Earth First!
Earth First! is a radical environmental movement founded in 1980 in the United States by a group of activists dissatisfied with conventional conservation organizations. It is known for its unconventional and often controversial tactics, including civil disobedience and ecologically motivated sabotage, aimed at highlighting and combating environmental destruction. The movement embraces the principles of deep ecology and is grounded in the wilderness preservation ideals of naturalist John Muir. Earth First! gained significant attention for actions such as tree sitting and monkeywrenching—tactics intended to disrupt logging and development activities.
Over time, Earth First! evolved from its original focus on wilderness preservation to include broader social justice issues, reflecting its diverse and politically anarchic membership. Notable events include the 1990 Redwood Summer protests in California and the activities of prominent figures like Judi Bari, who was injured in a bombing incident. While Earth First! has sought to distance itself from criminal acts, its legacy has inspired the formation of radical offshoots, such as the Earth Liberation Front, which has been labeled as a domestic terrorist group by the FBI. Today, Earth First! maintains a global presence, advocating for environmental causes across multiple nations while emphasizing nonviolent action in its current strategies.
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Earth First!
IDENTIFICATION: Radical environmental movement
DATE: Founded in 1980
Earth First! gained notoriety during the 1980s for employing unorthodox and controversial means to protest the abuse of wilderness areas. The movement’s use of ecologically motivated sabotage and highly visible civil disobedience actions, such as tree sitting to prevent logging, has drawn public attention to environmental causes; at the same time, it has drawn criticism from some environmentalists.
Earth First! was founded in the United States in 1980 by five men who were concerned about what they perceived to be a lack of passion and commitment within the old-line conservation organizations. The five founders were Howie Wolke, a Friends of the Earth representative; Ron Kezar, a National Park Service worker; Bart Koehler, a Wilderness Society representative; Mike Roselle, a Yippie activist; and Dave Foreman, a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society who had once been a Barry Goldwater Republican. Other like-minded persons quickly joined the cause.
A movement rather than a formally structured organization, Earth First! has gained notoriety and sparked controversy through its environmental activism. The movement is committed to naturalist John Muir’s wilderness preservation ideals as well as to the principles of deep ecology. The philosophy of Earth First! is expressed in the slogan “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.” Members of the movement view private and public developers as their enemies, and they see the US Forest Service as being too willing to capitulate to developers. The movement is also highly critical of mainstream conservation organizations, which Earth First! accuses of having become passive and bureaucratized.
Earth First!ers use various strategies to inhibit the destruction of wilderness, from letter-writing campaigns, petitions, boycotts, and legal actions to demonstrations, nonviolent civil disobedience, and ecologically motivated sabotage (also called ecotage or monkeywrenching). The movement entered the media spotlight in 1981 when Earth First!ers unfurled a 300-foot-long piece of black polyethylene depicting a “crack” on the face of the Glen Canyon Dam, located just south of the Utah-Arizona border, in symbolic opposition to the and its recently created reservoir, Lake Powell. Their methods led the media to dub Earth First!ers a real-life Monkey Wrench Gang, for the titular heroes of Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel who sabotage construction equipment in the American Southwest to stop environmental destruction.
Black plastic quickly gave way to monkeywrenching: Earth First!ers pulled up survey stakes, blocked logging roads, disabled construction equipment, and spiked old-growth trees (a controversial tactic in which metal or ceramic spikes are pounded into trees to ruin their commercial use and thwart logging equipment). Such actions have been widely condemned and criticized. Tree spiking, in particular, has the potential to harm loggers and sawmill workers by shattering saw blades that contact spikes; it was made illegal in the United States in 1988. Foreman published a detailed how-to book on ecotage, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (1985), in which he—like the movement itself—claimed to neither condemn nor condone the use of such tactics.
In 1989, Foreman and three Arizona Earth First!ers were arrested in an undercover sting operation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); they were charged with planning to sabotage power lines. Foreman was released on probation, but the others served prison sentences—a fact that caused resentment against Foreman among some Earth First!ers. In the decade since the movement’s inception, a rift had developed within the movement between conservationists such as Foreman and social justice activists such as Roselle. Earth First!’s antihierarchical lack of structure and leadership had attracted a politically anarchic following, and the movement’s focus had broadened from wilderness preservation to a host of leftist causes. Dissatisfied with what Earth First! had become, Foreman and others left the movement in 1990.
That year marked Earth First!’s Redwood Summer—a conscious attempt to emulate the Civil Rights movement’s 1964 Freedom Summer—when a number of protesters faced off against the lumber industry in California’s redwood forests. The protesters demonstrated a more communal, countercultural, and leftist spirit, with greater involvement by women, an increasing emphasis on social justice, and attempts to appeal to the loggers as a class against the corporations. One of the organizers, Judi Bari, was seriously injured by a bomb that had been placed in her automobile by an unknown assailant. Earth First! continued its confrontational campaign to save the redwoods through the decade, with Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s two-year-long occupation of an old-growth redwood tree in 1997-1999 gaining international media attention. In 1998 fellow redwood-defending Earth First!er David “Gypsy” Chain lost his life when he was struck by a tree that a logger refused to stop cutting. Earth First! is believed to be responsible for a chemical attack at Telluride Ski Resort in 1991 and the sabotage of a gas pipeline in Aspen, Colorado, in 2020.
Earth First! groups sprang up in the United Kingdom during the early 1990s, as did a radical spin-off group called the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). As Earth First! began to work to distance itself from criminal activities, focusing instead on nonviolent civil disobedience, ELF embraced economic sabotage as a means to save a dying planet. ELF, which went on to become an international presence, regards extreme methods such as arson and bombing as legitimate weapons in the war against profit-motivated environmental destruction. Housing developments, chain stores, construction sites, and automotive dealerships selling sport utility vehicles are favorite ELF targets. In 2002 the FBI listed ELF as America’s largest and most active domestic terrorist group. Spokespersons for ELF maintain that the group advocates violent action only against inanimate objects, but it does not shy away from harassment and threats against developers and corporate heads—“the real terrorists,” according to ELF.
In the early 2020s, Earth First! groups were scattered throughout the globe, including Canada, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, France, India, Spain, Slovakia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Australia, in addition to groups throughout the United States. It also increasingly cooperated with its sister organization, the Animal Liberation Front.
Bibliography
“About – Earth First! Journal.” Earth First! Journal, earthfirstjournal.news/about/. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Auslander, Jason. “FBI Aids in Investigation of Gas Pipeline Sabotage That Turned Heat Off in Aspen.” The Colorado Sun, 28 Dec. 2020, coloradosun.com/2020/12/28/aspen-gas-pipeline-ecoterrorism-sabotage/. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Foreman, Dave, and Bill Haywood, eds. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. 3d ed. Abbzug Press, 2002.
Liddick, Donald R. Eco-Terrorism: Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements. Praeger, 2006.
Ryan, Caitlyn. “Extremism Assessment Series: Earth Liberation Front (ELF).” Rise to Peace, 6 Nov. 2019, www.risetopeace.org/2019/11/06/eas-elf/cryan/. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Scarce, Rik. Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement. Updated ed. Left Coast Press, 2006.
Wall, Derek. Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements. Routledge, 2002.
Wolfe, Matthew. "The Rise and Fall of America's Environmentalist Underground." The New York Times Magazine, 15 June 2023, www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/magazine/earth-liberation-front-joseph-mahmoud-dibee.html. Accessed 16 July 2024.