierra Club member, bought the road with
donations from wealthy friends, some of his own fortune, and funds from
the Club itself. He donated the road to the federal government and for
several decades the new National Park Service maintained and gradually
improved it.
Until the late 1940s, the Sierra Club supported the Park Service’s plans
to upgrade the road from a narrow and windy drive to a wider and more
direct thoroughfare. Then some of the newer directors and one veteran of
the old guard, Harold Bradley, began to question the need for high-speed
travel through the park. Particularly at issue were plans to blast through
slabs of Sierra granite and skirt the edges of Tuolumne Meadows and
Tenaya Lake. Brower, Bradley, Adams, and Leonard opposed the improve-
ments from different ethical standpoints but shared an opposition to road
development for the sake of faster travel times. If the circuitous Tioga Road
forced visitors to slow down and take their time crossing the park, so much
the better. If it limited the number of visitors to higher elevation lakes and
valleys, it served its purpose. Improving and exploiting the park’s wilder-
ness and swelling its motorized crowds threatened to kill it, as Brower had
warned several years earlier. In order to grant more people a view, the Park
Service was dividing the chapel’s ceiling into bits.19
Much of the Sierra Club’s leadership remained either unmoved by Tioga
Road development or else more concerned with preserving the Club’s
working relationship with the Park Service. In the early and mid-twentieth
century, such relationships constituted the Club’s main currency. Years

later, when the Club had garnered a mass membership that it could rally
to its causes, it began loudly opposing the Park Service and Forest Service.
Before it gained the leverage of nationwide public support, though, it relied
on collegiality between its own leaders and federal land managers. Forest
and Park Service administrators regularly consulted the Club when making
major decisions about scenic places.
In the case of the Tioga Road, maintaining friendly relations won out.
The Park Service expanded the road with convenience and speed in mind.
Brower and the other directors who stood against the development plan
lost both the fight and, it seemed to them, a place they had been charged
with protecting. “I haven’t gotten over that yet,” Brower remarked a half
century later.20 Ansel Adams grew so disheartened in the immediate after-
math of the Park Service’s improvements to the road that he resigned from
the Club’s board of directors and sent furious telegrams to the Park Service,
the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Public Roads, and the Army
Corps of Engineers. Despite Adams’s breach of protocol, the Club did not
want to lose one of its best-known directors to an internecine battle and
refused the resignation. After venting his anger, Adams stayed on.21
Having lost the fight over Tioga Road, however, Brower, Adams, and
the others gained a sense of conviction that would gradually reshape the
Club. As the Park Service moved philosophically and administratively
toward Mission 66, its decade-long effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s
to expand visitor services and road access to national parks, the Sierra Club
moved haltingly in the opposite direction.22 It began to see-saw between
protecting parks for people and protecting parks from people, a balance
the Club struggled with for many years—as did the environmental move-
ment more broadly. The new Tioga Road changed Yosemite’s high valleys
forever, and it changed the Club as well. In 1951, the board proposed and
the membership approved amending the Club’s statement of purpose from
“explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific
Coast” to “explore, enjoy, and preserve the Sierra Nevada and other sce-
nic resources of the United States.”23 The Club had grown wary of the
overcrowded mountains encouraged by its founding documents, as it was
becoming even warier of the actual multitudes inhabiting the planet.
THE BATTLES OVER THE PARKS
The Sierra Club’s revised statement of purpose suggested not just chariness
about teeming crowds of people but also a much more sweeping purview,
far beyond the Sierra Nevada. Extending its reach nationally complicated
the Club’s work both politically and philosophically. While the new
statement’s wording took in the whole nation, and while the Club had
founded its Atlantic Chapter a year earlier, few directors spent much time
outdoors east of the Sierras. The Club, and conservationists in general, at
times argued for preserving places because of their popularity and at other
times argued for preservation on principle. If the threatened place sat a
few hours away in the Sierra Nevada Range, organizing pack trips could
rally support; if the site was in Alaska, it was the idea of that vast place
alone worth protecting. Sometimes bringing more people to the moun-
tains saved the wilderness, and sometimes the wilderness was worth sav-
ing because so few people made it there. Conservationists continued to
balance the democratic impulse of appealing to a broad public against the
fear of that public’s potential impact on a delicate landscape. They were
in the business of manipulating space—at times expanding it by keeping
roads narrow and slow and at other times shrinking it by bringing images
of distant lands into people’s living rooms.
Dinosaur National Monument in northwestern Colorado was one of
those distant lands that even most Sierra Club leaders had never visited.
Richard Leonard was an exception. In 1950, Leonard served as secretary of
the Sierra Club and as a councilmember of the Wilderness Society when
he attended the Society’s annual meeting at Twin Springs, Colorado, and
took a tour of nearby Dinosaur. The monument was then under the shadow
of a giant: a Bureau of Reclamation proposal for ten dams on the Colo-
rado River and its tributaries that would capture nearly fifty million acre-
feet of water for irrigation and hydropower throughout the Southwest.
Despite its anodyne name, the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP)
was, as the writer Marc Reisner later wrote, “as big as the universe itself.”24
The plan included a reservoir at the confluence of the Green and Yampa
rivers just above Echo Park, where the Bureau hoped to build one of two
dams within Dinosaur. The CRSP pitted two wings of the Department of
the Interior—the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation—

against each other, one opposed to any dams within national monuments
and the other eager to build several of them. Secretary of the Interior Oscar
Chapman sided with the Bureau and in 1950 forced the resignation of Park
Service director Newton Drury.25
Dinosaur left the Wilderness Society council awed at the monument’s
surprising beauty and shocked by the possibility of the first dam since
Hetch Hetchy to be built on Park Service land. Leonard took that shock
and awe with him to the Sierra Club, which elected him president in 1952.
As he discussed Dinosaur with his board of directors, he also decided that
the Club’s growing commitments required a more businesslike approach.
Leonard proposed that the Club hire an executive director, and he recom-
mended Brower.26 This would be the first paid staff position in what had
been an all-volunteer organization, a pivot away from the amateur tradi-
tion and toward professionalization. Although the Club took on paid staff
later than most conservation groups, it made up for lost time with its first
hire. The two independent decisions that Leonard encouraged—to defend
Dinosaur and to make Brower executive director—remade the Club in
ways that he could never have predicted. Director Edgar Wayburn later
called the combination of Dinosaur and Brower “the turn of the hinge.”27
Brower accepted the position of executive director in 1953, and soon began
to hire more paid staff members. “The Sierra Club,” Stephen Fox writes,
“moved irrevocably into the big time.”28
The proposed dam at Echo Park amounted to just one small piece of
the CRSP, but fighting even one piece of such a monumental project was
far beyond what the Club had taken on before. Nevertheless, Leonard and
Brower made Dinosaur the Club’s top priority, leading an effort that allied
the Club with the Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society, National
Parks Association, and several other groups. This quickly assembled coali-
tion caught its government adversaries by surprise. Brower famously
embarrassed the Department of the Interior during a Congressional hear-
ing in 1954 when he used a chalkboard to demonstrate that the Bureau had
miscalculated evaporation rates and that raising the height of the proposed
Glen Canyon Dam—outside of Dinosaur—would save more water than
constructing an entire dam at Echo Park.
But it was publicity and constituent pressure, much more than closed-
door hearings, that won the battle. Brower worked obsessively to raise the
ire of voters and their representatives with every means he could think of.
He made a short film, Two Yosemites, that compared the proposed dam
at Echo Park to the actual dam at Hetch Hetchy; he published a book of
essays and photographs called This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and
its Magic Rivers with an introduction by Wallace Stegner and a conclu-
sion by Alfred Knopf; and he took out a full-page advertisement in the
Denver Post. Brower waged a public-relations battle with the United States
Congress and with Congressman Wayne Aspinall of Colorado in particu-
lar, and the longer the battle went on, the more public opinion began to
swing in favor of the conservationists. Brower, the Club, and their allies
mobilized broad public support in a way that conservationists had not tried
to do since Hetch Hetchy, and with far greater success. Aspinall and the
Bureau of Reclamation finally relented, and in 1956 they scratched plans
for a dam at Echo Park.
It was, from Brower’s point of view months later, a Pyrrhic victory.
Several of the organizations that opposed dams in Dinosaur, in particu-
lar the Wilderness Society and National Parks Association, did so to keep
major projects out of Park Service lands. The Sierra Club went along with
this basic reasoning and agreed to allow a series of dams that would not
violate national parks or monuments. Brower’s own testimony suggested
that saving Echo Park meant building a bigger dam at Glen Canyon. And
so, a few months after the defeat of the dam at Echo Park, the Bureau of
Reclamation began construction on Glen Canyon Dam. Even as Brower
and his friends celebrated their victory, the photographer Eliot Porter
sent Brower photos from a float trip through Glen Canyon. The beauty
of Porter’s photos shocked Brower and he decided to visit Glen Canyon
himself. After taking three separate trips down the Colorado through a
canyon now consigned to flooding, he sunk into depression. At a time when
conservation decisions could come down to purely aesthetic questions,
Glen Canyon’s beauty alone led Brower to reevaluate what many considered
the Club’s greatest success (see figure 1.1).
Richard Leonard and other Club leaders praised their new executive
director’s restrained tone and reasoned approach to the Dinosaur fight.
Figure 1.1 David Brower in Labyrinth Canyon, near Glen Canyon (1961). Sierra Club
pictorial miscellany [graphic], BANC PIC 1971.026.006:10—AX. Courtesy of the Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Brower would never again be accused of either. After losing Glen Canyon,
he resolved never to surrender anything worth saving, especially for the
sake of compromise. Even his allies came to refer to the feistier, post-Dino-
saur Brower as “a shin kicker.” Brower got his chance to make up for Glen
Canyon ten years later when the Bureau of Reclamation proposed another
set of dams that threatened another national park, in order to complete
another massive irrigation and power scheme for the Southwest. The plan
was called the Central Arizona Project, and the dams would not be in the
park itself but at Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon on either end of Grand
Canyon National Park. The upper dam would calm the rapids of the Colo-
rado through the park, and the lower dam would back the river up several
dozen miles, flooding parts of the canyon.
Brower went to work with two San Francisco advertisers, Jerry Mander
and Howard Gossage, and together they created what became known as the
Club’s “Grand Canyon battle ads.” Much of the work to defeat the Grand
Canyon dams took place in Washington, D.C., where the Sierra Club had
grown more influential than it had been during the Dinosaur fight. Public
opposition again played a crucial role, and Brower, Mander, and Gossage ral-
lied it with some of the most effective pieces of persuasion in conservation
history. Most famous was the ad that responded to the Bureau’s claim that
a partially flooded Colorado would give tourists a better view of the Grand
Canyon’s walls from motorboats. Echoing Brower’s wilderness and develop-
ment analogy from twenty years earlier, the ad asked, “Should we also flood
the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” Congressional mail
turned overwhelmingly against the dams. Reader’s Digest and Life published
anti-dam articles. Representative Morris Udall condemned the ads from
the floor of Congress while his brother, Secretary of the Interior Stewart
Udall, fought Brower behind the scenes. But the opinions of voters swung
against any threat to the Grand Canyon, and the Department of the Interior
retooled the Central Arizona Project to work without the Marble Gorge
and Bridge Canyon dams. Brower and the Club had again cultivated and
then appealed to broad sentiment, portraying the Department of the Inte-
rior’s plans as not just misguided but a betrayal of the public trust.29
In one sense, the middle decades of the century were a time of renewed
leadership and resolve for the Club. “A quiet regional group of mountaineers
in 1945,” Fox writes, “two decades later the Sierra Club had become the
focal point of modern American conservation under the leadership of a
man who seemed to be Muir reincarnate.”30 In another sense, it was a period
when the Club, and Brower in particular, confronted the limits of conser-
vation work and the inevitable losses that accompanied every victory. Glen
Canyon was the most obvious example and would remain a symbol for
conservationists decades later. But there were others. Defeating the Grand
Canyon dams prevented development in one of the nation’s iconic parks
but may have contributed to air pollution in the Four Corners region and
to the strip-mining of Black Mesa on northern Arizona’s Navajo Reserva-
tion. In order to complete the Central Arizona Project, the Department of
the Interior substituted the power that would have come from the Grand
Canyon dams with electricity generated by the coal-fired Navajo Generat-
ing Station.31 Sierra Club policy at the time was to never sacrifice scenic
places for the sake of energy production because one was rare and the other
plentiful. Club leaders had not yet come to understand that the two issues
could not be separated.
During the various park battles of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the Sierra
Club acted selectively, not systemically. Conservationists had long recog-
nized the broad forces behind specific threats such as consumer culture or
the spread of roads and automobiles. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Alma-
nac and its call for a “land ethic” was a sacred text for conservationists, if
not yet for a wider public.32 But more often than not the Club and its allies
focused their efforts on easily bounded places, patrolling borders instead
of confronting root problems. That began to change. In 1963, Brower, who
ran the Club’s publication program, used Eliot Porter’s photographs of
Glen Canyon in a book called The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the
Colorado. It was both a lament for a lost place and a regret for a too narrow
definition of conservation. Brower’s foreword began, “Glen Canyon died
in 1963 and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you.”
He had appealed to public sentiment in the defense of Dinosaur, but sev-
eral years later he blamed that same public’s own myopia in the drowning
of Glen Canyon. He warned of other treasured places threatened by other
development plans, and he pointed his finger not at the Bureau of Reclama-
tion or the agricultural lobby but at an entire way of thinking. “The rest will
go the way of Glen Canyon,” he predicted, “unless enough people begin to

feel uneasy about the current interpretation of what progress consists of—
unless they are willing to ask if progress has really served good purpose if it
wipes out so many things that make life worthwhile.”33
Soon even that sweeping condemnation was overly timid. “The alterna-
tives that could have saved Glen Canyon are still unused. Fossil fuels, for
one,” Brower argued in The Place No One Knew. Nuclear and solar power,
he continued, would “make the destruction of Glen Canyon appear to
have been the most naïve of choices in the search for electricity.”34 By the
mid-1970s Brower had reconsidered this position. “The alternative I talk
about now,” he told an interviewer, “as I’m always looking for alternatives,
is to have a new look at growth. We don’t want atomic power, we don’t
want more hydroelectric power, we don’t want a lot of strip mining, we
don’t want to use up the fossil fuels which are, as someone has described it,
the earth’s life savings of energy.”35 In a few years the idea of “alternatives”
evolved from different sources of power to different ways of thinking.
In the 1960s, Brower questioned whether economic growth demanded
invading the nation’s most scenic resources. In the 1970s, he questioned
economic growth itself. As would be the case for many thinkers in the
emerging environmental movement, the tradeoffs involved in any source
of energy or economic expansion forced Brower to consider increasingly
fundamental premises.
Among those premises was the assumption that people knew what was
best for themselves and for others. Brower described the “moral” of the
Glen Canyon story as “Progress need not deny to the people their inalien-
able right to be informed and to choose. In Glen Canyon the people never
knew what the choices were.”36 Confident that “the people” would have
chosen his own position, Brower put his faith in democratic procedures.
Instead of arguing that conservationists articulated a crucial minority view,
Brower liked to assume that they spoke for the masses. In 1957, he talked
about Echo Park on a conservation panel for the Democratic National
Conference. “The conservationist force, I submit, is not a pressure group,”
he said. “It merely demonstrates the pressure of man’s conscience, of his
innate knowledge that there are certain things he may not ethically do
to the only world he will ever have. . . .”37 In 1959, he spoke to the North
American Wildlife Conference, declaring, “Support for the Wilderness

Bill comes from no hastily organized battalion of rugged hikers, no ‘wilder-
ness lobby’; it reflects broad public concern about direction.”38 In 1960, he
addressed the Sixty-Sixth National Conference on Government in Phoe-
nix and defined “conservation” as “humanity fighting for the future.” He
argued against undue restrictions on political advocacy by conservation
groups because such work was done by “citizens” representing “a corpora-
tion which is duly, naturally, and quite effectively taking care of its own
self-interest. I don’t say ‘selfish interest’ because that is merely to use a label
as a substitute for thought.”39 Conservation, in this view, was simply the
commonsense work of people protecting common interests. Brower would
always hold on to this idea, but like other conservationists he would also
begin to ask whether people acting on their own behalf might sometimes
cause more harm than good. A decade and some years after Glen Canyon,
he said, “My own thinking has evolved a long way away from finding the
handy geographical alternative to something; the alternative is inside our
own heads: Stop demanding so much for ourselves now, at the cost of all
the other people who are ever going to show up and all the other living
things.”40 Self-interest and selfish interest had become synonymous.
THE NEW LEFT AND ECOLOGY
The year 1969 was transformative for the Sierra Club and for the conserva-
tion movement it often led. The change most likely on the minds of the
Club’s directors was the resignation of David Brower. A majority of the
board had come to believe that Brower, despite his preternatural skills as
a publicist and political strategist, held little respect for the board’s own
views and too often acted on his own without consulting any of his staff
or his superiors. When Brower spent over $10,000 on a page-and-a-half
advertisement in the New York Times calling for an “Earth National Park,”
many had had enough, including Brower’s onetime fellow upstarts Rich-
ard Leonard and Ansel Adams. Club president Ed Wayburn suspended
Brower’s financial authority. The next board election pitted a Brower slate
against an anti-Brower slate, and when the latter won, the board pressured
Brower to resign.
Brower’s resignation was only a change in personnel, even if it involved

the most influential person in the Club. More significant was a change in
the direction of the Club, and even of the conservation movement as a
whole, in response to what would soon be called “the environmental move-
ment.” Although the two movements overlapped considerably, environ-
mentalism distinguished itself from traditional conservation in its concern
with nature close at hand in suburbs and cities rather than in faraway parks
and forests, and with the pollution of living spaces more than with the
extraction of natural resources.41 Those ideas emerged gradually in the early
and mid-twentieth century and then grabbed the nation’s attention with
the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s warnings
about the invisible threat of pesticides like DDT, as they wandered from
bugs to birds and from produce to people, took conservationists’ dim view
of unthinking “progress” and rendered it in human terms. Instead of wor-
rying about what industrial development and technological change might
mean for wildlife and wild places, Carson asked what they might mean for
families and neighborhoods.
In September 1969, the Club’s new executive director, Michael McClo-
skey, spoke to his board amid what the Conservation Foundation’s Rice
Odell called “the Big Bang of the Environmental Revolution,” a year that
began with a major oil spill off of the Santa Barbara coast and ended with
the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act.42 McCloskey
asked the assembled directors whether the Club should consider taking
on new priorities, including “environmental survival,” a catch-all category
centered on overpopulation and pollution. New priorities would mean a
broadening of Sierra Club interests beyond traditional conservation and
into the realm of environmentalism, a not uncontroversial decision for the
Club’s directors. Eliot Porter argued for the new priorities, as “shotgun
attacks” to protect particular places would be meaningless in the long run if
population and pollution ran rampant, whereas Martin Litton and Edgar
Wayburn opposed stretching the Club too thin and taking on too many
issues. No group more effectively protected remaining wilderness, Litton
said, and “saws can destroy redwoods faster than environmental pollution.”
The board finally decided that the Club should reach beyond its tradi-
tional responsibilities and take on new concerns.43 In truth the Club had
sporadically and unofficially involved itself in such issues for years, often
against the judgment of most directors. But what had once been haphazard
was now policy. The Sierra Club would no longer limit itself to conserva-
tion in the most conservative sense.
Eight months later, just weeks after the first Earth Day brought tens of
millions of Americans into parks, onto streets, and alongside rivers and
lakes to celebrate the planet and protest industrial pollution and waste,
McCloskey reported to his board again. “Congress has never been more
receptive,” he said. “And public understanding has never been greater.” The
sudden surge of attention that buoyed Earth Day also lifted the profile of
traditional groups like the Sierra Club that were quickly becoming envi-
ronmental as much as conservation organizations. Along with the unprec-
edented attention and leverage, however, came criticism. McCloskey
reported “skepticism . . . from a variety of sources.” Most of those sources
supported the Club’s philosophy while objecting to its strategy. But there
was also doubt “from those who believe established institutions are beyond
reform and must be made to tumble entirely, whether through paralysis or
revolution; and these people are often allied with those who believe the
environmental movement is merely a diversion of public attention from
other more pressing social issues.”44 That position—that environmental-
ism amounted to little more than a distraction from real problems—was
not an isolated one. It characterized much of the New Left for most of the
1960s and persisted well into the 1970s and after. In its most sophisticated
forms, it offered a substantive and vital critique of environmentalism from
a humanistic perspective. For several decades, environmental thought
would be shaped in part as a response to that critique. New Left groups
and ideas were both distinct from and a vital influence for the environ-
mental movement.
It was easy enough to assume by 1970 that environmentalism and the
New Left went together, and that years of popular protest would combine
with growing awareness of environmental harm to produce a more socially
just and ecologically sound society, or at least produce a dedicated effort
in that direction. Yale law professor Charles Reich predicted “a renewed
relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to
the land,” in his best-selling The Greening of America.45 Reich believed this
relationship would come about through a shift from a collective “conscious-

ness” tied to materialism and technology to one based in equality and com-
munity. The green and the just were intertwined. “If he thinks wilderness
areas should be ‘developed’ he is quite likely to favor punitive treatment for
campus disruptions,” Reich wrote of a hypothetical American stuck in the
old consciousness. Opinions about society and opinions about the environ-
ment reflected each other.46
The opposite was more often the case. In the 1960s, the politics of social
justice and the politics of conservation and environmentalism had little resem-
blance. The New Left—that amorphous movement that often emanated from
university campuses and was most concerned with civil rights, economic
inequality, opposition to the Vietnam War, and eventually feminism—came
to environmentalism late, and only with misgivings. Because the New Left
comprised several movements and many organizations, it was ideologically
indeterminate; historians have argued about what the New Left was and
what exactly it represented.47 Motley as it appeared, though, it prioritized
some issues and principles over others, and for most of the 1960s envi-
ronmentalism and conservation were not among them. A fundamentally
humanistic movement, the New Left tended to regard an emerging interest
in the nonhuman environment with skepticism or even hostility.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most voluble and politi-
cally plastic New Left organization, was never synonymous with the New
Left as a whole but its views and actions carried weight far out of propor-
tion to its numbers, and whether SDS followed the larger movement or
the larger movement followed SDS, its pronouncements, manifestoes, and
strategic decisions tended to approximate the views of a broad swath of
protesters, especially those based on campuses. SDS was a weathervane of
sorts; because the group organized itself not around a particular cause but
around questioning the social and economic conditions that many Ameri-
cans took for granted, it remained open to new issues and concerns. “Thus,”
onetime SDS president Todd Gitlin wrote in 1967, “we offer alternatives to
a wide variety of people and foment movements of different sorts, each of
which . . . attunes us to new outlooks.”48
The group rose to national prominence in 1965 when it took the lead in
staging an April demonstration in Washington, D.C. against the Vietnam
War. Although Vietnam was only one issue among many for SDS, the dem-
onstration turned into the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history, prompt-
ing many months of organizational hand-wringing, soul-searching, and
position paper after position paper as SDS debated what to do with its
newfound prominence. Paul Booth, who helped create the vibrant Swarth-
more chapter of SDS and was twice elected vice-president of the national
office, wrote in 1966 of SDS’s organizing efforts, “there is little clarity as to
the content of the radical program in behalf of which the organization is
carried out.”49
Even amid that uncertainty, the group held strong political commit-
ments. SDS first articulated its key issues and core values in 1962 at a
national conference in Port Huron, Michigan. SDS was only two years old
and the conference attracted just a few dozen attendees, but the document
the conference produced, the Port Huron Statement, became a key expres-
sion of New Left thought in the early 1960s, and a point of reference for
years after. The Statement highlighted a raft of problems needing atten-
tion, including labor relations, colonialism, higher education, the military-
industrial complex, and especially the American South’s racial segregation
and the Cold War’s potential for nuclear annihilation. There is the sense, in
the several dozen pages of the Statement, that its authors could have gone
on listing more and more causes for concern. Still, tying them all together
were the organization’s—and, the document implies, the generation’s—
basic values: “human beings, human relationships, and social systems.” Tom
Hayden, the principle author of the Statement, and his co-writers explained
SDS’s guiding principle as a faith in people. “Men,” they wrote, several years
before women in the New Left would point out the movement’s inherent
sexism, “have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-
understanding, and creativity.”50
To a large degree SDS owed its faith in the innate dignity and promise
of individuals to the influence of the Civil Rights Movement, the greatest
and most immediate source of inspiration for the New Left. The taproot of
the Civil Rights Movement was a humanistic defense of fundamental free-
doms, a principle voiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and demonstrated by
black Southerners standing up to violent repression. In the 1950s and early
1960s, the movement fought for the very same liberal values—equal rights,
civil liberties—that were at the heart of American political discourse, and

that many white Americans believed had already been achieved. Early New
Left leaders learned the importance and the tenuousness of those values not
only by witnessing the Civil Rights Movement but also by participating in
it; many activists in groups like SDS and campaigns like the Free Speech
Movement began their political lives by spending several weeks or months
in the South working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC). The South’s aggressive defense of segregation shocked
the conscience of white student volunteers from the North and the West.
They assumed the wrongs of segregation were obvious. In supporting the
Civil Rights Movement, the future New Left relied less on a new set of
ideals than on a reaffirmation of the liberalism that theoretically grounded
modern American democracy. Tom Hayden, reporting on attempts to
suppress SNCC’s 1961 voter registration efforts in McComb, Mississippi,
felt no need to explain what was at stake; in an account that relied almost
exclusively on straight description and that assumed the common values of
its readers, Hayden wrote, “This report is intended to make facts real and
evoke not reader interest but productive commitments. The method need
not be demagoguery however. Just read the facts. And read them again.
And again.”51
Less than a decade later, SDS and the New Left embraced a radicalism
that rejected the middle-class order of mainstream liberalism. But that rejec-
tion came gradually, and never completely. A few months after he reported
from the South, Hayden used the Port Huron Statement to articulate SDS’s
particular interpretation of the common values he had taken for granted
in Mississippi. As a group that fundamentally believed in democratic
participation, SDS had to also believe in human wisdom, and so the Port
Huron Statement emphasized “human independence,” “love of man,” and
the search for the “personally authentic.” These vague descriptions differed
little from the basic commitments of mainstream liberal thinkers in the
1960s, the thinkers behind many of the policies SDS came to oppose. The
primacy of the individual, and the importance of individual freedoms in a
democratic society, bound together student protesters and establishment
political figures. “Every liberal, of course,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in
1967, after the New Left had begun to attack the liberalism he represented,
“will define liberalism in his own way. But liberalism has always seemed to
me in essence a recognition that the world is forever changing and a belief
that the application of reason to human and social problems can enlarge the
dignity and freedom of man.”52 On this, even if on little else, Schlesinger
and SDS agreed. The New Left were humanists just like the mainstream lib-
erals they came to criticize. Schlesinger’s definition unwittingly echoed the
Port Huron Statement, which stated, five years earlier and with emphasis on
the object of its admiration, “We regard men as infinitely precious and pos-
sessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” Schlesinger
put his faith in the Democratic Party, and SDS invested itself in grassroots
activism; Schlesinger held that politics was the art of compromise, and
SDS gave no quarter; but liberals like Schlesinger and New Leftists like
SDS believed, fundamentally, that maximizing individual freedom would
produce social good, and that given enough freedom people had the com-
petence to create conditions favorable to all.
Ecological conditions did not figure prominently in this perspective.
SDS paid almost no attention to the state of the natural world and natural
resources or even to pollution in cities and suburbs. In the Port Huron State-
ment, the absence is notable. In dozens of pages of criticism and analysis is a
single sentence registering concern with environmental decline, noting the
threat of overpopulation and the “sapping of the earth’s physical resources.”
A year later SDS refined its critique of American society in America and
the New Era.53 Again the group focused its attention on the Cold War, civil
rights, and economic inequality, and ignored environmental concerns. In
the year between the Port Huron Statement and America and the New Era,
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring became a bestseller. But Carson’s warnings
about the unintended consequences of modern technology did not reso-
nate with early New Left activists. Although SDS leaders expressed grave
concern about nuclear technology and “the Bomb” in 1962 and 1963, they
drew no connections between nuclear fallout and the subtler sorts of tech-
nological threats to which Carson alerted the nation.
SDS held this non-stance toward ecology for the rest of the decade. The
SDS newsletter, New Left Notes, one of the most widely read journals of
the student movement, published practically no articles about environmen-
tal issues before 1970. Throughout the 1960s, New Left Notes reported on
race relations, urban poverty, and the war in Vietnam; late in the decade,
it addressed the Black Power movement, the counterculture, U.S. imperi-
alism, and radical feminism. But New Left Notes paid scant attention to
environmental issues or to the emerging environmental movement until
the first Earth Day in April 1970. SDS conventions demonstrated the same
set of concerns. At the 1967 national convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
attendees discussed draft resistance, whether to march on Washington to
protest the war, and supporting SNCC.54 The convention agenda included
workshops on first-time topics such as “cultural revolution” (in recognition
of the growing importance of the hippie counterculture) and “liberation of
women” (an issue several women in SDS had been pushing for years), but
delegates to Ann Arbor did not discuss environmental matters, and nor did
delegates to Clearlake, Iowa, in 1966 or to East Lansing, Michigan, in 1968.
The New Left assigned itself the daunting tasks of reducing poverty,
helping to end segregation, and ending the Vietnam War. Next to these for-
midable responsibilities, cleaning up lakes and rivers and protecting forests
seemed beside the point. More important, the New Left valued the libera-
tory potential of social movements and the idea that regular people held
the knowledge necessary to address social ills and achieve social harmony.
“Man is the end and man is the measure,” declared an anonymous 1966
essay in New Left Notes as SDS debated the direction it should take in the
second half of the decade. “The rock bottom foundation of radical ideology
is a view of man—human nature and human possibility.”55 Social justice,
for the New Left, meant delivering power from an entrenched elite to a
democratic mass, and believing that doing so would quickly lead to a better
world. Putting restrictions on people and suggesting that individual free-
dom could lead to social harm—as environmentalism seemed to imply—
remained anathema to the New Left’s general faith in liberation.
THE CLUB AND THE NEW LEFT
By the time the “ecology movement”—soon to be renamed “environmen-

talism”—arrived in 1969, the New Left had climbed aboard what Todd
Gitlin later called the “express train of antiauthority.”56 Escalation of the
Vietnam War played a large role, as growing frustration with American
foreign policy fueled a split between liberal antiwar groups and New Left
activists, the former anticommunist and the latter often sympathetic to
North Vietnam. Street fighting between police and protesters outside the
1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which led to hun-
dreds of hospitalizations and one death, radicalized both participants
and observers57 Looking back, Carl Oglesby marked the shift as early as
1965, the year he was elected president of SDS and “the black and white
sectors of the movement explicitly abandoned reformism and took up
that long march whose destination . . . is a theory and practice of revolu-
tion for the United States.”58 In the space of just a few years, SDS and
much of the New Left gave up on not just institutional liberalism but on
modern American society, as the group accepted the need for fundamen-
tal, sweeping change.
A more radical and more antiestablishment New Left found even more
fault with the ecology movement. Where once SDS simply disregarded
environmental issues, now the New Left actively disparaged them. Still fun-
damentally committed to social justice and a humanistic philosophy, many
activists worried that pointing to environmental harm did little to cut to
the core of what was wrong with the nation. The politics of ecology, some
activists felt, blunted the movement’s radicalism. Claiming that industrial
production harmed everyone smudged the differences in race, class, and
gender that had become central to the New Left’s criticisms of the modern
state. The New Left’s humanism was rooted in inequities of power between
different social groups, and the notion that American society unwittingly
poisoned itself ignored an unequal distribution of political influence and
material resources as it promoted a “we’re-all-in-this-together” attitude.
The ecology movement’s holism diverted attention from exactly the sorts
of differences that most concerned the New Left.
Radicals skeptical of ecology made their doubts clear in the pages of
the vast and raucous underground press. The Fifth Estate, Detroit’s best-
known alternative newspaper, declared, “Ecology sucks! It sucks the life
out of social reform. It sucks the energy out of campus movements. It sucks
the irritants out of capitalism. It sucks change out of politics. It sucks rea-
son out of thought.” According to The Fifth Estate the ecology movement
siphoned money away from crucial social programs, shifted blame from
industrial polluters to society as a whole, and distracted from more urgent

issues. “Limpid water in our lakes and rivers will not help the worker who
doesn’t have a job. . . .”59 The week before Earth Day, the Berkeley Tribe
reminded its readers that “there will be no peace between man and nature
until there is peace amongst men and women.” Radicals questioned any
framing of environmental concern that did not indict American society
as a whole. “Pollution control,” the Tribe argued, “at this point is merely
another means of social control: to prevent America’s children from real-
izing that the crisis in the environment represents nothing less than a crisis
in America itself.”60 In a more sanguine piece about ecology in New York’s
Rat, “Pocahontas” nevertheless warned that supposedly radical ecology
groups were in fact firmly in the mainstream: “They don’t make the con-
nection between violence on the environment and the society that perpe-
trates that violence.”61
The conventional media unwittingly confirmed the underground press’s
suspicions about ecology’s antiradicalism, covering the story of ecology on
campus as the issue to overshadow Vietnam and using words like “respon-
sible,” “conservative,” and “unpolitical.”62 Earth Day, created by a United
States senator, was for many on the Left the clearest sign yet of ecology’s
potential for co-opting the radical movement. According to the editors of
Ramparts, Earth Day organizers were attempting to “banish everything
but environment to the back pages of our minds.”63 That same month, New
Left Notes called overpopulation worries “racist hysteria,” and argued, “The
problem of non-white people . . . is super-exploitation and racist oppression,
not ‘overpopulation.’ ”64 Criticism spilled over into friendly publications,
too. An “angry reader” of Bellingham, Washington’s Northwest Passage, an
alternative newspaper that dedicated itself to environmental issues, called
ecology “the white liberal’s cop-out,” and complained, “People figure that
if they stick with a subject which is controversial as Apple Pie . . . then they
won’t get hasseled [sic] by those in power.”65
The Sierra Club’s attempts to reach out to a younger generation fur-
thered the New Left’s disdain. Hoping to take advantage of student activ-
ism, the Club made an early appeal to younger Americans through a campus
outreach program. In September 1969, the Club hired Connie Flate-
boe as its first campus coordinator. Flateboe started organizing activities
immediately, contacting and collaborating with local environmental groups

in the Bay Area, publishing handbooks for students about environmental
activism, and organizing a conference in Santa Cruz, California, with the
new Environmental Protection Agency’s Youth Advisory Board. The out-
reach program also acted as the Club’s primary campus presence on Earth
Day, and ambassador to a younger generation. “Conservation is an old
word,” Flateboe explained to the board. “Environment, or Ecology is with
it today.”66 And the program talked tough. “The fad is over and it’s time
for the hand wringing and bitching to stop,” staffer Ron Eber wrote to his
campus contacts late in 1971. “To save the California coast will take action
and not rhetoric.”67 Eber did not ask students to take to the streets, though,
but rather to support AB 1471 in the state assembly, which would set up
a statewide coastal commission. While the Sierra Club campus program
encouraged student groups to chart their own courses, often the Club used
the network as little more than an extension of its own political activities.
These students were not firebrands. Flateboe described them as “pragmatic,”
“concerned,” and “working within the system and making it work.”68
The Club’s praise for a new generation of activists usually betrayed its
own skepticism as much as its excitement. While the Sierra Club Bulletin
noted the importance of “ecological revolutionaries,” it described the revo-
lutionaries’ groups as “ill equipped to pursue conservation goals through
the courts or to conduct a protracted battle to stop pollution.” And while
the younger groups enjoyed “enthusiasm and dedication,” they were short
“the political muscle of a national organization with thousands of mem-
bers.”69 Even the Club’s attempts at outright pandering rang hollow. Paul
Brooks, a member of the Club’s board in 1969, wrote knowingly that the
conservation movement, “though it operates within the law, is in principle
revolutionary.” Many Americans mistook the movement’s revolutionary
potential for traditional values. “The younger generation understands this,”
Brooks explained, before going on to discuss the need to marshal facts in
debates with experts, to gain recognition in courts, and to otherwise pursue
decidedly non-revolutionary tactics.70
In 1972, two campus coordinators warned the Club’s board of directors,
writing, “At this point in time you must realize that students are very doubt-
ful that the system is capable of bringing about meaningful change.” It was
the job of the Sierra Club, they went on, to show that “the system” could
work, as “we cannot abandon our effort to inform and involve this country’s
students.”71 Soon after, the board dissolved the campus program due to bud-
get constraints. The mixed messages of the Club’s student outreach, which
used the language of environmental revolution but advocated more conven-
tional reform, underscored the environmental movement’s conflicted rela-
tionship with radical politics and student activism in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Even an established organization like the Sierra Club experimented
with the idea of environmentalism as an inherently radical movement, but
soon the Club and other leading groups pushed forward their programs of
reform along the well-worn paths of the established political process.
THE 1969 WILDERNESS CONFERENCE
Whatever success the Club had in reaching the New Left and a broader
youth culture was mostly unintentional, and much of it began with the 1969
wilderness conference in San Francisco. The conference showcased some of
the ideas that had been percolating at the Club for years and even decades.
A growing sense of ecological relationships and an embrace of Darwinism
gave shape to a more ecocentric perspective, which in turn nudged human
beings from the moral center of some Club leaders’ cosmologies. The 1969
conference was one vector through which these ideas traveled outward,
onto the pages of newspapers and into conversations between activists
across the Bay.
The concept of the wilderness conferences started with Norman Liver-
more, a livestock wrangler, economist, timber executive, Sierra Club
director, and California’s secretary for resources under Governor Ronald
Reagan.72 After an extended debate, the Club went ahead with Livermore’s
idea and held the first biennial wilderness conference in 1949, across the
Bay from San Francisco in Berkeley. Livermore initially proposed gathering
land managers, recreationists, and conservationists to consider a manage-
ment plan for the Sierras, but soon the conferences became a much more
wide-ranging discussion of wilderness. The Wilderness Society enthusiasti-
cally participated in the conferences but its director, Howard Zahniser, let
the Sierra Club take the lead.73
“I attended two and they were the dullest things I’ve ever been to in my
life,” Ansel Adams remembered.74 This was an uncommon view. Michael
Cohen makes clear the importance of the wilderness conferences, where
issues and positions would emerge for discussion years before the Club ren-
dered final judgment. The conferences served as a sort of incubator for ideas
that grew into organizational and sometimes national policy, including
the Wilderness Act itself.75 Brower, an early enthusiast of the conferences,
began publishing their proceedings in the late 1950s, effectively putting the
Club’s seal on informal talks not yet vetted by the board. At the 1959 con-
ference, speakers raised the issue of overpopulation years before the Club
took a formal stance on human numbers.76
Even more consequentially, the 1959 conference was, according to
Cohen, “filled with speakers who presented an ecological view of nature.”77
Soon an ecological perspective on wilderness became less notable at the
conferences, only because it was by then a given. The more traditional aes-
thetic and romantic justifications for wilderness never disappeared, but
they made room for scientific explanations of why wilderness mattered
as a baseline for measuring change, as habitat for particular species, and
as preserves of biodiversity. “By the 1960s environmental militants in the
club had come to have a dynamic perception of a wilderness park,” Susan
Schrepfer writes, using the word “militant” somewhat loosely. “Rather than
a preserve frozen in time, to them a wilderness park was a living organism
within which disease, fire, and all natural processes must play a continu-
ous and creative role.”78 Earlier conservationists assumed they knew exactly
how to manage and protect wild places. A more ecological approach was
one that presumed human ignorance and protected natural systems, which
were likely doing more work and offering greater benefits than managers
could fully comprehend. Even John Muir could get it wrong. Although
he thought in ecological terms decades before most conservationists,
Muir opposed any and all forest fires, while many Native Americans—
including Yosemite’s Miwok Indians—and a handful of forest commis-
sioners recognized the role of fires in forest health. Brower later dismissed
Muir’s “unecological attitude toward fire in the forests,” noting that it was
the view of the Forest Service’s mascot, Smokey Bear. “He didn’t know a
damn thing about forest ecology,” Brower said of Smokey, “and all he tried
to do was make people practice conservation through feeling guilt.”79
Brower wanted conservation to spring from “higher motives” than guilt,

but in fact conservationists like Brower were moving away from any sense
of hierarchy at all, whether of motives or of species. Schrepfer stresses the
shift in thought among Club leaders in the 1960s from the ordered world
of Muir, filled with intimations of divine intention, to the random sense
of evolutionary history captured in the popular writing of anthropologist
Loren Eiseley.80 Brower, an Eiseley enthusiast, convinced him to contribute
to several Sierra Club books. The lean toward Eiseley was also a nod at the
modern evolutionary synthesis, which reasserted Darwin’s theory of natu-
ral selection after several decades during which scientists considered more
directed theories of evolution. The renewed influence of Darwin in the
mid-twentieth century, popularized through writers like Eiseley, pointed
to a world without divine order and in which Homo sapiens was a chance
occurrence rather than an inevitable end product. If modern, industrial
society was happenstance rather than inexorable, it deserved greater scru-
tiny and doubt.
An emphasis on ecology and a darker view of the human place in evolu-
tion contributed to what Schrepfer calls “an ontological equality—that is,
men are not better than trees.”81 That idea would become an increasingly
important and vexing one in environmental thought and activism. Few held
it in the extreme before the 1970s. Most Club members and leaders thought
that men were, in fact, better than trees, or at least more valuable. But many
conservationists began to edge slowly toward the trees. James Morton Turner
describes how wilderness activists by the late 1960s and early 1970s used
more technical and scientific arguments for protection of wild places. As
those arguments gained favor, “what began to dwindle were sweeping claims
on behalf of the public interest, appeals to patriotism, and an emphasis on
the historic value of wilderness . . .”82 In conservation work, people were less
and less central to conceptions of the natural world and to arguments for its
protection, and that de-centering had inevitable moral implications.
An ecological emphasis and a pessimistic view of modern human societ-
ies were fully in evidence at the Club’s eleventh wilderness conference at the
San Francisco Hilton in March 1969. The conference foregrounded wilder-
ness and wildlife in Alaska, but looming in the background was the threat
that people posed to the planet. The media covered both. The Associated
Press reported on the howling timber wolf that played over speakers during
a talk on Canadian wildlife; the Los Angeles Times and St. Paul Dispatch
told readers about the important role of Alaska in wilderness politics, as
did, predictably, the Nome Nugget, Alaska Empire, and Kodiak Mirror.
Other papers focused on the more controversial topics addressed by the
conference’s opening and closing speakers, Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Har-
din. The San Diego Union and Los Angeles Times relayed Ehrlich’s gloomy
prediction that more and more people would inevitably degrade not just
wilderness but food, air, and water. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San
Francisco Examiner described Hardin’s recommendation that wilderness
be restricted to only those physically capable of strenuous hikes.83 Hardin
had recently published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the essay that would
make him both famous and infamous. In that piece, Hardin considered
how to conserve a resource when unrestrained individual gain could lead
to collective loss. Now he asked the same question of wilderness, a resource
that could easily be enjoyed to oblivion. Hardin concluded that while
other systems of selection might be more fair and democratic, one based
on “merit” would best match those most appreciative of wilderness with
places worth appreciating.84 Hardin argued unapologetically for exactly the
position that Bestor Robinson had called unconscionable during the San
Gorgonio debate more than twenty years earlier: a policy that would, in
Robinson’s words, “confine the use of the wilderness to the aristocracy of
the physically super-fit.”85 Not everyone in the Club approved of Hardin’s
view and his talk received a mixed response. But conference chairman Dan
Luten, fishing for bold statements, had invited Hardin in order to leave
the audience with “a persisting uneasiness.”86 In 1947, that unease had been
acute for many Club leaders. By 1969, it was part of the program.
Saving wilderness, Hardin told his audience, was “a problem of human
choice” as population increased and wilderness acreage did not.87 The idea
of human choice and its profound consequences echoed through the con-
ference. John Milton of the Conservation Foundation lamented a culture
“dominated by an assumption that our economy must always continue to
expand,” and advised, “There may still be time to choose a better vision, but
with each new dawn our options narrow.” Geographer George Macinko
warned, “In man’s headlong flight to conquer nature, he tends to behave as
though he were not subject to any ecological laws.” Brower suggested that
only by combining human self-interest with the interests of wildlife would

humanity survive.88 Beginning with Ehrlich’s pessimistic view of population
growth and ending with Hardin’s cold calculations for limiting human free-
dom, the Club’s eleventh wilderness conference left little doubt that people
and their modern comforts lay at the root of environmental problems.
What was there to do? Conference attendees knew that few Ameri-
cans shared their particular interests and concerns, or at least their sense
of urgency. As the Providence Journal joked of the roughly one thousand
people participating in San Francisco, “The hedonistic delights of that
most wonderful of all convention cities in North America will mean little
to them.”89 Some speakers walked gingerly up to the line separating con-
ventional reform from radical acts, disapproval of modern society from
outright resistance, but none crossed it. Chairing the first day’s afternoon
session, Richard Cooley asked the Club’s Northwest representative, Brock
Evans, whether environmentalists should be revolutionaries. “I have a split
feeling whether we should or not,” Evans answered. “Some decisions we
cannot accept,” he said, tempering that declaration by expressing hope for
judicial action to protect Oregon’s Cascade Range.90 When Ray Sherwin
told George Macinko that he had voiced “profoundly radical and sub-
versive” ideas and asked whether conservationists should use “civil rights
tactics,” Macinko demurred. To plan for the long-term future, he said, was
“prudent, not subversive.”91 The Club’s leaders and friends had started to
question economic growth, democratic principles, and human primacy in
the world, but they held firm to traditional methods of reform and sug-
gested that their arguments were little more than common sense.
THE BATTLE OVER THE PARK
Not everyone at the Hilton in 1969 found the program commonsensical.

The poet Gary Snyder told attendees between sessions that he would be
willing to sit in front of a bulldozer to prevent the destruction of the Earth.
He passed out copies of his “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” a poem that depicted
Smokey Bear as a Buddha appearing in “the American era” while the human
race “practically wreck[s] everything in spite of its own strong intelligent
Buddha-nature.”92 To Snyder, the dire warnings of the conference signaled
something profound, a threshold in human history. “Mankind has reached

the point of his greatest knowledge and power,” he said months later, “and
has come to a dialectical turning point when, if he is to become greater, he
has to become smaller.”93
Snyder had convinced his friend Keith Lampe, a fixture in the Bay Area’s
hip community, to join him at the conference. Lampe had been a Beat poet
in the early 1960s and a Yippie later in the decade, one of the organizers
of the 1967 effort to exorcize the Pentagon of evil spirits. He had never
been especially interested in conservation or ecology until the Sierra Club’s
conference changed his political and moral point of view. “People in the
Movement and subculture will have to take to the streets with disrup-
tive Save-Our-Species-Week demonstrations in order to give the liberals
of the Sierra Club any lobbying leverage with the U.S. regime,” he wrote
the following week in the Berkeley Barb, at once measuring the ideologi-
cal distance between radicals and liberals and recognizing the possibility of
aligned interests. Where the New Left had generally disparaged the ecology
movement as narrow and reformist, Lampe acknowledged both its limits
and its possibilities. The conference was “middle-classy,” with few young
people in attendance and even fewer nonwhite audience members. Ecol-
ogy had the potential, though, to bring together old and new leftists. “All
of us now hung up with the industrial revolution,” Lampe told his readers,
“have got to move from the disastrous notion of man-versus-nature into
a peaceful coexistence with nature.”94 After the Sierra Club conference,
Lampe dedicated himself to proselytizing for that cause. He started a news-
letter called Earth Read-Out that turned into a syndicated column in the
underground press, and he appointed himself the voice of the environment
among hippies and New Left radicals.
Lampe tapped into what was already a swirl of issues and activists in
the Bay Area. Several years before Earth Day, the New Left, the traditional
conservation movement, and an emerging environmentalism intersected
in and around San Francisco.95 Before 1969 this confluence was difficult
to see, visible only to those in the back reaches of the Bay Area political
scene where the various streams of thought met. They ran together most
often in Berkeley, where in 1967 a University of California student named
Cliff Humphrey met Chuck Herrick, who was just back from serving in
Vietnam. Cliff Humphrey and his wife, Mary Humphrey, took an inter-
est in ecology not only as a way of understanding the natural world but
also as a way of framing political decisions. Herrick, who had studied zool-
ogy, shared their point of view. The Humphreys and Herrick chose the
new Peace and Freedom Party as a vehicle for their ideas. In late 1967 and
early 1968 they distributed essays and articles about ecology and politics to
Peace and Freedom Party members. Humphrey wrote one piece, “A Uni-
fying Theme,” with help from forestry doctoral student Fred Bunnell and
professor of geography Dan Luten, a member of the Sierra Club’s board
of directors and later chair of the 1969 wilderness conference. “A Unify-
ing Theme” tried to connect war, overpopulation, racial hierarchy, and
economic inequality through the overarching theme of ecology. “Radical
movements in the United States are responses to inequities that constitute
ecological blasphemy,” the authors declared.96
The Humphreys and Herrick formed a group called Ecology Action,
recognized as an official caucus of the Peace and Freedom Party even as
Ecology Action shifted away from formal politics and toward education.
Ecology Action tried to convince the New Left of ecology’s critical role
in radical politics. “The relationship between current campus unrest and
a blindly expanding human population is not yet recognized,” Humphrey
wrote in 1968 after transferring to San Francisco State University. “Ecology
offers the beginnings of an alternative to the present value structure that
many have rejected,” he said in a radio broadcast on KPFA in June. Hum-
phrey lamented students’ lack of an ecological perspective, a shortcoming
compounded by a missing sense of urgency about environmental decline.97
Eugene Anderson, founder of the Southern California chapter of Ecology
Action, described conservation (the term “environmentalism” was not yet
coined) as “universally approved and universally unsupported,” an issue
that inspired none of the attention it deserved. Conservatives subordinated
environmental concerns to those of business, Anderson felt, and liberals
were generally pro-growth and pro-development. New Left radicals, the
group Anderson expected the most support from, felt that “somehow other
issues are ‘more important.’ ” A “narrow interpretation of Marx’ attack on
Malthus,” Anderson complained, “has led some radical friends of mine to
opposition of all conservation on principle.”98
But many New Left radicals opposed conservation on much more than
principle. Even as Ecology Action tried to combine the urgent concerns of
the New Left with the emerging issues of environmentalism, it often unwit-
tingly set them against each other by privileging one over the other. “The
magnitude of these problems reduces the Vietnam War to an absurdity,”
Humphrey and Bunnell wrote of environmental concerns in 1967.99 “Eth-
nic studies and campus autonomy are backlog issues, needed certainly, but
a settlement of these issues alone will not automatically move us toward
the search for behavior that is not self-destructive,” Humphrey insisted in
1968.100 Campus activists had little sympathy for Ecology Action’s holism,
its tendency to look only at the big picture and to insist on the primacy of
an environmental perspective.
Ecology Action thought of its holism as synthetic rather than hierarchical,
an overarching politics rooted in ecological principles and a step beyond
the traditional conservation movement of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County
Almanac, which Anderson derided as “The prototypic statement of the
pretty-pretty, Wilderness-values, nice-weekend-farm school attitude.”101
Uninterested in pastoral nature, Ecology Action carried money sacks weighed
down with Bay fill to financial institutions supporting the Bay’s development
and issued a statement of ecological relationships called “The Declaration of
Interdependence” at a press conference in front of the Berkeley dump. The
group insisted that environmental issues touched on all others, implying that
environmental issues were therefore always central.
The most influential project Ecology Action created was not initially a
political act. In May 1968, Chuck Herrick died in a car accident driving to
a Peace and Freedom Party conference in Ann Arbor. In response Ecology
Action took an abandoned lot on the corner of Dwight and Telegraph, several
blocks from the University of California campus, and designated it Herrick
Peace and Freedom Park. Ecology Action and its sympathizers planted a gar-
den in the lot and put up petitions on the fence which read, in part, “CITOY-
ENS: IF YOU WISH TO KEEP THIS AS A PARK, YOU MUST ACT.
THIS WILL BE A PEOPLE’S PARK. RATHER THAN ANOTHER
STRETCH OF ASPHALT TO SERVE THE AUTOMOBILE . . .
THE SIMPLEST WAY TO EXERT PRESSURE ON THE CITY OF
BERKELEY, WHICH OWNS THIS LAND, IS TO CALL A CITY
OFFICIAL.”102 The city removed the flowers and trees soon after, but Cliff
Humphrey began to work with Berkeley’s parks commission and city council
to find a site for a permanent park honoring Herrick.
The saga of Herrick Peace and Freedom Park remained in the collective
memory of the Telegraph Avenue community a year later when an avenue
merchant named Mike Delacour tried to find a performance space for a local
band. He picked an open area just off of Telegraph Avenue and bordered by
Haste Street, Bowditch Street, and Dwight Way, less than half a block from
the original site of Herrick Peace and Freedom Park. Lot 1875–2 belonged
to the University of California, which had torn down several buildings and
let the three acres collect mud and garbage. Through the Berkeley Barb,
Delacour invited community members to help transform the lot. Dozens
showed up on April 20 to lay sod and plant shrubs in the lot’s northeast
corner. Landscaping continued for the next three weeks, sometimes with a
handful of workers and sometimes with several hundred, all cleaning and
planting by day and celebrating at night. By the middle of May much of the
lot sprouted grass, flowers, and vegetables, and locals began calling it the
People’s Park (see figure 1.2).103
Figure 1.2 “Volunteers at People’s Park, Berkeley, California, 1969.” Photo by John Jekabson,
Sunday, May 11, 1969.
State and University officials, unwilling to cede the land but wary of
confrontation, spent several weeks debating the best course of action.
Chancellor Roger Heyns met with a group of park supporters in early May
to search for a compromise. Professor of architecture Sim Van der Ryn
suggested a park maintained by the Telegraph Avenue community under
the university’s sponsorship. Heyns considered and then abandoned the
idea, citing pressure from the Board of Regents. Finally, he declared that
the university would erect a fence in order to prevent further unauthorized
use of university land.
On May 15, a combined force of 250 officers from the Berkeley Police
Department, Alameda County Sheriff ’s Department, and California
Highway Patrol arrived in the early morning to evict overnight camp-
ers and protect a work crew ordered to put up a fence. Several thousand
locals gathered in response just a few blocks away and, after hearing a
string of speakers, surged toward the park. Halfway there the crowd
collided with the police and highway patrol. The confrontation quickly
escalated into rock- and bottle-throwing on one side, and tear gas and
birdshot on the other. Later, the police switched to more lethal buckshot.
At the end of the day over a hundred people were shot and wounded,
some seriously and one fatally. Governor Ronald Reagan mobilized the
National Guard, which occupied downtown Berkeley for seventeen days.
Those two-and-a-half weeks saw scattered skirmishes and clouds of tear
gas floating through the city, and finally the withdrawal of the Guard and
outside police forces. Still the Reagan administration, and through it
the University, refused to lease the park to the city, and the lot remained
contested space for years after.
People’s Park has long been understood as a violent clash between radical
activists and established institutions at a time when those two sides were most
determinedly opposed. Robert Scheer, a reporter for Ramparts, described
it in these terms just months after the fighting: “The park confrontation
was a battle in a war between the mainstream of society, as represented by
the University of California’s administration, and the counter-community
of revolt which thrives in the South Campus-Telegraph Avenue area, with
the People’s Park site at its heart.”104 Winthrop Griffith of the New York
Times explained the clash over the park as “part of the accelerating conflict
between the tightly structured and self-proclaimed ‘rational’ institutions of

society and the unordered and yearning youth of the nation.”105 The Black
Panther described the Park as “socialism in practice” and the fight over it as
an extension of “The Fascist State.”106 Ronald Reagan said the conflict cen-
tered on a group of local activists “challenging the right of private ownership
of land in this country.”107 New Left Notes agreed with Reagan’s analysis, if
not with his position; both sides, the newspaper explained, “understand
that the question of OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL OF PROPERTY
is the basis of the current struggle.”108
For much of the New Left, Berkeley was the likely epicenter of a nation-
wide uprising, and People’s Park was simply a potential catalyst to grow-
ing militancy, little different from the Democratic National Convention
in Chicago the previous year. Dazzled by direct action, they remembered
People’s Park for the street fighting that followed it rather than for the
planting and growing that preceded it. Months after the confrontation over
the park, New Left leaders Tom Hayden and Frank Bardacke called Berke-
ley “an example of rebellion to others” and “a kind of ‘front’ in the world-
wide battle against American capitalism.” In the Berkeley Tribe Hayden and
Bardacke took stock of what the movement had learned about revolution
and about itself in the East Bay “stronghold.” They discussed police tactics,
divisions within the radical community, proletarianization, and interna-
tionalization, but not ecology or the environment. Hayden and Bardacke’s
wide-ranging evaluation of what Berkeley had taught American radicals
showed no interest in the ecology movement nor in growing concern with
land use and resource destruction. People’s Park was a moment when “we
ripped off the Man’s land” rather than a sign of new goals and concerns.109
Its significance was quantitative, signaling escalating confrontation, rather
than qualitative, signaling a new set of ideas.
Local activists had a different take. Keith Lampe published an open
letter to Hayden and Bardacke explaining how “astounded” he was that
“you guys could type out so many pages of words without once relating to
what we’ve learned in recent months about the fragility of the earth’s life-
support system.” That absence, he went on, “renders your material naïve
and dated.”110 People’s Park, for Lampe and other Berkeley activists, infused
the movement with a green ethos and with a new concern for the natural
world. Here, finally, was the convergence of ecological concerns with New
Left radicalism. “We will never forget that if they win this simple struggle,
the planet will soon become a slag-heap of radioactive rubble,” one activist
wrote of the state and university, “but if we, in our own way, overcome the
official agents of uniform death, the earth will become a park.” Another
predicted, “We will fight with strange new weapons. With dirt and water.
With flowers and trees. . . . Can you legislate against the earth? We will be
the earth.”111
A year later, and a month before Earth Day thrust environmentalism
into the national spotlight, the Berkeley Tribe reported, “People’s Park was
the beginning of the Revolutionary Ecology Movement. It is the model of
the struggle we are going to have to wage in the future if life is going to
survive at all on this planet.” The new struggle, according to the editors
of the Tribe, combined the social politics of the New Left with a growing
ecological sensibility, a fusion first seen at People’s Park. “What we did with
one city block last spring is going to have to be done more and more on a
larger and larger scale,” the editors of the Tribe explained.112 While another
People’s Park never materialized, in the year or so following the original
event the radical community in Berkeley grabbed hold of ecology as a para-
mount concern. Just days after the National Guard pulled out of Berkeley,
over two thousand people gathered on campus for an “Ecology and Politics
in America” teach-in sponsored by two American Federation of Teachers
locals. “The questions raised by this issue,” the event’s flyers read, “reach
into two worlds at once: the world of power, politics and the institutional
shape of American society on the one hand, and world of ecology, conser-
vation and the biological shape of our environment on the other.” Ecology
and politics, the flyer explained, “are no longer separate or separable issues.”
Ecology Action held an ecology workshop and an “extinction fair” over the
summer; the Eco-Liberation Front temporarily hijacked a meeting of the
Bay Area Pollution Control District in early 1970; and a coalition of eco-
minded groups launched a months-long campaign to grow trees on unused
Bay Area Rapid Transit land.113
By late 1969, the seed of radical interest in the environment planted at
People’s Park took root as Left thinkers and writers began to think and
write about the natural world more than they ever had. In response to an
interviewer’s question about the place of poetry within the movement,

Allen Ginsberg began talking about how contemporary activism was
“a little wavelet on a larger awareness that’s growing in people, which is a
biological awareness rather than a political awareness.”114 Unprompted by
any question at all, another interviewer recorded, the Hog Farm commune’s
Hugh Romney said, “What I’m really into is the Whole Earth trip, because
that’s something that everyone can agree on. Everyone can see that the
planet is in bad trouble and we’ve all gotta get together and melt our flags
and hang a rainbow on a pole and share all the food.”115 And Todd Gitlin,
by 1969 a veteran of the New Left and increasingly skeptical of ever-newer
movements, offered grudging admiration for Gary Snyder’s Earth House
Hold. “Snyder can help us do one thing we’ve scanted,” Gitlin wrote, trans-
lating Snyder into his own terms, “which is to understand how American
capitalism rips up everything of value.”116
While People’s Park helped trigger a blossoming of radical interest
in ecology, that interest was sustained by an emerging view that ecology
played a role in an overall, radical analysis. The environment, New Left
activists came to argue, was not an isolated issue but rather an essential ele-
ment in a larger critique of American society. Lampe had been making this
point for months. By late 1969, he decided it was time to “begin to define
a more specifically radical (‘root’) approach to the emergency.” The com-
ing mistakes in addressing ecological issues, he predicted, would be pro-
grams based on competition, faith in technology, the profit motive, and
centralized authority. Lampe associated such approaches with “the OLD
TIME, i.e., the industrial-revolution phase of history.” Nations themselves,
he argued, must be phased out and replaced with “tribal and regional co-
operative post-monetary steady-state post-technocratic heliocentric eco-
nomic models, eco-models.” Lampe recognized earlier than many others
that, spun out to its extreme, the logic of ecological activism could call into
question the foundations of modern industrial society, including property,
economic growth, and centralized government.117
Few committed themselves to a radical ecotopia as Lampe did, but many
other activists began to consider what Ecology Action had long argued: that
the environment was an issue tailor-made for opposing the establishment.
Because concern for human survival was so basic, environmentalism—as
it was beginning to be called—could point to fundamental and even sui-

cidal flaws in modern American society. Holism, the tendency to group all
people together and reduce complicated issues to single causes like over-
population, was rhetorically both environmentalism’s worst characteris-
tic and its greatest strength. “The environment” could connect disparate
issues like racism and sexism and war, and offer an overarching symptom
(or cause—it worked both ways). “The notion of man’s ability/need to
completely control his environment is ancient,” the Austin Rag suggested.
“This idea should be critically analyzed by radicals. This analysis should be
prompt, for the consequences of a new understanding of man in nature
are far-reaching.”118 New York’s Rat agreed. “An exploration of ecological
trends demonstrates that the present ecological crises cannot be separated
from the social crisis,” a writer called “Pantagruel” explained. “An attack
against environmental destruction is an attack on the structures of control
and the mechanisms of power within a society.”119
For Ecology Action, the news was old but the sudden interest welcome.
“well, we finally hit the big time, sort of,” Eugene Anderson wrote from
Riverside with his typical disdain for capital letters. “i think it is a good
idea on the whole that Ecology Action’s part in people’s parks hasn’t been
publicized. still, it gives me a feeling of great satisfaction that we, in our
quiet peaceable way, have been responsible for a genuine revolution!!”120
Ecology Action tried to capitalize on People’s Park by helping to write and
distribute a special issue of Philip MacDougal’s magazine Despite Every-
thing, explaining how a green flag had flown at People’s Park “beside social-
ist red and anarchist black,” a flag that signaled “new indelible connections
in the mind which will re-color popular protest in every country in the
world, from this time on.” The environment, MacDougal claimed, held the
potential to unite the Left and even garner mainstream support because it
touched everybody.121
It was one thing to enthuse about environmentalism’s all-encompassing
meaning, but another to establish it. On the one hand, Eldridge Cleaver,
writing from exile in late 1968 after his parole was revoked but still the
Black Panther’s minister of information, seemed to have a sense of what
MacDougal meant. Cleaver compared the Black Panther’s Breakfast for
Children program with People’s Park as, respectively, a black and a white
response to the failures of “the system.” One addressed vital needs and the
other addressed what might be perceived as leisure, but “they both pose
precisely the same question” about the distribution of goods and amenities.
“I find myself very enthusiastic about these developments,” Cleaver said.122
On the other hand, MacDougal imagined Panther Bobby Seale, shovel in
hand, telling reporters that the park was a crucial issue for black Americans,
and then lamented that this scenario was “a mere dream.”123
People’s Park triggered a growing interest in integrating New Left radi-
calism with ecology—working at the roots, both figuratively and literally—
but the analytical framework for such a combination remained unclear at
best. “The underground culture is beginning to groove on conservation and
ecology, but a comprehensive radical viewpoint needs to be developed,”
Pantagruel noted. “Lewis Herber, in his breakthrough essay ‘Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought,’ provides a starting point.”124 In fact, Lewis Herber
provided much more than a starting point. “Lewis Herber” was a pseud-
onym for Murray Bookchin, an Old Left anarchist who became a New Left
guru by creating a school of political thought called “social ecology.” In
1969, abridged versions of Bookchin’s essay “Ecology and Revolutionary
Thought” appeared regularly in the alternative press. Bookchin followed
the New Left closely, occasionally writing to their publications and offering
advice based on his many years of radicalism. After a long and underap-
preciated career as a radical thinker, Bookchin enjoyed belated recogni-
tion within the New Left exactly because he offered an analysis that tied
together social and environmental politics.125
Bookchin, in other words, provided a pre-assembled philosophy for
integrating the “new” issue of environmentalism into the Left’s overall
radical analysis. Social ecology argued, essentially, that people’s abuse
of the natural world resulted directly from social inequality, that con-
trol and exploitation among human beings of each other led to control
and exploitation by human beings of nature. “The truth of the matter,”
Bookchin wrote, “is that man has created these imbalances in nature as
a direct outgrowth of the imbalances he has created in his own society.”
As an anarchist, Bookchin placed the blame for the modern world’s pre-
dicament squarely on the shoulders of social hierarchy and the suppression
of the individual. “The mass society, with its statistical beehive approach,”
he wrote, “tends to triumph over free expression, personal uniqueness and

cultural complexity. This creates a crisis not only in natural ecology but in
social ecology.”126
Such an analysis resonated with the New Left, opposed as it was to the
impersonal, bureaucratic “establishment,” and supportive as it was of free
expression and cultural pluralism.And so, many radical thinkers adopted
environmental concerns into a Bookchin-like framework. “Environment
destruction is merely another manifestation of the fundamentally fucked-
up system,” a contributor called “Panurge” wrote in the Rat. Such destruc-
tion “is the more subtle effect of a social system no longer in the hands
of the people.”127 The Old Mole of Cambridge, Massachusetts agreed: “The
problem we face cannot be solved if we think about it in terms of pollution,
which is a result of the crisis and not a cause,” wrote Roxanne O’Connell.
“It has to do with the way we operate and the way people and nature are
viewed—as something to be used and exploited.”128 After People’s Park, the
environment became a canary in a coalmine for some on the Left, a chief
indicator of just how oppressive and self-destructive modern establishment
society had become.
CONCLUSION
“The Environmental Movement is coming to be more than a re-labeled

Conservation Movement,” Michael McCloskey told the Sierra Club’s mem-
bership several months after Earth Day. The boundaries of the environmen-
tal movement stretched to embrace the consumer movement, population
stabilization, pacifism and participatory democracy, an action-oriented
youth movement, and “a diffuse movement in search of a new focus for
politics,” McCloskey said. “The varied groups are still learning to under-
stand each other.” McCloskey found this fragmentation and diversification
jarring. It remained unclear whether the coalition could hold. It might be
possible, he speculated, “to try, eclectically, to combine many of these per-
spectives.” It was equally possible, though, that the Club was “entering into
a period of competing strategies.”129
What seemed like a sudden efflorescence to McCloskey had been emerg-
ing for years and even decades. Going back to early battles over recreation,
roads, parks, and the balance between economic imperatives and the pro-
tection of scenic places, the Sierra Club had wrestled with questions of
democracy and legacy. New understandings of ecological relationships and
the place of humans in the natural world complicated those questions, and
conservationists increasingly made judgments based not just on what best
served the public but on how people affected the nonhuman. More and
more, the view that human action must be restrained—a view epitomized
by David Brower—informed the environmental movement. That view
would shape the topography of environmental politics in the late twentieth
century. In 1969, New Left activists and environmentalists struck a brief
and tenuous balance in and around People’s Park, connecting ecological
concerns with a much broader critique of capitalism and inequality. “At
some point,” McCloskey wrote presciently, “either a better synthesis of
philosophy must develop or hard choices will have to be made.”130 Those
choices would be made again and again, and would delineate the relation-
ship between the environmental movement and democratic procedures,
social justice, and individual freedoms.
2
Crisis Environmentalism
Environmental issues played a starring role in the Congressional campaigns

of 1970, a first in American politics according to New York Times reporter
Gladwin Hill. “While the ‘environmental crisis’ has not become the major
national issue that some militants predicted last spring it would be,” Hill
wrote, “it has clearly emerged as a new and possibly portentous fixture of
the political landscape.” Just a few months after Earth Day demonstrated
Americans’ strong interest in environmental issues, major environmental
organizations planted their flags in Washington, D.C. The nascent envi-
ronmental lobby helped put conservation and pollution on the agendas
and on the lips of every candidate fighting to retain a seat. However, while
many politicians talked about environmental issues, few debated them; the
topic, Hill reported, remained “in the category of ‘motherhood and apple
pie.’ ” Frank Denholm, a Democratic candidate for Congress from South
Dakota, said, “Pollution is not an issue with me until I find someone who is
for it.” Alabama state senator Pierre Pelham told Hill, “Nobody’s going to
take a stupid side of the issue in the campaign.”1
Environmentalism was in fact riven with controversy, but on the
national political stage much of that controversy took time to emerge. In
the first flush of Earth Day, those who felt regulation did not go nearly far
Crisis Environmentalism 55
enough stayed hidden from view, limited mainly to local organizations and
the alternative press. A strong anti-regulatory push by pollution-generating
industries also remained out of the spotlight, negotiated in private or else
papered over with green slogans. Critics of regulation’s ecological ineffec-
tiveness (as opposed to its economic harms) wanted to be heard, and so
emerged more quickly. “We are strapped in, crisis dead ahead, we can see it,
are evaluating it, but not acting on it yet, even though we are already suffer-
ing from pains of inaction,” Environmental Action’s Cliff Humphrey wrote
in 1969.2 For Environmental Action, and for a new organization called
Zero Population Growth, “inaction” included anything less than systemic
change that restructured the national economy and reoriented the mind of
the modern consumer. The environmental crisis was not metaphorical but
real, and it demanded a proportional response.
People had created the crisis, Humphrey believed, in their pursuit of
material comfort. “We have taught ourselves to believe in a man created
image,” he wrote, “but we are beginning to detect natural limits. The Amer-
ican dream images of the fifties are beginning to fade.”3 To find fault with
the high-consumption “American dream” of the 1950s was to condemn
more than nostalgia; 1970s environmentalism was in many ways a refer-
endum on 1950s affluence. Critics like Humphrey questioned some of the
most basic premises of postwar American society, including economic
growth, individual freedom, and even democratic government. These bed-
rock premises, they believed, might have to be limited or abandoned for
crisis to be averted. In the late 1960s and early 1970s when the mainstream
environmental movement steadily advanced its agenda through litigation
and legislation, crisis-minded environmentalists doubted the efficacy of
conventional reform and instead treated environmental issues as a national
emergency. In a state of emergency, they argued, fundamental assumptions
should be questioned and unprecedented political sacrifices made.
Edmund Muskie of Maine, running for a third term in the Senate,
seriously considered the question of limiting economic growth at a press
conference just before Earth Day. He rejected the idea but worried that
attending to environmental concerns in an expanding economy might
require Americans to “give up the luxury of absolute and unlimited free-
dom of choice.”4 Muskie’s dilemma was the environmental movement’s too.
56 Crisis Environmentalism
Most environmentalists advocated a moderate approach even as they

wondered whether settling for moderate reform might necessitate radical
change. Environmental organizations began to master the tools of incre-
mental improvement at the same time as environmental ideas pointed
toward desperation, crisis, and even questioning industrial society itself.
While major environmental organizations secured a part in the familiar
machinations of government, others asked whether human survival might
require giving up some of what Americans held most dear.
ENVIRONMENTALISM GOES TO WASHINGTON
By the end of the 1970s, Michael McCloskey, executive director of the

Sierra Club, could look back and identify unequivocally the Club’s
primary strategy for protecting the environment: “I think the Sierra
Club has mastered the theory of lobbying, particularly with respect to
Congress, better than any other organization in the environmental field,”
he said. By then the Club took pride in its reputation as a leader in con-
ventional methods of reform. “The club has become known preeminently
as the environmental lobby,” McCloskey said. “We tackle more issues; we
are there on more occasions and before more committees than any other
organization is.”5 Chief lobbyist Brock Evans told a reporter, “Whenever
there is a big issue of any kind on the hill, and we meet in coalition with
other environmental groups, we are always the ones who are turned to
to deliver the mail.”6 The Sierra Club had, over the course of the decade,
become an influential organization in Washington, D.C., scoring victo-
ries over bigger and better-funded industrial groups. And it was part of
a much larger trend. “The environmental movement, nurtured by Earth
Day’s youthful enthusiasm, has matured into a political lobby of formi-
dable sophistication,” the Washington Post reported in 1979. “More than a
dozen environmental groups now have Washington offices that rival the
best corporate lobbies.”7
Major environmental groups had committed to a strategy of lobbying
and working through the federal government years before the Washing-
ton Post acknowledged that strategy’s effectiveness. Beginning in the early
1970s the environmental movement focused on Congress and the courts,
organizing its advocacy around lobbying and lawsuits. Out of the varied
ideas and approaches that characterized the movement soon after Earth
Day, the major groups emerged with a clear plan of action: to use the fed-
eral government to institute legal protections for the natural world. Three
developments in particular furthered this goal, creating the foundation for
environmentalism’s legislative approach to protecting natural resources and
hitching the movement to the liberal democratic state.
The first major change occurred when the Sierra Club lost its tax-
deductible status. Between 1954 and 1976, the deductibility of donations
to conservation organizations remained a murky question. In 1954 the
Supreme Court upheld the Federal Lobbying Act of 1946, making it a
criminal offense to engage in lobbying without registering to do so. Being
an official lobbyist, however, risked an organization’s tax-deductible status,
and lobbying was defined only as directing a “substantial” portion of funds
or activities toward influencing legislation. What that meant was never
clear; organizing letter campaigns certainly counted as a form of lobbying,
but did testifying before Congress? Although David Brower would later
warn environmentalists against the centrifugal pull of Washington, D.C.,
in 1954 he argued that the Club should simply forego its tax status and
commit itself to lobbying. Other directors worried how members would
react to this aggressive stance and voted to set up a separate, non-deductible
organization called Trustees for Conservation so that the Club could stand
apart from the rough and tumble of politics.8
Once the home of the amateur tradition, by the 1970s the Club had
moved purposefully if haltingly toward a more professionalized environ-
mentalism. In the early 1960s more traditionally minded directors like
Edgar Wayburn continued to insist that the Club was not a lobbying orga-
nization.9 The battles over dams in Dinosaur and Grand Canyon, however,
forced the issue. Soon after Brower’s “battle ads,” the IRS suspended the
Club’s tax-deductible status. Having lost its high perch, the Club took the
path Brower initially advised and switched from a 501c3 tax-deductible
organization to a 501c4 non-deductible group free to lobby for or against
legislation (although not yet for or against specific candidates). The Club
lost many large contributions between 1966 and 1968, but its newfound
pugnaciousness and notoriety attracted many more small donations and
its membership grew from 39,000 to 60,000. “We should almost be grate-
ful,” Brower told the San Francisco Chronicle.10
The Club’s experience led, eventually, to greater clarity for other envi-
ronmental organizations. Several groups gave up their tax-deductible status
and established charitable foundations for non-political work, while others
limited their lobbying to 5 percent of their overall program expenses. Finally
the National Audubon Society pushed the IRS to specify what qualified
as an acceptable amount of lobbying for a 501c3 organization, and in the
Tax Reform Act of 1976 the IRS designated that amount at 20 percent of
a group’s overall budget. Audubon opened a Washington office soon after.
The Club, having lost its tax-deductible status and gained a much wider
constituency, found nothing to hold it back from direct involvement in
legislative debates, and it led the way toward more active lobbying by many
other groups. Almost accidentally, the Club remade itself and the move-
ment as a political force.11
The second development pushing environmental organizations toward
the nation’s capital, and toward a close relationship with the federal gov-
ernment, was the legislative infrastructure for protecting natural resources
and natural areas constructed by the Nixon administration. During Nixon’s
presidency, Congress passed some of the most far-reaching environmental
protection laws in U.S. history. Revised and strengthened Clean Air and
Clean Water acts, the Endangered Species Act, the Resource Recovery
Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) all came to fruition
between 1968 and 1973. Most significant of all was the 1969 passage of the
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law with implications far
beyond the estimations of the senator who championed it—Henry Jackson
of Washington—and the president who signed it into law.12 NEPA estab-
lished the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a three-person
board that advised the president on environmental matters and oversaw
the implementation of NEPA’s regulatory aspects, and NEPA required that
any government agency planning a significant project first file an environ-
mental impact statement (EIS) that described all reasonable alternatives
to the planned approach. Within a few short years, environmental groups
used NEPA to temporarily halt construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline
and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, and to force further review of
their potential effects; to postpone the operation of several nuclear power

plants; and to delay the sale of oil and gas leases off of the Gulf Coast.
By April, 1972 federal courts had ruled on more than 160 decisions related
to NEPA, and continued to do so almost weekly.
Historians have disagreed on the motivations behind Nixon’s environ-
mental credentials but generally attribute them to opportunism. Believing
that environmentalism excited many and offended few, Nixon seized on it as
an issue that might gain him respect among younger and more liberal voters
without losing support among conservatives. In private, the president com-
plained about environmentalists and criticized his own appointees as unrea-
sonable in their support of environmental regulation. But, despite himself,
Nixon declared the 1970s the “environmental decade,” and he appointed
Russell Train chairman of the CEQ, William Ruckelshaus administrator of
the EPA, and Walter Hickel Secretary of the Interior, all of whom proved
friendlier to environmentalists than either Nixon or environmental groups
could have guessed. Nixon also implemented a legal regime that would come
to define the environmental movement for the rest of the twentieth century.
Under Nixon-era laws, environmental organizations developed close work-
ing relationships with federal agencies, found new bases for lawsuits, and
gained clout on Capitol Hill. Intentionally or not, the Nixon administration
invited the environmental movement to Washington, D.C.13
The third development furthering a strategy of lobbying and litigation
was the expansion of environmental law. At the same time as more estab-
lished groups honed their lobbying operations, many new organizations
extended the boundaries of the environmental movement’s legal activities.
Major legislation like NEPA depended on enforcement, and enforcement
required watchdogs that would poke and prod federal agencies with law-
suits. These watchdogs could employ staff attorneys and pursue expensive
litigation thanks to the Ford Foundation, which committed funds to public
interest law in the 1970s. Over several years, the Ford Foundation awarded
tens of millions of dollars to public interest law groups in fields like con-
sumer advocacy, civil rights, and especially environmental law. Ford Foun-
dation grants allowed the establishment or expansion of the Environmental
Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC),
and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Continuing legal success further
bound the Club and the broader environmental movement to an approach

based on legislative gains in Congress and on enforcement of those gains in
the courts.14
The Sierra Club’s shift in tax status and newfound freedom to lobby,
the Nixon administration’s environmental protection laws, and the estab-
lishment of environmental law organizations all molded the environ-
mental movement in the early 1970s. These shifts worked together like
interconnected cogs: lobbying produced—and litigation fortified—key
environmental laws; those laws provided opportunities for successful law-
suits; and legislative victories bolstered the reputation of environmental
organizations, expanding membership and providing greater support for
renewed lobbying.15
A strategy centered on legislators and litigators furthered the profes-
sionalization of the environmental movement. Older groups like the Sierra
Club, the National Audubon Society, and later the Wilderness Society,
along with new groups like NRDC, EDF, and the League of Conserva-
tion Voters (LCV), shifted the movement’s focus from grassroots organiz-
ing and major publicity campaigns to technical expertise in environmental
policy and direct involvement in the legislative process. The major organi-
zations began to fashion common goals and a shared strategy and to focus
on the daily business of politics. Collectively, the primary environmental
groups employed only two or three full-time lobbyists in 1969; by 1975 they
had forty lobbyists in the halls of Congress, and ten years later more than
eighty.16 Environmental organizations grew rapidly, taking advantage of the
sudden popularity of environmental issues and using improved direct mail
techniques. By 1971 the Sierra Club had added over three thousand new
members a month, the Wilderness Society signed up over twenty thou-
sand each year, and the relatively unknown Friends of the Earth surpassed
twenty thousand members before its second anniversary.17
Professionalization also meant expanding funding by broadening envi-
ronmental organizations’ appeal, and that often meant toning down their
rhetoric. “Many of the ‘eco-freaks’ who had marched on Washington on
Earth Day did not leave the capital when the event concluded,” Arthur
Magida wrote in the National Journal in early 1976. “Gradually, their long
hair was shorn, their pockets were filled with grants from foundations or
donations from members of their environmental groups, and their naivete

was replaced by the sophistication of experienced Washington lobbyists.”
Creating a wider base of support meant not just looking the part but sound-
ing dispassionate, often relying on technical arguments rather than ethical
principles. The new lobby’s success, Magida suggested, rested on a less zeal-
ous approach to its work. “Environmentalists have been able to phrase their
arguments on non-environmental grounds” Magida wrote, “and to pick up
a greater variety of allies because of their growing confidence, decreasing
doctrinairism and increasing tolerance.”18
“Tolerance” meant accepting the give-and-take of politics. “As one
Congress ends and another begins, it is well to ask whether we and other
groups like us are solely the victims of compromise,” Michael McCloskey
wrote in 1977.19 “Might we not more properly be viewed as beneficiaries as
well, and really, as time goes by, more beneficiaries than victims?” Brock
Evans explained the benefits of compromise in his regular column for the
Sierra Club Bulletin: “We win some and lose some—that’s the nature of
the business,” he reassured readers in 1975. “Being realists, we cannot hope
to succeed at every point.”20
The environmental movement’s tone of detachment, its acceptance of
compromise, and its calculated political gamesmanship did not signal a
lack of ideology. It signaled exactly the opposite. The shift to Washington,
D.C. meant an embrace of institutions and processes as well as a particular
set of values. Environmental groups mastered the methods of liberal
democratic politics and accepted the premises behind those methods.
Despite the early-1970s rhetoric of “environmental revolution” and a “new
ecological ethic” heard among grassroots activists and established groups
alike, for the most part the major organizations appealed to trusted and
familiar political principles. Sierra Club director William Futrell called
NEPA an “environmental magna carta” and described environmentalism as
part of the “grand struggle for justice, which is the haunting theme of our
history.”21 Environmentalists frequently called for an “environmental bill
of rights” to delineate government’s various ecological responsibilities, and
Michael McCloskey justified political compromise as “the means by which
legitimate interests in a democracy come to understand that they are being
given fair consideration.”22
Mainstream environmental groups took the public favor generated by

Earth Day and turned it into political influence in the nation’s capital. The
blossoming of small-scale activity in 1970 was encouraging, McCloskey
thought, but finally ineffective: “The powerful who were polluting,” he
later wrote of Earth Day’s aftermath, “needed to be confronted with the
power of government, not just with hit-or-miss voluntary action.”23 With
Nixon-era laws firmly in place, the environmental movement gravitated
toward Washington, D.C. and the authority of the regulatory state.
ZERO POPULATION GROWTH
Even in Washington, D.C., amid the environmental movement’s emergence

as a savvy public interest lobby, a more dissident sort of environmentalism
surfaced. Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was not much more than a year
old when it opened its Washington, D.C. office just before Earth Day in 1970.
In late 1968, an entomologist named Charles Remington and an attorney
named Richard Bowers incorporated the group in Connecticut in order to
fight overpopulation by advocating “zero population growth.”24 The group’s
goal was an end to population growth; the means, troublingly, were not yet
specified. Within three years, ZPG had thirty-two thousand members.
Anxiety about population politics stretched back to at least the mid-
eighteenth century, decades before Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the
Principle of Population, when Europeans and American colonists weighed
the benefits and harms of a growing population for a polity’s resources
and governance. The idea of global overpopulation, however, and the con-
cern that there might be too many human beings in existence, was largely
a twentieth-century phenomenon. The fear of planetary overpopulation
stitched together a complicated tangle of issues including agriculture and
the distribution of resources, migration and national borders, reproduction
and human rights, economic theory and policy, and ecology and conserva-
tion.25 That fear could also be reduced to a narrow relationship between a
particular species and its resource base. In the United States, Aldo Leop-
old spelled out the ecological bases of overpopulation concern in his work
on animal populations and carrying capacity in the 1930s (work that envi-
ronmentalists would explicitly compare to global human population in
the 1960s). In 1948 conservationists William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn,

in Road to Survival and Our Plundered Planet, respectively, considered
a global carrying capacity for the human population and how overstep-
ping it could trigger resource shortages and environmental degradation.26
An American optimism born of material abundance and technological
advancements kept population worries muted but never silent in the 1950s
and early 1960s. In the late 1960s, the emerging environmental movement
stoked fears of excessive human numbers again.
The environmental movement’s emerging view that people were the
problem led almost inevitably to concern with overpopulation. Only a few
mainstream environmentalists, such as Brower, articulated this holism in
no uncertain terms. But conservation groups’ increasing discomfort with
the crowds at national parks, the roads through forests, and the loss of
countryside to suburbs made it a short step to the view that there were sim-
ply too many people in the world. The sharp criticisms of people’s impact
on the planet at the Club’s 1960s wilderness conferences made ZPG’s mes-
sage all the more urgent.
Within months of incorporating, ZPG relocated its headquarters to Los
Altos in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1960s the Bay Area was one
of the centers of population activism. The move allowed Stanford biolo-
gist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, to serve as the group’s
first president. Ehrlich was the most famous overpopulation alarm-raiser
in the country—the first edition of The Population Bomb was reprinted
twenty-two times between 1968 and1971—but he was just one of many in
the Bay Area. In 1969 Stephanie Mills proclaimed her refusal to have chil-
dren as she delivered the valedictory speech at Oakland’s Mills College. As
much an activist for women’s rights as for environmentalism, Mills con-
nected the two causes whenever she wrote or spoke. Ehrlich in particular
hovered behind Mills’s valediction; she had read The Population Bomb a few
months earlier and decided that a rosy graduation speech amid the popu-
lation crisis would be little more than “a hoax.” Mills was instantly a divi-
sive figure, celebrated for her environmental credentials and her refusal to
accept a predetermined place in society, and criticized for questioning the
choices of others and for dismissing centuries of tradition. After her gradua-
tion address she spoke widely, joined several boards of directors, headed the
campus program for Alameda County Planned Parenthood, and edited a

new magazine called Earth Times for Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner.
Mills continued to believe in rousing the public to attention, even if “some
people won’t get bothered about the smog in Los Angeles until it blocks the
view of their TV screen.”27
In October of that same year, in a parking lot in Hayward several miles
south of Oakland, Whole Earth Catalog publisher and founder Stewart
Brand invited anyone interested to surround themselves with a plastic wall
and subsist on only water for a week.28 Brand hoped his “Liferaft Earth”
would illustrate the dangers of overpopulation and limited resources. More
than one hundred people—including Stephanie Mills—participated. Just
north of Oakland, Berkeley folksinger Malvina Reynolds wrote songs
about sprawl and the harm wrought by too many people. Long before
Mills, Brand, and even Ehrlich concerned themselves with overpopulation,
Reynolds had satirized the endless conformity of “ticky tacky” suburban
houses south of San Francisco in “Little Boxes,” a song made famous by
her friend Pete Seeger. In “Song of the San Francisco Bay,” Reynolds wrote
about highways that paved over countryside so that cars could travel miles
and miles “To find a place where they can see a plant, a bush and a blade of
grass, and a lady bug and a bee.”29
ZPG pushed further what was already a key issue for mainstream envi-
ronmental organizations. The Sierra Club’s interest in overpopulation pre-
dated ZPG by many years. Population discussion emerged at the Club’s
wilderness conferences by the early 1960s, encouraged by Club director
Daniel Luten, and continued in its board of directors meetings soon after.
In 1968 the Club’s directors assembled an advisory committee on popula-
tion policy, and in 1969—the year ZPG was founded—the Club released
a series of statements calling for the liberalization of abortion law and an
end to pronatalist policies. David Brower persistently called attention
to the issue of overpopulation and continued to do so after he left the
Club. ZPG’s first lobbyists worked out of the Washington, D.C. offices
of Brower’s Friends of the Earth. In 1970 Club president Phil Berry listed
population first among “central subjects of concern for conservationists in
the ’70s,” ahead of both wilderness and pollution.30 Berry suggested that
the Club work with Planned Parenthood and the still little-known ZPG,
a suggestion the Club’s National Population Committee passed on to Sierra

Club chapters. Even though Club staffers like Louise Nichols questioned
the wisdom of taking strong stances on population politics and especially
immigration policy as early as 1973, overpopulation remained among the
Club’s main priorities for the rest of the decade thanks largely to the efforts
of John Tanton and Judy Kunofsky, two population activists who worked
with both the Club and ZPG. When the U.S. House of Representatives
considered a bill to establish an “Office of Population Policy” in 1982,
Kunofsky testified in favor of the bill on behalf of the Club.31
The Wilderness Society came to population politics largely at the behest
of its own supporters, though it did so more slowly and cautiously than
did the Sierra Club. “All attempts to preserve wilderness areas will come to
naught if mankind does not soon limit his numbers,” one member wrote
to Society director Stewart Brandborg and several Wilderness Society
councilmembers in 1969. Councilmember James Marshall responded sym-
pathetically, acknowledging the importance of overpopulation but noting
that the Society “has the responsibility, believing as it does, to concentrate
on conservation problems.”32 Later that year Congressman Morris Udall
wrote to Brandborg, stating, “It is my conviction that, increasingly, the
conservation movement is going to have to get involved in the population
problem.”33 By 1971 the Society felt impelled to take a stand. “As the one
species ever to undergo long-term, large-scale population growth,” the Soci-
ety’s “Statement Concerning the Need for a National Population Policy”
explained, “we must take seriously our responsibility to make our demands
upon the earth finite by limiting the growth of our numbers.”34
Unlike more established environmental organizations, ZPG did not
consider overpopulation an issue connected to its core interests; overpopu-
lation was its core interest. ZPG emerged near the end of a period that his-
torian Thomas Robertson has called “the Malthusian moment,” from the
end of World War II to the mid-1970s, when phrases like “spaceship earth”
gained wide currency and overpopulation grabbed the attention not just
of environmentalists but of policymakers.35 ZPG leveraged this attention
in its Washington, D.C. office and in its relationships with better-known
groups, but whereas many environmental organizations treated overpopu-
lation as a gradual problem to be dealt with over time, ZPG tapped into
a vein of acute distress that ran through the environmental movement.

Beneath the earnest concern of mainstream environmentalism lay a deeper
dread about immediate threats and irreversible trends.
Stressing the worst-case scenario did not always endear ZPG to poten-
tial supporters. While the Sierra Club bragged of “delivering the mail” and
environmental lobbyists pointed to Earth Day as evidence of their broad
mandate, ZPG took pride in its relative unpopularity. “All new ideas seem
extremist to those who uncritically support the established way of doing
things,” one of the group’s early pamphlets read. “Thus it is right and proper
that ZPG should seem like an extreme group to the general public.”36
ZPG did strike many as extreme, even with environmentalism ascendant.
“The degree of antagonism and hostility I encounter at the very mention
of ZPG seems to ensure that the members of our chapter will go on hav-
ing true communication only with the other members of our chapter,” one
ZPG member from Rhode Island complained less than a year after Earth
Day.37 ZPG did itself no favors by taking on cherished ideas, the most cher-
ished among them “pronatalism”—policies and beliefs that encouraged
reproduction and presumed that “parenthood is the natural, expected and
proper status to achieve,” in the words of board member Judy Senderowitz.
The inevitability of parenthood was “in most cases so ingrained as to be
unnoticed and thus unquestioned.”38 ZPG wanted to debate a subject that
most Americans did not even consider debatable.
To heighten the public’s concern about overpopulation, ZPG focused
on education as much as on legislation. In this regard it was not unlike
Cliff Humphrey’s Ecology Action in Berkeley. Humphrey believed that
“almost all governmental programs are irrelevant to the crisis we face, as
our officials can only propose solutions to problems that they publicly
acknowledge.”39 ZPG, which pushed for a national population policy,
had more regard for federal action than did Humphrey, but like Ecology
Action it found the national political conversation profoundly attenuated,
and its view of social and environmental problems in the United States
sprang directly from a sense of crisis. In the late 1960s and the 1970s this
acute sense of crisis defined a vital strain of environmentalism, distin-
guishing it from the mainstream movement and marking one of the key
elements of environmental radicalism.
CRISIS ENVIRONMENTALISM
Some environmentalists viewed democratic politics as inadequate to the

task of preventing social and ecological collapse. At the same time as most
mainstream organizations worked to better lobby Congress and shepherd
legislation, other environmentalists put little faith in conventional reform.
These environmentalists shared the belief that human impact on the nat-
ural world was approaching a breaking point beyond which lay certain
catastrophe. They disavowed gradual reform and urged immediate action,
insisting that anything less would bring about disaster. “Environmental cri-
sis” was a common and almost casual phrase in newspapers and magazines
after Earth Day, but these dissenting environmentalists took the idea liter-
ally, insisting that the nation and the world had reached a crucial moment
in which humanity would save itself and the planet or assure the destruc-
tion of both. Crisis was the precondition for casting doubt on traditional
methods of reform and for advocating extreme measures. Just as an accep-
tance of compromise and faith in either the electorate or its representatives
i nformed mainstream environmentalism, a belief in crisis galvanized the
radically minded environmentalists of the 1970s and later the ecocentric
radicals of the 1980s.40
A small but influential group of thinkers assembled the intellectual scaf-
folding of crisis environmentalism.41 Best known was Paul Ehrlich, who
warned about the peril of overpopulation in articles and public lectures
until David Brower convinced him to put his warnings into a book. The
Population Bomb was one of the first in a series of dire predictions at the
turn of the decade about human society and natural limits that together
formed a sort of doomsday canon for environmentalists. These forebod-
ing works shared the basic premise that any society based on continued
growth, whether of people or products, was bound to run up against the
simple fact of finite natural resources. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his wife
Anne Ehrlich were among the first environmentalists to successfully draw
attention to the idea of limits at a time when Americans still lived comfort-
ably within the nation’s longest economic boom—a boom that just a few
years earlier had prompted Lyndon Johnson to declare “unconditional war
on poverty” and to champion a “Great Society” that set its goals higher
than mere affluence. In The Population Bomb the Ehrlichs warned that the
world’s exponentially increasing population could lead to widespread fam-
ine and political instability in just a few years. They argued that the num-
ber of people in the world, combined with environmental degradation and
ever-higher consumption, was already outstripping available resources and
would soon trigger wars and social turmoil. The Ehrlichs took the central
points of Malthus’s 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population and placed
them squarely in the American present. But instead of claiming that society
approached the edge of a demographic cliff, the Ehrlichs claimed it had
already overshot and was now hanging in midair, ready to plummet.42
Few took crisis environmentalists entirely seriously, but few ignored
them outright. As historian Derek Hoff has shown, federal concern with
population growth declined steadily during the Nixon administration. But
that concern received “a very temporary shot in the arm” from the publi-
cation of The Limits to Growth, a report authored by a group of scientists
known as “the Club of Rome” and funded by an Italian businessman named
Aurelio Peccei. Headed by another husband-and-wife team, Donella and
Dennis Meadows, the group based its findings on computer models that
estimated population growth, food supply, availability of natural resources,
pollution, and industrial production to predict worldwide conditions
many decades into the future. From that seemingly objective point of view,
the group discerned a dark horizon: unless the rates of industrial growth,
population increase, and natural resource depletion slowed dramatically,
“the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the
next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden
and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”43
A more concise statement of this grim view appeared in Blueprint for Sur-
vival, a book based on a special issue of the British magazine Ecologist: “The
principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is
that it is not sustainable,” the editors stated in the book’s opening pages.44
The belief that human wealth and comfort could be achieved and expanded
by greater and greater industrial production was an illusion, and people
could ignore this difficult truth “only at the cost of disrupting ecosystems
and exhausting resources, which must lead to the failure of food supplies
and the collapse of society.”
The literature of crisis environmentalism offered more than just simple

apocalypticism. These ominous books provided a critique, implicit or
explicit, of the modern assumption of endless consumption. That critique
came into greatest focus among a group of heterodox economists who were
both convinced that crisis was at hand and interested in different ways of
thinking about the economy. Most proposed some version of a steady-state
system as a means of preventing destructive growth. A steady-state econ-
omy was one in which the total population and the total amount of natural
resources remained constant, at a particular level and with a minimum of
“throughput” (that is, the fewest births and deaths and the lowest levels
of production and consumption). The ecological economist Herman Daly
argued that a steady-state system was inevitable, given finite resources.45 The
only question was whether nations would ignore this fact until the point
of human extinction (which, given its balance of no people maintained by
no throughput, would simply be another sort of steady state) or else try to
shape their economies around the inescapable limits set by the planet itself.
The British economist E. F. Schumacher held views similar to Daly’s but
used a different language to express them: Schumacher called his approach
“Buddhist economics”—a view of the economy that focused less on mate-
rial wealth and more on human happiness. Its hallmarks were simplicity,
moderation, and an orientation toward the local. Economic sense, for
Schumacher, was a matter of achieving “the maximum of well being with
the minimum of consumption.” The unsustainable use of resources consti-
tuted a form of violence, and following Buddhism’s pacific teachings there
was “an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all
he does.”46
With discrete vocabularies, Daly and Schumacher articulated the same
view of modern economic thought and modern patterns of consumption.
Daly called the problem “growthmania,” the “mind-set that always puts
growth in first place—the attitude that there is no such thing as enough,
that cannot conceive of too much of a good thing.”47 Schumacher echoed
this thought: “An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-
minded pursuit of wealth—in short, materialism—does not fit into this
world,” he wrote, “because it contains within itself no limiting principle,
while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”48 A society
oriented toward economic growth, both Daly and Schumacher believed,

was a society hammering away at its own foundation.
The problem resided not just in the habits and practices of the mod-
ern world but in the very goals that world set for itself. Industrialization in
the late twentieth century, Schumacher explained, “produced an entirely
new situation—a situation resulting not from our failures but from what
we thought were our greatest successes.”49 Daly articulated this position in
even more specific terms: modern accounting considered “defensive expen-
ditures” incurred to counteract the effects of production (building deeper
wells and bigger pumps to pursue a dropping water table, building new
refineries to process lower-grade ores from depleted mines, and making fer-
tilizers to encourage depleted soil) as part of the gross national product,
and so a part of beneficial growth. “This” Daly said, “creates the illusion
of becoming better off, when in actuality we are becoming worse off.”50
Economic activity demanded by diminished resources counted as positive
expansion, and so liabilities were measured as assets.
Environmentalists concerned with limits to growth challenged some
of the most fundamental assumptions of the mid-twentieth-century
United States. More goods, more jobs, and greater production might sig-
nal an imperiled economy rather than a healthy one, and more products
for more people might be a disastrous rather than a noble goal. “We now
have a vested interest in our own destruction,” Cliff Humphrey said. “What
generates capital or credit today? A field lying fallow, seeded in legumes,
building up its nitrogen, or a housing tract on the same parcel?”51 What
had been thought to be the promise of the modern age was in fact its great-
est threat; material wealth did not mean boundless progress but instead
meant impending crisis. Simple reform in that case held little promise. The
vaunted environmental lobby fought a forest fire with a garden hose.
The line between incremental reform and sweeping change grew all the
more apparent in the 1970s. All environmentalists considered the harms
of economic and population growth but not all sided against them. Few if
any major environmental organizations would go as far as Cliff Humphrey,
who called the stock market “merely a device for signalling [sic] an immi-
nent or successful act of destruction or contamination of some part of our
surroundings.”52 Humphrey readily disavowed established institutions and
abided extreme solutions because he remained convinced that anything less

would flirt with calamity. The more an environmentalist like Humphrey
accepted the existence of environmental crisis, the more he rejected the
world as it was.
CRISIS AND SURVIVAL
At the edge of crisis simple endurance was the first order of business. If the
planetary environment was in a state of crisis, environmentalists concerned
themselves with survival as much as with quality of life. “The mounting evi-
dence of environmental degradation in the 1960s,” historian Adam Rome
writes, “provoked . . . anxieties about ‘survival,’ a word that appeared again
and again in environmentalist discourse.”53 Even though radical environ-
mentalists of the 1980s read and took to heart the major works of crisis
environmentalism, those works’ focus on human survival suggested how
non-ecocentric crisis environmentalism was by comparison.
For a few years, Cliff Humphrey did not just shout from offstage when
he warned of crisis and survival. At the beginning of the 1970s his existen-
tial concerns surfaced even at the Sierra Club, where he sat on the “survival
committee.” Officially known as the “environmental research committee”
but never referred to that way, the survival committee described itself to
the Club’s board as a “think tank” charged with providing advice on issues
“outside the ‘traditional’ areas of concern of the Club.” Responding to the
amorphous state of environmentalism early in the decade and the growing
array of ideas associated with it, the survival committee went far outside
the areas of concern the Club had favored for nearly a century. Although it
couldn’t bring itself to disavow economic growth in 1971, it willingly ques-
tioned many other premises of modern American society. Richard Cellarius,
one of the Club’s directors and the committee chair, assigned committee
members futurist tracts like Jean-Francois Revel’s Without Marx or Jesus:
The New American Revolution Has Begun, and Warren Wagar’s Building
the City of Man. Cellarius told the committee he believed “reformation/
revolution is our only hope. I accept Revel’s thesis that it is beginning. . . .
The environmental years of 1969-70-(71?) made up one early ‘campaign’
of the revolution.” The end goal of the Sierra Club, he suggested, should
be a global, steady-state civilization without nations and centered on the

sustainable use of all resources.54
The Sierra Club never adopted Cellarius’s idea as a stated goal, and the
handful of directors who retreated to a cabin on the California coast or
to a lodge in the Sierra Nevada to discuss the possibility of a drastically
changed world finally had little impact on the Club’s program. But in the
early 1970s the Club took the committee’s ideas seriously. Phil Berry, presi-
dent of the Club when it formed the survival committee, attended several
of the committee’s meetings and remembered it as an attempt to consider
the many dire predictions for the future that circulated in those years. “We
were talking about the elements of a program essential to global survival,”
he explained. The environmental movement was broadening itself to con-
sider issues far afield from national parks and forests, Berry said, and “We
were talking about how to put this into a Sierra Club agenda for action.
That’s really what the survival committee was.”55
The rhetoric of survival revealed two key characteristics of early 1970s
crisis environmentalism. The first was that despite its frequent references to
the decimation of natural resources and the destruction of natural places,
crisis environmentalism was overwhelmingly oriented toward people. The
ecocentrism of later radicals remained either rare or inchoate in the early
1970s. Whereas radical environmentalists of the 1980s would prioritize
nonhuman nature, crisis environmentalists worried most of all about the
fate of humanity. John Fischer, a contributing editor and columnist at
Harper’s, suggested as much when he proposed an experimental univer-
sity—“Survival U.”—structured entirely around “the study of the relation-
ship between man and his environment, both natural and technological.”
The crucial question for students at Fischer’s imagined campus would be
how long people could last on a degraded planet. The loss of forests and
animals was frightening, but the potential loss of people was the greater
tragedy. “For the first time in history,” Fischer declared, “the future of the
human race is now in serious question.”56
What was a thought experiment for Fischer was a serious undertaking
for Paul Ehrlich. In 1971, Ehrlich and political science professor Robert
North first proposed a program in “social ecology” at Stanford Univer-
sity to study the intersection of biological systems, social institutions, and
cultural values. “It is apparent that mankind is moving toward a crisis of

unprecedented magnitude,” the program’s official proposal began.57 The
crisis of human existence that Ehrlich and North feared arose from a com-
bination of industrialization, overpopulation, environmental degradation,
and above all a culture of endless expansion. Ehrlich and North wanted
to approach social and biological systems as interconnected and ultimately
unsustainable, in courses like “Environment, Ecology, and Survival” and
“Social Institutions and the Survival Problem.” People faced the greatest
risks on a dirty and crowded planet, and so the social ecology curriculum
focused on “stimulating social action for reducing mankind’s peril.”
The second characteristic of crisis environmentalism was an orientation
toward the future and a certainty about its dire condition. Crisis environ-
mentalism rested on the conviction that the house of cards would inevita-
bly topple. Crisis environmentalists demanded a dramatic and purposeful
response, not to a clear and present danger but to a disaster that was, osten-
sibly, moments away. They called attention both to what was easily demon-
strated, such as oil spills, pollution, or plans for a dam or power plant, and
to more serious but less apparent events lurking in the near future. And so,
because the public reflexively dismissed overly pessimistic outlooks, they
battled optimism. They dealt with the public’s rosy disposition in several
ways: by making the pragmatic argument that preparing for the worst
entailed the least risk, by claiming that the die had been cast and that it was
no longer a matter of if but of when, or by making predictions as rigorously
as possible. Ehrlich tried all three. He claimed that planning for disaster
would yield benefits even if disaster never arrived, he opened The Popula-
tion Bomb with the words “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and
most of all he tried to buttress his prophecies with data.58
Jay Forrester—a member of the Club of Rome, a mentor to the Mead-
owses, and a founder of the field called system dynamics—specialized
in anticipating what the near future would hold. Forrester claimed that
complex social systems, from corporate management to urban poverty
to the interaction of population, industrialization, and pollution, could
be modeled and predicted with the help of a computer. In an article first
published in Technology Review and later reprinted in the ZPG National
Reporter, Forrester argued that social policy was often ineffective and even
counterproductive because it relied on linear thought and failed to under-

stand the complicated relationships between different social and natural
systems.59 Ehrlich read the article with interest and proposed using, at Stan-
ford, something similar to Forrester’s DYNAMO (Dynamic Modeling)
computer program. Intrigued by the Club of Rome and its computer simu-
lations, Ehrlich arranged for the Meadowses to visit Stanford. The predic-
tive dimension of system dynamics made it compelling for Ehrlich and vital
to crisis environmentalists. Only some claim to scientific rigor would allow
policymakers to take crisis environmentalism seriously. Explaining to read-
ers why they had published Forrester’s article, the editors of ZPG National
Reporter wrote, “ZPG is a fortune-telling organ. . . . The roads to doom
seem many and broad. The path to a desirable, or even tolerable, life seems
intricate and narrow. Professor Forrester tells the future. And he tells it the
way we want to hear it told.”60 The first step to survival was knowing what
was to come. And the presumption of knowing quickly led to a second step:
political reaction.
CRISIS AND DEMOCRACY
So urgent was the crisis environmentalist sense of imminent catastrophe

that some willingly questioned not just demographic and economic growth
but also democratic governance. The political implications of crisis envi-
ronmentalism often simmered beneath the surface of calls for more drastic
measures, and on occasion they rose into plain sight. Crisis environmental-
ists found it difficult to reconcile the state of emergency they described with
democracy’s meandering procedures and its tendency to favor compromise
over decisive and dramatic action. Radical environmentalists of the 1980s
would become similarly frustrated with the gradualism of democracy, but
while those later radicals used direct action to either accelerate or circum-
vent conventional reform, crisis environmentalists pondered a wholesale
abandonment of democratic procedures.
Democracy’s great strength and weakness, political scientist David Run-
ciman argues, has always been indecisiveness. Lacking centralized author-
ity and a consistent vision, modern democracies have relied on trial and
error. Democratic governments, according to Runciman, think in the short
term and succeed in the long term. They take on problems as they arise,
and while this ad hoc approach can appear aimless in the moment it tends
to bear fruit over time. What democracies have lost through equivoca-
tion they have gained through flexibility. At various points of crisis in the
twentieth century, this was not a reassuring method of decision-making;
experimentation became a less palatable mode of governing as the point
of no return approached. And democratic nations, Runciman explains,
held tight to the belief in a bright future in order to remain confident of
their haphazard mode of politics, even when optimism seemed foolhardy.
“Could any democratic politician be expected to point out the limits of
growth,” he asks, “and to dampen expectations of continued expansion in
living standards?”61
Crisis environmentalists argued that the more urgent the issue at hand,
the less effective were democratic governments at taking necessary action.
Ecologist Garrett Hardin explicitly linked environmental problems to
broad political and social values in his 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the
Commons,” arguing that the use of any shared resource in a manner that
maximized individual gain would inevitably harm the general good. If indi-
vidual actors behaved in a rational manner, seeking to advance their own
interests, the net result would be to degrade any commons. Hardin’s exam-
ple was a grazing pasture, on which the advantage for any single herdsman
of adding an animal to his herd (the value of that animal on the market) was
significant, while the disadvantage (the effects of overgrazing borne by all
the herdsmen) was marginal. Logically, each herdsman would keep adding
to his herd to increase its value, and in doing so help destroy the pasture.
“Freedom in a commons,” Hardin wrote, “brings ruin to all.”62
Hardin suggested that the tragedy of the commons could be applied to
many resources, including the oceans, national parks, and unpolluted air.
But his chief interest was in the planet as a whole—the greatest commons
of all—and the growing human population that threatened to bring ruin
to it. Hardin’s basic argument was that overpopulation created a problem
with no technical solution. Technology and ingenuity, he insisted, would
not be sufficient in addressing growing human impact on the planet. The
sacrifice of some freedoms, including the freedom to breed, would be
necessary. Appealing to individual consciences, and thus relying on the
responsible behavior of some to outweigh the self-interested behavior of

others, would likely produce more resentment than results. Only “mutual
coercion, mutually agreed upon,” in Hardin’s much-repeated phrase, would
work. Individual freedom created the tragedy of the commons, and collec-
tive restraint would solve it.
Hardin never explained in his original essay exactly what he meant
by “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” although he implied that it
would involve a combination of public education and enforcement. On
its own, mutual coercion was not an argument against democracy—all
democracies, in fact, depended upon the proscription of some freedoms
through mutual agreement—but the political scientist William Ophuls,
who wholeheartedly agreed with Hardin, pushed the logic of Hardin’s
essay to its ultimate, antidemocratic conclusion. Ophuls pointed to “strik-
ing similarities” between “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Leviathan,
Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century justification for a strong, centralized
state. Like Hobbes, Hardin advocated giving up certain individual liberties
in order to gain social order, and argued that the loss of particular politi-
cal rights actually led to greater freedom by handing the state the power to
improve the general social good and, through it, individual opportunities.
The path to social stability, for Hobbes and, Ophuls claimed, for Hardin,
ran not through freedom and democracy but through something approach-
ing authoritarian control. The tragedy of the commons illustrated the need
for quick and selfless action, and the leisurely pace and self-interested nature
of democratic reform could only lead to disaster. “Real altruism and gen-
uine concern for posterity may not be entirely absent,” Ophuls admitted,
“but they are not present in sufficient quantities to avoid tragedy. Only a
Hobbesian sovereign can deal with this situation effectively, and we are left
then with the problem of determining the concrete shape of Leviathan.”63
Crisis environmentalists’ willingness to abandon personal freedoms did
not arise from philosophical considerations alone. A larger sense of decline
hung over the 1970s, fed by energy crises, runaway inflation, and politi-
cal scandals. The Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 to foster close
relations between North America, Western Europe, and Japan, called the
halting political response to the decade’s adverse conditions “The Crisis of
Democracy” in a 1975 report. The oil shock of 1973, in particular, raised
alarms about overpopulation and the conservation of natural resources

despite that event’s largely political origins. In 1974 the economist Robert
Heilbroner suggested basic social and political change might be the only
safeguard against overpopulation, environmental destruction, and nuclear
war. Caught between the individualistic and growth-oriented consumer
culture of the mid-century and the era of limits that the 1970s seemed
to inaugurate, fundamental and difficult changes might be realistic “only
under governments capable of rallying obedience far more effectively than
would be possible in a democratic setting. If the issue for mankind is sur-
vival, such governments may be unavoidable, even necessary.”64
A year later, Heilbroner felt even more convinced that the tension
between individual freedom and commonweal that characterized liberal
society could not be eased through democratic means. “The malaise, I have
come more and more to believe, lies in the industrial basis on which our
civilization rests,” he wrote. Democratic reform could not address such a
fundamental problem; so entrenched was the culture of individualism
and material gain that only force, backed by authority, could undo it. At
certain historical points, Heilbroner said, “It is not possible to reconcile
the hopes of the moment and the needs of the future, when a congruence
between one’s personal life and the collective direction of all mankind can-
not be established without doing violence either to one’s existence or to
one’s understanding.” Balanced against each other, personal lives could not
match the weight of the species and planet. Eventually human society as a
whole would have to make a grim choice that Ophuls described as either
“the coercion of nature” or “an iron regime.”65
ZPG AND THE THREAT OF COERCION
Crisis environmentalism in theory was often a far cry from crisis environ-
mentalism in practice. As an established environmental organization with
an office in Washington, D.C. and a relationship with federal legislators,
ZPG held a stake in public opinion. As a group trying to save civilization
from itself, however, ZPG confronted possibilities and considered meth-
ods that many others would not. The antidemocratic theories entertained
by crisis environmentalists got the sort of consideration in the offices of
ZPG that they would never get in the halls of the Environmental Defense
Fund or the National Audubon Society.
Throughout the 1970s, ZPG wrestled with the question of coercion. The
ease with which overpopulation could theoretically be ended by fiat made
obligatory measures seductive. Kingsley Davis, the demographer often
credited with coining the term “zero population growth,” liked to make
this point in the most clinical terms: “If ZPG were the supreme aim,” he
wrote, “any means would be justified. By common consent, however, rais-
ing the death rate is excluded; also, reducing immigration is played down.
This leaves fertility reduction as the main avenue.” The problem, Davis con-
tended, was simply a matter of what people were or were not willing to
give up to achieve demographic stability. “If having too many children were
considered as great a crime against humanity as murder, rape, and thievery,”
Davis pointed out, starting with a premise few people would support, “we
would have no qualms about ‘taking freedom away.’ ” In fact, he continued,
having children would be understood as a violation of others’ rights.66
This sort of turning of the moral tables was a common and often effec-
tive gambit for ZPG. The organization liked to refer to laws restricting
abortion as “compulsory pregnancy,” and to describe those laws as arising
from “a particular segment of the population . . . imposing its religious and
moral doctrine upon others who do not share their views.”67 But pointing
out the wrongness of one form of coercion did not establish the rightness of
another, as ZPG was well aware. Executive Director Shirley Radl wrote to
Ehrlich in early 1970 to assure him that the young organization was learning
how to present itself publicly. “We have good readings from the member-
ship, the general public, and our legislators, and an understanding of what
is acceptable to all such factions,” she explained. “We know, for example,
that to discuss hard-line compulsory birth control is totally taboo.”68 The
question persisted, though, among those most concerned with overpopula-
tion. ZPG supporters like Edgar Chasteen strongly advocated compulsory
birth control, and Radl had to explain the impracticality if not the undesir-
ability of such a position. “We have so many really serious problems with
which to cope,” she wrote to Chasteen, “I’m not sure any of us are ready to
take on the controversy which will result if we adopt a resolution endorsing
compulsory birth control.”69
Having the discussion and taking the position were different matters,
as ZPG came to understand. The group started off swimming against the
current. “We aren’t afraid to discuss the possibility that population pres-
sure may force compulsory family limitation” ZPG stated in 1969.70 That
fearlessness would quickly fade, however, in ways illustrated by one of the
odder episodes in ZPG’s history. In November 1971, director Michael Cam-
pus contacted ZPG about his new film based on the novel The Edict, to be
called Z.P.G. Like the novel, the film would tell the story of an overpopu-
lated future in which a “World Federation Council” makes reproduction a
capital offense. Campus claimed to be inspired by The Population Bomb and
wanted ZPG’s endorsement of a film he hoped would alert Americans to
the perils of too many people.71
Privately, ZPG’s leadership discussed the financial implications of the
film, which might produce significant royalties as well as a relationship with
billionaire Edgar Bronfman, who partially funded Z.P.G. After seeing an
early version of the movie, executive director Hal Seielstad recommended
endorsing it as long as Paramount Pictures agreed to a prologue and epilogue
scripted by ZPG.72 Publicly though, ZPG began to put strategic distance
between itself and the film, uncomfortably aware of how even fictional
suggestions of coercion might tar the group. A week after Seielstad recom-
mended endorsement to ZPG’s executive committee, he sent a “crisis alert”
to chapters: “Since ZPG advocates personal responsibility for voluntarily
restricting child birth rather than government decrees enforced by pain
of death,” he said, “this association is very damaging to our image with the
movie viewing public.”73
Paramount rejected the idea of a prologue and epilogue despite an
appeal by Campus himself. ZPG had not trademarked its name and so had
no guarantee of financial gain either. Weeks before the film’s release, ZPG
filed suit to block the use of its name and began organizing leafleting by its
members to make sure that audiences knew the difference between Z.P.G.
and ZPG. No injunction was granted, and Z.P.G. hit theaters in March.
Increasingly concerned about its brand, ZPG polled moviegoers in the Bay
Area, asking them whether they were aware of an organization called Zero
Population Growth, whether they thought such an organization called
for government restrictions on childbirth, and whether they thought the
organization endorsed the film. A plurality—before and after viewing—

believed that population activists advocated government regulation of
reproduction. On the other hand a majority had never heard of ZPG, so it
was unclear whether there was much of a brand to damage. By May, ZPG
felt comfortable declaring victory as it became clear the film was a flop.74
ZPG never in fact endorsed any form of coercion, although it con-
fronted the possibility more seriously than did any other environmental
group. At the organization’s founding, several board members, including
Garrett Hardin, pushed the idea and were soon outvoted. Richard Bowers,
a negligible presence for most of ZPG’s history despite helping to found the
group, later regretted that initial shift toward voluntarism. By the 1990s,
Bowers believed Hardin had been proven right and that “human coercion
is needed and the sooner the better for humankind and more so for wild-
life.”75 For the most part, though, controversies about coercion remained
more talk than action. ZPG staffers never actively sought legal strictures
to limit human numbers. They just believed in the urgency of the environ-
mental crisis enough to hazard the conversation. Walking up to the line
without ever overstepping it, ZPG’s discussions of coercion suggested
how environmentalists could question, however hesitantly, the unalloyed
good of individual freedom, material comfort, the nuclear family, and mid-
century liberalism.
ZPG AND LIBERALISM
After the movie’s brief run, ZPG’s staff kept busy “carefully logging the hate
mail we receive in response to the film.” But the public’s discomfort with
ZPG could arise as much from the group’s holism as from its depiction on
screen. Arguing that people were inherently problematic was never a popu-
lar position. When ZPG made the point in the most sweeping terms, it
tended to produce equal parts support and strenuous condemnation. Many
of those who condemned ZPG assumed, not without some justification,
that ZPG was saying what the broader environmental movement believed.
Environmental holism, though, was rarely as sweeping as the movement’s
rhetoric sometimes suggested. Some environmentalists lumped people, or
certain classes of people, into a homogenous mass. Most environmental-

ists, including ZPG, wrestled with the implications of gender, race, and
nationality even as they talked about a collective humanity. Holism offered
a stark framework for pressing concerns. It also fed a more pointed critique
of modern, growth-oriented liberalism.76
New Left activists pointed to overpopulationists as an example of
environmental antihumanism. “ZPG says that there are too many people,
especially non-white people, in the world,” New Left Notes reported in 1970,
“that these people are terrifying and violent, and that their population
growth must be stopped—by ‘coercion’ if necessary.” New Left Notes made
two specific critiques of population politics: first, it was coercive; second, it
blamed all people for environmental destruction instead of recognizing the
much greater guilt of the wealthy and the privileged. Population activists
abetted the most powerful in society by failing to expose the powerful’s
outsized responsibility. “This is not the first time that racist hysteria and
fascist practices . . . have been advocated by capitalist agents,” the newspaper
observed.77
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) accused ZPG of reckless sim-
plification, reasoning that by treating all people as a single flat category, pop-
ulation activists ignored not only human difference but also human value.
Ehrlich heard this complaint from both sides of the political spectrum. His
two chief antagonists were the Left-leaning biologist and environmentalist
Barry Commoner and the Right-leaning economist Julian Simon. Com-
moner said that Ehrlich never took account of social inequality, capitalism’s
drive for profits, or how some people were polluters and other people were
victims; Simon argued that Ehrlich failed to appreciate human ingenuity,
capitalism’s knack for innovation, and how more people could mean more
solutions to the problems of scarcity and pollution. Both critics accused
Ehrlich of failing to treat people as complicated and autonomous individu-
als rather than as simply part of the human horde.78
This was a key grievance against not only population activists but also
against environmentalists more generally. Too often, critics said, environ-
mentalists treated all people as the same in the good and the harm that they
did, ignoring the ways people could help as much as hinder and suffer as
much as perpetrate. SDS, Commoner, and Simon, despite their differences,

could all make this critique of population politics because they shared a
commitment to liberal individualism. The environmental movement, less
committed to individualism, could subordinate individual autonomy to
the interests and faults of a collective “people.” ZPG and its sympathizers
took this further, questioning the obligation to individual freedom that
had informed liberal political thought for centuries, and in particular ques-
tioning a twentieth-century liberalism that embraced consumption and
economic growth and emphasized social distinctions. By criticizing mate-
rial prosperity and minimizing social difference, ZPG cut against the grain
of a particularly modern liberal ethos. These points of tension were basic
and informed much of the debate between ZPG and its antagonists. But
ZPG was also a bridge between crisis environmentalism’s harsh rhetoric
and mainstream environmentalism’s more pragmatic reformism. As a crisis-
oriented group that operated in a broad political context, ZPG challenged
modern liberal commitments while still trying to pay heed to pluralism and
to how categories like gender and race structured society.
Any objections to material consumption challenged the essence of mid-
twentieth-century American liberalism. “Growthmania” was not simply a
matter of acquisitiveness. The shift in emphasis among policymakers from
economic stability to economic growth in the mid-twentieth century was
good for business, for organized labor, and for the middle class, as well
as for social reform. Government-sponsored economic growth provided
steady profits for the corporate sector, a rising standard of living for work-
ers and suburbanites, and increased military funding for the Cold War, and
it allowed politicians to talk less of redistributing wealth and resources and
more of expanding them. In this calculus, social reform was not a matter
of taking away from some to give to others but instead a means of letting
everyone have more. “The interpenetration of growth economics and lib-
eral politics,” Robert Collins writes, “produced a defining feature of public
life in the 1960s—the ascendancy of what might be labeled ‘growth liberal-
ism.’ ” Economic growth was not an end in itself, Collins makes clear, but
rather the means to many ends: the formula that solved for all problems
social, political, and material.79 Consumption was not only an economic
activity but also a civic responsibility and a political process. According
to Lizabeth Cohen, never-ending growth constituted the engine of “an

elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic politi-
cal freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil
religion from the late 1940s into the 1970s.”80
For much of the American public in the postwar decades, social reform,
an expanded state, and material affluence were not just coincidental but
connected. Consumption aligned closely with liberal political ideals. Eco-
nomic growth stood at the center of a broad social and political vision that
celebrated population growth in economic as well as cultural terms. More
people producing and consuming would lead to ever-greater benefits for
all. Nonetheless, as historian Derek Hoff has shown, many policymakers
found reasons to reconcile a lower birth rate with assumptions of contin-
ued increases in production and consumption. Departing from some of
John Maynard Keynes’s demographic views, these legislators and pundits
subscribed to what Hoff calls “stable population Keynesianism” (SPK),
essentially the view that state-induced consumption could offset lower
numbers of consumers. In fact, fewer consumers might even raise wages
and encourage gains in per capita consumption. According to SPK adher-
ents, the incomes and purchasing power of buyers mattered far more to the
overall economy than the mere number of buyers. “By contending that the
size of the population means little to the economy compared to spending
and saving habits,” Hoff writes of SPK, “it contributed to the rise of con-
sumerist liberalism in the United States.”81
Population politics contributed, and eventually population politics
took away. By the 1960s and 1970s, Hoff explains, environmentalists had
to decide whether to argue that limiting the population would foster eco-
nomic growth and benefit everyone materially or that economic growth
itself was inherently harmful to the planet and so must be limited too.
They had to decide, in other words, whether or not to challenge what had
become part of the scaffolding of twentieth-century American liberalism:
economic expansion and material affluence. Different environmentalists
made different arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of an expand-
ing economy and its relationship to environmental degradation. Most,
however, at least agreed that economic growth, population growth, envi-
ronmental harm, and political beliefs were all intricately related.
The Sierra Club waffled on these questions, at times critical of con-

sumption for consumption’s sake but more often uneasy with dismissing
the engine of national prosperity. Even the survival committee, which dis-
cussed dystopian and utopian possibilities as a matter of course, found itself
conflicted. Members of the committee discussed the problem of “credit,
which has led people to have a vested interest in their own destruction,” and
lamented “the lack of a rational measure of quality other than profit,” but
generally agreed that “the Sierra Club should not oppose growth as such.”82
To oppose an ever-expanding economy, the Club knew, was to oppose
many Americans’ dreams for the future.
Crisis environmentalists had fewer qualms. ZPG argued that economics
and ideology combined in a system it called “structural pronatalism.” This
system was part and parcel with mid-century suburbanization and the con-
sumer lifestyles that went along with it. The public and private institutions
that facilitated middle-class consumption, ZPG believed, also encouraged
people to have children in both obvious and subtle ways. The most obvious
was the tax code, which offered deductions for children and which treated
married couples as a unit rather than as individuals, discouraging two-
income households. Somewhat less obvious was the suburb itself, which
presented a host of problems. A report by ZPG’s population policy commit-
tee noted how suburban homes wasted energy; suburban neighborhoods
“increased the racial, social, and age segregation of American society”; and
suburban living patterns were “associated with a high-fertility life-style”
as well as “the increasing isolation of women from the job market.” Large
automobiles further contributed to suburban expansion, to large families,
and to air pollution. One member of the committee advocated the elimi-
nation of federally insured loans for houses larger than 1,500 square feet.
Another recommended a ban on all but subcompact vehicles.83
For crisis-minded environmentalists the birthrate alone was far from the
whole story. The problem was people, but even more so people’s consump-
tion. This sort of systemic view did not always endear environmental groups
to their supporters. George Mumford of Grayling, Michigan, wrote to Paul
Ehrlich in 1970 to complain about The Environmental Handbook, which
was published by the organizers of Earth Day and edited by Garrett DeBell,
one of ZPG’s lobbyists. The book included “some shockingly-dangerous
notions,” Mumford said. “For example, on pages 6 and 7, a kook named

Keith Lampe advocates phasing out nations and capitalism.”84 This was
true. Lampe had long advocated a dismantling of capitalism and industrial-
ism. In his own newsletter he told his readers, “enormously overcrowded
planetary conditions make necessary a rapid evolution from competition
to cooperation, that in the U.S. specifically . . . means shucking capitalism
and evolving a community for which there is yet no label, a community
within which the notions of ownership and money no longer have mean-
ing or appeal.”85 Ecology Action pushed beyond simple math too. “Simply
stated,” one of its editorials read, “a few people with what most of the world
considers a high standard of living have an infinitely greater negative impact
than few or even many people with a low standard of living.”86 ZPG sought
to put this theory into action, proposing in 1973 a Center for Growth Alter-
natives that would advocate “selective limitation of growth in population,
consumption and development,” and that would seek to “reverse the gen-
eral thought that affluence carries with it the right to disproportionate use
and degradation of the public environment.”87
By opposing an economy based on ever-greater consumption, environ-
mentalists picked a fight with a key element of twentieth-century American
liberalism. By opposing more products and more purchases, they set them-
selves against what many people viewed as an essential quality of Ameri-
can citizenship. While the nation yelled, “More,” environmentalists cried,
“Less.” Sometimes population activists glossed over the ways that different
social and economic contexts shaped different levels of consumption and
environmental impact. At other times they paid close attention to such
distinctions. At their most discerning, population activists considered the
ways that environmentalism and twentieth-century liberalism overlapped
but never aligned.
Unlike many environmental groups, ZPG frequently discussed gender
equality. This was a matter of both conviction and convenience. It was a
point of conviction for ZPG that normative gender roles both subordi-
nated women and encouraged childbirth. ZPG called this “psychological
pronatalism,” a cause and a consequence of structural pronatalism. While
structural pronatalism was easy enough to identify once described, psycho-
logical pronatalism was so ubiquitous as to be invisible. “The enormous
power exerted by this set of social attitudes results from its pervasiveness
in all aspects of our lives,” one member of the population policy committee
reported.88 This ever-present point of view was buttressed by a lack of pro-
fessional options for women and the assumption that most women should
raise children at home; restrictions on advertising contraception alongside
television’s regular celebrations of sex and parenthood; and hostility to sex
education in schools. In the mid-1970s ZPG argued that addressing the
unquestioned association of women with domesticity started with passage
of the Equal Rights Amendment, aggressive affirmative action programs,
and state-level commissions on the status of women. But laws were not
enough. Women would not dutifully take responsibility for birth control,
Rhonda Levitt and Madeline Nelson wrote in a special issue of the ZPG
National Reporter by and about women, “unless we are able to assert our
humanity outside of motherhood and servitude to our husbands.”89
It was a matter of convenience for ZPG and for reproductive rights
groups like Planned Parenthood that they could set aside some of their
key differences and unite in defense of abortion rights, which they both
supported wholeheartedly. In the 1970s ZPG and Planned Parenthood
adopted each other’s ideas and language to further their common goal.
“Never before had we been so aware of the crucial interdependence of
peoples and economies on our fragile, finite planet,” the Planned Parent-
hood Federation of America said of the previous year in its 1974 annual
report. “We have learned to speak of food production, population growth,
economic development, environmental protection and human rights not as
‘separate problems,’ but as interrelated dimensions of a single world crisis of
survival.”90 ZPG, for its part, dedicated several issues of the ZPG National
Reporter to reproductive rights. “Legalizing abortion will be the final step
in giving women control over their own reproduction,” the editors of one
of those issues wrote.91 Planned Parenthood of Alameda and San Francisco
participated in the Bay Area’s “World Population Day” in 1974 along with
ZPG and the Sierra Club, while ZPG signed on to a letter Planned Parent-
hood sent to every member of Congress on the second anniversary of the
key abortion decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.92
For several years, ZPG and Planned Parenthood, and the communities
they represented, stood on political and philosophical common ground.
But eventually feminists grew increasingly concerned about population

groups’ focus on a vague “greater good,” and how that focus might restrict
women’s right to have children rather than their right to terminate preg-
nancies. Between 1968 and 1971, The Birth Control Handbook, a popular
Canadian feminist text published by McGill University students, reversed
its view of overpopulation and the groups associated with it. The original
edition had linked birth control to both women’s liberation and the wel-
come reduction of human numbers. After 1971 the pamphlet described
population control—and in particular, Ehrlich and ZPG—as a racist proj-
ect that relied on coercive methods. ZPG recommended its members avoid
subsequent editions.93
Even more volatile for population activists than the issue of gender was
that of race. The Population Bomb famously opened with Ehrlich’s descrip-
tion of his family’s taxi ride through New Delhi, a white family inside of
the car and an endless mass of nonwhite people outside of it, the defining
moment when Ehrlich understood the population problem “emotionally.”
He immediately drew a line from the United States to the crowded streets
of urban India, writing, “The problems of Delhi and Calcutta are our prob-
lems too. Americans have helped to create them; we help to prevent their
solution.”94 But the visceral sense of the insideness and outsideness of that
taxi characterized population politics for decades.
African American leaders from Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson to Roy
Innis criticized population activists for using a white, middle-class point
of view to frame the population issue while claiming population as a uni-
versal problem.95 As Samuel Hays suggested in the late 1970s, environmen-
talists presented limits to growth as a problem for all people although the
issue often arose from concern for open space rather than for the state of
cities.96 Conservation groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Soci-
ety took up the issue more readily than did antipollution activists. Terms
like “survival,” applied frequently by population activists to the entire
human race, held different meanings when applied to particular social
groups. In March 1972 the Black Panthers organized a Black Community
Survival Conference in Oakland, where they registered over 11,000 voters,
tested more than 13,000 people for sickle-cell anemia, and gave away 10,000
chickens to local families. Environmentalists’ rhetoric of survival inspired
little sense of urgency among the Black Panthers, who understood survival
as the economic and political vitality of communities of color. “Primarily,”
Panther chairman Bobby Seale said, “we want to unify the people and let
them know that the party can institutionalize concrete survival programs
that serve their basic political desires and needs.”97
By 1969, stung by African American leaders’ criticisms and increasingly
cognizant of the shortcomings that those leaders so easily identified, Ehrlich
and other ZPG activists had begun to stress the disproportionate impact of
white, middle-class families. “Our goal is to change the hearts and minds
of middle-class America,” ZPG claimed in 1970.98 Racism and paternalism
continued to inform many population activists, however. That same year a
ZPG chapter coordinator from Albuquerque wrote to the ZPG National
Reporter about the possibility of compulsory birth control classes. “There is
a great deal of resentment about the welfare mothers being able to have as
large a family as they want, at the taxpayer’s expense,” the coordinator said,
“while the taxpayer is being asked to limit himself to only one or two natu-
ral children.” Explaining that she served on the board of the local Planned
Parenthood Association and knew firsthand that compulsory classes were
something that “welfare mothers” wanted, she noted, “A lot of the women
actually do not know how a conception takes place, let alone that anything
can be done about preventing it.”99
The most severe critics of Ehrlich and ZPG accused them of opening
the door to racial genocide. Such accusations sprang from the close con-
nection between family planning and eugenics in the early twentieth
century. Well into the 1940s and 1950s, writers considering the rela-
tionship between population and environmental limits—most notably
William Vogt—continued to organize their ideas according to a strict
sense of racial hierarchy.
The assumption, however, that eugenics persisted as practice and theory
throughout twentieth-century population politics is misleading, as Hoff
has argued, and it ignores the many differences among efforts to limit
population from decade to decade. While individual population activists
continued to harbor racist views, by the 1960s and 1970s population orga-
nizations were trying to break with the movement’s disturbing past. In 1971
the Council on Population & Environment, concerned about rifts between
business, labor, social justice, and environmental groups, organized a meet-

ing with representatives from each to discuss how to address population
and environmental issues while paying heed to matters of employment,
housing, and poverty.
Where Ehrlich once used India as an example of overpopulation, ZPG
increasingly used India as a point of comparison to illustrate American
overconsumption. “This is why ZPG has directed its educational campaign
toward the affluent consumptive middle classes,” executive director Hal Sei-
elstad wrote.100 ZPG member Lewis Perelman insisted that to achieve a global
steady state would require “a vastly more equitable distribution of wealth
and power among all the people of the world than exists today.”101 Increas-
ingly, ZPG called into question suburbs, cars, and middle-class lifestyles as
much as it did the birth rate. In 1972 it adopted a “local growth resolution”
that recognized municipalities’ right to limit population through local ordi-
nances but noted that such regulations “must at all times be administered so
as to protect and enhance the opportunities of the disadvantaged, including
the poor, the aged, and racial and religious minorities.”102
Nevertheless, the taint of eugenics stayed with population activists for
many decades. Black leaders tended to point out how proportional bal-
ance between different social groups was every bit as important as overall
numbers. Jesse Jackson argued that numbers were a source of strength for
minority communities, and that limiting childbirth meant limiting political
power. Keith Lampe, always trying to reconcile his environmentalism with
the broader Left, wrote, “Most black people in North America fear that all
the talk about population control might really be a cover story for genocide.
For this reason it is urgently important that groups like Zero Population
Growth (ZPG) make abundantly clear their opposition to genocide in any
form.”103 Although not at Lampe’s bidding, ZPG-California did take on the
question. Its 1972 convention included a panel discussion called “Popula-
tion Control, Racism, and Genocide,” which put Paul Ehrlich on stage with
several African American community leaders from the Bay Area. “I think
the discussion was very valuable in bringing out some of the basic misun-
derstandings and legitimate concerns that black people have toward the
population-stabilization movement,” secretary-treasurer Jean Weber wrote
to Ehrlich afterward. As though speaking for the movement as a whole, she
continued, “I know I learned a great deal from the discussion, but I still have
a long way to go.”104
Race was an obvious if at times surreptitious dimension of population
policy in discussions of immigration. A focus on immigration was to some
degree inevitable for population activists during the 1970s, a decade during
which the fertility rate declined in the United States and blame for popu-
lation growth shifted from childbirth to new residents. Environmental
organizations had wrestled with immigration since at least the early 1960s,
when the Sierra Club began to debate the “population explosion,” but it was
in the 1970s that immigration grabbed the attention of the environmental
movement as a whole. The shift was in part the work of John Tanton,
appointed chairman of the Club’s population committee in 1971 and several
years later president of ZPG’s board.105
“Any population policy that fails to deal with illegal immigration can be
of little worth,” Tanton reported to ZPG.106 He was in favor of restricting
legal immigration and fighting illegal immigration as determinedly as pos-
sible. ZPG largely agreed, proposing in 1975 a reduction of immigration to
roughly the level of emigration, and recommending a restriction of illegal
immigration through better funding for the Border Patrol; a crackdown on
employers hiring undocumented immigrants; and an increase in foreign
aid to improve potential immigrants’ economic opportunities at home.107
Because immigration of any kind did not actually increase the number of
people in the world, environmentalists often had to explain why they paid
any attention to it. They made two broad arguments that came close to
contradicting each other. The first was that Americans had a responsibility
to safeguard American resources, and that any increase in the population
of the United States jeopardized the American parks, forests, waterways,
cities, and ecosystems that environmentalists fought to protect. The sec-
ond was that more people in the United States meant more people liv-
ing a profligate and costly American lifestyle. Sometimes both arguments
appeared at once. Gerda Bikales warned members of the National Parks
& Conservation Association that “immigrants come, essentially, because
they want to eat, dress, live, and consume like Americans—a luxury our
planet can no longer afford,” and at the same time spoke of avoiding “the
ultimate sacrifice from us—the social and ecological ruin of our land.”108
Americans were at once the scourge of the planet and the stewards of a
fragile landscape.
Tanton represented both the balance of interests that could coalesce
around the population question and the troubling directions in which it
could all lead. An ophthalmologist with a practice in Petoskey, Michigan,
Tanton worked not just with the Sierra Club and ZPG but also with the
Michigan Audubon Society and the Michigan Natural Areas Council. He
was president of the Northern Michigan Planned Parenthood Association,
chairman of Planned Parenthood’s Great Lakes public affairs commit-
tee, and a member of the Sierra Club’s survival committee. Many in the
Club—and even in ZPG—began to ignore or oppose the increasingly
severe proposals that Tanton fired off.109 The Sierra Club’s Louise Nichols
wrote to Chuck Clusen about Tanton and immigration in 1973, stressing
the potential for embarrassment and offense. “I always suspected Petoskey
Michigan might not be the best place to live and understand what’s really
going on in the world,” she wrote.110 Ehrlich, responding ambivalently to
Tanton’s occasional requests that Ehrlich call for immigration restriction,
acknowledged the role of immigration in population politics but stressed
the many problems with immigration restriction.111 But both the Club and
ZPG took immigration seriously as an environmental issue, ceding Tanton’s
basic point and hoping that he would stick to ecological arguments. That
hope was misplaced. By the end of the decade, frustrated with inaction
by both organizations, Tanton began to set up anti-immigration organiza-
tions, including Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies, and
the Federation for American Immigration Reform. During the 1980s and
1990s he increasingly talked about immigration in terms of race, language,
and culture, and was less concerned with natural resources than he was with
“a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”112
Tanton was an extreme example of the ways that environmental argu-
ments could be used to support bigoted, jingoistic ideas. Well into the
twenty-first century, a vocal minority of mainstream environmentalists
pushed for closed borders. There were also more subtle and complicated
ways that environmental activists questioned basic claims underlying twen-
tieth-century liberalism, many of them rooted in a fundamentally ecologi-
cal perspective as opposed to a fundamentally social one. The anarchist
Murray Bookchin pointed this out when he criticized Gary Snyder’s widely
published essay “Four Changes,” which claimed, “there are now too many
human beings.” Bookchin called this statement “a social problem . . . being
given biological dimensions in a wrong way, a biological primacy that it
still does not have.” The issue was almost purely a political one, accord-
ing to Bookchin. “The solution to this kind of ‘overpopulation’ lies not in
birth control within the existing system, but in a social revolution that will
harmonize man’s social relations with man and man’s relationship with the
natural world.”113
Bookchin gestured toward a set of concerns that would become cen-
tral to radical environmental debates in the 1980s: whether environmental
problems were essentially social or ecological, whether justice preceded sus-
tainability or vice-versa, and eventually whether human welfare mattered
more than did the integrity of the natural world. Bookchin continued to
argue the points that he made in the 1960s when a new school of radical
environmentalists appeared in the 1980s. Those radicals would be both
more dedicated to the uncompromising protection of the natural world
and more dubious of modern liberalism’s commitments to individual free-
dom and economic growth.
CONCLUSION
In 1976, the environmental scholar Timothy O’Riordan wrote of Garrett

Hardin’s essay, “The commons parable is powerful because it drives right
at the heart of environmentalism—the moral relationship between short-
term selfishness and enlightened longer-term community interest.”114 Envi-
ronmentalists often understood the tragedies of various commons in these
terms: the unrestrained advance of individual interests jeopardized a col-
lective reliance on a resource, an ecosystem, or a planet. When too many
people tended to their own sheep, they failed to notice the entire meadow
disappearing in front of them.
Democratic governance could not attend to the common good, some
environmentalists believed, because it focused on short-term action (or
inaction) to fix problems in the present rather than on long-term plan-
ning to prevent greater problems in the near future. It improvised and
muddled through. Even the centralized state created by the New Deal—

evidence of democracy’s shortcomings when immediate action was
required—could not confront acute environmental problems. It was pro-
cedural rather than goal-oriented, relatively efficient in form but relatively
agnostic in purpose. And most Americans found no conflict between indi-
vidualism and the common good, believing instead that the one produced
the other. What Robert Collins calls “growth liberalism” tied consumerism
to social benefits, so that individual material achievement amounted to
a form of civic participation.
Environmentalists like Ehrlich, Hardin, and Ophuls insisted that the
planet was in a state of crisis, and that both conventional politics and
economic growth fed that crisis. Mainstream organizations, from this
perspective, tended to abet the worst qualities of democratic inefficiency.
After 1970 environmental organizations eagerly embraced the political
power of key pieces of legislation like the National Environmental Policy
Act. In doing so, they accepted the necessity of compromise that demo-
cratic reform entailed, and they rarely challenged the primacy of economic
growth. The rhetoric of crisis made clear the scale and the immediacy of
environmental threats and allowed crisis environmentalists to discuss alter-
natives to conventional reform and to a growth-oriented economy, but it
also tended toward holism: broad characterizations of people and human
civilization that ignored the complexities of inequality, social difference,
and relative culpability.
ZPG had a foot in each camp, working within the confines of
Washington, D.C. but using the rhetorical urgency of crisis environmen-
talism. ZPG was willing to entertain extreme measures, to insist on the
imminence of potential catastrophe, and to paint a picture of the human
relationship to the natural world with the broadest of brushstrokes, but it
was also attendant to the basic requirements of democratic politics, and
it tried to take heed of social distinctions and human complexity, even if it
never fully succeeded.
Crisis was a powerful idea that tried to clear a path to action by flatten-
ing the unevenness of the world. It was a basic ingredient of radical, eco-
centric environmentalism in the 1980s, and its adherents would borrow
liberally from the environmentalists of the 1970s. Like their predecessors,
ecocentric radicals claimed the planet had been pushed out of balance
by industrial and agricultural processes. They also blamed a flawed scale
of values that used human welfare to measure ultimate good. Only crisis
could justify the circumventing of conventional democratic procedures
and the questioning of modern society’s moral structure. But crisis-driven
politics always provoked the same difficult questions about what interests
were in jeopardy, from which perspective, and saved at greatest cost to
whom. They were questions that soon no environmentalist could afford
not to ask.
3
A Radical Break
“I heard that you are a bunch of radical, crazed environmental lunatics!”

a reader wrote to the Earth First! Journal in the summer of 1983. “That your
methods are unorthodox, destructive, and extreme! That you take matters
into your own hands with pragmatic—even vengeful—action! I’ve heard
also that all the proper environmental organizations look down on you
with disdain and often anger! That you are setting back years of proper
environmental progress!! So how the hell can I join?! Where do I sign up!”1
The zeal of Earth First!’s supporters was a function of not only the group’s
uncompromising politics and daring actions but also its unforgiving critique
of mainstream environmentalism’s sober gradualism. In the 1960s and early
1970s, environmental advocacy had been a matter of influencing legislators
with reasoned arguments and the measured application of public pressure—
what the Sierra Club’s Michael McCloskey called “the theory of lobbying.”
Professionals who understood legislative procedure and accepted the neces-
sity of negotiation performed this work in offices and conference rooms in
Washington, D.C. By the mid-1980s, environmental advocacy might involve
barricades, heated confrontations, and occasional acts of sabotage. Grass-
roots activists who possessed a fervor that bred near-total dedication carried
out this work in the forests of the Pacific Coast and intermountain West.
96 A Radical Break
This shift involved a tiny fraction of those Americans who called

themselves “environmentalists” and, for most of the mainstream groups,
remained an isolated phenomenon that had little to do with their larger
campaigns. But radical environmental groups like Earth First! exerted an
influence over popular perception, political climate, and philosophical
debate that far outweighed their numbers. What radicals perceived as the
failures of mainstream environmentalism by the late 1970s, stemming from
the major groups’ overreliance on conventional methods of reform, led to a
breakaway faction of conservationists who sought to reenergize the move-
ment with new ideas and new strategies.
Three elements in particular structured this radical break, all of them
intertwined and justifying one another. First, frustrated activists subscribed
to an ecocentric philosophy that placed nonhuman nature on an equal
moral footing with people, a philosophy they believed distinguished their
work from that of mainstream groups and explained mainstream environ-
mentalists’ shortcomings. Second, radical environmentalists focused on
wilderness preservation, the clearest and most vital example of ecocentric
environmentalism because wilderness—as radicals conceived it—meant
the absence of people. And third, radicals bypassed the incrementalism of
liberal democratic processes through direct action, both because they prior-
itized natural over political processes and because they believed that where
lawsuits and injunctions failed to stop bulldozers, human bodies could suc-
ceed. The clarity of Earth First!’s principles and the militancy with which
it advanced them was, for environmentalists who were discouraged by the
half-steps of conventional reform, irresistible. “Please send your newsletter”
wrote one supporter from California. “I wait with baited breath [sic] . . . has
the eco-revolution begun?”2
ECOCENTRISM
The philosophical foundation for 1980s and 1990s radical environmental-

ism had many labels. Generically it was “ecocentrism” or “biocentrism,” but
its brand name, by the 1970s, was “deep ecology.” Whatever its name, its
most basic idea remained straightforward: the moral equivalence of humans
and nonhuman nature. Ecocentric thought assumed that trees, bears, fish,
A Radical Break 97
and grasshoppers should receive as much consideration as humans in deci-

sions large and small about the shape of modern society. An ecocentric out-
look granted no more value to people—at least in terms of a basic hierarchy
of existence—than it did to plants, animals, and ecosystems.
No major environmental organization ever embraced ecocentrism, but
many environmental groups with a background in conservation worked
with the basic tools of ecocentric thought, even if they never built a last-
ing structure.3 At the Sierra Club’s mid-century wilderness conferences,
interest in the ecological significance of wilderness began to replace dis-
cussions of aesthetics and recreation. According to Michael Cohen, Club
director Bestor Robinson uncomfortably recognized “two contradictory
philosophies underlying wilderness preservation—philosophies that came
to be called anthropocentric and biocentric,” the one centered on people’s
enjoyment of wilderness and the other unconcerned with what people
wanted or felt.4
Few issues better tracked the emergence of this bifurcation in the Sierra
Club than the organization’s shifting positions on the Mineral King Valley
in the southern Sierras. The Mineral King debate grew out of the Mount
San Gorgonio controversy of the late 1940s in which David Brower had
fought against a ski resort that would mar the mountain’s wilderness charac-
teristics. Not yet an enemy of reflexive compromise, Brower fought against
the location rather than the construction of a ski resort and undertook an
aerial survey of Southern California mountains to find an alternative site
for skiers. He recommended Mineral King, a scenic valley nestled against
Sequoia National Park. In 1949 the Club’s directors, while not advocating
a resort, declared their willingness to tolerate one at Mineral King, should
one be proposed.5
A proposal materialized in the early 1960s in the form of a plan by Walt
Disney, Inc. for a massive ski resort. In the decade-and-a-half since San
Gorgonio, the Sierra Club had put itself on battle footing in Dinosaur
National Monument and the Grand Canyon, and even before Disney sub-
mitted its plan the Club’s Kern-Kaweah chapter formally recommended
protection of Mineral King from all development. The collision of the
Kern-Kaweah recommendation with the Disney proposal triggered a
four-hour debate during one of the Club’s board meetings, at which some
98 A Radical Break
directors argued for consistency and for accepting the inevitability of ski-
ing while others claimed that “in view of a new appraisal of the conflicting
values involved,” Club policy should be reversed. Change won the day, and
the board passed a resolution overturning the 1949 decision and oppos-
ing any development that might threaten “the fragile ecological values” of
Mineral King.6
Having switched its position, the Club filed suit against the Disney
development in 1969 and won a temporary restraining order. The Forest
Service appealed, and both an appellate court and the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that the Club lacked standing to sue because its members did not
hold any “direct interest” in Mineral King. By then the National Environ-
mental Policy Act offered another means of blocking development: Disney
and the Forest Service would have to file an environmental impact state-
ment (EIS). Completing a satisfactory EIS under the scrutiny of conserva-
tionists proved too arduous for Disney, which eventually shelved its plan
(see figure 3.1)
Figure 3.1 Mineral King Valley in 1974. [Sierra Club Photograph albums], BANC PIC
1971.031.1974.01:14a—LAN. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley.
A Radical Break 99
The Mineral King fight stretched over several decades, during which
environmentalists considered and reconsidered their justifications for pro-
tecting undeveloped places. In the 1940s, conservationists focused on the
scenic qualities of San Gorgonio and Mineral King. By the 1960s, the Club
grew increasingly concerned with Mineral King’s ecological integrity.
In the 1970s, new arguments emerged. Among the many flaws Michael
McCloskey found in the Sequoia National Forest’s draft EIS was an almost
exclusive focus on economic and recreational concerns. “A statement is
made that Mineral King in a natural state provides little or no benefits,
has no value in and of itself,” McCloskey wrote. “Does the USFS believe
that the natural environment has no ecological benefit or is of no scientific
value?”7 Several years earlier, the Club’s own Proclamation on Wilderness
had called for a new land ethic to make clear how “it is essential that wil-
derness be preserved for its own inherent value.” The Forest Service EIS
and the Supreme Court’s decision assumed that public lands policy should
prioritize use by people. The Sierra Club increasingly disagreed with this
view. So did a law professor named Christopher Stone, who followed the
Mineral King case and in 1972 published an article called “Should Trees
Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” in which he
considered how the interests of the nonhuman world might gain an inde-
pendent voice within the legal system.8
Why grant the nonhuman world legal status? Stone listed several advan-
tages for people, including a more pleasant environment, a greater sense of
empathy and interconnectedness, and a more developed moral sense. But
the question of what purpose his idea served was an “odd” one, he said,
because “it asks for me to justify my position in the very anthropocentric
hedonist terms that I am proposing we modify.” Stone implied that there
were nonutilitarian, non-anthropocentric reasons for granting legal protec-
tion to the natural world—reasons beyond any benefits gained or interests
held by people.9
Stone wrote with Mineral King in mind, knowing that the question of
the Club’s standing would soon come before the Supreme Court. He pub-
lished his article in a special issue of the Southern California Law Review
on law and technology for which Supreme Court Justice William Douglas
had agreed to write a preface. The ploy worked: Douglas read Stone’s essay,
100 A Radical Break
and the most influential part of Sierra Club v. Morton was not the decision
itself but Douglas’s dissent, in which he cited Stone and suggested the case
would be more properly titled Mineral King v. Morton. Those parts of the
natural world subject to “the destructive pressures of modern technology
and modern life,” Douglas argued, had their own interests. “The river as
plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”10
Stone’s article, and Douglas’s dissent, spoke to a broader discussion
about the prerogatives of humans and the integrity of the nonhuman
world, about ecocentric thought and liberal humanism. It was a fragmented
discussion whose participants did not always know of each other but none-
theless addressed some of the same concerns. Soon after Sierra Club v. Mor-
ton, the San Francisco Ecology Center held a “news ceremonial” at which
several people—dressed as a ponderosa pine, an Arctic loon, and a tan bark
oak—gathered to dance, make bird calls, and praise the “genius” of Doug-
las’s dissent. The tan bark oak told assembled reporters that “non-human
species have not been afforded dignity. . . . The only way to preserve your
democracy is to extend it to us.”11
Behind the news ceremonial was Living Creatures Associates, a media
group operated through the Ecology Center and founded by Keith Lampe,
who by the 1970s called himself Ro-Non-So-Te. In the summer of 1970,
just two months after Earth Day, Lampe wrote to a friend, “Seems to me
that by autumn or winter there needs to be a second generation of radical
eco-rhetoric & eco-actions in order to keep things moving. But I have little
idea what it should be except probably it should stress a post-humanist per-
spective, ie, protection of all beings, habitat thought, human logic gone.”12
A year later, Lampe started Living Creatures Associates in order to shift
public perceptions “from thinking in human-centered terms (anthropo-
centrically) to thinking in life-centered terms (biocentrically).”13 In the late
1970s he organized an All-Species Rights Day parade down San Francisco’s
Market Street, “a sort of spectacular of the biocentric focus.”14 By the 1980s
he had started a new group, “All-Species Projects,” whose slogan was, “Let
us join together to end human-centered behavior.”15
Lampe combined ecocentric thought with crisis environmentalism.
Crisis environmentalists rarely subscribed to ecocentric values, but nearly
all ecocentric activists thought in terms of crisis. To avoid anthropocentrism
A Radical Break 101
was, potentially, to avoid catastrophe. After the publication of The Limits

to Growth in 1971, “The public . . . simply drove its ostrich head deeper into
the sands,” Lampe wrote to Tom Hayden in 1975 as Hayden prepared to run
for a U.S. Senate seat. Lampe recommended that Hayden make “biocide”
central to his campaign and that he encourage students to think in terms
of the planet rather than themselves: “Hey, that trip you’re about to major
in can’t possibly be out there in 1987 because it has such a gross negative
environmental impact we’ll all have blowing sands by then.”16
Hayden did not take Lampe’s advice, but while Lampe occupied the
radical edge of Bay Area environmentalism he was not the only one advo-
cating nature-centered thought. Biocentricity, Debra Weiners reported
for the Pacific News Service in 1975, was not only “the latest trend” but
also an underlying ethic of environmentalism. Weiner noted the views of
Ponderosa Pine (Lampe’s third name), and described recent direct actions
to prevent whaling.17 But she also interviewed movement stalwart Jerry
Mander, who had worked with David Brower and the Sierra Club on the
Grand Canyon battle ads and several other campaigns in the 1960s. “Bio-
centricity is really a very simple idea,” Mander said. “There is no reason to
believe there is something better in humans that makes up [sic] superior
to other species.”18 The idea of biocentricity, or ecocentrism, came not just
from people on the outer fringes of the movement but from those near its
established center.
Environmental philosophers of the 1970s and 1980s traced the principles
of ecocentric thought back to Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Henry David Tho-
reau, and an amalgam of Native American cultures. But it was a Norwegian
philosopher named Arne Naess who most successfully placed the concept
into a modern political context and articulated a philosophy based on that
context, a philosophy he called “deep ecology.” Most of the environmen-
talists who later called themselves deep ecologists did not closely follow
the seven-point outline that Naess proposed in 1973, which he described
as “rather vague generalizations, only tenable if made more precise in cer-
tain directions.”19 The ideas that did stick, and which became characteristic
of deep ecology, were “biospherical egalitarianism,” the “equal right to live
and blossom” of forms of life other than human beings; “local autonomy
and decentralization,” an acknowledgment that governing or managing
102 A Radical Break
from afar tended to jeopardize local stability; and the claim that the mod-
ern environmental movement consisted of two strains, one of which was
“shallow,” professionalized, and anthropocentric; and the other “deep,”
grassroots, and ecocentric.20
Few Americans outside of academic philosophical circles had heard of
Naess, and he owed his sudden rise to prominence among environmental
thinkers late in the decade to the efforts of his greatest American propo-
nents, two northern California professors named Bill Devall and George
Sessions. Devall and Sessions began discussing Naess’s ideas in the 1970s.
By the early 1980s, through a series of conference papers, journal articles,
and newsletters, they had established deep ecology as an essential subject
in any discussion of environmental ethics. In 1983 a Canadian philosopher
named Alan Drengson started The Trumpeter, a journal of environmental
philosophy with a strong interest in deep ecology; and in 1985 Devall and
Sessions published Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, a summary
of the philosophy and a description of its intellectual context.21
Ecocentric thought came in milder and harsher forms. The Sierra
Club tended to adopt the language and ideas of ecocentrism even as it
never accepted its furthest implications. When John Tanton testified on
the Club’s behalf before the Commission on Population Growth and the
American Future, he complained that the Commission’s interim report
was “an anthropocentric document” that “regards man and his institutions,
recent though they may be, as the most central and important feature of the
natural scene.” The Club preferred to ask what was best “for the welfare of
the bio-physical world.” Tanton’s testimony made clear, however, that the
Club understood human and nonhuman interests as aligned rather than
opposed: “If the farmer will take care of his land,” Tanton quipped, “the
land will take care of the farmer.”22
An ecocentrism rooted in tension rather than cooperation was a harder
sell. Few environmentalists were comfortable with deep ecology as a legiti-
mate ethical stance when it posed people and nature as set against each
other. Many activists already struggled with the antidemocratic and illib-
eral sentiments that sprang from crisis environmentalism’s talk of “coer-
cion.” Disavowing those sentiments, they tried to frame environmentalism
as a fundamentally humanistic movement. Well-known environmental
A Radical Break 103
thinkers like Barry Commoner and Frances Moore Lappé already accused
Paul Ehrlich and other neo-Malthusians of ignoring social inequality.23
Lesser-known environmentalists made the same point. “By and large,”
wrote two contributors to the Canadian journal Alternatives, “it is man
who is the concern of the ecologist.”24 The project of environmentalism,
wrote another, was to protect human habitat. “This is not a rejection of the
concept of human rights,” he wrote, “but its extension.”25
Founded in 1970 by activists, students, and faculty at Trent University,
Alternatives would by the end of the decade become the official journal of
Friends of the Earth-Canada. Its contributors called crisis environmental-
ists like Garrett Hardin “counter-productive” and “dangerously wrong.”26
Like the mainstream movement, Friends of the Earth-Canada hoped
to bridge the ethics of environmentalism with the principles of liberal
humanism and social justice. Alternatives advocated a “conserver society”
that would minimize waste and pollution while remaining committed to
“social justice and political democracy.”27 In the 1970s, the environmental
movement’s growing clout in matters of public policy gave it all the more
reason to situate its ideas in the broadest and most inclusive frame. For
many activists, environmentalism was an idea that went with the grain of
liberal humanism.
Deep ecology could cut against that grain, and from the beginning it
made many environmentalists wary. In 1983 the philosopher Richard Wat-
son claimed deep ecology’s internal contradictions were “so serious that
the position must be abandoned.” Watson made what would become a
common and important criticism of deep ecology: that its adherents com-
plained about the notion that humans deserved separate moral consid-
eration, and then treated humans as morally distinct by demanding they
restrain their behavior, their population, and their impact on the planet.
Deep ecologists could not decide whether people were a part of nature or
nature’s antithesis.28 In a response to Watson, Arne Naess explained that
deep ecology was less a matter of strict rules and prescriptions than of broad
principles and attitudes. Certainly, Naess granted, humans must be treated
differently than the rest of the natural world; that, in many ways, was the
point of environmentalism. But people were nonetheless capable of consid-
ering the degree to which they privileged their own interests over others’
104 A Radical Break
or set aside their interests for the good of the natural world and the planet
as a whole.29 Deep ecologists tended toward the latter more than did other
people and even other environmentalists.
For most people it went without saying that human interests and human
life were paramount political and philosophical concerns. And most peo-
ple, the biologist David Ehrenfeld claimed in The Arrogance of Human-
ism, put a near-absolute faith in reason, technological innovation, political
planning, and the long-term viability of human civilization. Where others
saw the steady advance of material comfort and social stability, Ehrenfeld
saw a series of haphazard attempts to address narrow problems, attempts
that nearly always produced unintended consequences that injured people
and the nonhuman world. The greater the ambition to plan for the future
and to control the conditions of human life, the greater the distance would
grow between expectations and results. “There are no navigators on this
humanist ship,” Ehrenfeld wrote, “and the few steersmen we have are caught
in the same system of lies and pretense that enfolds us all.”30
Ehrenfeld’s critique was notable less for its complaints about reason
and technology than for its fundamental distrust of the most basic human
motivations, and for the fact that Ehrenfeld found environmentalism as
much to blame as anything else. Conservationists, he said, operated within
a humanist framework that rendered their work almost meaningless. The
standard justifications for the protection of nature—recreation, beauty, sci-
entific interest, stabilization of ecosystems, etc.—were all “anthropocentric
values.” The dilemma for conservationists, Ehrenfeld explained, was that in
order to make a case in humanist terms they labeled everything a “resource”
of one kind or another, diluting the meaning of the term and rendering
their arguments less and less convincing. All of the anthropocentric claims
for the value of nature were subjective, speculative, or so long-term as to be
easily ignored. “There is no true protection for Nature,” Ehrenfeld wrote,
“within the humanist system—the very idea is a contradiction in terms.”
The only way around this dilemma was through honoring “the Noah Prin-
ciple.” Noah’s Ark, which Ehrenfeld called the greatest conservation effort
ever described in Western culture, made an implicit argument for the
equal importance of all animal species. Ehrenfeld believed that such a non-
discriminating approach should ground the ethics of environmentalism.
“Long-standing existence in Nature,” he wrote, “is deemed to carry with it
A Radical Break 105
the unimpeachable right to continued existence.” Countering the humanist

tendency to judge nature in purely utilitarian terms required countering the
standards of judgment themselves and insisting that the natural world had
value independent of human reckoning. “For those who reject the human-
istic basis of modern life,” he said, “there is simply no way to tell whether
one arbitrarily chosen part of nature has more ‘value’ than another part, so
like Noah we do not bother to make the effort.”31
To reject the humanistic basis of modern life was to reject liberal indi-
vidualism, a stance made clear, ironically, by radical environmentalism’s
general distaste for animal rights. “The Noah Principle” and ecocentrism
more broadly focused on species and ecosystems rather than individual
beings. Because they had little concern for human interests, ecocentric
environmentalists distanced themselves from a mainstream, “anthropocen-
tric” environmentalism. And because they had little concern for individual
rights—whether of humans or non-humans—ecocentric environmental-
ists distanced themselves even from animal liberationists, their likely allies.
Animal liberationists insisted that only the capacity to suffer should matter
in considering a particular being’s interests. Animal liberation, the environ-
mental philosopher J. Baird Callicott explained, offered little more than
a “humane moralism” (moral standing to any sentient beings) against the
“ethical humanism” that characterized most philosophical thought. Envi-
ronmental ethicists, meanwhile, did not limit their concern to individuals
or bound it by sentience. Aldo Leopold, the prototypical philosopher of
a “land ethic” and also a lifelong hunter, showed little interest in the wel-
fare of individual animals. For Leopold, the integrity of the “biotic com-
munity” was of paramount importance and the individual lives of all its
members of secondary concern. Callicott went further, arguing that the
stability of the community and the lives of its inhabitants could easily be at
odds; overpopulation of any particular species diminished the value of its
individual members and threatened the community as a whole. As Calli-
cott suggested, “humane moralism” was only a small step beyond conven-
tional liberalism; animal liberationists’ concern for particular beings and
their interests put them in line with modern liberal thought and its focus
on individual liberties and protections. The humane moralism of ani-
mal liberation, he wrote, “centers its attention on the competing criteria
for moral standing and rights holding, while environmental ethics locates
106 A Radical Break
ultimate value in the ‘biotic community.’ ” For environmentalists like Calli-

cott, animal liberation was the same individualistic liberalism with fur and
feathers, and it similarly ignored the sense of interconnectedness that lay at
the heart of environmentalism.32
For ecocentric environmentalists, liberal individualism and the “arro-
gance of humanism” were of a piece and had for too long occupied a privi-
leged position above nonhuman communities. Ecocentrics’ willingness to
upset that hierarchy followed a sort of moral gravity. As value and con-
cern flowed toward biotic communities, they flowed away from individual
beings, and especially humans. Deep ecologists’ abundance of regard for the
nonhuman world could mean a poverty of consideration for humans. “The
extent of misanthropy in modern environmentalism,” Callicott explained,
“. . . may be taken as a measure of the degree to which it is biocentric.”33 Few
were as misanthropic as Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conser-
vation Society and a radical environmentalist who held little respect for any
of the supposed achievements of human civilization. Music, architecture,
and art were “vanity,” Watson wrote in the 1990s. A Van Gogh painting
was little more than “a bit of coloured hydro-carbon splattered on canvas,”
and human cultural achievements were “worthless to the Earth when com-
pared with any one species of bird, or insect, or plant.”34 Arne Naess never
suggested that valorizing the nonhuman world demanded a proportional
denigration of human civilization, but for those who most passionately
championed deep ecology, defending the one often meant attacking the
other. Ecocentric thought lent environmentalism an intellectual energy
and a political fervor that roused old-timers and newcomers alike, and it pit
radical environmentalists against human civilization in ways that became
increasingly difficult to maintain in both thought and practice.
THE POLITICS OF WILDERNESS BEFORE EARTH FIRST!
Ecocentric environmentalism would have been little more than an interest-

ing line of thought had environmentalists not applied its ideas to a timely
issue. The emerging radical environmental movement of the late 1970s and
1980s cohered around the cause of wilderness, a purpose that gave shape to
the philosophy of deep ecology. Radical environmentalists’ commitment
A Radical Break 107
to protecting wilderness sprang from the same principles as did their philo-
sophical values. Their primary ethical claim was that the natural world had
as much moral value as did the human world. Given the imbalance between
the destructive force of industrial society and the delicate processes by which
nature renewed itself, radicals believed the best way to advance their eth-
ics was to protect an autonomous nature from human influence. In the late
1980s, Earth First! described its ‘central idea’ as “that humans have no divine
right to subdue the Earth, that we are merely one of many millions of forms
of life on this planet,” and the ‘practical application’ of this idea as “that large
sections of Earth should be effectively zoned off-limits to industrial human
civilization.”35 Wilderness was the greatest expression of the radical belief in
the moral standing—and therefore the sovereignty—of the natural world.
Earth First! emerged as a direct result of wilderness politics in the late 1970s
and in particular of the Forest Service’s second Roadless Area Review and
Evaluation (RARE II), a wilderness inventory of thousands of roadless areas
in national forests that Earth First!’s founders considered the nadir of main-
stream environmentalism’s politics of appeasement. In a narrow sense, Earth
First! spent a decade trying to revisit RARE II as a matter of policy in order
to save millions of acres that might still be protected as wilderness; in a broad
sense, Earth First! spent those years challenging RARE II as a set of political
and ethical premises in order to question the principles of an increasingly
professionalized environmental movement and to assert the primacy of wild
nature among environmental causes.
Wilderness protection prefigured the conservation movement itself,
and by Earth Day it was an old idea. In the swirl of new issues that con-
stituted the modern environmental movement, the Sierra Club’s Michael
McCloskey worried that “wilderness preservation appears to many as
parochial and old-fashioned.”36 But wilderness advocates reinvented the
meaning of their work every few decades: wilderness was a refuge from
industrialization at one point and from unrestrained recreation at another,
it was solitude and escape for some and a heightened aesthetic sensibility
or a repository of democratic values for still others, and increasingly it was
a storehouse of biological diversity.
The decline of democratic justifications presaged the rise of ecocentric
thought. Early on, the democratic argument could be made in at least two
108 A Radical Break
ways that tended to contradict each other. On the one hand, early Wilder-
ness Society leaders like Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall appealed to
the democratic concern for protecting minority interests from a dominant
and flattening popular culture. On the other hand, the Society’s longtime
executive director Howard Zahniser described wilderness as a national
interest and a public good. Wilderness advocacy swerved between plural-
ism and populism. These tendencies did not always fit neatly into the small
offices of a single organization like the Wilderness Society. For early Soci-
ety leaders, Paul Sutter writes, “there would be a nagging tension between
wilderness as a democratic ideal and wilderness as a minority preference.”37
During the campaign for the Wilderness Act in the 1950s and 1960s, James
Morton Turner notes, an “emphasis on the interests of the minority . . .
was overwhelmed by a focus on the nation’s collective interest in protect-
ing wilderness as a national good.”38 In the 1970s democratic arguments
for wilderness both crested and splintered. The notion of wilderness as
a national good plateaued in the fight over Alaskan public lands, where
ecological arguments began to eclipse it. At the same time, a more plu-
ralist approach to wilderness fragmented in the aftermath of RARE II, a
process more heavily dependent on grassroots support. In the 1980s radi-
cal environmentalists largely abandoned democratic claims as they gave
wilderness one of its most powerful and troubling meanings, finding in
it an order and a set of values beyond—and often at odds with—those of
human society.
There was no more powerful example of wilderness in the United States
than the wild lands of Alaska. The Sierra Club’s John Muir extolled the
state’s vast public lands, as did the Wilderness Society’s Robert Marshall
and Olaus Murie, Adolph Murie, and Margaret Murie. Among those lands
were the valleys of the Koyukuk, Alatna, and Hammond Rivers in the
Brooks Range, straddling the southern edge of the Arctic Circle; the vast
northeast corner of the state between the Yukon River and the Beaufort
Sea, home to one of the nation’s largest caribou herds and nesting grounds
for migratory birds; the sprawling point of convergence for the Wrangell,
St. Elias, and Chugach mountain ranges; and, on Alaska’s southernmost tip,
a collection of islands and coastal strips that together made up the Tongass
National Forest. The remoteness and the scale of these places both set them
A Radical Break 109
apart from and made them symbolic of all other American public lands.
Alaska was, in many ways, the wilderness movement’s greatest prize.
Wilderness politics in the late 1970s converged on several approaching
legislative deadlines. One of the most important would determine the final
disposition of federal lands in Alaska, lands that contained the nation’s
greatest concentration of de facto wilderness. The slow process of decid-
ing jurisdiction began with the Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 and gained
greater urgency after the discovery of oil deposits at Prudhoe Bay in 1968.
It accelerated in 1971, when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act des-
ignated forty-four million acres for Native Alaskans, withdrew tens of mil-
lions more as “national interest lands” and “public interest lands” managed
by the Department of the Interior, and gave Congress until December 1978
to accept or reject Interior’s designations of those lands.39
By the middle of the 1970s environmental organizations had committed
themselves to Alaska lands as the movement’s top conservation priority.
Protecting tens of millions of acres of Alaskan lands as wilderness, parks,
or refuges would require unprecedented cooperation between a collection
of large and small environmental groups. Those groups banded together
under the Alaska Coalition, led by the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Soci-
ety, the National Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the National
Parks and Conservation Association, and encompassing many smaller
organizations. The Coalition’s efforts stretched from grassroots work in
Alaska to over a dozen staff members working full-time in Washington,
D.C. Edgar Wayburn, the most tireless advocate of Alaskan wilderness on
the Sierra Club’s board of directors, would later call it “the conservation
battle of the century.”40
The seven years between the Native Claims Act and the deadline for
designation of public lands were marked by political trench warfare as
conservationists and their opponents fought to a standstill. By Decem-
ber 1978, Congress remained deadlocked. As a stopgap measure President
Jimmy Carter, who had been heavily lobbied by both sides, used a patch-
work of environmental laws and agencies to temporarily protect 110 million
acres—more territory preserved by a president than at any single moment
since Theodore Roosevelt’s final days in office. A year later Congress
passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA),
110 A Radical Break
permanently protecting 103 million acres of Carter’s temporary withdraw-

als and more than tripling the total acreage of the National Wilderness
Preservation System.
The Carter administration celebrated Alaskan lands as a national
interest, treasured by all Americans. “Alaska is a reflection of our national
spirit,” the White House Press Office explained to reporters. “It is the
only place left in the United States where the vast open spaces, unmarred
scenery and free roaming wildlife that shaped early America can still be
found.”41 The administration’s supporters echoed the notion that Alaska
belonged to the American people. Over 150 members of Congress signed
a letter to the president that stressed “the strong desire of the American
people who want their natural heritage in Alaska protected.”42 The Alaska
Coalition itself, powered by national organizations based in Washing-
ton, D.C. and doing battle with Alaska’s own congressional delegation,
reflected the idea that a New Yorker had as great an investment in Alaska’s
public lands as did an Anchoragite.
But the campaign for Alaskan lands also advanced a newer language for
defending wilderness. In 1978 the Wilderness Society said of the proposed
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, “The issue is clear: whether the boundar-
ies of our largest national park will embrace the full ecological richness of
this choice mountain region . . . or little more than ice and rock heights.”43
Just after passage of the final Alaska lands bill in 1980, Wayburn praised it
for protecting wild territory “in an ecological manner with boundaries that
we hope will sustain the land and its wildlife.”44 Wilderness Society conser-
vation director Chuck Clusen agreed, writing, “Nowhere else in the free
world can one find such majesty, vastness and ecological diversity which for
the most part has escaped the impact of industrial civilization.”45 More than
in any previous wilderness campaign, the arguments in favor of protect-
ing Alaskan lands focused on an undisturbed natural world where people
rarely made an appearance. The Alaska campaign championed a form of
wilderness advocacy less concerned with preserving grand vistas for visitors
to enjoy and more concerned with protecting the natural processes that
took place in people’s absence rather than in their presence.
While the Alaska campaign brought the environmental movement
together in a grand coalition, RARE II revealed its points of fracture.
A Radical Break 111
RARE II involved another approaching deadline, this one triggered by the

Wilderness Act of 1964. The Wilderness Act stipulated that only Congress
could designate wilderness, and it immediately set aside nine million acres
of public land and directed the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior to
determine the suitability of their roadless lands for wilderness and to make
recommendations to Congress within ten years. The Forest Service man-
aged the bulk of potential wilderness in the United States, and the agency
followed a multiple-use mandate that required it balance the competing
interests of industry, recreation, and agriculture. Because of its wide juris-
diction—in terms of both geography and use—the Forest Service sat in the
very center of wilderness politics.46
In the initial fight over roadless areas in national forests, legislation and
litigation proved a winning strategy for environmentalists. In the early
1970s, RARE I (the Forest Service’s first attempt at classifying its hold-
ings) examined fifty-six million acres of roadless area and promised either
a massive addition to the wilderness system or an enormous loss of poten-
tial wilderness.47 “We face both our greatest opportunity and crisis now,”
McCloskey told the Club’s board.48 Rather than issuing environmental
impact statements for each area under review, the Forest Service designated
the review itself as a single, sweeping EIS. In 1972 the agency announced
it would recommend 274 areas comprising just over twelve million acres
as wilderness study areas (potential wilderness). Environmentalists consid-
ered this a paltry recommendation, especially because a third of the acre-
age recommended was already well on the way to wilderness classification.
Further, they charged that the Forest Service used overly narrow definitions
of wilderness in order to limit the number of sites under consideration,
and that the entire RARE process had been rushed. The Sierra Club sued,
accusing the Forest Service of submitting an insufficient EIS and therefore
violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it allowed
logging on nonrecommended sites. As was the case with Mineral King, the
EIS requirement of NEPA offered environmentalists their most expedient
tool. The chief of the Forest Service agreed to issue instructions to all forest-
ers directing them to comply with NEPA—generally, drafting an individ-
ual EIS—before developing any roadless area. This new policy effectively
overturned and ended RARE I.
112 A Radical Break
Five years later, wilderness remained a point of contention both for envi-
ronmentalists who claimed the Forest Service dragged its feet on wilderness
recommendations and for timber companies that complained the Forest
Service did not open enough land to logging. Rupert Cutler, the new Assis-
tant Secretary of Agriculture, hoped RARE II would address the concerns
of both the environmental movement and industry by making final recom-
mendations for 62 million acres of roadless area by 1979. Over the next two
years, even as the Alaska campaign dominated the major environmental
organizations’ agendas, the Forest Service examined close to three thou-
sand sites, held hundreds of public hearings, and tabulated hundreds of
thousands of public comments.49
In theory, the Wilderness Society was the group best suited by its mis-
sion and its structure to take charge of the RARE II fight. Stewart Brand-
borg, executive director of the Society in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
believed in the protection of wild places through grassroots citizen involve-
ment. A charismatic leader in the mold of David Brower, Brandborg took
special interest in grassroots training programs that would shape the next
generation of field organizers. “In the early 1970s,” James Turner writes, “the
Wilderness Society’s emphasis on citizen organizing reflected Brandborg’s
faith in participatory democracy.”50 While the amateur tradition of the
early twentieth century Sierra Club had relied on relatively affluent con-
servationists working in San Francisco, Brandborg’s grassroots wilderness
activism involved a cadre of conservationists who spent their time in the
field and cultivated local support.
But the Society overextended itself under Brandborg, who spent money
on current campaigns with little thought as to funding future endeavors.
By 1974 the Society’s finances dipped into the red. Brandborg began firing
employees to reduce costs, tarnishing his once sterling reputation among
the Society’s staff. This was especially the case in the Denver office headed
by Clif Merritt, which absorbed much of the downsizing. In the summer
of 1975, with staff morale plummeting and staff resignations climbing, the
Society’s governing council spent four days hearing from the skeleton crew
remaining. On the advice of a management consultant, the council fired
Brandborg at the beginning of 1976.51
A Radical Break 113
Between early 1976 and late 1978, the Wilderness Society managed to
put its finances back in order and to remain involved in the ongoing Alaska
campaign. But Brandborg’s replacement, George Davis, lasted barely a year,
and so the governing council turned to one of its own longtime members,
Celia Hunter, while it searched for a permanent director. The council hoped
to point the Society in a new direction—one that emphasized the sort of
structure and professionalism that council members thought befitted a
major environmental organization. The administrative turmoil, Hunter
explained to the Society’s members, grew out of “our rapid growth from
a fairly small, close-knit organization featuring easy camaraderie between
staff and management . . . to a large enterprise with two major offices and
widely dispersed field representatives.”52
The Society found itself pulled between its grassroots efforts and its
determination to streamline and professionalize. Even Hunter, beloved by
field staff and in possession of more backcountry bona fides than almost
any other Society director, fought against longtime staff members to con-
solidate the organization. When Hunter tried to shut down the Denver
office and move its field representatives to Washington, D.C., she collided
with Clif Merritt. “We want to make use of Regional Reps for lobbying in
Washington on issues with which they are familiar . . . ,” she explained to
Merritt in 1977. “In all of this, the role and function of the Denver office
is uncertain.”53 Merritt responded by stressing how important—and, he
claimed, underappreciated—Western issues like RARE I and RARE II
were for the Society, and how essential the Denver office had been and con-
tinued to be in coordinating those campaigns.54 “It could make a think-
ing person wonder,” Merritt complained the following year, “whether the
objective [of ] The Wilderness Society was to promote more centralization
of authority and bureaucracy or to save wilderness.”55
Merritt offered a view from the field, where staffers worked close to the
roadless areas at risk in the RARE II fight but far from the upheaval at
the Society’s headquarters. Throughout the mountain West, the conserva-
tionists who would later found Earth First! organized local participation in
Forest Service hearings and pushed for the maximum inclusion of wilder-
ness in each state and forest district. “The bulk of my time was involved in
114 A Radical Break
researching and worrying about RARE II,” Bart Koehler wrote in a monthly
activity report for late 1977.56 Koehler, a Wilderness Society regional repre-
sentative in Wyoming, dedicated even more of his time to RARE II the fol-
lowing year, doing interviews for Wyoming News and Rapid City television,
writing pieces in Wyoming Issues and Wyoming Wildlife Magazine, and even
speaking before the American Petroleum Institute. Bob Langsenkamp, a
Society field consultant in New Mexico, described his RARE II work in
mid-1978 as “Hectic.” Langsenkamp set aside work on the Bureau of Land
Management’s already neglected wilderness review because “RARE II &
Ak [sic] taking most of my time.” October, he reported, “was a month of
‘cooling my heels’ and regrouping from RARE II,” after having responded
to the Forest Service’s draft EIS. Langsenkamp cleaned his office for the
first time in six months.57
Future Earth First!ers in other organizations also sought to expand
national forest wilderness as much as they could. Late in 1978, Friends of
the Earth’s (FOE) Washington, D.C. office asked its staff members to file
inventories listing which issues gained most of their attention. “Alaska—
This goes without saying,” wrote Howie Wolke, FOE’s Wyoming field
representative, before offering an unsolicited opinion: “Perhaps this is a
regional bias of mine, but I do feel that FOE has not put enough emphasis
on wilderness and public lands issues in general (except for Alaska). With
RARE II due to be completed shortly, there will soon be a whole bunch of
Administration wilderness proposals . . . which will need action.”58 Wolke
was right about his regional bias; the Alaska campaign and the RARE II
fight both involved national and grassroots work, but “Alaska” brought
to mind clear images of mountains and glaciers for most Americans while
“national forest wilderness” remained an abstract idea until rendered in
local terms. All conservationists followed the Alaska fight, but east of the
Mississippi fewer kept close tabs on RARE II. Most Forest Service roadless
lands sat in the American West, where RARE II would be fought and from
which Earth First! would soon emerge.
The Wilderness Society found new leadership just as it entered the
final stage of the RARE II process. William Turnage, a graduate of the
Yale School of Forestry who spent several years as photographer Ansel
Adams’s business manager, assumed the directorship in November 1978.
A Radical Break 115
Turnage was an aggressive administrator who wasted no time overhauling

the organization by cultivating new sources of revenue and centralizing
operations in Washington, D.C. During his first few months as executive
director the Society lost a quarter of its staff to termination or resignation.
Turnage finally closed the Denver office for good, after which Merritt
declined Turnage’s offer of a position at the Society’s headquarters. For
years the Society had tried to keep at least one field representative in each
Western state in which it worked. Celia Hunter, during her tenure as execu-
tive director, centralized that network of field staff by bringing several key
field representatives—including Tim Mahoney, Debbie Sease, and Dave
Foreman—to Washington, D.C. to live in a bunkhouse in Virginia and help
with lobbying. Turnage went a step further, paring down the field staff to
a handful of regional representatives. When Turnage closed the Wyoming
office, Bart Koehler left, complaining of the new administration’s “complete
absence of respect for the regional representatives as professionals and as
human beings.” When Turnage closed the Utah office and fired Dick Carter,
upsetting many Western conservation leaders, he explained that despite
Carter’s good work, “He is not philosophically committed to the idea that
the central organization needs to make decisions.”59 Turnage’s plan for the
coming decade, according to the executive committee’s recording secretary,
was “an augmented staff capability in economics and in forestry . . . on a
highly professional basis. This would not include so-called ‘high-spirited’
people, as there was of course not an automatic conflict between profes-
sionalism and dedication.”60 Foreman, certainly one of the “high-spirited”
people Turnage had in mind, later described the new executive director as
“the businessman” who “replaced virtually the entire experienced and grass-
roots staff . . . with ‘professionals.’ ”61
In one view, the Wilderness Society’s administrative transformation
came many years late. “The shift to managerial executives has been an
inevitable one,” Michael McCloskey wrote three years after the Sierra Club
fired David Brower and three years before the Society fired Brandborg,
“but it has marked the passing from the scene of charismatic, beloved, and
esteemed figures.”62 In another view, the Society held out longer than the
Club had managed against an enervating focus on lobbying, efficiency,
and political negotiation: “Since the Sierra Club’s firing of David Brower,”
116 A Radical Break
Earth First!’s Dave Foreman wrote in 1984, “. . . the environmental move-

ment has been slowly co-opted by the concept of professionalism to the
detriment of the vision, activism, ethics and effectiveness of the cause.”63
The professionalization of the Society was never a simple matter of MBAs
managing from flow charts. Esteemed figures like Brandborg and Hunter
either refused to acknowledge fiscal and organizational imperatives or else
acquiesced to the changes those imperatives necessitated. But the Society’s
turn toward professionalization was a sharp one, too sharp for some of its
most experienced field representatives. For them, the governing council’s
answer to the Society’s management concerns solved technical problems
by abandoning core principles, putting the interests of the Society ahead of
the wilderness the Society pledged to protect. To already disgruntled field
representatives, the aftermath of RARE II provided the most damning evi-
dence that mainstream environmental groups could no longer stand firm.
At the very moment the Wilderness Society adopted a more profes-
sional approach in the mold of the Sierra Club, RARE II demonstrated
the potential limits of that approach to environmental work. Major lob-
bying campaigns depended on the cultivation of delicate alliances with
senators, representatives, and agency officials. The Alaska Coalition had
already committed the bulk of its staff time and its political capital to the
fight over Alaska lands and had little left for RARE II. By 1979 a handful
of field organizers and national staff had already been working toward a
RARE II endgame for years, but the full weight of the environmental lobby
seemed unlikely to materialize. Brock Evans warned the Sierra Club’s board
of directors that it remained unclear what sort of congressional support
existed for a fight with the Forest Service given that most environmentally
friendly legislators had already invested themselves in the Alaska campaign.
With the Alaska fight approaching a climax and battle lines forming around
hundreds of RARE II sites, environmentalists’ congressional to-do list had
grown uncomfortably long.64
More importantly, while the Alaska campaign was an ideal issue for a
powerful Washington lobby, RARE II was not. As an idea and as a politi-
cal entity Alaska constituted a single issue that wilderness advocates could
debate with a single set of terms. RARE II was a fight that encompassed
several industries, many landscapes, and dozens of states. An internal memo
A Radical Break 117
from early 1979 for the Environmental Study Conference (a collection of

senators and representatives organized in part by the Sierra Club to con-
front environmental issues) noted that although RARE II tried to deter-
mine the fate of sixty-two million acres of public lands at once, “that goal
may well be thwarted by the wide sweep of the proposal—ninety-two con-
gressional districts in thirty-eight states. And environmental, timber and
energy interests all have problems.” The Carter administration hoped to
address the RARE II lands with an omnibus bill, the memo explained, but
was unlikely to succeed because “the bill is just too unwieldy to deal with in
a package.” Regardless of pressure from both environmentalists and indus-
try representatives to reach a speedy decision about the RARE II lands, the
Interior Committee would likely “handle the entire Alaska lands issue right
away, including Alaska’s RARE II areas, and then deal with the other con-
troversial RARE II areas one by one.” The comprehensive, unified approach
that defined the Alaska campaign—and that had shaped the Wilderness
Act itself—was one that centralized political organizations tended to favor
but that did not fit the RARE II process.65
The Sierra Club, which prided itself on both its influential Washington,
D.C. office and its nationwide network of chapters, generally tried to coor-
dinate these two assets. In the lead-up to the RARE II recommendations,
the Club and the Wilderness Society sent regular bulletins and updates out
to their collective membership, stressing the importance of local efforts
but also reminding members that national coordination remained crucial.
“It will be most effective to make a single, comprehensive national challenge
through the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society network,” a bulletin from late
1977 emphatically advised. “This comprehensive approach will allow us to
organize the challenge most effectively, direct it to the proper officials, and
follow it up on a day-to-day basis in Washington, D.C.”66 Because RARE II
involved site-specific reports, recommendations, and hearings for hundreds
of potential wilderness areas, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society
benefited greatly from their active base of members. Still, both organiza-
tions worked hard to funnel all information and planning through their
Washington offices and to choreograph a single, nationwide strategy.
The Carter administration announced the RARE II results in April
1979. The Forest Service recommended 15.4 million acres for wilderness,
118 A Radical Break
10.6 million acres for further study, and 36 million acres for nonwilderness.
Environmentalists expressed deep disappointment. The Wilderness Soci-
ety, Sierra Club, and FOE jointly called the RARE II recommendations
“an imbalanced and shortsighted decision,” and Turnage described the
outcome as “among the most negative decisions in the history of public
land management.”67 RARE II, which environmentalists had followed with
guarded optimism, quickly became a major environmental defeat.
The tricky question of how to respond to RARE II revealed lines of frac-
ture among wilderness advocates. Well before some of the Society’s orga-
nizers broke away to start Earth First!, even moderate staffers struggled to
balance professionalism with a strident response. The Society approached
RARE II with caution, wary of alienating Carter and congressional mod-
erates with Alaska lands still at stake. Soon after Carter’s announcement,
Tim Mahoney, one of the Society’s RARE II experts, wrote to Turnage and
conservation director Chuck Clusen to report on how the Society’s deli-
cate response to the Forest Service recommendations played out on Capitol
Hill. Two of the environmental movement’s greatest congressional allies—
Ohio’s John Seiberling and Oregon’s James Weaver—sprinted ahead of
environmental leaders. “Weaver is calling Eizenstat [Carter’s chief domestic
policy advisor] today,” Mahoney reported. “Sieberling is calling again and
will threaten new oversight hearings on disputed RARE II areas. Weaver
himself and Weisner are asking how they can go out on a limb if [the Wil-
derness Society] and [the Sierra Club] will not.” The situation, Mahoney
wrote, amounted to “the worst of all possible worlds with forestry, mixed
with bad Alaska timing. Our congressional friends are sticking their necks
out and [Wilderness Society] lobbyists have their hands tied.”68
“This is B.S.—when have we been unwilling to go out on a limb,” Turnage
wrote in the margin of his own copy before forwarding it to Clusen. “I really
do not agree with the thrust of this memo—a lot of allusions & innuendoes
adding up to hysteria,” he wrote at the top. “I do not feel—I really empha-
size this—that our lobbyists have ‘had their hands tied.’ ”69 Environmental
leaders like Turnage had a hard time understanding those who criticized
the environmental movement rather than the industrial interests it fought
against. The movement, after all, had just completed a decade of stunning
successes and stood on the cusp of passing a monumental Alaska lands bill.
A Radical Break 119
Political negotiations involved give-and-take, and the major environmental

organizations had fared well according to their own particular goals.
Those limited goals were, for the most militant wilderness advocates,
exactly the problem. Dave Foreman wrote to sympathetic activists about
the need for a new, more radical group. “Conservation groups,” he said,
“have been especially co-opted by the Carter presidency: for the one sweet
plum of Alaskan National Monuments, they have failed to sue over the ille-
gal RARE II process—the greatest single act of wilderness destruction in
American history.”70
For years Foreman nursed a grudge over the Society’s failure to sue in
response to RARE II. After Carter announced the Forest Service recom-
mendations, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society leaders began working
with other environmental groups to salvage RARE II. One obvious tactic
was a lawsuit. Given the similarities between RARE I and RARE II, and
the Sierra Club’s successful lawsuit after the original inventory, it stood to
reason that the courts would find RARE II wanting as well. But environ-
mental leaders worried that a successful lawsuit might trigger a backlash
in Congress and ruin any opportunity to improve on RARE II’s minimal
protections.
Huey Johnson, the California Secretary of Resources and a strong
proponent of wilderness, felt differently. The Forest Service recom-
mended 2.4 million acres of federal lands in California for nonwilderness,
slightly more for further study, and less than a million acres for wilder-
ness. Johnson, who had said of RARE II, “A proper approach would start
with the objective of producing the greatest possible returns to society
in perpetuity, not simply the immediate profits of cutting, digging or
drilling,” thought that the Forest Service favored industry and slighted
posterity. Despite personal visits from Wilderness Society and Natural
Resources Defense Council staffers urging restraint, Johnson filed suit. In
early 1980 a district court ruled in Johnson’s favor, and in 1982 the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling. Echoing the decision that
ended RARE I, the courts decided that RARE II did not demonstrate
an adequate consideration of public sentiment and the potential impact
of development on wilderness areas and so did not satisfy the National
Environmental Policy Act.71
120 A Radical Break
California v. Block insured that the RARE II fight would stretch into
the 1980s and beyond. By the time Johnson sued, the Sierra Club and the
Wilderness Society had embarked on a state-by-state strategy, shepherd-
ing through Congress state-specific wilderness bills in order to circumvent
RARE II and pressure wilderness opponents. The state-by-state strategy
quickly became a complicated set of negotiations—made even more com-
plicated by Johnson’s lawsuit—that hinged on the fate of the acres left to
“further study.” Fearful that the Johnson suit opened the door to innumer-
able legal challenges by environmentalists, the timber industry pushed for
statutory release—also called “hard release”—that would definitively des-
ignate certain lands not wilderness. Environmentalists fought the concept,
arguing that Congressional review of wilderness already contained “suffi-
ciency language” that effectively released nonwilderness to logging. They
advocated “soft release” language that indicated nonwilderness while leav-
ing open the possibility of future wilderness designation. Occasionally, the
need for soft release led the Club and the Society to advocate state bills that
recommended even less acreage than did RARE II.72
The final disposition of roadless lands in national forests remained a
subject of negotiation for decades, and for radical environmentalists those
negotiations were evidence of the mainstream groups’ culture of compro-
mise. Years later, Foreman described RARE II as a decisive moment that
convinced him of the modern environmental movement’s ineffectiveness.
“We didn’t want a lawsuit,” he wrote, “because we knew we could win and
were afraid of the political consequences of such a victory. We might make
some powerful senators and representatives angry. So those of us in Wash-
ington were plotting how to keep the grassroots in line. Something about
all this seemed wrong to me.” Soon after the initial RARE II announce-
ment, Foreman left the Wilderness Society and helped found Earth First!73
EARTH FIRST! AND WILDERNESS
Earth First! was a question before it was an answer. The question was how
to avoid the compromises of RARE II and the political process more gen-
erally. The wilderness movement, as James Morton Turner makes clear,
was for most of the twentieth century a reform movement that worked
A Radical Break 121
comfortably within the bounds of conventional political institutions. Even

as social protest movements took a radical turn in the 1960s, for wilderness
advocates “a liberal faith in the federal government and the legislative sys-
tem remained an animating force.”74 Turner considers wilderness a political
process as much as a place, a process that involved people who lived near
wilderness, national groups that lobbied for it, and congressional repre-
sentatives with the power to designate it. When Dave Foreman and Bart
Koehler left the Wilderness Society in 1979, they questioned that process
and that liberal faith, and the Society’s increasing commitment to profes-
sionalization, centralization, and a political culture marked by the failures
and compromises of RARE II. Earth First!ers never abandoned conven-
tional reform, but they never stopped criticizing it and insisting that it suc-
ceeded only so far as it was spurred by radical thought and action.
To the degree that the word makes any sense applied to Earth First!,
“officially” the group’s founding took place at a ranch in Wyoming in the
summer of 1980. But the group was born several months earlier, when Dave
Foreman, Ron Kezar, Bart Koehler, Mike Roselle, and Howie Wolke spent
a week in and around the Pinacate Desert of northern Mexico. Most of the
five were either current or former staffers of major environmental organiza-
tions: Wolke of FOE, Kezar of the Sierra Club, and Koehler and Foreman
of the Wilderness Society. Their long association with mainstream groups
insulated them from charges of not giving conventional methods a chance.
They had tried convention and found it insufficient to the task. On the
way back from northern Mexico to Foreman’s home in Albuquerque, the
conservationists began to imagine a new group based both geographically
and culturally outside of Washington, D.C. and committed to a no-holds-
barred form of environmental advocacy. They chose the name Earth First.
Later they would add a mandatory exclamation mark as radical ecocentrism
increasingly punctuated their actions.75
The group drove all the way to northern Mexico in part because the envi-
ronmental writer Edward Abbey called the Pinacate “the final test of des-
ert rathood.”76 A few years earlier Abbey had finished The Monkey Wrench
Gang, a novel about a band of eco-saboteurs who traveled throughout the
Southwest disrupting or dismantling development projects. Earth First!
drew inspiration from the spirit and the form of Abbey’s fictional group.
122 A Radical Break
Like the Monkey Wrench Gang, Earth First! would fight against indus-
trial society directly. And like the Monkey Wrench Gang, Earth First!
would avoid professionalism whenever possible. Although it eventually
established a journal, a nonprofit foundation, and a modest publication
business, Earth First! never maintained offices, membership lists, formal
chapters, or salaried employees. Earth First!ers considered themselves part
of a movement rather than an organization. To be part of Earth First!, all
an aspiring radical had to do was show up (see figure 3.2).
If there is a particular reason that so much environmental activism in the
twentieth century sprang from the American desert, it is probably the char-
acter of industrial development there. Aridity defines not only the desert’s
geographical identity but also its industrial infrastructure. Agriculture and
human habitation in the American desert require water, and water requires
large-scale engineering. The arid West is crisscrossed with aqueducts,
siphons, and tunnels carrying water, with empty riverbeds where water
Figure 3.2 Earth First!ers, Ron Kezar, Ken Sanders, Bart Koehler, Howie Wolke, Dave Fore-
man, Mike Roselle, Roger Featherstone, Nancy Morton, and Shaaron Netherton in Tucson
in 1985. Earth First! had no formal offices but in the early 1980s, the group was informally
based in Tucson. Photo courtesy Dave Foreman.
A Radical Break 123
used to be and full riverbeds where water never flowed before. Water in the
West is impounded in hundreds of reservoirs and contained by thousands
of dams. The energy to move all of that water, and to electrify the cities and
farms that consume it, comes from generators within dams or from coal
mined in desert mountains and fed to power plants throughout the region.
The industrial base of human civilization is more apparent and glaring in
the desert West, where it is thrown into relief by not only the stark, open
space but also the monumental effort required to establish cities and towns
in such an unforgiving environment.77
But amid that network of pipes and pump stations, strip mines and
sluices, one single structure came to represent the ethos of industrializa-
tion in the desert more than any other: Glen Canyon Dam. Glen Canyon
Dam was not the biggest dam in the West; it was not even the biggest
dam on the Colorado River. It was not the most expensive or the most
obtrusive, and it did not contain more water than any other dam. But it
was the most despised. In the early twentieth century, conservationists in
California regretted few projects more than the O’Shaugnessy Dam, over
which John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had their greatest battle and which,
in the end, held back the Tuolumne River and inundated Hetch Hetchy
Valley. Glen Canyon Dam, which checked the Colorado and flooded Glen
Canyon with a reservoir called Lake Powell, produced an equal sense of
despondency but even greater anger among late-twentieth century conser-
vationists in the West.78
In David Brower’s own estimation, Glen Canyon was his greatest mis-
take, the canyon he sacrificed sight unseen for the sake of political expedi-
ency, “the place no one knew.” The dam remained for the rest of Brower’s
career a reminder of what compromise could lead to. For Edward Abbey,
it was a symbol of industrial civilization’s disregard for wilderness and the
natural world. In his more measured moments he recommended systemati-
cally dismantling the dam and letting nature reclaim the drained reservoir.
More often, he fantasized about blowing it up. The cover illustration for his
1977 collection of essays, The Journey Home, showed the Colorado breaking
through a crumbling Glen Canyon Dam.79
Earth First! adopted Abbey’s attitude, acknowledging Glen Canyon
Dam’s place at the top of any list of industrial offenses in the desert.
124 A Radical Break
The group staged its first action, or prank, at the dam in March 1981. “The
finest fantasy of eco-warriors in the West,” Dave Foreman wrote soon after,
“is the destruction of the dam and the liberation of the Colorado.” With
dozens of sympathizers watching, Foreman and several others unrolled a
three-hundred-foot strip of black plastic down the front of the dam, cre-
ating the illusion of a crack in the solid concrete barrier and, by impli-
cation, in the entire industrial infrastructure of the West. Abbey himself
addressed the crowd soon after, telling them to oppose the development
of the region by corporations and public agencies. “And if opposition is
not enough,” he said, summarizing his own philosophy and that of the
new group that had embraced it, “we must resist. And if resistance is not
enough, then subvert.”80
Subversion, for Earth First!, followed from the ecocentric ideas that dis-
tinguished its own view of wilderness advocacy from that of mainstream
organizations. Earth First! considered the wilderness bills of the early 1980s
nothing but half measures, and said so in letters to the Sierra Club, Wilder-
ness Society, FOE, and National Audubon Society, as well as in personal
visits to the offices of the Oregon Natural Resources Defense Council and
the Idaho Conservation League. When Montana’s congressional delega-
tion tried to determine the disposition of the state’s RARE II lands with
the Montana Wilderness Act of 1984, Earth First! slammed the Wilder-
ness Society for supporting a version of the bill that would release millions
of acres from wilderness designation, asking whether the Society—and in
particular lobbyist Peter Coppelman—“is now supporting the destruction
of defacto wilderness.”81 Coppelman defended the Society’s position. “In
my view the coalition proposal is a strong proposal which will be taken
seriously in the legislative process,” he explained. “That distinguishes it
from the Earth First! proposal to designate as wilderness every single acre
of forest roadless area remaining in Montana.” Earth First!’s position, Bill
Devall responded, might be less realistic but it advanced a set of views that
compromise would undermine. “For supporters of a deeper ecology move-
ment,” he told Coppelman, “it is important to work within the political
process but to always remember that our values are very, very different from
the dominant social paradigm.” To abandon those values, Devall insisted,
was to “provide more legitimacy for the existing political system.”82
A Radical Break 125
Wilderness preservation could be as much a critique of “the existing

political system” as an example of it. Even more: it could be a critique of
modern society itself and what David Ehrenfeld called “the arrogance of
humanism.” This was true in both a philosophical and a material sense. For
Earth First!, wilderness and ecocentric thought aligned. “In a true Earth-
radical group,” Foreman wrote in 1981, “concern for wilderness preservation
must be the keystone. . . . Wilderness says: Human beings are not domi-
nant, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form
on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession.”83 To respect
wilderness was to recognize the ethical limits of human activity. Wilderness
constituted a moral boundary as much as a geographical one.
As much as wilderness was morally freestanding, though, it was also
materially connected to a much larger collection of environmental harms
and potential catastrophes. When radical environmentalists talked about
the erosion of wilderness, crisis environmentalism never strayed far from
their minds. For most radicals, wilderness degradation acted as both a sign
and a cause of much broader environmental disaster. Pollution, extinction,
overpopulation, and the disruption of planetary cycles all intersected with
the plight of wilderness. This was not a new view; it had been percolat-
ing at the Sierra Club’s wilderness conferences in the 1950s, and the Club’s
Proclamation on Wilderness of 1970 stated, “Portions of this planet must
be protected from that impact of man which is now producing ecological
catastrophe.”84 The following year David Brower—by then head of Friends
of the Earth—spoke before a congressional subcommittee about popula-
tion stabilization. Brower turned immediately to the topic he considered
most vital to questions of planetary survival. “It is wilderness, and what it
stands for,” he told the subcommittee, “that taught conservationists the
folly of the idea of numbers without end.”85
Earth First! took that lesson to heart. Although wilderness remained the
political and philosophical focus, a much broader assault on nonhuman
nature constituted the crisis at hand. “Clearly, the conservation battle is
not one of merely protecting outdoor recreation opportunities, nor a mat-
ter of elitist aesthetics, nor ‘wise management’ of natural resources,” read an
Earth First! pamphlet explaining the group’s purpose. “It is a battle for life
itself, for the continued flow of evolution.”86 For Earth First!, wilderness
126 A Radical Break
made up the philosophical bedrock of ecocentric thought and the material

base of the nonhuman world. It also sat, stated or unstated, at the center of
any environmental crisis.
Earth First!’s fixation on wilderness as the antithesis of modern human
civilization and as the source of all balance in a roiling world earned it
criticism in the 1980s and for long after. According to critic Emma Marris,
a “high opinion of pristine wilderness and low opinion of human changes
to the landscape” marked the guileless views of wilderness absolutists,
views that devolved from the “pristineness approach” of the Wilderness
Act to the “purist conservation” of Earth First!87 Skeptics have pointed
out the particular, romantic, and often exclusive premises of wilderness
valorization; the ways that wilderness parks have catered to a white, mid-
dle-class visitorship while both marginalizing and dispossessing longtime
users and inhabitants; and how supposedly pure wilderness has always
been at least in part the product of human action and intention. There
is, William Cronon writes, “nothing natural about the concept of wilder-
ness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of
the very history it seeks to deny.”88
These were and remain essential questions about the idea of wilder-
ness, so essential that Earth First! could never answer them to even its own
supporters’ complete satisfaction. But wilderness enthusiasts were never
as naïve nor as reductive as some of their detractors have suggested. The
debate about what can be classified as “wilderness” and whether human
changes rule out such classification began within the environmental move-
ment itself. While wilderness advocates spoke to the public in sometimes
soaring language, in their own private discussions with each other and with
legislators they inevitably dealt in the practical details that rendered wil-
derness management a series of human choices. At the Sierra Club’s third
wilderness conference in 1953—more than a decade before passage of the
Wilderness Act—a panel on “the wilderness idea” dealt not with absolutes
but with degrees of wilderness, including buffer zones, accommodation of
livestock, and the use of built structures. Olaus Murie grouped wilderness
protection with gardening, both part of a shift toward “appreciation of
natural things”; and Howard Zahniser said, “The concept of wilderness is
something man has thought of; its values are human values.”89
A Radical Break 127
As James Morton Turner has explained, by the 1970s the Forest Ser-
vice, not conservationists, insisted on a strict definition of wilderness that
ruled out most human activity. The agency’s “purity policies” were a way
of limiting wilderness designation by defining it as narrowly as possible.90
During the Alaska campaign Pamela Rich of Friends of the Earth wrote
to Harold Sparck of Bethel, Alaska, to assure him that FOE supported
limited use of snowmobiles by Native Alaskans in wilderness areas while
the Forest Service might “interpret the Wilderness Act in a very ‘puristic’
sense” in order to restrict such use.91 Several years later the Wilderness
Society’s Bill Cunningham told the Owyhee Cattlemen’s Association
that the Forest Service “has used impossibly strict grazing management in
wilderness areas to turn ranchers against future wilderness designations.”92
In 1983 when Howie Wolke criticized the Wilderness Act as too weak,
one of the few qualities he found praiseworthy was the act’s flexibility and
its strategic ambiguity in defining wilderness as an area “which generally
appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the
imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.” That loose definition
with its many modifiers, Wolke noted, allowed for consideration of even
places that had suffered mining or clear cutting. In drawing boundaries
around wilderness, the environmental movement was more often agnostic
and the Forest Service dogmatic.93
Within the Earth First! community wilderness served more as a general
orientation than as an absolute. From the beginning, Earth First! advocated
“rewilding”—the remaking of wilderness through the removal of develop-
ment and infrastructure, including even roads—so pristine, “untouched”
nature was never a fundamental concern. In 1984, the year after they cel-
ebrated some of Earth First!’s early forest actions, the editors of southwest
Oregon’s bioregional journal Siskiyou Country wrote, “Our bioregion no
longer exists in a pristine ‘natural’ state. We find ourselves inhabiting a place
which has a history: millenia upon millenia [sic] in which people have lived
with, on, or against the land.”94 Some Earth First!ers agreed. “Many recent
wilderness management plans exemplify a tendency to view human pres-
ence in wild places as unnatural,” George Wuerthner wrote years later. “This
philosophical assumption is based on a mythical and sentimental view of
pristine wilderness.”95
128 A Radical Break
That mythical and sentimental view had a place in Earth First!, but moral
certainty could also demand rather than preclude subtle distinctions. To
pine for pure wilderness was to understand that it had disappeared long ago
and so to accept whatever remained. “Earth has been so ravaged by the pox
of humanity that pristine wilderness . . . no longer exists,” said Earth First!
stalwart Reed Noss. “A place may feel wild and lonely, but it is injured.”96
Noss echoed what Aldo Leopold once suggested in a more measured tone:
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in
a world of wounds.”97 In that wounded world conservationists had to fight
for what they could, including rewilding places profoundly transformed by
human activity. Sometimes they dreamed big: Howie Wolke insisted that
wilderness meant “multi-million acre chunks that represent all major eco-
systems complete with all known biological components.”98 At other times
their dreams were more modest. “Yes, let’s battle for wilderness,” Earth
First!er Tony Moore replied to Wolke, “but let’s fight equally hard to pro-
tect this planet in every way we can. Wilderness is not removed from Earth,
it’s part of Her.”99 Protecting big wilderness remained the ultimate form of
respect humans could pay to the nonhuman world, but never the only one.
DIRECT ACTION
“In my view, Earth First! means direct action,” Mike Roselle wrote in 1987.
“In fact, it is because of direct action that EF! exists.”100 Radical environ-
mentalists’ use of their own bodies to protest whaling, logging, and road-
building signaled a deep suspicion of what James Morton Turner calls
the wilderness movement’s “liberal faith in the federal government and
the legislative system.”101 To engage in physical protest was to circumvent
established political processes. By harassing whalers or blockading log-
ging trucks, radicals expressed their opposition not only to the plundering
of the natural world but also to what they considered the protracted and
ineffective methods of the mainstream movement. Direct action consti-
tuted a political position as much as a tactical choice. Roselle, who woke
up practically every day ready to be arrested, was the kinetic center of civil
disobedience for Earth First! and believed in “letting those actions speak
for our philosophy.” He threw together actions and ideas until they became
A Radical Break 129
completely entangled.102 So did Doc Sarvis of Edward Abbey’s Monkey

Wrench Gang, who advised his fellow eco-saboteurs, “Let our practice form
our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.”103
In one form or another direct action had always been a part of the mod-
ern environmental movement. Well before Earth Day, the alternative press
regularly reported on environmental sabotage. In 1968 the Express Times
described how a saboteur called “the Wasp” blew up a Pacific Gas & Electric
tower in California’s Bay Area, hoping to stop factories from polluting by
cutting off their power.104 In 1971 Harry related the exploits of “the Fox,”
a Midwest “ecoguerilla” who sealed an industrial smokestack, clogged a
factory’s drainage system, and dumped a jar of effluent in the offices of
U.S. Steel. “The eco-guerilla movement is growing,” Harry observed, “as
patience with the ‘proper authorities’ wears thin.”105 The Ann Arbor Argus
told of a group of “billboard bandits” who targeted roadside advertising
throughout Michigan.106 And Northwest Passage described how Florida’s
clandestine “Eco-Commando Force ’70” dropped seven hundred pre-
addressed cards in sealed bottles into sewage outlets that discharged near
the ocean, over a hundred of which ended up on the desks of the Miami
News and the governor’s office, mailed from towns and cities all along
Florida’s east coast.107
Direct action on behalf of the environment in the 1970s was usually
anonymous and covert, and often limited to isolated incidents. Some of
the acts targeted particular projects or companies, and others implicated
modern industry more generally. Most were one-time actions designed to
promote awareness or to inspire others. When the perpetrators communi-
cated with the public, they tended to describe themselves as catalysts trying
to trigger a chain reaction. Their deeds, if they worked, would make sparks
that could ignite a popular and sympathetic response.
The first environmental group to successfully adopt direct action not
just as a tenuous gambit but as an organizing principle was Greenpeace.
As Frank Zelko has made clear, Greenpeace excelled at drawing attention
to dangers and injustices by staging audacious encounters. Neither furtive
nor shy about its actions, Greenpeace confronted its industrial enemies in
broad daylight. Instead of focusing on single escapades the group garnered
enough support to organize long campaigns of persistent agitation that
130 A Radical Break
generated controversy and produced political pressure. Greenpeace was less

a single spark than a steadily burning fuse.108
When Greenpeace began it was not really an environmental group, and
it was not called Greenpeace. In 1969 a group of peace activists in Vancou-
ver, most of them Quakers, formed a group to oppose U.S. testing of atomic
bombs underneath the island of Amchitka, near the western end of Alas-
ka’s Aleutian chain. They were too late to stop a one-megaton explosion in
October 1969, but they vowed to fight the next blast. The group—initially
called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, in reference to fears of a tidal
wave from the underground nuclear tests—decided to sail a boat close to
Amchitka during the next explosion. This tactic, arrived at largely because
so few other options were available, was designed to illustrate the threats
posed by nuclear tests and to give the military some pause. It was also an
extension of the Quaker philosophy of “bearing witness” to injustice, a
silent condemnation that became a hallmark of Greepeace.109
The boldness and, for some, foolhardiness of sailing toward an atomic
explosion demonstrated not only the sense of urgency within the Don’t
Make a Wave Committee but also the limitations of more mainstream peace
and environmental organizations. Those organizations took Amchitka seri-
ously, not least because of the island’s status as a national wildlife refuge.
But the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission’s claims to “national
security” and the rapid pace of events worked against conventional tactics
like lobbying and litigation. The Sierra Club had been following the AEC’s
plans since 1965, publicly opposing the tests alongside several major envi-
ronmental groups. Quickly, however, environmentalists realized the limi-
tations of their influence as they confronted a powerful and determined
Cold War state. An internal Sierra Club memo from 1969 advised, “Alas-
kan conservation groups should not go out of their way to pick a fight
with AEC. We are already against ‘progress’ and can’t afford to be against
national defense too.”110 Just a few days later, James Moorman, one of the
Club’s lawyers, submitted a report on Amchitka strategy that pointed out
loopholes allowing the AEC to circumvent the Department of the Interior
and the Endangered Species Act. Given the competing claims to national as
against environmental interest, he guessed that federal courts were unlikely
to grant a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction. When
A Radical Break 131
the time frame was not years but months, and the stakes were not the siting
of a dam or the designation of a park but the conduct of nuclear war, the
legal system on which environmental groups relied turned sharply against
them. “Unless we have some solid evidence of serious damage,” Moorman
concluded, “we would be in the position of trying to stop a $200,000,000
defense expenditure for the principle of the thing. Under the circumstances,
I would not recommend a suit.”111
What Moorman did recommend were “legal guerilla actions.”112 Leading
up to the initial test, environmental groups flooded federal agencies with
requests for complete documentation of the possible effects of a nuclear
blast at Amchitka. When the requested information came slowly or not
at all, the organizations threatened lawsuits.113 These tactics failed to stop
or even slow the AEC’s plans. When the AEC announced it would stage
another test in 1971, environmental and peace groups banded together to
form the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility and promptly filed suit
against the AEC for an insufficient environmental impact statement. Suing
over an EIS, a tactic that had worked in environmentalists’ favor so many
times, in this case achieved only brief delays.114
The strongest legal weapons the environmental movement wielded were
no match for an atomic bomb. Major environmental organizations knew
this, as did the AEC. The Don’t Make a Wave Committee suspected this as
well, and so it chartered a fishing boat, the Phyllis Cormack, which left Van-
couver for the treacherous North Pacific seas in the fall of 1971 amid consid-
erable press coverage. After a temporary AEC cancellation, a ship change,
and inclement weather, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee was still several
hundred miles from Amchitka on November 6 when the United States
detonated a five-megaton blast several thousand feet underneath the island.
The Amchitka blast did not cause the earthquake or tidal wave that
many environmentalists feared and there was little evidence of leaked radia-
tion, but it created a half-mile wide impact crater, killed hundreds of sea
otters and an unknown number of fish and birds, and sent a shock wave
measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale through the island, the nearby ocean,
and a small, spring-mounted concrete bunker on the far side of Amchitka
where James Schlesinger, the chairman of the AEC, sat with his family in a
risky bid to reassure the public of the test’s safety. The blast also propelled
132 A Radical Break
the Don’t Make a Wave Committee to international recognition and lent it

a reputation for brash, confrontational actions.
The Don’t Make a Wave Committee soon changed its name to Green-
peace and changed its focus to whaling and ecological concerns. Even as
the group’s founding members sailed toward Amchitka, they had begun
to move toward more specifically environmental issues. Robert Hunter
later described a formative moment when the Phyllis Cormack docked at
Akutan, Alaska, the site of an abandoned whaling station, and the crew
discussed how few whales they had seen on their voyage across the Gulf of
Alaska. One of Hunter’s disgusted companions asked, “Who wants to save
the human race anyway?”115 Greenpeace’s founders lived and worked in a
coastal city that lay along the migratory routes of gray whales, humpback
whales, and orcas. The group drew from the city’s countercultural commu-
nity, and it took little to convince its members that whales were part of
a “planetary consciousness” threatened by the modern world. Greenpeace
activists began using fast and maneuverable inflatable boats called Zodi-
acs to position themselves between whales and the harpoon guns of whal-
ing fleets in what would become the organization’s signature tactic. “Since
1975,” Greenpeace explained to its supporters after a confrontation with
Spanish whalers in 1980, “Greenpeace has conducted direct action cam-
paigns against commercial whaling fleets operating in both the Pacific and
Atlantic oceans. These peaceful non-violent confrontations are based on
the belief that it is useless to wait for governments to act while the last of
the great whales die.”116
Greenpeace’s commitment to peace and nonviolence was absolute.
Despite its best intentions, though, the group opened the door to a more
aggressive style of activism, and Paul Watson walked through it. One of the
Don’t Make a Wave Committee’s earliest members, Watson’s penchant for
confrontation led to his ouster from Greenpeace in 1977. He would go on
to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a close ally of Earth First!
and a group known for mining whaling ships in port and ramming them at
sea. “Sometimes the only way you can stop outlaws,” Watson said in 1981, “is
by becoming an outlaw yourself.”117
The year Earth First! was born was the year direct action seemed to grip the
environmental movement. In January 1979 the Sea Shepherd Conservation
A Radical Break 133
Society set sail on its first ship, the Sea Shepherd. By the end of the year the
Sea Shepherd lay at the bottom of a Portuguese harbor after its crew rammed
an illegal whaler, surrendered to the Portuguese Navy, and then scuttled their
own ship rather than risk its falling into the hands of whalers. In May a rag-
tag conservation group called Friends of the River (FOR) took on the Army
Corps of Engineers in Northern California. FOR had spent years battling
the construction of New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River, a dam that
would tame a spirited river and flood a canyon treasured by whitewater raf-
ters. FOR tried rallies, legal actions, an appeal to the Historic Preservation
Act, and a ballot initiative to protect the Stanislaus under California’s Wild
and Scenic Rivers Act. None of those efforts worked. Finally, as the recently
completed New Melones Dam slowly flooded the river canyon, FOR’s Mark
Dubois walked to the river’s edge and chained himself to a rock. A few close
friends knew where Dubois was and where he had hidden the key. The Army
Corps of Engineers knew only that filling the reservoir would mean killing
him. Dubois remained hidden for a week until the Corps agreed to des-
ignate a temporary fill-level limit. “I always knew I would have to make a
personal statement at some time,” Dubois said of his risky act.118
By the end of the 1970s the door that Greenpeace had cracked was wide
open. “Now, according to some—a growing number—it is time to mutiny,”
the Chicago Tribune reported in 1981. “Nature’s bounty, they believe, is on
the brink of disaster. Normal channels lead nowhere. Ecological activism,
a movement of mutineers, has been born.”119 Greenpeace’s Robert Hunter,
long an advocate of nonviolence, began to question that inflexible principle
in the wake of his old comrade Paul Watson’s militance. Sensing a moment
of crisis, he wrote about eco-radicalism for New Age, saying of nonviolence,
“so far history has not shown much evidence that the strategy is inevitably
going to triumph. It is nice to think it must, but the trouble is, even if the
meek do finally inherit the earth, there may not be much of it left to enjoy.”120
“It is past time for this discussion,” Dave Foreman wrote approvingly
to the editor of New Age. “I think that the basic problem, however, goes
beyond merely the question of whether violence (directed against either
machines or people) is justified in protecting the earth. The real question
is that of radicalizing the environmental movement.” The answer to that
question, Foreman made clear, was aggressive action in defense of the wild
134 A Radical Break
and a de-centering of human beings politically, geographically, and philo-

sophically. “The only hope for Earth and her millions of residents (besides
humans) is to declare vast areas of the globe off limits to industrial civiliza-
tion,” Foreman wrote. The answer, then, was an ecocentric, direct-action
wilderness movement. The answer was Earth First! (see figure 3.3)121
Born in the southwestern desert, Earth First! grew into maturity in the
forests of the Pacific Coast. Those forests stretch from southern Alaska to
northern California and, together, constitute the greatest conifer forest on
the planet. By the late twentieth century, the trees had been disappearing
for a hundred years. Having decimated the hardwood forests of the North-
east and the pine forests of the upper Midwest, Americans began inten-
sively logging the Pacific Coast in the late nineteenth century. Much of
what remained in the 1980s stood on public land, and attempts to protect it
pitted environmentalists against a Forest Service that, Earth First! believed,
reflexively served the logging industry. It was during these campaigns that
Earth First! established itself as a direct-action group willing to push far
beyond conventional tactics.
The trees that environmentalists hoped to protect could only exist on
the Pacific Coast. Over many millennia of competition, conifers lost out to
more adaptable broad-leaved trees throughout North America, but on the
steep mountains and hillsides of the Pacific Northwest a temperate climate
that mixed dry periods with rain and fog allowed the conifers—spruces,
cedars, hemlocks, redwoods, and Douglas firs—to thrive. While the rugged
conditions supported fewer species of life overall than some other forests,
the size of the trees produced a greater mass of life, per acre, than even the
tropical rainforests. Within this idiosyncratic forest environment was an
even more unusual place: the Siskiyou Mountains in northern California
and southern Oregon. Never breaching eight thousand feet and lacking
a view of the ocean, the Siskiyous might have been overshadowed by the
towering Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges to the east or the more scenic
Coast Range to the west had they not distinguished themselves as one of
the greatest storehouses of biological diversity in the United States, a result
of having started as a string of volcanic islands before gradually migrating to
the mainland to make an east-west bridge linking nearby ranges.122
Figure 3.3 Dave Foreman, Bart Koehler, and fellow activists demonstrate Earth First!-style
wilderness activism. Photo courtesy Dave Foreman.
136 A Radical Break
Some of that biological diversity already enjoyed protection as the

Kalmiopsis Wilderness. But the Kalmiopsis sat amid many thousands of
acres of “de facto wilderness,” roadless and undeveloped land lacking the
Wilderness Act’s thick armor. Each logging road was another chink in a
de facto wilderness’s shield. The Forest Service—the greatest roadbuilding
agency in the world, its network of logging roads far longer than the inter-
state highway system—started to penetrate the area around the Kalmiopsis
soon after passage of the Wilderness Act. During the 1970s, as the Forest
Service began and completed RARE II only to have it mired in legal chal-
lenges, environmentalists in Oregon worked with Senator Mark Hatfield
on a statewide wilderness bill. Especially at issue was the area directly to
the north of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, an area that included old-growth
trees treasured by both environmentalists and logging companies, although
for different reasons. An ally of environmentalists except when it came
to forests and the timber industry, Hatfield defeated several legislative
attempts to create a northern addition. Then in the early 1980s the Forest
Service began to build a road to Bald Mountain that would run just north
of the Kalmiopsis, effectively cutting the established wilderness off from
any potential additions and opening up a large portion of the remaining de
facto wilderness to logging.123
Earth First! wed itself to direct action—and specifically to civil dis-
obedience—on Bald Mountain. First drawn to the region in 1982 to fight
the Gasquet-Orleans (G-O) Road in Northern California, Earth First!
quickly shifted its attention to Bald Mountain when a court halted con-
struction of the G-O Road for violating the religious protections of several
Native American peoples. Volunteers from Oregon and Northern Cali-
fornia, introduced to Earth First! through the G-O Road fight or during
one of the group’s “road show” tours through the region months earlier,
mounted blockades on the still incomplete Bald Mountain Road in late
April 1983. A half dozen or fewer people would stand across the road, arms
linked, preventing bulldozers from moving any further. Local sheriffs and
deputies took several hours to reach the remote site, so each blockade shut
down construction for at least half a day. By early May, activists were lock-
ing themselves to roadbuilding equipment with chains and handcuffs,
costing the construction crews even more time. The blockades wavered
A Radical Break 137
unpredictably between long periods of quiet standoff and brief moments

of angry confrontation. On May 10 a bulldozer charged a group of activists
with its blade down, burying them in a pile of dirt. On May 12 road workers
drove a pickup truck straight into Dave Foreman, knocking him down and
then dragging him for dozens of yards. In June Earth First! took the fight
to the courts, joining the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) in
a lawsuit against the Forest Service modeled after Huey Johnson’s challenge
to RARE II years earlier. A U.S. district court judge granted a temporary
restraining order that halted the road’s progress. Earth First! held its fourth
annual gathering in the Siskiyous, bringing together hundreds of support-
ers for what was to be the largest direct action yet. The swift decision by the
court left Earth First!ers celebrating rather than blockading.124
The Bald Mountain fight ended up in front of a judge, but Earth First!ers
believed their blockades played a key role. The Sierra Club Legal Defense
Fund had failed when it sued to prevent a road over Bald Mountain a year
earlier without challenging RARE II. After Earth First! stirred up renewed
interest, the ONRC found locals willing to fund a more aggressive suit.
Perhaps even more important in shaping long-term efforts to protect and
expand wilderness in Oregon, the Earth First! actions radicalized those
who participated. “I no longer have doubts about my commitment to
action NOW for the wilderness,” Molly Campbell wrote of her experience
in the blockades. “If we wait and go through the ‘proper channels’ one more
time, there will be no forests left . . . the strength of my beliefs and convic-
tions grew after facing the angered bulldozer driver.” Ric Bailey explained,
“We feel in our hearts that we have contributed to a great cause, and helped
with the advent of a new tactic in the protection of wilderness in America:
Direct Action.”125 And Karen Pickett told a judge after her arrest that if
her dedication to wilderness and species diversity was sincere, “then it is
my responsibility to act when I see things being destroyed.”126 Earth First!
paired particular campaigns for wilderness protection with the greater goal
of convincing others that the interests of the natural world were no less
important than those of humans, and worth great risk.
Because participants often found their own convictions either confirmed
or strengthened, Earth First! actions tended to produce further Earth First!
actions. When legal measures failed, activists quickly took matters into
138 A Radical Break
their own hands. The year after the Bald Mountain blockades, protesters
launched actions around the proposed Middle Santiam Wilderness, draw-
ing bigger crowds and producing more arrests than the year before. The
Middle Santiam sat in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon’s Cascade
Range. At less than nine thousand acres, its size left it especially vulnerable
to industrial activities nearby. For years the Forest Service allowed logging
in Pyramid Creek, just upriver from the wilderness. To avoid landslides the
Forest Service had moved Pyramid Creek Road several times, inadvertently
rendering the steep hillside slopes unstable and showering silt into creeks
and rivers. Local activists, who organized as the Middle Santiam Wilder-
ness Committee, filed lawsuits and requested restraining orders against
timber sales and roads in the Pyramid Creek area, although the Middle
Santiam was only de facto wilderness. In June Congress passed an Oregon
wilderness bill, protecting hundreds of thousands of acres as wilderness and
releasing millions of acres to potential logging. In the Middle Santiam, the
bill protected 7,500 acres, a fraction of what environmentalists had hoped
for. Even before final passage of the Oregon wilderness bill, activists asso-
ciated with the Middle Santiam Wilderness Committee and Earth First!
formed a new outfit, the Cathedral Forest Action Group (CFAG). CFAG
declared that it would fight for a complete moratorium on logging and
roadbuilding in old-growth forests; for protection for an eighty-thousand-
acre area the group dubbed the “Santiam Cathedral Forest”; for an end to
construction of the Pyramid Creek Road; and for a restructuring of Forest
Service policy away from logging and toward wilderness protection.127
The summer of 1984 saw more traffic than usual on Pyramid Creek Road,
much of it protesters heading in to block logging trucks and sheriffs head-
ing out to take protesters to jail. At the end of the summer, about a hundred
activists gathered at a park in Portland before marching to the Region 6
Forest Service main office. The regional forester slipped out of the building
before the protesters arrived, but a handful of Earth First!ers and Green-
peace members managed to slip in before police surrounded the office. The
group emerged on the fourth-floor balcony and unfurled a banner that
read, “Stop The U.S. Forest Service/Save Our Old Growth/Earth First!”
Eventually a deputy regional forester agreed to a meeting with two activists.
When that meeting produced no results, two members of CFAG chained
A Radical Break 139
themselves to the office’s doors. The Portland Police called in a SWAT team
to clear the office and place the two chained to the doors under arrest.128
Direct action, because it demonstrated an unusual degree of commit-
ment and conviction, served as an implicit statement of the basic Earth
First! philosophy that people could and should care as much about nature’s
interests as about their own. As such, it was also an implicit statement of
the difference between mainstream and radical environmentalism. Direct
action made clear the belief—righteous to some, naïve to others—that the
urgency of environmental destruction demanded an immediate, uninhib-
ited response, and that the larger environmental movement had failed to
provide it.
The riskier the action, the more resonant the statement. In the Middle
Santiam, Earth First! pioneered one of the riskiest tactics used to pre-
vent logging: the tree sit. It quickly became one of the archetypal actions
employed by radical environmentalists, the land-based version of Green-
peace’s placing their Zodiacs between whales and harpoons. Tree sitters
on platforms high in old-growth forests not only caught the attention of
reporters but also forced loggers to choose between sparing the occupied
trees or risking a human life. The original Earth First! tree sitter was Mikal
Jakubal, an experienced rock climber who had heard of Australian activists
occupying trees and experimented with the idea early in June 1985. Several
months later Earth First! perfected the tactic and managed over a month of
consecutive tree sits in the Squaw Creek watershed of the Middle Santiam.
For decades after, tree sits persisted as a standard feature of environmen-
tal battles in the Pacific Northwest, involving on one side more and more
elaborate platforms and strategies for resupplying sitters, and on the other
side stakeouts, cranes, and eventually professional tree climbers trained in
dismantling the platforms.129
Earth First!’s use of increasingly audacious direct actions made main-
stream environmentalists wary. Even before the Oregon tree sits, radicals
had caused enough of a stir that established organizations felt moved to
comment or else remain conspicuously silent. “They’re sort of a parody:
they don’t do anything,” one Sierra Club staffer told a reporter, contrasting
Earth First! with those environmentalists “who are actually out there slug-
ging away, putting on their neckties, going into offices, writing legislation,
140 A Radical Break
turning up at the hearings, filing comments on EISs, doing all that grungy
work that actually produces results.” The Wilderness Society’s William
Turnage worried that Earth First! reinforced an image of environmentalists
as “irresponsible and rather bizarre characters.” Cecil Andrus, the former
Secretary of the Interior, called Earth First!’s tactics “extremism that is irre-
sponsible, illegal and totally unacceptable to responsible conservationists
in America.” The Club’s deputy conservation director, Doug Scott, agreed:
“I don’t think you can be a monkeywrencher and still expect to be taken as
a serious player in the political process,” he said. Michael McCloskey, the
Club’s executive director, refused to talk about Earth First!.130
Critics who considered direct action more flash than substance made an
important point: the protection offered by blockades and tree sits lasted
only so long as activists did. For that reason, Earth First! had to pair its
tactics with a philosophy that bred commitment and devotion. “Thus,” Bill
Devall and George Sessions wrote in 1984, “the process of ecological resis-
tance is both personal and collective.”131 Despite the blockades of 1983, the
1984 Oregon wilderness bill left the de facto wilderness north of the Kalmi-
opsis open to logging. In 1987 the Forest Service began planning timber
sales there. In the intervening years, Earth First! had maintained not just
an interest but a physical presence in the north Kalmiopsis. Earth First!er
Lou Gold, a retired law professor from Brooklyn, kept a sporadic vigil
from a campsite near the Bald Mountain Road every summer from 1983
to 1987. With the north Kalmiopsis threatened again, Earth First! activists
returned to the area to rejoin Gold. By then Mike Roselle had organized
Earth First!’s Nomadic Action Group, a rapid response team ready to use
direct action to halt imminent threats. In 1987 Earth First! initiated sev-
eral years of blockades, lockdowns, tree sits, and at one point a group of
protesters sitting in the road with their feet encased in concrete. Although
the Forest Service took advantage of a fire to allow salvage logging in the
north Kalmiopsis, well over a decade of Earth First! actions helped pre-
vent any significant roadbuilding and kept alive the hope of enlarging the
Kalmiopsis Wilderness. After his arrest for blocking a bulldozer outside the
Kalmiopsis in 1987, at the same time as four other Earth First!ers began
a two-week jail term for occupying a log yarder, Roselle insisted that the
arrests and imprisonments couldn’t shake activists’ resolve. “They haven’t
A Radical Break 141
stopped Earth First! from protesting old growth cutting,” he said. “In fact,
we’re now even stronger.”132
CONCLUSION
The radical break that cleaved Earth First! from the mainstream envi-
ronmental movement was a political one that quickly became tactical
and philosophical too. Radicals grew frustrated with conventional lib-
eral democratic reform of the sort so many environmental organizations
had come to rely on. Conventional reform, they believed, could never be
a proportional response to the planetary crisis at hand. The profession-
alization of the movement and the culture of compromise that radicals
believed it bred, represented especially by RARE II, convinced some dis-
gruntled conservationists that environmentalism needed an infusion of
energy and ideas. The key idea radicals embraced, believing that it had
always animated what was most powerful about environmentalism, was
ecocentric thought: a rejection of the humanism that underlay so much of
the modern world. The most vital manifestation of that idea was the pro-
tection of wilderness. The energy came from direct action, from no lon-
ger depending on partial and incremental change and instead demanding,
urgently and emphatically, that species and ecosystems should be spared
from destruction.
The theory and practice of ecocentric, radical environmentalism raised
questions about what was central and what was marginal to the environ-
mental movement. Earth First!ers believed they were returning to the
basic premises of early conservation, to the ideas that had always given
environmentalism its most piercing cries. Its critics, throughout the 1980s,
asked to what degree such ideas bred reaction and misanthropy and
ignored social justice.
Even before Earth First! gained wide notoriety, Eugene Hargrove, the
editor of Environmental Ethics, worried about its ideas. Earth First! had
been inspired by Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Har-
grove wrote, and was at risk of moving from legitimate protests to violent
and immoral acts, acts which might “create a terrible backlash undo-
ing all the good that has been done” by the environmental movement.
142 A Radical Break
Environmentalists had often talked about “extending moral consideration

in some way to include nature,” but for Earth First! “nature, rather than
being included, is given priority.” That combination of an extreme philoso-
phy and a willingness to act on it was, for Hargrove, cause for concern. “In
the twentieth century,” he reminded readers, “terrorism . . . has been the last
resort when normal political action was frustrated,” but such measures were
uncalled for in protecting the natural world, as environmentalism “has been
an immensely successful political movement.”133
“Let’s have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly
violence . . . carried out against people and other living things. . . . Sabotage,
on the other hand, means the application of force against inanimate prop-
erty,” Abbey wrote in response. Bulldozers tearing up hillsides and dams
flooding canyons and valleys were acts of terrorism, he said, and the char-
acters in his novel—as well as, by implication, the activists those characters
inspired—“engage in industrial sabotage in order to defend a land they love
against industrial terrorism.” Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth
First!, let Abbey defend direct action and in a separate letter took up the
cause of greater limits to industrial civilization. “You say the environmental
movement has been immensely successful . . . ,” he wrote. “It appears to be
successful because it asks for so little and actually threatens the corporate
state to such a minor extent.” For both Abbey and Foreman, Hargrove’s
warnings about Earth First! epitomized exactly what was wrong with the
modern environmental movement. Too concerned with political niceties,
that movement would never risk serious confrontation with those in power
in order to defend the natural world. Too satisfied with token victories, it
would never present a significant challenge to the basic values of industrial
civilization. When Hargrove responded to Abbey and Foreman by asking
how anyone could support acts “both criminal and morally reprehensible
by normal moral or ethical standards,” Hargrove confirmed his opponents’
most fundamental complaint: conventional ethics was exactly what they
objected to. For them, effective environmentalism rested on countering the
anthropocentric values that were at the very center of industrial society.134
4
Public Lands and the

Public Good
On July 4, 1980 several hundred residents of Grand County, Utah gathered

in Moab, the county seat, to cheer on a bulldozer with “Sagebrush Rebel”
bumper stickers. As county commissioners denounced federal bureau-
cracy, the bulldozer scraped a road up to and just over the boundary of a
Bureau of Land Management wilderness study area, a violation of federal
law and one of the few direct actions in the anti-wilderness movement
known as the “sagebrush rebellion.” The slapdash road transgressed not
just a wilderness boundary but also the broader system of environmental
regulations governing public lands and even the authority of the federal
government. Grand County officials organized the event in opposition to
highhanded federal agencies, environmental extremists, and the misbegot-
ten alliance between them.1
It is tempting to think of the environmental movement as a product
of midcentury liberalism and as an enemy of the late twentieth-century
conservative ascendancy. That story allows historians to saddle Ronald
Reagan’s administration with major shifts in environmentalism’s fortunes:
the modern movement emerged in the 1960s and leapt to the top of the
nation’s political agenda on the strength of overwhelming public concern
and strong support in a still relatively liberal Washington, D.C., only to
144 Public Lands and the Public Good
be hobbled when Reagan’s election signaled the end of the modern lib-
eral era. But the Grand County bulldozer plowed into federal wilderness
months before Reagan’s election. As historians have looked more closely at
the 1970s and 1980s, they have found years of complicated political nego-
tiation in which the Reagan presidency was the culmination of political,
economic, and ideological trends already well under way rather than the
beginning of an inchoate conservatism.2
Any attempt to map environmentalism onto the Left or the Right
means negotiating the unruly terrains of both the state and the market.
Conservatives from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan used govern-
ment as a rhetorical foil, defining their own principles in opposition to
the state and defining liberalism as synonymous with “big government.”
But just as conservatives did not oppose the state as thoroughly as they
sometimes claimed, liberals did not uncritically align themselves with the
federal government. The historian Paul Sabin argues that public inter-
est environmental law brought to bear “an intensifying 1960s critique of
federal agencies and government power” in the name of a public good
that the state did not necessarily represent. “A new kind of liberalism—
skeptical and distrustful of government, yet still committed to collective
action by the state—had emerged in the heart of the liberal establish-
ment,” Sabin writes.3
Skepticism and distrust of the government emerged far outside of the
liberal establishment as well. Mainstream environmentalists who had relied
on state power for years began to question its effectiveness by the 1980s.
Radical environmentalists went much further, calling natural resource
agencies fundamentally corrupt and little different from extractive indus-
tries in their human-centered assault on the wild. Placing little faith in gov-
ernment or the democratic virtues it was supposed to represent, radicals
appealed to a sense of order and structure beyond human design. Generally,
this was a natural order of ecological relationships, but translating that nat-
ural order into policy was difficult to achieve through conventional liberal
democratic processes.
Uneasy with established procedures and institutions, radicals turned
to other political architectures. From its earliest days, Earth First! drew
from anarchist thought to explain the pitfalls built into systems of human
Public Lands and the Public Good 145
devising. Far less often but at times significantly, Earth First! subscribed to
an economic order of market relationships, and in doing so made common
cause with a New Right that was ostensibly the environmental movement’s
chief adversary. That partnership remained narrow, fleeting, and difficult,
but it made clear that radical environmentalists held few political commit-
ments beyond what they considered the interests of the nonhuman world.
And it suggested that environmentalism, like many other postwar politi-
cal movements, was neither liberal nor conservative in any obvious and
consistent way. In the 1970s mainstream environmentalists locked arms
with the federal government for pragmatic purposes. In the 1980s radical
environmentalists made clear the political and philosophical limits of that
partnership.
ENVIRONMENTALISM, CONSERVATISM,
AND THE SAGEBRUSH REBELLION
The state framed the relationship between environmentalism and con-

servatism. During the 1970s the environmental movement drew itself
closer to the federal government while the conservative movement set
itself apart, and those distinct trajectories made room for growing conser-
vative hostility toward environmental regulation. The distance between
the two movements stretched especially wide in the West, where debates
over public land management produced strenuous appeals to local auton-
omy and declamations against a faraway bureaucracy. Those appeals and
declamations rang loudest during the “sagebrush rebellion,” an attempt
by Western legislators to seize federal lands and hand them to state gov-
ernments. Even as the sagebrush rebellion heightened the differences
between environmentalists and anti-environmentalists, it demonstrated
how each side had a vacillating relationship to government. Westerners
were not entirely at odds with the federal government, and environmen-
talists were not entirely aligned. Radical environmentalists, in particular,
viewed federal agencies with suspicion as much as with favor. The dif-
ficulty of reconciling competing views of how public lands should be
used, and even of defining a “public good,” marked the limits of a plural
approach to land management.
The modern environmental and conservative movements were contem-

poraneous. Environmentalism gained broad support in the United States at
the same moment as conservatism reestablished its political relevance. After
several decades on the sidelines of American politics, conservatives took
the field in the late twentieth century. As scholars have recently empha-
sized, the 1960s was as much a decade of right-wing organization as of left-
wing agitation. Young conservatives grew frustrated with what was, in their
view, a centrist Republican Party cowed by the New Deal and decades of
liberal control in Washington, D.C. This New Right sought to take over
the party both politically and ideologically, its efforts coalescing around
Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Although Goldwater lost
the election, he inspired a generation of conservative activists who worked
to elect Ronald Reagan governor of California in 1966 and president of the
United States in 1980. At the same time, conservative thinkers as disparate
as Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Jerry Falwell, Irving Kristol, and William
Buckley, Jr. contributed to a collective critique of liberal ideas and policies.
In just two decades conservatism shifted from the margins to the center of
American politics and culture.4
As the New Right defined itself in reaction to the politics of race and
gender in the late twentieth century, so it defined itself against the envi-
ronmental movement. But that intellectual work had to overcome the ways
environmentalism and conservatism were not natural enemies. William
Buckley’s National Review, by the 1960s the voice of a nascent New Right,
briefly supported environmentalism. In early 1970 its editors acknowledged
that “conservation” would be one of the most important public issues of
the coming decade and worried that the Left would claim it. “This must
not happen,” they wrote. “As the very word itself suggests, ‘conservation’ is
intrinsically a conservative concern.” Equating conservation with the myth-
ical American frontier and the “virgin land” that the magazine’s editors felt
defined the early republic, they warned readers, “Conservation is likely to
be a powerful, indeed an overriding spiritual issue, which it would be politi-
cal suicide to concede to the Left.”5 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF),
which Buckley had also helped found, was similarly sanguine. YAF emerged
as the conservative alternative to Students for a Democratic Society, and
like SDS it had paid little attention to environmental issues throughout
the 1960s. But in the lead-up to Earth Day, YAF nodded approvingly, if
hesitantly, at efforts to clean up the American landscape. “It doesn’t take a
genius to see that pollution is potentially just as much an enemy of freedom
as Communist expansionism, statist legislation, and the violent left,” YAF
leaders advised. “Environmental control,” they insisted, “is not something
we can allow to become a monopoly of the liberal and radical left.”6
Even the ultra-conservative weekly Human Events tempered its skepti-
cism of the environmental movement with recognition of pressing envi-
ronmental issues. “No question exists that the majority of the public is
desperately in support of our national goal to bring pollutants under con-
trol and restore the planet to the balance of nature commensurate with the
existence of mankind,” Robert Bailey said.7 The race between Democrats
and Republicans to capitalize on environmentalism’s sudden popularity
was, John Chamberlain wrote, “the sort of political competition that must
help more than it can possibly hurt”; while James Jackson Kilpatrick wel-
comed “so much apparent evidence that the public, at long last, has awak-
ened to the situation and is prepared to take action.”8
What sort of “action,” however, quickly became a point of contention.
Doctrinaire conservatives could be for the environment and against envi-
ronmentalism. More often than not, the wedge between the cause and the
movement was federal authority and the role of the state. A YAF board
member said of environmentalism, “I have heard ‘conservatives’ and YAF
leaders, hopefully without too much thought, proclaiming that here really
is an area where the Federal Government must play a larger and larger role.
This disturbs me not only from a political and philosophical perspective,
but from a factual one.”9 Neoconservatives, those ex-Leftists migrating
steadily to the Right in the late-twentieth century, grew particularly wary
of environmentalism’s relationship to state power. Commentary editor
Norman Podhoretz warned that declarations of an environmental crisis
sacrificed the public interest and served those motivated by “the desire to
govern the rest of us.”10
More and more, conservatives associated environmentalism with
excessive state power. From its New York offices Commentary railed
against an imperious environmental movement and its tendency toward
“extraordinary measures of political control.”11 In the West, though, the
shadow of environmental regulation was coterminous with federal lands

in the public imagination. Along the Atlantic Coast, conservatives wor-
ried about regulation of industry; deep in the American interior, critics
of environmentalism assailed the management of public lands. Resource
users—in particular ranchers—grew increasingly frustrated with fed-
eral control of Western acreage. At the political and emotional center
of that frustration sat the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an
agency whose vast holdings in the eleven westernmost contiguous states
included nearly a quarter of surface lands and a majority of the subsurface
mineral estate.
Western hostility toward federal land management grew in part out of
the BLM’s evolving policies in the 1970s and especially the passage of the
Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976, a law that
offered the BLM the sort of coherent policy guidelines it had long operated
without. While the Forest Service and Park Service enjoyed relatively clear
identities and broad constituencies, few Americans outside of the rural West
knew the BLM. It was primarily ranchers who paid close attention to the
public domain (a general term for BLM holdings), having enjoyed decades
of grazing rights on public lands at below-market rates. FLPMA pushed the
BLM onto a more public stage, mandating a multiple-use approach to man-
agement and requiring that the BLM pay heed to scientific, ecological, rec-
reational, and historical values and consider wildlife as well as domesticated
animals. FLPMA also directed that the BLM review all roadless areas over
five thousand acres that possessed “wilderness characteristics,” a directive
that the Carter administration took seriously and interpreted generously.
The law and its application caused consternation in the rural West, stok-
ing anger toward environmentalists and the federal government. “When
Kruschev was dictator of Russia,” A. C. Wilkerson of the Uintah Cattle-
men’s Association said at a hearing on wilderness designation in the Ashley
National Forest, “he promised us he would bury us and with the help of the
environmentalists, he probably will.”12 Ranchers worried about the loss of
grazing lands, a general shift toward more environmentally minded poli-
cies, and federal agencies’ assertion of control over lands many Westerners
relied on. Like rising water, FLPMA extended government’s reach into the
narrowest spaces of rural Western life.
Western anger flared most during the sagebrush rebellion. In the strictest
terms, the sagebrush rebellion took place almost entirely in the legislatures
of nearly a dozen Western states with a few brief skirmishes in Washing-
ton, D.C. In the summer of 1979 the Nevada legislature passed a law that
declared all BLM lands in Nevada the property of the state, created a board
to oversee the transfer of public lands from federal to state hands, and
reserved funds for the inevitable court battle ahead. Utah Senator Orrin
Hatch embraced the issue and the anti-federal sentiment behind it, intro-
ducing a bill in Congress designed to transfer all BLM lands to state juris-
diction. For the next year and a half, more and more Western legislators at
the state and federal levels declared themselves sagebrush rebels, passing or
proposing legislation modeled on Nevada’s. The legal basis of the sagebrush
rebellion was always tenuous. None of the measures ever took effect, and by
1982 enthusiasm for large-scale land transfers began to fade away. But the
rhetoric and spirit of the sagebrush rebellion lasted for another decade and
beyond, framing environmental debates in the West.13
Antistatism and anti-environmentalism fit together neatly in the sage-
brush rebellion, bringing into further alignment the politics of the rural
West and the New Right. For movement conservatives and rural West-
erners alike, public land controversies were another instance of elite liber-
als imposing their values on others. The Nevada State Legislature’s Select
Committee on Public Lands, which helped engineer the original legisla-
tion, described the sagebrush rebellion as a reaction to “colonial” treat-
ment by a federal government that made policies “for a so-called national
constituency without regard for western problems.” Pointing to FLPMA,
the Alaska lands campaign, RARE II, and the BLM wilderness review, the
committee complained of an assault on Western autonomy at the behest
of an environmental establishment. The Alaska lands campaign, U.S. Rep-
resentative Don Young told his congressional colleagues, was by and for
“special interest groups in San Francisco and New York that would like to
turn Alaska into a park.” At the moment that conservatives and Western
politicians made political hay by opposing Washington, D.C., the environ-
mental movement’s flurry of activity in the capital left it a perfect target.14
Environmentalists tried to fight back by claiming that the “special inter-
est” label better fit their antagonists, and that it was anti-environmentalists
who sought their own narrow advantage. The Sierra Club described the
sagebrush rebellion as “another attempt by energy, mining, and livestock
interests to shuck off reasonable and lawful federal regulations and take
advantage of the American public.” Debbie Sease, the Wilderness Society’s
BLM specialist, told her colleagues, “The public lands belong to the nation
and cannot continue to be managed for the benefit of an elite minority.”15
Both sides claimed to stand for the public good and the most demo-
cratic use of public lands. FLPMA required that the BLM honor what
James Skillen has called “the new pluralism in public lands management,”
in which the BLM and Forest Service had to plan for the varied ways
Americans used and valued public lands rather than simply the various
economic benefits those lands offered.16 But as the agencies shifted away
from a focus on industry and toward a consideration of wilderness and
ecological integrity, they struggled to reconcile different opinions and phi-
losophies. In 1953 Richard McArdle, Chief of the Forest Service, had said
of his agency’s multiple-use mandate, “I believe that our inability to satisfy
completely each and every group of national-forest users is a definite sign
of success in doing the job assigned to us.”17 Allotting equal degrees of dis-
satisfaction might have worked in the 1950s, but by the 1970s that ideal
could not accommodate what had become not just competing uses but
also competing ethical claims. Sagebrush rebels and wilderness advocates
did not follow the rules of interest-group pluralism. They were not seeking
a compromise that left everyone equally frustrated. They argued over the
very premises of public lands policy.
Mainstream environmentalists had to make a particularly delicate argu-
ment. The alliance between environmentalism and federal agencies had
always been one of convenience rather than conviction. When William
Voigt of the Izaak Walton League wrote an account of grasslands man-
agement in the twentieth century, he called it Public Grazing Lands: Use
and Misuse by Industry and Government, pointing to a shared culpability.18
For decades environmentalists had offered measured criticisms of federal
agencies, including against the Department of the Interior over roads and
dams in Yosemite and Dinosaur. David Brower amplified those criticisms
in places like Mineral King and Grand Canyon.19 But during the 1970s
the most influential environmental organizations grew increasingly tied

to federal agencies and compelled to argue that the government served a
common interest.
Radical environmentalists were less hemmed in and so distributed blame
more broadly. “Only the most naïve ever believed that the true intent of the
so-called Sagebrush Rebellion was to gain title to the federal public lands
in the western states,” the Earth First! Journal cautioned in 1980. The actual
purpose of the sagebrush rebels, the Journal claimed, was to remake the
BLM into the pre-FLPMA “Bureau of Livestock and Mining”—environ-
mentalists’ nickname for an agency they felt catered to Western industry—
“to cow conservationists, the Forest Service, and Washington politicians,
and to encourage local and state politicians to make stronger anti-environ-
mental statements. They have admirably succeeded.”20 From Earth First!’s
point of view ranchers and mining companies wore the black hats, but
federal agencies were often little better than scared townspeople. Among
ranchers, politicians, land managers, and even mainstream conservationists
there were few heroes.
The success of the sagebrush rebellion, Earth First! argued, was political
rather than legal. While it failed in its stated goals, the sagebrush rebellion
reoriented Western land management, pushing back on federal agencies’
modest steps toward environmental protections. Earth First! found sage-
brush rebels and the broader New Right both exasperating and instructive.
“Is the Moral Majority timid? The NRA apologetic? The Sagebrushers
hesitant?” Dave Foreman asked rhetorically, urging a more militant envi-
ronmental movement. “If you believe in wilderness, if you love the Earth, if
you are appalled at what humankind is doing to the biosphere,” he advised,
“then don’t be timid. Speak out. Act with vigor and pride in your convic-
tions!”21 More and more, radicals’ convictions were less about what was
popular or democratic than about what was environmentally sound. The
point was to defend nonhuman nature, not any particular agency or even
political process. The state did not necessarily represent a common civic
good and often betrayed an ecological one. When human destructiveness
overlapped with popular opinion, Earth First! had no compunctions about
fighting both.
“THE T YPE OF GOVERNMENT I BELIEVE IN”: EARTH FIRST!

AND JAMES WATT
Earth First! rebuked the government much more readily than did the Sierra
Club or the Wilderness Society, but radicals simply said out loud what
establishment environmentalists said quietly to themselves. Even as the
sagebrush rebellion pushed mainstream environmentalists to defend pub-
lic lands and federal management, behind closed doors environmentalists
questioned whether their partnership with federal agencies cost more than
it paid. The Reagan administration offered environmental organizations an
opportunity to split the difference: to repudiate a particular government
without dismissing government itself. A hostile administration in Wash-
ington, D.C. allowed mainstream environmentalists to challenge federal
agencies but avoid rebuffing federal support. Radical environmentalists
pushed that skepticism of government past a single election cycle, con-
cerned less with the views of a particular political appointee than with the
reliability of the state itself.
Doubts about the federal government began with doubts about the state
of the environmental movement. The ten-year anniversary of Earth Day
provided an opportunity for taking stock of environmentalism’s trajec-
tory. Much of it was grim. “The environmental movement, an important
political force during the 1970s, is faltering,” U.S. News & World Report
said. “After a decade of spectacular success, the environmental movement
appears to be headed for more perilous times,” the Los Angeles Times
reported. Echoing the same sentiment, the San Francisco Examiner asked,
“After a decade of turbulent activism, is the environmental movement com-
ing to an end, going the way of previous grass-root political movements in
American history?” Science described the decline as a long time coming: the
1970s had offered “a large and sobering accumulation of evidence that the
environmental movement still has no tried and true strategy for success.”
All of the assessments pointed to a weakening of federal regulations and,
after a decade of economic uncertainty, a renewed concern for economic
growth. The end of what U.S. News & World Report called “the golden
age of environmentalism” began years before the Reagan Era.22 A sense of
decline came from within the movement and from without, a result of both
growing opposition to environmental regulation and diminishing returns

as a commitment to conventional reform produced ambiguous results like
RARE II.
Battle weariness was the mood at a meeting in January 1980 when two
dozen environmental leaders, journalists, and federal administrators gath-
ered in Harpers Ferry, Virginia for an “assessment and direction session”
about the state of environmentalism. Brock Evans represented the Sierra
Club and reported that the meeting had found “certainly evidence of slip-
page in our movement.” Evans described environmentalism as lacking inspi-
ration, bogged down in minutiae, and over-reliant on apathetic federal
agencies. Among the problems he identified was the failure of a strategy
based largely on federal power: “We thought that we could deal with envi-
ronmental problems by turning to the government as an interface between
us and the industrial corporations,” Evans wrote, summarizing the Harpers
Ferry discussion. That strategy worked for much of the 1970s but less so by
the end of the decade, when the movement’s opponents had “seized upon
such catch phrases as anti-regulation, anti-federalism, and false trade offs
between their values and ours,” and those catch phrases “tapped many gut
feelings of the American people.” The tenor of the meeting, Evans said, was
clear: “We need to rekindle the old spark.”23
The election of Ronald Reagan less than a year later affirmed the view
from Harpers Ferry. Reagan, who had cheered the sagebrush rebellion dur-
ing his campaign, demonstrated little interest in the environmental move-
ment, and his election stirred the hostility toward environmental regulation
that major organizations already encountered among politicians. “Because
of the November election,” one Nevada legislator and sagebrush rebel said
soon after Reagan’s victory, “it’s a whole new ball game.”24 In early 1981 the
Sierra Club’s Doug Scott warned his colleagues, “There is a strong indication
that we will very soon be facing a ‘covey’ of anti-wilderness/anti-public lands
and forests legislation,” likely including “nationwide ‘release’ of National
Forest roadless areas (worse than our sufficiency language compromise).”
Days later Senator Sam Hayakawa introduced a bill to immediately release
for other use all RARE II roadless areas not already proposed as wilderness.25
The greatest blow to environmentalists’ fortunes in Washington, D.C.
came soon after Reagan’s inauguration when the president nominated
James Watt for secretary of the interior. Watt had served in the Nixon and
Ford administrations and more recently headed the Mountain States Legal
Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promoted private enterprise
and fought government regulation. In Watt’s view federal management of
public lands generally did more harm than good, and the national wilder-
ness system was already large enough. He resented environmental orga-
nizations and opposed many of their goals, at one point calling them “a
left-wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe
in.”26 Within weeks of taking charge at Interior, Watt began relaxing
restrictions on strip-mining, offshore oil drilling, and the use of off-road
vehicles or snowmobiles on public land. Watt’s assault on environmental
regulations simultaneously energized his critics and further divided, to
differing degrees, mainstream and radical environmentalists from their
erstwhile federal allies.
There had been, at Harpers Ferry, the possibility of a more militant envi-
ronmental establishment. Participants discussed a less amenable, more stri-
dent environmentalism, one that inspired greater action from its supporters
and consternation from its adversaries. Taking the Civil Rights Movement
as a model, representatives at Harpers Ferry had talked about picketing,
marches, and street theater as ways to express indignation at lackadaisical
federal efforts. “We should get back on the cutting edge where we were ten
years ago, and not accept less than the best,” Evans said. “We should elevate
our issues from the back page to the front page, perhaps through these direct
action tactics.”27
For the major organizations, the possibility of broad-based direct action
quickly gave way to a political campaign with a single figure in its cross-
hairs. Watt fit the role of villain in a way that both clarified and simplified
environmentalists’ fears. His appointment reinforced the apprehensions
mainstream organizations already felt about federal agencies while offer-
ing a narrower and much more obvious target. The new secretary of the
interior posed a dire threat, and so provided an immediate means of rekin-
dling the “old spark” that Brock Evans found flickering. The press, Scott
predicted, would consider the Watt agenda “as a single big issue—basically
the tangible expression of the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion,’ ” and that consolida-
tion could invite a unified counterattack, “a really MAJOR campaign on
a scale (not unlike Alaska) which can really get grassroots people excited
and politically active on a grand scale.”28
Loud, brash, and unapologetically skeptical of the environmental move-
ment, Watt came to represent federal land mismanagement in its entirety,
swelling in size until he took up much of the movement’s field of vision.
Environmental organizations and especially wilderness advocates depicted
Watt as almost singlehandedly bending federal environmental policy away
from public sentiment and toward private interests. The Wilderness Soci-
ety compiled a six-chapter “Watt Book,” describing the secretary as tied to
corporations and disconnected from popular opinion. Environmentalists
represented the views of a majority of Americans, the Watt Book claimed,
while Watt fought for the narrow interests of the mining, ranching, lumber,
and oil industries.29 To demonstrate the broad base of anti-Watt sentiment,
the Sierra Club gathered over a million signatures for a “Replace Watt”
petition that accused the secretary of “sabotaging conservation goals sup-
ported by a vast majority of the American people.” The signatures, the Club
emphasized, came from “all over the country, from Republicans and Demo-
crats, many from people who had never heard of the Sierra Club before.”30
As Scott had predicted, the anti-Watt campaign galvanized concern, more
than doubling the Wilderness Society’s membership between 1979 and
1983 and nearly doubling the Sierra Club’s.
For extractive industries, meanwhile, Watt’s tenure signaled a return to
what they considered pragmatic, growth-oriented natural resource poli-
cies and a measured application of federal oversight. Bronson Lewis, the
American Plywood Association’s executive vice president, wrote directly
to Reagan about the Sierra Club’s petition drive and about environmen-
tal organizations’ “vehement media campaign” against Watt. Lewis assured
the president that his “resounding public mandate” signaled “the urgent
need to correct policies of the previous Administration [sic] and Congress
which sacrificed multiple-use management to the overzealous creation of
single-use wilderness.”31 Watt worked with broad public support, indus-
try claimed, and against an aggressive minority. “Predictably,” a Mobil Oil
ad read, “certain special interest representatives have raised a hue and cry
over Mr. Watt’s proposals.” Even Newsweek suggested Watt sought prin-
ciple more than profit. “He undercuts their basic claim to legitimacy,” the
magazine argued of Watt’s opponents, “which is that they alone are disin-
terested champions of the commonweal.”32
Earth First! agreed with industry as much as with mainstream environ-
mental organizations. Yes, Watt was a threat to public lands and natural
resources, but not in a way that made him exceptional. Although radical
environmentalists never missed an opportunity to mock, disparage, and
protest Watt, they insisted the secretary was little different from many other
politicians and bureaucrats, and that singling him out was a mistake. “Watt
accurately represents the Earth-be-damned attitude of the power establish-
ment in this country,” Foreman wrote in the wake of the Sierra Club’s anti-
Watt campaign, “but he is at least honest about it. . . . In contrast, men like
Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus pretended
to be friends of the environment but were in reality committed to the same
extremist development philosophy that Watt is.” Mainstream environmen-
talists who found fault with Watt and Watt alone failed to see the larger
picture: “The petition campaign by the Sierra Club,” Foreman continued,
“demonstrates that the established conservation groups are committed
merely to the reform of the existing system and cannot see that the sys-
tem itself is responsible for our environmental ills.”33 For Earth First! James
Watt was not a distortion of federal management; he was its unbridled real-
ization (see figure 4.1).
Radicals believed not only that Watt was typical in the threat he posed
to public lands but also that mainstream environmentalists’ response was
typically lackluster. For wilderness advocates, Watt’s greatest sin was his
attempt to expand mineral, gas, and oil exploration in wilderness areas. The
Wilderness Act allowed such exploration through the end of 1983 and Watt
made it clear he would take advantage of that loophole in ways previous
secretaries had not, even proposing an extension of the deadline into the
twenty-first century. In response, the Wilderness Society went to the press
with a study that showed wilderness could provide only a tiny fraction of
the nation’s energy needs. Public opposition to Watt’s plan grew, and Con-
gress began debating a Wilderness Protection Act that would withdraw all
designated wilderness from oil and gas exploration.34
Enthusiastic support for the proposed Wilderness Protection Act
by groups like the Wilderness Society, according to Earth First!, offered
(a)
(b)
Figure 4.1 Rallies for (a) and against (b): Secretary of the Interior James Watt inspired
strong feelings of support and opposition. Photos courtesy Dave Foreman.
“further evidence that the environmental movement has gotten too used
to scrambling after Wonder Bread crumbs and pretending they’re prime rib
and artichoke hearts.” What, Earth First! asked, would the act do to protect
not-yet-designated wilderness left behind by RARE II, like Little Granite
Creek in Wyoming’s Gros Ventre Range?35 The Gros Ventres sat astride
the overthrust belt running from Canada to Utah where colliding tectonic
plates had folded layers of rock on top of each other, producing spectacular
mountains and rumors of abundant natural gas. In 1982 Getty Oil applied
for a permit to drill at Little Granite Creek, where it held a lease, and the
Forest Service accommodated Getty by planning a new road. “Traditional
conservation groups . . . will probably sue the feds,” Howie Wolke predicted,
“but the eventual outcome of this legal action is anybody’s guess. Should
these legal efforts fail, Earth First! is committed to organizing and carrying
out massive civil disobedience, including an occupation of the canyon and
rig site, in order to stop this travesty.”36
Earth First! held its third Round River Rendezvous (the group’s annual
gathering) in Little Granite Creek on the Fourth of July weekend, 1982.
Two of the group’s signature tactics made an early appearance: the crowd of
nearly five hundred attendees formed a brief, symbolic blockade of the pro-
posed access road, and saboteurs removed several miles of the road crew’s
survey stakes both before and after the Rendezvous. Earth First! claimed
that its Gros Ventre gathering, and the threat of further action, spurred the
Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission’s denial of Getty’s permit as well as
the Forest Service’s stay on construction of its own road. Equally likely is
that the agencies’ decisions originated with Bart Koehler’s administrative
appeal—under the aegis of the Wyoming Wilderness Association—which
pointed out that although Getty held a legal claim to the drilling site, it did
not yet have the right-of-way required for an access road. Koehler’s reason-
ing led to a similar appeal by the state of Wyoming itself, and it revealed a
tenuous alliance of environmentalists, hunters, and Wyoming politicians
against outsiders. “We see a multinational corporation and the federal gov-
ernment come in and say they’re going to tell us how to run this state,”
governor Ed Herschler said. “We take the position that Wyoming is not for
sale.”37 In this case, Earth First! agreed with Herschler’s broad sentiment:
extractive industries and the federal government together posed a threat to
Figure 4.2 Earth First!ers tell Getty where to go. Little Granite Creek, Wyoming, 1982.
Photo courtesy Dave Foreman.
local interests. Little Granite Creek had to be protected from business and
government as usual, not from a rogue bureaucrat (see figure 4.2).
THE USE AND ABUSE OF BUREAUCRACY
“Government is a paradox, but there is no escaping it,” Andrew Bard

Schmookler wrote in the Earth First! Journal in 1986.38 Schmookler ques-
tioned the coherence of anarchy as a political philosophy, and in doing so
he called attention to the sometimes mismatch between radical environ-
mentalists’ theory and methods. Earth First!’s distrust of federal manage-
ment ran deep enough that the group nurtured an anarchist spirit. But
Earth First! remained committed to and drew from the more traditional
conservation movement enough that it often relied on federal agencies and
celebrated public lands. Dubious about state power in theory, radicals nev-
ertheless relied on state power in practice. An unapologetic ecocentrism
ultimately distinguished radicals from their mainstream counterparts, a

distinction that at times mattered little and at times sent Earth First! in
directions mainstream groups would not follow.
Radicals looked at the record of federal conservation with bitter regret.
“I have heartily supported every law, executive order, and petition to sal-
vage the dwindling biological wealth of the earth,” wrote Charles Bowden,
a close friend of Edward Abbey and Earth First! “But now I see what hap-
pens to every decent impulse in my society: they become that ugly thing,
government.”39 The state, radical environmentalists tended to argue, made a
blunt tool for protecting the nonhuman world, one that missed as often as
it struck. Even the most celebrated pieces of environmental legislation were
not exempt from criticism. In 1983, twenty years after passage of the Wilder-
ness Act, Howie Wolke judged the law “seriously and basically flawed” and
the nation’s total wilderness acreage “a miserable fragment of the system for
which early visionaries such as Muir, Marshall, and Leopold had hoped.”
The wilderness movement’s greatest legislative success had accomplished
only the bare minimum. “The ‘progress’ ” Wolke wrote, “about which many
of our politicians and even some of our alleged colleagues (take note, Bill
Turnage) like to brag is illusory.”40
Earth First! balanced a dwindling faith in state efforts with an expan-
sive view of political philosophy. Many key figures and supporters—most
notably Abbey—described themselves as anarchists.41 Like the crisis envi-
ronmentalists of the 1970s, radical environmentalists distrusted liberal
individualism as a foundation for social policy. The theories, values, and
processes that defined conventional American politics offered radicals little
hope for the salvation of the natural world. Anarchism, on the other hand,
offered a ready-made political philosophy that resonated both in terms of
strategy and principle.
Radical environmentalists considered it axiomatic that social hierarchies
resting on the concentration of power resulted in the exploitation of the
nonhuman world. “A house built on greed cannot long endure,” Abbey
said. “Whether called capitalism or communism makes little difference;
both of these . . . systems are driven by the greed for power over nature
and human nature; both are self-destroying.” Abbey wrote in response to
Schmookler’s insistence that “Only government can restrain power in the
interests of other values” a claim that made many Earth First!ers bristle.42
Radical environmentalists shared anarchists’ dim view of government as
well as anarchists’ complaints about the complexity of modern technology;
the compromises and corruption of representative democracy; the mis-
guided emphasis on the individual by liberalism; and the exploitative and
utilitarian use of the natural world by industrial society. Radical environ-
mentalists thought that anarchists understood modern society’s fatal flaws.
The feeling was mutual. When Earth First!er Roger Featherstone vis-
ited Chicago’s Haymarket International Anarchist Conference in 1986, he
didn’t have to build many bridges. “It was felt that anarchism may be the
only hope for the environment,” he reported, “and that present structures
are not adequate for the saving of Mother Earth.”43 The affinity Feather-
stone noted in Chicago had grown during the 1970s and 1980s. The few
regular anarchist publications in the United States directed more and more
attention toward environmental issues and ecological theory. “The connec-
tions, I trust, are clear,” Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in 1985. “The subjects are
indeed complex, but it seems obvious that the concerns of ecology, appreci-
ated in the full . . . match those of anarchism, particularly in its communal
strain.”44 A year earlier John Clark suggested that anarchists were beginning
“to see the ecological perspective as the macrocosmic correlate . . . of the lib-
ertarian conception of a cooperative, voluntarily organized society.”45 Some
anarchists developed specific theories of how anarchism and environmen-
talism fit together. Sale was one of the most well-known advocates of bio-
regionalism, an environmentally-based anarchism that stressed small-scale
communities organized around ecological features like watersheds and cli-
mate. Others simply emphasized connections between environmental and
anarchist thought. George Crowder speculated that in any sort of anarchist
revival, “The most convincing argument would seek to establish a concep-
tual link between anarchism and ecological values.”46
Unlike strict anarchists, however, radical environmentalists could never
entirely divorce themselves from the state. Earth First! strategy often
revealed the limits of grassroots civil disobedience, the necessity of federal
authority, and the important role of even Turnage’s Wilderness Society.
A few months after Gros Ventre, Earth First! blockaded an illegal road to
a drilling site jury-rigged by Yates Petroleum in New Mexico’s Salt Creek
Wilderness. With the well two-thirds complete and the protest attracting
national attention, a federal judge issued a restraining order forcing Yates
to halt its operations.47 Environmentalists declared victory. “We must have
bodies, willing to take the time and energy to watch developers, oil com-
panies, utilities, etc.” Kathy McCoy urged after her participation in the
Salt Creek blockade, emphasizing the inadequacy of statutory protections.
“Without watchdogs, they’ll take it all.”48
At first the Salt Creek blockade stood as an example of bureaucratic
failure and the importance of direct action. The oil company had received
mixed legal signals; it was granted permission to drill from the State of New
Mexico, which owned the subsurface mineral rights, but not from the U.S.
Fish & Wildlife Service, which managed the surface. The Department of
the Interior informed Yates that despite a temporary congressional ban on
drilling in wilderness, it had “no legal objection” to the drill site, but then
Fish & Wildlife charged the company with trespassing. Administrative
ambiguity left room for creative interpretation. With just hours remain-
ing on its lease, Yates decided that action meant more than regulation and
started drilling. Earth First! agreed and stood in the way of Yates drill crews
traveling over the illegal road.
What was momentarily a heroic demonstration of civil disobedience
soon became an illustration of its limited ambit. Six weeks after the block-
ade, the government granted Yates a drilling permit. Congress had over-
turned its own temporary ban, and the Department of the Interior used the
opportunity to open up Salt Creek to oil exploration. In his post-mortem on
Salt Creek and its disappointing results, Foreman simultaneously criticized
and made the case for mainstream environmental organizations: despite an
apparent legal victory, Salt Creek suffered the drill “because the rest of the
conservation groups did little.” Earth First!, Foreman explained, “is not the
environmental movement. We are only a part of it. We can only fill a few
roles.” The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, and National Audubon Society
were necessary and absent, Foreman implied, their importance revealed by
their failure.49
From its inception Earth First! placed itself sometimes far outside of
industrial civilization and liberal democratic thought and sometimes on
the fringe of conventional reform. Those two positions were not always
mutually exclusive; a narrow ridge connected them, and radicals often

walked it. In the mid-1980s the ongoing RARE II fight shifted from a
national legal battle over roadless areas to state-by-state wilderness bills.
Mainstream groups like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club led this
strategy, calculating that if they began with West Coast states where the
timber industry sought legal clarity on what it could log—and so where
environmentalists had more leverage—they could set the terms for future
bills and avoid any sweeping release of public lands to industry. Earth First!
saw the state-by-state bills as a “lack of vision, courage, and leadership” that
would lead to weak initial proposals made even weaker through negotia-
tion. “The forces of industrial tyranny, of humanistic arrogance, sit tall in
the saddle,” Foreman wrote.50
To fight industrial tyranny and human arrogance, Earth First! used a
“new weapon”: administrative appeals. Earth First! had always found main-
stream environmentalists’ unwillingness to file suit against RARE II itself
one of the great sins of late twentieth-century conservation, one that Cali-
fornia Resources Secretary Huey Johnson partially atoned for with Cali-
fornia v. Block. On Bald Mountain, Earth First! strengthened the case for
attacking the Forest Service in court with its own suit, Earth First! v. Block,
based on Johnson’s precedent. A national lawsuit over RARE II would be
prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, so Earth First! advocated
shelving all wilderness bills until after the 1984 elections and hoping for
a more favorable political geography.51 Administrative appeals drew from
the legal authority of California v. Block and Earth First! v. Block, both of
which effectively ruled development activities on RARE II lands in viola-
tion of the National Environmental Policy Act. The Earth First! Journal
published a sample appeals form for readers to file after any announcement
of timber sales or development projects in de facto wilderness. “Done at the
right time,” Earth First! advised in one of the group’s milder declarations,
“a little piece of paper can temporarily stop the destruction of your roadless
area more effectively than anything else.”52
Using a form that began “Pursuant to 36 C.F.R. §211.18 . . .” as a weapon
against modern civilization confirmed Schmookler’s description of govern-
ment as an inescapable paradox. Radicals pointed to the limits of institu-
tional reform only when they weren’t busy engaging in it. When Foreman
proposed a strategy for a 1980s environmental movement, he both acknowl-

edged and questioned the effectiveness of traditional methods: “The Sierra
Club and Wilderness Society lobbyists should keep on wearing their three-
piece suits or high heels while playing the game but they should ask for
a little more,” he wrote. Earth First!, meanwhile, should keep “question-
ing the very philosophical basis of Western Civilization, and engaging in
non-violent direct action to stop the industrial beast whenever necessary”;
and anonymous supporters, of their own volition, should continue “spik-
ing trees, closing roads, trashing bulldozers, pulling stakes and what-have-
you when the methods of the rest of us fail.”53 Earth First! shifted nimbly
between conventional methods and anarchist-inspired resistance, often
during the same campaign. Radicals understood and appreciated the fed-
eral government’s role as steward of the public lands, but they also assumed
the state would always fall short of its responsibilities. Federal protections
were necessary but never sufficient, and where they flagged, Earth First!
picked up the baton.
CAPITALISM AND ENVIRONMENTALISM
In American politics, to be skeptical of public agencies is, generally, to be

confident about private enterprise. The Reagan administration argued that
federal oversight could be replaced by market incentives and that private
property yielded more benefits than did public lands. In 1982 the adminis-
tration, encouraged by market fundamentalists on the president’s Council
of Economic Advisors, tried to sell off tens of millions of acres of public
land through long-term leases or outright sales. Environmentalists, mean-
while, put even less faith in the market than they did in the government.
The Wilderness Society’s Bill Turnage called the administration’s plan to
privatize federal land “pirating the public treasure for private benefit.”54
Environmental opposition to unfettered capitalism was far from absolute,
and ideological opposition to environmentalism was never a premise of
market fundamentalism, but for the most part environmentalists and capi-
talists lined up against each other. Paradoxically, it was at their most philo-
sophically uncompromising that they met and that the market seemed to
offer environmental protections where the state did not.
An expanding economy divided environmentalists from capitalists. In

1982 an internal Republican Party committee warned colleagues of “the
threat that environmental groups represent to natural resource develop-
ment and economic growth.” The committee’s report lumped mainstream
groups like the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Audubon Soci-
ety, and Natural Resources Defense Council with “a new revolutionary
stream in the environmental movement referred to as ‘deep ecology.’ ”55
Earth First!, always sensitive to being unfairly associated with environ-
mental moderates, complained that “the Republicans are a little dull when
it comes to identifying the environmental ‘extremists’ they are so actively
trying to discredit.”56 But despite the philosophical differences between
Earth First! and the Sierra Club, a broad view of American politics would
put them side by side on the question of economic growth. The Club was,
according to Michael Cohen, inherently “in conflict with the major corpo-
rate interests of modern America.”57 In 1971 Club president Philip Berry
spoke to the Atomic Industrial Forum about “an end to growth as we have
too much known it—growth at the expense of the environment and associ-
ated human values.”58
The opposition of environmentalism and big business after Earth Day
was, however, as much a product of industry’s attacks on environmentalists
as the reverse. At Harpers Ferry in 1980, environmental leaders discussed
not just the failures of government but the success of those who worked to
undermine governmental regulation. Participants spoke at length about an
invigorated effort by industry to weaken federal oversight. This same con-
cern came up at a Conservation Foundation-sponsored meeting of envi-
ronmental leaders in Estes Park, Colorado three months later, as well as in
plans for a series of regional conferences that major environmental groups
held in 1981 and 1982. “The corporations, after being caught off guard and
set back by us in the early 1970s, seem to have reasserted themselves in their
former control of the power structure in the government,” Brock Evans
reported. “In spite of all the good laws we passed, more and more agencies
simply refuse to act to enforce what is there unless they are in turn forced
by us, because of this rising counter pressure.”59
Long before environmentalists had to contend with the Reagan admin-
istration’s attacks on regulation, they clashed with the regulated industries
themselves. Even as environmental organizations celebrated Earth Day

and strengthened their hand in Washington, D.C., they heard rumblings
of opposition. “The backlash is here,” San Francisco’s Clear Creek reported
in 1972.60 That same year Michael McCloskey talked to the Sierra Club’s
board about “weathering the full force of industry’s counterattack.”61 The
Wilderness Society had already warned its members of a “counterrevolu-
tion against the environmental movement,” offering as evidence a speech
that Thomas Shepard, Jr., publisher of LOOK magazine, gave to the annual
meeting of the Soap and Detergent Association. In its “attempts to destroy
our free enterprise system,” Shepard said, the environmental movement lied
about ecological harms and ignored economic benefits. “To protect some
birds, they would deprive mankind of food,” he complained. “To keep fish
healthy, they would allow human beings to become sick.” This “cockeyed
set of priorities” was one few Americans would countenance. “So let’s start
fighting back!”62
“Fighting back” involved a combination of diluting and challenging
environmental efforts. Industry-sponsored public relations campaigns and
public service announcements shifted blame from corporations to consum-
ers by focusing on individual behavior rather than industrial processes.
People littered, left lights on, and wasted gasoline, while corporations
simply and disinterestedly provided the basic elements of a modern life-
style. In some cases, utilities advertised electricity as fueling antipollution
technologies. Power plants were at once the source of and the solution to
the pollution problem. Friend of the Sierra Club Jerry Mander called this
doublespeak “eco-pornography.”63 At the same time, those industries most
directly saddled with environmental regulation fought back by pushing a
cost-benefit language that assumed a zero-sum relationship between eco-
nomic health and environmental oversight. Such reasoning took root in the
stagnant economy of the 1970s. “How can a recession-hit town eject pollut-
ing plants at the expense of vitally needed jobs?” Time asked.64
So successful was this rhetorical attack that the Nixon administration,
to address industry concerns about the administration’s own National
Environmental Policy Act, created a National Industrial Pollution Control
Council composed mainly of corporate executives in order to afford indus-
try a voice in the regulatory process. That voice spoke of economic costs,
and it led to a “Quality of Life Review” program that evaluated consumer

and environmental regulations against potential harm to the private
sector. The review process lasted through the Ford administration and
served mainly to scrutinize the Environmental Protection Agency. Several
weeks before Reagan took office the New York Times was already reporting
on an “anti-regulatory atmosphere” in New Jersey, where environmental-
ists “suffered setbacks from business interests on several fronts,” includ-
ing the EPA’s decision not to enforce fees on companies dumping sewage
in the Atlantic, and Congress’s weakening of the Carter administration’s
“superfund” toxic cleanup act.65 By then, industry groups simply outspent
environmental organizations. “When you talk about environmentalists
being on the run,” a Carter administration official told the Los Angeles
Times, “you have to consider that they are being chased by a very well orga-
nized, very well financed lobby of some of the biggest corporate names in
the country.”66
The corporate backlash against environmentalism was self-serving, but
it was also an expression of a particular philosophy. What environmental-
ists failed to understand, Thomas Shepard told the Soap and Detergent
Association, was that “man must settle for less than perfection, for less than
zero risk, if he is to flourish.” Modern society, Norman Podhoretz explained
in Commentary, echoing Shepard’s sentiment, involved “a continuing series
of bargains—with nature, with the past, with the future—and to make a
good life is to make the soundest and fairest bargains we can.” Driving these
bargains and these balances between risk and flourishing was what Shepard
called “progress” and Podhoretz called “restless growth.”67 Material comfort
and an expanding economy remained imperative, and were best achieved
through market forces made manifest in the choices of consumers and the
decisions of chief executives. Government regulation, when it contravened
those forces, frustrated modern society’s ordered development.
Faith in the market and concern for the nonhuman world were not
mutually exclusive, some economists said. No group thought harder about
the philosophical relationship between markets and the environment
than did a small school of economists who called themselves “free mar-
ket environmentalists.” For most interested parties, the authority of the
market moved in and out of environmental debates like a summer storm,
dramatic but short-lived. For free-market environmentalists, that author-

ity was a permanent feature of the landscape. Sagebrush rebels and their
environmental adversaries summoned market incentives when it was
convenient—sagebrushers in protesting what they considered government
takings of their property, and environmentalists in accusing ranchers of
living off the public dole. Free-market environmentalists’ commitment to
private property and free enterprise, on the other hand, was doctrinaire
and consistent. Free-market environmentalists scoffed at ranchers’ sub-
sidized grazing permits just as readily as they complained about publicly
funded national parks and forests. Applying libertarian ideas to natural
resources, they argued that property owners’ economic interests in their
investments made them the best conservationists of all: forest owners
would always be more concerned with conserving trees and wildlife than
would forest visitors and forest managers.
The sagebrush rebellion sprang from a growing partisan divide as West-
erners increasingly identified with the Republican Party for a variety of
cultural, ideological, and self-interested reasons. Free-market environ-
mentalism emerged out of an intellectual movement closer to the philo-
sophical heart of the New Right. As historian Brian Drake has explained,
midcentury academic debates about “externalities”—direct costs of doing
business, shouldered by those not receiving direct benefits—produced on
the one hand environmental critiques of capitalism by economists like Her-
man Daly and on the other hand capitalist critiques of environmentalism
by neoclassical economists. Libertarians in particular called on the market
to solve any and all environmental problems and to illustrate the folly of
public land management, claiming that private property regimes offered
the best protection for natural resources and national parks. Too many
environmental problems, the libertarian magazine Reason argued, arose
because environmentalists “ignored the way that free markets can cope with
shortages by rationing out dwindling supplies and making it profitable to
develop substitutes.” The New Right’s belief in the efficiency and effective-
ness of markets over governments applied to the nonhuman world as much
as to anything else. “It is the absence of the profit system and private prop-
erty,” Libertarian Review insisted, “not their existence, which causes envi-
ronmental problems.”68
Montana State economist John Baden gave institutional form to free-

market environmentalism by founding a series of think tanks, beginning
with the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources in the late
1970s and the Political Economy Research Center (PERC—later renamed
the Property and Environment Research Center) in 1980. A steady flow of
papers and proposals yielded a modest political response when the Reagan
administration tried, unsuccessfully, to privatize public lands in 1982. Baden
continued to develop his ideas, founding the Foundation for Research on
Economics and the Environment in 1985. Never considered part of the rec-
ognized environmental movement, free-market environmentalists’ views
could occasionally accord with those who were. Garrett Hardin’s classic
essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” one of the canonical examples of
1970s crisis environmentalism, questioned the wisdom of informally shared
resources and pointed, ambiguously, toward either greater state control
or else privatization. Crisis environmentalists gravitated toward the first
choice, but Hardin and Baden gave room to both possibilities in a co-edited
volume called Managing the Commons. In the book’s preface, Hardin and
Baden questioned “obsolete sanctions” on the one hand and “independence
of individual action” on the other. Aldo Leopold, they pointed out, said
that people treated their own property carelessly. Aristotle, they suggested,
said the opposite: “What is common to the greatest number gets the least
amount of care,” Aristotle wrote in Politics. “Men pay most attention to
what is their own: they care less for what is common.”69
PRIVATE PROPERT Y, PUBLIC LANDS
Baden and his colleagues tried to bring their message of market-based envi-
ronmentalism to policymakers in state capitals and in Washington, D.C.,
but it was in the forests and especially on the grasslands of the West that
their ideas gained purchase. Environmentalists, increasingly disappointed
by public agencies and always skeptical of private industry, at times had to
lean toward one or the other. Traditionally, they chose government. On
the Great Plains, however, radical environmentalists experimented with
the power of the market. Dispirited by the BLM’s middling record of
defending Western grasslands, Earth First! began to argue that economic
competition could achieve what federal agencies could not. Committed

to ecocentric rather than to progressive principles, radicals made common
cause with market fundamentalists and even, at moments, with the Reagan
administration. Earth First!’s rangeland campaigns suggested the group’s
ideological flexibility. Rangeland activism also suggested how radical envi-
ronmentalists viewed the natural world in broader and more fluid terms
than their critics allowed. Although remote wilderness remained Earth
First!’s primary concern, radicals also dedicated themselves to the defense
of the working landscapes of the American West.
Whatever line generally existed between private property and public
land, between market forces and federal subsidies, disappeared from view
behind the rolling hills of the Western range. Although the sagebrush
rebellion had concerned grazing permits on public lands, in the rebels’ own
eyes it was a fight for private property. Grazing permits were tied to private
property, and because ranchers factored the permits into the value of their
base property, they interpreted an increase in permit fees as a taking with-
out just compensation. Raising fees would lower the value of ranchers’ land
and so violate their property rights. Adjusting the cost of grazing fees on
public lands to fair market value amounted to the seizure of private prop-
erty by the federal government.
Despite the ambiguities of ownership, the rhetoric remained clear. In
the same way that large industries tried to convince Americans that eco-
nomic well-being was as much a common good as environmental well-
being, Western resource users argued that private property was a public
interest, and they questioned whether environmentalists were in fact cham-
pions of the commonweal. The New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau
urged ranchers to support the sagebrush rebellion-aligned Mountain States
Legal Foundation in its lawsuits against federal land management agencies,
warning members of the odds stacked against them. “Over one hundred so-
called ‘public interest’ law centers have been created in order to represent
the ‘public’ in our country’s Judicial System,” the Bureau explained. Envi-
ronmental groups, in particular, had “completely ignored private property
and individual rights.”70
In fact, Western livestock was one of the few issues for which environ-
mentalists raised the importance of private property and free enterprise
(although not individual rights) as a counterweight against compromised

government agencies. When arguing about ranching, everyone became a
free-market environmentalist. “We are increasingly convinced that both
the environmental and the economic costs of bureaucratic management
of natural resources are excessively and unnecessarily high,” Baden and
PERC co-founder Richard Stroup wrote in 1981. “These social costs are
generated by perverse institutional structures that give authority to those
who do not bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions.”71
The below-market cost of grazing on the public domain, environmental-
ists Denzel and Nancy Ferguson wrote two years later, “invites overgrazing
and makes profitable the grazing of degraded public lands that could not
support grazing in a free-market economy.”72 Baden and Stroup pointed
their fingers at federal managers and the Fergusons pointed at ranchers,
but all appealed to the logic of the market as a standard against which to
judge public programs.
Protecting grasslands from ranching was one of the least glamorous
conservation causes of the 1980s but, according to Earth First!’s Don
Schwarzenegger, one of the most urgent, “only eclipsed by the threat of a
nuclear winter.”73 Denzel and Nancy Ferguson agreed: “Public resources
are seldom managed in the public’s interest,” they wrote in the Earth First!
Journal in 1984, “and the dismal results are nowhere more evident than in
the use of public lands by private stockmen.” Cattle ran roughshod over the
Western landscape because the ranchers that owned them also owned the
agencies managing the public domain. “The industry has held the public
land management agencies hostage” the Fergusons explained, “and has
dispensed intolerable abuses upon loyal and dedicated federal agencies.”
In the early 1970s the Fergusons found extensive cattle damage to Oregon’s
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where they managed a field station.
They received death threats when they tried to limit grazing at Malheur.
That angry response piqued the Fergusons’ interest and a decade later they
published Sacred Cows at The Public Trough, an exposé of how ranching
destroyed Western public lands for little obvious benefit.75 “For any EF!er
not to read it is a dereliction,” Schwarzenegger advised.76
Environmentalists had long been derelict in the attention they paid to the
Western range, and Earth First! believed that at the heart of that myopia were
anthropocentric values. People could much more easily cherish lush national
forests and majestic national parks for aesthetic enjoyment than they could
sparse grasslands. Any visitor knew a logged forest when they saw one, the
Fergusons pointed out, while few noticed overgrazed grasslands, “yet the end
results may be the same.”77 Lynn Jacobs, Earth First!’s grazing task force coor-
dinator, warned against focusing on faraway places to the neglect of “more
level, fertile, and well-watered lands . . . where species diversity and wildlife
numbers are at their greatest.”78 Although some scholars have accused radical
environmentalists of fetishizing spectacular and remote areas, an ecocentric
view could easily lead to greater appreciation of more aesthetically mundane
landscapes. Earth First!’s commitment to rangelands was a measure of its
commitment to an ecological rather than a romantic perspective.
From an ecological perspective ranching presented a series of dire threats
to the nation’s grasslands. According to the Fergusons, cattle trampled soil
and destroyed root systems, contributing to desertification; they clustered
in riparian zones, removing vegetation, depositing excrement, and eroding
streamsides that provided shaded habitat for fish; they destroyed nesting
sites for migratory birds; and they triggered a federal predator control pro-
gram that intentionally wreaked havoc on populations of coyote, bobcat,
mountain lion, and wolf, and unintentionally on those of badger, beaver,
fox, raccoon, deer, rabbit, and porcupine. “Suffice it to say” Foreman wrote
in agreement, “that the livestock industry has probably done more ecologi-
cal damage to the western United States than any other single agent.”79
Addressing this ecological damage meant taking on the ranching indus-
try, and environmentalists waged this fight on two fronts. The first was
cultural. The luster of the ranching industry shimmered brightly, and far
beyond the plains. “Like other new arrivals in the West,” Edward Abbey
admitted to a crowd at the University of Montana in 1985, “I could imagine
nothing more romantic than becoming a cowboy.”80 Dave Foreman left a
brief career as a horseshoer to join the Wilderness Society with his first
wife, Debbie Sease. “Our dream, though,” he remembered, “was to be cow-
boys.”81 Challenging the heroic cowboy West was a political risk. The Sierra
Club’s Brock Evans advised his colleagues against “attacks on either states
or states’ rights or upon ranchers” when taking on sagebrush rebels, judging
those targets “too much a part of the American mythology.”82
To the Fergusons, reverence for ranching was exactly the problem and
had to be revealed as such. “Seldom in history have so many been so thor-
oughly brainwashed by so few,” they wrote of the cowboy myth.83 Vener-
ated as an example of Western hardihood and individualism, the cowboy
was, Abbey finally concluded, “a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches
and a comical hat.”84 The barbed wire fences that historian Walter Prescott
Webb once celebrated as an innovation essential to wresting a living from a
harsh environment were, for the Fergusons, “a truly alarming cause of wild-
life mortality” that tangled pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and moose
calves in fatal snares.85 Ranching destroyed far more than it returned. Envi-
ronmentalists rattled off the numbers: cattle grazing on public lands pro-
duced only 3 percent of the nation’s beef supply, cost the treasury twice what
it contributed, and disproportionately benefited ranchers with large herds
and landholdings. Ranchers were less risk-taking entrepreneurs building
a market economy than mooches draining public funds to wreck public
lands. “The proud, independent rancher as the paragon of the free enter-
prise system?” Foreman asked. “Forget it, he’s a welfare bum.”86
The second front, related to the first, was economic. The most vulnera-
ble point in the Western ranching industry’s political armor was the below-
market grazing fees on BLM land that amounted to public subsidies. In
the late 1960s several federal agencies determined that fair market value
was five times BLM rates, and in the 1980s the BLM and Forest Service
reviewed their fee formulas. Simply raising the rates could drive ranching
off public lands, which is exactly what Earth First! wanted. Standard direct-
action tactics would be little help in this fight. “Laying down in front of
a herd of cows,” Schwarzenegger advised, “is just a good way to ‘git cow
shit on ya.’ ”87 Instead, Earth First!ers chose to forego blockades and ally
themselves with market forces, becoming fierce advocates of either a com-
petitive bidding process that would help establish a market-based price or,
better yet, an open bidding process that would allow environmentalists to
bid against ranchers and let the market determine best uses.
“Competitive bidding is the basis of a free-market economy, is demo-
cratic, and is standard practice in most federal operations,” the Fergusons
wrote.88 In this range war, environmentalists embraced the idea, if only tem-
porarily, that compromised federal agencies managed the public domain
for private interests while private enterprise furthered the public interest by
conserving resources. Earth First! became a grudging cheerleader for David
Stockman, the director of Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, who
was willing to wave his cost-cutting axe dangerously close to several politi-
cal third rails. While in most arenas environmentalists aggressively fought
the Reagan administration’s budget-cutting and deregulatory approach to
government, when it came to ranching on public lands, Schwarzenegger
suggested, “the consistent application of ‘Reaganomics’ could just conceiv-
ably bring about the demise of that industry.”89
Even mainstream environmental groups began to discern the limits of
their partnership with the federal government in the 1980s, but radical
groups like Earth First! more readily explored other means of staving off
industrial development, even if that meant fighting occasional allies and
aligning with frequent enemies. Never partisan and rarely ideological other
than in its commitment to ecocentrism, Earth First! could find common
cause with some conservatives. Radicals’ deep skepticism of capitalism as
a handmaiden of industrial society prevented any enduring affiliation with
the New Right, but frustration with government could make market-based
solutions more appealing. In the absence of federal management, markets
offered an alternative source of order.
EARTH FIRST! VS. THE FOREST SERVICE
While radical environmentalists chastised the BLM, they saved the lion’s
share of their anger for the United States Forest Service. Whether because
it was responsible for RARE II, or because the clear cuts it sanctioned were
such an obvious scar on the land, or because it had a longer and more sto-
ried history to betray than any other land management agency, the Forest
Service earned as much of Earth First!’s opprobrium as did any extractive
industry. “The Forest Service has become a criminal and immoral agency
on such a widespread basis,” Montana Earth First!er Randall Gloege said,
“that any short term victories in the absence of total reformation will likely
be temporary, at best.”90
Radical environmentalists’ fury over Forest Service policy was consis-
tent with their view of James Watt as symptom rather than cause. Unlike
the BLM, Park Service, and Fish & Wildlife Service, the Forest Service fell
under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture and so outside of
Watt’s purview. And yet, Earth First! argued, the Forest Service epitomized
an ethos of reckless industrial growth better than any other federal resource
agency. “Although some conservationists believe the Forest Service road
building binge to be largely the result of a massive Reagan Administration
conspiracy,” Wolke wrote, “the fact is that it is actually the result of three
quarters of a century’s bureaucratic growth,” and “an almost religious belief
in the anthropocentric idea of ‘multiple use.’ ” Wolke—whose disgust with
the Forest Service exceeded that of any five Earth First!ers combined—saw
the agency as little more than a means of harvesting natural resources to
feed an ever-expanding economy. Environmentalists would have to rede-
fine the agency’s reason for existence. Short of that, Wolke said, “we’re
merely pissin’ in the wind.”91
An ethos of industrial growth began with roads, as David Brower rec-
ognized in the mid-twentieth century when the Tioga Road fight put him
on the path to militancy. Any possibility for development in wilderness
started with a road, and a road multiplied such possibilities exponentially.
The “road building binge” that Wolke wrote about was a Forest Service plan
for 75,000 miles of roads through RARE II roadless areas by the end of
the century, roads that would disqualify those areas from wilderness des-
ignation. Earth First! regularly called Forest Service employees “Freddies,”
a derogatory term borrowed from rural Westerners’ disdain for all federal
agents, but in this case revelations about a massive roadbuilding program
came from the Freddies themselves. An anonymous group of foresters
known as “Deep Root” warned major media about the Forest Service’s
pronounced bias toward logging and about the roads that would result.
“There’s absolutely no question that the reason for all these roads in virgin
areas is to make sure the land can never be included in a wilderness,” one
Deep Root forester from Montana told the Washington Post.92
The Forest Service’s penchant for fragmenting wildlife habitat by build-
ing roads into de facto wilderness kept the agency at the top of Earth First!’s
enemies list throughout the 1980s. Earth First!ers fought Forest Service
logging roads, timber sales, and mineral leases in Oregon’s Willamette and
Siskiyou Forests, California’s Stanislaus and Los Padres Forests, Wyoming’s
Bridger-Teton Forest, Montana’s Gallatin Forest, Washington’s Mount

Baker-Snoqualmie Forest, Texas’s Sam Houston Forest, and Utah’s Dixie
Forest, among others. Despite all of these actions and despite mainstream
groups like the Sierra Club pushing hard for a reduction in the Forest Ser-
vice’s roadbuilding budget, in late 1986 Congress allocated $229 million
for forest roads—$50 million more than the agency itself had requested.
Wolke, recently released from several months in prison for pulling up sur-
vey stakes on a proposed road in the Bridger-Teton Forest, was livid. “The
deeper one delves into the seething caldron of bureaucratic idiocy,” he
wrote, “the more one is repelled by the stink of the iniquitous. As I con-
tinue to learn about the US Forest Service and its roadbuilding mania I am
forced to conclude that the major missing ingredient in the battle against
the vile agency is widespread physical resistance.”93
A little over a year later, on John Muir’s 150th birthday, Earth First! put
Wolke’s suggestion into practice. Coordinated by Earth First! stalwart
Karen Pickett, the “National Day of Outrage” against the Forest Service on
April 21, 1988 consisted of close to one hundred protests from California
to New England. Earth First! activists and their friends held rallies outside
of Forest Service facilities in big cities and tiny towns. Earth First!er David
Barron, dressed as Smokey Bear, offered his resignation to a San Francisco
regional office along with 150 other protesters. The Forest Service hid sensi-
tive equipment at some offices, mobilized the Federal Protective Service
at others, and in Washington, D.C. put the Department of Agriculture’s
headquarters on heightened alert.94
Direct action was a way to oppose the Forest Service but not neces-
sarily to remake it. That required addressing the presumed shortcom-
ings of public agencies. “The Forest Service is the epitome of all that is
wrong with bureaucracy, from the Bureau of Reclamation to the Krem-
lin,” Wolke said.95 W. Robert Brothers (also known as “Bobcat”) called the
agency an “entrenched bureaucracy infected with top-level corruption.”96
Requirements for working in the Forest Service, an Earth First!er named
“Skoal Vengeance” argued, “should first include a love for the outdoors,
and should not include a lust for advancement in a bureaucracy.”97 Earth
First!’s view of the Forest Service was not unlike that of free-market envi-
ronmentalists’. John Baden and Richard Stroup described federal resource
agencies as incentivized by little more than protecting individual jobs

and agency funding, operating with a lack of accountability in the form
of either profits or votes and so with enormous latitude for self-interested
decision-making.
Free-market environmentalists prescribed market-based incentives
as a cure for bureaucratic inertia, and radical environmentalists seriously
considered this view. Wolke and Brothers dismissed the many “obvious
anthropocentric analyses” at a forest symposium that featured Stroup and
was put on by the forestry consulting firm Cascade Holistic Economic
Consultants (CHEC); but Earth First! listened closely to Randal O’Toole,
director of CHEC, persistent critic of the Forest Service, and according to
Wolke, “a brilliant forest economist.”98 Partial to technical arguments and
allergic to sentimental ones, O’Toole spoke a different language than many
environmentalists. But when he attacked the Forest Service—as he did in
the Earth First! Journal and at a Round River Rendezvous—everyone lis-
tened carefully. “If the upper echelons of the Forest Service had any pride
remaining,” Foreman said, “they would be crushed by the detailed criticism
their plans receive at the hands of forest economist Randal O’Toole.”99
The gist of O’Toole’s critique of Forest Service timber sales resembled
environmentalists’ complaints about BLM grazing permits: the sales
made little sense economically and a great deal of sense bureaucratically.
Although the Forest Service’s timber program made money in the aggre-
gate, many individual timber sales amounted to giveaways. The program
profited from the cash register forests of the Pacific Northwest and the
South while losing money nearly everywhere else. The Wilderness Society
made the same argument. “These roads are being built to harvest timber
in low-productivity, high-cost areas at a tremendous loss to the taxpayer,”
the Society’s chairman, Gaylord Nelson, said of the Forest Service’s massive
roadbuilding program.100 But O’Toole’s analysis went further. He argued
that economic mismanagement sprang from “budget maximization”—the
tendency of bureaucratic agencies to prioritize their own budgets above all
other concerns. Because timber programs cost more than recreation and
even grazing, because the Forest Service kept more money from timber
receipts than any other activity, and because timber production yielded
the greatest political returns for those who held the agency’s purse strings,
“multiple use” meant timber sales first, second, and third. The solution,
O’Toole advised, was “marketization”: decentralizing the agency, eliminat-
ing its congressional appropriations, and allowing forest managers to charge
market rates for all resources from timber sales to camping permits.101
Earth First!ers tended to agree with O’Toole’s criticisms emphatically
and with his proposals sporadically. Brothers found environmentalists’
discomfort with market incentives antiquated, insisting that because of
bureaucratic cost-ineffectiveness, “dollar values have now come over to
the side of forest ecology, wilderness and watershed protection.”102 Wolke
remained only partially convinced. He supported much of O’Toole’s plan
but regretted that it was “based on economic, not intrinsic, values” and
“would not promote biocentric management in areas where logging really
is economically sound.”103
In fact, environmentalists were gradually winning the fight over forest
reform in the 1980s, too gradually for their own tastes and too impercep-
tibly for many to appreciate. Even more than the BLM, the Forest Service
slowly reined in its emphasis on industrial production. The aesthetic appre-
ciation of forests advanced by groups like the Sierra Club, the increasing
incidence of and anger over clear cutting, and Nixon-era environmental
laws all served as leverage for the application of new ecological ideas about
forest management in the late-twentieth century. Scientists emphasized the
need for foresters to consider biological and structural diversity, wildlife
habitat, and old growth in addition to the maximum sustainable yield of
timber. As local and national environmental organizations used ecologi-
cal insights to criticize federal forest management, foresters entered into a
period of soul-searching and forestry schools trained a new generation of
ecologically-minded managers. Pressure from outside and inside the For-
est Service prompted whistleblowers like Deep Root, groups like Forest
Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and a 1989 forest supervisors
conference in Tucson at which supervisors expressed dismay at the agency’s
stubborn focus on timber.104
Still, Earth First! and O’Toole were not wrong in their deprecations
against bureaucratic inertia. The transformation of a fixed agency like the
Forest Service took decades, the persistent agitation of several organized
and vocal stakeholders, and most importantly a coherent set of ideas that
could compete with the internal logic already in place. Here environmen-
talists and economists shared a distrust in public agencies that was the flip
side of a greater faith in some larger order. “Marketization” fell several steps
behind the privatization pushed by free-market environmentalists, but it
rested on the same basic premise as privatization and ecocentric manage-
ment: reform had to come from without. Politicians, bureaucrats, and their
various constituencies often made poor decisions about natural resources
and would make similarly poor decisions about structuring any agency in
which they remained invested. Remaking the Forest Service depended on
some countervailing force—for free-market environmentalists a system of
economic incentives, and for radical environmentalists a system of ecologi-
cal imperatives. In both cases, redemption lay in an order beyond that of
central planners and political institutions.
“Indeed,” the writer and environmentalist Michael Pollan observes, “the
wilderness ethic and laissez-faire economics, antithetical as they might at
first appear, are really mirror images of one another.”105 O’Toole agreed:
“Although these two groups appear to represent polar extremes,” he wrote of
PERC and Earth First!, “in fact there are many similarities between them.”
Both groups shunned interest-group politics, he explained, and both cham-
pioned decentralization. And although PERC opposed public lands and
Earth First! distrusted capitalism, “markets are the key to reforming pub-
lic land management,” O’Toole said, “because they most clearly resemble a
natural ecosystem.”106 The free-market environmentalist M. Bruce Johnson
liked to point out that the study of interconnectedness in ecology reflected
similar interests in economics. “General equilibrium models are a formal
way of saying that ‘everything depends on everything else,’ ” he said. Given
the similarities, “one wonders why a partnership between the two was not
formed in the natural course of events.”107 Lack of faith in government as an
expression of a shared ethic led to a conceptual instability that required, for
ballast, some larger sense of order, whether of nature or of markets.
The odd correspondence between laissez-faire economic thought and
environmentalism arose from a mutual distrust of liberal individualism.
Libertarianism is often understood as a philosophy based on reason, indi-
vidual freedom, and the realization of human potential, but it can just
as easily be understood as rooted in the limits of reason and the folly of
individuals. This streak of doubt within libertarianism is primarily the

legacy of the Austrian School of Economics, whose main exponents—
including Ludwig von Mises but in particular Friedrich Hayek and Murray
Rothbard—found in the free market an order that countered the limita-
tions of human reason. Hayek was a libertarian not because he had com-
plete faith in individual human freedom, but because he didn’t. The point
of rules, for Hayek, was to make up for the fact that people did not know
enough to make the right decisions all of the time, and the utility of any set
of rules was only as sound as the limited knowledge of its authors. The state,
therefore, could never regulate deliberately what the market could regu-
late organically. Hayek called this organic regulation “spontaneous order,”
and although he believed it arose from the aggregate of choices made by
free individuals acting in their own interests, he speculated, as John Gray
explains, that it might be found “not only in the population biology of ani-
mal species, but in the formation of crystals and even galaxies.”108
This unease with human design and acceptance of an order beyond
human estimation could bring together environmentalism and liber-
tarianism philosophically, despite their profound differences politically.
Although they disagreed on nearly all the specifics, both radical and free-
market environmentalists subscribed to an order beyond the confines of
the human imagination. Ric Bailey gestured toward such an order when he
represented Earth First! at a hearing on wilderness held by Oregon’s Sena-
tor Mark Hatfield and said, “There is more to the scheme of life than the
devices of man.”109 Dave Foreman made a similar point by asking, “What
right does a man with a life span of seventy years have to destroy a two thou-
sand year old redwood to make picnic tables?”110 Stephanie Mills reflected
more explicitly on human limits after participating in the 1985 Round River
Rendezvous, writing, “Some say we are trapped in the solipsism of human
consciousness and that there are no absolutes save those we choose. Yet the
evidence of ecological destruction that mounts all around us suggests that
we may not have infinite latitude for self-definition after all; that, in Paul
Ehrlich’s mordant phrase, ‘Nature bats last.’ ”111 Nancy Newhall summa-
rized this sense of order most succinctly in a justification for wilderness that
David Brower frequently repeated: “The wilderness holds answers to more
questions than we yet know how to ask.”112
CONCLUSION
Earth First! was never unaware of the complicated and at times contradic-
tory relationship it had with government, bureaucracy, and democracy. In
1985 Mike Roselle, by then the busy center of Earth First!’s direct-action
scene, felt aggrieved by the red tape that he encountered when applying for
funds from the Earth First! Foundation and entered into an extended argu-
ment with some of the Foundation’s staff. “I think such conflict is inherent
in the situation where an organization deliberately places itself between
governmental bureaucracy and an opposing gang of anarchists,” observed
LaRue Christie, one of the Foundation’s creators, “and then arrogantly pro-
poses to use the benefits available through the former to help the latter.”113
Radical environmentalists’ in betweenness was a source of both tension
and advantage. Earth First!ers pilloried the Forest Service, the BLM, and
even the Wilderness Act itself at the same time as they treated national for-
ests and statutory wilderness as sacrosanct. They lay down in front of bull-
dozers when federal laws were a hindrance and filed administrative appeals
when those laws were a help. And they argued, at turns, that wilderness was
either a national inheritance or something beyond nation, law, and even the
human capacity to understand. Radicals could not always explain or recon-
cile their inconsistencies from one case to the next but they rarely lost track
of their ultimate commitment to ecocentric principles, even when those
principles butted heads with democracy and the state.
Earth First!’s willingness to challenge the state’s authority and compe-
tence positioned it, at times, alongside conservatives and their own hostility
toward centralized power. Environmental anarchists and free-market liber-
tarians could momentarily put aside their considerable differences before
a common enemy like the Forest Service. Both groups believed that there
was a larger order that called into question a human-devised state order,
and even called into question human reason itself, but the different orders
to which the groups appealed—a natural one and an economic one—were
finally irreconcilable. “Privitization [sic] is not some flimflam scam hatched
by Marlboro men in the sagebrush of Nevada,” Foreman warned in 1982.
“It is a serious thrust launched by neo-conservative intellectuals and free-
market economists.”114
Radical environmentalists’ conflicted views about government were

exaggerated versions of those held by mainstream environmentalists. As
closely tied to federal agencies as mainstream environmentalism became
in the 1970s, there was never any essential bond between the movement
and the institutions. Environmentalists criticized land management
agencies’ bias toward industry on grasslands and in forests while relying
on regulatory measures rooted in federal power. As Paul Sabin argues,
mainstream environmentalists ran hot and cold according to whether
they thought federal agencies effectively represented the public inter-
est.115 Radical environmentalists shifted their stance in similar fashion.
But radicals judged federal policy by a broader set of interests, ranging far
beyond the human community.
5
Earth First! Against Itself
“I believe that any movement immune from criticism, especially from

internal evaluation and analysis, will become uncreative, stodgy, bureau-
cratic, and undemocratic,” Dave Foreman wrote in 1987 with what would
prove to be unintended irony.1 That year, fault lines within Earth First!
became unmistakable, and at the end of the decade they began to rupture.
The enthusiasm of Earth First! supporters derived from the power and the
clarity of the group’s animating idea: that protecting wild nature should take
priority over all other concerns. By the late 1980s, that idea shifted from an
article of faith to a subject of intense debate. Increasingly, dissident voices
within Earth First! informed by anarchism, feminism, and a broad sense of
social justice insisted on the importance of taking into account social differ-
ence, and highlighted the risks of a strictly ecocentric perspective.
Among the greatest risks of an ecocentric perspective was holism, and
in particular the view that human beings and nonhuman nature stood
across a growing divide. To understand wild nature as existentially threat-
ened by human presence was to understand the two as mutually exclusive.
William Cronon has called this view the “central paradox” of the idea of
wilderness, “a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the
natural.”2 Radical environmentalists could easily fall into this trap, judging
184 Earth First! Against Itself
nature pure and humans profane and the two forever at odds. “In this era
of humanity’s suicidal brutality,” an Earth First! supporter from Utah said,
“any attempt to love Nature by loving mankind is like jumping off a cliff
in order to save one’s life. Philanthropists ask us to side with the villain
in a worldwide conflict. I’ll stick with the only side that has any hope of
winning in the end.”3 The notion of environmentalism as a “worldwide
conflict” between humans and the natural world remained a persistent
undertone in Earth First!’s rhetoric, sometimes veering into misanthropy.
Like crisis environmentalists, radical environmentalists of the 1980s too
often placed the blame for environmental destruction on an undifferen-
tiated human species, refusing to consider relative culpability and the
ways that social justice and environmental protection might inform each
other. At its worst, this sort of dualism led radicals to advocate reducing
the human population through any means and with little regard for who
should be left to die.
Critics of Earth First! tended to assume that radical environmental-
ists embraced this dualistic view always and without qualification, but
as readily as radicals spoke of nature’s virtues and humanity’s vices when
they decried environmental destruction, in their own circles they wrestled
with how, as Earth First!er W. J. Lines put it, “humans are both inextri-
cably of, and separate from, nature.”4 Behind the occasional declarations
of humanity’s fundamental corruption was the more common Earth First!
view that humans in the modern, industrial world had fallen away from a
close and vital relationship with nonhuman nature. “For over 99 percent of
our history,” Jamie Sayen of Earth First! and Preserve Appalachian Wilder-
ness wrote in 1989, “we have been a part of the wild.”5 In this sense, radical
environmentalists differed only in degree and not in kind from more estab-
lished environmentalists like the Wilderness Society’s Howard Zahniser,
who said in 1951, “We are a part of the wildness of the universe. That is our
nature”; or the Sierra Club’s David Brower, who wrote in 1969, “It may seem
strange to link a love of the human condition with the wilderness experi-
ence, but the two are only different aspects of the same consciousness.”6
At times radical environmentalists dismissed the human species as a purely
destructive force. Much more often they struggled to reconcile industrial
society’s insatiable appetite with humanity’s place in the nonhuman world.
Earth First! Against Itself 185
The late 1980s were a period of intense political and intellectual conflict
for Earth First! As the group enjoyed its greatest renown and influence,
antagonists from within the broad environmental movement pointed to
the serious limitations of radical environmentalism’s perfunctory consid-
eration of social justice. That critique fractured and then changed Earth
First! into a group less exclusively dedicated to ecocentrism. Throughout it
all, Earth First! and its critics contended with what Cronon calls “the old
dilemma about whether human beings are inside or outside of nature,” the
same dilemma that runs and shifts through all environmentalism.7
EDWARD ABBEY
Edward Abbey novels bookended Earth First!’s tenure as the nation’s most
controversial environmental group. The Monkey Wrench Gang, a story of
eco-sabotage throughout the Southwest, gained fame just a few years before
a band of disaffected conservationists traveled to the Pinacate Desert and
imagined a new, more militant environmental group. A sequel, Hayduke
Lives!, came out in 1990, the year Earth First! began to reorganize and rede-
fine its message and the year after Abbey himself died. Edward Abbey’s life
and writing intertwined with Earth First! through direct participation and
equally direct inspiration. Looking back on his career with Earth First! soon
after he left the group, Dave Foreman described one of the initial goals of its
founders as “To inspire others to carry out activities straight from the pages
of The Monkey Wrench Gang.”8 Abbey’s novels delineated a view of the rela-
tionship between people and their communities, their governments, and
their natural environments. In that view, people stood collectively apart
from nature, separated by a line between civilization and wilderness. But as
individuals they could cross that line and begin to commune with the wild,
and to defend it.
Abbey was not a naturalist or “nature-writer” in any conventional sense.
“The only birds I can recognize without hesitation are the turkey vulture,
the fried chicken, and the rosy-bottomed skinny-dipper,” he wrote. “If a label
is required say that I am one who loves unfenced country. The open range.”
It was not just the absence of taxonomical knowledge that distinguished
Abbey from more conventional nature writers but also what was present in
his work: attitude, opinion, and an argumentative personality. While oth-

ers concerned with the natural world tried to step out of their readers’ way
and offer a quiet and unobstructed view, Abbey always remained within
sight and within earshot. He was probably the only environmental hero
who could get away with writing about tossing empty beer cans out of the
window of a moving vehicle (and, by implication, opening full beer cans in
a moving vehicle); contemplating wilderness while blasting across a stream
in a pickup truck; and disdaining in equal measure tourists, hippies, and
park rangers.9
“If Abbey is not a naturalist . . . then just what is the place of the envi-
ronmental theme in his writing?” Donn Rawlings asked Wilderness Soci-
ety supporters in 1980.10 The place of the “environmental theme” was at
the very center of Abbey’s dispute with the modern world. He wrote about
nature to make a point. Abbey could write as floridly as John Muir and as
contemplatively as Thoreau, but he usually chose not to. Unlike Muir and
Thoreau, Abbey relied on humor in his writing, and more than Muir or
even Thoreau, he expressed anger. Abbey’s fictional characters, as well as
the persona he adopted for his personal essays, spoke bitter and profane
words. They had little respect for authority of any kind and were gener-
ally looking for a fight. Abbey did not concern himself with subtleties and
details; he was an advocate of “big nature”—large, wild spaces, the open
range—and this gave his writing the sort of clarity that comes from a point
of view uncomplicated by any concession to nuance. He enjoyed nature on
a scale that allowed for an obvious distinction between the civilized and
the wild, and he did not spend time exploring the ways that the human and
nonhuman worlds ran together, as did nature writers like Edward Hoa-
gland and Wendell Berry. “As I said to Hoagland: ‘It is no longer sufficient
to describe the world of nature. The point is to defend it,’ ” Abbey wrote
in his journal in the late 1970s. “He writes back accusing me of trying to
‘bully’ him into writing in my manner. Which is true, I was. He should.”11
Abbey saw a clear line between the modern, industrialized world and the
wild places about which he wrote, and he patrolled that line without apol-
ogy or ambivalence.
That clear line meant that Abbey took an interest in wilderness above all
else. Wilderness for Abbey, and later for Earth First!, stood as the clearest
example of not-human, not-technology, not-civilization. This was not an

absolutist view. Abbey understood how complicated and subtle an idea
wilderness was, and even that it owed a great deal to the human imagina-
tion, but to him that made it no less vital or wild. “The boundary around a
wilderness area,” he wrote, “may well be an artificial, self-imposed, sophis-
ticated construction, but once inside that line you discover the artificiality
beginning to drop away; and the deeper you go, the longer you stay, the
more interesting things get.”12
Abbey first drew his line in the sand between wilderness and civiliza-
tion in Arches National Monument in southern Utah, where he worked
for several scattered seasons over the course of a decade as a ranger with the
National Park Service. He described his experiences and his thoughts in
Desert Solitaire, the book that gained him recognition before The Monkey
Wrench Gang made him famous. Desert Solitaire established a set of ideas,
principles, and complaints that reappeared in most of Abbey’s writing.
“There is a cloud on my horizon,” he wrote. “A small dark cloud no bigger
than my hand. Its name is Progress.” Progress, in the immediate sense, took
the form of the development of national parks, with roads, power lines, and
designated campgrounds. Behind that specific version of progress, though,
were a series of assumptions. The starkest and the most explicit was the
unquestioning embrace of industrial development. Subtler and more insid-
ious was the view that Abbey attributed to the Park Service: “that although
wilderness is a fine thing, certain compromises and adjustments are neces-
sary in order to meet the ever-expanding demand for outdoor recreation.”
At the base of that view lay the assumption that national parks should be
user-friendly, and that an infrastructure built for cars was friendliest to
users. “Is this assumption correct?” Abbey asked. “Perhaps. Does that jus-
tify the continued and increasing erosion of the parks? It does not.”13
The essential points Abbey made in his case against “industrial tourism”
were the same that David Brower and those closest to him began to make
in the 1940s, and that later inspired Earth First! Those points were that
unquestioning support of industrial progress was an untenable position;
that those government agencies which claimed to protect natural resources
and natural places inevitably compromised their principles; that compro-
mise led to the destruction of nature; and that the most popular views were
not necessarily the best. Taken together, those principles led to a single con-
clusion: if development was wrong, if federal protection was weak, and if
only a significant minority understood this, then wilderness could be lost
forever, “despite the illusory protection of the Wilderness Preservation Act
[sic], unless a great many citizens rear up on their hind legs and make vig-
orous political gestures demanding implementation of the Act.”14 Passive
reliance on democratic processes and public agencies would not protect the
wild. Only active efforts by dedicated individuals could slow the advance of
industrial progress.
ANARCHISM
Abbey’s distrust of federal agencies came as much from personal philoso-

phy as from personal experience. He relied on legal protections for public
lands but believed those protections emerged despite rather than because
of the normal operations of government. Like many in Earth First!, Abbey
was a casual anarchist. Anarchist ideas animated the essays and opinion
pieces that populated the Earth First! Journal alongside action reports and
campaign updates. Earth First!’s principles and beliefs, which justified its
tactics, grew mostly out of deep ecology but also out of anarchist thought.
Although sometimes obscured from view, anarchism provided a crucial
framework for the discussions that nourished radical environmentalism
early in the 1980s and for the disputes that fragmented it later in the decade
(see figure 5.1).
The most fundamental tenets of anarchism are that human freedom is
paramount, that institutionalized authority represses that freedom, and
that a society without institutionalized authority—in particular, without
government—is both feasible and desirable. Government does not fos-
ter social harmony; it stifles it. Social harmony is the natural tendency of
people left to order their own communities, and formal government takes
that initiative, and that tendency, away from people. “Man is born free,”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “and everywhere he is in chains.”15 As soon
as a community cedes its decision-making power to a distant government,
even a democratic one, it has resigned its members to being governed as
abstractions rather than as complete people. The belief that the authority of
(a)
(b)
Figure 5.1 The Gadsden Flag, a symbol of antigovernment sentiment, often flew at early
Earth First! gatherings as a gesture toward the group’s frustration with federal land-manage-
ment agencies and loose affiliation with anarchism. (a) Edward Abbey; (b) Dave Foreman.
Photos courtesy Dave Foreman.
the government derives from the consent of the governed assumes that such
consent is granted by every citizen, every minute, regardless of whether citi-
zens were present at the government’s founding. According to anarchists,
this belief, and the moral authority that it claims, is a fiction.
Whether radical or not, environmentalists had no inherent interest in
championing freedom, decrying authority, and dismantling government—
the crisis environmentalists of the 1970s found themselves arguing for the
exact opposite, at least in the short term—but many of the corollaries to
the central tenets of anarchism overlapped with the ethics of radical envi-
ronmentalism. Most immediately, anarchism offered a cogent critique of
conventional democratic procedures. Anarchists found the principle of
majority rule baffling. They believed that reason and experience, not the
weight of popular opinion, should determine outcomes. The aim should
be overwhelming agreement through direct participation rather than a
simple show of hands. For radical environmentalists frustrated with the
federal agencies in charge of managing public lands and natural resources,
anarchism’s insistence on more local and more grassroots forms of control
were appealing. Although their views of decision-making and especially of
human reason differed considerably, anarchists had long made the same
complaints about representative democracy that environmentalists began
to make in the 1970s: that it granted authority to far-away bureaucrats, that
it remained vulnerable to corruption, and that it tended to satisfy no one.16
Because they objected to the rule of the majority and to being directed
by any institutionalized authority, anarchists often relied on direct action
to achieve their ends. Direct action centered on personal decision-making,
not on rules from above, and could encompass anything from violence
to civil disobedience to cooperative enterprises. The point, for anarchists
(as for environmentalists), was to allow individuals and small groups to
advance a political position on their own and through their own methods.
Whether a sit-down strike in a factory or a tree-sit in a redwood forest,
direct action worked on the basis of individual initiative or group consen-
sus, and it avoided immediate participation in the political system it was
meant to disrupt.17
The most meaningful and the most complicated overlap between anar-
chism and radical environmentalism, however, was the notion of a natural
order. A great deal of distance stood between anarchist and environmental

conceptions of it, but that distance shrank considerably when seen from a
height that could take in liberal individualism’s deep skepticism of natu-
ral order. Liberal thinkers generally saw government as a necessary protec-
tion against the perils of a state of nature. Anarchists saw government as
an obstacle to people’s inherent tendency toward social harmony. Reject-
ing government without eschewing order, anarchists were left in need of a
source of structure outside of human invention, one without the authority
and hierarchy that inevitably accompanied religion. Many turned instead
to an immanent order that included but did not originate with people.
“Society,” for anarchists, was a product of nature, of the natural order that
people were part of when uninhibited by human institutions. Society pre-
dated government, and was corrupted by it. “Underlying the perfectionist
view,” writes George Crowder, referring to the anarchist faith in the human
capacity for reason and morality, “is an assumption of ultimate harmony in
the universe.”18
Anarchists’ idealized views of a social order rooted in nature have had
them perpetually looking over their shoulders at what has already gone by.
Despite the reasonable association of anarchists with revolution and with
wiping clean the slate, they have often been fixated on long ago. Anarchists’
affinity for a natural order, though, is at once focused on the past and also
ahistorical. The anarchist conception of long ago is, George Woodcock
writes, “a kind of amalgam of all those societies which have lived—or are
supposed to have lived—by co-operation rather than by organized govern-
ment.”19 And this sort of political nostalgia has lent anarchists a kind of
“primitivism,” an often romantic affection for communities further from
the industrial revolution and seemingly closer to nature. The anarchist call
for decentralization and for society on a smaller scale has usually been cou-
pled with a call for simplification in terms of technology, social structure,
and politics. Generally, the simpler the society the greater the virtue anar-
chists have found in it. Looking forward, for anarchists, has always meant
looking back.
Environmentalists, too, held the distant past in high regard—if not the
explicit past then contemporary cultures that suggested to them historical
alternatives to modern society. Abbey took the side of Navajo and Hopi
traditionalists against the industrial development of reservation land, at

least rhetorically. Foreman enthused to Earth First!ers about a speech by
American Indian activist Russell Means at the Black Hills International
Survival Gathering in 1980. Means criticized the European intellectual tra-
dition—linear, rational, abstract thought, or what Means called “the despir-
itualization of the universe”—in terms similar to radical environmentalists’
own critique. Rationality, Means said, “is a curse since it can cause humans
to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf
never forgets his or her place in the natural order.” Against the European
mind, Means offered the wisdom of cultures opposed to industrial civili-
zation. “Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate,
and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where
they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my people, of the
Hopi people, and of other correct peoples.”20 This cyclical view, in which a
better future means a return to tradition and so to the natural order, is as
persistent in environmental thought as it is in anarchist thought. Because
of this, radical environmentalists embraced traditional cultures, in theory if
not always in practice.
MURRAY BOOKCHIN VS. EARTH FIRST!
In bridging anarchist thought and the more radical strains of the envi-
ronmental movement, there was no thinker more dedicated than Murray
Bookchin. In the late 1960s Bookchin’s essay “Ecology and Revolution-
ary Thought” helped bring ecological issues to the New Left. By the 1980s
Bookchin had constructed a complex political philosophy called “social
ecology,” one of the most ambitious attempts to combine anarchist values
with environmental concerns. His distrust of mainstream environmental-
ism and his fidelity to social equality offered a counterpoint to the more
single-minded radicalism of Earth First!, and in the late 1980s he became
the chief antagonist of deep ecology in general and of Foreman and Abbey
in particular. At the heart of Bookchin’s complaint lay the issue of human
freedom and the way that, according to him, the absence of any social cri-
tique impoverished Earth First!’s views. Bookchin’s fight with Earth First!
became the main event in a larger “social ecology/deep ecology debate”
that made clear how relevant social issues remained in discussions of the
environment despite Earth First!’s claims otherwise. Bookchin labored to
reconcile anarchism’s critique of industrialism and sensitivity to the natural
world with its commitment to humanism. He convinced few that he had
succeeded, but he convinced many that Earth First!’s refusal to try was in
itself a kind of failure.21
Bookchin grew up in New York surrounded by radical politics; his parents
were Russian immigrants and members of the Industrial Workers of the
World. As an adolescent he joined the Communist Party, but disillusioned
by Stalinism and the Popular Front, he slowly moved away from communism
and toward anarchism. At the same time, Bookchin grew interested in the
effects of capitalism on the natural and human environment, writing about
chemicals and industrial pollutants under the pseudonym “Lewis Herber.” In
1962 he published Our Synthetic Environment, a study of the environmental
consequences of industrial capitalism. Although well received, Our Synthetic
Environment was overshadowed six months later by Rachel Carson’s less
far-reaching but more pointed and eloquent Silent Spring. At the end of the
decade Bookchin founded Ecology Action East in New York City, inspired
by the radical politics of Berkeley’s Ecology Action.22
For years before and after Earth Day, Bookchin’s interest in environmen-
tal issues grew as a part of his interest in anarchism and social freedom.
In 1982 these various tributaries came together in The Ecology of Freedom,
his major work. The book’s central premise was that the domination of
nature by humans was a product of the domination of humans by humans.
“Indeed, like it or not,” Bookchin said, “nearly every ecological issue is also
a social issue.” The essential problem, according to Bookchin, was not class
structure, or impersonal technology, or unjust laws—although these were
all part of the problem—but rather the existence of hierarchy. Systems of
hierarchy, he believed, structured the way that people thought about each
other, about themselves, and about the natural world. Hierarchy nurtured
the complementary assumptions that only through authority by some
over others could society function, and only through authority of people
over nature could society exist. At the root of modern environmental and
social problems was the unequal distribution of power among people and
between species.23
Human society and the natural world, for Bookchin, were in many ways
distinct: people had achieved a degree of separation from wild nature that
no other species had. But Bookchin also believed that society and nature
were not inherently opposed; whatever opposition existed between the
human and the natural worlds emerged from hierarchical thought. Much
of The Ecology of Freedom took up the history and prehistory of this opposi-
tion. One of the great conundrums of anarchism was the question of how
and why people structured societies along lines of authority and domina-
tion if that was not their natural tendency. Bookchin had little new to say
about why, but he had a great deal more to say about how.
Like radical environmentalists and his fellow anarchists, Bookchin ide-
alized the distant past. In The Ecology of Freedom he celebrated the Neo-
lithic period, or late Stone Age, an era of hunter-gatherer peoples and early
agricultural communities. Bookchin called this world “organic society”
and praised Neolithic peoples’ egalitarianism and rich sense of the natural
world. Communal ties guaranteed that all members of a community were
provided for, and nature was understood as abundant rather than “stingy”
and so something from which sustenance could be coaxed and carefully
drawn forth rather than heedlessly and urgently extracted. Neolithic agri-
culturists did not establish rank or status among each other, Bookchin
explained, nor did they assert their own superiority over their surround-
ings. A sense of mutual benefit within the community encouraged a sense
of mutual benefit between the community and its environment. Gradually,
however, this balance shifted. “And thence” Bookchin wrote, “came the long
wintertime of domination and oppression we normally call ‘civilization.’ ”24
How did civilization happen? According to Bookchin, in stages so
gradual as to be noticeable only between rather than within generations:
Hierarchy first emerged in the form of gerontocracy, a deference toward
elders that at least afforded all members of a community the opportunity
to achieve superior status. Stratification by gender was more exclusionary
and more influential. Conflict between societies led to warrior cultures
that privileged men and elevated the civic sphere over the domestic. Not
all men joined the warrior class but few if any women could, and so the
growing importance of warriors and civic leaders meant the growing sub-
jugation of women. The final and greatest break from organic society was
the decline of “the blood oath,” an affiliation based on clan, tribe, or village
rendered obsolete as urban life minimized familial bonds. The city eclipsed
the village, and civic relationships replaced ancestral ties. Communal use of
resources declined as private property arose and a system of economic and
class relations redefined social life. In the absence of the blood oath, imper-
sonal, economic relations produced the state, “the institutionalized apex of
male civilization,” and finally capitalism, “the point of absolute negativity
for society and the natural world.”25
So deep set was modern society’s domination of nature that simple
reform was little more than fool’s gold. The moderate tone of environmen-
talism and its tendency toward compromise irritated Bookchin enough that
he chose “ecology” rather than “environmentalism” to identify his own phi-
losophy. “Environmentalism, conceived as a piecemeal reform movement,”
he wrote later, “easily lends itself to the lure of statecraft, that is, to partici-
pation in electoral, parliamentary, and party-oriented activities.” The main-
stream environmental movement participated in the politics of the state
and in all of the inherently corrupt and authority-driven practices that such
participation meant to an anarchist. Those who succumbed to this tempta-
tion were “obliged to function within the State, ultimately to become blood
of its blood and bone of its bone.”26 Bookchin, in other words, voiced much
the same criticism of mainstream environmentalism as did Earth First! and
writers who identified as deep ecologists. Earth First!, in turn, frequently
pointed to Bookchin as a canonical environmental thinker.
This made it all the more surprising when in the summer of 1987, Book-
chin publicly attacked deep ecology, Earth First!, and anyone associated
with either, branding them as the most dangerous elements within the
broad environmental movement. His keynote speech for the National
Green Gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts was largely a denunciation
of deep ecology. Bookchin began by applauding the environmental move-
ment’s increasing skepticism toward the “shopworn Earth Day approach” of
conventional politics. Then he warned that any genuinely radical perspec-
tive could not accept the premises of deep ecology. Never one for rhetori-
cal restraint, Bookchin called deep ecology “a black hole of half-digested,
ill-formed, and half-baked ideas,” an “ideological toxic dump.” Its adher-
ents were “barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones, and
outright social reactionaries,” and David (Bookchin insisted on the more

formal version of his name) Foreman was an “eco-brute.” Deep ecology
and Earth First! offered one possible road for the environmental move-
ment, Bookchin argued, at the end of which was reaction, xenophobia,
and misanthropy.27
Earth First! brought Bookchin’s anger down on itself. At the Amherst
conference, Bookchin responded particularly to public remarks by Fore-
man and Abbey and to several controversial pieces in the Earth First!
Journal. In a 1986 interview with Bill Devall, Foreman had suggested that
U.S. aid to relieve starvation in Ethiopia was counterproductive and would
simply delay the inevitable, leading to even more suffering. The best thing,
Foreman said, was to “let nature seek its own balance.” In the same inter-
view he advocated immigration restriction because immigrants amounted
to “more pressure on the resources we have in the USA.”28 Abbey was
famously hostile to immigration from the south as well, not only because
of its supposed environmental impact but also its attendant “alien mode of
life which—let us be honest about this—is not appealing to the majority
of Americans.”29 Most controversial, however, was an article in the Earth
First! Journal about the AIDS epidemic. “If radical environmentalists were
to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it
would probably be something like AIDS,” wrote the pseudonymous “Miss
Ann Thropy.” AIDS, the author wrote hopefully, “has the potential to end
industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crisis.”30 In
Bookchin’s mind, such remarks captured the callous disregard that was the
essence of Earth First!’s uncompromising view.
The controversy highlighted the overlap between crisis environmen-
talism and radical environmentalism. Both started from the premise that
there existed a planetary environmental crisis, and both found a clear path
from that premise to various solutions of last resort, including totalitari-
anism and starvation. Of particular concern was population pressure. The
fear of surpassing the planet’s carrying capacity had sparked crisis environ-
mentalism in the 1970s and sat at the center of radical environmentalism in
the 1980s. This “new Malthusianism” was, to Bookchin, “the most sinister
ideological development of all.”31 He had long been wary of the holism that
it promoted. Even as he lamented the misguided reformism of mainstream
environmentalism in the 1970s, Bookchin made clear that Paul Ehrlich and
Zero Population Growth spoke an accusatory language that conflated vic-
tims and perpetrators and ignored the role of capitalism in environmental
destruction. “This ethos,” Bookchin wrote, “already crystallized into the
‘life-boat ethic,’ ‘triage,’ and a new bourgeois imagery of ‘claw-and-fang’
called survivalism marks the first steps toward ecofascism.”32 Throughout
his career, Bookchin remained committed to the idea that the late twen-
tieth century was a post-scarcity era. In the 1960s this idea buttressed his
claim that Marxism was outdated and should make way for a revolutionary
politics unbounded by class interest. Two decades later he used the idea
of a fecund nature to counter the concept of overpopulation. In the first
instance he pointed to technology as the source of abundance and in the
second to the cornucopia of nature, but his point remained the same: fear
of scarcity was a chain that bound people to a limited set of ideas. In this
sense, Bookchin was a rarity in the 1980s—an optimistic environmentalist.
The Amherst speech touched off two years of heated exchange between
supporters of Earth First! and supporters of social ecology that poured
onto the pages of the mainstream and alternative press. The recrimina-
tions flew back and forth. Bookchin repeatedly used the term “eco-fascist”
to describe elements within Earth First! R. Wills Flowers of Earth First!
called social ecology little more than “a restatement of the old Left/Liberal/
Marxist/Progressive social reform ideology,” and Bill Devall complained
about the “verbal assaults, personal attacks, nonsense, and rubbish” coming
from Bookchin and his allies, before stressing the importance of “cordial
relationships.”33 The Utne Reader quoted Bookchin as saying Garrett Har-
din, Edward Abbey, and Earth First! promoted racism. Abbey suggested
Bookchin consult a dictionary. Bookchin again called Abbey a racist and a
fascist (this time without the modifier), and Abbey called Bookchin a “fat
old woman.”34
Into this already messy fray jumped the editors of Fifth Estate. Created
in the 1960s as an alternative newspaper based in Detroit, Fifth Estate rein-
vented itself in 1975 as an explicitly anarchist publication. The paper’s writ-
ers and editors, like earlier anarchists, considered Marxism little better than
capitalism in its focus on production, “a rigid fetter on the mind that can
only make us shrink from the real potentials of a human existence.” Skeptical
of the premises underlying both capitalism and Marxism they questioned

society’s relationship to technology, government, and the natural world.35
As Fifth Estate contributor David Watson wrote in 1981, “The state is only
one structural element—albeit an integral one—in a totality which is the
bureaucratic-technological megamachine.”36 That “megamachine,” an idea
borrowed in part from Lewis Mumford, occupied Fifth Estate’s attention
for many years.
Fifth Estate rode a growing wave of frustration with Earth First!’s neglect
of social justice. Although Bookchin and the Fifth Estate collective fre-
quently clashed, a shared distaste for deep ecology made them intellectual
allies. Under the pseudonym “George Bradford,” Watson published an
extended essay in 1989 summarizing his views on deep ecology. The rhetori-
cal title of Watson’s essay, How Deep Is Deep Ecology?, left little suspense as
to the answer. From the beginning, Watson followed the social ecological
critique. Like Bookchin (and Earth First!), he dismissed the mainstream
environmental movement as hopelessly compromised. Like Bookchin, he
found deep ecology an unacceptable alternative because it ignored social
difference and offered “no really ‘deep’ critique of the state, empire, technol-
ogy, or capital, reducing the complex web of human relations to a simplistic,
abstract, scientistic caricature.” Like Bookchin, he viewed Foreman’s and
Abbey’s statements about immigration as possibly “fascist,” and he rejected
crisis environmentalists’ belief that overpopulation rather than inequitable
distribution caused resource shortages. Much of How Deep Is Deep Ecol-
ogy? in fact refuted William Catton’s Overshoot, a classic work of crisis envi-
ronmentalism and a favorite of Earth First! Although more sympathetic to
Earth First! than was Bookchin, Watson nevertheless felt that the poverty
of the group’s ideas outweighed the enthusiasm of its followers.37
THE HUMAN AND THE NATURAL
What William Cronon called the “central paradox” of wilderness—

the question of whether the human and the natural could be strictly
distinguished—always hovered at the edges of debates about Earth First!,
anarchism, and justice. When radicals made too-simple statements cleav-
ing people from nonhuman nature, they inadvertently revealed just how
intertwined the two actually were. When their critics, including Book-
chin, argued that the human and the natural were of a piece, they demon-
strated the moral impasses such thinking led to. Like the shoreline and the
water’s edge, the human and the natural could never be entirely separated
or conflated.
The forces that set apart people from nonhuman nature were, for
radicals, historical rather than absolute. Earth First! in fact insisted on
a fundamental affiliation between humans and nature. Foreman listed
“an awareness that we are animals” as a defining principle of the group,
and Earth First! saw one of its greatest obstacles as “the bizarre utilitar-
ian philosophy that separates one specie (Homo sapiens) from its place
in the biosphere and from its relationship with the land community and
the life cycles of the entire planet.”38 It was modern society and its atten-
dant beliefs that had wrenched humans away from the nonhuman. The
split having taken place, however, radical environmentalists tended to
blame a collective “humans” for all of the planet’s environmental harms.
The sense that people and nature were at odds, even if not inherently,
led Earth First! to make the same sort of sweeping accusations against
a collective humanity that the crisis environmentalists of the 1970s had
leveled. People and nonhuman nature were not sundered forever, but at
a great enough distance that radical environmentalists made few distinc-
tions when they cast blame.
Deep ecology, its critics complained, had little to say about class or race or
the inequality that global capitalism wrought. And it had little to say about
gender, as feminists increasingly pointed out. Lending social ecology’s basic
argument a more specific valence, “ecofeminists” claimed that the destruc-
tion of nature and the oppression of women mirrored each other. Ariel
Kay Salleh wrote, “The master-slave role which marks man’s relation with
nature is replicated in man’s relation with woman”; and Ynestra King said,
“Deep ecology ignores the structures of entrenched economic and politi-
cal power within society.”39 Because the purported proximity of women to
nature through procreation and childrearing had long been used to restrict
women’s lives, feminists claimed that any connection between the exploita-
tion of nature and the exploitation of people had to be understood in terms
of gender. By associating women with natural cycles, men had historically
imagined themselves as rational and disciplined, and women as emotional

and instinctual, assumptions that determined men’s and women’s relative
roles in the home, in the community, and in society. Across different eras
and different cultures, the closer women were to nature the further they
were from autonomy and freedom.
Complicating the feminist critique, another branch of ecofeminism
problematically embraced the association of women with nature. Feminists
like Mary Daly and Starhawk claimed that women were more directly con-
nected to the natural world and less likely than men to engage in warfare,
exploitation, and environmental destruction.40 If culture and nature stood
opposed, women represented the best that nature had to offer against the
worst that culture perpetrated. Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s longtime com-
panion and intellectual partner, broke with ecofeminism over what she
considered its untenable embrace of social categories based in natural pro-
cesses.41 But ecofeminists were not alone in wrestling with this problem.
Other radical ecological thinkers also turned to nature for moral mean-
ing, if less explicitly. Anarchists spoke of society as natural and spontane-
ous and stifled by excessive human planning and design. Deep ecologists
praised early societies for living in accord with natural cycles and harbored
an acute distrust of modern notions of progress. All three groups granted
the natural world some degree of order, meaning, and wisdom. Anywhere
theories of the human and the nonhuman overlapped, the ground sloped
toward essentialism.
In the 1980s and 1990s Bookchin slid down that slope, even as he
tried to walk away from it. He moderated his celebration of preindustrial
societies and his skepticism of human instrumentalism as he grew more
and more frustrated with some ecofeminists and all deep ecologists. He
became a defender of human reason. Although Bookchin had always
found a central place for people in any conception of an environmentally
sound society, his battle with the deep ecologists pushed him into a more
robust advocacy of humanism and of people’s distinct role as manipulators
of the natural world. “Above all,” he wrote, “antihumanists deprecate or
deny humanity’s most distinctive hallmark—reason, and its extraordinary
powers to grasp, intervene into, and play a guiding role in altering social
and natural reality.”42
Reason was not just a product of nature, Bookchin suggested, but the
product of nature. Human reason, he implied, might be the manifestation
of nature’s voice, direction, and meaning, and the product of evolution.
“What we today call ‘mind’ in all its human uniqueness, self-possession,
and imaginative possibilities is coterminous with a long evolution of mind,”
Bookchin wrote in The Ecology of Freedom. To one degree or another, the
subjectivity of the rational mind always inhered in the natural world, cul-
minating in human thought. Nature, then, moved with purpose. “The fact
that the natural world is orderly . . . has long suggested the intellectually cap-
tivating possibility that there is a logic—a rationality if you will—to reality
that may well be latent with meaning.” And, Bookchin suggested, that logic
and meaning might be readily apparent: “To render nature more fecund,
varied, whole, and integrated may well constitute the hidden desiderata of
natural evolution.”43 Although he rarely led with this idea, Bookchin often
mentioned in his writing at least the possibility that the natural world had
a distinct set of goals—fertility, diversity, unity—and that people could be
nature’s most developed means of achieving those goals.
Bookchin countered deep ecology’s calls for a return to wilderness not
by claiming human superiority but by claiming that people were nature’s
means of achieving its own ends and so responsible for improving it. The
distinction was lost on Earth First!, and even on Earth First!’s critics.
As concerned as those critics remained about Earth First!’s disregard of
humans, they also recognized the threat to the nonhuman world posed by
conflating people and nature. When Bookchin described people as “liter-
ally constituted by evolution to intervene in the biosphere,” David Watson
cried foul, calling such views “a kind of anthropocentric manifest destiny”
and Robyn Eckersley read Bookchin’s equation of people and nature as
the arrogance of humanism in another guise, asking, “Are we really that
enlightened?”44
Like many environmental thinkers, Bookchin tried to steer a course
between the permissiveness of judging people a part of nature and the
cynicism of judging them apart from it. The former could lead to inac-
tion, or even anti-environmentalism. Some early twentieth-century wil-
derness advocates embraced progressive evolution and compromised their
own activist spirit by believing, as historian Susan Schrepfer writes, that
“technology was not a violation of nature but a fulfillment of natural his-

tory.”45 Thomas Shepard of LOOK magazine took this argument much
further. “Man is part of nature,” he told a roomful of industrialists, explain-
ing the senselessness of the environmental movement. “Anything we do we
do as card-carrying instruments of nature.”46 The latter could lead to a poi-
sonous misanthropy, as Bookchin feared and Earth First! demonstrated.
“Man has absolute dominion over the earth until he finally will destroy
it,” one Earth First!er said in a neat summary of the radical environmental
view of humanity.47
Bookchin struggled to reconcile his fierce loyalty to human freedom
and achievement with his deep concerns about environmental destruction.
Simply commingling the human and the nonhuman, though, left both con-
strained. To argue that human beings should follow the dictates of nature
was to invite a debate about what those dictates might be, a debate in which
the terms “natural” and “unnatural” would be brandished like cudgels.
For anyone committed to social justice or human freedom, this would be
a debate with no winners. Conversely, to argue that human actions were
by definition part of nature was to sanction the very forms of abuse that
Bookchin had dedicated himself to fighting. “The fashionable view is that
humanity’s disruption of the environment is somehow (we know not how)
‘natural,’ ” Earth First!’s Christopher Manes wrote disapprovingly, “since
by definition we evolved into the kind of rapacious animals we are.”48 As
Joel Kovel suggested, the debate pulled in directions that cut against the
grain of what most people believed about human beings: “That is, humans
are very much part of nature, but there is also something in us that is never
content with nature.”49
Were people the antithesis of nature or its highest expression? Bookchin
and his fellow social ecologists tried to reconcile a commitment to restrain-
ing human use of the natural world with a commitment to social justice and
human freedom. Social ecologists wanted to satisfy two principles that were
in many ways in tension with each other, and so ended up satisfying neither
completely. Earth First! tried to ignore one and champion the other, and
so ended up supporting positions that most found despicable, like Fore-
man’s solution to starvation, Abbey’s statements about immigration, and
“Miss Ann Thropy’s” comments about AIDS and overpopulation. The
logic of social ecology led to impasse; the logic of deep ecology as practiced
by Earth First! led to too-simple solutions for complex issues. Earth First!
embraced anarchism’s critique of modern society but ignored the long-held
anarchist commitment to human freedom, a commitment that Bookchin
tried for decades to pair with ecological health.
But there was for many an elegance in the simplicity of Earth First!’s
politics, and a power in the forthrightness with which the group fought
single-mindedly for one cause, never troubling itself with competing moral
claims. Because the group had no membership rolls, it is impossible to say
how many Earth First!ers there were, but some estimates ran as high as fif-
teen thousand. By the mid-1980s the group had an international following
and reputation and stories about Earth First!’s bravado proliferated in print
and on television.50
Meanwhile, Murray Bookchin and social ecology remained little
known even among environmentalists. There were those who, consciously
or not, worked with Bookchin’s basic ideas and toward at least his interme-
diate goals. Most of these people, however, did so within a conventional
framework that Bookchin explicitly rejected. They wanted social jus-
tice and environmental protection together, and without a fundamental
restructuring of society, ignoring Bookchin’s view that one depended on
the other. Among the radicals to whom Bookchin addressed himself, his
many and thoughtful ideas never caught fire. Bookchin’s complaints about
radical environmentalism were fundamental, prescient, and underappre-
ciated; he anticipated not only some of the particular issues that would
divide Earth First! several years later but also the broad issues that would
cause concern within mainstream groups. An unconventional anarchist in
almost every other way, Bookchin was typical in that his diagnoses rang
truer than his prescriptions.
“ALIEN-NATION”
The fierceness of Earth First!’s conviction and the directness of its methods
continued to inspire many activists seized by the spirit of radicalism, but
the crossed purposes of deep ecology and social justice increasingly vexed
others. The roiling of Earth First! in the late 1980s revealed the group’s
strengths and weaknesses. Internal critics still paid homage to the ethos of
Earth First! and often remained convinced that it was the best means of
righting the wrongs of industrialism, while at the same time they increas-
ingly rejected the philosophy of Earth First!’s “old guard” with its shades of
jingoism and misanthropy. The perception of antihumanism began to cost
Earth First! support within its own ranks, and the dissatisfactions pulling
at the group’s edges came first from the anarchist Left.
One of the earliest signs of irreconcilable differences came during the
1987 Round River Rendezvous in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. At
that year’s Rendezvous—just a few weeks apart from the National Green
Gathering in Amherst—a group of anarchists from Washington engaged
Edward Abbey in heated argument. The anarchists set up a table to dis-
tribute their literature along with several pieces “for discussion,” including
copies of an editorial for the Bloomsbury Review that Abbey had written a
year earlier complaining of high rates of immigration to the United States
from Central America. When Abbey approached the table, the anarchists
questioned him about his chauvinism and lack of attention to imperialism
and inequality. A crowd gathered, and soon the Rendezvous coordinating
committee interceded on Abbey’s behalf.
Several months later the Washington group published a pamphlet
explaining their position under the title “Alien-Nation,” and the Earth First!
Journal reprinted the pamphlet for its readers. The Alien-Nation anarchists
explained that they attended the Rendezvous with an open mind but left
convinced that Earth First! anarchism was libertarian rather than commu-
nalist and that Earth First! espoused a “wild west” image, “extremely right
wing, if not decidedly fascist in its orientation.” Deep ecology had become
“human hating and finally a racist ideal for advanced capitalist countries to
maintain their dominance over the rest of the world and its resources.” The
anarchists’ own philosophy was “eco-mutualism, that is, that human society
and the natural world are not mutually exclusive.” In case it was not entirely
clear, the anarchists announced they would no longer associate themselves
with Earth First!51
The impassioned response to Alien-Nation in the Earth First! Journal
came quickly. Most readers and contributors stridently objected to Alien-
Nation. One of the most conciliatory letters was from “Lone Wolf Circles,”
who described himself as both a deep ecologist and an anarchist. “There

will not be any social equality until we are once again small populations of
spiritually-aware Earth warriors,” he wrote, “conscious of our impact, arti-
sans in lifestyle, spread thin across a globe diverse and wild once again.”
One of the least conciliatory letters was from Paul Watson, who more than
fifteen years earlier had been on the losing side of arguments within Green-
peace over how militant the organization should be. “This is the kind of
bullshit that drove David Brower out of Friends of the Earth and hundreds
of other people out of groups and movements they founded,” he wrote.
Watson had no interest in the issues that Alien-Nation raised. “My heart
does not bleed for the third world,” he wrote. “My energies point toward
saving the one world, the planet Earth which is being plundered by one
species, the human primate.”52
Mitch Friedman, one of the coordinators of Washington Earth First!,
warned Foreman that the clash between the Washington anarchists and
Edward Abbey was symptomatic of greater dissonance within the radical
environmental community. Friedman knew and worked with the Alien-
Nation anarchists, and although he disagreed with most of their criti-
cisms he recognized that competing views within Earth First! could not
be ignored for long. Many local groups handled differences of opinion and
approach amicably, but Earth First! had garnered a national reputation,
and Friedman understood that on a larger stage personal relationships mat-
tered less. “I’m only concerned that by delaying the problem on the national
level,” he told Foreman, “it may reach a crisis stage and cause deep rifts.”53
The rifts opened gradually but steadily. West Coast anarchists came
from a younger generation of radicals with their roots in antiauthoritar-
ian politics rather than the conservation politics of Earth First!’s found-
ers. They were deeply committed to preventing environmental destruction,
but not exclusively. In 1989 Mikal Jakubal—the original tree sitter—and
a group of West Coast anarchists published the first issue of Live Wild or
Die, a zine that would push past the Earth First! Journal’s focus on narrowly
construed environmental issues. Like Bookchin, Jakubal and his peers saw
environmentalism not as an end in itself but as one of the clearest windows
onto essential structures of hierarchy and control. “There is an incredible
amount of knowledge about the nature of power, revolt, how the system
co-opts, organization & the like” Jakubal wrote to Foreman, “that has been
developed (& practiced, by the way) by the ‘anarchist intellectual’ commu-
nity . . . that hasn’t even been touched by most of EF!” Jakubal had cor-
responded with several noted anarchists, including David Watson at Fifth
Estate. “These folks—though you may not believe it—actually have an
almost identical worldview (‘deep ecology’ if it must be labeled) to us but
they’ve come at it from a completely different direction,” he told Foreman.54
The group behind Live Wild or Die emerged from Earth First! but
strained against what they perceived to be philosophical limits. “We grew
to a certain point under the name Earth First!,” Live Wild or Die editor
Gena Trott wrote to Foreman that summer, “but we won’t stop growing
if we start to disregard the name—anymore than a baby will stop grow-
ing if she stops using the (once beneficial) diaper.” The diaper, in fact, had
become restrictive. “Surely the battle that Earth First! is fighting is laud-
able and many of us have learned from it,” Trott wrote. “But what was once
supposed to be a movement has become self-limiting in its scope.”55 Like
Jakubal, Trott had corresponded with the Fifth Estate crowd and decided
that Earth First!, for all its many strengths, could no longer contain the
evolving radical environmental scene on its own (see figure 5.2).
As was the case in the Bookchin/Earth First! debate, questioning envi-
ronmentalists’ most basic goals became a matter of questioning where
people ended and nonhuman nature began. Lev Chernyi, pseudonymous
editor of Anarchy, the magazine that called itself “a journal of desire armed,”
criticized deep ecology as a moral system that stifled individual freedom.
At the center of deep ecology’s rigid morality was “nature,” Chernyi said,
yet another false idol used to control human thought and behavior. Nature
could not act as a source of authority. “It is not something to be worshipped,”
he wrote, “nor is it something for us to serve.” Lone Wolf Circles again took
up the cause of deep ecology and responded, “Wilderness is the negation
of control—it is ultimately radical.” Chernyi and Jakubal countered that
deep ecology was “false consciousness” and “ideological.” Like Bookchin,
Chernyi and Jakubal tried to bind human and nonhuman interests in order
to reconcile justice and ecology. Nature, they argued, did not constitute a
stable reality separate from humanity but rather something each individual
defined for herself. “Our own perspectives open out on a natural world, but
Figure 5.2 Although Live Wild or Die critiqued Earth First!’s politics, its contributors also
embraced Earth First!-style ecotage. From Live Wild or Die 1 (1988).
directly because of this fact we thus cannot possibly really see the world
from any ‘higher’ point of view than our own,” Chernyi wrote. Any author-
ity external to the individual suppressed that individual’s will, Jakubal
agreed, whether that authority be Marxism, deep ecology, or “an abstracted
idea of Nature itself. These all kill our unruly, natural wild humanity.” For
Chernyi and Jakubal the only “nature” worth following was an internal one,
shaped by an individual’s imagination and free will. Like Bookchin, they
wondered if the wildest places on the planet might be human minds.56
Once the moral authority of nonhuman nature and the objective reality
of wilderness lost their moorings, some of environmentalism’s most basic
claims began to float away. “What a bizarre circumstance,” Jakubal wrote,
“to be risking injury or imprisonment to defend an idea of nature while
killing the real living nature in ourselves!”57 Trees, mountains, forests, and
rivers became ideas, while internal thoughts, impulses, and drives remained
real. The new green anarchists, Foreman lamented, were “more interested in
the wild within than the wilderness without.”58 Lone Wolf Circles pointed
out the risks Jakubal ran: the absence of shared values or an organic order
could be used to justify or excuse a great deal. “Is the desire to help someone
no greater than the desire to hurt them?” he asked. “The desire to defend
the natural world against all odds no ‘higher’ than the desire to constrain,
demean, and destroy it? The bleak and violent history of civilized humanity
is all a product of someone’s ‘armed desire.’ ”59
Deep ecology remained just as ethically problematic. Denying human
beings a privileged moral position exposed people (and some more than
others) to the same disregard as granting human beings moral superior-
ity exposed nature. David Watson pointed to this dilemma in an exchange
with “Miss Ann Thropy.” “If we are ‘one’ with nature,” he wrote, “then we
are no different than starfish or protomammals, and nature is doing this
strange dance with herself, or is chaos. If we are a uniquely moral agent, then
not only will our intervention reflect some kind of stewardship . . . but the
question of the configurations of power, domination and alienation within
human development are key.”60 In all of the debates around Earth First!,
the question just out of reach was about the objective and moral limits
of people and nature. If nonhuman nature provided an order and stabil-
ity that humans could violate, environmentalism was an urgent matter of
living with restraint. If people were as natural as starfish, environmentalism

became primarily a philosophical question about what sort of world the
majority of humans wanted.
ENVIRONMENTALISM AND NATIVE SOVEREIGNT Y

IN THE SOUTHWEST
Radical environmentalists were not averse to working for social justice as

long as environmental goals came first. When radicals aligned their cause
with social movements, the strict terms of partnership made clear how
provisional such alignments were. Environmentalists often found it easi-
est to affiliate themselves with Native Americans, assuming environmental-
ism and Native rights to be complementary. Both groups, it was thought,
fought to protect and conserve a natural heritage. “What we need to do,”
Earth First!er Art Goodtimes said in 1986, “is build bridges between natives
struggling for sovereignty and deep ecologists struggling for a biocentric
paradigm shift away from industrialism’s exploitation and desecration of
the Mother.”61 Goodtimes saw such bridges as short and sturdy, connect-
ing sister causes against a common enemy. In some cases the connections
existed, and environmental and Native groups worked together. But Good-
times’s assumption of shared interests overlooked the ways that environ-
mentalists often considered Native Americans exemplars of a sustainable
relationship between people and the nonhuman world, ignoring the more
complicated political and social context in which Native peoples fought for
sovereignty and for control of their lands.
Radical environmental efforts in the Southwest emerged, in part, from
the perception of common ground between environmentalists and Native
Americans. That common ground was initially Black Mesa, a coal-rich
plateau straddling the Navajo and Hopi reservations in northern Arizona.
The fight over Black Mesa coal demonstrated both the powerful rhetoric as
well as the risks of political oversimplification in assumptions that Native
American sovereignty and environmental protection stood adjacent. In the
1960s a consortium of energy utilities called Western Energy Supply and
Transmission (WEST), with plans to build six coal-fired power plants in
the Four Corners region of the Southwest, convinced the Hopi and Navajo
tribal councils to lease sixty-five thousand acres of Black Mesa to the Pea-
body Coal Company. The new power plants would feed energy consump-
tion far beyond northern Arizona, turning Black Mesa coal into electricity
for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and much of Southern California. Pea-
body’s plans to strip mine Black Mesa grew more secure late in the decade
when the federal government gained a strong interest in Arizona coal. After
the Sierra Club helped defeat the Department of the Interior’s proposed
Grand Canyon dams, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall began to
negotiate for a portion of the electricity from WEST’s Navajo Generating
Station near Page, Arizona. In order to guarantee a steady supply of energy
for its Central Arizona Project (CAP), Interior helped WEST construct
the legal infrastructure for the generating station and for a railroad to carry
Black Mesa coal.62
Peabody’s Black Mesa and Kayenta mines occupied tens of thousands
of acres of the plateau, but their potential environmental effects stretched
much further. The rain and snowmelt in drainages that started on the pla-
teau’s rim passed through the strip mines, collecting sulfuric acid and then
running to nearby farms. Black Mesa Mine used a 275-mile slurry pipeline
from the plateau to the Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, Nevada,
carrying 5 million tons of crushed coal a year by pumping 1.4 billion gallons
of water through the pipe. That water came from the Navajo Aquifer deep
under Black Mesa, a primary source of water for the arid region. Because
Black Mesa sat above a basin, lowering the water table there could drain
farms and communities for many miles around. Each of the six proposed
plants would pump hundreds of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air each day,
and several plants would be within just a few miles of each other in a region
subject to inversions that trapped warm air and pollutants and kept them
stationary for days at a time.63
With both public and private interests poised to mine Black Mesa, only
Abbey’s “citizens on their hind legs” stood in the way. In northern Arizona,
at first, these citizens consisted of traditionalist factions within the Navajo
and Hopi at odds with their tribal councils, and a handful of amateur con-
servationists from the Four Corners region. One of those amateurs was Jack
Loeffler, a close friend of Abbey’s. Loeffler started the Black Mesa Defense
Fund in 1970, and both present and future environmental activists moved
through its Santa Fe office, including Abbey, the advertising consultant

Jerry Mander, and Dave Foreman, who volunteered to stuff envelopes.
Black Mesa Defense Fund fought Peabody’s plans for the next two years
through publicity, public hearings, and occasional clandestine mischief.64
Black Mesa Defense Fund made little distinction between environmen-
talism and traditional Native American culture. “Traditional Indians still
live in the Southwest—people who regard themselves as stewards of the
Earthmother,” Loeffler wrote. “They live by a system of ethics which we
seem to have forgotten.” Loeffler did not group all Native Americans under
a single banner. He sided with the traditionalist factions of the Hopi and
Navajo against tribal councils who he believed had betrayed their people.
But he and other environmentalists understood Native politics largely
through the categories of traditional people and modern, industrial society.
“To the Bureau of Reclamation and the power companies, the Southwest is
a momentary answer to the energy needs of the West,” Loeffler wrote. “To
the traditional Indians, to many non-Indians who live there or visit there,
the Southwest is the last refuge of peace, beauty and natural balance.”65
“Natural balance” was not the only issue in the Black Mesa fight, how-
ever. Central too was “Navajo nationalism,” which historian Andrew
Needham calls “the main language by which Navajos sought to alter
the dynamics of energy development in the Southwest.”66 The Navajo
expressed as great a concern as environmentalists about how Peabody’s
strip mines would pollute the air and water of northern Arizona, and con-
fronting the ecological consequences of industrial development was an
important part of Navajo nationalism. But Navajo nationalism included
social and economic dimensions. When voiced by members of the tribal
council, Navajo nationalism argued that Native Americans should reap
more direct economic benefits from energy development on their land.
When articulated by Native activists who doubted their council’s lead-
ership, it meant fighting energy development that threatened not just
the environment but Navajo culture and political sovereignty. The anti-
development version of Navajo nationalism lined up well with environ-
mentalism, pitting both Native Americans and environmentalists against
extractive industries. Still, when armed members of the American Indian
Movement blocked Peabody mining equipment in 1974, they stood their
ground to protect Navajo sheep herds and economic autonomy as much

as the plateau itself. In some ways, antidevelopment Navajos and antide-
velopment environmentalists even opposed each other. As Navajo activists
embraced an anticolonial analysis, Needham explains, they rejected any
strict distinction between “civilized” and “primitive” nations, the sort of
distinction that radical environmentalists embraced romantically just as
easily as developers embraced it disparagingly.67
Radical environmentalists’ interest in Black Mesa revealed more about
their expansive view of nature and environmentalism than about their inter-
est in social justice. A strip mine, like a ranch, was a working landscape and
not a wilderness. Needham argues that the Sierra Club’s vigorous defense
of the Grand Canyon against the threat of dams in the 1960s and less
energetic defense of Black Mesa against the threat of mining in the 1970s
showcased the Club’s tacit categorization of landscapes as either “sacred”
or “productive,” the one inviolable and the other expendable. The hazard,
he suggests, of defining some places as particularly scenic and hallowed
was to write off other places to the dirty necessities of industrial produc-
tion and to ignore the plight of the people who suffered harm. In that case,
radical environmentalists held a broader view of what was worth protect-
ing and why.68 Abbey called Black Mesa “the chief current battleground” in
the fight between industrial development and the West.69 As selectively as
radicals sometimes valorized wilderness, their belief in a planetwide fight
against the forces of industrialization meant that battles might be fought
anywhere. Wilderness areas remained the places most worth protecting,
but coal mines and cattle ranches were more immediately threatened, and
so they were where activists could most directly engage their opponents.
If the Sierra Club’s willingness to cede places like Black Mesa to the
imperatives of modern society also meant looking away from the attendant
harm to humans living there, radical environmentalists could claim to be
the greater populists as well. But that populism remained narrow. The gen-
eralizations about people that radical environmentalists relied on meant
they shared the cause of traditionalist Native Americans only partially.
When Earth First!er George Wuerthner questioned Alaska Natives’ rela-
tionship to their natural environment in 1987, Lewis Johnson responded,
“Since it is my racial group he’s attacking, I am on guard and recognize both
in his tone and his arguments the kinds of racist statements that are usually
made in other contexts, but are made here in defense of ecology—an issue
we should be on the same side of.”70
At times that same side was more obvious, if still conditional. In the
mid-1980s Energy Fuels Nuclear proposed several uranium mines near the
Grand Canyon, some of which threatened Havasu Canyon on the Havasu-
pai Reservation. In late 1986 Earth First!, the Sierra Club, Canyon Under
Siege, and members of the Havasupai held a demonstration at the entrance
to Grand Canyon National Park. Several dozen environmentalists and
Havasupai then drove thirteen miles to where Energy Fuels Nuclear had
begun removing vegetation for its proposed Canyon Mine. The Havasu-
pai offered a prayer and environmentalists replanted sagebrush. “This land
which was cursed is now blessed,” Earth First!er Roger Featherstone said.71
The temporary partnership between Earth First! and the Havasupai
arose largely from circumstance. Earth First!ers had been monkeywrench-
ing Grand Canyon mines for months and, along with Mary Sojourner’s
Canyon Under Siege, fighting federal bureaucracy in general and the For-
est Service in particular. “Once again,” Earth First!er Ned Powell wrote of
the environmental assessment process for mines on Kaibab National For-
est land, “the legal process is just a parody of public servants listening to
the wishes of the American people.”72 In this case, the American people
included Native Americans similarly opposed to uranium mining, and
environmentalists welcomed that alliance. Foreman insisted such alliances
work primarily on Earth First!’s terms, however. “I would like to see a nat-
ural and honest working together between Earth First! and Indians—in
mutual respect, without guilt, and with a firm commitment to Earth,” he
wrote in 1985.73
Environmentalists tended to funnel their commitment to Native sov-
ereignty through either romantic generalizations or moral absolutes. In
the Southwest, neither environmentalists nor the Navajo could look at
Black Mesa without seeing streetlamps and air conditioners in Phoenix,
Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. But Navajo activists also saw political and eco-
nomic inequality, as well as imperialism. Edward Abbey, the Black Mesa
Defense Fund, and later Earth First! used fewer and starker categories than
did the Navajo to explain energy infrastructure in the Southwest. Those
categories were never entirely limited to the human and the nonhuman;
radical environmentalists took into account different people’s differing
relationships to development and Western lands. But radical environmen-
tal thought rested on a clear divide between the modern, industrial world
and what Loeffler called “the Earthmother,” with people lined up on one
side or the other.74
EMETIC
In the midst of internecine conflicts that pit eco-anarchists and radical and
mainstream environmentalists against one another, and that underscored
Earth First!’s circumscribed view of social justice, it took the FBI to remind
all parties involved that they shared at least some basic aims as well as antag-
onists. In 1989 federal agents arrested several Earth First!-affiliated activists
in Arizona operating under the name EMETIC. Prosecution at the hands
of the state bought Earth First! credibility from some of its anarchist critics,
and Earth First!ers themselves rallied around their comrades. Attacks from
the outside only momentarily muffled what were steadily growing differ-
ences within the movement but nonetheless alerted radicals and environ-
mentalists of various stripes to the high stakes for which they fought.
The Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy (EMETIC—
the name poking fun at Arizona’s recently impeached governor) claimed
responsibility in the late 1980s for several incidents of sabotage. In 1988
EMETIC damaged or felled several dozen poles supporting power lines
that fed Energy Fuels Nuclear’s Canyon and Pigeon Mines north of Grand
Canyon National Park, temporarily shutting down the mines. In 1987 and
again in 1988, the group used acetylene torches to cut ski-lift poles at the
Fairfield Snowbowl resort near Flagstaff, writing to the resort to warn of
the damage and make clear that repaired poles would be dismantled again.75
EMETIC emerged in part from two characteristics of Earth First! activ-
ism in the Southwest. The first was a focus on industrial infrastructure. By
the time of the 1987 Round River Rendezvous near the Grand Canyon,
Earth First! had increased its activities in Arizona significantly, waging
battles against a proposed Cliff Dam on the Verde River, a Phelps-Dodge
copper smelter in Douglas, and uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.76
During the same weekend that Alien-Nation confronted Abbey, one hun-
dred Earth First!ers invaded Pigeon Mine just a few miles away, halting the
mine’s operations for several hours and landing twenty-one protesters in
jail.77 Focused especially on the energy infrastructure spreading through-
out the state, Arizona Earth First!ers hoped eventually to take on the Palo
Verde nuclear plant and the Central Arizona Project (CAP) itself.
The second development was the presumed association of environmen-
tal activism in the Southwest with Native American rights. The Snowbowl
resort sprawled across the San Francisco Peaks and, as EMETIC noted in
its letters to the resort’s owners, the Hopi and Navajo had long objected to
the development of sacred mountains. “The use of this mountain to enter-
tain rich white people by allowing them to slide down without bother of
walking up is inappropriate,” EMETIC scolded.78 The eco-activists echoed
the Sacred Mountain Defense Fund, a Native group organized to protect
the San Francisco Peaks as well as to oppose “colonialism, corruption,
waste, rampant unplanned development and nuclear power.”79 Native activ-
ists had nothing to do with the Snowbowl sabotage and made no public
statements in support or in opposition. EMETIC nonetheless claimed to
fight for Native rights, just as it pointed to the rights of the Havasupai in its
attacks on the Canyon Mine. The group warned of birth defects and illness
from uranium mines and chided Energy Fuels Nuclear, writing, “Perhaps
the fact that the victims have mostly been dark skinned children on reserva-
tions makes it easier for you to ignore this.”80 Peg Millet of EMETIC said
later that she and her fellow activists “were all doing it as a spiritual exercise.
Our targets were all sacred lands.”81
EMETIC was not the same as Earth First! but neither was it entirely dis-
tinct. The group emerged from the 1987 Round River Rendezvous. Millett,
an Earth First! regular who lived in Prescott, Arizona, volunteered for the
Rendezvous organizing committee. Mark Davis, who also lived in Prescott,
attended the Rendezvous to learn more about Earth First! and to find some
partners in environmental sabotage. He found Millett. She was arrested for
the first time at the Pigeon Mine protest and was ready to take even greater
risks when Davis revealed his plans for Snowbowl. The pair recruited Ilse
Asplund, a close friend of Millett’s, as well as a Prescott botanist named
Marc Baker.
In late May 1989 Millett, Davis, Baker, and Mike Tait—whom Millett
met at the 1988 Round River Rendezvous in Washington—approached a
power-line tower feeding energy to a pump station outside of Salome, Ari-
zona, two pieces among thousands that made up the CAP. As they gathered
around the tower with a cutting torch, flares suddenly arced above them,
illuminating several dozen approaching FBI agents who quickly arrested
Baker and Davis. Millett ran into the dark, evading the agents, their track-
ing dogs, and the searchlight of a Blackhawk helicopter that was scanning
the desert. “I did not have an adversarial relationship with the natural
world and all of the people who were chasing me did,” she explained later.82
Millett walked sixteen miles through the night, then hitchhiked back into
Prescott to the Planned Parenthood office where she worked and where the
FBI finally caught up with her. Mike Tait was never arrested. His real name
was Mike Fain, and he was an undercover agent who had been infiltrating
EMETIC for over a year.
Several hours after Millett eluded capture in the desert, FBI agents
burst into Dave Foreman’s Tucson home and placed him under arrest. The
government charged various combinations of the activists for the attacks
on Snowbowl, the uranium mines, and the CAP tower, as well as with
conspiracy to destroy an energy facility. The case rested on hundreds of
hours of taped conversations gathered by Fain, several paid informers in
Prescott and Tucson, and listening devices planted in houses, telephones,
and in at least one instance operated by FBI agents in an airplane cir-
cling above Foreman and Fain. Among the recorded conversations were
discussions between Davis and Fain about the possibility of simultane-
ously toppling power lines to the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona and
the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, as well as to the Rocky
Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado. The prosecution claimed the
CAP action was just practice for the attacks on nuclear facilities, and that
although Foreman had not participated in any EMETIC actions he was
the group’s mastermind and source of funds. Several weeks into the trial
the defendants agreed to a plea bargain. The court finally sentenced Davis
to six years in prison, Millett to three years, Baker to six months, and
Asplund—whom a grand jury indicted on related charges over a year after
the initial arrests—to one month. The government’s comparatively weak
case against Foreman allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor after five

years’ probation.83
The arrests, trial, and sentencing of the “Arizona Five” formed, in many
ways, a brief moment of cohesion for an Earth First! that confronted criti-
cisms from within and from without. Friends like David Brower showed up
in Prescott to raise support. Gary Snyder, a monkeywrenching skeptic, nev-
ertheless donated money to the activists’ legal defense fund.84 Even recent
antagonists pledged their loyalty. “Political differences make little matter to
us when the state victimizes those fighting to destroy the megamachine,” the
editors of Fifth Estate wrote. “You are to be congratulated for your efforts,
not prosecuted.” When the New York Times described Murray Bookchin
as an Earth First! adversary, he responded, “Whatever my differences with
Earth First! and Mr. Foreman, I believe the organization’s membership is
generally high-minded and deeply concerned with the destruction of the
environment. I have contributed to the legal defense fund for the three [sic]
who were arrested and urge others to do so.” The Sierra Club, which had
long kept a safe distance from Earth First!, inched closer. “In its obsession
to tie the issue of monkeywrenching to nuclear sabotage,” Sierra magazine
reported, “the FBI had to invent a conspiracy where none existed; whatever
‘message’ it intended to send was lost along the way.”85
Earth First!ers urged resolve rather than retreat after the FBI crackdown.
Mark Davis, who received the strictest sentence, spoke for himself, refusing
to disavow what he had done. “I acknowledge the necessity of courts and
laws, and accept my prison term,” he said from jail. “But I am not sorry.” In
fact, he continued to sound an alarm. “We humans are collectively killing
this planet and dooming our own children by indulging in an orgy of con-
sumption and denial,” he warned, reminding activists of all that he believed
remained at stake.86 Other radicals tried to find in EMETIC inspiration
rather than fear. “As I pound away on these keys,” Myra Mishkin wrote in a
special edition of the Earth First! Journal, “it seems that people are carrying
on. There are people sitting in Redwoods, others are blockading roads, and
meetings go on across the country. The reasons why we each got involved
in the first place are still with us.”87 But those reasons—strict ecocentrism
or something broader and more capacious—remained at issue, as did Earth
First!’s strategy, tactics, and culture.
ECOTOPIA EARTH FIRST!
“Earth First! is alive and well. Earth First! is alive and wild,” several of the
group’s key figures declared in late 1991. “And we must unite as we orga-
nize, educate, agitate, and yes, monkeywrench, to defend this Earth.”88 The
“statement of solidarity & unity” was an explicit response to the Arizona 5
trial and an implicit acknowledgment of changes arising from Earth First!’s
own inner turmoil. Alien-Nation and Murray Bookchin had signaled a
larger transformation within Earth First! that would eventually shift the
group’s philosophy away from deep ecology and toward a more humanistic
brand of radicalism; shift the group’s tactics away from monkeywrench-
ing and toward civil disobedience; and shift the group’s center of gravity
away from the Southwest and toward the West Coast. None of these shifts
was new. Deep ecology had always been a subject of debate, many of Earth
First!’s actions involved sitting in front of bulldozers in the middle of the
day rather than sabotaging them at night, and Earth First!ers had always
hailed from Oregon and California as much as from New Mexico and Ari-
zona. But by the early 1990s these different approaches had evolved from
friendly disagreements to serious doubts about the group’s original prem-
ises. Despite its decentralized structure and resistance to official hierarchy
Earth First! did have a public identity, and a few of its most active chapters
moved to redefine that image.
Some of the voices questioning Earth First!’s founding principles were
new and distant; others were familiar and close at hand. No voice was more
familiar than that of Mike Roselle, who signed the “statement of solidar-
ity & unity” and welcomed a reimagined Earth First! One of the group’s
founders, Roselle gradually became a stern critic. He came from a different
background than the rest of the original Earth First!ers. At the end of the
1970s Roselle had far less exposure to establishment conservation but more
experience with radicalism, having spent the early part of the decade as an
antiwar activist. He anchored some of the early Earth First! campaigns on
the West Coast and remained an active participant throughout the 1980s.
By the end of the decade, though, he was increasingly uncomfortable with
Earth First!’s sweeping critiques of all people and was interested in building
bridges to other progressive movements. In 1990 The Nation’s Alexander
Cockburn found Roselle during an anti-logging action in California and

asked him about the infamous remarks on immigration and starvation by
Foreman and Abbey. Roselle complained about Foreman’s “dirty laundry”
and insisted that most local Earth First! groups were “part of this more
progressive movement toward social justice and economic justice as well
as environmental sanity.” Roselle also discussed his work on a committee
charged with overhauling the Earth First! Journal. “Discussion of anarchy,
animal rights, vegetarianism, racism, and feminism (to name a few) are
felt by many to be vital to the health of the movement,” the committee’s
report read.89 The Earth First! Journal had long claimed not to represent
any comprehensive view of Earth First! as a movement. Now many felt that
it should.
The insurgent feelings within Earth First! coalesced around Judi Bari,
who was relatively new to the movement but nonetheless one of its most
important figures by the time she signed the statement of solidarity and
unity. Originally from Maryland, Bari moved to Northern California in
1979. By the late 1980s she lived in Mendocino County and worked as a car-
penter. Her activist background was in organized labor, not environmen-
talism, but after building houses with thousand-year-old redwood trees,
she began thinking and reading about the coastal forests that surrounded
her community. Her friend Darryl Cherney, who had moved to California
from New York in 1985, convinced her to join Earth First! Very quickly,
Bari became one of the most active organizers and key strategists for Earth
First! in Northern California. She joined the movement as the logging of
old-growth tree stands garnered more and more attention in California and
nationwide, and the issue defined her activism (see figure 5.3).
Bari’s personal philosophy drew from several influences, and her ease
in talking to people with different political commitments made her an
especially effective organizer. She was a dedicated environmentalist and
considered herself an ecocentric one, although she implied that her eco-
centrism differed substantively from that of Earth First!’s old guard. Bari’s
years as a union organizer gave her a strong sense of loyalty to workers and
their communities. During the campaign to save redwoods she tried to ally
environmentalists and loggers, constantly reminding both groups that they
shared a common enemy in the large corporations profiting off of Northern
Figure 5.3 Judi Bari and her Ecotopia Earth First! championed some radical environmental
views while challenging others.
California lumber. Bari also considered herself an ecofeminist, arguing that

violence toward nature echoed violence toward women. Her local Earth
First! group became gender-balanced while she was part of it and regularly
elevated women to leadership positions in its campaigns, a process Bari
called “the feminization of Earth First!”90 And although she never identi-
fied as a social ecologist, she often articulated the core claim of social ecol-
ogy: that social injustice and environmental destruction were bound up
with each other, and that neither could be addressed adequately on its own.
Few issues more pointedly captured the differences between the old
Earth First! and Bari’s Northern California “Ecotopia Earth First!” than
the debate over tree spiking, one of radical environmentalism’s most con-
troversial tactics. At the core of that debate was the question of whether
Earth First! should engage in the sort of sabotage that risked harming
people, and whether doing so meant minimizing not just social justice but
human welfare. A halting shift away from ecotage and toward civil disobe-
dience was a movement backward along the path Abbey had described at
Glen Canyon in 1981: first oppose, then resist, then subvert. Ecotage was—
always in symbol and at times in fact—an act of subversion. Civil disobedi-
ence was a means of resistance, designed to augment more conventional
forms of opposition and to trigger changes in law and public opinion. One
tactic sidestepped established institutions; the other at least in part relied
on them. Earth First! had long used both tactics, but in Northern Califor-
nia it leaned more and more on civil disobedience alone.
Earth First! civil disobedience in Northern California looked much
as it did elsewhere, only more so. Although tree-sits initially grew out of
wilderness campaigns in Oregon, the tactic became ubiquitous in Califor-
nia’s coastal forests. Starting in 1988, Northern California Earth First!ers
climbed trees relentlessly to hang banners over freeways, to attract media
attention, and to delay logging. The strategy persisted for the next decade,
growing larger in scale and longer in duration. On the ground, activists con-
tinued to mount blockades of timber roads. Because blockades were within
easy reach of sheriff ’s deputies, radicals who once simply stood shoulder-
to-shoulder now devised increasingly complicated ways of “locking down.”
Blockaders would, for instance, handcuff themselves to each other after
inserting their arms into metal tubes running through concrete-filled
barrels half-buried in the ground, a configuration known as the “sleeping

dragon.” Removing the blockade meant digging up the barrels, breaking
apart the concrete, and sawing through the tubes.91
While blockades and tree-sits spread as hallmarks of Northern Califor-
nia forest activism, a third tactic—tree spiking—receded. The end goal of
tree spiking was the same as tree sitting and blockading: delaying, inconve-
niencing, and discouraging logging. By driving large nails into trees sched-
uled to be logged and then informing loggers that an area was “spiked,”
activists forced the Forest Service to spend time and money walking the
forest with metal detectors and removing spikes or else risk breaking
expensive mill equipment when saws hit nails. The means, though, were
different. Blockading and tree sitting were civil disobedience, publicly
staged and demanding recognition. Tree spiking was ecotage, surreptitious
and anonymous. Done correctly, tree spiking advocates argued, the risk
was minimal. If spikers notified the proper authorities, if those authorities
took those notifications seriously, and if the Forest Service or logging com-
panies thoroughly swept the spiked area, then the metal-on-metal hazards
of spiked trees could always be avoided. But any missteps in that string of
qualifications could lead to a nail striking a mill blade, sending pieces of
machinery flying.
Earth First!’s use of tree spiking had always been both tactical and philo-
sophical. Foreman and Bill Haywood recommended non-ferrous hammers
for quiet spiking in Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. The
manual also discussed when and where to spike, how high up the tree spikes
should be placed, how to enter and exit the forest, and the best types of nails
to use. Ecodefense’s narrow focus on specifics was in the service of broad
ideas. “Representative democracy in the United States,” Edward Abbey
wrote in the book’s “Forward!,” “has broken down.” Even civil disobedience
relied too heavily on an established system of reform, he suggested, while
ecotage provided a means of directly and immediately confronting indus-
trial development when other means failed. “It is time for women and men,
individually and in small groups,” wrote Foreman, “to act heroically and
admittedly illegally in defense of the wild.”92
Women and men, individually and in small groups, did exactly that
in Earth First!’s early years. In 1983 the “Bonnie Abzug Feminist Garden
Club”—named after one of the members of Abbey’s Monkey Wrench

Gang—spiked a stand of trees in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, and
the following year the “Hardesty Avengers” notified the Willamette Forest
supervisor that a proposed timber sale in the Hardesty Mountain roadless
area contained sixty-three pounds of spikes.93 In both instances the Forest
Service spent time and money de-spiking the sales. Over the next seven
years, tree spikers struck repeatedly in Oregon, Washington, and British
Columbia. Gradually the practice spread to other states too. In 1989 there
were a dozen incidents in Northern California alone.94
Tree spiking was the most unequivocal statement of Earth First!’s
militancy. By booby-trapping the forest, Earth First! edged toward an
armed defense of wilderness and seemed willing to risk human well-
being for the sake of trees. The backlash came quickly. In the late 1980s
tree spiking became the easiest way to turn public opinion against Earth
First! In Oregon, the Forest Service offered $5,000 for information about
tree spikers.95 Oregon congressman Bob Smith described tree spiking as
“a radical environmentalist’s version of razor blades in Halloween candy.”96
Hal Salwasser, a Forest Service researcher, called Earth First! “criminally
insane.” Louisiana-Pacific’s managers began calling tree spikers “environ-
mental terrorists.”97
In May 1987, a Louisiana-Pacific band saw at a mill in Cloverdale,
California hit a spike in a redwood log and shattered. Pieces of the saw
flew across the room, one of them hitting a mill worker named George
Alexander in the head, shattering his plastic shield. Alexander ended up
in the hospital with a broken jaw, missing teeth, and major lacerations. It
was the first injury attributed to tree spiking. There was evidence that the
Cloverdale incident had nothing to do with Earth First!, but it neverthe-
less demonstrated the possibility of what spiking trees could lead to, scar-
ing loggers and giving some Earth First!ers pause.98 Criticism of radical
environmentalism from politicians, the timber industry, the Forest Ser-
vice, and the public grew louder. One year later senators from Idaho and
Oregon attached a rider to a drug enforcement bill that made tree spiking
a felony. A year after that, FBI and Forest Service agents in Montana sub-
poenaed several Wild Rockies Earth First!ers for a grand jury regarding a
tree-spiking incident in Idaho.99
Tree spiking put mainstream environmentalists in an awkward position,

at a distance and yet never separate from radicals. The easiest response was
simple condemnation. Doug Scott, the Sierra Club’s associate executive
director, said, “Action in the night is on a slippery slope down toward ter-
rorism, and that is a slippery slope that I abhor.” And yet the tactic was on
a slope and not off of a cliff; even established groups could see a winding
path from lobbying to some forms of ecotage. “Boy, I could probably put
cement in a bulldozer,” one “high-ranking staffer at a Washington environ-
mental group” told a New York Times reporter under cover of anonymity.
More forthrightly, the National Audubon Society’s Brock Evans told the
Los Angeles Times, “I honor Earth First! for having the guts to do the things
they do.”100
In late 1988, at the height of the tree-spiking controversy, Wilderness
Society staffers felt pulled in two directions. Pointing to the increas-
ing association of established conservation groups with “more fringe and
radical activist groups,” a staff member distributed a memorandum recom-
mending a clear public statement of disapproval and a small contribution
to a tree-spiking fund in Oregon that the Bureau of Land Management
used for information leading to arrests. One staffer responded, “Before we
attack another environmental group in such an aggressive way, we’d better
be damn sure it’s a good idea.” Another agreed. “The time to talk about tree
spiking is if we are asked or if someone tries connecting us to this practice,”
she wrote. The tree-spiking fund, she pointed out, was associated with the
local timber industry, and it was likely that “the same companies who have
practiced their own form of violence against people engaged in peaceful
civil disobedience are contributing to the fund.” Reminding the other staff
members of a recent incident in which a logger almost felled a tree with a
protester on it, she concluded, “If this logger or his employer is contrib-
uting to the tree spiking fund, I for one would not want [the Wilderness
Society] on record in support of the effort.”101
Radicals themselves never shied from debating the merits and failings
of tree spiking. Earth First! recognized that many within its own ranks
remained uncomfortable with ecotage, whether for moral or strategic
reasons. Public attacks by a U.S. congressman led some Montana Earth
First!ers to distance themselves from the tactic. “Neither I nor anyone else
that I know of affiliated with Montana Earth First! has ever spiked trees,”
insisted Montana Earth First! coordinator Gary Steele.102 In Oregon, Earth
First!ers created the Cathedral Forest Action Group in part to deemphasize
ecotage. “The dignity of people outside CFAG is recognized by following a
nonviolent code,” explained Mary Beth Nearing and Brian Heath, two stal-
warts of the old-growth fights. “For us, that eliminates tree spiking and sur-
vey stake pulling—either individually or as a group.”103 But through many
fierce arguments about ecotage—one of them leading to the resignation
of the Earth First! Journal’s editor—Earth First!’s basic stance remained
the same. The group did not explicitly endorse ecotage but celebrated the
efforts of those who engaged in it on their own initiative. “We are not ter-
rorists,” Foreman insisted. “But we are militant. We are radical. . . . We will
not officially spike trees or roads but we will report on the activities of those
who do. They are heros [sic].”104
That basic stance began to falter in 1990 when Judi Bari and Ecoto-
pia Earth First! disavowed tree spiking more forcefully than had any
Earth First!ers. Tree spiking, Bari argued, didn’t work. Despite dozens of
recorded instances of spiked tree stands, most of those stands ended up cut.
Those that remained were more likely saved by legislative activity or pub-
lic pressure than by sabotage. If the goal of tree spiking was to cost timber
companies money then the reasoning behind it was flawed, Bari pointed
out, as it was the tax-funded Forest Service that generally absorbed the cost
of removing spikes. In addition, spiking trees stoked the anger of loggers
and sheriffs and put activists engaging in civil disobedience at risk of retri-
bution. Finally, it was inherently dangerous. Although it was likely that no
Earth First! tree-spike had ever hurt any person, the risk remained. “The
point is,” Bari wrote, “that if you advocate a tactic, you had better be pre-
pared to take responsibility for the results.”105 Was Earth First!’s commit-
ment to ecocentrism firm enough to put human life at risk?
At the heart of Bari’s rejection of tree spiking was her sense of social jus-
tice and her desire to build an alliance with loggers. Bari tried to reconcile
her ecocentric views with her background in labor organizing, and North-
ern California forest activism offered her an opportunity. Because Earth
First! had operated almost entirely on public lands in the 1980s it tended
to view the Forest Service as its main antagonist. Pacific Lumber, Ecotopia
Earth First!’s longtime adversary, was a private company logging private

land, where trees were a capital investment and so the imperative to log
them was much greater. Here, Bari’s experience targeting corporate man-
agement rather than public agencies proved especially useful. She worked
toward partnerships with timber workers by telling them that Pacific Lum-
ber executives were their real enemies. Loggers remained unconvinced by
Bari’s overtures as long as they felt threatened by spikes, so spiking had to
end. Gene Lawhorn, a timber worker and environmentalist from Oregon
who first challenged Bari to speak out against tree spiking, insisted that
the practice was dangerous for loggers, bad publicity for environmentalists,
and an effective wedge issue which timber companies could use to prevent
environmentalist-logger alliances. “Renouncing tree spiking is not a com-
promise,” Lawhorn said, “but a move forward.”106
Many within Earth First! remained unmoved. Some simply resented
what they considered a compromise, telling Ecotopia Earth First! to “go
back to the Sierra Club.”107 Paul Watson was as usual the most strident,
and he zeroed in on Bari’s core concern. “Those anthropocentric socialis-
tic types—whose hearts bleed for the antiquated rights of the workers—
were won over,” he wrote of Ecotopia Earth First!’s stance. Loggers, Watson
believed, were guilty by association. “Certainly they are being exploited by
the companies,” he wrote, “but they have made the decision to be exploited.
The trees have not.” Civil disobedience, meanwhile, was of only limited
utility. “Redwood Summer is not an Earth First! type of action,” Watson
said of Bari’s 1990 old-growth campaign. “The establishment loves CD. The
authorities are trained to deal with it. There are no surprises.”108
Nonetheless, Ecotopia Earth First! had reached a decision. In its pub-
lic announcement it called its renunciation “not a retreat, but rather an
advance that will allow us to stop fighting the victims and concentrate
on the corporations themselves.”109 In a memo to the broader Earth First!
Movement, Bari claimed that in Northern California, “Earth First! has
been so successful in working & strategizing with timber workers that the
alienation caused by tree spiking, not to mention the danger, be it real or
imagined, was harming our efforts to save this planet.”110
The tree-spiking debate changed Earth First! and radical environmen-
talism, although not decisively. The abandonment of tree spiking and
eventually of ecotage by Earth First! did not fundamentally transform the

group or its relationships with allies and antagonists. Bari’s attempts at log-
ger-environmentalist alliances never fully materialized.111 And mainstream
organizations, although they publicly disparaged tree spiking, continued
to hold some sympathy for radical activism and for the risks that radicals
took to defend forests. Within Earth First!, arguments about strategy and
tactics raged on. A year after Ecotopia Earth First!’s moratorium on spiking
and days before he began a weeks-long jail sentence for protesting the con-
struction of an astronomical observatory on Arizona’s Mt. Graham, Erik
Ryberg posed the same questions about civil disobedience that Bari had
about tree spiking. Echoing Abbey, Watson, and other proponents of eco-
tage, Ryberg asked whether civil disobedience had become “nothing more
than a ritual of dissent which raises no questions, a game which holds no
surprises, a compulsive societal twitch that confuses no one, subverts noth-
ing, and which in practice does as much to legitimize power as it does to
undermine it?”112
Nevertheless, after Judi Bari’s declaration Earth First! became increas-
ingly committed to traditional civil disobedience, while monkeywrenchers
carried out their activities without the Earth First! stamp. Bari’s critique
had suggested the limits of ecotage to the point that even Foreman began
to express doubts. “But is tree spiking really effective?” he asked in 1991. “Is
it of significant value in stopping the logging of our forests? Probably. In
some cases. But . . . I dunno. It’s like a tough piece of jerky being chewed
around the campfire. You chew and you chew and you chew and nothing
much happens. You work up a lot of spit, but you still have a big glob in
your mouth. I dunno.”113
Foreman’s opaque analogy considered tree spiking’s effectiveness as
opposed to its morality, but the two could not be separated. Earth First!
was willing to try many tactics of dubious utility, but few produced the sort
of soul-searching that tree spiking did. If tree spiking was in fact explicitly
violent, it was for many a bridge too far. Advocating violence to achieve
political ends meant rendering a final judgment on the legitimacy of the
liberal democratic procedures that Earth First! criticized and circumvented
but never entirely gave up. Further, it meant declaring the battle against
not just institutions but the modern world itself, and drawing a bright
line between people and nonhuman nature. Earth First! let others take up
that fight. “It’s time to leave the night work to the elves in the woods,” Bari
advised in 1994.114 The “elves in the woods” were anonymous members of
the Earth Liberation Front, an Earth First!-inspired group of saboteurs
who in the 1990s began using tree spiking and arson to combat logging,
recreational development, suburban sprawl, and genetic engineering.115
Even more radical, ELF took up where Earth First! left off. Tree spiking
represented the horizon of Earth First!’s willingness to judge nature above
all human interest.
REDWOOD SUMMER
Bari spent less time than many other prominent Earth First!ers spelling
out her views in detail. She was primarily an activist, and her actions spoke
clearly and consistently. In 1989 she assisted employees at a Georgia-Pacific
lumber mill as they filed claims with the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration after a dangerous chemical spill, and later she helped work-
ers at a Pacific Lumber mill publish an underground newsletter, Timber
Lyin’, challenging the official company newsletter, Timberline. Her orga-
nizing around redwoods culminated in an event called “Redwood Sum-
mer,” which brought over three thousand people to the hills and mountains
of Northern California in 1990 for a series of marches, rallies, and direct
actions from early June through August. Ecotopia Earth First! organized
blockades, tree-sits, picket lines, and demonstrations at corporate offices.
Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Ecotopians held impromptu
discussions between activists and loggers. Although many staunch Earth
First!ers viewed any cooperation with loggers, miners, or dam-builders as
a form of capitulation to industrial society, Bari argued that the modern
world could only be changed from the inside out.116
Bringing several thousand activists into the woods and logging towns
of Northern California for weeks of marches and direct actions was a
dangerous proposition for all involved, and Bari tried to defuse the pos-
sibility of violence through her tree-spiking moratorium. But violence was
already a part of old-growth activism. In 1989, outside of Whitehorn on the
Humboldt-Mendocino border, a group of Earth First!ers confronted the
Lancasters, a family that ran a small logging company that had been violat-
ing its timber harvest plan. The confrontation erupted into a fist fight. A
fifty-year-old activist named Mem Hill tried to intercede and got knocked
unconscious. A shotgun blast into the air finally sent the environmental-
ists running.117 In 1991, near Boonville in Mendocino County, two Earth
First! activists chained themselves to a cattle guard to blockade a road until
a court order took effect halting nearby logging. A local man and his wife
nearly ran over the activists, stopping their truck only when a sheriff ’s dep-
uty reached through the window and grabbed the keys.118 Soon after the
Whitehorn incident, Bari, Cherney, a friend, and several children skidded
off the road when a logging truck hit Bari’s station wagon from behind,
slamming it into a parked vehicle. Bari assumed the collision was an acci-
dent until she realized that she and Cherney had blockaded the same driver
and truck a day earlier.119
Bari was both the Earth First!er most associated with opposing potential
violence and the most notable victim of it. On May 24, 1990 Bari and Cher-
ney drove from Oakland to Berkeley to pick up their musical equipment for
an afternoon show in Santa Cruz promoting Redwood Summer. They had
stopped in the East Bay to meet with Seeds of Peace, a group helping Earth
First! prepare for the summer’s actions. As Bari’s Subaru station wagon
approached Interstate 580 at Park and Thirty-Fourth Street in Oakland, a
ball bearing rolled into place and completed an electrical circuit, triggering
the detonation of an eleven-inch pipe bomb under the driver’s seat. The
explosion warped the front end of the car, blew out the windshield, and
collapsed the passenger compartment. Cherney suffered minor injuries,
while Bari took the brunt of the blast and had to be extracted from the
car by emergency responders. Within an hour, a dozen FBI agents began
an investigation. Normally the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
would have jurisdiction in a bombing case, but because Earth First! was on
the FBI’s list of domestic terrorist groups, the ATF handed the case over to
the special agents on the scene. The FBI briefed the Oakland Police Depart-
ment on Bari and Cherney, explaining that they were part of a terrorist
organization, some members of which had recently been arrested in Ari-
zona for attempting to destroy a power line and plotting to cut off power
to several nuclear facilities. Later that afternoon the police arrested both
Cherney and Bari on charges of illegally transporting a bomb. The police

moved Cherney to the downtown jail and posted several officers outside of
Bari’s room at Highland Hospital.120
Bari remained in the hospital for the next two months before moving
back to Mendocino County to further recuperate. She never regained the
full use of her right leg. Gradually, mainstream environmental organiza-
tions rallied to Bari’s and Cherney’s defense. Greenpeace, which had suf-
fered its own bombing in 1985 when French commandos attached mines to
the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, put up one million dollars in bail
for Bari and Cherney. Along with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace helped
convince the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society to publicly
question the FBI’s investigation.121
Although Bari spent Redwood Summer in the hospital, she insisted that
it should continue without her. Cherney remained involved in the summer’s
activities and several other Northern California Earth First!ers stepped
into Bari’s place. Redwood Summer and the bombing made Ecotopia Earth
First! one of the most talked about Earth First! groups in the nation. Bari,
however, remained skeptical of radical environmentalism’s culture and poli-
tics. She embraced the idea of ecocentrism and the strategy of direct action,
but she rejected blanket attacks on humanity along with the single-minded
defense of wilderness despite any social costs. Bari’s criticisms were not new,
but she did more than just voice them; she inculcated activists in one of the
most dynamic Earth First! regions to her way of thinking. By 1990 Earth
First! was stretched to the point of breaking between the intermountain
West and the West Coast.
The break came as Redwood Summer wound down. The Earth First!
Journal devoted its September issue to what some considered the splintering
of Earth First! and others considered the group’s maturation. Most of the
journal’s staff announced their respective resignations, and several promi-
nent articles discussed the battle between the “new guard” and the “old
guard,” the place of social context in wilderness campaigns, and the grow-
ing influence of California Earth First! groups. Howie Wolke expressed his
dismay at the infighting and wondered if he was still a part of Earth First!.
“Wilderness is the real world,” he wrote, making clear his fundamental con-
cern, “and its importance dwarfs all human demons, real and imagined.”122
Dave Foreman and his professional and personal partner, Nancy Mor-
ton, wrote what they called a “Dear John” letter to Earth First! “We feel like
we should be sitting at the bar of a seedy honky-tonk,” they began, “drink-
ing Lone Star, thumbing quarters in the country-western jukebox, and writ-
ing this letter on a bar napkin.” They emphasized their pride in the group’s
accomplishments and their confidence that it would continue to do good
work. “But we cannot escape the fact that we are uneasy with much in the
current EF! movement,” they wrote. In particular they worried about “an
effort to transform an ecological group into a Leftist group.” Earth First!,
they explained, was always a wilderness preservation group before and
above anything else, and its proponents followed that principle: “We are
biocentrists, not humanists.” Calling their departure a “no-fault divorce,”
they declared their separation from what Earth First! had become.123
“I feel like I should be sitting around base camp listening to Bob Mar-
ley, smoking a hooter, and writing this on the back of a rolling paper,” Bari
responded, emphasizing the cultural distance between the Southwest and
the West Coast. She made clear her respect for Foreman, “for introducing
me and many others to the idea of biocentrism, and for the decentralized,
non-hierarchical non-organization he helped set up in EF!” But she also
expressed her approval of Foreman’s departure, because of his unwillingness
to support the changes within Earth First! A narrow focus on wilderness
preservation to the exclusion of any other forms of activism could not last,
she felt; Earth First! had to concern itself with changing the way people
thought and behaved, so that wilderness preservation would become a pri-
ority for society as a whole. “In other words, Earth First! is not just a con-
servation movement,” Bari wrote, “it is also a social change movement.”124
With those words Bari neatly summarized what was for some in Earth
First! an obvious statement and for others a betrayal of the group’s most
essential principle.
CONCLUSION
After the shakeup of 1990, Earth First! remained a conflicted group but
one gradually moving toward a more ecumenical style of environmental-
ism. That new style allowed Earth First! more allies, more supporters, and
for many a more palatable sense of ends to work toward and means to get
there. What got lost was the clarity and purposefulness of an Earth First!
that claimed to represent, almost alone, strictly nonhuman interests. An
ecocentric view—and its implicit skepticism toward humanism—was
Earth First!’s great strength and weakness. The strength came from a single
and undeniably radical idea that, like a lighthouse, cut through the fog of
competing interests and values. At a time when the mainstream, national
environmental groups entrenched themselves in Washington, D.C. and
fixed on technical legislative battles, Earth First! championed unqualified
resistance to industrial development through direct action. Mikal Jakubal
admitted as much to skeptical Fifth Estate readers, writing that “it is the
heartfelt desire to act on one’s beliefs that deeply infuses EF! and lends the
movement a vitality and spirited sense of purpose and humor not often
found in activist milieus today.”125 For environmental activists who believed
that the gradualism and moderation of conventional democratic reform
could not possibly address what was a clear and growing crisis, Earth First!
offered the possibility of an energetic, grassroots alternative. For those who
believed that liberal humanism itself lay at the root of the environmental
crisis, only groups like Earth First! offered a commensurate response.
Ecocentrism’s great weakness was that it risked advocating simplistic and
myopic ideas. The same sort of holism that could focus a collective effort
on a single goal could also reduce complicated questions to deceptively
easy solutions. Painting all people with a broad brush was not only coun-
terintuitive but often counterproductive. As Bari pointed out, sabotaging
bulldozers did little to hurt large lumber corporations, which contracted
out logging operations to smaller companies that actually owned the equip-
ment. More fundamentally, Earth First!’s broad condemnations ignored
profound social differences and glossed over the divergent roles that differ-
ent people played in the transformation of the natural world. “While the
split is truly a multiple fracture,” Estelle Fennell wrote of Earth First!’s tra-
vails in Fifth Estate, “the major conflict can be boiled down to a difference
of opinion over whether radical environmentalism can be effective without
supporting social justice issues.”126 Too often ecocentrists began conversa-
tions by pointing an accusatory finger at everyone in the room, uninter-
ested in their particular stories.
Anarchism provided an alternative to the complete rejection of lib-

eral humanism. Disavowing unqualified individualism, anarchists instead
advocated small-scale, decentralized communities, a careful regard for
natural order, and an end to industrialization. In these ways anarchists
and radical environmentalists were allied, and Alien-Nation, Murray
Bookchin, and Earth First! could speak the same political language. But
anarchists held a strong faith in human nature as well, and sought vari-
ous forms of social justice. Although they readily admitted the persistence
of human folly—most notably in the form of the state—they believed a
desire for freedom and justice ran like a current through history, ready
to be released in the service of a better society. People always stood at the
center of the anarchist ideal, and here anarchism and radical environmen-
talism parted ways.
Radical environmentalists had few satisfying answers for the criticisms
that Bookchin, Bari, ecofeminists, and green anarchists voiced, but radical
environmentalism’s critics did not have entirely satisfactory answers them-
selves. In part the ongoing argument was the familiar one about radicalism
and reform. Soon after Redwood Summer, one of the Fifth Estate’s readers
complained about the paper’s favorable coverage of Bari’s signature cam-
paign. “The Redwood Summer cover story refers to the summer’s actions
as the ‘environmental equivalent of the 1964 voter registration campaign
in Mississippi,’ ” wrote J.B. “Since when do anti-industrial anarchists sup-
port either voting or environmentalism or reproductions of ‘60s liberal
reform?”127 The same crucial questions that Bari asked about monkey-
wrenching’s effectiveness could be applied to her own strategies. Redwood
Summer almost certainly affected the debate over reform of forest manage-
ment in California, but many complained that in immediate terms it did
not save a single tree.
More fundamentally, Earth First! and its critics contended with the
distinction—if any—between human beings and nonhuman nature.
Recoiling from environmental misanthropy, some critics of radical envi-
ronmentalism risked muddying the waters so much that it became hard
to know what counted as a wrong committed against nonhuman nature.
Radical environmentalists at times erred in the other direction, blam-
ing an abstract “humanity” for anything that wild nature might not
somehow sanction. Connecting these two extremes was what the biolo-

gist Stephen Jay Gould once called “an essential and unresolvable tension
between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness.”128 Earth
First! never stopped struggling with that tension. “We are creatures of
the earth and we participate in the great mysteries of the earth,” Earth
First!er James Berry said of humans. “While we are each different we share
an identity.”129 The overly generalized “we” led radicals in many troubling
directions, but it also led to a sense of communion with the natural world
and an appreciation of people’s place in it.
Edward Abbey depicted the internecine fights at Earth First! gatherings
in a chapter of Hayduke Lives! The scene is a Round River Rendezvous,
at which a single character—“Bernie Mushkin,” a social ecologist from
Berkeley—represents both Murray Bookchin and Alien-Nation. As Dave
Foreman speaks to the crowd, Mushkin calls him a “fascist,” “racist,” “terror-
ist,” and “eco-brutalist.” Then Mushkin takes the stage and delivers a screed
against all assembled, accusing them of setting the environmental move-
ment back several decades. Mushkin is a comical character, and although
Abbey allows him a reasonable approximation of Bookchin’s actual criti-
cisms, Abbey generally leaves him flustered and ineffective.130
But even Abbey could not completely discount Bookchin’s respect for
human dignity. Abbey, amid all his complaints about people, and his claims
to prefer deserts to human society, was given to rare moments of reverence
for the human. In Desert Solitaire, Abbey describes finding the dead body
of a tourist at the edge of the canyonlands. He notes how easy it is to joke
about the anonymous death, and how a dead person is simply an example
of natural cycles that keep the planet habitable. And then he points out
how insufficient this impersonal perspective is. “A part of our nature rebels
against this truth and against that other part which would accept it,” he
writes, searching out the limits of his own radical beliefs. “A second truth
of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, phi-
losophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily defin-
able, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason
and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying
our humanity.”131
6
The Limits and Legacy

of Radicalism
Earth First! reached the limits of radicalism in the 1990s. Those limits were
not absolute, but they forced the Earth First! movement to change—in the
minds of some, to change enough that Earth First! became something else
entirely. Direct action was still radical environmentalists’ defining tactic,
but the tree-spiking debate had already limited the role of ecotage and ele-
vated the importance of civil disobedience. Ecocentrism remained the phil-
osophical core of Earth First!-style radical environmentalism, but it was an
ecocentrism tied more and more to scientific justifications. Ecology gradu-
ally migrated to the center of the conservation movement over the course
of the century and has always been at the heart of radical environmental-
ism. By the 1990s, though, some Earth First!ers had aligned themselves
almost completely with conservation biology, a mission-driven scientific
field that bridged empirical claims and passionate activism. Wilderness also
remained a fundamental category for radicals, but the dynamics of wilder-
ness advocacy shifted. One of the most important environmental battles of
the 1990s—over Northern California’s Headwaters Forest—took place on
private land, helping to revise an understanding of “wilderness” that had
long rested on public agencies and public lands.
236 The Limits and Legacy of Radicalism
At the same time, radical environmentalism changed the environmental

movement as a whole. What had once been extreme was now mainstream.
This was especially the case at the Sierra Club, where a ballot system and
direct election of the board of directors allowed members to push for rapid
change. On logging, on dam removal, and on ambitious wilderness bills,
pressure from grassroots members and from newly elected directors pushed
the Club to take positions that just a decade earlier had defined the move-
ment’s outer fringe. The legacy of radical activism also shook the Club in a
years-long fight over immigration restriction, a controversy that suggested
not only the persistence of radicals’ subordination of social difference and
social justice but also how that subordination had long been part of the
mainstream movement as well.
The fragmenting of Earth First!-style activism in the 1990s and the speed
with which its signature issues appeared among mainstream organizations
made clear how close radical and mainstream environmentalists always
were. Their differences were significant but their commonalities were more
so. As Earth First! absorbed less criticism, its struggle to weigh environ-
mentalism against industrial society and liberal humanism belonged to the
movement as a whole.
THE REDWOOD FORESTS
In their broad, philosophical writings, radical environmentalists often

used abstract terms like “civilization,” “the environment,” and “the natural
world.” In their own personal experiences these abstractions took concrete
form. “Civilization” was most immediately a shopping mall, a dam, a strip
mine, or a nuclear reactor. Similarly, “nature” at its most meaningful was a
nearby river, a threatened desert, an endangered species, or a high moun-
tain lake. The passion with which radical environmentalists fought against
development ran strongest when it cohered around a particular place. And
for many radicals in the late 1980s and 1990s, no place meant more than the
old-growth forest stands of the Pacific Northwest.
The most immediately distinct characteristic of the West Coast’s tem-
perate rainforests—stretching from Northern California through Oregon
and Washington and into Canada—is their size. With the exception of
The Limits and Legacy of Radicalism 237
junipers, the forests are home to the largest species within each conifer
genus that grows there, including Douglas firs, noble firs, sugar pines, pon-
derosa pines, Sitka spruce, and Port Orford cedars. Each of these species
is capable of growing higher than the tallest trees in the eastern United
States, and some can reach nearly twice the height of any tree east of the
Mississippi. Looming above all of them are the redwoods, the tallest trees
in the world. At their greatest height, coast redwoods begin to approach
four hundred feet, taller by far than the Statue of Liberty from the base of
the foundation to the tip of the torch.1
Coast redwoods grow so high that their canopies remained unexplored
until the 1990s. Scientists expected to find a “redwood desert”—a mass of
branches and foliage, and little else—but found instead a redwood forest.
Redwood trunks and branches are capable of producing “reiterated trunks”
that sprout dozens or hundreds of feet above the ground, growing along-
side the main bole. At the point where the trunks meet, as well as on large
branches, soil can collect. These patches of “canopy soil” can become several
feet deep, hundreds of feet in the air. Epiphytes—plants that live on other
plants—spring from the canopy soil. Ferns and shrubs flourish high up in
redwood crowns, as do other trees: firs, hemlocks, and spruce can be found
growing in redwood canopies.
Redwoods’ ecological relationships reach beyond surrounding plants
and into the clouds. Redwood trees transport water from the ground to
hundreds of feet above it, but they also drink from the coastal fog of North-
ern California summers. Stripped of redwoods, a forest stand might lose
close to a third of its water gain because of increased solar radiation, accel-
erated evaporation, and the loss of moisture that redwoods harvest from
foggy days and transfer to the forest floor. Even more sensitive to climate
and geography than the lesser giants around them, redwoods range only
from Big Sur halfway up the California coast to just a few miles over the
Oregon border.
Tall as they are, coastal conifers may be even more impressive for their
longevity. Most of their ages are measured in centuries; some are mea-
sured in millennia. The redwoods, again, are exceptional, and are among
the oldest trees in the world. Redwoods grow about fifty feet in their first
couple of decades and usually reach maximum height sometime during
their eighth century. Young redwoods that find themselves surrounded by

taller trees and trapped in shadow stop growing for many years. With what
humans can only describe as patience, they wait until a big tree falls and a
shaft of light breaks through, and then they sprout rapidly. Scientists can-
not tell exactly how old most redwoods are because so many of them have
been hollowed out by fire and lost their rings, but they estimate that the
largest—called “giants” or “titans”—are well over two thousand years old.
The numbers are big enough that redwoods’ ages often require points of
reference; they are described as trees that began growing during the reign of
Julius Caesar, that reached full height during the middle ages, that already
constituted old growth by the time Columbus arrived in the Americas.
Logging in Northern California started when many of these trees were
into their second or even third centuries. Cutting began at lower elevations,
near the coast, where the soil was more productive and the trees closer to
market. Forests withdrawn for public lands were higher and still mostly
uncut by the middle of the twentieth century. But while the timber indus-
try had until then lobbied to keep public forests off of the market in order
to keep prices high, the housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s led to greater
demand and increased logging on federal land. By the 1980s almost all of
the unprotected lower elevation old growth was gone and what remained
further inland fell to the saw at a faster and faster clip.
Those forests did not vanish without a fight. When Earth First! took
up the cause of Northern California redwoods, it joined a long list of con-
servation organizations and a century-old concern for the survival of the
state’s most iconic tree. “No tree species in modern U.S. history,” writes
Jared Farmer, “has inspired more passion and controversy than the coast
redwood.”2 In the late nineteenth century the Sierra Club and the Semper-
virens Club called attention to redwood logging in the Santa Cruz Moun-
tains south of San Francisco, attention that led to the establishment of the
California Redwood Park (later renamed Big Basin Redwoods State Park).
In the 1900s William Kent, a businessman who later served in Congress and
helped create the National Park Service, donated a grove of the Bay Area’s
last old-growth redwood to the federal government with the understanding
that Theodore Roosevelt would then designate it Muir Woods National
Monument. In the mid-twentieth century conservationists looked north
to Humboldt and Del Norte counties, where logging companies gained

access to once remote forests, prompting the newly formed Save the Red-
woods League and the Sierra Club to campaign for what would eventually
become Redwood National Park. Still, the modest successes of West Coast
conservationists were anomalies. Because old growth is difficult to define
there is no precise account of how much disappeared, but by any reason-
able estimate the vast majority has been logged. By the 1990s old-growth
redwood forests were likely reduced by 95 percent from what stood before
European settlement.3
For some environmentalists it was rivers, or deserts, or mountains that
came to represent the mystery and majesty of nature. For many of the most
confrontational activists of the 1990s it was thousand-year-old trees. For
these activists, the size and age of old-growth forests moved them to humil-
ity before something so unfathomable, and left them full of shame at the
ease with which people destroyed it. And shame could very easily become
anger that, when combined with a sense of urgency, offered a justification
for uncompromising positions and radical tactics.
OLD GROWTH, SPOTTED OWLS,

AND CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
In the 1980s and 1990s activists paired awestruck reverence of nature with
scientific arguments for the importance of biological complexity and diver-
sity. The broader conservation movement had relied on sentiment since the
late nineteenth century, and then increasingly on technical knowledge in
the late twentieth. The two approaches were distinct but never entirely;
the mechanics of ecological processes might arouse as much wonder as the
sight of a majestic tree, and scientific justifications for conservation were
usually packaged with an emotional appeal. Forest activism required reach-
ing people both in their hearts and in their heads.
Scientific research could provide a counterweight to the sort of eco-
nomic demands that informed the profession of forestry. Decades of
orthodoxy had taught foresters to aim for “regulated” forests where young
trees predominated rather than “overmature” forests where annual decay
canceled out annual growth. As timber, young trees were productive while
old trees were wasted space. This philosophy put a premium on logging and
in the short term maximized lumber yield. When the Forest Service took
the approach to its logical conclusion, allowing extensive clear-cutting in
order to meet midcentury demand for timber, forest visitors cried foul for
aesthetic and then ecological reasons. Clear-cuts were jarring scars on a
green mountainside, and they also destabilized slopes, disrupted watersheds,
and fragmented wildlife habitat.4
Environmental organizations put pressure on land management agen-
cies to adopt new scientific approaches to their work, a pressure some-
times matched from within the agencies themselves. This was especially
true of the Forest Service. In the 1980s, agency foresters like Jerry Franklin
pushed for “new forestry” practices that would balance timber produc-
tion with ecosystem management and timber sale planner Jeff DeBonis
created a group called the Association of Forest Service Employees for
Environmental Ethics to criticize his own agency’s fixation on logging.5
“Ecological forestry,” as the historian Samuel Hays calls it, treated the for-
est as a whole rather than as a sum of its parts.6 Forests provided habitat
for wildlife and so the protection of biodiversity, a buffer for riparian
areas and so the protection of watersheds, and nutrients for soil and so
the protection of loamy ground and all that grew from it. Long trained in
silviculture, federal foresters increasingly brought to bear ecological sci-
ences as well. In the early 1990s John Mumma, the first biologist ever to
rise to the position of regional forester, resigned after refusing to contra-
vene environmental laws in order to meet congressionally imposed tim-
ber targets. By then Paul Hirt was willing to suggest, in the pages of the
Earth First! Journal, that “we appear to be in the midst of a major, historic
revolt within the Forest Service.”7
Chief among the new ideas that began to reframe forestry and land
management was conservation biology. Conservation biologists took the
insights of island biogeography—especially the relationship between the
size and relative isolation of island habitats on the one hand, and species
and genetic diversity on the other—and applied them to islands of wildlife
in a sea of civilization. Habitat fragmentation, they argued, whether caused
by four-lane highways or clear-cut forests, jeopardized biodiversity. The size
of habitats mattered as did ease of migration between them, so that wildlife
preserves should be large and interconnected. Led initially by the ecolo-

gist Michael Soulé, the field of conservation biology translated scientific
research directly into policy prescriptions.8
Conservation biology drew from a spirit of urgency and intervention,
pairing research and advocacy. In 1980, long before he began working with
conservation biologists, Dave Foreman wrote, “Someone needs to force-
fully state the importance of preserving the biological/ecological diversity
of our planet.”9 Although Foreman did not know it, Soulé was doing just
that, describing conservation biology as “a mission-oriented discipline”
aimed at conserving biodiversity. By 1986, when the ecologist Reed Noss
attended the National Forum on Biodiversity on behalf of Earth First!,
science and politics mixed easily. Soulé spoke at the Forum, as did Paul
Ehrlich, David Ehrenfeld, the biologist E.O. Wilson, and the paleontolo-
gist Stephen Jay Gould, all of them as interested in outcomes as in data.
“[M]ore and more academic scientists are becoming angry enough about
the loss of biodiversity to speak eloquently in its defense,” Noss reported.
This was not science for the sake of knowledge but for the sake of arresting
an extinction crisis, one that conservation biologists believed people caused
and people could prevent.10
Just as some scientists embraced advocacy in the mid-1980s, many activ-
ists made greater use of scientific research. In the Earth First! Journal, color-
ful descriptions of protesting and monkeywrenching gradually made room
for sober articles about the plight of the Atlantic salmon or the Coeur
d’Alene salamander. Mitch Friedman described conservation biology as
“a welcome advance in conservation, where biological considerations have
tended to be overcome by political and economic forces, in part due to a
relative lack of solid data on which to base decisions.”11 As crucial as empiri-
cal research was becoming to conservation, though, its authority remained
limited by the inevitable ambiguity of its theories and models. “Diversity”
for instance, the term at the very center of conservation biology, was never
an unalloyed good. Noss warned that when environmentalists stressed the
importance of species diversity they risked playing into the hands of the
logging industry. Measured simply as the total number of species present,
diversity could serve as a justification for clear-cuts, because although clear-
cuts fragmented habitat for the forest’s longtime inhabitants, they also
created habitat for those species that thrived in early successional environ-
ments. And clear-cuts created zones where different habitats met, provid-
ing simultaneously for adjacent sets of inhabitants as well as species that
specialized in straddling—a set of circumstances that ecologists called “the
edge effect.”12 In this sense biodiversity could be a relatively weak argument
against clear-cuts in the short term, although in the long term, high edge-
interior ratios did tend to reduce overall biodiversity. Scientific arguments
relied on interpretation and political acumen.
Because the technical language of science remained politically muted,
environmentalists had to speak in more lyrical terms as well, and here ambi-
guity was a boon. Much of the debate about forestry practice concerned
old growth. The term “old growth” was not a technical one, or at least not
very specific. Its exact definition shifted from region to region and even
from forest to forest. Generally it involved a forest’s size, estimated age,
canopy, undergrowth, and ecological complexity. For decades the Forest
Service had thought of old growth as little more than old trees, valuable
for the wood they could provide and the space their removal would open
up. In the 1970s and 1980s, research began to point to old growth as a key
element in forest health. Old trees amplified structural diversity, contrib-
uting to a greater variety of habitats and a richer set of ecological processes.
Cutting down old trees jeopardized those habitats and processes and so
jeopardized the forests themselves. “In the rush to turn public and pri-
vate forests into agricultural tree farms,” Earth First!’s George Wuerthner
warned, “we may be ripping apart ecological relationships which hold all
forest ecosystems together.”13
In 1986, after several years of study, a Forest Service Old-Growth Defi-
nition Task Group concluded that old-growth forests were “too complex
in structure and composition to allow simple characterizations.”14 A year
later, as environmentalists ratcheted campaigns to protect aged stands in
the Pacific Northwest, the Wilderness Society was still reaching for a work-
able definition. The timber industry exploited this uncertainty, calling
into question large discrepancies between Forest Service and Wilderness
Society estimates of remaining old growth. The Northwest Forest Resource
Council, an industry-affiliated trade group, claimed that the nation’s forests
were still flush. “Most of the mature forests in the national forests of the
Pacific Northwest,” the council said, “are old growth under one definition
or another.”15
But if old growth could not be clearly defined, it could still be movingly
described. Forest activists experimented with terms like “virgin” and “prime-
val.” They settled on “ancient forests,” a phrase that had the virtues of both
accuracy and poetry, suggesting the complex whole that might be lost and
also how trees that took centuries to grow were, in human terms, irreplace-
able.16 Rebranded, the fight to protect old growth continued under new
banners. A coalition of grassroots and national environmental groups—
including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the National
Audubon Society—loosely coordinated their efforts as the Ancient Forest
Alliance. A group of philanthropic foundations provided funds for a new
organization called the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, built with local
activists from the Pacific Northwest. A congressman from Indiana named
Jim Jontz introduced the Ancient Forest Protection Act, a bill calling for
the designation of ecologically significant forest reserves. And a rotating
crew of activists led by Earth First!’s Mitch Friedman organized an Ancient
Forest Rescue Expedition, a weeks-long educational tour of the nation in
a flatbed truck carrying a 730-year-old Douglas fir that Friedman and Ric
Bailey bought from a wood products firm in Port Angeles, Washington.17
“Old growth, or ‘ancient forest,’ ” Friedman said after a Wilderness Society
old-growth strategy conference in 1988, “is now a national issue.”18
Just as the ancient forest campaign gained traction, the spotted owl
controversy of the 1980s and 1990s tested environmentalists’ use of both
science and sentiment. Northern spotted owls nested in Pacific Northwest
old growth, and the more that old growth fell to the saw, the fewer owls
survived. As early as the 1970s, biologists asked the Forest Service to avoid
cutting old growth near owl nests. By the 1980s spotted owl populations
were in precipitous decline and environmentalists began filing lawsuits.
Protecting the owls, they knew, was a way of protecting forests. Several
laws offered leverage, including the National Forest Management Act
(NFMA), which required the Forest Service to safeguard a diversity of
plant and animal species as well as “viable populations” of vertebrate
species; the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which directed
federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their actions; and
the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which had the power to stop logging
trucks in their tracks if they threatened the extinction of an officially listed
species. Lawsuits based on the NFMA in particular led a federal judge
to issue an injunction in 1989 severely restricting logging in Oregon and
Washington. Timber companies fought back, accusing environmentalists
of privileging wildlife over livelihoods and landing the spotted owl on the
cover of Time magazine.19
“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” John Muir wrote, “we find
it hitched to everything else in the universe.”20 Few things validated Muir’s
sense of interconnectedness more than did the spotted owl. Because the
spotted owl thrived in old growth, it acted as a kind of scientific metonym
for both the forests and the complex ecological relationships the forests
housed, and even Forest Service biologists considered the owl an “indica-
tor species” whose own health tracked the health of forest habitats. But the
owl’s connectedness was political as well as ecological. The Ancient Forest
Alliance knew that the plight of the spotted owl could come to represent
far more than the constitution of forests. Fairly or not, the owl could also
signal environmentalists’ dismissive attitude toward the economic well-
being of entire communities. Owl protection coincided with declining
economic fortunes in Pacific Northwest logging towns, making it easy to
blame the one for the other. The timber industry estimated that owl pro-
tection would cost the region 50,00 to 100,000 jobs. Environmentalists
claimed the industry blamed owl protection for job losses that were in fact
the result of mechanization and the exporting of American logs. “In fact,
then,” the Wilderness Society’s George Frampton wrote, “while this previ-
ously obscure, shy and attractive little creature may have hastened change, it
simply accelerated trends that were driven and inevitable.”21
Whether or not they were inevitable, the changes that swept through
Pacific Northwest logging towns in the 1970s and 1980s were jarring, and by
the late 1980s logging communities increasingly pinned declines in logging
and milling work on spotted owl protection. Aware of this political context,
the Ancient Forest Alliance hemmed and hawed over whether to continue
its legal assault. The top-down approach that legal challenges entailed, with
federal judges dictating policy for entire forests, did not endear environ-
mentalists to logging communities. Pressure built within the environmental
community, however, and by 1992 environmentalists had not only forced

the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list the owl as endangered but also won
an injunction under NEPA against logging old growth on Bureau of Land
Management lands.22 Pacific Northwest towns that had once allied them-
selves with environmental organizations now turned away. As the historian
Erik Loomis has shown, timber industry labor unions in Washington and
Oregon spent much of the twentieth century concerned about workplace
safety (including chemical exposure among timber workers) and the pro-
tection of natural resources that logging towns relied on.23 Conservation-
ists and environmentalists were obvious partners in these concerns, and
the AFL-CIO worked with the Sierra Club to compensate workers who
lost jobs because of public lands conservation. Late twentieth-century eco-
nomic contractions strained such partnerships, pitting environmentalists
against jobs in loggers’ eyes. By the 1980s loggers saw environmentalists as
sacrificing local paychecks for the sake of an odd-looking bird.
Environmentalists had a harder time touting intact ancient forests when
they stood just miles away from disintegrating logging towns. Whatever the
relationship between the two, simple emotional appeals for one grew more
fraught because of the other. Scientific data became all the more important,
but even biological research remained a moving target. In the 1970s and
1980s biologists learned not only that the owl depended on old-growth for-
est but also that it ranged widely. As scientists discovered more and more
nesting sites and longer and longer flight patterns, the forest preserves they
recommended for spotted owl protection ballooned from three hundred to
ten thousand acres each.
These sorts of uncertainties complicated policy debates. Spotted owl
talk dominated Washington Earth First!’s Regional Rendezvous in 1986,
where local Earth First!ers discussed a Forest Service plan to protect 550
pairs of owls in habitat areas of 2,200 acres per pair spaced roughly twelve
miles apart. The Audubon Society, meanwhile, recommended protection
for 1,500 pairs in habitat areas of anywhere from two thousand to six thou-
sand acres, close together and connected by habitat corridors. The Forest
Service claimed its plan would adequately protect a viable owl population,
while the Audubon Society argued that 550 pairs was too few and that
the islanded habitats envisioned by the Forest Service would create edge
areas that would encourage competition and predation by barred and great
horned owls.24 Scientific findings were rarely definitive. What had been a
battle of words became a battle of numbers.
The increased prominence of biological science in land management
policymaking constituted one of the great environmental victories of the
1980s, but research went only so far without determined political support.
U.S. district court judge William Dwyer’s 1989 temporary injunction on all
logging in western Washington and western Oregon found that, according
to scientists, the Forest Service had not satisfied the requirements of the
NFMA. In response, U.S. senators Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Brock
Adams of Washington, both allies of the timber industry, bypassed the
court with a spending bill rider that released more than a billion board
feet from Dwyer’s injunction and exempted future timber sales from
legal challenge. Although Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy was preparing
to enlist environmentalists in killing the rider, Sierra Club and Wilder-
ness Society lobbyists withdrew their opposition when Hatfield agreed to
include language acknowledging the ecological value of old growth. Hav-
ing decided that the simple recognition of scientific findings constituted
a victory, environmentalists gave up the political fight. Earth First!, mean-
while, held protests at Hatfield’s Portland and Salem offices and accused
the Club of betraying the Ancient Forest Alliance. “The rider from hell,”
as environmentalists called it once its consequences became clear, led to
more than six hundred timber sales, many of them involving clear-cuts and
most of them in spotted owl habitat.25
Judge Dwyer maintained jurisdiction over the spotted owl controversy
even after the rider from hell, and the Forest Service knew that in order
to satisfy the judge it would have to work with the best science available.
The Forest Service hired Jack Ward Thomas, an agency biologist from
Oregon, to head three separate scientific committees in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. All of Thomas’s committees advanced the idea of “ecosystem
management”—that forests should be managed as a whole and not for the
protection of any single species or for the harvesting of a single resource.
Thomas used the research of conservation biologists to argue that protect-
ing the spotted owl under the ESA necessarily meant protecting old-growth
forests and thousands of species that inhabited them.
The Thomas committees also understood the political imperative

of allowing logging on national forests at a level that could sustain the
Pacific Northwest timber industry. In 1993, in the wake of newly elected
president Bill Clinton’s “timber summit” in Portland, the third Thomas
committee released a Northwest Forest Plan that satisfied the environ-
mental regulations the Forest Service had long neglected while still
allowing over a billion board feet of timber, including logging in old-
growth reserves.26 Heartened at the prominent role of scientists in a For-
est Service initiative and worried that the Northwest Forest Plan might
be the last chance to exercise leverage, organizations like the Wilderness
Society and Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund gave their support. “Main-
stream Groups Sell Out,” ran the headline on page one of the Earth
First! Journal.27
Two years later the Sierra Club echoed Earth First!’s skepticism. Jack
Ward Thomas had become Clinton’s chief forester and continued to
champion ecosystem management. Done right, Sierra magazine allowed,
the approach could transform Forest Service practice. “At worst, however,
Ecosystem Management serves as a smarmy justification for the same old
abusive logging, a theoretical beauty strip around the clearcut.”28 The spot-
ted owl debate tested and tried environmentalists’ justifications for pro-
tecting old-growth forest, making clear that the balance between moral
claims, scientific findings, and political muscle needed constant adjust-
ment. Appeals to meaning and value on their own were at times short-
sighted and too readily dismissed; research and data without political
advocacy were too often manipulated. For radical environmentalists, this
meant drawing more and more on the work of conservation biology while
remaining committed to bedrock ecocentric principles and direct-action
tactics, as well as taking into account the views of those who lived and
worked alongside the land at risk.
PACIFIC LUMBER AND THE TIMBER WARS
Earth First! reimagined its political relationship to wilderness during the

“timber wars,” a series of battles over old growth in Northern California.
The timber wars would eventually become the most visible environmental
controversy in the country, drawing in several members of Congress, the

governor of California, and the president of the United States. In the early
1980s, though, two environmental groups led the way among the red-
woods: Earth First! and the Environmental Protection Information Cen-
ter (EPIC), a tiny organization based in the town of Garberville just a few
dozen miles south of Scotia. EPIC and Earth First! shared the same goals,
but because EPIC consisted mainly of professional and amateur lawyers
working within strict legal boundaries, the two groups maintained a com-
fortable distance in public. Operating apart, Earth First!’s brash direct
actions and EPIC’s methodical legal actions nonetheless worked in concert
and set a template for forest activism.
Activists and logging companies fought the timber wars in Mendocino
and Humboldt counties, north of the San Francisco Bay Area.29 Ini-
tially environmentalists tried to limit the cuts of logging companies like
Georgia-Pacific (G-P) and Louisiana-Pacific (L-P), high-volume timber
companies known for clear-cutting their land down to the smallest com-
mercially viable trees. On its own land in coastal Mendocino County, G-P
clear-cuts decimated old-growth redwood and crept closer and closer to
the borders of Sinkyone Wilderness State Park. Trees fell at Hotel Gulch,
Dark Gulch, and Anderson Gulch. EPIC drew the line at a grove of trees
next to Little Jackass Creek, an area that environmental activists—worried
that its name would not inspire affection—called “Sally Bell Grove” after a
Sinkyone Indian who had still lived on the rugged coast in the early twen-
tieth century. EPIC spent the first years of the decade working through
the state assembly to little effect, and in 1983 Earth First! entered the for-
est. Radical activists readied to stall logging while EPIC prepared a law-
suit against the California Department of Forestry (CDF) and the Save
the Redwoods League and the Trust for Public Land began negotiating
a purchase of Sally Bell Grove. In October EPIC posted an alert—“G-P
Cutting Sinkyone”—on a Garberville theater marquee, and fifty Earth
First!ers rushed into action, lying on the ground where trees might fall
and forcing a halt to logging while EPIC convinced a judge to grant a
temporary restraining order. “Once again,” Mike Roselle concluded, “non-
violent direct action proved effective and essential in helping to protect
our natural heritage.”30
In 1985 EPIC, with the support of the International Indian Treaty

Council and the Sierra Club, won its suit alleging that CDF approval of
G-P’s timber harvest plan violated the California Environmental Quality
Act by not sufficiently seeking public input, neglecting the impact of log-
ging on the creek’s hillside, and failing to consult the Native American Her-
itage Commission.31 The following year, G-P agreed to sell seven thousand
acres to the Trust for Public Land and the Save the Redwoods League. The
Trust for Public Land donated half, including Sally Bell Grove, to Sinkyone
Wilderness State Park, and years later donated the other half to an Inter-
Tribal Sinkyone Wilderness. The Sally Bell fight looked much like other
Earth First! efforts in that activists placed themselves between chainsaws
and old growth, but Sally Bell Grove was private land owned by a private
company and environmentalists protected it by applying laws more often
associated with public lands and, finally, purchasing the land and transfer-
ring it to public hands. They pursued the same strategy on a much larger
scale a decade later.
By the 1990s the timber wars centered on the smallest of the “big three”
timber companies and the one that, for many years, seemed least likely to
anger environmentalists. Pacific Lumber, which operated almost entirely
in Humboldt County, spent much of the twentieth century exercising
restraint. The company practiced “selective cut” and “sustained yield,”
removing only 70 percent of mature trees and cutting no more in total
wood than could grow back each year. It avoided the sort of clear-cuts that
other companies practiced regularly. These policies were a matter of econ-
omy as much as ecology. Clear-cuts left soil loose and mobile and ready
to wash into streams and rivers under heavy rains, and less soil on the for-
est floor meant less nutrients for second-growth trees and so less timber
over time. In the early 1980s Pacific Lumber was neither the biggest nor the
wealthiest company cutting trees in Northern California, but it possessed
more high-value old growth than any other and 70 percent of all remaining
privately held ancient redwood.32
In 1985 Pacific Lumber seemed a good example of the claims made
by free-market environmentalists. A year later it became a cautionary
tale about profligate use of resources in private hands. In 1985 the com-
pany owned 190,000 acres of land and the trees on it and, as free-market
environmentalists suggested, ownership bred careful conservation. Sus-

tained yield harvesting allowed modest profits while the company’s thou-
sand-year-old assets steadily increased in value. But the very qualities that
made Pacific Lumber profitable, sustainable, and solvent over the long term
left it vulnerable to exploitation. Because Pacific Lumber had protected
its old-growth redwood groves, it had practically cornered the market for
some of the most valuable wood in the industry. As investors soon real-
ized, that same old growth could produce record profits in the short term
through maximizing the timber harvest and clear-cutting big trees.
Charles Hurwitz was one of those investors. A corporate raider from
Texas, Hurwitz owned several companies including the Houston-based
Maxxam. Normally, exploiting a company like Pacific Lumber would be
prohibitively difficult because of the cost and the reluctance of shareholders
and the board of directors to sell. But in the 1980s both problems could be
overcome through hostile takeovers using leveraged buyouts: deals financed
with high-risk, high-yield securities (often “junk bonds”), the securities col-
lateralized with assets from the soon-to-be purchased company. Maxxam’s
raid of Pacific Lumber featured some of the best-known names in 1980s
corporate takeovers, including Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and the
investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. By the time the Pacific Lumber
board of directors realized what was happening there was little they could
do but negotiate. In early 1986 they sold at $40 a share.33
The historian Darren Speece has made clear that Hurwitz did not single-
handedly transform Pacific Lumber.34 Years before Maxxam’s takeover, an
executive named John Campbell had already pushed the board of direc-
tors to increase the annual harvest and return to clear-cutting. But Hurwitz
catalyzed Campbell’s aggressive business plan and swept away whatever
restraints still stood at Pacific Lumber’s headquarters in San Francisco or
in Scotia, its company town. Pacific Lumber under Hurwitz and Camp-
bell turned into one of the most voracious timber companies on the West
Coast, hiring hundreds of new employees and increasing shift lengths at its
mills in order to more than double production. And it zeroed in on some
of the oldest and biggest stands of redwood in Humboldt County and so
in the world. Maxxam had incurred $795 million in debt to buy Pacific
Lumber. To pay it off, Hurwitz sold most of Pacific Lumber’s holdings not
directly related to timber production and accelerated logging on some of

the company’s most valuable land, speeding the annual rate of cut from 140
million board feet in 1985 to 330 million in 1988.
For environmentalists like Darryl Cherney and Greg King, Pacific
Lumber came to represent the worst of the Northern California timber
industry. Cherney had been the frenetic center of Earth First! in North-
ern California before Judi Bari assumed the role in 1988, and he and Bari
worked together closely in the 1990s. King had written about the lumber
industry as a Sonoma County journalist and gave up reporting on logging
in order to campaign against it. Having read about Pacific Lumber under
Maxxam, King convinced Cherney that local Earth First!ers should focus
their energy on the company’s redwood stands. The two founded the Earth
First! Redwood Action Team for that purpose.
King often snuck onto private land to explore old-growth forests. In
March 1987, he searched for two parcels of old growth included in timber
harvest plans Pacific Lumber had recently filed with the state. The parcels
sat deep in the woods at the headwaters of Salmon Creek and the Little
South Fork of the Elk River. Logging companies assigned parcels numbers,
and environmental activists personalized them by giving parcels evocative
names. King passed through a threatened stand that the Redwood Action
Team called All Species Grove. Beyond All Species Grove, and deeper into
the forest than he had ever penetrated, King found a stand of redwoods
where the undergrowth was so thick he could barely move forward. He
had wandered onto several thousand acres of the largest remaining stand of
old-growth redwood on private land. The parcels he was searching for were
87–240 and 87–241. He named the whole area Headwaters Forest. The
subsequent campaign against Maxxam remained a fight against logging old
growth throughout Northern California and even the entire Pacific North-
west, but the Headwaters Forest was often figuratively and sometimes liter-
ally at the center of that fight.35
FORESTS FOREVER?
In late August 1987, Greg King and Jane Cope sat on platforms suspended
130 feet above the Headwaters Forest floor. When Humboldt County
sheriff ’s deputies and Pacific Lumber security accused King and Cope of
trespassing, King replied that Pacific Lumber’s logging practices invali-
dated whatever claims the company held to the forest. Owning forestland
that was also interconnected wildlife habitat did not, King suggested,
exempt owners from responsible management. “I feel that Maxxam has
abrogated its right to private property by its total destruction of it,”
he later told the press.36
Forest activists refined their views of ownership and stewardship in their
fight against Pacific Lumber. The spotted owl controversy in the Pacific
Northwest encouraged Earth First! to pivot toward a greater emphasis on
ecological arguments, rooted in the work of conservation biologists, pairing
radical environmentalists’ core ecocentric beliefs with scientific research. In
Northern California, meanwhile, following biological studies and ecocen-
tric principles led radicals away from their longtime commitment to pub-
lic lands and toward the defense of old-growth in forests owned by private
companies. When scientific and moral considerations were paramount,
legal and administrative boundaries meant less. In 1988 Howie Wolke rec-
ommended that Earth First!ers should “force the big timber companies to
practice sustained yield on their private lands.”37 At that point forest activ-
ists were already beginning to push further. When they realized that some
of the most intact stands of old growth grew in privately held forests, they
began agitating for an end to logging in those stands. The fight over private
forestry culminated in the Headwaters Forest. As increasingly ambitious
strategies met with increasingly formidable obstacles, activists adapted
with novel approaches and evolving ideas about where wilderness began
and ended, yielding new legal and political conceptions of wilderness in a
democratic society.
By 1990 both EPIC and Earth First! were stretched thin as legal and
extralegal tactics began to stall. EPIC had become unshakably effective in
its legal maneuvers, successfully arguing suit after suit charging that a given
Pacific Lumber timber harvest plan violated state or federal environmen-
tal laws. But despite increasing legal help from the Sierra Club, the ardu-
ous work fell mostly to a handful of people, especially EPIC co-founder
Robert Sutherland, known to all as “The Man Who Walks in the Woods”
or more commonly “Woods,” and Cecelia Lanman, an ex-labor organizer
and veteran of the Sinkyone fight. For every suit that Woods, Lanman,
and their colleagues filed based on a particular timber harvest plan, Pacific
Lumber could draw up a dozen more plans for environmentalists to review.
In between the filing of a suit and the granting of an injunction, Pacific
Lumber might cut as many trees as it could manage unless Earth First!ers
stood in the way. EPIC’s work slowly eroded the rubber-stamp relationship
between the CDF and the timber industry that Darren Speece has called
“industrial corporatism.”38 But old growth continued to fall.
California’s ballot initiative system offered the chance of a more endur-
ing proscription. A few hundred thousand signatures earned any initiative
a place on the statewide ballot and, if voters saw fit, the force of law. EPIC
and its grassroots allies put together a thorough forest management reform
package inspired in part by the “new forestry” of Jerry Franklin, banning
nearly all clear-cutting, heavily restricting logging near riparian zones,
requiring sustained-yield practices, creating a compensation and retrain-
ing fund for loggers, and authorizing a $750 million bond to purchase
biologically significant old growth starting with Headwaters Forest. Soon
large environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the Natural
Resources Defense Council joined the effort. When the initiative received
enough votes, it officially became Proposition 130, but its backers made sure
it was better known as “Forests Forever.”
The gambit failed by a slim margin, polling at 56 percent a week before
voting but earning only 48.5 percent on election day. The reasons for the
defeat were varied. Voters were confused by another measure—Proposition
128 or “Big Green”—assembled by the California Public Interest Research
Group. Big Green focused less on old growth, addressing clear-cutting but
also greenhouse gasses and pesticide use. The Sierra Club supported both
propositions, but Pacific Lumber described Forests Forever as a radical,
Earth First!-inspired measure. And Pacific Lumber agreed to a voluntary
moratorium on clear-cuts in old growth (although not on selective cutting)
provided several key legislators refuse to support Forests Forever. In addi-
tion, the election came amid the 1991 Gulf War, pushing environmental
issues down on voters’ list of priorities. Hundreds of hours and millions of
dollars’ worth of reform effort yielded almost no tangible results as voters
rejected both Forests Forever and Big Green.39
While EPIC tried to save the forest Earth First! defended the trees,
meeting logging companies on the ground. Redwood Summer and the
bombing of Bari and Cherney had already focused national attention on
Northern California old growth. Freshly arrived activists like Alicia Little-
tree Bales staged dozens of actions on the coast and in the Headwaters For-
est.40 Then in the summer of 1995 another rider to another appropriations
bill again pushed environmentalists back on their heels. The Republican
wave election of 1994 put in power a House of Representatives hostile to
environmental regulation, and in 1995 the House attached a “salvage log-
ging” rider to a bill providing emergency funds for the victims of the Okla-
homa City bombing. The rider ostensibly allowed timber companies to
salvage dead trees before they lost value but was written broadly enough
that just a handful of sick trees cleared the way for logging anywhere nearby.
President Clinton initially vetoed the bill but then signed it under political
pressure. Months later he called the bill “a mistake.”41
The salvage rider infuriated activists and underscored the need for a
long-term remedy. In Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, an arson-
caused fire opened up spotted owl habitat to salvage logging, and Earth
First!ers mounted a fort complete with a moat and drawbridge on a log-
ging road leading to Warner Creek. The Warner Creek blockade lasted a
year, canceled the timber sale, and inspired similar stand-offs throughout
the Pacific Northwest. But the overall effect of the salvage rider was bruis-
ing. “Each year,” the environmental group Earth Island Institute wrote to its
donors about ongoing activism to protect Headwaters Forest, “this coali-
tion of activists and attorneys have managed to block the logging, but this
year the salvage rider has created a whole new set of rules. The tactics of the
past have been significantly weakened.”42
To the chagrin of some activists, the tactics of the future involved relying
on the federal government. Environmental activism on private land proved
as difficult as it was urgent. Endangered species crossed legal boundaries all
the time, and so efforts to preserve biodiversity had to cross those boundar-
ies as well. But while legal distinctions meant little for wildlife, they meant
a great deal for activists. “Private lands, where endangered species’ habitats
generally do not receive legal protection,” Reed Noss wrote about his home
state of Florida, “are simply not being managed in a way that will maintain
red-cockaded woodpeckers, black bears, or Florida panthers.”43 The short-

term answer was Earth First!-style activism; one long-term answer was mak-
ing private lands public. “Ideally,” George Wuerthner wrote, “our public and
private lands should both be managed with ecological processes in mind.
However, this would require a complete change in our attitudes about pri-
vate property and what constitutes responsible stewardship.”44 Forest activ-
ists were gradually learning to craft approaches that could stretch across
both public and private lands, a strategy that a group called the Wildlands
Project would soon champion. In the pitched battle over the Headwaters,
that sort of nuance remained out of reach.
Earth First!ers knew that conservation work on private property pre-
sented serious legal obstacles, and so they had long considered the possi-
bility of a federal purchase of Headwaters. In 1993 Darryl Cherney began
pushing a “debt-for-nature” plan in which Pacific Lumber would hand the
Headwaters Forest to the federal government in exchange for forgiveness of
several hundred million dollars of claims against Hurwitz related to man-
agement of United Savings Association of Texas, one of many Savings and
Loans that the government had to bail out in the late 1980s.45 By 1995 the
Sierra Club’s Ed Wayburn began discussing the same idea with California
senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.46
Pacific Lumber itself drew the federal government in further. In 1996 the
Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of EPIC when it upheld
an injunction on logging Owl Creek in Headwaters Forest because of the
threat that logging posed to the endangered marbled murrelet. Pacific Lum-
ber immediately filed a “takings” suit against the government, claiming that
under the Fifth Amendment private property owners were due compensa-
tion if regulatory action deprived them of their property’s value.
As the presidential election of 1996 approached, the Clinton adminis-
tration was under fire from environmentalists for its acquiescence to the
salvage logging rider and under the threat of Pacific Lumber’s takings suit.
Eager to defuse the suit and win back the green vote, the administration
hoped to broker a deal that would save Headwaters and satisfy Hurwitz.
Both sides steadily applied more pressure. Pacific Lumber threatened to
begin salvage logging in Headwaters. Earth First! gathered thousands of
protesters for a rally in the mill town of Carlotta and assembled a massive
tree-sit at Owl Creek, where four hundred square feet of netting connected
six redwoods. Behind the scenes, the Clinton administration spoke with
senators Feinstein and Boxer, California governor Pete Wilson, and Pacific
Lumber management.47
In late September, Feinstein announced what would soon be called
“the Deal.” The federal government would pay $250 million and the state
of California $130 million for roughly 7,500 acres of Pacific Lumber land,
including part of Headwaters Forest along with a thin buffer zone. The
money would also facilitate the transfer of several thousand acres of non-
old growth from another timber company to Pacific Lumber. Addition-
ally, Pacific Lumber would file a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) and
California Sustained Yield Plan for its remaining lands, and drop its tak-
ings suit.
The Deal satisfied no one fully, and many not at all. Ironing out the
details took several more years, during which Earth First! continued to
stage direct actions in the woods and outside the offices of politicians and
executives. The Headwaters Forest Coordinating Committee—a coalition
of groups whose key representatives ranged from longtime Sierra Club
redwood activist Kathy Bailey to Earth First!er Karen Pickett—pushed to
expand the protected acreage. David Brower, now the chairman of Earth
Island Institute, was among the environmentalists who called Pacific
Lumber’s HCP “even worse than expected.” HCPs had been added to the
Endangered Species Act in 1982 as a way of giving property owners the
flexibility to destroy endangered species and their habitats provided they
offset that destruction by improving habitat elsewhere. Brower called it
“the Headwaters hoax.”48 Environmentalists managed to strengthen the
HCP’s protections of coho salmon and marbled murrelet habitat, but
not to everyone’s satisfaction. Nonetheless, in 1999 Pacific Lumber, the
federal government, and the state of California finalized the Deal, tacking
on an extra $100 million for 1,600 more acres of old growth, much of it
in Owl Creek.
As the Deal neared its final negotiations, Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s
executive director, took stock of the Club’s approach to private forestland.
Moral hazard, Pope made clear, was one of the most vexing concerns about
conservation through the purchase of private land. “They do not believe,”
he wrote of the Deal’s environmental critics, “that public aquisition [sic] of

the groves is sufficiently important to justify paying Hurwitz an inflated
price and giving him the additional financial resources to purchase addi-
tional timber lands.” The politics of purchasing private land twisted some of
the Club’s basic strategies. Building a legislative majority would no longer
guarantee success, “because the landowner will always have a veto.” Appeal-
ing to the public could have perverted consequences, since generating con-
cern and anger were “the very actions that increase the landowners leverage
and jack up the price.” And there was added pressure for environmental
organizations to complete a deal, given how challenging was activism on
private lands. “There is little precedent for preventing all logging on such a
valuable piece of private timberland for such an extended period of time,”
Pope noted. “Only public ownership has proven a reliable way of exercising
public control over this kind of a resource.”49
And yet purchasing land or land rights had long been a basic tool of
the conservation movement. The Save the Redwoods League had relied
on it. Muir Woods, one of the most visited stands of protected redwoods,
gained recognition only after switching from private to public hands. Ste-
phen Mather and the Sierra Club purchased the Tioga Road for Yosem-
ite National Park. There was not only a federal program—the Land and
Water Conservation Fund—dedicated to the acquisition of ecologically
significant private lands, but also an entire sector of the conservation
movement—land trusts—that rested on purchase power. Land trusts,
which protected threatened places by buying them outright or buying
rights to them, stretched back in one form or another to the eighteenth
century but grew especially important in the late twentieth century
through the work of groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Trust
for Public Land.50
Protection-through-purchase and protection-through-easement had
always been accepted tactics, even for Earth First! A decade before the Deal
and just a few dozen miles south of Headwaters Forest, Earth First! cre-
ated the conditions for the Save the Redwoods League and the Trust for
Public Land to save Sally Bell Grove by paying for it. During the 1980s,
Earth First!ers discussed the possibility that conservationists might pro-
tect grasslands by simply buying ranchers’ grazing permits. By the 1990s,
land purchases and conservation easements gained influence as activists

followed endangered species onto private lands and ecological imperatives
demanded not just representative samples of particular landscapes but large
and intact ecosystems.
In the 1980s and 1990s environmentalists began to question the effec-
tiveness of islanded reserves in public parks and public forests. More and
more, wilderness advocacy involved not just the solid blocks on maps that
represented Forest Service or Park Service holdings, but a legal patchwork
stitched together to make a messy whole—what some scholars have called
“mosaics on the land.” The idea of wilderness was moving away from the
clear boundaries suggested in the Wilderness Act and toward a piecemeal
definition that might yield larger swaths through which a mountain lion
could safely roam. For activists pushing once-radical ideas in novel direc-
tions, this strategy became the basis for a new approach to wilderness.51
THE LEGACY OF RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM:

THE WILDLANDS PROJECT
No organization better represented the new approach to wilderness than

the Wildlands Project (TWP). The conversation that would become the
Wildlands Project began in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1988 when Barbara
Dugelby, a onetime Texas Earth First!er who had moved to Michigan to
study with Michael Soulé, brought Dave Foreman and David Brower to
campus and took them and Soulé out to breakfast. TWP took firmer shape
after a 1991 meeting of veteran Earth First! activists and supporters includ-
ing Foreman, Soulé, Rod Mondt, Mitch Friedman, Roz McClellan, John
Davis, George Wuerthner, Jamie Sayen, and Reed Noss.52 The group met in
San Francisco at the house and at the behest of Doug Tompkins, the founder
of the clothing brands Esprit and The North Face. TWP shared many basic
commitments with Earth First!, notably an ecocentric philosophy and a
sense of planetary crisis fueled by the sixth great extinction. But TWP was
not a direct-action organization. Its staff took less interest in the spirited
defense of particular places than in formulating blueprints for large-scale
land management and convincing policymakers and stakeholders that what
might sound idealistic was not only realistic but also imperative.53
“The U.S. conservation movement has been in a period of identity crisis

since the late 1980s,” Friedman wrote to the TWP board and staff in 1997,
“when the tactical ‘vision’ of Earth First! and the science-based ‘vision’ of
conservation biology combined to challenge the traditionally incremental
approaches to wildlands protection.”54 That identity crisis was an opportu-
nity for remaking. TWP used it to argue in favor of continental wildlands
planning—vast areas created and managed “based on the needs of all life,
rather than just human life.” Dismissing existing parks, wildlife refuges, and
wilderness areas as little more than “islands of nature in a sea of develop-
ment,” TWP encouraged greater purpose and ambition. Such ambition
began with Earth First!’s central goal: protecting de facto wilderness. “Not
one more acre of old-growth or substantially natural forest should be cut,”
TWP’s mission statement made clear. “Not one more mile of new road
bladed into a roadless area.”55 It ended with the restoration of a consider-
able chunk of the continent to a wild state. Not a static state, but rather one
that Foreman hoped would allow “the process of evolution, of speciation,
of seral changes in ecosystems,” and that Noss described simply as “adapt-
able to a changing environment.”56, 57
Conservation on this scale meant reaching far beyond public lands,
and figuring out how to create buffer zones in which limited human activ-
ity existed alongside wildlife. TWP’s carefully sketched plans for massive
nature reserves looked like jungle camouflage, with differently shaded blobs
that demarcated degrees of use nudging and penetrating one another. The
Sky Islands/Greater Gila Nature Reserve Network included low and mod-
erate use “stewardship zones” that could be public or private land and on
which people might hunt, log, or even graze cattle.58 TWP’s David Johns
described the Yellowstone to Yukon Network, perhaps the most ambitious
conservation effort of all, as “politically complex, subject to the jurisdic-
tion of at least three states, two provinces, two territories, two central
governments, international treaties, several Native peoples’ governments,
multinational corporations and many local governments.”59 Under these
conditions wilderness advocacy no longer involved just one agency or even
government, nor did it involve drawing strict boundaries between wild and
domesticated places. “How do we integrate Wildlands objectives with tra-
ditional uses of the land—ranching, farming, hunting, fishing, etc.—while
encouraging sustainable, wildlife-friendly practices on private lands?”

TWP asked its supporters.60 Harvey Locke, a TWP director and Yellow-
stone to Yukon founder, encouraged conservationists to adapt. “We need
to think how the landscape lives,” Locke said, “not how we draw lines.”61
In many ways this was simply an extension of what Earth First! had
always advocated. From its earliest years Earth First! drafted and redrafted
its own wilderness preserve system, sized to nearly ten times the existing
system in order to “allow meaningful wildness to coexist with human civi-
lization on the North American continent.”62 And Earth First! had always
advocated restrained use of working landscapes. Looking back in 1995,
Foreman explained, “We have fought for Wilderness Areas, yes; we have
also fought like hell for sensible, sensitive, sustainable management of other
lands,” from agricultural valleys to rangelands. “We have fought for good
management of the matrix.”63
In another sense, TWP’s work constituted a significant next step. Earth
First! was a form of resistance, while TWP was a means of planning for
a possible future. Even more than Earth First!, TWP emphasized the
“science-based ‘vision’ of conservation biology.”64 Emphasizing science
meant that TWP insisted on what conservation biologists called “cores,
corridors, and carnivores”—large, core reserves of wilderness; areas out-
side of wilderness through which wildlife could easily travel from one core
to another; and the presence of keystone species, most often large preda-
tors.65 TWP worked to push cores, corridors, and carnivores to the top of
conservationists’ agendas. “TWP is a lonely hearts club for conservation
biologists,” Foreman said. “We’re like a computer dating service to intro-
duce them to conservation groups who want to use their knowledge and
expertise.” Emphasizing “vision” meant describing a world in which human
self-restraint might permit sufficient habitat for wildlife. Allowing himself
more hope than he ever had in his Earth First! days, Foreman wrote, “It is
only by rewilding and healing the ecological wounds of the land that we can
learn humility and respect; that we can come home, at last.”66
The Wildlands Project did not sit in or spike trees, did not block log-
ging roads, did not even picket Forest Service offices, but it neverthe-
less demonstrated some of the successes of Earth First!-style radicalism.
First, by imagining wildlands protection on a large scale, TWP inspired
or furthered projects in which conservationists began with the assump-

tion that wildlife deserved room to thrive as much as people did. Those
projects ranged from Reed Noss’s attempts to create a regional reserve
network for panthers in Florida; to the Southern Rockies Ecosystem
Project’s efforts to protect bears, lynx, wolves, and bighorn sheep across
the Southwest; to Mitch Friedman’s work on the Greater North Cascades
Ecosystem, straddling the U.S.-Canadian border; to the Sky Islands/
Greater Gila Nature Reserve Network, stretching from northern Mexico
to northern New Mexico.67
Second, by stressing conservation biology, TWP inadvertently made
clear how important were Earth First!’s moral claims. Appeals to what
was good or right, on their own, tended to convince only those who were
already persuaded, and it was partly for this reason that wilderness advo-
cates increasingly relied on scientific research. “I don’t know if science
alone can help us rise above deep-rooted social conflict,” Amy Irvine of the
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said. “But I do have faith that solid
research and facts strengthen our philosophical assertions that we need
more wilderness.”68 Still, science never remained beyond doubt; and in fact,
some TWP projects tested hypotheses as much as they applied theories.
The Sky Islands/Greater Gila project was, in part, an investigation into
whether “umbrella species”—species that ranged especially widely each
day, month, or season—could serve as indicators for a reserve system.69 The
biologist Daniel Simberloff raised doubts about whether conservationists
could even be sure that cores, buffers, and corridors were the best approach
to wildlife preservation. For Simberloff, though, this was beside the point.
“In your past writings,” he told Foreman, “you have been enormously effec-
tive not by being science-based, but by articulating visions of conservation
and human activities conducive to conservation, and by inspiring people to
work towards those visions even without necessarily thinking about all the
details . . .”70 The National Audubon Society’s Brock Evans agreed, writing
to Wild Earth, TWP’s partner journal, “For all the important discussions
about biology and biodiversity, about ecosystems and change of life, we
should never forget the spiritual and aesthetic part of our forests, too.”71
Earth First!’s clenched fist remained a vital part of wilderness work even
when it emerged from the sleeve of a lab coat.

THE SIERRA CLUB
“If you were effective, baby, the dreaded U.S.-sector secret police would have
put a bomb in your car just as they did with effective environmentalists Judi
Bari and Darryl Cherney,” Keith Lampe/Ro-Non-So-Te/Ponderosa Pine
wrote to David Brower in 1994. “If you were effective, you’d have spent a
few years in prison because of lies about you uttered before a lackey judge
by paid members of that same secret police. That’s exactly what happened
to effective environmentalists Marc Baker, Mark Davis and Peg Millett of
Earth First!”72 In 1985 Lampe had attended an Earth First! and Rainforest
Action Network road show in San Francisco, focused on Central American
deforestation. He brought a version of the show to a community center in
Bolinas and wrote to Brower, “Earth First! has done our dirty work long
enough. It’s time for us to take on the cutting-edge chores and let them kick
back awhile.”73 A decade later, frustrated by Brower’s lack of interest, Lampe
accused him of ineffectiveness and “speechifying.”
For Lampe, Earth First!’s radicalism took its most meaningful shape
as direct action and complete opposition to the establishment. Anything
less was mere “speechifying.” Some Earth First!ers likely agreed with him
but most did not. Earth First! had always operated in tension but in tan-
dem with established environmental organizations. A sympathetic gadfly,
Earth First! worked with groups that ranged from militant to milquetoast
and had a hand in founding several new groups that rabble roused without
risking arrest, including the Wildlands Project, the Rainforest Action Net-
work, and the Center for Biological Diversity.
One of the clearer signs of Earth First!’s enduring legacy, however,
was how it helped shape the Sierra Club, a group that Earth First!’s John
Davis described in 1990 as “in need of infiltration and radicalization” and
Brower accused of being “so eager to compromise” that it undercut grass-
roots activists.74 Although mainstream groups had embraced conventional
reform and negotiation since the early 1970s, their cause retained the
potential for a fundamental critique of modern society. Even at its meek-
est, environmentalism whispered questions about the reasonableness of
unending industrial growth, the wisdom of technological progress, and
the assumptions of liberal individualism. The differences between radi-

cal and mainstream environmentalists were real and significant, but never
absolute. Some of the policy debates that had been taking place at Earth
First! gatherings migrated—in a somewhat more moderate form—into
the conference rooms of the established organizations. This was espe-
cially the case at the Sierra Club, where members elected the board of
directors and could amend the Club’s official positions through ballot
initiatives. In the 1990s, Sierra Clubbers inspired by the no-compromise
environmental politics of the 1980s led the Club to tougher positions on
several key issues.
Despite the general opposition of its leadership, in 1996 the Club voted
to endorse an end to all commercial logging on national forests, a policy that
the Sierra Club officially called “no commercial logging” to make clear that
cutting by individuals and families was exempted, but which most environ-
mental activists knew by its catchier name, “zero cut.”75 Overriding Club
leadership had required a lengthy campaign. Zero cut emerged years earlier
and hundreds of miles away from the timber wars of the West Coast, at
the meetings of an Indiana environmental group called Protect Our Woods
(POW). Focused on the tiny and fragmented Hoosier National Forest in
southern Indiana, POW initially fought off-road vehicles and clear-cuts
and by 1987 called for an end to commercial logging in the Hoosier. When
POW’s Andy Mahler learned that most national forest timber sales made
little economic sense, he founded a new organization called Heartwood
to push for zero cut throughout the national forest system. Heartwood
started its work in 1991, soon after Earth First! and local activists completed
an eighty-day occupation of a logging road into Illinois’s Shawnee National
Forest.76 Back on the West Coast, a frustrated Sierra Club volunteer in
Oregon named Tim Hermach started a group called the Native Forest
Council (NFC) after butting heads one too many times with Club leader-
ship. When NFC pursued an end to the logging of old-growth forests and
roadless areas, Hermach found himself tangling once again with the Club
and several other environmental organizations worried about the political
fallout from NFC’s doggedness. Like Earth First!, NFC’s frustrations with
mainstream groups pushed it to take even stronger stances and soon it sup-
ported zero cut in all national forests.
The Club’s calculated moderation risked discouraging its most dedi-

cated members. Two in particular, Margaret Hays Young and David Orr,
created the Association of Sierra Club Members for Environmental Eth-
ics (ASCMEE) to push the Club away from compromise and toward a
hard-line stance on wilderness. Young’s and Orr’s complaints echoed those
of Earth First!, which Orr had worked with in Texas before volunteering
for the Club. The established environmental groups made decisions “in
private, by a small number of very powerful people,” Young wrote in Wild
Earth. “Individual members’ opinions do not enter into their political cal-
culations, because they feel we are not as well informed and we don’t have
‘political expertise.’ ” The result, Young explained, was that the established
organizations settled on positions weaker than those of their own chap-
ters or of local environmental groups.77 In 1994 ASCMEE—relabeled the
“John Muir Sierrans” after the Club threatened to sue over the use of its
name—put a proposal on the Club ballot that the Sierra Club endorse zero
cut. Nearly two-thirds of the membership voted against it. In 1996 the John
Muir Sierrans tried again. This time two-thirds of the Club’s membership
voted in favor.
The two years between the two votes witnessed changes outside and
inside of the Club. Outside, the new Republican majority in the House
of Representatives convinced President Clinton to sign the salvage rider
that put forest activists in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest
on the defensive. Grassroots activists, sensing that the major organiza-
tions’ clout in Washington, D.C. yielded only limited returns, tried to
put in place sturdier statutory restrictions. “Without an offense, we are
destined to always be pushed backwards,” the zero cut campaign insisted.
“The recent passage of the horrible ‘salvage logging’ rider, which sus-
pended our public forest protection laws nationwide, is a grim example
of this.”78 Although zero cut would have no direct effect on private forest-
lands like that of Pacific Lumber, it would erase any room for negotiation
or maneuver on the nation’s public forests. By its nature, zero cut was a
policy of no compromise.
Inside the Club, the insurgency grew. Chad Hanson, a member of the
Los Angeles chapter, began writing articles in the Earth First! Journal
about the Club’s failure to take a stand on logging, and soon he received
an invitation to join the John Muir Sierrans. In 1995 Hanson took charge
of the zero cut effort for the 1996 ballot. The John Muir Sierrans gath-
ered their two thousand signatures and started sending letters to each of
the individual chapters, using the addresses on the back of each chapter’s
newsletter. Club leadership notified the John Muir Sierrans that the chap-
ter addresses were proprietary and that their use would disqualify the bal-
lot initiative. So Hanson and Orr spent the next two months driving all
across the United States, talking to chapter leaders in person and sleeping
on volunteers’ floors.79
The insurgency outran even those who might be most expected to sup-
port it. When the Earth First! Journal asked Brower for his views on zero
cut in 1995 he advised against it, arguing that it would protect new growth
on public lands at the expense of old growth on private lands.80 Dave
Foreman opposed zero cut because he considered it ecologically unsound
(preventing necessary logging in monocultural second-growth stands
that replaced clear-cuts) and strategically unwise (risking a backlash at the
moment that environmentalists were trying to reverse the salvage logging
rider).81 Hermach and Hanson finally convinced Brower to support zero
cut. Foreman remained opposed to zero cut as national Club policy but
supported a forest-by-forest approach.
“By adopting such a stringent and ill-conceived posture, the normally
mainstream environmental group has joined the ranks of the radical
extremist groups like Earth First! and Greenpeace,” wrote environmental
critic Karl Drexel in an opinion piece for the Christian Science Monitor
soon after the Sierra Club announced its support for zero cut.82 This was
overstatement, but the success of the John Muir Sierrans did show how
mainstream groups could be pushed by those activists who had embraced
the no-compromise culture of groups like Earth First! The Club, for its
part, tried to downplay the extremism of zero cut. Hanson and Carl Pope
responded to Drexel by explaining that 95 percent of the nation’s original
forest was gone; that the federal logging program was essentially a massive
subsidy to the timber industry; that a Forest Service poll showed a majority
of Americans opposed to resource extraction on public lands; and that only
12 percent of the national timber supply came from public lands. “What is
the more ‘radical’ position?” they asked.83
Activists had only begun to push the Club in more militant directions.
In 1995 both David Brower and Dave Foreman won election to the Sierra
Club board of directors. From 1994 to 2000, the John Muir Sierrans ran
candidates for each board election, achieving a brief majority in 1999.
Even after the adoption of zero cut, the policy’s advocates within the Club
continued to push for further action on logging and then on other issues.
Several years after the zero cut victory, Club members solicited enough sig-
natures for an ultimately unsuccessful “zero cud” initiative advocating an
end to commercial grazing on public lands, a position that Earth First! had
urged the Club to adopt as early as 1988.84
Brower recommended several changes to Club strategy. Among
them were partnering with the Wildlands Project, “the most promis-
ing of efforts to determine now what we hope America will look like
fifty years from now,” and supporting a five-state wilderness bill called
the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA).85 Inspired
by the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone in 1987, and the
epitome of the cores, corridors, and carnivores philosophy that lay at the
heart of the Wildlands Project, NREPA was a vast wilderness reserve
that would encompass over sixteen million acres of public land. It was,
according to Foreman, “the strongest and most visionary wilderness leg-
islation since the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.”86
TWP championed NREPA, as did the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
But the Club’s national office as well as its Montana chapter considered
NREPA unrealistic, and not only fought against the proposed legisla-
tion but also nearly suspended Margaret Hays Young’s Atlantic Chapter
for its support.87
In 1993 the Montana Chapter held a special meeting to consider cen-
suring and even disbanding Bozeman’s Headwaters Group of the Sierra
Club (named after the headwaters of the Missouri River) for its contin-
ued support of NREPA despite Club opposition. “The continued exis-
tence of the Headwaters Group is in considerable jeopardy,” the chapter
chair warned.88 Brower, the Wildlands Project, and the Alliance for the
Wild Rockies continued to press the issue, and the Club grew increasingly
uncomfortable with the infighting. Realizing that the grassroots would
not easily fall in line, the Club pivoted grudgingly and then enthusiasti-
cally in favor of NREPA. By the time the bill reached the House floor in
1994, the Club called it a “visionary proposal” and sent its legislative direc-
tor, Debbie Sease, to testify in favor.89 Thanking Brower for his consistent
support, Brooks Martin of the Headwaters Group summarized the con-
flict just as Earth First! might have. “We learned to stick firm against not
only anti-environmentalists,” he wrote, “but also against the compromise-
compromise conservation community.”90
Brower had always served as a bridge between the mainstream environ-
mental movement and its radical critics, commanding respect from the
environmental establishment while championing grassroots and radical
groups, even when the organizations he worked for—and the organi-
zations he founded—did not. In 1993 he sent a check to Mark Davis of
EMETIC at a federal prison in California after Davis appealed for funds
in the pages of the Earth First! Journal. The prison sent the check back to
Brower, along with a note from Davis. “I am taken care of for the moment,
and I know that you could do better things with the money,” the Arizona
Five conspirator wrote. “But I thank you very sincerely for the thought.
And while I’m at it, thanks for how you’ve lived your life. I don’t think
there is much hope of keeping the industrial death machine from it’s [sic]
apocalyptic and pyrrhic ‘victory’ over nature, but you sure have been an
inspiration to try.”91
As he reached his eighties Brower kept trying, at times to the Club’s
consternation. If Bill Clinton’s greatest sin for conservationists was the
salvage logging rider, his support of free-trade policies that rolled back
environmental regulations was a close second. “To let loose corporations
on a global marketplace without adherence to minimum global environ-
mental laws will reverse almost every conservation gain made this century,”
Brower warned.92 Hundreds of environmental groups opposed the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as well as the updated General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). “Economic growth under such
circumstances—however vibrant, however sustained—can never translate
into economic and environmental health,” Carl Pope wrote of NAFTA’s
effects on the U.S.-Mexico border.93
Discouraged with Clinton’s first term, Brower wrote an opinion piece in

the Los Angeles Times citing the salvage logging rider, NAFTA, and GATT,
and declaring that he could not support Clinton’s re-election. Coming just
as the Club was considering a second Clinton endorsement, Brower’s piece
sparked a vigorous round of emails among staffers about principle and prac-
ticality. “The Brower Op-Ed plants the seeds of discouragement for this
election season among environmentalists,” Julie Beezley wrote. “Frankly,”
Paul Hendricks wrote of Clinton, “right now we need him more than he
needs us.” Leslie Reid, on the other hand, called Clinton’s record a “betrayal
of the Sierra Club” and claimed an endorsement would cost the Club cred-
ibility among younger members.94 Chad Hanson said that an endorsement
“would be disastrous for morale in the Club.”95
Club president Adam Werbach stepped in to calm nerves, explaining
that Brower had told him the opinion was Brower’s own and had nothing
to do with the Club’s endorsement. Brower remained pragmatic enough to
understand the Club’s reasons for supporting Clinton but angry enough
about the salvage rider and NAFTA that he could not bring himself to do
so too, and he wanted the president to know it. For Tim Hermach, how-
ever, it was the Clinton endorsement that pushed him out the door after
years of challenging the Club’s leadership. “President Clinton sees our
movement as little more than a political expediency,” Hermach wrote to his
friends and colleagues, “and he has used our good will to break the back of
many of our environmental and social justice efforts.” Hermach finally quit
the Sierra Club, “in resignation and disgust.”96
Brower preferred to work from the inside, pushing and cajoling the
Club toward a harder line. In 1996 he coaxed the Club to adopt the policy
proposal closest to his and many radical environmentalists’ hearts: tear
down Glen Canyon Dam. Unlike Abbey and Earth First!, Brower did not
mean this literally. The dam, he pointed out, could remain standing, while
its diversion tunnels let 200,000 cubic feet of water per second through
the end of the canyon, effectively draining Lake Powell and revealing
Glen Canyon once again. Brower, activist Katie Lee, and longtime Club
director Martin Litton created the Glen Canyon Institute to develop a
restoration plan. In November 1996, the Club’s board unanimously sup-
ported removal.97
Brower’s proposal was, by 1996, slightly less inconceivable than it had

once been. As hundreds of dams came due for licensing renewal in the
1990s, a combination of economic sense and political will put greater
pressure on dams than did the water they impounded. Dams threatened
more and more fish populations along with the livelihoods of fishing com-
munities; agricultural regions began to find alternative sources of water;
and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt took dam removal seriously. A
surge in dam removal was limited to smaller structures, however, making
the Glen Canyon bypass a long shot. When Congress’s Subcommittee on
National Parks and Public Lands held hearings on the Sierra Club’s pro-
posal, the tone of lawmakers’ comments ranged from skeptical to hostile.
Even with the Club’s backing, the idea of draining Lake Powell never had
much chance.98
Even if Glen Canyon Dam held fast, the Club’s proposal had conse-
quences. The Sierra Club made several pragmatic arguments for draining
Lake Powell: the lake was becoming smaller and smaller through a com-
bination of sedimentation and evaporation; its value in storing water was
negligible other than in case of severe drought; and Glen Canyon Dam
generated a relatively insignificant amount of power. For Brower, however,
the most important arguments remained philosophical. “Beginning with
the Industrial Revolution,” he wrote to Club members about his proposal,
“people have been forgetting to ask what progress costs the earth and the
future.”99 Decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam made economic and eco-
logical sense, but it also served as a symbol of the anti-industrial ethos that
radicals had been using for years to criticize the moderate politics of estab-
lished groups. By the turn of the century the Club trumpeted that ethos
itself, at least rhetorically. Among five “bold ideas for the new century”
named by Sierra magazine were both zero cut and the end of Glen Can-
yon Dam. “In Edward Abbey’s eco-classic The Monkey Wrench Gang,” the
magazine noted, “a band of nature-loving malcontents plots to restore the
Colorado River by blowing up Glen Canyon Dam. The Sierra Club has
the same goal of rescuing rivers across the country (minus the outlaw pyro-
technics).”100 In advocating the removal of Glen Canyon Dam, the Sierra
Club also advocated the removal of part of what stood between radical and
mainstream environmentalism (see figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1 Katie Lee and Dave Foreman in Durango, Colorado. Lee helped found the Glen
Canyon Institute, which advocated the removal of Glen Canyon Dam. Photo courtesy
Dave Foreman.

IMMIGRATION
Among the legacies of Earth First!-style radicalism was the sort of holism
that amounted to a bleak view of people. The very idea of the destruction of
nature, where “nature” was the nonhuman world, rested on the belief that
humans were invariably the destructive force. The greater the crime that
humanity committed against the planet, the less germane were distinctions
between different people and their relative degrees of guilt. Radical groups
made explicit what established organizations kept tacit. Just as radical envi-
ronmentalists’ campaigns against industrial society grew from the seed of
an idea already present in the mainstream movement, radicals’ disregard
for social difference was an extreme version of what could already be found
among mainstream environmentalists. Radical or not, environmentalists
could easily miss the people for the planet.
The environmental justice movement made this point most forcefully,
admonishing established groups in the same way social ecologists admon-
ished radical groups.101 Environmental justice activism was at least as old
as environmental activism and arguably older. Pollution was a local issue,
disproportionately affecting particular communities, long before it was
a national and international concern. As the environmental movement
garnered attention in the 1960s and 1970s, antitoxics activists in groups
like the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, the Urban Envi-
ronment Conference, the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now, and many smaller groups fought the effects of industrial pol-
lution in low-income communities. But there was little sense of a coherent
movement based around issues of the environment, race, and class until the
late 1980s. In 1987 the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church
of Christ issued a report called Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,
which helped define the range and the pervasiveness of what became known
as “environmental racism.” Soon after, sociologist Robert Bullard examined
how siting decisions for dumps and industrial pollution disproportionately
harmed minority neighborhoods in Dumping in Dixie. Environmental
justice activists fought against industrial pollution on a neighborhood-
by-neighborhood basis, preventing toxic dumping through countless local
battles. This strategy was as much a function of limited resources as it was of

effective organizing, as the movement had few allies in Washington, D.C.
That absence, to environmental justice advocates, was in part a failure of the
mainstream environmental groups.
In 1990 ten of the largest mainstream environmental organizations
received two letters, one from the Gulf Coast Tenant Leadership Devel-
opment Project and the other from the Southwest Organizing Project,
both signed by many other local groups and individual activists. The letters
pointed out the mainstream environmental movement’s failure to address
pollution as it affected working-class communities and communities of
color, and the lack of representatives from those communities on the boards
and staffs of all of the national organizations. In 1991 environmental justice
activists held the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership
Summit in Washington, D.C. Three hundred grassroots activists attended
the first day of the Summit. On the second day, 250 additional attendees
joined, some of them from mainstream environmental groups. The main-
stream leaders who spoke at the Summit confessed to their organizations’
conspicuous absence from environmental justice campaigns, and promised
a stronger effort to address environmental justice issues and to hire more
diverse staffs.
The mainstream environmental groups and the environmental justice
movement approached each other haltingly. A year and a half after estab-
lished leaders promised a new commitment to issues of justice, that pledge
remained largely unfulfilled. The Environmental Careers Organization
released a report on diversity within environmental groups, concluding
that the broad environmental movement remained overwhelmingly white.
And although many established groups quickly launched environmental
justice programs in the wake of the two 1990 letters and the 1991 summit,
most of those programs would come from new grant proposals. Few groups
committed significant existing funds to issues of social justice.
Environmental justice advocates, meanwhile, wrestled with some of
the thornier implications of all environmental activism. Mark Dowie has
chronicled the evolution of environmental justice from NIMBY (“not in
my backyard”) to NIABY (“not in anybody’s backyard”).102 Campaigns
based on NIMBY tended to simply push pollution from one neighborhood
to another. Activists tried to address this problem by opposing pollution

on a wider scale and preventing the dumping of waste in any economi-
cally marginal community. As corporations began to export their waste to
poorer countries around the world, environmental justice activists began
to talk of a third acronym: NOPE (“not on planet earth”). The Reverend
Benjamin Chavis, one of the most influential proponents of environmental
justice, insisted that the movement did not seek to simply relocate toxic
facilities. “You can’t get justice by doing an injustice on somebody else,”
he said. “When you have lived through suffering and hardship, you want
to remove them, not only from your own people but from all peoples.”103
This was a radical proposition. To demand an end to industrial byproducts
anywhere on earth was to demand an end to industry itself, or at least a
dramatic scaling back. Environmental justice activists rarely followed this
line of thought to its ultimate conclusion; like mainstream and radical envi-
ronmentalists, they never fully reconciled means with ends.
Whatever its own limits, the environmental justice movement made
clear how environmental organizations struggled to balance a commitment
to protecting particular resources with a broader concern for social justice.
No single issue dragged this struggle onto a public stage more than did the
issue of immigration. The immigration debate exploded in the 1990s, but
even in the 1970s immigration had been a vital piece of population poli-
tics. While most crisis environmentalists sounded alarms about drowning
in a planetwide sea of people, some of them—notably Garrett Hardin—
warned that waves of humanity would soon crash over national borders.
Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics” required severe immigration restrictions. More
and more people piling into lifeboat nations, Hardin argued, would even-
tually sink everyone.104
The Sierra Club often stood at the center of the conversation about
immigration and the environment. At one of the Club’s 1972 board meet-
ings, director Sidney Liebes, a member of the board’s population commit-
tee, pointed to immigration’s contribution to overall population growth in
the United States and recommended the Club declare an official policy on
immigration. At least one board member objected, and the board presi-
dent referred the idea to several other committees for consideration.105 Five
years later the population committee offered concrete changes to the Club’s
population policies, including a call for an end to illegal immigration and

a gradual reduction of legal immigration.106 A year after that, the popula-
tion committee had backed off those specific goals and instead proposed
an examination of federal immigration laws, foreign policy, and the root
causes of immigration to the United States.107 The Club adopted the pro-
posal as policy, and then in 1988 called on the federal government to seek
immigration levels that would not destabilize the nation’s population.108
In 1993, as the Club finished celebrating its centennial, the population
committee drafted a comprehensive population plan that included among
its recommendations a reduction in net immigration to the U.S. and Can-
ada and that claimed immigration rates led to significant environmental
harm. The draft plan struck many desks with the force of controversy and
sparked several years of debate. Vivian Li, chair of the Club’s Ethnic and
Cultural Diversity Task Force—created in the wake of the environmen-
tal justice movement’s criticisms—expressed “anger and rage” at the plan’s
premises. “The debate” Julie Beezley said a year and a half later, “has been
contentious and exhausting.”109
Although immigration policies concerned national borders, the fight
over those policies often unfolded in California. Along with the Ethnic and
Cultural Diversity Task Force the draft plan’s most persistent critic was the
Club’s Angeles chapter, representing greater Los Angeles. Soon after the
draft plan’s release, the Angeles chapter passed a resolution recommending
the Club take an explicitly neutral position on immigration control. The
chapter warned the national office that anything short of a neutral position
would risk painting the Club as bigoted, xenophobic, and provincial, and
could alienate large communities in diverse areas like Southern California.110
Immigration politics threatened to further entrench the prejudices that
environmental justice advocates had pointed to only a few years earlier.
That threat grew even greater in mid-1994 when anti-immigration activ-
ists put Proposition 187 on the state ballot, a measure that would deny
public services to undocumented immigrants. Among Proposition 187’s
supporters was the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),
an anti-immigration organization started by John Tanton. In the 1970s
Tanton had served as president of Zero Population Growth and chair of the
Club’s population committee. By the 1990s he cared less about protecting
natural resources than about protecting a social order. Wealthy nations like
the United States, he wrote to the Atlantic, “are being selected against in
the great reproductive sweepstakes and will gradually be replaced (become
extinct, in Johnson’s and Darwin’s term) unless they control entry into their
living space. It’s that simple.”111
The Club’s board tried to end the debate in 1996, resolving that no one
speaking for the Club could take a position on immigration policy. “The
Club remains committed to environmental rights and protections for all
within our borders,” the resolution read, “without discrimination based on
immigration status.”112 But the politics of population and immigration had
already ranged too far to be contained by one proclamation. As soon as
the board declared neutrality, a group of Sierra Club members began to
agitate for an explicit Club policy that called for comprehensive population
stabilization through a drop in both natural increase and net immigration.
They formed a group, Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS),
led by Ohio Sierra Club volunteer Alan Kuper.113 SUSPS succeeded in
putting its proposal on the Sierra Club ballot in 1998. The Club’s board,
overwhelmingly against the proposal, put a counter-proposal on the ballot
calling for the Club to reaffirm its neutral stance on immigration policy.
SUSPS argued that reducing consumption in the United States was impor-
tant but not adequate; only by reducing both consumption and popula-
tion could the American environment be saved. The board insisted that the
Club should both think and act globally and address root causes such as
poverty and the restriction of human rights, of which immigration was only
a symptom.114
Whichever proposal received the most votes would have no legal weight,
no immediate impact beyond the Club itself, and likely no effect on U.S.
policy—and yet the vote raised concern throughout the environmental
community. The National Audubon Society and the environmental jour-
nalist Bill McKibben supported the board’s position;115 Earth Day founder
Gaylord Nelson and Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson supported the SUSPS
proposal. California State Senator Hilda Solis wrote to Carl Pope to warn
of the vote’s corrosive effects. “It is imperative,” Solis wrote, “for [the Club’s]
members to realize how divisive and potentially harming a position against
immigration would be to the organization.”116 The tension within the Club
pulled at longtime loyalties. Anne Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich’s wife, colleague,

and frequent co-writer, emailed Kuper to withdraw her and her husband’s
endorsement. Although the Ehrlichs generally supported any discussion of
population politics, in this case they felt the debate had become so conten-
tious as to take away from the Club’s overall mission.117
Although both sides fought for his support, Brower waffled. He had
always insisted on the centrality of overpopulation to environmental poli-
tics and the relevance of immigration to both, but he was as concerned with
root causes as with policies at the border. Brower believed that free trade
agreements and the influence of corporate agriculture on nearby nations
contributed to unduly high rates of immigration. NAFTA, Brower argued,
both incentivized immigration and encouraged rampant consumerism.
Julie Beezley, worried that Brower might support the SUSPS proposal and
reminding him that he had insisted on the importance of root causes at a
recent board meeting, told him that the board’s proposal sought to address
exactly those concerns. SUSPS felt a similar claim to Brower’s vote. “Dave,”
Alan Kuper urged, “we can’t silently acquiesce to endless rapid U.S. popula-
tion growth and also ‘protect and preserve’ much of anything. The cred-
ibility of the Sierra Club is at stake.”118
The credibility of the Sierra Club amid a protracted fight worried Dave
Foreman and led him, at first, to grudgingly advise that Kuper drop his
campaign. “I think a battle over immigration will be even more emotionally
divisive than zero cut or a Clinton endorsement,” he told Kuper in 1996.119
Eventually though, Foreman offered his support for the SUSPS proposal.
It was an odd endorsement given the ways in which his new organization,
the Wildlands Project, built coalitions and pushed beyond national bound-
aries. Several of TWP’s reserves straddled the United States’ southern or
northern borders and involved working with Canadian and Mexican con-
servationists and landowners. “Understanding the culture and cultural dif-
ferences of the region provides us with the means of connecting to people,”
TWP’s David Johns wrote of the countless communities that lived within
the vast sweep of the Yellowstone to Yukon reserve.120 The conservation
work of TWP depended on crossing political boundaries and on treating
people as not just raw numbers but distinct parties with distinct but over-
lapping interests. “Thus,” one internal memo about working with Native
peoples read, “the question to TWP should not be whether, but how to
include most effectively other cultures whose knowledge and political clout
are critical to our long-term success.”121
The approach that TWP increasingly represented, one based on hazy
borders and hard-won partnerships, carried the day at the Sierra Club when
60 percent of members voted for the board proposal. But the fight reminded
all involved of the delicate balance between curtailing human impacts and
protecting human freedoms. Although they differed in their solutions, the
most reasonable advocates on both sides of the Club’s immigration debate
agreed that the core of the problem was more and more people consum-
ing at an American pace. In 1994 the Angeles chapter warned that sup-
port of immigration restriction would put “blame for our environmental
problems on immigrants while not taking responsibility for our own U.S.
consumptive lifestyles.”122 In 1997 Ric Oberlink, an SUSPS supporter, said
simply, “The larger the U.S. population, the more havoc we cause.”123 The
immigration debate demonstrated the slow emergence of social politics and
coalition-building in an environmental movement that had long neglected
both. It also demonstrated how the freedom of people—and particularly
of Americans—to amass and consume remained a central concern for the
environmental movement.
WILDERNESS REVISITED
Wilderness remained at the center of philosophical and political disputes

in which radical ideas persisted. Even as the Wildlands Project moved away
from an exclusive focus on strictly bounded wilderness and toward a mosaic
of different land uses, it defended the core philosophical commitments of
traditional wilderness advocacy. In the late 1990s environmentalists clashed
publicly over wilderness as an idea even as they achieved political victories
that protected wilderness acreage. Wilderness remained a contentious issue
in environmental thought and activism, a key measure of what environmen-
talists hoped to achieve.
A debate about the meaning of wilderness among environmentalists and
philosophers gathered momentum in the mid-1990s when the University
of California’s Humanities Research Institute launched a three-year project
on “Reinventing Nature,” comprising conferences in Berkeley, San Diego,

and Davis, and a semester-long residential seminar in Irvine. Conservation
biologists and wilderness advocates grew interested and wary when they
heard about the effort. Michael Soulé and the philosopher Gary Lease held
their own conference in Santa Cruz—partially under the auspices of the
Reinventing Nature project—in order to examine what they considered a
“tense but unavoidable relationship” between a human-focused “construc-
tionism” and a nature-focused “essentialism.”124
The tense relationship grew more so when the New York Times Magazine
published “The Trouble with Wilderness,” an essay by William Cronon
that grew out of the Reinventing Nature seminar. Pointing to Earth First!
in particular, Cronon presented the idea of wilderness as not only essential-
ist but also exclusionary and ahistorical. The essay did not take issue with
the National Wilderness Preservation System itself but with a particular
understanding of wilderness that, Cronon wrote, “is entirely a creation of
the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.”
To the degree that wilderness served as a bedrock idea for much of the envi-
ronmental movement—and Cronon believed it to be a high degree—its
limitations suffused much of what environmentalists fought for.125
Cronon’s essay and its reprinting in several magazines and newspa-
pers raised hackles at Wild Earth. “We’ve decided to devote much of the
winter ’96 issue of Wild Earth to defenses of wilderness—the concept as
well as the areas—against the latest philosophical onslaught,” editor John
Davis wrote to Gary Snyder. “In particular, WE will challenge William
Cronon’s problems with wilderness.”126 The winter 1996 issue devoted sev-
eral dozen pages to aggressive critiques of “The Trouble with Wilderness,”
most of them accusing Cronon of reckless relativism. Lost in the salvos
was the common ground on which each side had at least one foot. “In the
wilderness,” Cronon wrote, neatly summarizing a tenet of ecocentrism,
“we need no reminder that a tree has its own reasons for being, quite
apart from us.”127 In Wild Earth, ecologist Don Waller granted Cronon’s
central claim that wilderness was in large part a cultural product. Waller
turned to “wildness” instead and, echoing Cronon’s and TWP’s pivot
away from strict wilderness, wrote, “We must recognize that degrees of
wildness exist.”128
As Cronon’s essay and Wild Earth’s reaction to it made clear, wilderness

remained a critical idea and a sensitive subject for many environmental-
ists, a classification that carried a great deal of conceptual weight even as
it changed from decade to decade. Wilderness also did crucial political
work. TWP fought to protect “de facto wilderness”—roadless areas with-
out official wilderness designation—as “cores,” largely undeveloped land
surrounded by nested degrees of wildness. Bill Clinton, the subject of so
much discord at the Sierra Club, became an unlikely hero in the protec-
tion of de facto wilderness. Pressured by environmentalists and frustrated
by the House of Representatives, Clinton looked to achieve a conservation
legacy and increasingly relied on administrative authority. In 1997 Clin-
ton and Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck announced a science-based
effort to reform roadless area management. After three years of political
wrangling, that reform took shape as a roadless rule that would prohibit
roadbuilding and commercial logging on nearly 59 million acres of national
forest roadless areas, while still allowing some grazing, mining, and motor-
ized recreation.129 “The Clinton ruling is perhaps the best example of how
a continually evolving concept of wilderness has influenced on-the-ground
policy and management,” Foreman later wrote.130 In 2004, as the Bush
administration fought to prevent the rule’s enactment, it looked as though
the achievement would come to nothing. Foreman remarked that the Clin-
ton rule “ranks with the passage of the Wilderness Act as a landmark con-
servation victory—had it been successfully implemented.”131 But the legal
battle continued well into the Obama administration, and although law-
suits scaled back the acres protected, for the most part the Clinton roadless
rule survived intact. From a policy perspective it was one of the most far-
reaching legacies of Earth First!-style wilderness advocacy.
CONCLUSION
Earth First! emerged in 1980 as an oppositional group, against industrial

society, against human-centeredness, and against the incrementalism
of the mainstream environmental movement. But as much as they bad-
gered mainstream organizations, radicals never entirely abandoned them.
Earth First!’s founders always argued that they could push the movement
away from compromise and toward more robust protection of wilderness

by making the established groups look moderate. In 1980 they created a
shadow group called La Manta Mojada (“the wet blanket”), made up of
eight counselors from national organizations charged with preventing
Earth First! from acting completely at odds with the larger movement.132
La Manta Mojada did not last long, and soon Earth First! abandoned any
formal attempt to work with established organizations. But radicals never
abandoned the goal of coaxing the national groups a little further down the
path that Earth First!ers had already walked.
There was, through the 1980s and 1990s, much straddling and shuf-
fling between mainstream and radical circles. Widely read writers like
George Wuerthner and Jamie Sayen also wrote for the Earth First! Journal.
Respected scientists like Reed Noss and Michael Soulé conspired with radi-
cal activists. Federal land management employees like Denzel and Nancy
Ferguson and Jeff DeBonis contributed to radical critiques. And conserva-
tion legends like David Brower and Brock Evans decided that Earth First!
was vital, the one immediately and the other eventually.
As much as anyone else, Bart Koehler embodied the bridge between
radical and reformist environmental work. Frustrated with new and in his
mind timid leadership at the Wilderness Society in the late 1970s, Koehler
quit and helped found Earth First! For several years he was the heart of
Earth First!’s early demonstrations and its “road show” recruitment efforts
as Johnny Sagebrush, “legendary outlaw country singer.” But Koehler was
also an experienced grassroots strategist and by the middle of the decade
he had left Earth First! to work with the Southeast Alaska Conserva-
tion Council (SEACC), a local organization working through Congress
to protect Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. SEACC’s work in the 1980s
culminated in the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990, which protected
nearly one million acres of forest from logging. In the late 1990s Koehler
joined wilderness advocates Brian O’Donnell and Melyssa Watson to work
on the Wilderness Support Center, a training and troubleshooting group
for wilderness campaigns around the country. The Support Center needed
financial and institutional assistance, and found it in a newly grassroots-
friendly Wilderness Society under the leadership of Bill Meadows. Nearly
two decades after he left it, Koehler returned to a Wilderness Society
reinvested in the sort of ground-level work that he felt it had forsaken in the
1970s. Having given full rein to his radical ideals, Koehler also stepped back
toward the sort of gradual reform that Earth First! had long questioned.
“Battling for the freedom of the wilderness in the halls of Congress is one of
the purest forms of Democracy that there is,” Koehler wrote in an essay for a
Wilderness Support Center manual, stressing the civic-mindedness of wil-
derness advocacy. After expounding on the importance of working within
the political system, Koehler ended by quoting Edward Abbey—“A patriot
must always be ready to defend his country against his government”—and
winking at his own more radical days, when wilderness activism ended with
an exclamation mark and began with a sense of fighting for what was most
vital in the world.133
Conclusion
In December 2008, the outgoing Bush administration held an auction in

Salt Lake City for oil and gas drilling rights on thousands of acres of public
land in the West. As the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance protested out-
side, a University of Utah student named Tim DeChristopher entered the
federal building with a vague plan to deliver an impromptu speech about
fossil fuels and climate change. Someone asked him if he was there to bid,
and he quickly responded that he was. Soon DeChristopher had won drill-
ing rights worth nearly two million dollars on twenty-two thousand acres
of land. Bureau of Land Management officials abruptly ended the auction
and interrogated DeChristopher, who admitted that he had placed bids
only to interfere with an auction that he believed threatened the planet.1
Charged with disrupting the auction and making false statements,
DeChristopher tried to employ a “choice of evils” or “necessity” defense,
a legal strategy that would allow him to argue that the imminent catastro-
phe of climate change required that he choose a lesser evil—breaking the
law—in order to prevent a much greater harm. The judge did not allow
the defense and sentenced DeChristopher to nearly two years in prison.
An environmental movement ever more focused on climate change
embraced DeChristopher’s actions and the urgency behind them, and in
2013 he emerged from prison a hero to many organizations and activists.2
284 Conclusion
DeChristopher’s appeal to necessity assumed the need for an extralegal

response to an impending crisis in a way that echoed Earth First! In 1984,
when thirty-four activists with the Earth First!-affiliated Cathedral Forest
Action Group were arrested for protesting logging upriver from the Mid-
dle Santiam Wilderness in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, several
employed the necessity defense.3 Earth First!er Cecelia Ostrow reminded
the jury that governments often sanctioned injustice, leaving citizens with
an obligation to break the rules. Ostrow based her ultimately unsuccessful
bid on the belief that moral imperatives could eclipse legal strictures. She
assumed that laws were always imperfect and in flux, as did Mike Roselle,
who tried to use the necessity defense several times. “When the system
fails, and everyone admits that it does fail occasionally,” Roselle wrote, “an
individual has only his or her conscience to consult for guidance.”4 Radical
environmentalists’ consciences told them that human institutions remained
limited and fallible, and that environmental crises demanded action that
might outpace legal progress.
The necessity defense’s implied critique of conventional reform, estab-
lished institutions, and common wisdom was at once what separated and
connected radical and mainstream environmentalists. The separation began
in the 1970s. Convinced of an already unfolding crisis and frustrated by
creeping professionalism and a culture of compromise among mainstream
groups, radicals turned their backs on traditional reform and the political
and philosophical commitments it entailed. They adopted a strategy of
direct action, from civil disobedience to sabotage. They advocated an eco-
centric philosophy, ascribing to the natural world a moral standing equal
to that of the human world. And they argued that wilderness remained the
most significant measure of the chances that one world would survive the
other. Seeing in the mainstream movement a capitulation to liberal human-
ism and its anthropocentric values, radicals took a separate stand against
the ills of modern, industrial civilization.
But while radical and mainstream environmentalists defined themselves
against each other in the 1980s, they sprouted from the same seed. “What
you gentlemen have been discussing is profoundly radical and subversive in
the context of the present political, economic and technological paradise,”
Raymond Sherwin remarked after a panel on population and wilderness
Conclusion 285
preservation at the Sierra Club’s 1969 wilderness conference, pointing to

environmentalism’s unwelcome message.5 Two years later, and still nearly
a decade before the emergence of Earth First!, Sierra Club president Phil
Berry described the conservation movement as “fundamentally at odds”
with industrial society. “No responsible conservationists advocate violence
and certainly I don’t,” he said, “but it is worth noting that if we fail in our
efforts, others who might assume leadership in the conservation field would
be unwilling to work through existing institutions.”6
In its message and at times in its methods, the environmental move-
ment questioned basic premises. Environmentalists felt impelled to push
back against a press of humanity moving toward bigger economies, more
consumption of natural resources, and an escape from earthly limits. That
impulse could encourage holism, the treatment of all people as a consen-
tient mass acting against the nonhuman world. To embrace holism was to
ignore social difference and flatten social inequality, to indict all people
regardless of their particular actions, experiences, and identities. Especially
when expressed by radicals, environmental holism imagined the combina-
tion of consumerism, individualism, and liberal humanism as a near uni-
versal problem that led to the privileging of people and their interests over
biodiversity and intact ecosystems. This modern condition, some environ-
mentalists argued, afflicted nearly everyone. Loggers, ranchers, shoppers,
executives, the rich and the poor, all shared complicity in the destruction
of nonhuman nature. This was an unconditional view that risked essential-
izing that which was wild and vilifying all that was not.
Further, such a view risked a questioning of human wants and needs that
could easily appear to be a form of misanthropy. At times it was. Dave Fore-
man’s remarks about ending foreign aid for the good of the planet were
condemnable but not exceptional. Long before Earth First! existed, the
Sierra Club considered whether foreign aid should be restricted solely to
programs that limited human numbers. The Club’s board discussed how
foreign aid for “seemingly humanitarian purposes” in fact competed with
the need to limit population growth.7
But misanthropy was never fundamental to radical or mainstream
environmentalism, nor was the belief that people were antithetical to the
nonhuman world. It has become reflexive for critics of environmentalism
286 Conclusion
to insist that humans are a part of nature, even though a strict separation
between the two has never been among the central claims of mainstream
or radical environmentalism. Many environmentalists, in fact, worried that
modern humans recklessly ignored their essential connection to the nonhu-
man world. In 1983 Friends of the Earth considered whether to change the
name of its newsletter, Not Man Apart. The odd-sounding and, for many,
sexist name came from the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote, “The greatest
beauty is organic wholeness,” and advised, “love that, not man apart from
that.” In defense of the newsletter’s name, David Brower, Tom Turner, and
Connie Parrish described organic wholeness and the connection between
people and nature as “the most important part of the conservation ethic.”
Jeffers’s line was, they insisted, “properly critical of people who, in their
escape from humility, try to separate humanity from the wholeness it is
dependent on.”8
A call for humility, restraint, and a sense of connectedness was in fact at
the heart of the environmental movement. This call could come in many
forms: a skepticism toward material and technological progress, a belief
in limits to human reason and knowledge, and an insistence on the inher-
ent value of nonhuman life. At its most oppositional—David Ehrenfeld’s
declamations against the “arrogance of humanism,” Paul Ehrlich’s taunting
“Nature bats last,” or Earth First!’s tree spikes—it could hint at or veer into
antihumanism. Mostly, however, it was the conviction that human beings as
a whole should exercise precaution in their dealings with an unfathomably
complicated nonhuman world. That sort of forbearance could be its own
reward. Modesty, deep ecologists Bill Devall and George Sessions claimed,
was a byproduct of “ecological resistance” and “a virtue nearly lost in the
dominant technocratic-industrial society.”9 It could even be liberatory. “The
ability to accept freedom within the limits of the natural world,” Brower
suggested, clarified rather than constrained. “In understanding those limits
we define ourselves, and by that definition we can finally understand what
our real possibilities are,” he wrote. “We are set free to act in a truly human
way by our comprehension of the whole within which we exist.”10
Although it points in the direction of misanthropy, holism does not have
to lead there. Understood as a functional although always incomplete way
of looking at the world, it can instead lead toward questions that grow more
Conclusion 287
and more vital in the age of climate change. The historian Dipesh Chakrab-
arty acknowledges the profound limitations of any uniform conception of
people, but he also believes the scope of climate change transcends familiar
historical narratives and explanations and pushes toward broad categori-
zations that “scale up our imagination of the human.” Chakrabarty calls
this scaled-up imagination “species thinking.”11 It is more an abstract than
a lived reality; capitalism, the legacy of imperialism, and many forms of
inequality necessarily structure how climate change unfolds and reshapes
people’s lives. Within the terms set by planetary climate there are diverse
and contingent human experiences. But the terms remain nonetheless.
Among the insights of species thinking may be a different understanding
of human freedom. Various conceptions of freedom since the Enlighten-
ment, Chakrabarty says, have all concerned oppressions and injustices at
the hands of people and systems of people’s devising. Those conceptions
have never in any direct sense taken into account the conditions of the
natural world, he points out, although post-Enlightenment thought over-
laps with the accelerating use of coal, oil, and gas as forms of energy. “The
mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel
use,” Chakrabarty writes. “Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-
intensive.” The abstract ideals to which liberal thought are committed have
rested, precariously, on the demands of growth liberalism. There is a com-
plicated correlation between the politics of the modern, industrial world
and that world’s environmental repercussions, and so Chakrabarty asks
whether the vast scale of those repercussions may be “the price we pay for
the pursuit of freedom.”12
For the novelist and literary scholar Amitav Ghosh, it is the inequali-
ties through which climate change unfolds that connect the particular
to the general, the unevenness of the world to Chakrabarty’s species-
thinking. European imperialism concentrated the use of fossil fuels in the
West by monopolizing the production and consumption of resources—
especially oil—that were available elsewhere. The consequences, Ghosh
explains, included not only a stratification of wealth and power but also a
staggered progression toward fully industrialized economies on the Asian
continent and, now, billions of people on the cusp of fossil-fuel driven
wealth and material comfort at the very moment that such wealth and
288 Conclusion
comfort has reached a point of crisis. “Asia’s historical experience demon-

strates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted
by every human being,” Ghosh writes. “Every family in the world can-
not have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator—not because of
technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxi-
ate in the process.” Environmental holism, in other words, stands against a
less obvious because more widely embraced holism, what Ghosh calls “the
universalist premise of industrial civilization” as well as “a hoax.”13 It may
be that the age of climate change is stretched between these two forms
of holism. “So it looks as if we are faced with an impasse,” writes Jeremy
Davies. “Justified hostility to the claim that ‘we’re all in it together’ versus
justified recognition that fossil-fueled prosperity for everybody appears
ecologically impossible.”14
Responding to climate change must involve a recognition of inequity
and history and an aspiration toward justice, and an understanding of how
limits to growth are produced by politics and human decisions as much as
by material absolutes. For Davies this means a turn to “plural ecologies”—
varied movements and strategies that respond to common concerns in
different ways.15 As environmentalists have insisted, though, any response
should include a chastening of modern exuberance. Ghosh, concerned
especially with literature and storytelling, doubts the 2015 Paris climate
agreement’s “expression of faith in the sovereignty of Man and his ability
to shape the future,” preferring the more diffident view of humankind in
Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. “Insofar as the idea of the limitlessness of human
freedom is central to the arts of our time,” Ghosh writes, “this is also where
the Anthropocene will most intransigently resist them.”16
The most essential message of ecocentric environmentalism was always
a call for humility, precaution, and the inclusion of nonhuman interests in
human decision-making. “Humility” is a near-meaningless concept when
taking into account the diversity and inequity of human experience, but
a meaningful one when considering humanity in the most general terms.
Ecocentric radicals were saying in a much more pointed way what the envi-
ronmental movement as a whole has long suggested: that, as Ghosh writes
of human affairs and nonhuman subjects, “conversations among ourselves
have always had other participants.”17 At its most pointed this message
Conclusion 289
spoke of ideals like freedom and liberal individualism as defined and delim-
ited by a green planet and everything it sustains.
In 1987 Mike Roselle and four Greenpeace activists tried to hang a banner
protesting acid rain over the faces of Mt. Rushmore. Park rangers arrested
them before they could get the entire banner unfurled. They spent a month
in a Rapid City jail. Roselle, when he realized that he would have to submit
to random searches of his home and person in order to be released on pro-
bation, decided to spend three additional months in confinement instead.
He wrote a statement that he hoped to read to the judge who had sentenced
him. The judge’s ruling, Roselle explained, ignored both free speech and
Native American treaty rights. “As for the protest, in your Honor’s words,
being a ‘violation’ of the Shrine of Democracy,” Roselle wrote, “I can only
say, that in all due respects to the cherished ideals that the carved heads of
the 4 former Presidents represent, the sculpture itself is a violation of the
mountain into which they have been dynamited.”18
In 2007 Roselle helped found a new group, Climate Ground Zero
(CGZ), to fight the dynamiting of different mountains.19 Based in West
Virginia, CGZ wages Earth First!-style campaigns against mountaintop
removal mining. Roselle has spent years living among coal miners and their
families, convinced that activism works best when it is embedded in the
specifics of particular communities and their circumstances. CGZ’s broad
goals, though, reach far beyond West Virginia. Roselle considers moun-
taintop removal mining the most destructive and carbon-intensive method
of getting coal, and ending coal burning the necessary first step in fighting
climate change.
Balanced precariously between determination and resignation, Roselle
has immersed himself in the particulars of Appalachian coal communities
while doubting whether the human species can survive its own folly. He
continues to wrestle with the questions that environmentalists of all stripes
have confronted, however incompletely: the limits of human freedoms
and ambitions, the relationship between the human and the natural, and
the intersection of social justice and environmental resilience. They will be
reasked and reanswered on a changing planet.
Notes
MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS
ACR Alaska Coalition Records, Conservation Collection, Denver Public Library,
Denver, Colorado
DRB David Ross Brower Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley
DF Dave Foreman personal papers, Albuquerque, New Mexico
EA Ecology Action Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
EW Edgar Wayburn Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
GN Gaylord Nelson Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison,
Wisconsin
GS Gary Snyder Papers, Special Collections, University of California, Davis
PE Paul Ehrlich Papers, University Archives, Stanford University, Stanford,
California
ROC Richard O. Clemmer Papers, Special Collections, University of California,
Davis
SCMP Sierra Club Members Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley
SCNLOR Sierra Club National Legislative Office Records, Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley
SCOED Sierra Club Office of the Executive Director Records, Bancroft Library.
University of California, Berkeley
SCR Sierra Club Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
SCSW Sierra Club Southwest Office Records, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley
KL Keith Lampe Column, Special Collections, University of California, Santa
Barbara
SPC Social Protest Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
WSR Wilderness Society Records, Conservation Collection, Denver Public
Library, Denver, Colorado
292 Preface
PREFACE
1. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong
Nature,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
(New York: Norton, 1995), 69.
2. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 80. For collections of familiar writings about
wilderness and responses to recent reinterpretations—most notably Cronon’s—see
J. Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1998); and The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing
the Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). For a
useful overview of the wilderness debate, see Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight
Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2002), 7–18. The most important popularizer of these ideas is
Michael Pollan, whose work is committed to the idea that nature and culture are inter-
mingled so deeply that one cannot understand either on its own. The garden is Pollan’s
example and metaphor for this claim, a place “where nature and culture can be wedded
in a way that can benefit both,” and a metaphor that “may be as useful to us today as
the idea of wilderness has been in the past.” See Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s
Education (New York: Grove, 1991), 5.
3. Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Envi-
ronmental History,” The Historian 66, no. 3 (September 2004), 562.
4. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton,
1991), xvii.
5. See, for instance, Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in
Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Karl Jacoby,
Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of Ameri-
can Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Mark Spence, Dis-
possessing The Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political Life
of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). See also
Richard White, “ ‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work
and Nature,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground. On cities and nature see Michael
Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2010); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Richard Walker, The Country in the City:
The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Seattle: University Of Washington Press,
2007); Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Ante-
bellum City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Dawn Beihler, Pests
in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle: University Of Washington
Press, 2015). On suburbs see Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban
Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); and Christopher Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the
Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2012).
Introduction 293
6. Paul Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History”; and
“Nature Is History,” all in Journal of American History 100, no. 1 ( June 2013), 97, 147.
7. A rich meditation on the multiple uses of “natural” is Kate Soper, What is Nature?:
Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
8. For a sense of ecocentrism’s centrality to environmental philosophy, see the journal
Environmental Ethics, in particular during the 1980s and 1990s.
9. William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,”
Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990), 1129.
10. Sutter, “The World with Us,” 119.
11. “Mr. Reagan v. Nature,” Washington Post, October 10, 1980.
12. Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr., “An Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto,” From the Right (1990),
4, 6; and “The sky is not falling,” advertisement, New York Times, September 28, 1995.
13. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 21–22. For a discussion of the claim that climate
change is “natural,” see Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2016), 23–24.
14. Sutter, “The World with Us,” 97. Sutter believes that anxiety is an essential part of envi-
ronmental history too. “So angst it is—existential fear tinged with hope,” he writes. “How
can anyone do environmental history without it?” See Sutter, “Nature Is History,” 148.
15. Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2015), 285.
16. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 70, 80, 87.
INTRODUCTION
1. Nicholas Kristof, “Forest Sabotage Is Urged by Some,” New York Times, January 22,
1986.
2. Max Oelschlaeger describes the distinction between “biocentrism” and “ecocentrism”
as a concern for living beings on the one hand and a concern for natural systems (includ-
ing non-living nature) on the other. Although radical environmentalists used the terms
interchangeably, “ecocentrism” best captures radicals’ focus on species and ecosystems
rather than on individuals. See Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehis-
tory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 292–301.
3. Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (New York: Vintage, 2009), 11. “Although liberal-
ism comes in many stripes,” Douglas Kysar writes, “at the core of liberal theories tends to
be a belief that the individual is, if not ontologically prior to social groups and orderings,
then at least normatively privileged in the sense of providing the proper vantage point
from which to consider government obligations to protect and provide.” See Kysar,
Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 151. C. B. MacPherson describes key elements of
liberal democracy as civil liberties, equality before the law, protection of minorities, and
“a principle of maximum individual freedom consistent with equal freedom for others.”
See MacPherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Ontario: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 7. For useful discussions of environmentalism’s commitment to ends, and
294 Introduction
liberalism’s commitment to means, see Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Phi-
losophy, Law, and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
146–170; and Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge,
2007), 149–158. See also Matthew Alan Cahn, Environmental Deceptions: The Tension
Between Liberalism and Environmental Policymaking in the United States (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995).
4. Environmentalism’s skeptical stance toward humanism has been much criticized. For
a liberal’s call for an environmentalism that celebrates rather than denigrates people,
and that embraces human potential rather than criticizes human actions, see Alan
Wolfe, “Liberalism, Environmentalism, and the Promise of National Greatness,” in
Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson, eds., Liberalism for a New Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007). Similarly, the self-described liberal environ-
mentalist Martin Lewis criticizes the antihumanist strain within environmentalism
and calls for a “Promethean environmentalism” that seeks to prevent environmental
destruction by harnessing human ingenuity through technological progress. See
Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).
5. On environmentalism as opposed to individualism, see Thomas Borstelmann, The
1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 231–247; and Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore,
“The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,”
International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (2008), 23.
6. See Robert Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic:
The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003).
7. For an example of how environmental commitments can be broad but shallow, see
Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France,
1960–2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
8. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2011), 253–254 and 288n47. Two key scholarly critiques of deep
ecology from the 1980s and 1990s are Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Envi-
ronmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmen-
tal Ethics 11 (Spring 1989); and William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or,
Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground:
Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995). Another influen-
tial criticism is George Bradford, How Deep Is Deep Ecology? (Ojai: Times Change
Press, 1989). For the techno-thriller view of radical environmentalists as both naïve
and lethal, see Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six (New York: Penguin, 1998); and Michael
Crichton, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
9. For overviews of the environmental movement, see Samuel Hays, A History of Envi-
ronmental Politics Since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000);
Hal Rothman, Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since
1945 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The
American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993);
Introduction 295
and Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). On environmental historians and the sources
of modern environmentalism, see Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History
of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Samuel
Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States,
1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Adam Rome, The
Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmen-
talism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nash argues that environ-
mentalism is part of a long tradition of extending rights to long-ignored groups (in
this case, parts of nature). Donald Worster has reiterated this view, writing, “We have
not fully appreciated how much the protection of wild nature owes to the spread of
modern liberal, democratic ideals and to the support of millions of ordinary people
around the world.” See Worster, “Nature, Liberty, and Equality,” in Michael Lewis,
ed., American Wilderness: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007),
263. Hays’s and Rome’s important works are the classic explanations of how middle-
class affluence led to environmentalism. More recently, Rome has written about Earth
Day and considered the various roles of liberals and the New Left. Although Rome
does not focus on ideology, he offers a strong sense of Earth Day’s ideological diver-
sity. See Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made
the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). Christopher Sellers has
argued that suburban environmentalism was not just a middle-class phenomenon but
also a cross-class and multiracial movement. See Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Subur-
ban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Paul Sabin is concerned with how
environmentalism became partisan in the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting broader philo-
sophical stances for both parties. See Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and
Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Andrew
Kirk has considered the relationship between counterculture environmentalism and
market-centered libertarianism in Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Cat-
alog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
Frank Zelko has also examined countercultural environmentalism, mostly in terms of
how it never realized its political ideals. See Zelko, Make It a Green Peace!: The Rise
of Countercultural Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). An
early work that looks carefully at radical environmental thought is Robert Gottlieb,
Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement,
rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005). For recent works that deal seriously
with radical activism, see Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Popu-
lation Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2012); James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: Environ-
mental Politics Since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Douglas
Bevington, The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted
Owl to the Polar Bear (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2009); and Darren Speece,
Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environ-
mentalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). Political philosophers
296 Introduction
have been more interested in radical environmental thought. One of the standard
texts is Dobson, Green Political Thought, a good summary of much other work and
a rich discussion in its own right. For political philosophers’ views, see also Robyn
Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2004); Brian Doherty and Marius De Geus, eds., Democracy and Green Politi-
cal Thought: Sustainability, Rights, and Citizenship (London: Routledge, 1996); Tim
Hayward, Ecological Thought: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Mar-
cel Wissenburg, Green Liberalism: The Free and the Green Society (London: UCL
Press, 1998); Marcel Wissenburg and Yoram Levy, eds., Liberal Democracy and Envi-
ronmentalism: The End of Environmentalism? (London: Routledge, 2004); Andrew
Dobson and Paul Lucardie, eds., The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political
Theory (London: Routledge, 1993); Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley, eds., Polit-
ical Theory and the Ecological Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); and John Barry and Robyn Eckersley, eds., The State and the Global Ecological
Crisis (Boston: MIT Press, 2005). Many of these authors are in direct conversation
with one another. Their concern is usually more political than historical, focused on
technical questions like whether environmentalism is an ideology in its own right.
Another important work in this field is Robert Paehlke, Environmentalism and the
Future of Progressive Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). See also David
Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999); and
Bob Pepperman Taylor, Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in
America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992). Historians of religion are well
versed in taking extreme ideas seriously. For excellent recent examples, see Darren
Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the
Rise of Evangelical Conservatism; and Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of
Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
10. One of the most influential early examples of environmental optimism was Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming
Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” originally distributed as a pamphlet but widely
available online. The essay was expanded into a book, Nordhaus and Shellenberger,
Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). For further examples, see Stewart Brand, Whole Earth
Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and
Geoengineering Are Necessary (New York: Penguin, 2009); and Emma Marris, Ram-
bunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
For a useful discussion of the competing philosophies at work as they relate to public
lands, see Ben Minter and Stephen Pyne, eds., After Preservation: Saving American
Nature in the Age of Humans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
11. Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. The Climate,” The Nation (November 28, 2011), 14. For
an extended version of this argument, see Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism
vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 56–58.
12. Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), 383.
1. ECOLOGY AND REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT

1. On the Sierra Club’s democratic structure, see William Devall, “The Governing of a
Voluntary Organization: Oligarchy and Democracy in the Sierra Club,” (unpublished
dissertation, University of Oregon, 1970); and Michael Cohen, The History of the
Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 395–406. Cohen’s is the best
and most complete history of the Sierra Club. On the Club in the mid-twentieth
century, see also Tom Turner, David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Move-
ment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
2. Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Mad-
ison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985 [1981]), 115.
3. Fox, The American Conservation Movement, 182.
4. Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 51–52. On the role of private wealth in the early
National Park Service, see Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save The Redwoods: A History of
Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 20
5. On the Sierra Club in the 1960s, see Michael McCloskey, In the Thick of It: My Life in
the Sierra Club (Washington, D.C.: Island, 2005), 52–55.
6. On Rosalie Edge and Paul Sears, and on working behind the scenes, see Fox,
The American Conservation Movement, 110, 334.
8. James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics
Since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 28. Schrepfer describes the
early Save the Redwoods League as “both zealous in its privatism yet democratic in its
spirit.” Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods, 36.
10. On Farquhar and for Leonard quote, see Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 151–154.
11. Paul Sutter establishes the many connections between outdoor recreation and con-
servation in Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the
Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). See
also Marguerite Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2001).
12. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods, 88.
13. David Brower, Environmental Activist, Publicist, and Prophet (Regional Oral History
Office, Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley, 1980) 56.
14. Bestor Robinson (written anonymously), “San Gorgonio: Another Viewpoint,” Sierra
Club Bulletin, January 1947, 5.
15. David Brower, “San Gorgonio Auction: Going, Going, —,” Sierra Club Bulletin,
January 1947, 9, 13. On the San Gorgonio debate, see Cohen, The History of The Sierra
Club, 82–89. Brower was a skier himself and not opposed to the sport; see Brower and
Richard Felter, “Surveying California’s Ski Terrain,” Sierra Club Bulletin, March 1948.
16. Brower, “How to Kill a Wilderness,” Sierra Club Bulletin, August 1945, 3–4. On
Brower’s military service, see Brower, For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David
Brower (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1990), 87–128.
298 1. Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
17. Sutter, Driven Wild, 53.

18. On the Tioga Road fight, see Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 89–100, 134–142.
19. For the Club’s views on Tioga and roadbuilding in general, see Harold Bradley and
David Brower, “Roads in the National Parks,” Sierra Club Bulletin, June 1949.
20. David Brower, “WE Interview,” Wild Earth, Spring 1998, 36.
21. On Ansel Adams’s resignation and telegrams, see Adams, Conversations with Ansel
Adams (Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California-
Berkeley, 1978), 634.
22. Ethan Carr, Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma (Amherst: Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
23. Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 100. For a sense of fears among Club leaders
about crowds in parks, see William Colby, “Yosemite’s Fatal Beauty,” Sierra Club
Bulletin, March 1948.
24. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (New
York: Penguin, 1986), 140.
25. See Russell Martin, A Story That Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for
the Soul of the West (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); Cohen, The History of The Sierra
Club, 143–186; and Brower, Environmental Activist, 111–137.
26. On Leonard and Dinosaur, see “Board of Directors Meets at Norden,” Sierra Club
Bulletin, September 1950.
27. Edgar Wayburn, Sierra Club Statesman, Leader of the Parks and Wilderness Movement:
Gaining Protection for Alaska, the Redwoods, and Golden Gate Parklands (Regional
Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley, 1985), 49.
29. On Brower and compromise, see Michael McCloskey, In the Thick of It: My Life in the
Sierra Club (Washington, D.C.: Island, 2005), 89–90. On the Grand Canyon dams
battle, see Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 283–290; Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club,
352–365; and Brower, For Earth’s Sake, 325–370.
31. On substituting coal for hydropower, see Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 290; Brower, Envi-
ronmental Activist, 140–141; and Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the
Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014),
185–212. Tom Turner suggests the causal relationship between Grand Canyon dams
and the power plant was less than clear, as did the Club’s Southwest Representative
John McComb, who in 1970 argued that energy needs so dwarfed the output of the
proposed dams that power plants were an inevitability. See Turner, David Brower,
127–128, and McComb, letter to the editor, Arizona Daily Star, April 5, 1970.
32. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1949).
33. Eliot Porter, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (San Francisco and
New York: Sierra Club/Ballantine, 1963), 5.
34. Porter, The Place No One Knew, 6.
35. Brower, Environmental Activist, 142.
36. Porter, The Place No One Knew, 6;

37. David Brower, “Conservation and the American Conscience,” carton 9, folder 12,
DRB.
38. Brower, “Foreword,” in Brower, ed., Wildlands in Our Civilization (San Francisco:
Sierra Club, 1964), 17.
39. Brower, “The Citizen Acts—As Lobbyist,” carton 9, folder 46, DRB.
40. Brower, Environmental Activist, 142.
41. Among the classic interpretations of the modern environmental movement are Samuel
Hays, Beauty, Health, And Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States,
1945–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Robert Gottlieb,
Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement
(Washington, D.C.: Island, 1993). See also Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire:
The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), and
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement,
1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). On the suburban origins of environ-
mentalism, see Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in The Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and
the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001), and Christopher Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of
Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2012). For environmentalism as less a response to industrial technol-
ogy and more a response to corporate capitalism, see Thomas Jundt, Greening the
Red, White, And Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
42. Rice Odell, Environmental Awakening: The New Revolution to Protect the Earth
(Cambridge, MA: Harper & Row, 1980), 4.
43. Board of directors meeting minutes, September 20–21, 1969, carton 4, folder 9,
SCR.
44. Board of directors meeting minutes, May 2–3, 1970, carton 4, folder 10, SCR.
45. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970), 4.
46. Charles Reich, The Greening of America, 15.
47. James Miller, claims that the New Left’s commitment to participatory democracy
was “America’s last great experiment in democratic idealism.” Van Gosse similarly
argues that the New Left achieved a “new democratic order” in which hierarchies
of race, gender, and sexuality were no longer widely accepted. David Barber is
much more critical, arguing that the white New Left, represented by SDS, failed
to achieve radical change because it cleaved to traditional notions of nationalism,
gender roles, and especially racial hierarchy. Neither celebratory nor critical is
Doug Rossinow, who finds that the New Left was primarily an existential search
for authenticity that experimented with radical politics and settled on reform lib-
eralism. See James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege
of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 16; Van Gosse, Rethinking the
New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 208;
David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed ( Jackson, MS: University
Press of Mississippi, 2008); and Doug Rossinow, The Politics Of Authenticity: Lib-
eralism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1998). Understandably, none of these works—with the exception of a
few pages in Rossinow—discusses environmentalism. For broader overviews of the
decade that put the New Left and environmentalism in some conversation with
each other, see Terry Anderson, The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America
From Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
and Mark Hamilton Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the
Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
48. Todd Gitlin, “Theses for the Radical Movement,” Liberation, May–June, 1967, 34–36.
49. Paul Booth, “Facing the American Leviathan: Convention Working Paper,” New Left
Notes, August 24, 1966, 27.
50. The Port Huron Statement is available widely, online and in published form, including
as an appendix to Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets,” 329–374.
51. Tom Hayden, Revolution in Mississippi (New York: Students for a Democratic Society,
1962), 5. On participation in SNCC by white, non-Southern students, see Anderson,
The Movement and the Sixties, 43–57; Gitlin, The Sixties, 81–85; and Clayborne Car-
son, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 51–55.
52. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The New Liberal Coalition,” The Progressive, April, 1967, 15.
Todd Gitlin responded, “The differences between the New Left and Schlesinger’s
liberalism could occupy many volumes,” carefully specifying that “Schlesinger’s liberal-
ism” was only one version. Gitlin found the spirit of Schlesinger’s appeal to human
reason unobjectionable since, in 1967, the New Left was making the same appeal.
See Todd Gitlin, letter to the editor, The Progressive, May, 1967, 38.
53. America and the New Era (Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society, 1963). Michael
Kazin notes that the Port Huron Statement had no mention of environmentalism,
feminism, and conservatism. See Kazin, “The Port Huron Statement at Fifty,” Dissent,
Spring 2012, 88.
54. New Left Notes, July 10, 1967.
55. “Calls for Radical Reconstruction,” New Left Notes, April 22, 1966, 5.
56. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 232.
57. On the Democratic National Convention, see Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York:
Random House, 1973), 473–477, and David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1988); on radicalism within the antiwar movement, see Anderson,
The Movement and the Sixties, 145–147.
58. Carl Oglesby, “Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin,” Liberation, August–
September, 1969, 7.
59. “Vote No on Survival,” The Fifth Estate, February 19–March 4, 1970.
60. “Eco-Shuck,” Berkeley Tribe, April 17–24, 1970, 15.
61. “Hold it Right There, Sam! Have You Heard About Ecology?” Rat, December, 1969,
10. On the history of the Underground Press Network, the Liberation News Service,
and the alternative press generally, see Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and
Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Roger Lewis, Outlaws
of America: The Underground Press and its Context (London: Heinrich Hanau, 1972);
and Raymond Mungo, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation
News Service (Boston: Beacon, 1970).
62. On the mainstream media see, for instance, Gladwin Hill, “Environment May Eclipse
Vietnam as College Issue,” New York Times, November 30, 1969; Gladwin Hill, “Youth
and Environmental Reform,” New York Times, November 24, 1969; and “New Bag on
Campus,” Newsweek, December 22, 1969, 72.
63. “Editorial,” Ramparts, May 1970, 2–4.
64. “Too Many People?” New Left Notes, May, 1970, 8.
65. “A Letter from an Angry Reader,” Northwest Passage, May 18, 1970, 12.
66. Connie Flateboe, memorandum to board of directors, December 6, 1969, carton 4,
folder 9, SCR.
67. Ron Eber to student contacts, October 12, 1971, carton 116, folder 20, SCMP.
68. Connie Flateboe, memorandum to Lone Star Chapter, November 14, 1970, carton 22,
folder 48, SCR.
69. “Protest!” Sierra Club Bulletin, December 1969, 11.
70. Paul Brooks, “Notes on the Conservation Revolution,” Sierra Club Bulletin, January
1970, 16–17.
71. Ronald Eber and Shelley McIntyre to Sierra Club Board of Directors, February 3, 1972,
carton 22, folder 48, SCR.
72. On Livermore, see Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 121–126.
73. On Zahniser and the Wilderness Society, see Brower, Environmental Activist, 180.
74. Ansel Adams, Conversations with Ansel Adams (Regional Oral History Office,
Bancroft Library, 1978), 683.
75. On the Wilderness Act, see Edgar Wayburn, Sierra Club Statesman, 28, 158–159, and
“About the Wilderness Conference,” carton 133, folder 15, SCMP.
76. On the 1959 conference, see Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 232–233; and
“How Dense Should People Be?” Sierra Club Bulletin, April 1959.
77. Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 233.
78. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save The Redwoods, 129.
79. On Brower, Muir, and Smokey Bear, see Brower, Environmental Activist, 164. The clas-
sic work on the history of ecological thought is Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy:
A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also
Sharon Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
80. On Darwin, Eiseley, and the Club, see Schrepfer, The Fight to Save The Redwoods,
79–102. See also Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 345–350. Cohen emphasizes
the critical view of humankind in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, increasingly present
in Club materials and a source of controversy for the board.
81. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save The Redwoods, 236;
Since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 120.
83. Press clippings about the wilderness conference are in carton 123, folder 15, SCR, and
carton 133, folder 16, SCMP.
84. Hardin, “We Must Earn Again for Ourselves What We Have Inherited,” in Maxine
McCloskey, ed., Wilderness: The Edge of Knowledge (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1970).
85. Robinson, “San Gorgonio: Another Viewpoint,” 13.
86. Dan Luten to Stewart Udall, January 29, 1969, carton 133, folder 10, SCMP.
87. Hardin, “We Must Earn Again for Ourselves What We Have Inherited,” 260.
88. McCloskey, ed., Wilderness: The Edge of Knowledge, 41, 212, 216–217, 245.
89. Garrett Byrnes, “The Sierra Club: Explore, Enjoy, Protect . . .,” The Providence Journal,
March 14, 1969, carton 123, folder 15, SCR.
90. McCloskey, ed., Wilderness: The Edge of Knowledge, 116.
91. McCloskey, ed., 254–255.
92. “Smokey The Bear Sutra,” at Snyder’s direction, “may be reproduced free forever” and
is widely available online. The Forest Service mascot’s official name is “Smokey Bear.”
93. On Snyder, see Rasa Gustaitis, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us,” Los Angeles
Times, November 30, 1969.
94. Keith Lampe, “Last Chance for Our Species,” Berkeley Barb, March 21–27, 1969. For
more on Lampe, see Rasa Gustaitis, Wholly Round (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1973), 218–264. On the Pentagon, see Lampe to Snyder, July 23, 1967, carton
102, folder 62, GSP.
95. For an overview of the relationships between these various groups and movements
nationally, see Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpect-
edly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 9–56.
96. Fred Bunnell and Cliff Humphrey, “A Unifying Theme,” Ecology Action, 1971, carton 4,
folder 10, EA, 6.
97. Cliff Humphrey, “Student Strife on a Befouled Planet”; “Radical Politics—June 1968”;
and Eugene Anderson, “The Uptight Politics of Conservation,” all in carton 24, folder
14 (reel 89) SPC.
98. Anderson, “The Uptight Politics of Conservation.”
99. Bunnell and Humphrey, “A Unifying Theme,” 5.
100. Humphrey, “Student Strife on a Befouled Planet,” 2–3.
101. Eugene Anderson to “people,” n.d., carton 1, folder 1, EA.
102. Peace and Freedom Park petition, carton 7, folder 54, EA. On the history of Ecology
Action and Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, see Mary Humphrey, “History and Evo-
lution of Ecology Action as Indicated by Early Leaflets and Essays—With Comments
by an Insider,” Ecology Action, (1971), carton 4, folder 10, EA, 14–19.
103. This account of People’s Park is taken largely from W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley At War:
The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 124–166, and Jon David Cash,
“People’s Park: Birth and Survival,” California History 88, no. 1 (2010), 8–55.
104. Robert Scheer, “Dialectics of Confrontation: Who Ripped Off the Park,” Ramparts,
August, 1969, 43.
105. Winthrop Griffith, “People’s Park—270’ by 450’ of Confrontation,” New York Times
Magazine, June 29, 1969, 5;
106. Val Douglass, “What Has Happened to Our City,” The Black Panther, May 31, 1969, 14;
107. Lawrence Davies, “Reagan Links ‘People’s Park’ Battle to Politics,” New York Times,
June 14, 1969.
108. “From Occupied Berkeley,” New Left Notes, May 30, 1969, 1; see also “The Berkeley
Massacre,” New Left Notes, May 20, 1969, 1. For a more conservative critique written
around the same time, see William O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of
America in the 1960s (New York: Times, 1971), 260–261. Many histories of the 1960s
barely mention People’s Park, and when they do generally associate it with New Left
militancy rather than with environmentalism. One exception is Mark Hamilton Lytle,
America’s Uncivil Wars, 329–331.
109. Tom Hayden and Frank Bardacke, “Free Berkeley,” Berkeley Tribe, August 22–29, 1969,
13–16.
110. Keith Lampe, “The Real Dirt on People’s Park,” Berkeley Tribe, August 29–September
4, 1969, 10.
111. “We Will Be the Earth,” Berkeley Barb, May 30–June 5, 1969, 2; and “Never Forget,”
Berkeley Barb, 2.
112. “. . . And but for the sky there are no fences facing. . . ” Berkeley Tribe, March 13–20,
1970, 13–16.
113. On the various post-People’s Park actions and events, see Earth Read-Out 2, May 29,
1969, KLCS; “Earth Read-Out,” The Fifth Estate, June 12–25, 1969, 10; “Eco-Tripping,”
Berkeley Tribe, September 5–12, 1969, 7; “Extinction Fair—Dig?” Berkeley Barb, June
6–12, 1969, 13; “Ecolibrium,” Berkeley Tribe, February 6–13, 1970, 13; and “Tree Con-
spiracy Spreads,” Berkeley Tribe, January 16–23, 1970, 7.
114. “The Trees Are Our Allies,” The Fifth Estate, October 30–November 12, 1969, 8.
115. “Lumpy Wavy and the Five Days of Styrofoam,” Seed, November 7–20, 1969, 8.
116. Todd Gitlin, “Earth and Politics,” Space City News, July 17–August 28, 1969, 19.
117. Keith Lampe, “Earth Read-Out,” Berkeley Tribe, November 27–December 5, 1969, 18.
118. “Radical Conservation, Part I: Technology & Environment,” Rag, June 26, 1969, 3.
119. “Earth Revolts: Man Victim,” Rat, July 9–23, 1969, 14.
120. Anderson to “People,” n.d., carton 1, folder 1, EA;
121. Philip MacDougal, “The Helicopter and the Green Balloon,” Despite Everything,
December, 1969, in carton 7, folder 54, EA, 2. The article is only attributed to “P. M.,”
but it is reasonable to assume that it is MacDougal. On Despite Everything, see Rora-
baugh, Berkeley At War, 126.
122. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Meeting the Needs of the People,” The Black Panther,
August 16, 1969, 4.
123. MacDougal, “An I-Told-You-So Introduction to the Second Printing,” Despite
Everything (December, 1969), vii-viii. Rorabaugh claims that Bobby Seale did show
up at People’s Park, but there is no evidence of this in The Black Panther. MacDou-
gal reports, “No Panthers ever appeared at the Park. . . .” See Rorabaugh, Berke-
ley At War, 157; and MacDougal, “An I-Told-You-So Introduction to the Second
Printing,” viii.
124. “Earth Revolts: Man Victim,” Rat, July 9–23, 1969, 14.
125. For a collection of Boockhin’s most important essays from the period, see Murray
Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK, 2004).
126. Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” The Fifth Estate, April 2–
April 15, 1970, 9.
127. “The Politics of Ecology,” Rat, August 12–26, 1969, 12.
128. “The Roots of Ecology,” The Old Mole, April 3–16, 1970, 12.
129. Michael McCloskey, “Editorial,” Sierra Club Bulletin, June 1970, 2.
130. McCloskey, “Editorial,” 2.
2. CRISIS ENVIRONMENTALISM
1. Gladwin Hill, “Ecology Emerges as Issue in Many of Nation’s Races,” New York Times,
September 27, 1970. On the importance of Earth Day in establishing environmental-
ism’s broad reach, see Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In
Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).
2. Cliff Humphrey, “Sweeping Social Change Is on the Way: Why It Must Be a Cultural
Transformation and Why It May Be a Violent Revolution,” 1969, 1, carton 5, folder 10,
EA.
3. Humphrey, “Sweeping Social Change,” 2.
4. David Bird, “Muskie Tells Conservationists Economic Growth Must Go On,” New
York Times, April 19, 1970.
5. Michael McCloskey, “Sierra Club Executive Director: The Evolving Club and the Envi-
ronmental Movement, 1961–1981,” oral history by Susan Schrepfer, 1981 (Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), 149–152.
6. Brock Evans to Arthur Magida, January 29, 1976, carton 201, folder 37, SCR.
7. Margot Hornblower, “Environmental Movement Has Grown a Sharp Set of Teeth,”
Washington Post, June 2, 1979.
8. On the Club’s tax battle, see Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–
1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 163–166; see also Michael McCloskey, In the
Thick of It: My Life in the Sierra Club (Washington, D.C.: Island, 2005), 146–149.
On Brower’s later objections to Washington, D.C. and on grassroots environmentalists
“unhappy with the movement’s new emphasis on lobbying and legislation,” see Lucy
Howard, “Environmentalists in a Family Fight,” Newsweek, January 27, 1986.
9. On Wayburn, see Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Fran-
cisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 277.
10. Scott Thurber, “Tax Crackdown ‘Helps’ Sierra Club,” San Francisco Chronicle, March
11, 1968.
11. On other organizations’ reactions, see Robert Mitchell, “From Conservation to Envi-
ronmental Movement: The Development of the Modern Environmental Lobbies,” in
Michael Lacey, ed., Government and Environmental Politics: Essays on Historical Devel-
opments Since World War II (Washington, D.C.: The Wilson Center, 1989), 103–104.
12. On NEPA, see Robert Gillette, “National Environmental Policy Act: How Well Is It
Working?” Science, April 14, 1972, 146–150; and Gillette, “National Environmental
Policy Act: Signs of Backlash are Evident,” Science, April 7, 1972, 30–33. See also Serge
Taylor, Making Bureaucracies Think: The Environmental Impact Statement Strategy of
Administrative Reform (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984).
13. On Nixon and environmentalism, see J. Brooks Flippen, Conservative Conservation-
ist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great
Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2001),
30–32; and Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of
America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 460–462. Flippen and Perlstein argue that
Nixon passed environmental laws to gain political advantage, not realizing—or not
caring—how consequential those laws would be. Schulman goes further, arguing that
Nixon passed laws he knew to be relatively weak in order to appear friendly to envi-
ronmentalism while in fact undermining its legal basis. Schulman does not explain,
however, how his argument takes into account the consistent and widespread use of
Nixon-era laws by environmental groups ever since.
14. On the Ford Foundation and environmental law, see Christopher Bosso, Environment,
Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 39–40;
and Paul Sabin, “Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order,” Law and
History Review 33, no. 4 (November, 2015). See also Don Harris, “Conservation and
the Courts,” Sierra Club Bulletin, September 1969.
15. On the gradual shift from lobbying for new legislation in the 1970s to enforcing exist-
ing legislation through lawsuits in the 1980s (and an attendant shift from national to
local groups), see Cody Ferguson, This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in
the Late-Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
16. On the number of lobbyists in Washington, see Mitchell, “From Conservation to
Environmental Movement,” 104; and Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 215–216.
17. On membership numbers, see James R. Wagner, “Washington Pressures—Environment
Groups Shift Tactics from Demonstrations to Politics, Local Action,” National Journal,
July 24, 1971, 1557–1564.
18. Arthur Magida, “Environment Report—Movement Undaunted by Economic, Energy
Crises,” National Journal, January 17, 1976.
19. Michael McCloskey, “Are Compromises Bad?” Sierra Club Bulletin, February 1977,
20–21.
20. Brock Evans, “New Life for the Old Cause,” Sierra Club Bulletin, April 1975, 19.
21. William Futrell, “Editorial: The Environment and the Courts,” Sierra Club Bulletin,
May 1973, 18. On the environmental bill of rights generally, see Carole Gallagher,
“The Movement to Create an Environmental Bill of Rights: From Earth Day, 1970 to
the Present,” Fordham Environmental Law Journal 9, no. 1 (Fall 1997), 107–154. On the
Sierra Club’s involvement, see Nancy Mathews to Michael McCloskey, May 6, 1968,
carton 117, folder 29, SCR; and McCloskey, “Keynote address of Michael McCloskey,”
carton 132, folder 24, SCR, in which McCloskey concluded with a call for a “bill of
environmental rights.”
22. McCloskey, “Are Compromises Bad?.”
306 2. Crisis Environmentalism
23. McCloskey, In the Thick of It, 108.

24. The literature on Zero Population Growth is limited; there is not yet a full study of the
organization. The best places to start for ZPG and population politics in the 1960s are
Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth
of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012);
Derek S. Hoff, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in
U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Paul Sabin, The Bet:
Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2013).
25. On eighteenth-century discussions of population, see Hoff, The State and the Stork,
14–43. On global overpopulation and its many connections, in particular in Europe
and Asia, see Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on
Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
26. On Leopold and carrying capacity, and on Vogt and Osborn, see Robertson, The Mal-
thusian Moment, 23–29, 36–60, 170–171.
27. Rasa Gustaitis, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us,” Los Angeles Times, November
30, 1969. On Mills more generally, see Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 184–190; on the
Bay Area and population, see Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 132–136.
28. On Brand, see Gustaitis, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.”
29. On Reynolds, “I Sing a Song of Living,” ZPG National Reporter, November 1970, 9.
30. For Berry quote, see board of directors’ meeting minutes, exhibit A, May 1970, carton
4, folder 10, SCR; see also National Population Committee memo to “chapter and
group population committees,” n.d., carton 91, folder 8, SCNLOR.
31. For a sketch of the Club’s various population activities in the 1960s, and for Nichols’s
warnings, see Louise Nichols memo to Chuck Clusen, December 28, 1973, carton 5,
folder 9, SCR. For one of the Club’s early population policy statements, see “Popula-
tion and the Sierra Club,” June 1975, carton 91, folder 8, SCNLOR. On the “Office
of Population Policy,” see “Statement of Judith Kunofsky,” March 11, 1982, carton 285,
folder 124, SCR.
32. Member Kenneth Kraft wrote to several Society officials all at once. See Kenneth Kraft
to James Marshall, Kenneth Kraft to Stewart Brandborg, and Kenneth Kraft to John
Oakes, all March 24, 1969, and James Marshall to Kenneth Kraft, March 28, 1969, all
in box 43, folder 14, WSR.
33. Morris Udall to Stewart Brandborg, July 31, 1969, box 43, folder 14, WSR.
34. “Statement Concerning the Need for a National Population Policy,” box 43, folder 19,
WSR.
35. Robertson, The Malthusian Moment.
36. “Zero Population Growth Inc., Plans and Perspectives,” box 1, folder 6, PE.
37. Letters to the editor, ZPG National Reporter, April, 1971, 23.
38. Carl Pope memo to ZPG board including draft “population policy document” by
Pope, Judy Senderowitz, and others, n.d., 21, box 1, folder 2, PE.
39. Clifford Humphrey, “From Institutionalized Inaction to Action Institutions,” box 5,
folder 13, EA, 4.
40. Apocalyptic environmentalism in the 1970s has received increasing attention from
environmental historians, most notably in Hoff, The State and the Stork, and Robert-
son, The Malthusian Moment. Samuel Hays gives a broad overview of concerns about
overpopulation, diminishing resources, and limits to growth in Hays, Beauty, Health,
and Permanence, chap. 7. Frederick Buell gives more specifics and argues that a palpa-
ble sense of crisis in the 1970s had not diminished two decades later, but had become so
embedded in everyday politics and culture that it was unexceptional; see Buell, From
Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York:
Routledge, 2003). Political scientists have also paid attention to these environmental-
ists. See, for instance, Bob Pepperman Taylor, Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental
Political Thought in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), chap. 2; and
Robert Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989), chap. 3.
41. I am using the term “crisis environmentalism”—my own—to refer both to the advo-
cates of a steady-state economy (people like Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, and
E. F. Schumacher) as well as to the “neo-Malthusians” like Garrett Hardin and William
Ophuls who argued for the necessity of scaling back civil liberties. These two groups
did not necessarily consider themselves a coherent school of thought, but they were
both animated by the same belief in an imminent crisis that both American society
and the major environmental groups were either underestimating or ignoring entirely,
and they were both willing to question received values to a degree that the mainstream
movement was not. For an example of Daly and Ophuls making similar arguments
against a common adversary, see “Economic Growth” in letters to the editor, Science,
August 8, 1975, 410–414. For a treatment of the two groups as aligned against Lockean
liberalism, see Susan M. Leeson, “Philosophic Implications of the Ecological Crisis:
The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism,” Polity 11, no. 3 (Spring 1979), 303–318.
The great exception to this description of “crisis environmentalism” was Barry Com-
moner, who was second to no one in his sense of urgency about impending ecologi-
cal catastrophe but who had very different views from Hardin and Ophuls about the
best solutions. Where Hardin and Ophuls thought that environmentalism trumped all
other issues, Commoner argued that protecting the environment and promoting social
justice were deeply connected; where Hardin and Ophuls believed that avoiding cri-
sis would mean scaling back democracy, Commoner insisted that only through more
democratic processes could the public hold private interests accountable and reduce
pollution. Paul Ehrlich, however, was Commoner’s primary opponent. Commoner
argued that Ehrlich overemphasized and oversimplified the role of overpopulation in
the environmental crisis. See Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Sur-
vival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
42. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1971 [1968]); and Thomas
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993).
43. Donella Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project
on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1973 [1972]), 23. On the
reception to this thesis, see Robert Reinhold, “Mankind Warned of Perils in Growth,”
New York Times, February 27, 1972; Robert Gillette, “The Limits to Growth: Hard Sell
for a Computer View of Doomsday,” Science, March 10, 1972; B. Bruce Briggs, “Against
the Neo-Malthusians,” Commentary, July 1, 1974; William Tucker, “Environmentalism
and the Leisure Class,” Harper’s, December 1977; Anthony Lewis, “Ecology and Poli-
tics: 1,” New York Times, March 4, 1972; “On Reaching A State of Global Equilibrium”
New York Times, March 13, 1972; and “A Blueprint For Survival,” New York Times,
February 5, 1972. For further critiques, see John Maddox, The Doomsday Syndrome
(London: MacMillan, 1972); Wilfred Beckerman, Two Cheers for the Affluent Society:
A Spirited Defense of Economic Growth (New York: St. Martin’s, 1974); and Peter Pas-
sell and Leonard Ross, The Retreat from Riches: Affluence and Its Enemies (New York:
Viking, 1973). For a historian’s consideration at the end of the decade, see Samuel Hays,
“The Limits-To-Growth Issue: A Historical Perspective,” Explorations in Environmen-
tal History: Essays by Samuel Hays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).
44. Edward Goldsmith, et al., Blueprint for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972),
3, 8. On the decline of establishment population concerns, see Hoff, The State and the
Stork, 195–218, and on the “shot in the arm,” see Hoff, 222.
45. Herman Daly, “The Steady-State Economy: Toward a Political Economy of Biophysi-
cal and Moral Growth,” in Herman Daly, ed., Toward a Steady-State Economy (San
Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973), 149–174. On “ecological economics” and environ-
mentalism, see Hoff, The State and the Stork, 175–187.
46. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York:
Harper & Row, 1973), 50, 54, 57.
47. Daly, “The Steady-State Economy,” 149–150.
48. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 27.
49. Schumacher, 17.
50. Daly, “The Steady-State Economy,” 150–151.
51. Cliff Humphrey, “Sweeping Social Change Is on the Way,” 4, carton 5, folder 10, EA.
52. Humphrey, “From Institutionalized Inaction to Action Institutions,” 5.
53. Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 38.
54. “The Environmental Research (Survival) Committee Report to the Sierra Club Board
of Directors,” April, 1972; Richard Cellarius to committee members—n.d., but likely
November 15, 1972; Richard Cellarius to committee members, December 27, 1972, all
in carton 53, folder 21, SCR.
55. Phillip Berry, “Sierra Club Leader, 1960s-1980s: A Broadened Agenda, A Bold
Approach,” oral history by Ann Lage, 1981, 1984 (Regional Oral History Office, The
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), 59–61. Berry stated that the Club’s
energy and population committees resulted in part from discussions in the survival
committee; the Sierra Club had been working on issues of population and energy for
several years, however, before the survival committee was organized.
56. John Fischer, “The Easy Chair: Survival U.,” Harper’s, September 1, 1969, 14, 22. Fischer
declared that he had found “Survival U.” two years later. See Fischer, “The Easy Chair:
Survival U. is Alive and Burgeoning in Green Bay, Wisconsin,” Harper’s, February 1,
1971.
57. Paul Ehrlich, Douglas Daetz, Robert North, and Dennis Pirages, “A Proposal to
Establish a Program in Social Ecology at Stanford University,” February, 1972, box 4,
folder 9, PE, 1, 5, 19.
58. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, xi. Ehrlich claimed that even if his predictions proved
false, his prescriptions would leave people better fed and housed. Sabin, The Bet, 98.
59. Jay Forrester, “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems,” ZPG National Reporter,
June, 1971.
60. “Editorial,” ZPG National Reporter, June, 1971, 8. Ehrlich’s interest was recipro-
cal; Dennis Meadows told Ehrlich that his Population, Resources, Environment was
“required reading for anyone joining our group,” and in late 1971 Ehrlich arranged for
Donella and Dennis Meadows, along with Princeton professor of international law
Richard Falk, to participate in several seminars with Stanford faculty and students.
See Meadows to Ehrlich, January 19, 1971; Ehrlich to Meadows, January 27, 1971; and
“Schedule for Meadows-Falk Visit,” n.d., all in box 4, folder 43, PE.
61. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World
War I to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 204. Accord-
ing to Ira Katznelson, the 1930s and 1940s was the greatest test of democracy in the
twentieth century, a period that “witnessed the disintegration and decay of democratic
and liberal hopes.” See Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our
Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 12. Anne Kornhauser argues that democracy was to
some degree sacrificed as the United States created “a level of bureaucracy that threat-
ened popular sovereignty”; see Anne Kornhauser, Debating the American State: Liberal
Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015), 4–5.
62. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in Garrett Hardin and John Baden,
eds., Managing the Commons (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), 20.
63. William Ophuls, “Leviathan or Oblivion?” in Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy,
225. By 1977, Ophuls had moderated his views on authoritarianism only a little.
Whereas four years earlier he had written, “Only a Hobbesian sovereign can deal
with this situation effectively,” in 1977 he said, “Only a government possessing great
powers to regulate individual behavior in the ecological common interest can deal
effectively with the tragedy of the commons.” His terminology was not as stark, but
his basic claim had not changed: although a steady-state society did not necessarily
need to involve “dictatorial control over our everyday lives,” it certainly would have to
“encroach upon our freedom of action.” The only alternatives to a self-imposed loss of
freedom were “the coercion of nature” or “an iron regime.” See William Ophuls, Ecol-
ogy and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State (San
Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), 152–156.
64. Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into The Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974), 110.
65. Robert Heilbroner, “Second Thoughts on the Human Prospect,” Futures, February
1975, 36, 40; and Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, 152–156. On the crises of
the 1970s and the Trilateral Commission, see Runciman, The Confidence Trap, 184–224.
On the sense of crisis and environmentalism, see Robertson, The Malthusian Moment,
186–190; and Hoff, The State and the Stork, 211–230. Crisis environmentalists’ critique
of democracy was a longstanding one. Robert Dahl has written that the two stron-
gest critiques of democratic principles have always been anarchism and “guardianship”
(Dahl’s term for an enlightened form of authoritarianism). Despite their differences,
anarchists and guardians both argue that what the majority wants is not necessarily
what is best. See Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989). No crisis environmentalist welcomed the idea of an authoritarian state.
Both Heilbroner and Ophuls, for instance, believed in small-scale, decentralized alter-
natives but did not think them possible in the short-term. Heilbroner valorized the
Greek polis and Ophuls favored a “frugal sustainable state” committed to conservation
and oriented around “humane values” rather than industrial growth. See Heilbroner,
An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, 134–141; and Ophuls, “The Politics of the
Sustainable Society,” in Dennis Pirages, ed., The Sustainable Society: Implications for
Limited Growth (New York: Praeger, 1977), 157–172.
66. Kingsley Davis, “Zero Population Growth: The Goals and the Means,” in Mancur
Olson and Hans H. Landsberg, eds., The No-Growth Society (New York: Norton,
1973), 21, 28.
67. “In This Issue,” ZPG National Reporter, August 1970, 3. See also “Compulsory Preg-
nancy Criminal Laws,” ZPG Communicator, March 1969, 3, box 1, folder 7, PE.
68. Shirley Radl to Paul Ehrlich, April 2, 1970, box 1, folder 1, PE.
69. Shirley Radl to Edgar Chasteen, (n.d.), box 1, folder 1, PE.
70. “Plans and Perspective,” box 1, folder 6, PE.
71. On the film, see Hal Seielstad, “Zealot Paramount Gambles,” ZPG National Reporter,
April 1972, 3.
72. Hal Seielstad, confidential memo of February 8, 1972, box 1, folder 1, PE.
73. Harold Seielstad, “Crisis Alert,” February 17, 1972, box 3, folder 7, PE.
74. On ZPG’s legal proceedings and leafleting efforts, see Board of Directors Fortnightly
Report, February 16–29, 1972; Board of Directors Fortnightly Report, March 16–31,
1972, box 1, folder 1, PE; and Hal Seielstad, “ZPG Sues Paramount,” ZPG National
Reporter, March 1972, 3. On ZPG’s polling, see Board of Directors Monthly Report,
December 1972, box 1, folder 1, PE.
75. See Richard Bowers, letter to the editor, Wild Earth (Winter 1991/1992), 9.
76. Hal Seielstad, “Executive Director’s Report,” ZPG National Reporter, May 1972, 16.
77. “ZPG: Too Many People?” New Left Notes, May 1970, 8. By “ZPG,” New Left Notes
generally meant the movement, not the organization; all of its specific criticisms were
against Ehrlich and The Population Bomb. By 1970, New Left Notes was a publication
of the “Progressive Labor” faction of Students for a Democratic Society and no longer
represented SDS as a whole.
78. On Ehrlich and Commoner, see Egan, Barry Commoner; on Ehrlich and Simon, see
Sabin, The Bet.
79. Robert Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 61.
80. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-
war America (New York: Vintage, 2003), 127. See also Robertson, The Malthusian
Moment. For a discussion of three major phases of liberalism in the United States,
see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War
(New York: Vintage, 1995), 3–14. Meg Jacobs traces “economic citizenship” back to
the early twentieth century and emphasizes the fight to achieve “purchasing power”
and restrain inflation. Like Collins and Cohen, she connects consumption to politi-
cal identity. See Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-
Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
81. Hoff, The State and the Stork, 92.
82. Environmental Research Committee on Survival meeting minutes, November 6–7,
1971, carton 34, folder 12, SCR.
83. Carl Pope memo to ZPG Board, (n.d.), 17–20, box 1, folder 2, PE.
84. George Mumford to Paul Ehrlich, April 14, 1970, box 10, folder 19, PE.
85. Keith Lampe, Earth Read-Out 5, July 10, 1969, 3, KL.
86. “Editorial: On Population,” Ecology (n.d.), carton 4, folder 10, EA, 21.
87. “A Center for Growth Alternatives,” September 6, 1973, carton 117, folder 23, DRB.
88. Carl Pope memo to ZPG Board, (n.d.), box 1, folder 2, PE, 21–23.
89. Rhonda Levitt and Madeline Nelson, “Editorial,” ZPG National Reporter, May
1971, 12.
90. Planned Parenthood Federation of America Annual Report 1974, carton 35, folder 30,
DRB, 1.
91. “In This Issue,” ZPG National Reporter, August 1970, 3. See also ZPG National
Reporter, July–August 1971.
92. On World Population Day, see Judy Kunofsky, memorandum and report, November
4, 1974, carton 120, folder 12, SCMP. On Roe v. Wade anniversary, see January 1975
letter to Congress, carton 91, folder 2, SCNLOR.
93. On both the partnership of ZPG and Planned Parenthood and the eventual split of
population activists and feminists, see Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 157–160,
190–194; and Hoff, The State and the Stork, 188–189. On The Birth Control Handbook
and ZPG, see Christabelle Sethna, “The Evolution of the Birth Control Handbook:
From Student Peer-Education Manual to Feminist Self-Empowerment Text, 1968–
1975,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 23 (2006); and “Letters,” ZPG National
Reporter July–August 1971, 26.
94. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1–2.
95. Hank Lebo, “Revolutionary Chicken,” Clear Creek, June 1972, 10.
96. See Hays, “The Limits-To-Growth Issue.”
97. On African American objections to ZPG and population politics, see Robertson, The
Malthusian Moment, 171–175, 178–181, 190–194.
98. “A Comment on LIFE’s Coverage of ZPG,” ZPG National Reporter, May 1970, 13. On
Ehrlich, see Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 171–175.
99. “Letters,” ZPG National Reporter, August 1970, 36.
100. Hal Seielstad, “Zero Consumption Growth,” ZPG National Reporter, April 1972, 12.
101. Lewis Perelman, “Towards Global Equilibrium,” ZPG National Reporter, June 1972, 8.
102. On population politics and genocide, see Hoff, The State and the Stork, 149–157.
On Council on Population & Environment, see Janet Malone to Michael McCloskey,
July 30, 1971, carton 91, folder 3, SCNLOR. On local effects, “In This Issue,”
ZPG National Reporter, September 1970, 3. On suburbs, see Bicky Dodge, “The
Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Inventions,” ZPG National Reporter, September
1971, 1. For local growth resolution, see ZPG Board of Directors meeting minutes,
October 19, 1974, box 1, folder 2, PE, 9.
103. Keith Lampe, Earth Read-Out 17, November 26, 1969, 4, KL.
104. Jean Weber to Paul Ehrlich, November 4, 1972, box 2, folder 10, PE. See also Robin
Daniels to Paul Ehrlich, September 20, 1972, box 2, folder 10, PE.
105. On the history of the Sierra Club and immigration, see Louise Nichols to Chuck
Clusen, December 28, 1973, carton 5, folder 9, SCR.
106. Memo from Carl Pope to ZPG board on population policy committee (n.d.), box 1,
folder 2, PE, 26.
107. On ZPG’s policies, see ZPG: Recommendations for a New Immigration Policy for the
United States, box 3, folder 4, PE.
108. Gerda Bikales, “Immigration Policy: The New Environmental Battlefield,” National
Parks & Conservation Magazine, December 1977, carton 91, folder 5, SCNLOR, 16.
109. For Tanton’s affiliations, see Tanton, “Testimony prepared for the Commission on
Population Growth and the American Future,” carton 285, folder 122, SCR.
110. Louise Nichols to Chuck Clusen, December 28, 1973, carton 5, folder 9, SCR.
111. Tanton to Ehrlich, September 17, 1974; and Ehrlich to Tanton, July 25, 1974, both in
box 3, folder 1, PE.
112. Jason DeParle, “The Anti-Immigration Crusader,” New York Times, April 17, 2011.
See also “English Spoken Here, But Unofficially,” New York Times, October 29, 1988.
113. Bookchin’s response to “Four Changes” was published in Earth Read-Out 13,
October 30, 1969, 2, KL.
114. Timothy O’Riordan, Environmentalism (London: Pion, 1976), 36.
3. A RADICAL BREAK
1. Letter to the editor, Earth First!, June 21, 1983, 3. The publication had different
names at different moments but was generally known as the Earth First! Journal. For
convenience, though, in the notes I refer to it simply as Earth First!, which is often
how the name appeared on the journal’s front page.
2. D. H., letter to the editor, Earth First!, June 21, 1982, 2.
3. The exception to “major groups” avoiding strict ecocentrism was Greenpeace in its
earliest days. See Frank Zelko, Make It a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural
Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195–197.
4. Michael Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club: 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club,
1988), 128.
5. Board of Directors annual meeting minutes, May 6–7, 1972, exhibit F, carton 4, folder
12, SCR; and David Brower and Richard Felter, “Surveying California’s Ski Terrain,”
Sierra Club Bulletin, March 1948.
6. Board of Directors annual meeting minutes, May 1–2, 1965, carton 4, folder 4, SCR,
13–14. For background on Mineral King, see Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club,
339–345.
7. Michael McCloskey to John Leasher, July 16, 1974, carton 3, folder 19, SCLDF. “Sierra
Club Proclamation on Wilderness,” Exhibit F, board of directors annual meeting
minutes, May 2–3, 1970, carton 4, folder 10, SCR.
8. Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural
Objects (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman, 1974).
9. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing, 44.
10. Stone, 75. On Harry Blackmun’s separate dissent, see Stafford Keegin, “Top of the
Seventh: Mickey Mouse-1, Sierra Club-0,” Clear Creek, July–August, 1972.
11. “Ecology Conference: Birds and Trees Speak Up in S.F.,” San Francisco Examiner, n.d.,
box II: 103, folder 3, GS. For the larger legal discussion of the “rights of nature,” see
Martin Krieger, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?” Science 179, no. 4072 (February
2, 1973); Laurence Tribe, “Ways Not to Think About Plastic Trees: New Foundations
for Environmental Law,” Yale Law Journal 83, no. 7 ( June 1974); Mark Sagoff, “On
Preserving the Natural Environment,” Yale Law Journal 84, no. 2 (December 1974);
and Tribe, “Environmental Foundations to Constitutional Structures: Learning from
Nature’s Future,” Yale Law Journal 84, no. 3 ( January 1975).
12. Keith Lampe to “Allen,” June 25, 1970, box II: 102, folder 66, GS. See also Rasa
Gustaitis, “They Didn’t Laugh at Ro-Non-So-Te,” Washington Post, March 11, 1971.
13. Lampe, “An Open Letter to Readers of the Old Earth Read-Out,” Spring 1972, box II:
102, folder 85, GS. Of Living Creatures Associates, Buckminster Fuller said, “A nice
manifest of man’s consciousness. Their effectiveness approximately zero,” in Rasa
Gustaitis, Wholly Round (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 264.
14. Press release, San Francisco Ecology Center, August 4, 1978, box II: 103, folder 3, GS.
15. Lampe to Gary Snyder, June 27, 1983, box II: 103, folder 4, GS.
16. Keith Lampe to Tom Hayden, July 18, 1975, box II: 102, folder 90, GS.
17. Debra Weiners, “Biocentrics: This Is the Latest Trend in the Ecology Movement,”
San Francisco Examiner, October 4, 1975, box II: 103, folder 3, GS.
18. Debra Weiners, “Biocentrics.”
19. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Sum-
mary,” Inquiry 16 (1973), 100. On what was most influential from Naess’s original
article, see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985), 65–77. See also Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of
Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991), 281–319.
20. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep,” 95–100.
21. On Devall and Sessions and their embrace of deep ecology, as well as their impor-
tant publications, see Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing
New Foundations for Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990), 60–70. As Fox
points out, several thinkers discussed anthropocentric vs. non-anthropocentric envi-
ronmentalism before or around the same time as Naess, including Leo Marx, Theo-
dore Roszak, Timothy O’Riordan, and Murray Bookchin. Fox offers three possible
reasons for why deep ecology took root in a way that these other thinkers’ ideas did
not: that deep ecology came first (which Fox shows to be inaccurate); that deep ecol-
ogy had better and more determined boosters than any similar school of thought
314 3. A Radical Break
(which Fox agrees was at least part of the story); and that deep ecology was substan-
tially different from other forms of non-anthropocentrism in ways that made it more
intellectually attractive (which Fox argues was the case). Fox places far more weight
on deep ecology’s psychological dimension (Naess’s interest in gaining an appre-
ciation of symbiosis and interconnectedness through ‘self-realization’) than on its
‘popular’ interpretation (what Naess sometimes called ‘biocentric egalitarianism’).
But for radical environmental groups like Earth First!, the ‘popular’ interpretation
was the more relevant. Earth First!ers and similar radical activists had little to say
about the dissolution of the ego and the discovery of nature through psychological
awareness, and much to say about the hierarchy of values that privileged the human
over the natural. See Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, 26–40, 55–77.
22. John Tanton, “Testimony Prepared for the Commission on Population Growth and
the American Future,” April 15, 1971, carton 285, folder 122, SCR, 3–4.
23. On Commoner and Lappé among other critics, see Thomas Robertson, The Malthu-
sian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 176–200.
24. Robert Carter and David Lasenby, “Values and Ecology: Prolegomena to an Environ-
mental Ethics,” Alternatives, Winter 1977, 40.
25. Richard Bond, “Salvationists, Utilitarians, and Environmental Justice,” Alternatives,
Spring 1977, 41, 42.
26. Janet Besecker and Phil Elder, “Lifeboat Ethics: A Reply to Hardin,” Alternatives,
December 1975, p. 23; see also Jeffrey O’Hearn, “Beyond the Growth Controversy: An
Assessment of Responses,” Alternatives, Summer 1978.
27. On Friends of the Earth and the ‘conserver society,’ see “Editorial,” Alternatives,
Summer/Fall 1979, p. 2; and Arthur Cordell, “Another Look at . . . the Conserver
Society,” Alternatives, Winter 1980, 4–9.
28. Richard Watson, “A Critique of Anti-Anthropocentric Biocentrism,” Environmental
Ethics 5, no. 3 (Fall 1983), 251. Although Watson never uses the term “deep ecology,”
preferring “anti-anthropocentric biocentrism,” he identifies Sessions and especially
Naess as chief offenders, making clear that he is writing about deep ecology and its
followers. See also Watson, “Comment: A Note on Deep Ecology,” Environmental
Ethics 6, no. 4 (Winter 1984), in which Watson accuses deep ecologists of utopianism
and argues that there is little hope for human civilization to ever consciously live in
balance with nature for an extended period of time.
29. Arne Naess, “A Defence of the Deep Ecology Movement,” Environmental Ethics 6,
no. 3 (Fall 1984).
30. David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), 240. Like all polemics, Ehrenfeld’s book tended toward simplification and over-
statement. As Milton Snoeyenbos pointed out, it was difficult for an environmental-
ist to attack human reason, technology, and science, given the central role that those
things played in identifying environmental problems. “In short,” Snoeyenbos wrote,
“it is reason that enables us to recognize reason’s horizons.” Radical environmentalism
had an ambivalent relationship with science and technology, on the one hand relying
on scientific expertise to prove the ill effects of industrial civilization, and on the other
hand blaming scientific expertise for creating those ill effects. But few environmental-
ists—radical or not—were willing to denounce science and technology without res-
ervation. For most, the problem was one of degree: the modern world, they argued,
fostered an unquestioning belief in scientific progress’s inherent good, a belief that
deserved greater skepticism. See Milton Snoeyenbos, “A Critique of Ehrenfeld’s Views
on Humanism and the Environment,” Environmental Ethics 3, no. 3 (Fall 1981), 234.
31. Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 202, 208.
32. J. Baird Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,” Environmental Ethics 2,
no. 4 (Winter 1980), 337. Regarding Leopold’s hunting, the apparent exception that
in the end proves to be the rule is the wolf that Leopold describes killing and in whose
eyes a “fierce green fire” dies as he reaches her. The wolf, Leopold makes clear, repre-
sents a natural order and is important less as an individual than as part of an inter-
connected world. See Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and
There (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 130. The animal liberation/land ethic
debate is deeply complicated with differences of philosophical opinion even within
the animal rights community. The debate ranged across the pages of Environmental
Ethics for the journal’s first several years. A useful summary of one side of the debate by
the journal’s editor is Eugene Hargrove, ed., The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics
Debate: The Environmentalist Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992). See also Anthony Povilitis, “On Assigning Rights to Animals and Nature,” Envi-
ronmental Ethics 2, no. 1 (Spring 1980); Tom Regan, “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs,”
Environmental Ethics 2, no. 2 (Summer 1980); Tom Regan, “The Nature and Possi-
bility of an Environmental Ethic,” Environmental Ethics 3, no. 1 (Spring 1981); and
Edward Johnson, “Animal Liberation versus the Land Ethic,” Environmental Ethics 3,
no. 3 (Fall 1981). One of the founding texts of animal liberation is Peter Singer, Ani-
mal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2002 [1975]). All of this only scratches the
surface.
33. Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,” 326.
34. Paul Watson, Earthforce!: An Earth Warrior’s Guide to Strategy (Los Angeles: Chaco,
1993), 37, 24, 18.
35. See “Wilderness Preserves” in Earth First!, a pamphlet and ‘guide’ to the group pro-
duced by the Earth First! Journal and undated, but published sometime in the late
1980s—probably 1987, DF.
36. Michael McCloskey, “Wilderness Movement at the Crossroads,” Pacific Historical
Review 41, no. 3 (August, 1972), 352.
37. Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern
Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 80.
Since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 28. Sutter and Turner have
delved deeper into the political meaning of wilderness than any recent historians. The
classic work on the meaning of American wilderness is Roderick Nash, Wilderness and
the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
39. This description of Alaskan wilderness politics is drawn largely from Julius Duscha,
“Setting the Crown Jewels: How the Alaska Act Was Won,” The Living Wilderness,
Spring 1981, 4–9; Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 272–315; and Turner, The
Promise of Wilderness, 141–181. See also a series of updates by Edgar Wayburn, includ-
ing “Alaska: President Carter to the Rescue,” Sierra, January/February 1979, 22; “Alaska
1979,” Sierra, March/April 1979, 25; “Alaska in the House: The Last Act?” Sierra, May/
June 1979, 54–55; and “Alaska Lands Bill in the Senate: Slowdowns and Showdowns,”
Sierra, September/October 1980, 36–39.
40. Edgar Wayburn, “Alaska: An Act of History,” Sierra, January/February 1981, 5. On
the Alaska Coalition’s origins in the battle over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, see Peter
Coates, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation, and the
Frontier (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1993 [1991]), 217–220.
41. White House Press Office, “Alaskan Lands Endangered Again,” April 26, 1979, box 1,
folder 1, ACR.
42. “The Alaska Lands Issue in 1979,” January 1979, box 1, folder 1, ACR.
43. “Two Alaskan Perspectives: 17 National Monuments Proclaimed; Congress Has
Unfinished Business,” The Living Wilderness, October/December 1978, 20.
44. Edgar Wayburn, “Alaska Lands Bill in the Senate,” 38; Wayburn, “Alaska: An Act of
History,” 5.
45. Chuck Clusen, “Viewpoint,” The Living Wilderness, Spring 1981, 3. On the role of
ecology in the Alaska campaign more generally, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness,
146–148. The campaign that resulted in ANILCA was hugely influential but not the
first to use ecological arguments. On the ecological arguments made in establishing the
Arctic National Wildlife Range two decades earlier, see Roger Kaye, The Last Great
Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Fairbanks:
University of Alaska Press, 2006), 213–225.
46. One of the best histories of the Forest Service’s wilderness policies throughout the
twentieth century is Dennis Roth, The Wilderness Movement and the National Forests
(College Station, TX: Intaglio, 1988). The best political history of RARE II is Turner,
The Promise of Wilderness, 183–224. See also Tim Mahoney and Jody Bolz, “RARE II:
A Test for Forest Wilderness,” The Living Wilderness, April/June 1978.
47. On RARE I, see Roth, The Wilderness Movement and the National Forests, 37–45; and
James Risser, “The Forest Service and its Critics,” The Living Wilderness, Summer 1973.
48. Board of directors annual meeting minutes, May 6–7, 1972, 3, carton 4, folder 12, SCR.
49. The acreage under consideration for RARE II was considerably more than RARE I
because RARE II used different systems of analysis to determine what lands qualified,
left aside the Forest Service’s restrictive “purity policies,” and gave greater consideration
to Eastern forests. See Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 190.
50. Turner, 129. On Brandborg’s enthusiasm and eventual firing, see Turner, 101–104,
128–133.
51. On the Society’s internal problems and the firing of Brandborg, see Turner, 131–133;
and “Resolution of the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society,” July 28, 1975,
box 16, folder 12, WSR.
52. Celia Hunter to “Friend of Wilderness,” (n.d.), folder 30, box 6, WSR.
53. Celia Hunter to Clif Merritt, September 9, 1977. box 37, folder 25, WSR.
54. Clif Merritt to Celia Hunter, September 23, 1977, box 37, folder 25, WSR.
55. Clif Merritt to Bill Turnage (n.d., but in response to August 30, 1978 memo from
Hunter), box 17, folder 6, WSR.
56. Bart Koehler activity reports, July 1977 and April 1978, box 37, folder 22, WSR.
57. Bob Langsenkamp activity reports, June 1978 and October 1978, box 37, folder 23, WSR.
58. Howie Wolke to Jeff Knight and Rafe Pomerance, (n.d., but sometime in fall 1978),
carton 26, folder 1, DRB.
59. On the firing of Koehler and Carter, see Ann Schimpf, “Wilderness Society Fires Key
Utah Environmentalist,” High Country News, July 27, 1979. On Turnage generally,
see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 202–210.
60. Minutes, executive committee, December 14 and 15, 1979, 14, box 17, folder 6, WSR.
61. Foreman, “Making the Most of Professionalism,” Earth First!, August 1, 1984, 16.
62. Michael McCloskey, “Wilderness Movement at the Crossroads, 1945–1970,” Pacific
Historical Review 41, no. 3 (August 1972), 354.
63. Foreman, “Making the Most of Professionalism,” 16.
64. Meeting minutes, Sierra Club Board of Directors, May 5–6, 1979, carton 4, folder 18,
SCR.
65. Sherry Howman, “RARE II Touches off Stormy Debate,” (fact sheet attached to Envi-
ronmental Study Conference briefing paper), February 5, 1979, box 160, folder 33,
GN. On the Club’s role in the Environmental Study Conference, see minutes of the
annual board of directors meeting, May 3–4, 1975, 18–19, carton 4, folder 15, SCR.
66. See series of bulletins from the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society: “RARE-II:
A Citizen’s Handbook for the National Forest Roadless Area Review and Evaluation
Program: 1977–1978,” May 1978, carton 224, folder 19, SCR; “RARE-II: A Citizen’s
Handbook . . .,” December 1978, carton 224, folder 21, SCR; and “RARE II: A Raw
Deal for Wilderness,” February 1979, carton 235, folder 34, SCR.
67. Press release (n.d.), box 11, folder 3, WSR.
68. “Tim, John” to “Chuck, Bill,” April 6, 1979, box 11, folder 3, WSR.
69. “Tim, John” to “Chuck, Bill,” April 6, 1979, annotated by William Turnage, box 11,
folder 3, WSR.
70. Dave Foreman memo to “the leading intellectual and literary lights of EARTH
FIRST,” September 1, 1980, DF.
71. Huey Johnson, “The Flaws of RARE II,” Sierra, May/June 1979, 10. On the response to
RARE II and to the Johnson suit, see Roth, The Wilderness Movement and the National
Forests, 53–55; Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental
Movement (New York: Viking, 1993), 93–100; Robert Jones, “Plan to Open Million
Acres of Forest Blocked,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1980; and Robert Day, Jr.,
“California v. Bergland,” Journal of Forestry 78, no. 4 (April 1980).
72. On the aftermath of RARE II, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 183–224; Roth,
The Wilderness Movement and the National Forests, 56–60; and John McComb to
Senator Jesse Helms, April 4, 1981, carton 52, folder 1, SCNLOR.
73. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Crown, 1991), 13–14.
74. Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 68, 5.
75. The most complete version of the Pinacate Desert story is told by Susan Zakin in
Coyotes and Town Dogs, 115–134. Foreman references the Wyoming campfire in “Earth
First!” The Progressive, March 1981.
76. Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1984), 151.
77. On the arid conditions of the desert West and the consequent political and indus-
trial infrastructure, see W. Eugene Hollon, The Great American Desert: Then and Now
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). The literature on water in the West is
huge. One of the best—and most fun—overviews is Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert:
The American West and its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin, 1986).
78. The story of Glen Canyon Dam is told in Russell Martin, A Story That Stands Like a
Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West (New York: Henry Holt,
1989).
79. For some of Abbey’s more politic views on Glen Canyon Dam, see “The Damnation
of a Canyon,” in Abbey, Beyond the Wall. Abbey’s thoughts about blowing up the dam
appear in fictional form in The Monkey Wrench Gang (New York: Perennial Classics,
2000 [1975]). See also “Down the River,” in Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the
Wilderness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990 [1968]).
80. Foreman, “Earth First!,” 42.
81. “The Wilderness Society Supports Logging and Mining in Montana Road-
less Areas??!” Earth First!, August 1, 1984, 7; See also “Kill the Bills,” Earth First!,
November 1, 1983, 1.
82. Peter Coppelman and Bill Devall, Exchange, Earth First!, December 21, 1984, 18.
83. Dave Foreman, “Earth First!” Earth First!, February 2, 1982, 5.
84. “Sierra Club Proclamation on Wilderness,” exhibit F, board of directors annual meet-
ing minutes, May 2–3, 1970, carton 4, folder 10, SCR.
85. “Statement of David Brower,” August 5, 1971, carton 91, folder 1, SCNLOR, 1.
86. Earth First!, a pamphlet and ‘guide’ to the group produced by the Earth First! Journal
and undated, but published sometime in the late 1980s—probably 1987, DF.
87. Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2011), 24–25, 52.
89. David Brower, ed., Wildlands in Our Civilization (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1964),
146–151.
90. Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 72–90.
91. Pamela Rich to Harold Sparck, January 28, 1977, carton 40, folder 36, DRB.
92. Bill Cunningham, “Grazing in Wilderness,” July 30, 1980, carton 20, folder 17, SCSW.
93. Howie Wolke, “Dismantle the Wilderness Act!” Earth First!, March 21, 1983, 11. See
also Sutter, Driven Wild, 71, on Aldo Leopold’s non-purist definition of wilderness.
Conservationists often fought to relax classification standards. While arguing that the
Sweetwater River should be awarded Wild and Scenic River status, Wolke complained
to the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation: “It seems that you are bound up by the term
‘outstandingly remarkable.’ I don’t know who in Congress cooked-up that descriptive
term, but your interpretation strikes me as meaning ‘one of a kind.’ Standard dictionary
definitions refute that meaning.” See Wolke to B.O.R., July 7, 1977, box 37, folder 22,
WSR.
94. “The Other Side of the Bioregion,” Siskiyou Country, February/March 1984, 2.
95. George Wuerthner, “The Natural Role of Humans in Wilderness,” Earth First!,
December 21, 1989, 25. On rewilding, see, for instance, “Wilderness Recovery Areas,”
Earth First!, February 2, 1984, 7.
96. Reed Noss, “Recipe for Wilderness Recovery,” Earth First!, September 23, 1986, 22.
97. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, [1949] 1966), 197.
98. Howie Wolke, “Editorial,” Earth First!, March 20, 1982, 4–5.
99. Tony Moore, “Editorial,” Earth First!, May 1, 1982, 5.
100. Mike Roselle, “Guest Editorial: Nomadic Action Group,” Earth First!, September 23,
1987, 3.
101. Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 68.
102. Roselle, “Nomadic Action Group,” 3.
103. Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang, 68.
104. Express Times article reprinted as “PG&E Saboteur, Still at Large, Tells How He Did
It,” Rat, June 1–14, 1968, 8;
105. “The Eco-Guerillas Are Coming,” Harry, April 24–May 7, 1971, 9; “Eco-Guerillas,”
Northwest Passage, August 16–September 5, 1971.
106. “The ‘True’ Adventures of Billie Board,” Argus, June 1971, 6–7.
107. On the Eco-Commando Force ’70, see “Eco-Guerillas,” and Allyn Brown, “Ecology
Commandoes Strike at Dawn,” Coronet, May 1971, 73–77. Subversive actions by envi-
ronmentalists were so popular after Earth Day that the student group Environmental
Action held an “ecotage” award ceremony, handing the top honor to Eco-Commando
Force ’70. See Stewart Udall and Jeff Stansbury, “Ecotage,” press release, January 26,
1972, carton 167, folder 15, SCR.
108. Frank Zelko, “Make It a Green Peace!”: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
109. This description of the origin of Greenpeace and the Amchitka campaign is drawn
from Robert Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979); and Zelko, “Make It a Green Peace!”
The literature on Greenpeace includes many first-person accounts besides Hunter’s,
including Rex Weyler, Greenpeace: How A Group of Journalists, Ecologists, and Vision-
aries Changed the World (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2004). The major scholarly treatment
is Zelko, “Make It a Green Peace!” See also Paul Wapner, “In Defense of Banner Hang-
ers: The Dark Green Politics of Greenpeace,” in Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance
Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995); and Ronald Shaiko, “Greenpeace U.S.A.:
Something Old, New, Borrowed,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 528 ( July 1993).
110. R. B. Weeden, memorandum, September 17, 1969, carton 14, folder 13, SCNLOR.
111. James Moorman, memorandum, September 19, 1969, carton 14, folder 13, SCNLOR.
112. On the “legal guerilla actions,” see Lloyd Tupling to Walter Hickel, September 29,
1969.
113. David Brower to Walter Hickel, September 29, 1969; “Sierra Club Challenge Use of
Wildlife Refuge as Site for Nuclear Bomb Test By AEC,” press release, October 1, 1969,
all in carton 14, folder 13, SCNLOR.
114. On Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, see Robert Fleisher, press release, July 8
(year unknown), carton 14, folder 13, SCNLOR.
115. Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, 52.
116. Mark Long, “Campaign in Spain,” Greenpeace Examiner, Winter 1980, 18.
117. Eric Schwartz, “Ecologists Escalate Fight Over Nature,” Chicago Tribune, May 30,
1981. There are several useful books on Watson and Sea Shepherd, all of them largely
descriptive and all of them with combative titles that contrast sharply with the pacific
name of Watson’s group. See Paul Watson and Warren Rogers, Sea Shepherd: My Fight
for Whales and Seals (New York: Norton, 1982); Paul Watson, Ocean Warrior: My
Battle To End the Illegal Slaughter on the High Seas (Toronto: Key Porter, 1996); David
Morris, Earth Warrior: Overboard With Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conserva-
tion Society (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1995); and Peter Heller, The Whale Warriors: The
Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals (New York: Free
Press, 2007). See also Raffi Khatchadourian, “Neptune’s Navy: Paul Watson’s Wild
Crusade to Save the Oceans,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2007.
118. W. B. Rood, “Army Hunts Reservoir Foe,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1979. For a
complete account of Friends of the River, see Tim Palmer, Stanislaus: The Struggle for
a River (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
119. Schwartz, “Ecologists Escalate Fight Over Nature,” 11.
120. Robert Hunter, “Eco-Violence,” New Age, October 1980, 51.
121. Dave Foreman to editor of New Age, (n.d.), DF.
122. On the Pacific forest, see David Rains Wallace, The Klamath Knot: Explorations of
Myth and Evolution (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1983); and Catherine Caufield,
“The Ancient Forest,” New Yorker, May 14, 1990.
123. On the history of the Kalmiopsis, see Chant Thomas, “Kalmiopsis/Bald Mountain
Background,” Earth First!, May 1, 1983; and “Oregon RARE II Suit Filed,” Earth First!,
February 2, 1984.
124. On the Bald Mountain blockades, see “Kalmiopsis Blockade Begins,” Earth First!, May
1, 1983; and “Wilderness War in Oregon” and “Blockade Personal Accounts,” Earth
First!, June 21, 1983. On the G-O Road, see “Gasquet-Orleans Road,” Earth First!,
May 1, 1982; “The Siskiyous and the G-O Road,” Earth First!, May 1, 1983; and Peter
Matthiessen, Indian Country (New York: Viking, 1984), 167–199. On the lawsuit, see
“Sue the Bastards,” Earth First!, June 21, 1983. See also Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs,
228–272.
125. Molly Campbell, Ric Bailey, et al., “Blockade Personal Accounts,” Earth First!, June 21,
1983.
126. Karen Pickett, “Blockade #7,” Earth First!, September 23, 1983, 4.
127. See George Draffan, “Cathedral Forest Action Group Fights for Oregon Old Growth,”
Earth First!, June 20, 1984.
128. On the summer blockades, see Draffan, “Cathedral Forest Action Group Fights for
Oregon Old Growth,” Earth First!, June 20, 1984; Mike Roselle, “Middle Santiam
Heats Up: 15 Arrested—More to Come,” Earth First!, June 20, 1984; Matt Veenker,
“Blockaders Roughed Up in Middle Santiam,” Earth First!, August 1, 1984; and Mike
Roselle, “Middle Santiam Struggle Continues,” Earth First!, August 1, 1984. On the
office occupation see Mike Roselle, “Earth First! Takes Regional Forester’s Office,”
Earth First!, November 1, 1984.
129. On tree sits, see Ron Huber, “Tree Climbing Hero” Earth First!, June 21, 1985; Aries,
“Go Climb a Tree!,” Earth First!, June 21, 1985; Ron Huber, “Battle for Millenium
Grove: Giant Crane Attacks Tree Sitter” Earth First!, August 1, 1985; and Mike Roselle,
“Oregon Overview: Squaw Creek Action,” Earth First!, August 1, 1985. See also Zakin,
Coyotes and Town Dogs, 260–261.
130. For comments from other environmentalists about Earth First! see Elizabeth Kaufman,
“Earth-Saving: Here Is a Gang of Real Environmental Extremists,” Audubon, July 1982,
116–120; and Ann Japenga, “Earth First! A Voice Vying for the Wilderness,” Los Angeles
Times, September 5, 1985.
131. Bill Devall and George Sessions, “Direct Action,” Earth First!, November 1, 1984, 19.
132. Greg King, “Roselle Does Two Weeks,” Earth First!, September 23, 1987, 8. For a useful
summary of Kalmiopsis actions, see Karen Wood, “North Kalmiopsis Threatened,”
Earth First!, August 1, 1991. On Lou Gold, see Lou Gold and T. A. Allen, “Lou Gold
Escapes Bald Mountain,” Earth First!, November 1, 1987. See also Chant Thomas,
“Return to Bald Mountain,” Earth First!, March 21, 1987.
133. Eugene Hargrove, “Ecological Sabotage: Pranks or Terrorism?” Environmental Ethics 4,
no. 4 (Winter 1982), 291–292.
134. Edward Abbey, Dave Foreman, and Eugene Hargrove, “Exchange,” Environmental
Ethics 5, no. 1 (Spring 1983), 94–96.
4. PUBLIC LANDS AND THE PUBLIC GOOD

1. On the Grand County incident, see R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land, Western
Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1993), 4–9.
2. Recent literature that complicates late twentieth-century political oppositions
includes Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Robert Self, All In the Family: The
Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012);
Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic
Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Michael Stewart Foley,
322 4. Public Lands and the Public Good
Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2013); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’Alive: The 1970s and the
Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); and Jefferson Cowie
and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in
American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (2008). Several
environmental historians have recently given Reagan’s election significant weight. See
Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 137–152; Thomas Robertson, The Malthu-
sian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 218–220; Darren Frederick Speece,
Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environ-
mental Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 122–123; and Patrick
Allitt, A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (New York: Pen-
guin, 2014), 156–165. Cody Ferguson tells a somewhat different story in which the shift
from the 1970s to the 1980s was not just ideological but technical, as environmentalists
focused more on enforcing than passing legislation. See Cody Ferguson, This Is Our
Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2015). For a discussion of environmentalism that focuses on
partisanship but downplays Reagan, see James Morton Turner, “ ‘The Specter of Envi-
ronmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New
Right,” Journal of American History 96, no. 1 ( June 2009).
3. Paul Sabin, “Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order,” Law and
History Review 33, no. 4 (November 2015), 968, 1000. For a discussion of the uneven
history of liberal skepticism about state power, see Anne Kornhauser, Debating the
American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
4. The literature on the New Right has been growing rapidly in recent years. For general
works focusing especially on politics and ideas, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm:
Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill &
Wang, 2001), and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
(New York: Scribner, 2008); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up:
A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1996); Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: Nor-
ton, 2010); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap, 2011); and Bruce
Shulman and Julian Zelizer, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the
1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). The classic work is George
Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York:
Basic, 1976).
5. “Conservation: High Priority,” National Review, January 27, 1970, 70–72.
6. Jim Merkel, “Environmental Control: The Conservative Imperative,” The New Guard,
April 1970, 14–16. On the New Right and social politics (but not environmentalism),
see Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Self, All in the Family; Lisa McGirr, Suburban
Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001); and Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Con-
servatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). On environmentalism and the
New Right, see Brian Allen Drake, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmental-
ism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2013); and Turner, “ ‘The Specter of Environmentalism.’ ”
7. Robert Bailey, “As Radicals Work to Seize Control of Ecology Movement,” Human
Events, April 4, 1970, 12–13.
8. John Chamberlain, “Are We Being Too Tough on Pesticides?” Human Events, March 7,
1970, 17; James Jackson Kilpatrick, “Pause Needed in Ecological Binge,” Human Events,
February 14, 1970, 13.
9. Randal Cornell Teague, “Environmental Pollution and YAF,” The New Guard,
April 1970, 9–10.
10. Norman Podhoretz, “Reflections on Earth Day,” Commentary, June 1970, 28.
11. Norman Podhoretz, “Doomsday Fears and Modern Life,” Commentary, October, 1971,
6. See also, for instance, Gertrude Himmelfarb, “A Plague of Children,” Commentary
April, 1971; Rudolf Klein, “Growth and its Enemies,” Commentary, June, 1972; and B.
Bruce-Briggs, “Against the Neo-Malthusians,” Commentary, July, 1974.
12. A. C. Wilkerson, “Rancher Speaks Out Against Environmentalists,” Vernal Express,
February 9, 1978, carton 20, folder 25, SCSW. On FLPMA and the BLM wilderness
review see John McComb, “The BLM Begins Its Wilderness Review,” Sierra, January/
February 1979, 46; and James R. Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau
of Land Management in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2009), 120–131. Western distrust of the federal government might also owe much to
nuclear testing and the Atomic Energy Commission. See Leisl Carr Childers, The
Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2015), 69–102.
13. The most comprehensive study of the sagebrush rebellion is Cawley, Federal Land,
Western Anger. Also important are William Graf, Wilderness Preservation and the
Sagebrush Rebellions (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990); and Karen Mer-
rill, Public Lands and Political Meaning: Ranchers, The Government, and the Property
Between Them (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Skillen, The Nation’s
Largest Landlord is the best work on the BLM and includes a useful discussion of
the sagebrush rebellion. On the wilderness movement and the sagebrush rebellion,
see James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Poli-
tics Since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 225–262; and William
Robbins and James Foster, eds., Land in The American West: Private Claims and the
Common Good (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). The primary legal
argument used by the sagebrush rebels was a challenge to the legality of the “dis-
claimer clause” under which most Western states were admitted to the Union and
which required each state to disclaim any right to unappropriated public land. The
Northwest Ordinance of 1784, which contained the disclaimer clause, also contained
an “equal footing doctrine” under which new states were to be admitted on an equal
footing with the original states. Sagebrush rebels argued that the clause violated the
doctrine, since the original states had not been forced to disclaim public lands. Legal
precedent offered little support for this argument. See Cawley, Federal Land, Western
Anger, 96–101. On the flagging popularity of the rebellion, see Dan Balz, “Once Riding
High, Sagebrush Rebels Turn in Midstream,” Washington Post, April 10, 1982; and Sara
Terry, “Sagebrush Rebellion Becomes Newest Bad Guy Out West,” Christian Science
Monitor, August 5, 1981.
14. Nevada’s Select Committee on Public Lands, “Questions and Answers on the ‘Sage-
brush Rebellion,’ ” February 22, 1980, folder 2, carton 139, SCNLOR; Don Young to
“Colleague,” January 25, 1977, folder 36, carton 40, DRB. On antistatism and the late
twentieth-century West, and particularly the role of Barry Goldwater, see Lisa McGirr,
Suburban Warriors; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmak-
ing of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); and Drake, Loving
Nature, Fearing the State.
15. “The Public Land Grab—An Exercise in Greed,” February, 1981; and Debbie Sease,
memorandum, August 26, 1979; both in box 44, folder 17, WSR.
16. Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord, 111;
17. Richard McArdle, “Multiple Use—Multiple Benefits,” Journal of Forestry 51 (May
1953), 325. On the expanding definition of multiple use, see Childers, The Size of the
Risk, especially 121–123. For a discussion of the tension between the public interest and
pluralism, see Kornhauser, Debating the American State, 29–40.
18. William Voigt, Jr., Public Grazing Lands: Use and Misuse by Industry and Government
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976).
19. On Brower and the park and forest services, see Tom Turner, David Brower: The
Making of the Environmental Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2015), 86–89; and Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San
Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 190–191.
20. “Sagebrush Rebellion Succeeds!” Earth First!, November 1, 1980, 6. Scholars take seri-
ously the claim that the sagebrush rebellion was more about influence than legislative
change. See for instance Sandra Davis, “Fighting over Public Lands: Interest Groups,
States, and the Federal Government,” in Charles Davis, ed., Western Public Lands and
Environmental Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 21.
21. Dave Foreman, “Editorial—Timid Environmentalism,” Earth First!, December 21,
1980, 5.
22. “Hard Times Come to Environmentalists,” U.S. News & World Report, March 10,
1980; Robert Jones, “U.S. Environmental Efforts Face Erosion,” Los Angeles Times,
November 25, 1979; Peter Bernstein, “Whatever Happened to Ecology Movement?”
San Francisco Examiner, April 20, 1980; Luther Carter, “Environmentalists Seek
New Strategies,” Science 208 (May 2, 1980); all in carton 246, folder 7, SCR. See
also Bill Stall and Anne E. Baker, “The Revolutionary Years,” The Living Wilderness,
Fall 1981; and Brock Evans, “The New Decade—Dawn or Dusk?” Sierra, January/
February 1980.
23. Brock Evans, memorandum, January 11, 1980, carton 246, folder 7, SCR. Anti-
environmentalists agreed with his sentiments. Well before Reagan’s election, the
National Association of Property Owners told its members that the environmental
movement’s success in Alaska was a “high water mark” and would result in “severe
backlash.” See “NAPO Fact Sheet,” carton 20, folder 25, SCSW.
24. “ ‘Sagebrush Rebels’ are Reveling in Reagan,” New York Times, November 24, 1980.
25. Doug Scott, memorandum, March 26, 1981, carton 52, folder 1, SCNLOR. On the
Hayakawa bill, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 198–202.
26. Dale Rusakoff, “Watt and His Opponents Love Their Mutual Hate,” Washington Post,
March 23, 1982. On the Reagan administration’s response to environmental issues
generally, see Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in
the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 491–526.
On Watt, see Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger, 110–122; and Turner, The Promise
of Wilderness, 232–238. For a hagiographical take on Watt, see Ron Arnold, At the
Eye of The Storm: James Watt and the Environmentalists (Chicago: Regnery Gateway,
1982).
27. Brock Evans, memorandum, January 11, 1980, carton 246, folder 7, SCR.
28. Doug Scott, memorandum, March 26, 1981, carton 52, folder 1, SCNLOR.
29. “The Watt Book,” carton 131, SCMP; press release, April 16, 1981, carton 131, folder 14
SCMP.
30. “More than a Million Americans Sign for the Environment,” carton 131, folder 15,
SCMP. On the response to the anti-Watt campaign, see Turner, The Promise of
Wilderness, 236.
31. Bronson Lewis to President Reagan, May 12, 1981, carton 131, folder 14 SCMP.
32. “A Plug for Mr. Watt,” carton 131, folder 14 SCMP; Jerry Adler, “James Watt’s Land
Rush,” Newsweek, June 28, 1981, 22.
33. “Earth First! Opposes Watt Removal Drive,” press release, April 23, 1981, DF.
34. On Watt’s attempts to expand energy exploration and Congressional action in
response, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 234–237.
35. “Editorial: The Wilderness Protection Act,” Earth First!, September 21, 1982, 2.
36. Howie Wolke, “Little Granite Rig Gets Green Light!” Earth First!, May 1, 1982, 1.
37. Dale Russakoff, “Unlikely Wyoming Posse Saddles Up for Energy Fight,” Washington
Post, August 27, 1982. On the Rendezvous, see Bart Koehler and Pete Dustrud, “Earth
First! Tells Getty Where to GO,” and “Little Granite Stakes Pulled—Again,” both in
Earth First! August 1, 1982; and Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and
the Environmental Movement (New York: Viking, 1993), 216–221.
38. Andrew Bard Schmookler, “Schmookler on Anarchy,” Earth First!, May 1, 1986, 22.
39. Charles Bowden, Blue Desert (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1988 [1986]),
34.
40. Howie Wolke, “Dismantle the Wilderness Act!” Earth First!, March 21, 1983, 11.
41. For a rich discussion of Abbey and anarchism, see Drake, Loving Nature, Fearing the
State, 139–178.
42. Edward Abbey, “A Response to Schmookler on Anarchy,” Earth First!, August 1,
1986, 22; Andrew Bard Schmookler, “Schmookler on Anarchy,” Earth First!, May 1,
1986, 22. See also Schmookler, “Schmookler Replies to the Anarchists,” Earth First!,
December 21, 1986, 24; Schmookler, “Schmookler Replies to Anarchists’ Replies
to Schmookler’s Reply to the Anarchists,” Earth First!, September 23, 1987, 26; and
Schmookler, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, 2nd
ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
43. Roger Featherstone, “Report from The Midwest,” Earth First!, June 21, 1986, 9.
44. Kirkpatrick Sale, “Anarchy and Ecology—A Review Essay,” Social Anarchism 10 (1985),
15.
45. John Clark, The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and Power
(Montreal: Black Rose, 1984), 28.
46. George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon,
Bakunin, and Kropotkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 195. See also
Kingsley Widmer, “Natural Anarchism: Edward Abbey, and Gang,” Social Anarchism
15 (1990). On bioregionalism, see Sale, Dwellers in The Land: The Bioregional Vision
(San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1985). For more on the connection between anarchism
and environmentalism, see Graham Purchase, Anarchism and Ecology (Montreal:
Black Rose, 1996).
47. “Judge Bars Drilling in Wilderness Area,” Washington Post, November 13, 1982.
48. Kathy McCoy, “A Trip to Salt Creek,” Earth First!, December 21, 1982, 10. See also Bart
Koehler, “The Battle of Salt Creek,” Earth First!, December 21, 1982.
49. Dave Foreman, “Editorial: The Lessons of Salt Creek,” Earth First!, March 21, 1983,
2. See also Dale Russakoff, “Firm Gets Approval to Drill in Refuge,” Washington Post,
December 28, 1982.
50. Dave Forman, “Editorial: Shipwrecked Environmentalism,” Earth First!, March 20,
1984, 2. On the state-by-state strategy, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 217–222.
51. Dave Foreman, “Editorial: Kill the Bills,” Earth First!, September 23, 1983, 2.
52. “Appeal the Bastards!” Earth First!, May 1, 1984, 1.
53. Dave Foreman, “An Environmental Strategy for the ’80s,” Earth First!, September 21,
1982, 7.
54. On the privatization initiative and Turnage’s response, see Philip Shabecoff, “U.S.
Plans Biggest Land Shift Since Frontier Times,” New York Times, July 3, 1982; see also
Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger, 123–142. On the response of sagebrush rebels,
see William Schmidt, “West Upset by Reagan Plan to Sell Some Federal Lands,” New
York Times, April 17, 1982.
55. Republican Study Committee, “The Specter of Environmentalism: The Threat of
Environmental Groups,” February 12, 1982, carton 267, folder 52, SCR.
56. “An ‘F’ for the Republicans,” Earth First!, May 1, 1982, 6.
57. Cohen, The History of The Sierra Club, 441.
58. Philip Berry, “No Growth, Zero Growth, Limited Growth,” October 21, 1971, carton
282, folder 157, SCR, 2.
59. Brock Evans, memorandum, January 11, 1980, carton 246, folder 7, SCR. On the Estes
Park meeting, see Neal Pierce, “Ecologists Facing Image Problem,” Sacramento Bee,
April 20, 1980, carton 246, folder 7, SCR; and Carter, “Environmentalists Seek New
Strategies.” On the regional meetings, see Ann Sweazey, memorandum, August 14, 1981,
and Chuck Clusen, memorandum, September 23, 1981, both in box 8 folder 14, WSR.
60. Roger Lubin, “Ecology Backlash: The Selling of the Environment,” Clear Creek, March
1972, 26.
61. Minutes of the Sierra Club board of directors meeting, May 6–7, 1972, carton 4,
folder 12, SCR, 3.
62. “The Counterrevolution,” The Living Wilderness, Summer 1971, 2; and Thomas
Shepard, Jr., “The Case Against ‘The Disaster Lobby,’ ” The Living Wilderness, Summer
1971, 28–30.
63. On public service announcements and individual behavior, see Finis Dunaway, Seeing
Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 64–120. On electric utilities and Jerry Mander, see Joe Greene
Conley II, “Environmentalism Contained: A History of Corporate Responses to the
New Environmentalism,” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2006), 75–79.
64. “The Rise of Anti-Ecology,” Time, August 3, 1970, 43.
65. Leo H. Carney, “For Environmentalists, the Battle Goes On,” New York Times,
January 4, 1981; On the Quality of Life Review program, see Conley, “Environmen-
talism Contained,” 159–167.
66. Jones, “U.S. Environmental Efforts Face Erosion.”
67. Shepard, Jr., “The Case Against ‘The Disaster Lobby,’ ” 29–30; Podhoretz, “Doomsday
Fears and Modern Life,” 4–6.
68. Robert Poole, Jr., “There’s A New Age Dawning,” Reason, April 1979, 16; Jeff Riggen-
bach, “Free Market Conservation,” Libertarian Review, February 1979, 6. See also C. R.
Batten, “The Second Battle of the Redwoods,” Reason, October 1979, 23; Jeffrey San-
chez, “A Pollution Revolution,” Libertarian Review, October/November 1980, 55; and
Robert Smith, “Conservation and Capitalism,” Libertarian Review, October 1979, 25.
The best summary of free-market environmentalism’s history is Brian Drake, Loving
Nature, Fearing the State, 114–138; the best summary of its ideas is Terry Anderson and
Donald Leal, Free Market Environmentalism, rev. ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Lib-
ertarianism has a complicated relationship to the broader conservative movement. On
the Libertarian Party, see Jennifer Burns, “O Libertarian, Where Is Thy Sting?” Journal
of Policy History 19, no. 4 (2007); on libertarianism more generally, see Brian Doherty,
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian
Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007). On the role of free market thought in the
rise of the New Right, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Mar-
kets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
69. Garret Hardin and John Baden, eds., Managing the Commons (New York: W. H. Free-
man, 1977), x-xi.
70. A.W. Langenegger to Farm Bureau members, n.d., carton 131, folder 15, SCMP. Skillen,
The Nation’s Largest Landlord, 73–77. Ranchers’ association of permits with private
property was in part a product of the complicated legislative history of range owner-
ship in the West. For a useful discussion, see Childers, The Size of the Risk, 20–30.
71. John Baden and Richard Stroup, Bureaucracy vs. Environment: The Environmental
Costs of Bureaucratic Governance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 1.
72. Denzel Ferguson and Nancy Ferguson, Sacred Cows at the Public Trough, (Bend, OR:
Maverick Publications, 1983), 202.
73. Don Schwarzenegger, “Beyond Sacred Cows at the Public Trough . . . Or Heading to
the Last Roundup . . . (With Any Luck at All),” Earth First!, November 1, 1984, 22.
74. Denzel Ferguson and Nancy Ferguson, “Sacred Cows at the Public Trough,” Earth
First!, August 1, 1984, 14.
75. Ferguson and Ferguson, Sacred Cows at The Public Trough, 199.
76. Schwarzenegger, “Beyond Sacred Cows,” 22.
77. Ferguson and Ferguson, Sacred Cows, 90.
78. Lynn Jacobs, “The Howling Wilderness?” Earth First!, March 20, 1986, 17.
79. Dave Foreman, “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” Earth First!, February 2,
1986, 18.
80. Edward Abbey, “Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow,” in Abbey, One Life at
A Time, Please (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988), 9.
81. Foreman, “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” 18.
82. Brock Evans, memorandum, November 26, 1980, carton 22, folder 28, SCSW.
83. Ferguson and Ferguson, Sacred Cows at the Public Trough, 3, 122.
84. Abbey, “Free Speech,” 17.
85. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981
[1931]), 295–318.
86. Foreman, “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” 18.
87. Schwarzenegger, “Beyond Sacred Cows at the Public Trough,” 22. On permit rates,
see Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord, 75.
88. Ferguson and Ferguson, Sacred Cows at the Public Trough, 206.
89. Don Schwarzenegger, “Free Enterprise Threatens Welfare Ranchers,” Earth First!,
May 1, 1985, 14. On various bidding schemes, see Lynn Jacobs, “Free Our Public
Lands!” Earth First!, September 23, 1987.
90. “Forest Debate Heats Up,” Earth First!, March 20, 1984, 7.
91. Howie Wolke, “Road Frenzy,” Earth First!, June 21, 1985, 1; “Forest Debate Heats Up,” 7.
See also Wolke, “The Grizzly Den,” Earth First!, December 21, 1984, 11. Historians
do not disagree with Wolke’s assessment. See Paul Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism:
Management of the National Forests Since World War Two (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1994).
92. T. R. Reid, “Guerrilla War for the Wilderness,” Washington Post, November 25, 1984.
See also “30,000 Miles of Roads in RARE II Areas,” Earth First!, December 21, 1984.
93. Howie Wolke, “Editorial: Do It!” Earth First!, December 21, 1986, 5.
94. See “Smokey the Bear Has a Bone to Pick,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1988; and
Karen Pickett, “Day of Outrage Shakes Forest Service Nationwide!” Earth First!,
June 21, 1988.
95. Howie Wolke, “Stop the Forest Service!” Earth First!, February 2, 1988, 1.
96. Bobcat, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the US Forest Service—But
Were Afraid to Ask,” Earth First!, August 1, 1984, 13.
97. Skoal Vengeance, “Burn Down the Façade!” Earth First!, June 21, 1988, 28.
98. Howie Wolke, “Don’t ‘Marketize’ the Priceless!” Earth First!, June 21, 1988, 28. On
the CHEC symposium, Michael, “Freddies and Environmentalists Talk (But What
About the Trees?),” Earth First!, February 2, 1985, 6. On O’Toole, see Kathie Durbin,
Tree Huggers: Victory, Defeat and Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign
(Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1996), 38–40.
99. Dave Foreman, “Hands-On Forest Planning,” Earth First!, August 1, 1985, 24.
100. Gaylord Nelson, letter to the editor, New York Times, November 17, 1984.
101. Randal O’Toole, Reforming the Forest Service (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1988).
102. Bobcat, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know . . .,” 11.
103. Wolke, “Save Our National Forests!” (insert) Earth First!, March 20, 1988.
104. On changes in forestry and the Forest Service, see Samuel Hays, Wars in the Woods:
The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2007). For a perspective from inside the agency, see Jim Furnish, Toward A Natural
Forest: The Forest Service in Transition (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press,
2015).
105. Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Dell, 1991), 223.
106. O’Toole, Reforming the Forest Service, 185, 193.
107. M. Bruce Johnson, “Concluding Thoughts on Earth Day Reconsidered,” in John
Baden, ed., Earth Day Reconsidered (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1980),
106. This alignment of environmentalism and economics has roots in classical eco-
nomic theory, which took the limits of the natural world as absolute and so understood
the study of economics and the study of nature as overlapping. According to Margaret
Schabas, the decoupling of economics from the natural sciences—the “denaturaliza-
tion of the economic order”—was recent and incomplete. Only in the late-nineteenth
century, she argues, did economists begin to measure the influence of human agency
as equal to or above the influence of natural phenomena. See Schabas, The Natural
Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Lisa McGirr
argues that despite the many disagreements between libertarians and social conserva-
tives, they joined forces because libertarians’ belief in property rights as fundamental
to ordering the human world was equivalent to the transcendent moral authority of
religion. See McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 163–165.
108. John Gray, Hayek on Liberty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 29. On libertarian
distrust of human reason and even reservations about the moral basis of capitalism,
see Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 32–38, 108–116, 188–192. According to Alexander
Shand, Hayek considered the market an organic system of protocols arising from
collective and unconscious knowledge that operated by “the same fundamental
principle of natural selection found in the mechanism of Darwinian evolution.” See
Shand, Free Market Morality: The Political Economy of the Austrian School (London:
Routledge, 1990), 54, 66–68.
109. “Oregon Wilderness Hearing,” Earth First!, September 23, 1983, 21.
110. Dave Foreman, “Dreaming Big Wilderness,” Earth First!, August 1, 1985, 18.
111. Stephanie Mills, “Thoughts from the Round River Rendezvous,” Earth First!, February 2,
1986, 25.
112. David Brower, For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City:
Peregrine Smith, 1990), 287.
113. LaRue Christie, memorandum, August 20, 1985, DF.
114. Dave Foreman, “Around the Campfire,” Earth First!, September 21, 1982, 2. Presumably
Foreman meant “neoliberals.”
115. Sabin, “Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order.”
330 5. Earth First! Against Itself
5. EARTH FIRST! AGAINST ITSELF

1. Dave Foreman, “Around the Campfire,” Earth First!, March 20, 1987, 2.
2. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong
3. Leslie Lyon, letter to the editor, Earth First!, December 22, 1987, 22.
4. W. J. Lines, “Is ‘Deep Ecology’ Deep Enough?” Earth First!, May 1, 1987, 31.
5. Jamie Sayen, “Thoughts on an Evolutionary Ethic,” Earth First!, June 21, 1989, 26.
6. Howard Zahniser, “How Much Wilderness Can We Afford to Lose?” in David
Brower, ed., Wildlands in Our Civilization (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1964), 48;
David Brower, “Foreword,” in Maxine McCloskey and James Gilligan, eds., Wilderness
and the Quality of Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1969), vii.
7. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 80.
8. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Crown, 1991), 18. On Edward
Abbey, see James Cahalan, Edward Abbey: A Life (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2001); and Brian Drake, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism
and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2013), 139–178. Also helpful are James Bishop, Jr., Epitaph for A Desert Anarchist: The
Life and Legacy of Edward Abby (New York: Atheneum, 1994); James Hepworth and
Gregory McNamee, eds., Resist Much, Obey Little: Remembering Edward Abbey (San
Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996); and Bill McKibben, “The Desert Anarchist,” New York
Review of Books, August 18, 1988.
9. Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (New
York: E. Dutton, 1977), xi-xiii. On Abbey and nature writing, see Cahalan, Edward
Abbey, 274–275. For Abbey’s various adventures in his own words, see “The Second
Rape of the West,” in Abbey, The Journey Home, 158; “How It Was,” in Edward Abbey,
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1984), 60–61; and “Return to Yosemite: Tree Fuzz vs. Freaks,” in Abbey, The Journey
Home, 138–145.
10. Donn Rawlings, “Abbey’s Essays: One Man’s Quest for Solid Ground,” The Living
Wilderness, June, 1980, 45.
11. Edward Abbey, Confessions of A Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward
Abbey, 1951–1989 (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1994), 264–265.
12. Edward Abbey, “Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom,” in Abbey, The
Journey Home, 230.
13. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1968), 42–51. “On wilderness preservation: Don’t rely on the Park Service,”
Abbey wrote in his journal in 1956. See Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, 132.
14. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 47. On David Brower’s battle with the Park Service over its
“Mission 66” program to encourage car-friendly parks, see Tom Turner, David Brower:
The Making of the Environmental Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2015), 86–88.
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in Rousseau, The Basic Political
Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 141. There is a large literature on classical anar-
chist history and theory. An essential introduction is George Woodcock, Anarchism:
a History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York: Meridian, 1962). A more
recent synthesis is Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991). See also James Joll, The Anarchists (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Gerard Runkle, Anarchism: Old and New (New York: Dela-
corte, 1972); Irving Horowitz, ed., The Anarchists (New York: Dell, 1964); Alan Ritter,
Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980);
and George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proud-
hon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Rousseau’s
relationship to anarchism is fraught. Joll points to Rousseau’s valorization of nature
and “primitive” societies as well as to his emphasis on education and reason, writing,
“It is Rousseau who created the climate of ideas in which anarchism was possible” (The
Anarchists, 30). But while anarchists adopted Rousseau’s criticisms of modern society,
they rejected his prescriptions. According to Runkle, “Rousseau, whose celebration of
the simple life and whose praise for the natural goodness and equality of man make
him a hero of sorts for many anarchists, is nevertheless a flawed hero” (Runkle, Anar-
chism, 43). Rousseau, after all, argued for a social contract that would bind all people
and even generations not yet born. As Woodcock writes, anarchists’ belief in the natu-
ral origin of society set them against any structured system contrived by people, and
“has made almost every anarchist theoretician, from Godwin to the present, reject
Rousseau’s idea of a Social Contract” (Woodcock, Anarchism, 23).
16. “The anarchist is beguiled by neither the practice nor theory of democracy,” Gerald
Runkle writes in Anarchism (4–5). See also Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 37–51.
17. On direct action, see Woodcock, Anarchism, 32–33; and Runkle, Anarchism, 95.
18. Crowder, Classical Anarchism, 13. The belief in a natural order, always just out of reach,
has taken on different forms in anarchist thought but has remained foundational. The
British proto-anarchist William Godwin distinguished between justice and human
law, the former arising from unchanging moral truths, the latter from easily corrupted
human decisions. The French anarchist Pierre Proudhon believed that personal rela-
tionships, unregulated by government, inevitably produced a balanced social struc-
ture. But it was the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin who first connected his social
beliefs directly to the natural world. “Science loudly proclaims that the struggle of each
against all is the leading principle of nature,” he wrote, “and of human societies as well,”
when in fact, he argued, the opposite was true. Against a crude Darwinism, Kropotkin
claimed animals of the same species survived and evolved by assisting one another, and
that cooperation rather than self-interest was the basic principle of nature. (Mutual
Aid: A Factor of Evolution [Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006], 188). Kropotkin’s
ethics were “empirical,” according to Runkle, their justification found “in nature itself ”
(Anarchism: Old and New, 59–60). As Woodcock points out, this is one of the fun-
damental problems with anarchist theory: anarchists reject authority and champion
freedom, but they believe in a well-ordered society. “Indeed,” Woodcock writes, “the
general anarchist tendency to rely on natural law and to imagine a return to an exis-
tence based on its dictates leads by a paradoxical logic toward determinist conclusions
which, of course, clash in a very obvious way with the belief in the freedom of individ-
ual action” (Anarchism, 70). Alan Ritter tries to reconcile this difficulty by arguing that
anarchists advocate “communal individuality,” in which greater freedom for individu-
als leads to greater awareness by individuals of their social situatedness and so a greater
appreciation of community (Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis, 25–39). The point is
that individual freedom, on its own, is not enough for anarchists; the important thing
is what results from that freedom. See also L. Susan Brown, “Anarchism, Existentialism
and Human Nature: A Critique,” The Raven, June 1988; Michael Duane, “Anarchism
and Nature: 1,” The Raven, June 1988; and David Morland, “Anarchism and Nature: 2,”
The Raven, July 1989.
19. Woodcock, Anarchism, 25–27; see also John Clark, The Anarchist Moment: Reflections
on Culture, Nature and Power (Montreal: Black Rose, 1984), 15.
20. “For Your Information,” Earth First!, December 21, 1980. Means’s speech is reprinted
in several periodicals, including as an insert titled “On the Future of The Earth” in The
Fifth Estate, December 1980. Foreman saw Earth First! as allied with bioregionalism,
an anarchistic movement for simplified technology and decentralized political struc-
tures shaped to ecological regions. “Bioregionalism,” he wrote, “is what we are working
for—the future primitive.” See Dave Foreman, “Reinhabitation, Biocentrism and Self
Defense,” Earth First!, August 1, 1987, 22. For a more complete version of the environ-
mentalist veneration of traditional cultures, see Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore
and the Sacred Game (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998 [1973]).
21. Bookchin has never received the attention he deserves. The literature on Bookchin
is limited and not at all proportional to the richness of his writing, and as a result
he became his own greatest promoter. In addition to Bookchin’s own voluminous
works, see Janet Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015). For a collection of mostly critical essays about Book-
chin and social ecology, see Andrew Light, ed., Social Ecology After Bookchin (New
York: Guilford, 1998). For another critical treatment, by a frequent antagonist and
sometimes admirer of Bookchin, see David Watson, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a
Future Social Ecology (New York: Autonomedia, 1996). For defenses of Bookchin, see
Andy Price, Recovering Bookchin: Social Ecology and the Crises of Our Time (Norway:
New Compass, 2012); and John Clark, ed., Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social
Ecology: A Celebration of the Work of Murray Bookchin (London: Green Print, 1990).
22. On the early years of Bookchin’s career, see Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism,
and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993–1998 (San Francisco: AK, 1999),
15–58; on the origins of Bookchin’s interest in environmentalism and on Ecology
Action East, see Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe, 52–99, 131–137; see also Murray Book-
chin, “When Everything Was Possible,” Mesechabe, September/October 1991.
23. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
(Oakland: AK, 2005), 32, 68. Bookchin’s other major works on social ecology include
The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club,
1987), an explanation of an anarchist approach to city life called “libertarian munici-
palism”; Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End, 1990), a
condensed description of both social ecology and libertarian municipalism; and The
Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays in Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose,
1996), a more theoretical treatment of social ecology.
24. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 129. On organic society more broadly, see
109–129.
25. Bookchin, Remaking Society, 66, 94. On hierarchy more generally, see Bookchin,
The Ecology of Freedom, 130–190.
26. Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society, 160.
27. Murray Bookchin, “Social Ecology versus ‘Deep Ecology’: A Challenge for the Ecology
Movement,” Green Perspectives, Summer 1987. The text reprinted in Green Perspectives
is a longer version of the remarks Bookchin made at Amherst and was distributed to
the audience. On the subsequent debate between Bookchin and Earth First!, see Mark
Stoll, “Green versus Green: Religions, Ethics, and the Bookchin-Foreman Dispute,”
Environmental History 6, no. 3 ( July 2001); and Steve Chase, “Introduction: Whither
the Radical Ecology Movement?” in Chase, ed., Defending the Earth.
28. On the Foreman interview, see Foreman, “Second Thoughts of an Eco-Warrior,” in
Chase, ed., Defending the Earth, 107–109; for a more complete version of Foreman’s
early views on immigration, see Foreman, “Is Sanctuary the Answer?” Earth First!,
November 1, 1987.
29. Edward Abbey, “Immigration and Liberal Taboos,” in Abbey, One Life at A Time,
Please, 43.
30. Miss Ann Thropy, “Population and AIDS,” Earth First!, May 1, 1987, 32. “Miss Ann
Thropy” was the pseudonym of Earth First! stalwart Christopher Manes. See also
Daniel Conner, “Is AIDS the Answer to an Environmentalist’s Prayer?” Earth First!,
December 22, 1987.
31. Bookchin, Remaking Society, 11.
32. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 140 (emphasis in original). On Bookchin’s critiques
of Ehrlich and ZPG, see Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe, 148–150; and for a sense of
Bookchin’s original arguments about post-scarcity society, see Bookchin, Post-Scarcity
Anarchism.
33. R. Wills Flowers, “Of Old Wine in New Bottles: Taking Up Bookchin’s Challenge,”
Earth First!, November 1, 1987, 19; Bill Devall, “Deep Ecology and Its Critics,” Earth
First!, December 22, 1987, 18. On the term “eco-fascist,” see Michael Zimmerman,
Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 166–183.
34. Brad Edmonson, “Is AIDS Good for The Earth?” Utne Reader, November/December
1987, 14; letters, Utne Reader, January/February 1988; letters, Utne Reader, March/
April 1988. For a description of much of this exchange, see Kirkpatrick Sale, “Deep
Ecology and Its Critics,” The Nation, May 14, 1988; and Bookchin, letter to the editor,
The Nation, October 10, 1988.
35. “Marx: Good-By to All That,” Fifth Estate, March 1977, 7. For a detailed defense
of the newspaper’s anti-technological stance, see T. Fulano, “Uncovering a Corpse:
A Reply to the Defenders of Technology,” Fifth Estate, November 1981.
36. George Bradford, “Marxism, Anarchism and the Roots of the New Totalitarianism,”
Fifth Estate, July 1981, 10.
37. George Bradford, How Deep Is Deep Ecology? (Ojai: Times Change, 1989), 10, 35. On
Catton, see, for instance, Bill Devall and George Sessions, “The Books of Deep Ecol-
ogy,” Earth First!, August 1, 1984, 18; and William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological
Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Catton
responded that the problem was not capitalism but “industrialism, capitalist or non-
capitalist.” See Catton, Bill McCormick, and George Bradford, “Was Malthus Right?
An Exchange on Deep Ecology and Population,” Fifth Estate, Spring 1988, 9.
38. Dave Foreman, “Whither Earth First!?” Earth First!, November 1, 1987, 21; on “bizarre
utilitarian philosophy,” see “Wilderness Preserve System,” Earth First!, June 21, 1983, 9.
39. Ariel Kay Salleh, “Deeper Than Deep Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection,” Envi-
ronmental Ethics 6, no. 4 (Winter 1984), 340, 344; Ynestra King, letter to the editor,
The Nation, December 12, 1987. One of the most important essays on this subject is
Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Michelle Rosaldo and
Louise Lamphere, eds. Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1974); on the assumed opposition of nature and culture, see Carole Pateman,
“ ‘The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice,” Ethics 91, no. 1
(October 1980).
40. See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1978); Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great
Goddess (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
41. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End, 1991). On the split
between “nature feminists” and “social feminists,” see Joan Griscom, “On Healing
the Nature/History Split in Feminist Thought,” and Ynestra King, “Feminism and
the Revolt of Nature,” both in Heresies, 1981. See also Marti Kheel, “The Liberation
of Nature: A Circular Affair,” Environmental Ethics 7, no. 2 (Summer 1985).
42. Murray Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against
Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism (London: Cassell, 1995), 4.
By the 1990s, Bookchin expressed regret over his earlier “excessive criticism of the
Enlightenment.” See Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe, 289.
43. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 320, 319, 441.
44. Bookchin, Remaking Society, 71–72; Watson, Beyond Bookchin, 17; and Robyn Eckers-
ley, “Divining Evolution and Respecting Evolution,” in Light, ed., Social Ecology After
Bookchin, 71.
45. Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform,
1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 87.
46. Thomas Shepard, Jr., “The Case Against ‘The Disaster Lobby,’ ” The Living Wilderness,
Summer 1971, 30.
47. Tom Stoddard, “Wilderness and Wildlife,” Earth First!, December 22, 1983, 11.
48. Christoph Manes, “On Becoming Homo ludens,” Earth First!, November 1, 1988, 27.
49. Joel Kovel, “Negating Bookchin,” in Light, ed., Social Ecology After Bookchin, 49.
50. For the estimate of Earth First! followers, see Douglas Bevington, The Rebirth
Of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear
(Washington, D.C.: Island, 2009), 33. On Earth First!’s notoriety, see Stewart
McBride, “The Real Monkey Wrench Gang,” Outside, December/January 1983;
“Dave Foreman: The Plowboy Interview,” Mother Earth News, January/February
1985; Ken Slocum, “Radical Ecologists Pound Spikes in Trees to Scare Loggers and
Hinder Lumbering,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 1985; Ann Japenga, “Earth
First! A Voice Vying for the Wilderness,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1985; James
Coates, “ ‘Bears’ Monkey with Yellowstone Intruders,” Chicago Tribune, August 20,
1985; Ronald Taylor, “Pranks and Protests Over Environment Turn Tough,” U.S.
News & World Report, January 13, 1986; and Kirkpatrick Sale, “The Forest for The
Trees,” Mother Jones, November 1986.
51. Alien-Nation, “ ‘Dangerous’ Tendencies in Earth First!?” Earth First!, November 1,
1987, 17–18. As much as “Alien-Nation” sounded like a restatement of social ecology,
Earth First! reported that the Washington anarchists considered Bookchin’s effort a
failure.
52. For Lone Wolf Circles see letters to the editor, Earth First! December 22, 1987, 21; Paul
Watson, “Paul Watson Replies to Alien-Nation, Earth First!, December 22, 1987, 20.
53. Mitch Friedman to Dave Foreman, September 23 (no year given, but almost certainly
1987), DF. On Friedman’s tenure with Earth First!, see William Dietrich, The Final
Forest: Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2010), 159–173.
54. Mikal Jakubal to Dave Foreman (n.d.), DF.
55. Gena Trott to Dave Foreman, May 12, 1989, DF. For a preview of Live Wild or Die
as “a forum for activists feeling a bit alienated from the workings of the [Earth First!
Journal],” see Mikal Jakubal, “ ‘Live Wild or Die’—The Other EF!,” Fifth Estate,
Winter 1988, 10.
56. Lev Chernyi, “Biocentrism: Shackler of Desire,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed,
March/April 1989, 19; Lone Wolf Circles, “The Freedom of Biocentrism: A Poem”;
and Lev Chernyi, “If Nature Abhors Ideologies . . . Biocentrism is no Exception,”
both in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Fall/Winter 1988, 19; and Mikal Jakubal,
“Biocentrism: Ideology Against Nature,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed,
May/July 1989, 21. See also Feral Faun, “Not Guilty,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire
Armed, March/April 1989, 18; and Feral Faun, “The Iconoclast’s Hammer: Nature
as Spectacle,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Summer 1991, 28. Despite intel-
lectual clashes, the anarchists continued to participate in Earth First! actions. See
Mikal Jakubal, “Stumps Suck! on the Okanogan”; and Lev Chernyi, “Notes from The
California Earth First! Rendezvous,” both in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed,
Fall/Winter 1988; and Orin Langelle, “Timber Sale Halted in the Shawnee,” Anarchy:
A Journal of Desire Armed, Autumn 1990.
57. Jakubal, “Biocentrism: Ideology Against Nature,” 21.
58. Estelle Fennell, “The Split in Earth First!” Fifth Estate, Winter 1990/1991, 5.
59. Lone Wolf Circles, “Earth Jazz: Bear Scat and Deep Ecology Licks (More Poet-Tree),”
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, March/April 1989, 18.
60. George Bradford to Christoph Manes, March 20 (no year, although likely 1986 or
1987), DF.
61. Art Goodtimes, letter to the editor, Earth First!, June 21, 1986, 9. On the perception
of environmentalism and Native Sovereignty as aligned, see Paul C. Rosier, “ ‘Modern
America Desperately Needs to Listen’: The Emerging Indian in an Age of Environ-
mental Crisis,” Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (December 2013).
62. On Black Mesa and Peabody Coal, see Rosier, “Modern America Desperately Needs
to Listen”; Judith Nies, “The Black Mesa Syndrome: Indian Lands, Black Gold,”
Orion, Summer 1998; Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of
the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and James
Robert Allison III, Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and
Indian Self-Determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 37–60.
63. See William Brown, “The Rape of Black Mesa,” Sierra Club Bulletin, August 1970; and
Melissa Savage, “Black Mesa Mainline: Tracks on the Earth,” Clear Creek, May 1972.
64. On Black Mesa Defense Fund, see Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First!
and the Environmental Movement (New York: Viking, 1993), 45–62.
65. Jack Loeffler, “Editorial”; and Loeffler, “The Southwest As Symbol,” both in Clear
Creek, May 1972, 12.
66. Needham, Power Lines, 213.
67. On Navajo nationalism generally, see Needham, Power Lines, 213–245; and Rosier,
“Modern American Desperately Needs to Listen,” 728–733. Navajo activists, Allison
explains, developed a “colonial critique” that “blamed bad energy deals on an impe-
rialist federal government intent on ‘modernizing’ (that is, anglicizing) the ‘savage.’ ”
See Allison, Sovereignty for Survival, 59.
68. Needham, Power Lines, 201–212.
69. Abbey, “The Second Rape of the West,” 158–162.
70. Lewis Johnson, letter to the editor, Earth First!, June 21, 1987, 3.
71. Lew Kemia, “Havasupais and Earth First!ers Restore the Canyon,” Earth First!,
December 21, 1986, 7.
72. Ned Powell, “Grand Canyon Uranium Mine Update,” Earth First!, May 1, 1986, 11. On
mine monkeywrenching, see Hayduchess, “Mining the Grand Canyon,” Earth First!,
May 1, 1985; and Mary Sojourner, “Grand Canyon Uranium Mine Protested,” Earth
First!, September 22, 1985.
73. Dave Foreman, “Around the Campfire,” Earth First!, September 22, 1985, 2.
74. For an account of how environmental harm, race, class, and gender have inevita-
bly interwoven in the Southwest, see Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of
Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2015).
75. On EMETIC’s various actions near the Grand Canyon and at Snowbowl, see “Dear
Ned Ludd,” Earth First!, November 1, 1988; and “Monkeywrenching News from
Around the World,” Earth First!, February 2, 1989.
76. John Davis, “Arizona Earth First! Defends on a Broad Front,” Earth First!, September
22, 1985.
77. Michael Robinson, “21 Arrested in Uranium Mine Takeover,” Earth First!, August 1,
1987.
78. Leslie James Pickering, The Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy
(Portland: Eberhardt, 2012), 7.
79. Sacred Mountain Notes, fall 1979, box 3, folder 4, ROC.
80. David Quammen, “Reckoning,” Outside, November 1990, 54.
81. Peg Millett, “Interview with Peg Millett,” in Pickering, The Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist
International Conspiracy.
82. Millett, “Interview with Peg Millett,” 47. On the FBI operation and EMETIC, see
Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 316–341; and Dale Turner, “FBI Attacks Earth First!”
Earth First!, June 16, 1989.
83. On the trial, see Michael Lerner, “The FBI vs. the Monkeywrenchers,” Los Angeles
Times Magazine, April 15, 1990; and Karen Pickett, “Arizona Conspiracy Trial Ends in
Plea Bargain,” Earth First!, September 23, 1991.
84. On Brower, see Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 429; on Snyder, see Daniel Conner to
Gary Snyder, July 15, 1989, box II: 49, folder 13, GS.
85. The Fifth Estate staff, letter to the editor, Earth First!, June 21, 1989, 3; Murray Book-
chin, letter to the editor, New York Times, July 27, 1989; Christine Keyser, “Compro-
mise in Defense of Earth First!,” Sierra, November/December 1991, 47. See also “Gov’t
Attacks Earth First!” Fifth Estate, Summer 1989. Bookchin and Foreman later made
peace; see Chase, ed., Defending the Earth.
86. Mark Davis, “Wake Up!” Earth First!, November 1, 1991, 1.
87. Myra Mishkin, “Keep One Keeping On,” Earth First! Special Edition, June 16, 1989,
np.
88. Mike Roselle, Judi Bari, et al., letters to the editor, Earth First!, November 1, 1991, 31.
89. Alexander Cockburn, “Beat the Devil” The Nation, July 16/23, 1990, 79; G.T.,
“A Report from the Journal Advisory Committee,” Earth First!, September 22, 1990, 4.
On Mike Roselle’s career more generally, see Roselle, Tree Spiker: From Earth First! To
Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action (New York: St. Martin’s,
2009). Roselle was central not only to Earth First! and Greenpeace but to the Rain-
forest Action Network and, later, the Ruckus Society.
90. Judi Bari, “The Feminization of Earth First!” Ms., May 1992. See also Bari, Timber
Wars (Maine: Common Courage, 1994); and Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 342–396.
On Bari’s political views generally, see “Earth First! in Northern California: Interview
with Judi Bari,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4, no. 4 (December 1993).
91. On tree-sits, see Greg King, “New Battles in Maxxam Campaign,” Earth First!, June 21,
1988; Greg King, “Anti-MAXXAM Warriors Climb Back into the Trees,” Earth First!,
June 21, 1989; and Judi Bari, “Californians Start a New Fad: Tree-Sitting Becomes a
Pastime,” Earth First!, September 22, 1989. On lock-box tactics, see Bevington, The
Rebirth of Environmentalism, 63, 133–134; and Mike Roselle, Tree Spiker: From Earth
First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action (New York:
St. Martin’s, 2009), 88.
92. Dave Foreman, and Bill Haywood, eds., Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
(Tucson: Ned Ludd, 1990 [1985]), 14.
93. Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 259–260; and “Hardesty Avengers Spike Trees,” Earth
First!, November 1, 1984, 1.
94. Trip Gabriel, “If a Tree Falls in the Forest, They Hear It,” New York Times Magazine,
November 4, 1990, 58.
95. Ken Slocum, “Radical Ecologists Pound Spikes in Trees to Scare Loggers and Hinder
Lumbering,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 1985.
96. Bob Smith, see “Radicals Hard as Nails About Trees,” Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1988.
97. Michael Lerner, “The FBI vs. the Monkeywrenchers,” Los Angeles Times Magazine,
April 15, 1990, 16.
98. See Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Crown, 1991), 149–152;
and Mike Roselle, Tree Spiker, 124–126. The spiked tree was a thin, second-growth
redwood logged outside of wilderness, from an uncontroversial timber sale, and had
been spiked only after logged, all of which suggested the spiker was not affiliated with
Earth First!.
99. Dale Turner, “Montana Earth First!ers Get Federal Subpoenas,” Earth First!, November
1, 1989.
100. Gabriel, “If A Tree Falls in The Forest,” 58–59; Lerner, “The FBI vs. the Monkey-
wrenchers,” 21.
101. Rich to Mary, et al., August 11, 1988; and Deanne to Rich, et al., August 12, 1988,
both in box 47, folder 14, WSR. See also, in the same folder, draft letter from George
Frampton to the Denver Post disavowing tree spiking, with marginal comment from
“Ben” asking, “Do we really want to be so harsh?”
102. Gary Steele, “My response to Williams terrorism accusation,” n.d., DF.
103. Mary Beth Nearing and Brian Heath, “Oregon Update,” Earth First!, March 20,
1986, 7.
104. Dave Foreman, “Editorial,” and Pete Dustrud and Gary Snyder, letters to the editor,
Earth First!, August 1, 1982, 2.
105. Judi Bari, Timber Wars (Maine: Common Courage, 1994), 269. See also Bari, “Spiking:
It Just Doesn’t Work,” Earth First!, February 2, 1995; and Elliot Diringer, “Environmen-
tal Group Says It Won’t Spike Trees,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 1990.
106. Gene Lawhorn, “Why Earth First! Should Denounce Tree Spiking,” Earth First!,
September 22, 1990, 9.
107. John Henry, letter to the editor, Earth First!, August 1, 1990, 3.
108. Paul Watson, “In Defense of Tree Spiking,” Earth First!, September 22, 1990, 7–9.
109. “Northern California Earth First! Renounces Tree Spiking,” n.d., DF.
110. Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney, and North Coast California Earth First!ers to All Earth
First! Groups, Chapters, Individuals, etc., memorandum, n.d., DF.
111. Neither Erik Loomis nor Darren Speece finds any evidence that Bari’s attempts at
coalition-building yielded enduring alliances. See Erik Loomis, Empire of Timber:
Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2016), 227–228, and Speece, Defending Giants, 188.
112. Erik Ryberg, “Civil Disobedience: An Urgent Critique,” Earth First!, May 1, 1991, 8.
113. Foreman, Confessions of An Eco-Warrior, 158.
114. Judi Bari, “Monkeywrenching,” Earth First!, February 2, 1994, 8.
115. On the Earth Liberation Front, see Craig Rosebraugh, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet:
Speaking for the Earth Liberation Front (New York: Lantern, 2004); and Leslie James
Pickering, The Earth Liberation Front: 1997–2002 (Portland, OR: Arissa, 2007).
116. Bari was in this sense close to the anarcho-syndicalists of the nineteenth century, who
favored direct action but shed the anarchists’ resistance to working within the indus-
trial system. On anarcho-syndicalism and the “timber wars,” see Graham Purchase,
Anarchism and Environmental Survival (Tucson: See Sharp, 1994).
117. Harris, The Last Stand, 273–276.
118. Bari, Timber Wars, 188–192.
120. On Bari, Cherney, and the bombing, see Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 386–396; Bari,
Timber Wars, 25–54, 193–195, 286–328; Kate Coleman, The Secret Wars of Judi Bari:
A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! (San Francisco:
Encounter, 2005), 8–13, 151–185; “The Bombing: What Happened?” and “Someone
Tried to Kill Us, the Cops Tried to Frame Us,” both in Earth First! Extra, Summer
1990; and Judi Bari, “For F.B.I., Back to Political Sabotage?” New York Times, August
23, 1990. On the makeup of the bomb itself, see Harris, The Last Stand, 328–329.
121. The Oakland district attorney eventually dropped the case for lack of evidence, and
the FBI investigation never found a convincing suspect. For Earth First!, it remained
an article of faith that the FBI targeted Bari and Cherney, going to great effort to
prove the activists were responsible for their own bombing. Unsubstantiated theories
about who set the bomb have included logging companies; antiabortion protesters
targeting Bari’s pro-choice activism; Bari’s ex-husband, Mike Sweeney; and the FBI
itself. On Greenpeace and the reaction to the Oakland bombing, see Mike Roselle,
Tree Spiker, 130–131. On the larger environmental movement’s response, see Paul
Rauber, “No Second Warning,” Sierra, January/February 1991.
122. Howie Wolke, “FOCUS on Wilderness,” Earth First!, September 22, 1990, 7.
123. Dave Foreman and Nancy Morton, “Good Luck, Darlin’. It’s Been Great,” Earth First!,
September 22, 1990, 5.
124. Judi Bari, “Expand Earth First!” Earth First!, September 22, 1990, 5.
125. Mikal Jakubal, “ ‘Live Wild or Die’—The Other EF!” Fifth Estate, Winter 1988/
1989, 10.
126. Fennell, “The Split in Earth First!” 5.
127. “A Challenge to the Fifth Estate: Environmentalism and Revolution,” Fifth Estate,
Winter 1990–1991, 18.
128. Stephen Jay Gould, “Our Natural Place,” in Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further
Reflections on Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 25.
129. James Berry, “Is the Sky Falling?” Earth First!, December 21, 1982, 17.
130. Abbey, Hayduke Lives!, 186–212.
131. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 214–215.
340 6. The Limits and Legacy of Radicalism
6. THE LIMITS AND LEGACY OF RADICALISM

1. On human understandings of redwoods and redwood forests, see Elliott Norse,
Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1990); Reed Noss,
ed., The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods
(Washington, D.C.: Island, 2000); John Evarts and Marjorie Popper, eds., Coast Red-
wood: A Natural and Cultural History (Los Olivos, CA: Cachuma, 2001); and Richard
Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (New York: Random House,
2007).
2. Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (New York: Norton, 2013), 5.
3. On conservationists and redwoods, see Evarts and Popper, eds., Coast Redwood,
123–163; Farmer, Trees in Paradise, 60–108; and Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the
Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1983).
4. On orthodoxy and change within the Forest Service, see Samuel Hays, Wars in the
Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2007). For a rich discussion of assumptions about sustainability and yield, see
Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the
Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
5. On Franklin and DeBonis, see William Dietrich, The Final Forest: Big Trees, Forks,
and the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 106–125,
174–190.
6. Hays, Wars in the Woods.
7. Paul Hirt, “Dissension Within the Ranks,” Earth First!, May 1, 1990, 7. On Mumma,
see Paul Rauber, “The August Coup,” Sierra, January/February 1992.
8. See Michael Soulé and Bruce Wilcox, Conservation Biology: An Evolutionary-Ecologi-
cal Perspective (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1980); and David Quammen, The
Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (New York: Touchstone,
1996).
9. Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke to “The Hardcore,” 1980, DF.
10. Reed Noss, “National Forum on Biodiversity: Is Anyone Listening?” Earth First!,
November 1, 1986, 13.
11. Mitch Friedman, “Conservation Biology and the Greater North Cascades Ecosystem,”
Earth First!, May 1, 1988, 26.
12. Reed Noss, “Do We Really Want Diversity?” Earth First!, June 21, 1986, 20.
13. George Wuerthner, “Monarchs of Millenia: Old Growth Forests,” Earth First!,
December 21, 1986, 22. On changing views of forests and old growth, see Hays, Wars
in the Woods, 45–54; Kathie Durbin, Tree Huggers: Victory, Defeat and Renewal in
the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1996), 49–53; and
Steve Erickson, “Forest Service Holds Old Growth Symposium,” Earth First!, August
1, 1989, 7.
14. Pacific Northwest Research Station Old-Growth Definition Task Group, “Interim
Definitions for Old-Growth Douglas-Fir and Mixed-Conifer Forests in the Pacific
Northwest and California,” July 1986, box 22, folder 5, WSR, 3.
15. Northwest Forest Resource Council, “Old Growth: Here Forever,” March 1991, box 22,
folder 7, WSR, 3. On the Wilderness Society, see “Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Defini-
tions,” May 13, 1987, box 22, folder 5, WSR.
16. For competing origin stories of the phrase “ancient forests,” see Dietrich, The Final
Forest, 223–229; and Brock Evans, “Wild Words, Wild Lands,” Wild Earth, Spring
1999, 9–11.
17. Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 280–189; Durbin, Tree Huggers, 146–155; and
“ ‘The Big One’ Educates America,” Earth First!, August 1, 1989, 8.
18. Mitch Freedman [sic], “Old Growth Strategy Revised,” Earth First!, December 21,
1988, 7.
19. For a brief summary of the controversy over the northern spotted owl and old
growth, see Douglas Bevington, The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots
Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear (Washington, D.C.: Island, 2009),
114–123; on environmental pressure, see Wallace Turner, “Endangered Owl is
Focus of Meeting,” New York Times, August 29, 1987.
20. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (New York: Mariner, 1998 (1911)), 157.
21. George Frampton, memorandum, July 15, 1991, box 22, folder 7, WSR. On industry
estimates, see Northwest Forest Research Council, “Northern Spotted Owl,” n.d.,
box 22, folder 7, WSR. On environmentalists’ claims, see Sallie Tisdale, “Marks in
the Game,” Sierra, July/August 1992.
22. On environmental strategy, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 280–289; and
Durbin, Tree Huggers, 87–94.
23. Erik Loomis, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
24. Mitch Freedman, “Spotted Owl EIS Out,” Earth First!, September 23, 1986; and
Mitch Friedman and Lizzie Zemke, “Earth First! Digs in in Washington,” Earth First!,
November 1, 1986.
25. On the “rider from hell,” see Durbin, Tree Huggers, 106–110; and Karen Wood, “Hatfield
Tries to End Controversy, Owls, Old Growth,” Earth First!, September 22, 1989. On
mainstream environmentalists’ response, see Mitch Friedman, “The 1989 Timber
Compromise: Will Environmentalists Ever Learn?” Earth First!, February 2, 1990.
26. On the various Thomas committees, see Durbin, Tree Huggers, 111–118, 197–208.
27. Justin Time, “Option 9: Mainstream Groups Sell Out,” Earth First!, November 1,
1983, 1.
28. Paul Rauber, “Improving on Nature,” Sierra, March/April 1995, 72.
29. On the timber wars, see Darren Frederick Speece, Defending Giants: The Redwood
Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2017); David Harris, The Last Stand: The War Between Wall
Street and Main Street Over California’s Ancient Redwoods (San Francisco: Sierra Club,
1996); and Bevington, The Rebirth of Environmentalism.
30. Mike Roselle, “Tree Huggers Save Redwoods,” Earth First!, November 1, 1983, 4.
31. See David Cross, “Sally Bell Redwoods Protected!” Earth First!, February 2, 1987.
32. For useful discussions of Pacific Lumber’s practices, see Speece, Defending Giants,
124–132; and Harris, The Last Stand, 8–20.
33. On the Maxxam raid, see Harris, The Last Stand; Speece, Defending Giants; and Phil
Garlington, “Predator’s Maul,” Outside, December 1988.
34. See Speece, Defending Giants, 124–142; and Garlington, “Predator’s Maul,” 42. On
criticism of Pacific Lumber, see Robert Lindsey, “Ancient Redwoods Fall to a Wall
Street Takeover,” New York Times, March 2, 1988.
36. “Greg King’s Statement,” Earth First!, September 23, 1987, 6.
37. Howie Wolke, “Save Our National Forests!” Earth First! supplement, March 20,
1988, n.
38. Speece, Defending Giants, 41–42, 154–158. See also Harris, The Last Stand, 284–285.
39. On Forests Forever, see Speece, Defending Giants, 179–184; and Paul Rauber, “Losing
the Initiative?” Sierra, May/June 1991.
40. Speece, Defending Giants, 191–196
41. Reed McManus, “Logging Without Looking,” Sierra, July/August, 1996, 30.
42. Jeanne Trombly email to David Brower, July 2, 1996, carton 23, folder 20, DRB.
43. Reed Noss, “Florida’s National Forests: Our Last Chance,” Earth First!, March 21,
1989, 21.
44. George Wuerthner, “A New Sagebrush Rebellion,” Earth First!, May 1, 1989, 24.
45. Darryl Cherney, “Debt for Nature, Jail for Hurwitz,” Earth First!, December 21, 1993.
46. Ed Wayburn to Dianne Feinstein, September 5, 1995; Barbara Boxer to Ed Wayburn,
March 28, 1996; and Alice Goodman to Dianne Feinstein, August 29, 1995, carton 11,
folder 3, EW.
47. See Speece, Defending Giants, 229–237; and Bevington, The Rebirth of Environ-
mentalism, 62–66.
48. Michael Passoff email to Mikael Davis, September 30, 1998, carton 100, folder 28,
DRB.
49. Carl Pope email to Michael Dorsey et al., July 14, 1998, carton 11, folder 3, EW.
50. See Richard Brewer, Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America (Lebanon,
NH: University Press of New England, 2003).
51. Sally Fairfax, Lauren Gwin, Mary Ann King, Leigh Raymond, and Laura Watt,
Buying Nature: The Limits of Land Acquisition as a Conservation Strategy, 1780–2004
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 5.
52. On the two meetings, see Greg Hanscom, “Visionaries or Dreamers?” High Country
News, April 26, 1999; and David Johns, “North American Wilderness Recovery
Strategy,” Wild Earth, Winter 1991/1992.
53. On TWP, see Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation
in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Island, 2004); David Clarke Burks, ed.,
Place of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1994); and
Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 303–311.
54. Mitch Friedman to TWP board and staff, October 27, 1997, carton 24, folder 8, SCSW.
55. “The Wildlands Project Mission Statement,” Wild Earth (special issue, n.d.), 4.
56. Dave Foreman, “Dreaming Big Wilderness,” Wild Earth, Spring 1991, 12–13.
57. Reed Noss, “Biodiversity, Wildness, and The Wildlands Project,” in Burks, ed., Place of
the Wild, 38.
58. “Proposal: Sky Islands/Greater Gila Nature Reserve Network,” November 18, 1997,
carton 24, folder 10, SCSW.
59. David Johns, “Protecting the Wild Heart of North America: The Politics of Y2Y,”
carton 24, folder 9, SCSW, 1.
60. “Wildlands Implementation Workshop: Designing Strategies for On-The-Ground
Protection,” carton 24, folder 8, SCSW.
61. Howard Schneider, “Conservationists Take Stock of the Land,” Washington Post,
October 27, 1997.
62. “Wilderness Preserve System,” Earth First!, June 21, 1983, 9.
63. Dave Foreman, “Wilderness Areas Are Vital,” Wild Earth, Winter 1995/1995, 68 (italics
in original). See also Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke, The Big Outside: A Descriptive
Inventory of the Big Wilderness Areas of the U.S. (Tucson: Ned Ludd, 1989).
64. Dave Foreman, “Around the Campfire,” Wild Earth, Summer 1993, inside cover.
65. On cores, corridors, and carnivores, see Foreman, Rewilding North America, 128–143;
and Caroline Frasier, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution
(New York: Metropolitan, 2009).
66. Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America, 229.
67. On these various efforts, see Jonathan Adams, The Future of the Wild: Radical Con-
servation for a Crowded World (Boston: Beacon, 2006); Mitch Friedman and Paul
Lindholdt, eds., Cascadia Wild: Protecting an International Ecosystem (Bellingham,
WA: Greater Ecosystem Alliance, 1993); Foreman, Rewilding North America; and
Frasier, Rewilding the World.
68. Amy Irvine, “Strange Bedfellows for Wilderness: Science and Faith,” Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance, Summer 1999, 4.
69. “Proposal: Sky Islands/Greater Gila Nature Reserve Network.”
70. Daniel Simberloff to Dave Foreman, November 23, 1997, carton 24, folder 8, SCSW.
71. Brock Evans, letter to the editor, Wild Earth, Winter 1996/1997, 10.
72. Keith Lampe to David Brower, April 18, 1994, box II: 103, folder 25, GS.
73. Keith Lampe to David Brower, November 14, 1986, box II: 103, folder 17, GS. See also
unnamed Lampe newsletter, July 6, 1985, box II: 103, folder 7, GS.
74. John Davis, “Ramblings”; and David Brower, “The Politics of Environmental
Compromise,” both in Earth First! (February 2, 1990), 2, 26.
75. On zero cut, see Bevington, The Rebirth of Environmentalism, 111–159; and Turner, The
Promise of Wilderness, 315–326.
76. On the Shawnee, see Orin Langelle, “Shawnee Timber Sale Stopped,” Fifth Estate,
Winter 1990–1991, 7.
77. Margaret Young, “What the Big 10 Don’t Tell You,” Wild Earth, Spring 1991, 50. See
also Margaret Young, “Nightmare on Polk Street: ASCMEE Acts Up,” Wild Earth,
Winter 1991/92; and Keith Schneider, “Logging Policy Splits Membership of Sierra
Club,” New York Times, December 26, 1993.
78. Chad Hanson email to David Brower, February 16, 1996, carton 23, folder 20, DRB.
79. This story is told in Bevington, The Rebirth of Environmentalism, 134–138.
80. David Brower, “Public Trees,” September 3, 1994, carton 103, folder 17, DRB.
81. Dave Foreman, “Around the Campfire,” Wild Earth, Spring 1996.
82. Karl Drexel, “Will the Real Sierra Club Please Stand Up?” Christian Science Monitor,
May 24, 1996.
83. Chad Hanson and Carl Pope, letter to the editor, Christian Science Monitor, June
13, 1996. On ongoing zero cut issues, see “Emily,” memorandum, August 13, 1997,
carton 23, folder 34, DRB.
84. On zero cud, see Kirsten Bovee, “Zero-Cow Initiative Splits Sierra Club,” High
Country News, February 26, 2001; and Lynn Jacobs, “An Open Letter to the Sierra
Club and Range Activists,” Earth First!, August 1, 1988, 16.
85. David Brower to Jim McNeill, November 29, 1994, carton 5, folder 110, DRB. On
NREPA, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 311–315; and “NREPA Reintroduced,
Pronounced ‘Dead on Arrival,’ ” Big Sky Sierran, July 1993, 4.
86. Dave Foreman, “The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act and the Evolving
Wilderness Area Model,” Wild Earth, Winter 1993/1994, 57.
87. Dave Foreman, “Evolving Wilderness Area Model,” 57.
88. James Conner, memorandum, August 17, 1993, carton 23, folder 7, DRB.
89. Bruce Hamilton, “An Enduring Wilderness,” Sierra, September/October 1994, 48. On
the Club’s change of heart see also Jenny Martin to “Sierrans,” May 25, 1994, carton 23,
folder 7, DRB.
90. Brooks Martin to David Brower, November 23, 1992, carton 23, folder 7, DRB.
91. Mark Davis to David Brower, 1993, carton 103, folder 17, DRB.
92. David Brower, “Free Trade: Environment in the Balance?” n.d., carton 5, folder 117,
DRB.
93. Carl Pope, “Paying the Price for Free Trade,” Sierra, June/August 1997, 15.
94. See Julie Beezley et al., email chain, July 24–31, 1996, carton 23, folder 21, DRB.
95. Chad Hanson email to David Brower et al., August 27, 1996, carton 23, folder 21, DRB.
On Werbach’s intervention, see Tom Elliott email to David Brower et al., October 1,
1996, carton 23, folder 21, DRB.
96. Tim Hermach to “friends and colleagues,” October 18, 1996, carton 23, folder 21, DRB.
97. David Brower, “Let the River Run Through It,” Sierra, March/April 1997; Christopher
Franklin, “Un-Dam It!” Wild Earth, Fall 1997.
98. On dam removal in the 1990s, see Timothy Egan, “Heralding a New Era, Babbitt Chips
Away at Harmful River Dams,” New York Times, July 15, 1998; Reed McManus, “Down
Come the Dams,” Sierra, May/June 1997; Brad Knickerbocker, “Turning Man-Made
Creations Back to Nature,” Christian Science Monitor, September 26, 1997; and William
Lowry, Dam Politics: Restoring America’s Rivers (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 2003). On reactions to the Sierra Club’s proposal, see Scott Miller,
“Undamming Glen Canyon: Lunacy, Rationality, or Prophecy?” Stanford Environmen-
tal Law Journal 19, no. 1 ( January 2000), 123. For a favorable view, see Daniel Beard,
“Dams Aren’t Forever,” New York Times, October 6, 1997. Beard was commissioner of
the Bureau of Reclamation—the largest dam-building agency in the world—from 1993
to 1995, and a senior vice-president at the National Audubon Society.
99. David Brower, “Let the River Run Through It,” 42.
100. Jennifer Hattam, “Thinking Big: Five Bold Ideas for the New Century,” Sierra,
January/February 2000, 58.
101. On environmental justice, see Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Envi-
ronmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York:
New York University Press, 2001); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transfor-
mation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1993);
Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1990); Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmental-
ism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 125–174; and
Eileen Maura McGurty, “From NIMBY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environ-
mental Justice Movement,” Environmental History 2 ( July 1997).
102. Dowie, Losing Ground, 133–135.
103. On Chavis, see “A Sierra Roundtable on Race, Justice, and the Environment,” Sierra,
May/June 1993, 52.
104. Garrett Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” in Garrett Hardin and John Baden, eds.,
Managing the Commons (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1977).
105. Regular meeting of the board of directors, minutes, February 5–6, 1972, carton 4,
folder 12, SCR.
106. Organizational meeting of the board of directors, minutes, May 7–8, 1977, carton 4,
folder 17, SCR.
107. Organizational meeting of the board of directors, minutes, May 6–7, 1978, carton 4,
folder 17, SCR.
108. . B. Meredith Burke, “Sierra Club Schism: The Limits of Sharing,” Christian Science
Monitor, April 21, 1998. On shifts in Club population policy more generally, see “Popu-
lation,” n.d., carton 23, folder 32, DRB.
109. For Li quote, see Hannah Creighton, “Not Thinking Globally,” Race, Poverty and
the Environment, Summer 1993, 28, carton 40, folder 4, SCOED; Julie Beezley to
“Sierra Club friends,” March 10, 1995, carton 23, folder 15, DRB.
110. “Proposed Resolution for Neutral Position on Immigration Control,” n.d., carton 40,
folder 4, SCOED.
111. John Tanton, letters to the editor, The Atlantic, May 1992, 11.
112. “Population,” n.d., carton 23, folder 32, DRB.
113. On SUSPS, see Alan Kuper to SUSPS members, February 13, 1998, carton 24,
114. On the 1998 vote, see John Cushman, “An Uncomfortable Debate Fuels a Sierra
Club Election,” New York Times, April 5, 1998; and Glen Martin, Ramon McLeod,
and Chronicle staff, “Sierra Club Divided by Vote on Immigration,” San Francisco
Chronicle, February 23, 1998. For the text of the competing proposals, see “Sierra Club
Bulletin,” Sierra, January/February 1998, 105–106.
115. Bill McKibben, “Immigrants Aren’t the Problem. We Are,” New York Times, March 9,
1998.
116. Hilda Solis to Carl Pope, October 28, 1997, carton 23, folder 32, DRB.
117. Roy Hengerson email to Anne Ehrlich, November 20, 1997, carton 23, folder 32, DRB.
118 David Brower, “What Causes Migration?” n.d., carton 6, folder 4, DRB. Julie Beezley
email to David Brower, October 24, 1997, carton 23, folder 32, DRB. Alan Kuper email
to Chris Franklin and David Brower, October 31, 1997, carton 23, folder 32, DRB.
119. Dave Foreman to Alan Kuper, August 29, 1996, carton 40, folder 8, SCOED;
120. David Johns, “Protecting the Wild Heart of North America: The Politics of Y2Y,”
n.d., 7, carton 24, folder 9, SCSW.
121. “Cultural Diversity Issues at TWP,” June 10, 1998, carton 24, folder 9, SCSW.
122. Bonnie Sharpe to Michele Perrault and Sue Lowry, April 26, 1994, carton 40, folder 4,
SCOED.
123. Ric Oberlink email to unknown, November 3, 1997, carton 23, folder 32, DRB.
124. See Michael Soulé and Gary Lease, eds., Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern
Deconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995), 10.
Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in
Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 79.
126. John Davis to Gary Snyder, August 15, 1996, box II: 204, folder 44, GS.
127. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 88.
128. Donald Waller, “Wilderness Redux,” Wild Earth, Winter 1996/1997, 38.
129. On the roadless rule, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 351–362.
130. Foreman, Rewilding North America, 158.
131. Foreman, Rewilding North America, 208.
132. On La Manta Mojada, see Nature More: The Newsletter of Earth First, July 1980, DF.
133. Bart Koehler, “Democracy at Work: Thoughts on Wilderness, Democracy, Freedom,
and Patriotism,” in Wilderness Support Center, Stand by Your Land: An Activists
Guide to Helping People Protect America’s Wild Places, n.d., personal collection of Bart
Koehler. On SEACC, see Durbin, Tree Huggers, 145–146; on the Wilderness Support
Center, see Turner, The Promise of Wilderness, 380–391.
CONCLUSION
1. Abe Streep, “The Trials of Bidder 70,” Outside, December 2011.
2. Kirk Johnson, “No ‘Choice of Evils’ Defense in Oil Lease Case, Judge Rules,” New York
Times, November 17, 2009. On DeChristopher’s popularity, see Streep, “The Trials of
Bidder 70.”
3. On the Middle Santiam, see Mike Roselle, “Oregon Trials: The Middle Santiam Tries
Oregon,” Earth First!, December 21, 1984.
4. Mike Roselle, “Deep Ecology and the New Civil Rights Movement,” Earth First!,
May 1, 1988, 23.
5. Maxine McCloskey, ed., Wilderness: The Edge of Knowledge (San Francisco: Sierra
Club, 1970), 254.
6. Philip Berry, address before Education for Environmental Awareness Conference,
February 28, 1971, carton 4, folder 51, EA.
7. George Marshall to Philip Berry, November 19, 1969, carton 6, folder 7, SCR.
8. David Brower, Tom Turner, and Connie Parrish, “What’s in a Name?: Yes,” Not Man
Apart, October 1983, 2.
9. Bill Devall and George Sessions, “Direct Action,” Earth First!, November 1, 1984, 19.
10. David Brower, “Foreword,” in Maxine McCloskey and James Gilligan, eds., Wilderness
and the Quality of Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1969), vii-vii.
Conclusion 347
11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35
(Winter 2009), 206. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the
Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43 (Winter 2012). For a rich
discussion of Chakrabarty’s views, see Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
12. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 208, 210.
13. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 92, 111.
14. Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 57.
15. Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 198–202.
16. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 158–159.
17. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 31.
18. Mike Roselle, draft statement, n.d., carton 93, folder 25, DRB. See also Karen Pickett,
“Roselle Gets 4 Month Sentence,” Earth First!, March 20, 1988.
19. On CGZ, see Tricia Shapiro, Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop
Removal for the Future of Us All (Oakland: AK, 2010).
Index
Abbey, Edward, 185–88; anarchism of, Alaska National Interest Lands

160–61, 188, 189fig; anti-immigration Conservation Act (ANILCA), 109–10,
stance, 196, 204; and Black Mesa, 316n45. See also Alaska: battle over
211, 212; vs. Bookchin, 192, 197, 234; public lands
on the breakdown of representative Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
democracy, 222; on cowboy life, 172; (1971), 109
Desert Solitaire, 187, 234; and Earth Alexander, George, 223
First!, 121–22, 124, 185, 189fig, 204; and Alien-Nation (anarchist group), 204–5,
the Glen Canyon Dam, 123; Hayduke 233, 335n51
Lives!, 185, 234; The Journey Home, 123; Alliance for the Wild Rockies, 266
The Monkey Wrench Gang, 121–22, 129, Allison, James Robert, III, 336n67
141, 185, 269; on patriotism, 281; on All-Species Projects, 100
terrorism vs. sabotage, 142 Alternatives (journal), 103
Adams, Ansel, 15, 17–18, 26, 38 Amchitka atomic testing ground (Alaska),
Adams, Brock, 246 130–31
AIDS epidemic, 196 America and the New Era (SDS), 32
air quality, xi, 24, 84. See also Clean Air American Indian Movement (AIM), 211–12
Act; pollution anarchism, 188–92; as critique of
Alaska: Alaska Natives, 109, 127, 212–13; democratic principles, 310n65; deep
atomic bombs tested in, 130–31; battle ecology criticized by anarchists, 204–8;
over public lands, 108–10, 114, 116, 117, Earth First! and, 144–45, 159, 160–61,
127, 149, 324–25n23; highlighted in 164, 188, 189fig, 204–6 (see also Earth
1969 wilderness conference, 39–40; First!); Fifth Estate editors’ views,
trans-Alaska pipeline, 58 197–98 (see also Fifth Estate); radical
Alaska Coalition, 109–10, 116 environmentalism and, 7, 144–45,
350 Index
anarchism (continued ) Austin Rag, 50

160–61, 188–92, 189fig, 233 (see also authoritarianism, 76, 77, 309n63, 310n65
radical environmentalism); Rousseau
and, 188, 331n15 Babbitt, Bruce, 269
Anarchy (magazine), 206. See also Chernyi, Baden, John, 169, 171, 176–77
Lev Bailey, Kathy, 256
Ancient Forest Alliance, 243, 244 Bailey, Ric, 137, 180, 243
ancient forests. See forest protection; old- Baker, Marc, 215–16, 262
growth forests; Pacific Coast forests; Bald Mountain (Ore.), 136–37, 140, 163
redwoods; timber industry Barber, David, 299n47
Anderson, Eugene, 43, 44, 50 Bardacke, Frank, 47
Anderson, Harold, 13 Bari, Judi, 7, 219–21, 220fig, 339n116;
Andrus, Cecil, 140, 156 alliance with loggers attempted, 219,
animal liberation movement, 105–6, 315n32 225–26, 228, 338n111; bombed and
the Anthropocene, xii–xiii arrested, 229–30, 262, 339n121; on
anthropocentrism: vs. biocentrism/ Foreman’s departure, 231; Redwood
ecocentrism, xi, 97, 99–105, 313–14n21 Summer event, 228–30, 233, 254; on
(see also ecocentrism); Western sabotaging bulldozers, 232; and tree
grasslands neglected through, 171–72. spiking, 221, 225–28
See also conservation movement; Barron, David, 176
human beings; nonhuman world Beezley, Julie, 268, 274
(nature) Berkeley, Calif., 44–48, 44fig. See also
antiwar protests, 29–30 Ecology Action; People’s Park;
apocalyptic environmentalism. See crisis University of California; wilderness
environmentalism conferences: of 1969
Argus (newspaper), 129 Berkeley Barb, 45, 45
Arizona: EMETIC activities in (Arizona Berkeley Tribe, 35, 47, 48
Five), 214–17, 229, 262; environmental Berry, James, 234
threats to the Grand Canyon, 23–24, Berry, Phil, 64–65, 72, 165, 285, 308n55
57, 150, 213, 214, 298n31; fight over Black Berry, Wendell, 186
Mesa coal, 24, 209–13; uranium mining Biehl, Janet, 200
in, 213–15. See also Lake Powell Big Green (Calif. Proposition 128), 253
Arizona Five, 214–17, 229, 262. See also Bikales, Gerda, 90–91
Davis, Mark; EMETIC biocentrism: anthropocentrism vs., 97,
Army Corps of Engineers, 133 99–105, 313–14n21; defined, 2, 293n2.
The Arrogance of Humanism (Ehrenfeld), See also deep ecology; ecocentrism
104–5, 314n30 biodiversity, 240–42, 254–55
Aspinall, Wayne, 21 bioregionalism, 161, 332n20
Asplund, Ilse, 215, 216 birth control, 78–80, 86, 88. See also
Association of Forest Service Employees population policy and politics
for Environmental Ethics, 178, 240 The Birth Control Handbook, 87
Association of Sierra Club Members for Black Mesa (Ariz.), 24, 209–13, 298n31
Environmental Ethics, 264. See also Black Mesa Defense Fund, 210–11
John Muir Sierrans The Black Panther (newsletter/newspaper),
Atomic Energy Commission, 130–31 47
Audubon Society. See National Audubon Black Panthers, 50–51, 87–88
Society BLM. See Bureau of Land Management
Index 351
blockades: of Forest Service offices, 138–39; population policy and immigration,

of mining equipment, 211–12; of Salt 64, 67, 276; progress, economic growth
Creek oil drilling location, 161–62; of questioned, 24–26; as Sierra Club board
timber roads and logging equipment, member, 266, 267–69; as Sierra Club
136–38, 140, 158, 221–22, 254; useless in executive director, 11, 20, 26–27, 57, 58,
rangeland activism, 173 115; on Smokey Bear, 38; and TWP, 258;
Blueprint for Survival (Goldsmith, et al.), 68 and the wilderness conferences, 38; and
Bonnie Abzug Feminist Garden Club, zero cut, 265. See also Sierra Club
222–23 Buddhist economics, 69. See also
Bookchin, Murray, 7, 51, 192–93, Schumacher, E. F.
332n21; on anthropocentric vs. non- Bullard, Robert, 271
anthropocentric environmentalism, Bunnell, Fred, 43, 44
313n21; and Earth First!, 192–93, 195– Bureau of Land Management (BLM):
98, 217, 233; humanism of, 200–202; on authority, mandate and holdings, 148;
overpopulation as a social problem, 92; Earth First!’s criticism of, 181; grazing
social ecology of, 51, 192–95, 200–203, fees/permits, 173; injunction against
332–33n23, 333n27 logging old growth on BLM lands,
Booth, Paul, 30 245; jurisdiction over, 175; oil and gas
Bowden, Charles, 160 drilling rights auction, 283; and the
Bowers, Richard, 62, 80. See also Zero sagebrush rebellion, 143, 149–51
Population Growth (see also sagebrush rebellion); and tree
Boxer, Barbara, 255 spiking, 224; wilderness review, 114
BP Deepwater Horizon spill, xi–xii Bureau of Reclamation, 20–21, 23, 211,
Bradford, George. See Watson, David 344n98. See also dams; Department of
Bradley, Harold, 17–18 the Interior
Brand, Stewart, 64 Bush administration, 279, 283
Brandborg, Stewart, 65, 112, 116 business. See capitalism; economic growth;
Brooks, Paul, 36 industry; and specific corporations and
Brothers, W. Robert (“Bobcat”), 176–78 industries
Brower, David: and the Arizona Five, 217;
as bridge between mainstream and California: coastal commission, 36; Earth
radical environmental groups, 267; First! in, 134–36, 218, 219–22, 226,
and Clinton, 267–68; on combining 228–29, 238, 247–57 (see also Bari, Judi;
human self-interest with the interests Earth First!); environmental ballot
of wildlife, 40–41; and dams, 20–25, initiatives, 253; Hetch Hetchy Valley, 14,
22fig, 123, 150, 268–69; development of 123; immigration politics in, 274–76;
wilderness areas opposed, 15–17, 20–25; Mineral King Valley, 97–100, 98fig, 150;
Earth First! deemed vital, 280; and Mount San Gorgonio resort, 15–16, 97,
Eiseley, 39; essential points made by, 99; New Melones Dam, 133; People’s
187–88; on freedom within limits of the Park, 44–48, 50–51, 303n108; power
natural world, 286; and the Headwaters line tower sabotaged, 129; Proposition
Forest, 256; holism of, 63; on human 128, 253; and RARE II (California
beings as part of nature, 184; on the v. Block), 119–20, 163; redwoods in,
importance of wilderness, 125; Lampe’s 236–39 (see also redwoods); Redwood
letters to, 262; and Mineral King Valley, Summer event, 228–30, 254; timber
97, 150; need to restrain human action wars in, 247–58 (see also forest
espoused, 53; Newhall quoted, 180; and protection); tree spiking
352 Index
California (continued ) civil disobedience: activists arrested/

in, 222–23; Yosemite National Park, prosecuted for, 138–39, 140–41, 284 (see
14–15, 17–18, 257. See also Pacific Coast also under radical environmentalism);
forests; University of California; and blockades, 136–40, 158, 161–62, 173,
specific locations, organizations, and 211–12, 221–22, 254; vs. ecotage,
individuals 221–22, 225–27 (see also sabotage,
California Redwood Park, 238 environmental); limits of, 161–62,
California v. Block, 119–20, 163 227; tree sitting, 139, 140, 221, 251–52,
Callicott, J. Baird, 105–6 256. See also direct action; and specific
Campbell, John, 250 protests, organizations, and individuals
Campbell, Molly, 137 civilization: development of, in Bookchin’s
Campus, Michael, 79 thought, 194–95; and environmental
Canyon Under Siege, 213 damage/destruction (see crisis
capitalism: anarchists skeptical about, environmentalism; economic growth;
197–98; in Bookchin’s thought, 193, human beings; progress)
195, 197 (see also Bookchin, Murray); Civil Rights Movement, 30–31, 154
and climate change, 287; critiques of, Clark, John, 161
69–70; and environmentalism, 164–69; Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, 58
Lampe on phasing out, 85; ranchers Clear Creek, 166
and, 173 (see also ranchers and cattle clear-cutting, 178, 240, 241–42, 246, 248,
ranching). See also consumption; 249–50, 253. See also forest protection;
economic growth; industry; the timber industry
market; oil and gas drilling; private Cleaver, Eldridge, 50–51
property; timber industry; and specific climate change, xii, 8, 287–89
companies Climate Ground Zero, 289
Carson, Rachel, 27, 32, 193 Clinton, Bill, 247, 254, 264, 267–68, 279;
Carter, Dick, 115 Clinton administration, 255–56
Carter, Jimmy, 109–10, 118, 156; Carter Club of Rome, 68–69, 74
administration, 109–10, 117–18, 148, 167 Clusen, Chuck, 110, 118
Cathedral Forest Action Group (CFAG), coal-fired power plants, 23–24, 209–10,
138, 225, 284 298n31. See also Black Mesa
cattle. See grasslands; ranchers and cattle coal mines, 209–11. See also Black Mesa
ranching Cockburn, Alexander, 218–19
Catton, William, 198, 334n37, 334n37 coercion, and environmental issues, 76–81,
Cellarius, Richard, 71–72 87, 102, 309n63
Central Arizona Project (CAP), 23–24, Cohen, Lizabeth, 83
210, 215, 216, 298n31. See also Black Cohen, Michael, 12, 38, 97, 165, 297n1,
Mesa 301n80
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 287 Collins, Robert, 82–83, 93
Chavis, Benjamin, Rev., 273 Colorado River. See Colorado River
Cherney, Darryl, 219, 229–30, 251, 255, 262, Storage Project; Glen Canyon Dam;
339n121 Grand Canyon; Lake Powell
Chernyi, Lev, 206–8 Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP),
Chicago Tribune, 133 19–21. See also Glen Canyon Dam
Christie, LaRue, 181 Commentary, 147–48, 167
Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Commission on Population Growth and
Wastes, 271 the American Future, 102
Index 353
Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, 131 conservatism (political), 143–49, 181. See
Commoner, Barry, 81–82, 103, 307n41 also New Right; Republican Party; and
commons, tragedy of the, 40, 75–76, 92, specific administrations and individuals
169. See also grasslands consumption, 15, 69–70, 82–85, 93, 275,
compromise: dangers of, 187; and the 277, 287–88, 311n80. See also economic
Glen Canyon Dam, 21–23, 123; growth
mainstream organizations’ acceptance cooperation, 191, 331n18. See also natural order
of, 1, 61, 67, 93, 120 (see also lobbying, Cope, Janet, 251–52
environmental; RARE II); politics as Coppelman, Peter, 124
art of, 32; radical environmentalists’ Council on Environmental Quality, 58
rejection of, 6, 95, 120, 121, 124 (see also Council on Population & Environment,
radical environmentalism) 88–89
Congress: 1970 campaigns, 54; and Alaskan cowboy, myth of, 172–73
public lands, 109–10; and ancient (old- crisis environmentalism: and
growth) forests, 243; and the BLM, 149; authoritarianism, 76–77, 169, 309n63,
environmental lobby and, 28, 56–58, 310n65; crisis and survival, 71–74, 77,
116; and forest roads, 176; Koehler on 87–88, 308n55; critiques of, 102–3; and
working with, 281; and the NREPA, democracy, 74–77, 190; ecocentrism
267; Oregon wilderness bill passed, and, 100–101 (see also ecocentrism);
138; and population policy, 65, 86; economic growth criticized by, 70–71,
and RARE II, 116–20; salvage logging 84 (see also economic growth); ideas
rider passed, 254, 264; “superfund” and history of, x–xi, 66–71, 92–94,
toxic cleanup act weakened, 167; 307nn40–41; overlap between radical
temporary ban overturned, 162; and the environmentalism and, 196–97; and
Wilderness Act, 111. See also specific acts population fears/policy, 68, 70–71,
and individuals 84–92, 196–97 (see also population
conservation biology, 235, 239–47, 252, policy and politics; Zero Population
255, 259–61, 266, 279. See also forest Growth); as term, 307n41; wilderness
protection: timber wars; NREPA; degradation as sign/cause of
old-growth forests; spotted owls; the environmental disaster, 125. See also
Wildlands Project ecocentrism; radical environmentalism
conservation movement: amateur/ Cronon, William, viii, xi, xiii–xiv, 126, 183,
philanthropic tradition in, 12–13; 185, 198, 278-279
anthropocentrism of, 104 (see also Crowder, George, 161, 191
anthropocentrism); balancing public Cunningham, Bill, 127
appeal vs. public impact, 16–17, 18,
19; Brower on, 25–26; conservatism Dahl, Robert, 310n65
and, 146–47; democracy and, 25–26; Daly, Herman, 69, 70, 168, 307n41
ecological/evolutionary turn, 38–41; Daly, Mary, 200
environmentalism and, 27 (see also dams, 123; dam removal, 268–69; Glen
environmentalism: emergence of ); Canyon Dam, 20, 21–23, 24–25, 123–
limits of, 24; and the New Left in the 24, 268–69; New Melones Dam, 133;
San Francisco Bay Area, 42–44; and proposed for Grand Canyon, 23–24, 57,
overpopulation, 38, 63, 64–65 (see also 298n31; proposed in Dinosaur National
population policy and politics); Sierra Monument (Echo Park), 19–21, 57;
Club at center of, 11 (see also Sierra Tuolumne River (Hetch Hetchy
Club); working within the system, 36–37 Valley), 14, 123. See also water
354 Index
Davies, Jeremy, 288 Despite Everything (magazine), 50,

Davis, John, 258, 262, 278 303n121
Davis, Kingsley, 78 Devall, Bill, 102, 124, 140, 196, 197, 286
Davis, Mark, 215–17, 262, 267 Dinosaur National Monument, 19–21, 57
DeBell, Garrett, 84–85 direct action: activists arrested/prosecuted
DeBonis, Jeff, 240, 280 for, 138–39, 140–41, 214–17, 284 (see
DeChristopher, Tim, 283–84 also under radical environmentalism);
deep ecology: Bookchin vs., 192, 195–96, anarchism and, 190; blockades, 136–40,
198–203; conflated with mainstream 158, 161–62, 173, 211–12, 221–22, 254;
environmentalism, 165; criticisms and by Earth First!, 128, 134–42, 158–59,
responses, 102–4, 195–96, 198, 199–201, 161–62, 164, 176, 213–15, 221–28,
204–9; defined, and core principles, 248, 252–56 (see also Earth First!); by
2, 96–97, 101–2; ethical dilemmas EMETIC, 215–17 (see also EMETIC);
of, 102–6, 202–9; reason for rise of, environmental sabotage, before Earth
313–14n21. See also ecocentrism Day, 129, 319n107 (see also sabotage,
Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered environmental); by Greenpeace,
(Devall and Sessions), 102 130–32; preferred by radical
Delacour, Mike, 45 environmentalists, 2, 95, 96, 128–42,
democracy: Abbey on the breakdown 190; tree sitting, 139, 140, 221, 251–52,
of, 222; anarchist critique of, 188–90; 256; tree spiking, 1–2, 221–28, 338nn98,
antidemocratic “coercion,” 76–81, 101. See also specific organizations,
87, 102; Brower on democracy, locations, and individuals
development, and wilderness, 16–17, Disney corporation (Walt Disney, Inc.),
25–26; crisis environmentalism’s 97–98. See also Mineral King Valley
critique of, 74–77, 92–93, 309n63, 309– Dombeck, Mike, 279
10n65 (see also crisis environmentalism); Don’t Make a Wave Committee, 130–32.
environmentalists’ questioning of, 55, See also Greenpeace
190; limits of, 7, 74–75, 92–93; need Douglas, William O., 100
for compromise in, 61; New Left and, Drake, Brian, 168
31–32, 299n47; Sierra Club’s democratic Drengson, Alan, 102
goals, 13, 15–17 Drury, Newton, 20
Democratic National Convention (1968), 34 Dubois, Mark, 133
Department of the Interior: and Alaskan Dugelby, Barbara, 258
public lands, 109 (see also Alaska); and Dumping in Dixie (Bullard), 271
the Central Arizona Project, 23–24, Dwyer, William ( Judge), 246
210; and dam construction, 19–21, 23
(see also dams); environmentalists’ Earth Day, 28, 35; and environment
criticism of, 150; during the Nixon lobbying, 56–57, 60, 62, 66; New Left’s
administration, 59; Salt Creek opened criticism of, 35; Sierra Club and, 36;
to oil drilling, 162 (see also Salt Creek tenth-anniversary stock-taking, 152–53.
Wilderness); Watt as head of, 154–56, See also Nelson, Gaylord
157fig, 174–75. See also Bureau of Land Earth First!: Abbey and, 121–22, 124,
Management; Bureau of Reclamation; 185 (see also Abbey, Edward); and
National Park Service anarchism, 144–45, 159, 160–61, 188,
desert, American, 122–23 189fig, 204–6 (see also anarchism);
Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 187, 234. See also Arizona Five arrests and trial, 214–17,
Abbey, Edward 229; Bookchin vs., 192–93, 195–98,
Index 355
201–3; and the California timber (see also wilderness preservation);

wars, 247–56; coexistence of wildness wilderness preservation the primary
and human civilization advocated, goal of, 124–26; women in, 221. See
260; and conservation biology, 235, also crisis environmentalism; direct
252 (see also conservation biology); action; radical environmentalism; and
contradictory approaches of, 162–64, specific individuals
173–74, 181; core principles, 6–7, Earth First! Journal, 312n1; Bookchin’s
107, 120–22, 125–26, 139, 141, 183, criticism of articles in, 196; on carrying
199; criticism of, 7, 126, 139–42, 185, on the fight, 217; on dissension within
200, 204–5; direct action by, 128, the Forest Service, 240; on divisions
134–42, 158–59, 161–62, 164, 176, within Earth First!, 230; Forest Service
213–15, 221–28, 248, 252–56; divisions critiqued, 177; on grazing on public
within, 183, 185, 203–6, 218–28, lands, 171; mainstream organizations
230–33; ecocentrism of, 6–7, 124–26, criticized, 247, 264; one reader’s
174, 183–85, 232, 235, 314n21 (see also enthusiasm, 95; responses to Alien-
ecocentrism); and EMETIC, 214–17; Nation, 204–5; on the sagebrush
vs. the Forest Service, 107, 174–79, 181, rebellion, 151; sample appeals form
245, 247 (see also forest protection; published, 163; Schmookler on
and specific protest locations); government as paradox, 159; scientific
and Glen Canyon Dam, 123–24; research reported, 241; and zero cut,
government criticized, 152; on the 265
human-nonhuman relationship, 107, Earth First! v. Block, 163. See also Bald
125–26, 139, 184–85, 199, 202, 233–34; Mountain
importance and legacy of, 261–64; Earth Island Institute, 254
influence of, 96, 262–64, 279–81 (see Earth Liberation Front (ELF), 228
also specific organizations); and James Earth Read-Out (Lampe newsletter/
Watt, 156; mainstream organizations column), 42. See also Lampe, Keith
criticized, 6, 124, 156–58, 162, 247; and Eber, Ron, 36
market relationships, 145; membership Eckersley, Robyn, 201
(following), 203; and Native peoples, ecocentrism, 96–106; alternate terms
211, 212–13; and the New Right, 145; for, 2, 96, 293n2; anthropocentrism
Nomadic Action Group formed, vs., 97, 99–105, 313–14n21; and crisis
140; origins of, 6, 120–22, 122fig, environmentalism, 100–101; critiques
141; and the purchase of private of, 103–4, 314n28; defined, and core
lands, 248–49, 257 (see also Sally Bell principles, x–xi, 2, 6, 96–97, 101–2, 278,
Grove); rangeland activism, 169–74; 288–89, 293n2; of Earth First!, 6–7,
on Republicans’ attempts to discredit 124–26, 174, 183–85, 232, 235, 314n21
them, 165; rewilding advocated, 127– (see also Earth First!); embraced by
28; Round River Rendezvous, 158, 180, radical environmentalists, 151 (see also
204, 215, 216, 234; on the sagebrush radical environmentalism); history of
rebellion, 151; and social issues, 7, 183, ecocentric thought, 101–6, 313–14n21;
196, 202–5, 219, 231, 232 (see also Bari, holism a risk of, 6–7, 183–85, 232–33
Judi); state-by-state strategy criticized, (see also holism); Sierra Club and,
163; supporters’ zeal, 95; traditional 97–99, 102; wilderness and ecocentric
and radical strategies both used, 163– thought, 125. See also biocentrism; deep
65; and tree spiking, 221–28, 338n98; ecology
wilderness politics before, 106–20 Eco-Commando Force ’70, 129, 319n107
356 Index
Ecodefense: A Field Guide to politics, 87, 88, 89; and Stanford, 72–73,
Monkeywrenching (Foreman and 309n60; and ZPG, 78, 78
Haywood), 222 Eiseley, Loren, 39
ecofeminism, 199–200, 221. See also EMETIC (Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist
women’s movement International Conspiracy), 214–17, 267.
eco-guerrilla movement, 129. See also direct See also Arizona Five
action Endangered Species Act (ESA), 58,
Eco-Liberation Front, 48 246–47, 256
ecology. See conservation biology; Energy Fuels Nuclear, 213, 214, 215
conservation movement; deep ecology; Environmental Action (organization), 55,
environmentalism; social ecology 319n107
Ecology Action, 43–44, 48–50, 66, 85, 193. environmental crisis. See crisis
See also People’s Park environmentalism
Ecology Action East, 193 The Environmental Handbook (DeBell,
“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” ed.), 84–85
(Bookchin), 192. See also Bookchin, environmental impact statements (EIS), 58,
Murray 98–99, 111, 131
The Ecology of Freedom (Bookchin), environmentalism: and the 1970
193–94, 201 Congressional campaigns, 54;
economic growth: critiqued/questioned, anarchism and, 161 (see also anarchism);
25, 55, 68–70, 83–84, 93, 165; growth in the Anthropocene, xii–xiii;
liberalism, 4, 82–83, 93, 287, 311n80; anthropocentrism of mainstream
as imperative, 82–83, 167; steady-state environmentalism, 102–5, 171–72
economy as alternative to, 69, 307n41. (see also anthropocentrism); anti-
See also capitalism; consumption; environmentalists criticized, 149–50;
industrialization; industry; the market anti-Watt campaign, 154–56; backlash
ecosystem management, 246–47. See also against (see sagebrush rebellion);
Forest Service, U.S. Bookchin’s criticism of, 195 (see also
ecosystem protection. See also forest Bookchin, Murray); call for humility,
protection; wilderness preservation restraint, and connectedness at heart of,
ecotage. See sabotage, environmental 286; capitalism and, 164–69; concept
Ecotopia Earth First!, 219–21, 225–30. See of collective humanity in, 80–82;
also Bari, Judi connections between mainstream
ecotopianism, of Lampe, 49, 85. See also and radical environmentalism, 236,
Lampe, Keith 262–69, 279–81, 284–86 (see also
Edge, Rosalie, 13 specific organizations and topics);
Ehrenfeld, David, 104–5, 125, 241, 314n30 conservation and, 27, 52 (see also Sierra
Ehrlich, Anne, 67–68, 276. See also The Club); conservatism and, 145–48,
Population Bomb 165; and the “cultural turn,” viii–x; as
Ehrlich, Paul: at the biodiversity forum, distraction from social problems, 28;
241; critiques of, 81, 84, 88, 103, 197, and economic growth, consumption,
307n41, 310n77; and immigration and and capitalism, 55, 83–85, 93, 165–69
population politics, 91, 276; ’“Nature (see also capitalism; consumption;
bats last,” 180; on overpopulation and economic growth); emergence of,
crisis, 40, 41, 67–68; The Population 52–53; and Forest Service reform,
Bomb, 63, 67–68, 73, 87, 309n58, 178–79 (see also Forest Service, U.S.);
310n77; and race and population fundamental philosophical debates
Index 357
within, 7 (see also democracy: limits Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),

of; individual freedom: limits of; the 36, 58, 167
market); and holism (see holism); Environmental Protection Information
humanism vs., 2–3; ignored/disparaged Center (EPIC), 248–49, 252–55
by New Left and SDS, 29, 32–33, 34–35, environmental regulation: Endangered
43, 300n53; and immigration, 90–91, Species Act (ESA), 58, 246–47, 256;
236, 273–77 (see also immigration); environmental impact statements
and laissez-faire economics, 179–80, (EIS), 58, 98–99, 111, 131; EPA,
329n107; and Left/Right politics, 36, 58, 167; Federal Land Policy
143–45; limits as central concern of, and Management Act (FLPMA),
3, 55–56; lobbying by environmental 148, 150 (see also Bureau of Land
organizations, 56–58, 60–61, 95, Management); industry opposition
109–10, 113, 115–16; mainstream groups to, 55, 165–67 (see also industry);
criticized by radicals, 6, 95–96, 119, National Forest Management Act
124, 142, 156–58, 162, 247; mainstream (NFMA), 243–44; during the
groups criticized from within, 263–64; Nixon administration, 58–60,
modern society questioned by, 55–56, 167–68, 305n13; during the Reagan
262–63; momentum declining, administration, 154; salvage logging
in 1980, 152–53, 324–25n23; and rider and, 254, 264, 268. See also
Native sovereignty in the Southwest, lobbying, environmental; National
209–14, 215; and the New Left, Environmental Policy Act; and specific
28–29, 42–44, 48–49 (see also New agencies and federal laws
Left; People’s Park); optimism, 7–8; Environmental Study Conference, 117
organizations’ relationship with the EPA. See Environmental Protection
federal government, 58–62, 150–53, Agency
159–60, 182; and population issues/ EPIC. See Environmental Protection
politics, 62–66, 80–81, 83–84 Information Center
(see also population policy and Evans, Brock: on the benefits of
politics); primary concerns of, 27; compromise, 61; on Earth First!,
professionalization of environmental 224, 280, 280; on the failure of the
groups, 57, 60–61, 115–16, 151; and regulatory approach, 153, 165; and
the sagebrush rebellion, 149–51; the RARE II campaign, 116; and
skepticism central to, 7–8; and social the sagebrush rebellion, 172; on the
ecology, 51–52 (see also social ecology); Sierra Club’s influence, 56; on the
and social justice, 29, 34–35, 103, environmental movement at the end
203, 236, 271, 307n41 (see also social of the 1970s, 153, 154; on the spiritual
justice); state power’s effectiveness and aesthetic aspects of forests, 261; on
questioned, 144; tensions between whether environmentalists should be
liberalism and, 3–5, 293–94n3, 294n4 revolutionaries, 41
(see also growth liberalism; individual evolution, 39, 200–201
freedom; liberal humanism); traditional
cultures esteemed, 191–92, 209, 212 Fain, Mike (“Mike Tait”), 216
(see also Native Americans). See also Farmer, Jared, 238
crisis environmentalism; radical Farquhar, Marjory, 13
environmentalism; Sierra Club FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 214,
environmental justice movement, 271–73. 216, 223, 229–30, 339n121
See also social justice Featherstone, Roger, 122fig, 161, 213
358 Index
federal government: and Alaskan public traditional methods, 163–64; on the

lands, 109–10; conservative views Glen Canyon Dam, 124; on green
on federal power, 147–48; corporate anarchists, 208; on human limits, 180;
influences, 165–66; EMETIC and on the human-nonhuman relationship,
Earth First! activists arrested and 199; on immigration and foreign aid,
prosecuted, 216–17 (see also Arizona 196, 276, 285; interviewed by author,
Five); environmental organizations’ xvi; on James Watt, 156; on mainstream
relationship with, 58–62, 150–53, environmental groups, 162, 164; on the
159–60, 181–82 (see also lobbying, need for criticism, 183; on O’Toole’s
environmental); and the purchase of critique of the Forest Service, 177;
private lands for conservation, 256–57; on radicalizing the environmental
skepticism and distrust of, 144, 151–52, movement, 133–34; on ranching,
158–61 (see also anarchism); Westerners’ 172, 173; on relations with Native
relationship with, 143, 145, 148, 323n12 Americans, 213; and the rifts within
(see also sagebrush rebellion). See also Earth First!, 205–6; on Russell Means,
Congress; environmental regulations; 192; as Sierra Club board member, 266;
Supreme Court; and specific ’on tree spiking, 222, 227; and TWP,
departments, agencies, administrations, 258, 260–261; violence against, 137; on
and individuals wilderness preservation, 125; and the
Federal Land Policy and Management Act Wilderness Society, 115–16, 119, 120;
(FLPMA), 148, 150. See also Bureau of and zero cut, 265
Land Management forest protection: ancient (old-growth)
Federal Lobbying Act (1946), 57 forests, 236–39, 242–57, 265; salvage
Feinstein, Dianne, 255, 256 logging rider detrimental to, 254, 264;
feminism. See gender equality; women’s science and, 239–44; spotted owls and,
movement 243–47, 252; zero cut policy, 263–66.
Ferguson, Denzel and Nancy, 171, 172, 173, See also litigation; Pacific Coast forests;
280 wilderness preservation
Fifth Estate (anarchist newspaper), 34–35, forestry practices: clear-cutting, 178, 240–
197–98, 206, 217, 232, 233 42, 246, 248–50, 253; fire and forest
fire, and forest health, 38 health, 38; forest reform, 178; selective
Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S., 162, 175, 245 cut and sustained yield, 249–50, 252;
Flateboe, Connie, 35–36 traditional, 239–40. See also Forest
Flippen, J. Brooks, 305n13 Service, U.S.; timber industry
FOE. See Friends of the Earth forests. See forest protection; forestry
FOR (Friends of the River), 133 practices; Forest Service, U.S.; Pacific
foreign aid, 196, 285 Coast forests; redwoods; timber
Foreman, Dave, 135fig, 189fig, 220fig; in industry; wilderness; wilderness
Abbey’s Hayduke Lives!, 234; arrested preservation
by FBI, 216–17; on biodiversity, 241; Forest Service, U.S.: author’s experience
on bioreligionism, 332n20; and Black with, vii–viii; dissension within, 175,
Mesa, 211; Bookchin vs., 192, 195–96; on 178, 240; Earth First! vs., 107, 174–79,
Clinton-era roadless area management 181, 245, 247 (see also specific protest
reform, 279; departure from Earth locations); ecosystem management,
First!, 231; direct action defended, 246–47; grazing fees, 127, 173;
142, 151; Earth First! founded, 120, jurisdiction over, 175; and Mineral King
122fig, 185; on the effectiveness of Valley, 98–99 (see also Mineral King
Index 359
Valley); and mining, 213; multiple- GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
use mandate, 99, 111, 150, 177–78; Trade), 267–68
old-growth forests studied, 242; and gender equality, 85–86, 199–200. See also
Oregon lands, 136–38, 140; and “purity women’s movement
policies,” 127; and RARE I, 111; and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
RARE II, 107, 110–12, 116–19, 316n49 See GATT
(see also RARE II); roadbuilding Georgia-Pacific (G-P), 228, 248
“binge,” 175; roadless area management, Getty Oil, 158–59, 159fig
vii–viii, 279; Sierra Club and, 17–18, Ghosh, Amitav, 287–88
176; slow reform of, 178–79; Smokey Ginsberg, Alan, 49
Bear mascot, 38, 41, 302n92; and Gitlin, Todd, 29, 33, 49, 300n52
spotted owls, 243–47; and the timber Glen Canyon Dam, 20, 21–23, 22fig, 24–25,
industry, 111–12, 120, 136, 138, 177–78, 123–24, 268–69
240, 242 (see also timber industry); Godwin, William, 331n18
traditional vs. ecological forestry, Gold, Lou, 140
239–40; and tree spiking, 222, 223, 225 Goldwater, Barry, 144, 146
Forests Forever (Calif. Proposition 130), 253 Gulf Coast Tenant Leadership
Forrester, Jay, 73–74 Development Project, 272
fossil fuels, 25, 287–88. See also Black Mesa Goodtimes, Art, 209
(Arizona); coal-fired power plants; oil Gossage, Howard, 23
and gas drilling Gosse, Van, 299n47
the Fox (ecoguerilla), 129 Gould, Stephen Jay, 234, 241
Fox, Stephen, 12, 13, 20, 23–24, 313–14n21 government (generally): anarchist view
Frampton, George, 244, 338n101 of, 188–89, 191 (see also anarchism);
Franklin, Jerry, 240, 253 Schmookler on, 159, 160–61, 163.
freedom. See individual freedom See also Congress; democracy;
free-market environmentalism, 167–74, federal government; and specific
176–77, 179–80, 249–50 federal departments and agencies,
free trade, 267–68, 276 administrations, and states
Friedman, Mitch, 205, 241, 243, 258, 259, Grand Canyon, threats to, 23–24, 57, 150,
261 213, 214, 298n31
Friends of the Earth (FOE): and the grasslands: grazing permits and fees, 127,
Alaskan wilderness, 109, 114, 127; and 170, 173–74; overgrazing and protection
the Bari investigation, 230; criticized by of, 150, 169–74; zero cud initiative, 266.
Earth First!, 124; Friends of the Earth- See also ranchers and cattle ranching
Canada, 103; growth of, 60; newsletter grassroots activism: appeal of, 190; and
name, 286; and RARE II, 114, 118; and California ballot initiatives, 253;
ZPG, 64 and environmental justice, 272;
Friends of the River (FOR), 133 environmental movement’s shift
Futrell, William, 61 to professionalism from, 60–61,
future, predictions of, 40, 67–68, 115–16 (see also professionalization
72–74, 309n58. See also crisis of environmental groups); fervor/
environmentalism; The Population dedication of activists, 96; limits
Bomb; population policy and politics of, 161–62; as one of two strains of
environmentalism, 102; SDS and, 32;
Gadsden Flag, 189fig and the Sierra Club, 236, 243, 262,
Gasquet-Orleans (G-O) Road (Calif.), 136 266–67; and Watt’s agenda, 154–55,
360 Index
grassroots activism (continued ) Hobbes, Thomas, 76

162; Wilderness Society and, 112, Hoff, Derek, 68, 83, 88
113–14, 120, 243, 280–81; and zero cut, holism, xi, 285; of crisis environmentalism,
264. See also civil disobedience; direct 80–81, 93, 196–97; defined, xi;
action; radical environmentalism; and ecocentrism and, 6–7, 183–85, 232–33;
specific groups and individuals of Ecology Action, 44; human beings
Gray, John, 180 and nonhuman nature viewed as
The Greening of America (Reich), 28–29 mutually exclusive, 183–85; in light
Greenpeace, 129–32, 138, 230, 289, 312n3. of climate change, 286–88; and
See also Hunter, Robert overpopulation concerns, 63, 196–97
growth liberalism, 4, 82–83, 93, 287, 311n80. (see also population policy and politics);
See also consumption; economic growth social and cultural differences ignored
by, xi, 34, 81–82, 184, 232; as strength
Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs), 256 and weakness of environmentalism, 34,
habitat destruction. See Habitat 50, 232; of ZPG, 80, 197
Conservation Plans; spotted owls Hoosier National Forest, 263
Hanson, Chad, 264–65 Hopi people, 191–92, 209–11, 215. See also
Hardin, Garrett, 40, 75–76, 80, 92, 169, Native Americans
273, 307n41 How Deep Is Deep Ecology? (Bradford), 198
Hargrove, Eugene, 141–42 human beings: Abbey on relationship to
Harpers Ferry conference, 153, 154, 165 nature of, 234 (see also Abbey, Edward);
Harry (newspaper), 129 Bookchin on relationship to nature
Hatch, Orrin, 149 of, 193–95, 200–202 (see also social
Hatfield, Mark, 136, 180, 246 ecology); crisis environmentalism’s
Havasupai people, 213 emphasis on, 72 (see also crisis
Hayden, Tom, 30, 31, 47, 101 environmentalism); debates over
Hayduke Lives! (Abbey), 185, 234. See also relationship to nonhuman world
Abbey, Edward (generally), 7, 198–99, 202–9, 233–34;
Hayek, Friedrich, 180, 329n108 Earth First! on the human-nonhuman
Hays, Samuel, 87, 240, 295n9 relationship, 107, 125–26, 139, 184–85,
Haywood, Bill, 222 199, 202, 233–34; nonhuman world
Headwaters Forest (Calif.), 251–57. See also (nature) valued equally with, x, 39,
forest protection: timber wars 96–97, 101, 104–5, 107; in opposition
Heartwood (organization), 263 to the nonhuman world, xi, 40–41,
Heath, Brian, 225 94, 103, 183–85, 198–99, 202,
Heilbroner, Robert, 77, 310n65 208–9, 217, 233–34, 271 (see also crisis
Herber, Lewis. See Bookchin, Murray environmentalism; ecocentrism;
Hermach, Tim, 263, 265, 268 holism); as part of/related to the
Herrick, Chuck, 42–44 nonhuman world, 103–4, 184–85,
Herschler, Ed, 158 200–202, 206–9, 233–34, 286; role of,
Hetch Hetchy Valley, 14, 123 in deep ecology, 103–4 (see also deep
Heyns, Roger, 46 ecology); Sierra Club’s increasingly
Hickel, Walter, 59 critical view of, 39–41, 301n80; women
hierarchy, Bookchin on, 193–95 associated with nature, 194, 199–200.
Hill, Gladwin, 54 See also anthropocentrism; humanism;
Hirt, Paul, 240 liberal humanism; misanthropy; social
Hoagland, Edward, 186 justice
Index 361
Human Events, 147 and cattle ranching; timber industry;

humanism: of Bookchin, 200–202 and specific corporations
(see also Bookchin, Murray); IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 57–58
critiques of, 314–15n30; Ehrenfeld’s
critique of, 104–5, 125, 314–15n30; Jackson, Henry, 58
environmentalism framed as, 102–3; Jacobs, Lynn, 172
environmentalism vs., 2–3; of the New Jacobs, Meg, 311n80
Left, 32. See also anthropocentrism; Jakubal, Mikal, 139, 205–8, 232
liberal humanism Jeffers, Robinson, 286, 301n80
humility, 4, 286, 288–89 John Muir Sierrans, 264–66. See also
Humphrey, Cliff, 42–43, 44, 55, 66, Association of Sierra Club Members for
70–71 Environmental Ethics
Humphrey, Mary, 43 Johns, David, 259, 276
Hunter, Celia, 113, 115, 116 Johnson, Huey, 119, 163
Hunter, Robert, 132, 133 Johnson, Lewis, 212–13
Hurwitz, Charles, 250–51, 255, 257. See also Johnson, M. Bruce, 179
Pacific Lumber Joll, James, 331n15
hydroelectric power. See dams The Journey Home (Abbey), 123. See also
Abbey, Edward
immigration, 90–91, 196, 204, 236,
273–77. See also population policy and Kalmiopsis Wilderness and Bald Mountain
politics (Ore.), 136–37, 140
individual freedom: anarchism and, 188– Katznelson, Ira, 309n61
89, 332n18; cowboy myth, 172–73; crisis Kazin, Michael, 300n53
environmentalists’ questioning of, 40, Kent, William, 238
75–76, 309n63; culturally entrenched, Kezar, Ron, 121–22, 122fig
77; environmental activists’ questioning King, Greg, 251–52
of, 55–56, 80; environmental concerns King, Ynestra, 199
vs., 3, 55–56, 287 (see also coercion Kirk, Andrew, 295n9
and environmental issues); Hayek’s Klein, Naomi, 8
questioning of, 180; limits of, 7; Koehler, Bart, 114–15, 121–22, 122fig, 135fig,
New Left and, 31–32, 33; ZPG’s 158, 280–81; interviewed by author, xv
questioning of, 78–80, 82. See also Kornhauser, Anne, 309n61
liberal individualism; liberalism; Kropotkin, Peter, 331n18
libertarianism Kunofsky, Judy, 65
individualism. See liberal individualism Kuper, Alan, 275, 276
industrialism, Catton on, 334n37 Kysar, Douglas, 293n3
industrialization: critiques of, 70, 187;
industrial infrastructure, 122–23, laissez-faire economics, 179–80, 329n107
209–13, 214–15; industrial pollution, Lake Powell (Utah; Ariz.), 123, 268–69. See
210, 271–72 (see also pollution); Means also Glen Canyon Dam
on nature’s revolt against, 192; Western Lampe, Keith, 41, 47–49, 85, 89, 100–101, 262
water infrastructure, 122–23 (see also land ethic: vs. animal liberation, 105–6,
dams). See also economic growth; 315n32; calls for, 24, 99
industry; progress land management, large-scale, 258–61. See
industry, 55, 68, 155–56, 165–67. See also also the Wildlands Project
mining; oil and gas drilling; ranchers land trusts, 257–58. See also private property
362 Index
Langsenkamp, Bob, 114 local autonomy, as ecocentric principal,

Lanman, Cecelia, 252–53 101–2
Lappé, Frances Moore, 103 Locke, Harvey, 260
Lawhorn, Gene, 226 Loeffler, Jack, 210–11, 214
Leahy, Patrick, 246 “Lone Wolf Circles” (pseud.), 204–8
Lease, Gary, 278 Loomis, Erik, 245
Lee, Katie, 268, 270fig Los Angeles Times, 40, 152, 167, 224, 268
Leonard, Richard, 13, 15, 17–18, 19–20, 26 Louisiana-Pacific (L-P), 248
Leopold, Aldo: democratic justification Luten, Daniel, 40, 43, 64
for wilderness preservation, 108; and
ecological thought, 62, 101; as hunter, MacDougal, Philip, 50, 51, 303n121
105, 315n32; on living in a wounded MacPherson, C. B., 293n3
world, 128; on private property, 169; A Mahler, Andy, 263
Sand County Almanac, 24, 44 Mahoney, Tim, 115, 118
Lewis, Martin, 294n4 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (Ore.),
Li, Vivian, 274 171
liberal humanism, 4, 31–34, 103–6, 294n4. Malthus, Thomas, 62, 67
See also humanism Managing the Commons (Hardin and
liberal individualism, 3, 31–32, 105–6, 179– Baden), 169
80, 293n3. See also individual freedom Mander, Jerry, 23, 101, 166, 211
liberalism, 3–5, 28–29, 80–91, 143–44, 191, Manes, Christopher (“Miss Ann Thropy”),
287. See also growth liberalism; liberal 196, 202, 333n30
humanism; liberal individualism; New the market: Earth First! and market
Left; Zero Population Growth relationships, 145; environmentalists’
libertarianism, 168, 179–80, 181, 204, skepticism toward, 164; free-market
329n107. See also free-market environmentalism, 167–74, 176–77,
environmentalism 179–80, 249–50; free-trade policies,
Libertarian Review, 168 267–68, 276; as regulating force,
The Limits to Growth (Meadows, et al.), 179–80, 329n108; solutions to
68, 101 environmental problems through, 7–8.
litigation: administrative appeals, 163; See also private property
Amchitka atomic bomb tests and, Marris, Emma, 126
130–31; environmental agenda advanced Marshall, Robert, 108
through, 55, 59–60; legal arguments materialism, critique of, 69–70. See also
used by sagebrush rebels, 323–24n13; consumption; economic growth
over Pacific Coast forests, 137, 138, Mather, Stephen, 17–18, 257
243–47, 248, 252–53, 255; over RARE I Maxxam, 250–51, 252. See also Pacific Lumber
and II, 111, 119–20; by the Sierra Club, McCloskey, Michael: on the environmental
98–100, 111, 137 movement, 28, 52–53; and
Little Granite Creek (Wyo.), 158–59, 159fig environmental politics, 28, 56, 61–62,
Litton, Martin, 27, 268 95, 305n22; on the industrial backlash,
Livermore, Norman, 37 166; refusal to talk about Earth
Live Wild or Die (zine), 205–6, 207fig First!, 140; on the shift to managerial
Living Creatures Associates, 100 executives, 115; and Sierra Club
lobbying, environmental, 56–58, 60–61, 95, priorities, 27; on the value of natural
109–10, 113, 115–16, 117. See also specific environment, 99; and wilderness
organizations and issues preservation, 107, 111
Index 363
McComb, John, 298n31 Murie, Olaus, 108, 126

McGirr, Lisa, 329n107 Muskie, Edmund, 55–56
McKibben, Bill, 275
Meadows, Donella and Dennis, 68, 74, Naess, Arne, 101–2, 103–4, 106, 313–14n21
309n60 NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Means, Russell, 192 Agreement), 267–68, 276
Merritt, Clif, 112–13, 115 Nash, Roderick, 295n9
middle class, 15, 42, 84, 88, 89, 126, 295n9. National Audubon Society: and the
See also consumption; economic Alaskan wilderness, 109; and ancient
growth; outdoor recreation forests and spotted owls, 243, 244–45;
Middle Santiam Wilderness (Ore.), 138–39, and the Bari investigation, 230;
284 criticized by Earth First!, 124, 162;
Miller, James, 299n47 Echo Park dam opposed, 20; and
Millet, Peg, 215–16, 262 immigration, 275; lobbying by, 58. See
Mills, Stephanie, 63–64, 180 also Evans, Brock
Mineral King Valley (Calif.), 97–100, 98fig, National Environmental Policy Act
150 (NEPA; 1969), 27, 58; embraced by
mining, 210, 212, 213, 289. See also Black environmentalists, 58–59, 61, 93, 98;
Mesa Forest Service and, 98, 111; industry
misanthropy: Earth First! and, 7, 141, 184, concerns about, 166–67; and RARE II,
196, 202, 204; and environmentalism 119; and spotted owls, 243, 245. See also
generally, 106, 285–86. See also environmental impact statements
holism; human beings; immigration; National Forest Management Act
population policy and politics; social (NFMA), 243–44
justice national forests. See forest protection;
“Miss Ann Thropy,” 196, 333n30 Forest Service, U.S.; public lands;
Mobil Oil, 155, xi wilderness preservation; and specific
The Monkey Wrench Gang (Abbey), 121–22, national forests and locations
129, 141, 185, 269. See also Abbey, National Green Gathering (Amherst,
Edward 1987), 195–96
monkeywrenching. See Earth First!; National Industrial Pollution Control
sabotage, environmental Council, 167–68
Montana Earth First!, 224–25 National Journal, 60–61
Montana Wilderness Act (1984), 124 National Parks and Conservation
Moorman, James, 130–31 Association, 20, 90–91, 109
Morton, Nancy, 122fig, 231 National Park Service, 17–18, 20–21,
Muir, John: Abbey contrasted with, 175, 187. See also specific parks and
186; on Alaska, 108; battles with monuments
Pinchot, 13; death, 14; and ecocentric National People of Color Environmental
philosophy, 101; forest fires opposed, Leadership Summit, 272
38; on interconnectedness, 244; as National Review, 146
Sierra Club’s first president, 12; and the Native Americans: and Alaskan
Yosemite Valley, 15 lands, 109, 127; and ecocentric
Muir Woods National Monument (Calif.), philosophy, 101; environmentalism
238–39, 257 and Native sovereignty, 209–14, 215,
Mumford, George, 84–85 336n67; esteemed/romanticized by
Mumma, John, 240 environmentalists, 191–92, 209, 212;
364 Index
Native Americans (continued ) NFMA (National Forest Management

fire’s role in forest health recognized, Act), 243–44
38; and Georgia-Pacific, 249; TWP Nichols, Louise, 65, 91
and, 276–77 NIMBY (“not in my back yard”), 272–73
Native Forest Council, 263 Nixon, Richard, 59, 305n13; Nixon
natural order, 190–92, 200, 201, 331–32n18 administration, 58–59, 68, 166–67
natural resources, depletion of, 68, 70. See Nixon, Rob, xi–xii, 5
also mining; oil and gas drilling; timber Noah Principle, 104–5
industry; water nonhuman world (nature): Abbey on,
Natural Resources Defense Council 185–87 (see also Abbey, Edward);
(NRDC), 59, 60, 119, 124, 253 animal liberation movement, 105–6,
nature. See nonhuman world; wilderness 315n32; Bookchin on relationship
Nature’s Metropolis (Cronon), ix of humans to, 193–95, 200–202;
Navajo people, 24, 209–12, 213, 215. See also debates over relationship of humans
Native Americans and (generally), 7, 202–9, 233–34,
Nearing, Mary Beth, 225 286; environmentalism’s critics’ claims
necessity defense, 283–84 re, xi–xii; humans as part of/related
Needham, Andrew, 211, 212 to, 103–4, 184–85, 200–202, 206–9,
Nelson, Gaylord, 177, 275 233–34, 286; humans in opposition to/
neoconservatives, 147. See also as cause of destruction, xi, 40–41, 103,
conservatism; New Right; and specific 183–85, 198–99, 202, 208–9, 217, 233–34,
administrations 271 (see also anthropocentrism; crisis
NEPA. See National Environmental Policy environmentalism; ecocentrism; holism);
Act interests seen as aligned with human
New Age (periodical), 133 interests, 102; legal rights for, 99–100;
Newhall, Nancy, 180 markets and, 168 (see also free-market
New Left, 29, 299n47; Bookchin and, 51, environmentalism); revered/valorized,
192 (see also Bookchin, Murray); and 8, 125–26, 181, 206; symbols of, to
the Civil Rights Movement, 30–31; and environmentalists, 239 (see also redwoods;
conservationism and environmentalism wilderness); valued equally with humans,
in the Bay area, 42–44, 48–49 (see x, 39, 96–97, 101, 104–5, 107; women
also People’s Park); environmentalism associated with nature, 194, 199–200. See
ignored/disparaged, 29, 32–35, 43, also natural order; wilderness
300n53; environmentalism supported, Nordhaus, Ted, 296n10
28, 48–49; and population politics, North American Free Trade Agreement.
35, 81; radical, antiestablishment turn, See NAFTA
33–35; SDS and, 29–33. See also social Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection
justice; Students for a Democratic Act (NREPA), 266–67
Society; and specific individuals Northwest Forest Plan (Forest Service),
New Left Notes (SDS newsletter), 32–33, 247. See also Forest Service, U.S.
47, 81, 310n77 Northwest Forest Resource Council,
New Melones Dam (Calif.), 133 242–43
New Right, 145, 146, 151, 168–69. See Northwest Passage (newspaper), 35, 129
also conservatism; free-market Noss, Reed, 128, 241, 254–55, 258, 261, 280
environmentalism; neoconservatives NRDC. See Natural Resources Defense
Newsweek, 155–56 Council
New York Times, 46–47, 54, 217, 224 NREPA (Northern Rockies Ecosystem
New York Times Magazine, 278 Protection Act), 266–67
Index 365
nuclear technology: power plants, 59, 216 Pacific Coast forests, 134–36, 236–37; Bald
(see also uranium mines); weapons, 32, Mountain and Little Santiam protests,
130–31 136–41; logging profitable in, 177, 219–
Nussbaum, Martha, 9 21; old-growth forests, 236–39, 242–43
(see also old-growth forests); redwoods,
oil and gas drilling, xi–xii, 156–59, 159fig, 237–39, 248–51; spotted owls, 243–47,
161–62, 283. See also fossil fuels; and 252; timber wars, 247–57. See also forest
specific companies protection; timber industry
old-growth forests, 236–39, 242–57, 265. Pacific Lumber, 225–26, 228, 249–53,
See also forest protection; Pacific Coast 255–57. See also Headwaters Forest
forests; redwoods; spotted owls; timber partisan politics, and environmentalism,
industry 143–45. See also conservatism
The Old Mole (periodical), 52 (political); neoconservatives; New Left;
Ophuls, William, 76, 77, 307n41, 309n63, New Right; Republican Party
310n65 Peabody Coal Company, 209–11. See also
Oregon: Earth First! actions in, 136–40, Black Mesa
175, 222–23; Kalmiopsis Wilderness and Peace and Freedom Party, 43
Bald Mountain, 140; Oregon wilderness People’s Park, 44–48, 50–51, 303n108
bill, 140; Siskiyou Mountains, 134–37, Perlstein, Rick, 305n13
175; and the spotted owl controversy, Pickett, Karen, 137, 176, 256
244, 246 (see also spotted owls); Pinchot, Gifford, 12, 13
wilderness bill, 136, 138; Willamette The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on
National Forest, 148–49, 175, 223, 254, the Colorado (Porter), 24
284. See also forest protection; Pacific Planned Parenthood, 64, 86
Coast forests Podhoretz, Norman, 147, 167
Oregon Natural Resources Council, 137 Political Economy Research Center
O’Riordan, Timothy, 92, 313n21 (PERC), 169, 179. See also Baden, John
Orr, David, 264 Pollan, Michael, 179, 292n2
Osborn, Fairfield, 63 pollution: air pollution, 24, 84; as concern
O’Shaughnessy Dam (Calif.), 14, 123 of environmentalism, 27–28, 54;
Ostrow, Cecilia, 284 conservative views on, xi–xii, 147;
O’Toole, Randal, 177–78, 179 crisis environmentalism and, 73, 125;
Our Synthetic Environment (Bookchin), environmental justice movement and,
193 271–73; industrial pollution, 27, 28, 55,
outdoor recreation: as anthropocentric 166–67, 210, 271–72; markets in, 8; oil
value, 104; BLM and, 148; Forest spills, xi–xii; regulation of, 35, 58–59,
Service, national forests and, 99, 62, 167–68 (see also Environmental
111, 177–78, 279; opposition to Protection Agency); and wilderness,
development for, 15–18, 97–100, 125; YAF on, 147
214–15, 228; Park Service and, 187; Pope, Carl, 256–57, 265, 267, 275
privileged over subsistence hunting The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 63, 67–68,
and Native sovereignty, ix; and roads, 87, 310n77. See also Ehrlich, Paul
15–18, 188 population policy and politics: history
overpopulation. See population policy and of concern about overpopulation, 40,
politics 41, 62–65, 67–68, 196–97 (see also
Overshoot (Catton), 198, 334n37 crisis environmentalism); mainstream
Owl Creek (Calif.), 255, 256. See also environmentalism and, 38, 63, 64–65,
Headwaters Forest 83–84, 87, 90, 273–74, 285; New Left
366 Index
population policy and politics (continued ) 164, 169, 181; public opposition to
and, 35, 81; population and economic resource extraction on, 265; roadless
growth and consumption, 83–85; areas (see under Forest Service, U.S.);
race and immigration and, 81, 87–92, state attempts to seize, 149 (see also
273–74 (see also immigration); tragedy sagebrush rebellion). See also Bureau of
of the commons and, 75–76; women Land Management (BLM); Bureau of
and, 84, 85–87; ZPG (organization) Reclamation; forest protection; Forest
and, 62–66, 78–82, 85–86 (see also Zero Service, U.S.; wilderness preservation;
Population Growth). See also Ehrlich, and specific states and lands
Paul; immigration Purdy, Jedediah, xiii
Porter, Eliot, 21, 24, 27
Port Huron Statement (SDS), 30–32, race: anti-immigration sentiments,
300nn50, 53 90–91, 196, 204, 273–76 (see also
power generation. See coal-fired power immigration); Civil Rights Movement,
plants; dams; mining 30–31; environmental movement
private property: activism difficult on, predominantly white, 5, 42, 272;
254–55; and the concept of wilderness, and outdoor recreation, 126, 215;
253; free-market environmentalism and population policy/politics, 35,
and, 168, 169–70; and grazing rights, 81, 87–92, 273–77. See also Native
170–71, 327n70 (see also ranchers Americans; social justice
and cattle ranching); and large-scale radical environmentalism: activists
wildlands management, 259–60 (see arrested/prosecuted, 138–39, 140–41,
also the Wildlands Project); libertarian 214–17, 229–30, 267, 283–84; and
belief in property rights, 329n107; and anarchism, 7, 144–45, 160–61,
logging (timber wars), 247–58, 264; 188–92, 189fig, 233; belief in crisis as
People’s Park and private ownership, 46 motivating force, 67 (see also crisis
(see also People’s Park); privatization of environmentalism); commitments
public lands, 164, 169, 181; purchasing demanded by, 5; connections between
lands/rights for conservation, 248–49, mainstream environmentalism and,
253, 255–58; rise of, in Bookchin’s 236, 262–69, 279–81, 284–86 (see also
thought, 195 specific organizations and topics); and
professionalization of environmental conservation biology, 235, 241–42,
groups, 57, 60–61, 115–16, 151 247, 259; core principles/beliefs,
progress, 25, 27, 187, 269. See also capitalism; x, xii–xiii, 1–3, 8–9, 151, 180, 235;
economic growth; industrialization; democratic justifications abandoned,
industry 108; direct action preferred, 2, 95, 96,
pronatalism, 66, 84, 85–86. See also 128–42 (see also direct action); vs. the
population policy and politics Forest Service, 174–79 (see also Forest
Protect Our Woods, 263 Service, U.S.; and specific actions);
Proudhon, Pierre, 331n18 and free-market environmentalism,
Providence Journal, 40 169–70; frustrated with democracy’s
Public Grazing Lands: Use and Misuse by gradualism, 74; government distrusted,
Industry and Government (Voigt), 150 144; humans blamed for environmental
public lands: competing views re use harm, 183–85, 199, 233–34 (see also
of, 143, 149, 150; grazing lands, 127, holism; nonhuman world: humans in
150, 169–74, 266 (see also grasslands; opposition to); “in-betweenness” of,
ranchers and cattle ranching); hard 181; and James Watt, 156; mainstream
vs. soft release, 120; privatization of, movement criticized by, 119, 124,
Index 367
142, 156–58, 162, 247; and Native Reich, Charles, 28–29

sovereignty in the Southwest, 209–14, “Reinventing Nature” project (Univ. of
215; necessity defense employed, Calif.), 277–79
283–84; overlap between crisis Reisner, Marc, 19
environmentalism and, 196–97 (see Remington, Charles, 62. See also Zero
also crisis environmentalism); People’s Population Growth
Park as beginning of, 48, 51 (see also Republican Party, 165. See also
People’s Park); scholarship on, 5–6, conservatism; New Right; and specific
294n8, 294–96n9; shift toward, 95–96, individuals
141, 284 (see also ecocentrism); and rewilding, 127–28, 259, 260
social justice, 7, 196–98, 202–5, 236, Reynolds, Malvina, 64
271 (see also Bari, Judi; Bookchin, Ritter, Alan, 332n18
Murray; race; social justice); traditional roadless areas: Forest Service management
cultures esteemed, 191–92, 209, 212; of, vii–viii, 279; RARE I, 111; RARE II,
wilderness preservation the focus 107, 110–14, 116–20, 153, 163, 175–76,
of, 2, 96, 106–7, 125–26 (see also 316n49. See also Forest Service, U.S.
wilderness preservation). See also roads: blockades of timber roads,
crisis environmentalism; Earth First!; 136–38, 140, 158, 221–22 (see also
ecocentrism; and specific groups, tactics, timber industry); Forest Service’s
incidents, and individuals roadbuilding program, 175 (see also
Radl, Shirley, 78 RARE II); outdoor recreation and,
Ramparts, 46 15–18, 187. See also Forest Service, U.S.;
ranchers and cattle ranching, 127, 148, and specific sites
169–74, 266, 323n12. See also grasslands; Road to Survival (Vogt), 63
sagebrush rebellion Robertson, Thomas, 65
rangeland activism, 169–74. See also Robinson, Bestor, 15, 40, 97
grasslands; ranchers and cattle Rockwell, Llewellyn, xi, xii
ranching Rome, Adam, 71, 295n9
RARE I (Roadless Area Review and Romney, Hugh, 49
Evaluation), 111 Roosevelt, Theodore, 238
RARE II (second Roadless Area Review Roselle, Mike, 218, 337n89; on direct
and Evaluation), 107, 110–14, 116–20, action, 128, 248; on Earth First!’s red
153, 163, 175–76, 316n49 tape, 181; and the founding of Earth
Rat (New York periodical), 35, 50, 52 First!, 121–22, 122fig; interviewed by
Reagan, Ronald: anti-environmentalism author, xv–xvi; and the Kalmiopsis
claims of, xi; as California governor, Wilderness protests, 140–41; and
37, 46, 47, 146; Reagan administration, mountaintop removal mining, 289;
143–44, 152–55, 164, 169, 174 (see also Mt. Rushmore protest, 289; necessity
Watt, James) defense employed, 284; and rifts within
Reason (magazine), 168 Earth First!, 218–19
reason, human, 4, 32–33, 179–80, 190, 191, Rossinow, Doug, 299n47
200–201. See also humanism; liberal Round River Rendezvous (Earth First!),
humanism 158, 180, 204, 215, 216, 234. See also
Redwood National Park, 239 Little Granite Creek
redwoods, 236–39; timber wars, 247–57. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 188, 331n15
See also Pacific Coast forests; Redwood Ruckelshaus, William, 59
Summer; Save the Redwoods League Runciman, David, 74–75, 309n61
Redwood Summer, 226, 228–30, 233, 254 Runkle, Gerald, 331n18, 331nn15, 18
368 Index
Sabin, Paul, 144, 182, 295n9 Shand, Alexander, 329n108

sabotage, environmental, 207fig; Abbey Shawnee National Forest (Ill.), 263
on, 142 (see also The Monkey Wrench Shellenberger, Michael, 296n10
Gang); in Arizona, 213, 214–17; before Shepard, Thomas, Jr., 166, 167, 201
Earth Day, 129; at Little Granite Creek, Sherwin, Raymond, 41, 284–85
158; mainstream groups’ opinions on, “Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward
224; tree spiking, 1–2, 221–28, 338nn98, Legal Rights for Natural Objects”
101. See also direct action; Earth First! (Stone), 99–100
Sacred Cows at The Public Trough Sielstad, Hal, 79, 89
(Ferguson and Ferguson), 171 Sierra Club, 11–12; and the Alaskan
Sacred Mountain Defense Fund, 215 wilderness, 109; amateur tradition
sagebrush rebellion, 143, 145, 149–51, 153, within, 12–14, 57; and the Amchitka
168, 170, 323–24n13, 324n20. See also atomic bomb test, 130–31; and ancient
grasslands; ranchers and cattle ranching forests and spotted owls, 238–39,
Sale, Kirkpatrick, 161 243–47; anti-Watt campaign, 154–56
Salleh, Ariel Kay, 199 (see also Watt, James); and the Bald
Sally Bell Grove (Calif.), 248–49, 257 Mountain road, 137; and the Bari
Salt Creek Wilderness (N.M.), 161–62 investigation, 230; battles over the
salvage logging rider, 254, 264, 268 parks (1940s–1960s), 19–26, 212,
A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 24, 44 257; Brower as executive director, 11,
San Francisco Ecology Center, 100 20, 26–27, 57, 58, 115 (see also Brower,
San Francisco Examiner, 40, 152 David); and Clinton, 267–68;
San Gorgonio, Mount, 15–16, 97, 99 criticized by Earth First!, 124, 162; at
Save the Redwoods League, 12, 239, 248, a crossroads (1940s–1950s), 14–18;
257, 257 division within, 263–68, 274–76;
Sayen, Jamie, 184, 258, 280 Earth First! criticized, 139–40; and
Schabas, Margaret, 329n107 ecocentrism, 97–99, 102; and economic
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 31–32, 300n52 growth questions, 84, 165; expansion
Schlesinger, James, 131 into environmental concerns, 27–28,
Schmookler, Andrew Bard, 159, 160–61, 163 52–53; on the FBI investigation of
Schrepfer, Susan, 15, 38, 39, 201–2, 297n8 Earth First!, 217; Forest Service
Schulman, Bruce, 305n13 roadbuilding opposed, 176; founding
Schumacher, E. F., 69–70, 307n41 and early years, 12–14; and Glen
Schwarzenegger, Don, 171, 173, 174 Canyon Dam, 21–23, 24–25, 268–69;
Science (journal), 152 growth (membership and donations),
Scott, Doug, 153, 154–55, 224 57–58, 60, 155; and immigration, 91,
SDS. See Students for Democratic Society 236, 273–77; increasingly critical view
Seale, Bobby, 51, 88 of humankind, 39–41, 301n80; Legal
Sears, Paul, 13 Defense Fund, 59, 137, 247; lobbying
Sease, Debbie, 115, 150, 172 by, 56–58, 60, 95, 109–10; and Mineral
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, King Valley, 97–100; mission and
132–33. See also Watson, Paul goals, 12, 14, 18–19, 27–28; and the
Seiberling, John, 118 Park Service and Forest Service, 17–18;
Sellers, Christopher, 295n9 population concerns, 64–65, 84, 87, 90,
Sequoia National Forest (Calif.). See Forest 273–74, 285; and private land purchases,
Service, U.S.; Mineral King Valley 256–57; Proclamation on Wilderness,
Sessions, George, 102, 140, 286 125; professionalization of, 57, 115–16;
Index 369
radical environmentalists’ influence Snyder, Gary, 41–42, 49, 92, 217, 278,
on, 236, 262–69; and RARE I and II, 302n92
111, 116–20; on the sagebrush rebellion, social ecology, 51–52, 72–73, 192–95, 197,
150; scenic locations privileged over 332–33n23, 333n27. See also Bookchin,
“working” landscapes, 212; state-by-state Murray
strategy, 120, 163; survival committee, social justice: Bari and, 219–21; Civil Rights
71–72, 84, 308n55; tax-deductible Movement, 30–31; climate change
status lost, 57–58; and the timber wars, and inequality, 287–88; Earth First!
249, 252, 253, 256–57; on tree spiking, and, 7, 183, 196, 202–5, 219, 231, 232;
224; uranium mining protested, 213; environmentalism and (generally),
wilderness conferences (1949–1969), 29, 34–35, 103, 203, 236, 271, 307n41
37–42, 63, 125, 126, 284–85; and the (see also Bookchin, Murray; social
Yosemite Valley, 14–15, 17–18; and ecology); environmentalism and
young activists (campus program, Native sovereignty in the Southwest,
1960s–1970s), 35–37; and zero cut, 263, 209–14, 215, 336n67; environmental
269. See also specific individuals justice movement, 271–73; New Left
Sierra Club Bulletin, 15, 16–17, 36, 61 and, 29–31, 299n47; population policy
Sierra Club v. Morton, 97–100 and, 85–92; radical environmentalism’s
Sierra magazine, 217, 247, 269 disregard for, 7, 196–98, 202–5, 236,
Sierra Nevada Mountains, 14, 18. See also 271; SDS and, 30, 32–33. See also
Sierra Club; Yosemite National Park immigration; Native Americans;
Sierrans for U.S. Popularization women’s movement
Stabilization (SUSPS), 275, 276 social order: in anarchist thought, 191,
Silent Spring (Carson), 27, 32, 193 331–32n18; Bookchin on, 193–95. See
Simberloff, Daniel, 261 also natural order
Simon, Julian, 81–82 “Song of the San Francisco Bay”
Sinkyone Wilderness State Park (Calif.), (Reynolds), 64
248–49. See also Sally Bell Grove Soulé, Michael, 241, 258, 278, 280
Siskiyou Country (journal), 127 Southeast Alaska Conservation Council
Siskiyou Mountains (Calif. and Ore.), (SEACC), 280
134–37, 175 Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, 261
skepticism: of anarchists, about capitalism, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 261,
197–98; Brower’s growing skepticism of 283
progress, economic growth, 24–26; and Southwest Organizing Project, 272
distrust toward federal government, species thinking, 287
144, 151–52, 158–61 (see also anarchism; Speece, Darren, 250, 253
sagebrush rebellion); environmentalism SPK (stable population Keynesianism), 83
and, 7–8, 164; radical environmentalism spotted owls, 243–47, 252
and, 3–5, 7 stable population Keynesianism (SPK), 83
Skillen, James, 150 Stanford University, 72–73, 74, 309n60
ski resorts, 15–16, 97–100, 214–15 Stanislaus River (Calif.), 133
Sky Islands/Greater Gila Nature Reserve Starhawk, 200
Network, 259, 261 “Statement Concerning the Need
Smokey Bear, 38, 41, 302n92 for National Population Policy”
SNCC, 31, 33 (Wilderness Society), 65
Snoeyenbos, Milton, 314–15n30 steady-state economy, 69, 307n41, 307n41,
Snowbowl ski resort (Ariz.), 214–15 309n63
370 Index
Steele, Gary, 224–25 with protesters, 137, 228–29; zero cut

Stockman, David, 173 policy and, 263–66. See also forest
Stone, Christopher, 99–100 protection; Forest Service, U.S.; roads;
Stroup, Richard, 171, 176–77 wilderness preservation
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Time magazine, 166, 244
Committee (SNCC), 31, 33 Tioga Pass Road (Yosemite), 15, 17–18, 257
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Tompkins, Doug, 258
29–35, 81, 82, 299n47, 300n53. See toxic waste. See pollution
also New Left Notes; Port Huron Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States
Statement (Commission for Racial Justice of the
suburbs, 84, 89. See also middle class United Church of Christ), 271
Supreme Court, U.S., 57, 98, 99–100 “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin),
survival, 71–74, 77, 87–88, 308n55. See also 40, 75–76, 92, 169
crisis environmentalism trees. See forest protection; forestry
Sutherland, Robert (“Woods”), 252–53 practices; Forest Service, U.S.; Pacific
Sutter, Paul, ix–x, xi, 16–17, 108, 293n14, Coast forests; redwoods; timber
315n38 industry; wilderness; wilderness
Sweetwater River, 319n93 preservation
system dynamics, 73–74 tree sitting, 139, 140, 221, 251–52, 256
tree spiking, 1–2, 221–28, 338nn98, 101
Tanton, John, 65, 90–91, 102, 274–75 Trott, Gena, 206
technology, 7–8, 201, 314–15n30. See also “The Trouble with Wilderness” (Cronon),
industrialization; nuclear technology viii, xiii–xiv, 278
This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Trust for Public Land, 248–49, 257
Magic Rivers (Sierra Club), 21 Tuolumne River dam, 14, 123
Thomas, Jack Ward, 246–47 Turnage, William, 114–15, 118, 140, 164
Thoreau, Henry David, 101, 186 Turner, James Morton: on the Forest
timber industry (logging industry): Service’s narrow definition of
Bari’s desire to build alliance with wilderness, 127; on the political
loggers, 219–21, 225–26, 228, 338n111; meaning of wilderness, 13, 120–21,
complaints against the Forest Service, 315n38; on the shift in justifications
112; efforts to protect Midwest forests for wilderness protection, 39; on the
from, 263; efforts to protect Pacific Wilderness Act campaign, 108; on
Coast forests from, 134–41, 238–39, the wilderness movement’s faith in
243–57; Forest Service bias toward, government, 128; on the Wilderness
175; Forest Service timber sales to, Society under Brandborg, 112
177–78; percentage of timber supply Turner, Tom, 286, 298n31
from public lands, 265; practices, 178, Two Yosemites (Sierra Club film), 21
239–42, 246, 248–50, 252, 253; release TWP. See the Wildlands Project
of public lands to, 112, 120 (see also
RARE I; RARE II); salvage logging Udall, Morris, 23, 65
rider, 254, 264, 268; and spotted owls, Udall, Stewart, 23, 210
243–47, 252; state-by-state strategy “A Unifying Theme” (Humphrey), 43
and, 163; timber companies, private University of California, 45–46, 277–79
land, and the timber wars, 247–57; tree uranium mines, 213, 214–15
sitting and, 139; tree spiking and, 1–2, U.S. News & World Report, 152
221–28, 338n98; violent confrontations Utne Reader, 197
Index 371
Van der Ryn, Sim, 46 debates over meaning, classification,

Vietnam War, 29–30, 33–34 and degrees of, viii–x, 126–28, 170,
violent confrontations: between loggers 186–88, 277–79, 319n93; and ecocentric
and protesters, 137, 228–30; over thought, 125 (see also ecocentrism);
People’s Park, 46–48 evolving conceptions of, 235, 253,
Vogt, William, 63, 88 258; hybrid nature of, viii–x, xii,
Voigt, William, 150 292n2; inherent value of, 99; mass
consumption of, 16–17 (see also
Waller, Don, 278 outdoor recreation); as measure of
Washington Earth First!, 205, 245 planetary health, 2; overpopulation
Washington Post, 56, 175 and, 65 (see also population policy
water, 70, 122–23, 210. See also dams and politics); rewilding, 127–28, 259,
Watson, David, 198, 201, 206, 208 260; roadbuilding in, 175–76 (see also
Watson, Paul, 106, 132–33, 205, 226 Forest Service, U.S.; RARE II; and
Watson, Richard, 103, 314n28 specific sites); roadless areas, vii–viii,
Watt, James, 154–56, 157fig, 174–75 279 (see also RARE I; RARE II);
Wayburn, Edgar, 20, 26–27, 57, 109, 110, 255 valorized by radical environmentalists,
Webb, Walter Prescott, 173 8, 125–26, 181; Watt’s attempt to expand
Weminuche Wilderness (Col.), vii–viii, mineral, gas, and oil exploration in,
xiii–xiv 156; Wolke on the importance of, 230.
Werbach, Adam, 268 See also nonhuman world; wilderness
the West: desert climate and water preservation; and headings beginning
infrastructure, 122–23 (see also with “wilderness”
dams); environmentalism and Native Wilderness Act (1964), 38, 111, 117, 127, 156,
sovereignty in the Southwest, 209–14, 160, 181, 188
215; oil and gas drilling, 283; sagebrush wilderness conferences (Sierra Club),
rebellion, 143, 145, 149–51, 153, 168, 37–39, 125, 126; of 1969, 39–42, 63,
170, 323–24n13, 324n20; Westerners’ 284–85
frustration with federal government, wilderness movement, 13. See
143, 145, 148–49, 323n12. See also also conservation movement;
Bureau of Land Management (BLM); environmentalism
Forest Service, U.S.; grasslands; wilderness preservation: anti-wilderness
Pacific Coast forests; ranchers and movement (see sagebrush rebellion);
cattle ranching; and specific states and contradictory philosophies underlying,
locations 97, 107–8 (see also conservation
Western Ancient Forest Campaign, 243 movement; ecocentrism); de facto
Western Energy Supply and Transmission wilderness, 109, 136, 138, 140,
(WEST), 209–10. See also Black Mesa 163, 175, 259, 279 (see also Alaska;
whaling, 132 Bald Mountain; Middle Santiam
White, Richard, vii Wilderness; public lands; RARE II;
Wild Earth (TWP journal), 261, 264, the Wildlands Project); democratic
278–79 justifications for, 14–18, 19, 107–8;
wilderness: Abbey on, 185–87 (see also direct action as means of (see direct
Abbey, Edward); central paradox of, action); Earth First!’s focus on,
viii, 183–84, 198 (see also holism); 124–26 (see also Earth First!); ecological
critiques of wilderness valorization, justifications for, 38–41, 110; as focus of
126; Cronon on, viii, xiii–xiv, 183, 198; radical environmentalists, 2, 96, 106–7
372 Index
wilderness preservation (continued ) Wilson, E.O., 241, 275

(see also radical environmentalism); Wolfe, Alan, 3
Forest Service interpretation of, 127 (see Wolke, Howie: and the Alaskan
also Forest Service, U.S.); large-scale campaign, 114; and the definition of
wildlands planning, 258–61 (see also the wilderness, 127, 128, 319n93; on the
Wildlands Project); local/grassroots failure of environmental legislation,
efforts, 112, 113–14 (see also Earth First!; 160; and forest protection, 175–78;
grassroots activism); Northern Rockies and the founding of Earth First!,
Ecosystem Protection Act, 266–67; 121–22, 122fig; on the importance of
scenic locations privileged, 212; state- wilderness, 230; interviewed by author,
by-state strategy, 120, 124, 163 (see also xv; and the Little Granite Creek
Oregon: wilderness bill); through land protests, 158; on logging on private
purchase, 248–49, 253, 255–58; Turner lands, 252
on the wilderness movement, 120–21; women’s movement (feminist movement),
Wilderness Protection Act (proposed), 30, 33, 85–87, 199–200, 221, 300n53. See
156–58. See also direct action; forest also Mills, Stephanie
protection; grasslands; litigation; Woodcock, George, 191, 331n15,
Pacific Coast forests; redwoods; 331–32n18
wilderness; and specific organizations, Worster, Donald, 295n9
legislation, locations, protests, and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (Alaska),
individuals 110. See also Alaska
Wilderness Society: administration and Wuerthner, George, 127, 212–13, 242, 255,
finances, 112–16; and the Alaskan 258, 280
wilderness, 109, 110; and ancient forests
and spotted owls, 242–46; anti-Watt YAF (Young Americans for Freedom),
campaign, 155, 156 (see also Watt, 146–47
James); backlash warned about, 166; Yates Petroleum, 161–62
contradictory philosophies within, Yellowstone to Yukon Network, 259, 276
108; criticism of, 118–19, 124, 162; Yosemite National Park, 14–15, 17–18,
and Dinosaur National Monument, 257
19–21; Earth First! criticized, 140; Young, Margaret Hays, 264, 266
and Forest Service policy, 177; and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF),
grassroots activism, 112, 113–14; growth 146–47
of, 113, 155; Koehler and, 114, 115, 121,
280–81; population concerns, 65, 87; Zahniser, Howard, 37, 108, 126, 184
professionalization of, 115–16; and the Zelko, Frank, 295n9
RARE II fight, 112–14, 116–20; and the Zero Population Growth (organization;
sagebrush rebellion, 150; state-by-state ZPG), 93; Bookchin’s criticism of,
strategy, 120, 124, 163; and tree spiking, 197; Forrester article published, 74
224, 338n101; and the wilderness (see also Forrester, Jay); and gender
conferences, 37. See also Anderson, equality, 85–86; holism of, 80, 93; on
Harold inaction, 55; and liberalism, 80–91;
Wilderness Support Center, 280–81 and population policy/politics, 62–66,
the Wildlands Project (TWP), 255, 258–61, 78–82, 87–90; scholarship on, 306n24;
266, 276–77, 279 and system dynamics, 74; and the threat
Willamette National Forest (Ore.), of coercion, 77–80
148–49, 175, 223, 254, 284 Z.P.G. (film), 79–80

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The Ecocentrists

Keith Makoto Woodhouse

Columbia University Press New York

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress

isbn 978-0-231-16588-4 (cloth)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

The Forest Service’s commitment to using livestock and hand tools inside

in 2010. The blowout was “a natural phenomenon,” BP’s defenders argued,

what Jedediah Purdy calls “the prophetic strain of environmental politics,

A Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship proved crucial in completing my

“It is environmentalism gone mad,” John Benneth of the American Forest

Because tree spiking targeted industrial equipment but also threatened

critique as well as the selective shortsightedness of environmental thought

Despite a diversity of beliefs and goals in the broad sweep of environmen-

The second valence is liberal humanism: a prioritizing of human inter-

common sense. The widespread (although fragile) support that environ-

Radical environmentalists have more often been objects of derision than

modern environmental movement complicates an older view of environ-

could quickly slide into a sweeping antihumanism. The simplicity of radical

from itself, since the environmental movement’s problem is that it has

rather than with sweeping declarations. And even sweeping declarations

Ecology and Revolutionary

Because radical and mainstream environmentalism have the same intel-

EARLY YEARS OF THE SIERRA CLUB

THE CLUB AT A CROSSROADS

consumer choice” in the mid-twentieth century, as a culture of mass con-

century, such relationships constituted the Club’s main currency. Years

THE BATTLES OVER THE PARKS

the Interior—the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation—

go the way of Glen Canyon,” he predicted, “unless enough people begin to

American Wildlife Conference, declaring, “Support for the Wilderness

THE NEW LEFT AND ECOLOGY

Brower’s resignation was only a change in personnel, even if it involved

relationship would come about through a shift from a collective “conscious-

civil liberties—that were at the heart of American political discourse, and

THE CLUB AND THE NEW LEFT

By the time the “ecology movement”—soon to be renamed “environmen-

industrial polluters to society as a whole, and distracted from more urgent

immediately, contacting and collaborating with local environmental groups

THE 1969 WILDERNESS CONFERENCE

Brower wanted conservation to spring from “higher motives” than guilt,

only by combining human self-interest with the interests of wildlife would

THE BATTLE OVER THE PARK

Not everyone at the Hilton in 1969 found the program commonsensical.

something profound, a threshold in human history. “Mankind has reached

between the tightly structured and self-proclaimed ‘rational’ institutions of

interviewer’s question about the place of poetry within the movement,

it was beginning to be called—could point to fundamental and even sui-

he wrote, “tends to triumph over free expression, personal uniqueness and

“The Environmental Movement is coming to be more than a re-labeled

Environmental issues played a starring role in the Congressional campaigns

Most environmentalists advocated a moderate approach even as they

ENVIRONMENTALISM GOES TO WASHINGTON

By the end of the 1970s, Michael McCloskey, executive director of the

their potential effects; to postpone the operation of several nuclear power

bound the Club and the broader environmental movement to an approach

donations from members of their environmental groups, and their naivete

Mainstream environmental groups took the public favor generated by