|
|
Earth First! is a radical environmental advocacy group
that emerged in the
Southwestern United States in 1979. Inspired by Rachel
Carson's Silent
Spring, Aldo
Leopold's land ethic, and Edward Abbey's The Monkey
Wrench Gang, a group of activists composed of environmental
activist Dave Foreman, ex-Yippie (Youth International Party) Mike
Roselle, Wyoming Wilderness
Society representatives Bart Koehler and Howie Wolke and Bureau of Land
Management employee Ron Kezar pledged, "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!" while traveling in Foreman's VW bus
from the Pinacate
Desert in northern Mexico to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
There are Earth First! groups in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Belgium Philippines, Czech Republic, India, Mexico, France, Germany, New Zealand, Poland, Nigeria, Slovakia, Ireland, Italy,
and Spain
During the group's early years (1979-1986), Earth First! mixed publicity
stunts (such as rolling a plastic "crack" down Glen Canyon Dam) with far-reaching wilderness proposals that
reportedly went beyond what mainstream environmental groups were willing to
advocate (with conservation biology research from a biocentric perspective). The
group's proposals were published in a periodical, Earth First! The Radical
Environmental Journal, informally known as the Earth First! Journal.
Edward Abbey often spoke
at early gatherings, and his writings were an inspiration that led him to be
revered by the early movement. An annual
gathering of the group was known as the Round River Rendezvous, with the name
taken from an Ojibwa
myth about a continuous river of life flowing into and out of itself and
sustaining all relations. The
rendezvous is part celebration with art and music, part activist conference with
workshops and accounts of past actions.
In the spring of 1985, a nationwide call to action in the Earth First!
Journal brought
Earth First! members from around the United States to the Willamette National Forest of
western Oregon, to take action against
Willamette
Industries, a logging company. Finding logging road blockades (carried out
by Corvallis-based Cathedral Forest Action
Group) were offering too short-term a protection, Marylander Ron Huber and Washingtonian Mike Jakubal devised tree sitting as a more
effective civil
disobedience alternative
On May 23, 1985 Mike Jakubal made the first Earth First! tree sit.
When U.S. Forest Service law enforcement
official Steve Slagowski arrived, Mike Roselle, Ron Huber and others were
arrested sitting at the base of the tree in support. This first tree sit lasted
less than a day—Jakubal came down in the evening to look over the remains of the
forest that had been cut down around him that day, and was arrested by a hidden
Forest Service officer—but the tree-sitting concept was deemed sound by Earth
First! members. Huber and Jakubal, in the company of Mike Roselle, brought the
concept to the June 14th Washington EF Rendezvous; on June 23, a convoy of activists arrived at Willamette National Forest, and set
up tree platforms in a location
"Squaw/Three timbersale the group thought
was threatened with imminent destruction. While at one point, up to a dozen
trees were occupied, a July 10 clash took down all the
trees with platforms except for Ron Huber's as the other sitters had gone for an
overnight meeting elsewhere. Huber remained in his tree, dubbed Yggdrasil, until July 20 when two
Linn County sheriff's deputies were
lifted in a crane box and wrestled him
from the tree.
Later, from about 1987 on, Earth First! became primarily associated with direct action to prevent logging, building of dams, and other forms of development which Earth First! finds may
cause destruction of wildlife habitats or the despoilation of wild places.
This change in direction attracted many new members to Earth First!, some of
whom came from a leftist or anarchist political background or involvement in the
counterculture. Dave
Foreman has related that this led to the introduction of such activities as a
"puke-in" at a shopping
mall, a flag
burning, heckling of Edward Abbey at a 1987 Earth First rendezvous, and
back-and-forth debates in the Earth First! Journal on such topics as
anarchism, with which Foreman and others did not wish to be associated. Most of
the group's older members, including Dave Foreman, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler,
Christopher Manes, George Wuerthner, and Earth First! Journal editor John
Davis became increasingly uncomfortable with this new direction. This change
reportedly led several of the founders to sever their ties to Earth First! in
1990. Many of them went on to launch a new magazine, Wild Earth, and a new environmental group, The
Wildlands Project. Roselle, on the other hand, along with activists such as Judi Bari, welcomed the new
direct-action and leftist direction of Earth First!.
Starting in the mid-1980s, Earth First! began an increasing promotion of and
identification with "Deep Ecology," a philosophy put forward by Arne Næss, Bill Devall, and
George Sessions, which holds that all forms of life on Earth have equal
value in and of themselves, without regard for their utility to human beings.
Earth First followers use this philosophy to justify an ecocentric view of the world in
which intrinsic values for organisms and ecosystems outweigh their resource values.
Since 1990, action within the Earth First! movement has become increasingly
influenced by anarchist political philosophy. The change also
brought a rotation of the primary media organ in differing regions, an aversion
to organized leadership or administrative structure, and a new trend of
identifying Earth First! as a mainstream movement rather than an organization.
In 1992, the push of Earth First! toward being a mainstream movement caused
members who refused to abandon criminal acts to start a militant offshoot called
Earth
Liberation Front. Most members of
Earth First! liken themselves to a decentralized, locally informed activism based
on communitarian
ethics while Earth First adversaries characterize the group as conducting a
form of terrorism.
In various parts of the country, individual citizens and small groups form
the nuclei for grassroots political actions, which may take the form of legal
actions—i.e. protests, timber sale
appeals, and educational campaigns—or civil disobedience—tree sitting, road blockades, and sabotage—called "ecotage" by some Earth First! members, claiming it is
done as a form of ecodefence.
Often, disruptive direct action is used primarily as a stalling tactic in an
attempt to prevent possible environmental destruction while Earth First! lawsuits try to secure long-term
victories. Reported tactics include road blockades, activists locking themselves
to heavy equipment, tree-sitting, and sabotage of machinery.
Earth First! was known for providing information in the Earth First!
Journal on the practice of tree-spiking and monkeywrenching (or
ecotage) which have led to reports of injuries from such tactics, although no
evidence that Earth First! was involved in related activity.
In 1990, however, Judi Bari led
Earth First! in the Northern California and Southern Oregon region to renounce these practices,
calling them counterproductive to an effort to form a coalition with workers and
small logging businesses to defeat large-scale corporate logging in Northern California.
Some critics of the movement still call Earth First! activity eco-terrorism, though Earth
First! proponents say that the term more accurately describes the people who
destroy the environment. In response to being labeled terrorists, some Earth
First! members have adopted the neologism terrist instead.
In 1990, a bomb was placed in Judi Bari's
car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and
Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally
exploded. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of
evidence. Bari died in 1997
of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland,
California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and
Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million. Eighty
percent of the damages were for violation of their First
Amendment rights by the FBI and police trying to discredit them in the media
as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing
remains unsolved
|
 Copyright(C) 2007
- 2020. All rights reserved.
|