Environmental Radicalism: The Extremes and the Earth

Tree Spiker: From Earth First! To Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press, 2009, 272 pp., $24.99

Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save America’s Wilderness
by Dean Kuipers
Bloomsbury, 2009, 320 pp., $25

The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear
by Douglas Bevington
Island Press, 2009, 304 pp., $35

In the forest, a protester U-locks her neck to a bulldozer set to plow a road through an immaculate redwood grove. On the seas a small, agile boat chases after a much larger whaling vessel to interrupt its hunt. In the courtroom, a scrappy legal team demands an injunction to protect the habitat of an elusive, endangered panther.

The extent to which these images seem familiar is a testament to the effectiveness of the radical environmental movement’s entry into the mainstream of American consciousness. In the 1960s and 1970s, large national organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council surged in membership and helped pass landmark legislation such as the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

But in the decades that followed, many—if not most—of the major environmental gains in this country have been the product of a more militant and countercultural strain of eco-campaigners. Operating on a fraction of the budgets needed to run their Washington-oriented counterparts, groups including Earth First!, Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the Rainforest Action Network, and the Center for Biological Diversity concocted a powerful mixture of civil disobedience and confrontational litigation—tactics that the politically wary environmental establishment observes with trepidation.

Some thirty years after they first appeared on the national scene, these grassroots environmentalists have defined for two generations what a resolute commitment to defending the natural world can entail. At the same time, they have given rise to extreme factions that trash research labs in the name of animal rights, torch condo developments to combat sprawl, and, in the process, alienated wide swaths of the American public.

In times when the very climate that supports life on earth is in jeopardy, the need for bold action that can effectively rally popular sympathy and convey a sense of urgency is greater than ever. But the need for mass support also means that tendencies toward factionalism and self-isolation are more destructive than ever. What, then, can we learn from the legacy of radical environmentalism?

A significant moment for eco-radicals in the United States came in September 1971, when Greenpeace famously sailed into the popular imagination by navigating its boat the