Philosophy The radical environmental movement aspires to what scholar Christopher Manes calls "a new kind of environmental activism: iconoclastic, uncompromising, discontented with traditional conservation policy, at times illegal". Radical environmentalism presupposes a need to reconsider
Western ideas of religion and philosophy, including
capitalism,
patriarchy, The movement is typified by
leaderless resistance organizations such as
Earth First!, which subscribe to the idea of taking
direct action in defense of
Mother Nature including
civil disobedience,
ecotage and
monkeywrenching. Radical environmentalists can include
earth liberationists, as well as
anarcho-primitivists,
animal liberationists,
bioregionalists,
deep ecologists,
eco-nationalism,
ecopsychologists,
green anarchists, and less often
anti-globalization and
anti-capitalist protesters,
ecofeminists,
neo-Pagans,
Third Positionists, and
Wiccans.
History While many people believe that the first significant radical environmentalist group was
Greenpeace, which made use of
direct action beginning in the 1970s to confront
whaling ships and
nuclear weapons testers, others within the movement, argues as
Earth Liberation Front (ELF) prisoner
Jeff "Free" Luers, suggests that the movement was established centuries ago. He often writes that the concept of "eco-defence" was born shortly after the existence of the human race, claiming it is only recently that within the modern development of human society, and individuals losing touch with the earth and its wild roots, that more radical tactics and political theories have emerged. The alternative tactic of using explosive and
incendiary devices was established in 1976 by
John Hanna and others as the
Environmental Life Force (ELF), also now known as the
original ELF. The group conducted a campaign of armed actions in northern
California and
Oregon, later disbanding in 1978 following Hanna's arrest for placing incendiary devices on seven crop-dusters at the
Salinas, California airport on
May Day, 1977. It wasn't until over a decade and a half later that this form of
guerrilla warfare resurfaced as the Earth Liberation Front using the same ELF
acronym. In 1980
Earth First! was founded by
Dave Foreman and others to confront environmental destruction, primarily of the American West. Inspired by the
Edward Abbey novel
The Monkey Wrench Gang, Earth First! made use of such techniques as
treesitting and
treespiking to stop
logging companies, as well as other activities targeted towards
mining,
road construction,
suburban development and
energy companies. The organization were committed to nonviolent
ecotage techniques from the group's inception, with those that split from the movement in the 1990s including the
Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in 1992, naming themselves after the
Animal Liberation Front (ALF) who formed in the 1970s. Three years later in
Canada, inspired by the ELF in
Europe the first
Earth Liberation direct action occurred, but this time as the
Earth Liberation Army (ELA), a similar movement who use ecotage and
monkeywrenching as a tool, although no guidelines had been published. The ELF gained national attention for a series of actions which earned them the label of
eco-terrorists, including the burning of a
ski resort in
Vail, Colorado in 1998 that the ALF also claimed credit for —and the burning of an
SUV dealership in
Oregon in 1999. The defendants in the case were later charged in the
FBI's "
Operation Backfire", along with other arsons and cases, which were later named by environmentalists as the
Green Scare; alluding to the
Red Scare, periods of fear over communist infiltration of U.S. Following the
September 11, 2001 attacks several laws were passed increasing the penalties for ecoterrorism, and hearings were held in Congress discussing the activities of groups such as the ELF. To date no one has been killed as a result of an ELF or ALF action since both groups forbid harming human or non-human life. In 2005 the FBI announced that the ELF was America's greatest
domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property, with the United States
Department of Homeland Security confirming this regarding the ALF and ELF.
Plane Stupid then was launched in 2005, in an attempt to combat the growing airport expansions in the UK using
direct action with a year later the first
Camp for Climate Action being held with 600 people attending a protest called
Reclaim Power converging on
Drax Power Station in
North Yorkshire and attempted to shut it down. There were thirty-eight arrests, with four breaching the fence and the railway line being blocked. Radical environmentalism has been called a
new religious movement by
Bron Taylor (1998). Taylor contends that "Radical environmentalism is best understood as a new religious movement that views
environmental degradation as an assault on a sacred, natural world." Some writers have used it to refer to the hypothetical danger of future
dystopian governments, which might resort to
fascist radical environmentalist policies in order to deal with environmental issues. Themes of eco-fascism and radical environmentalism can be found in
movies and literature like
Soylent Green,
The Hunger Games,
Z.P.G., and
My Diary from 2091. Research analyzing 32 commercially and culturally significant fiction film portrayals of radical environmentalism—released between 1972 and 2023—found that depictions tended to show more extreme acts of environmentally-motivated violence, like
eco-tage and
eco-terrorism, as morally illegitimate, with more recent and commercially successful films tending to favor binary hero–villain characterizations over morally complex narratives.
Offshoots Several philosophies have arisen from ideas in radical environmentalism that include
deep ecology,
ecofeminism,
social ecology and
bioregionalism. Deep Ecology is attributed to
Arne Naess and is defined as "a normative, ecophilosophical movement that is inspired and fortified in part by our experience as humans in nature and in part by ecological knowledge." A rising Deep Ecologist among radical environmentalist circles is
Pentti Linkola, regarded as the founder of
ecofascism, and author of the book
Can Life Prevail? A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis. Ecofeminism originated in the 1970s and draws a parallel between the oppression of women in patriarchal societies and the oppression of the environment. Social Ecology is an idea attributed to
Murray Bookchin, who argued that in order to save the environment, human society needed to copy the structure of nature and decentralize both socially and economically. Bioregionalism is a philosophy that focuses on the practical application of Social Ecology, and theorizes on "building and living in human social communities that are compatible with ecological systems". == See also ==