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CHAPTER 2

At the Turn of the Millennium

Youth Culture and the Roots of Contemporary Activism

Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly

not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp

and terrible eyes.

—H. L. Mencken

Youth as menace symbolizes both the collective fear

and the changing face of America. . . . They represent

the emergence of new forms of community, national identity,

and post­modern citizenship.

—Henry Giroux

INTERSECTING PATHS

The paths activists took to arrive at the Earth First! Rendezvous in western Pennsylvania in 2012 were varied and circuitous: from childhood love of the wild to hardcore punk rock scenes. Many of these activists shared the feeling of being at odds with society and the experience of finding a sense of belonging with like-minded young people in activist circles. They rejected the typical goals of the majority of their high school and college peers and developed critiques of capitalism, predictions of societal collapse, and a desire to work for change. In this chapter, I trace some of the ways in which young adults in the 1990s and early 2000s became involved with animal rights and environmental direct action through various networks of affiliation. Nettle, who was an editor at the Earth First! Journal for six years, arrived at the Rendezvous by way of feminism, anarchism, Paganism, tree-sitting in Scotland, and a tour of the United States with a jug band in a vegetable oil–powered van. I met Nettle at the first Earth First! Rendezvous I attended in Oregon in 2009, talked with her at subsequent gatherings, and visited her in Lake Worth, Florida, in 2014. First at the Earth First! Journal office and then at her home, Nettle spent several hours with me, describing in detail the path she took to activism. While no one person’s story is typical of radical activists’ lives, Nettle’s reveals some common themes in activist biographies. Her account offers a starting point for understanding the convergence of historical trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that created a milieu in which radical activism thrived.

Nettle grew up the youngest of three children in a nominally Jewish family in Chicago. Her mother was Canadian and her father Israeli. Her family recycled and composted, and her parents were avid gardeners. As a child she “enjoyed being in nature,” camping with her family or exploring forests outside the Chicago area, especially by bicycle. Her older brother and sister were politically active and exposed her to environmental causes, gay rights, feminism, and critiques of capitalism. Not only did her brother support Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, but he also organized buses for a gay rights march in Washington, DC, in 1993. Most of Nettle’s high school friends were “jocks,” and she remembers being the “weirdo” in the popular crowd. She felt as though she did not fit in and saw her high school years as “years of departure” and depression: “I was an angsty teenager . . . internalizing all sorts of bad things that were going on in the world . . . I would go in and out of depression, I painted my room dark purple, listening to Nirvana.” When she went to college, she took courses on feminism and especially feminist art, decided to study abroad, and ended up at an art college in Scotland.¹

While studying in Scotland, Nettle began a journey into activism that was shaped in part by her family background. Young Americans like Nettle reject common notions of what it means to become a successful adult (making money and owning a house, for example) and convert to radical activism as a kind of subversive rite of passage. Activists often describe their conversion to activism in relation to a protest march or an illegal act of sabotage that expresses their commitment to forests and nonhuman animals rather than to U.S. legal codes and lucrative careers. For them, conversion is a threshold experience, a movement from one existence (the taken-for-granted one) to another (countercultural activism).² For many environmental and animal rights activists, conversion takes place during adolescence or young adulthood, which is itself a liminal, threshold-like experience. During this transitional time, young people move from a world that was carved out for them by parents and their social context into a world that they have chosen for themselves, a world in which other species are as important as other humans.

In Scotland at the beginning of her journey to activism, Nettle decided to be a “blank canvas” and start over, so she cut off all her hair and got involved with a collectively run vegetarian art café in Edinburgh. Through the café she was exposed to contemporary Paganism, anarchism, antiwar activism, and environmentalism. Discovering Paganism was for her like finding something she “always believed. Just like finding feminism and anarchism, things I internally already was.” Although she liked the communal and ritual aspects of Judaism and some of the Christian churches she had visited as a child, she could not relate to their theology: as a feminist she “was not connecting with this white male god.” Paganism resonated with her concerns because she already believed “we are all divine, no hierarchy among individuals, plants and animals.” Armed with this affinity for Pagan perspectives, she went into the woods to join an antiroads tree-sit.

Although she had helped organize a protest against the 2005 G-8 summit in Auchterarder, Scotland, Nettle really came home to environmentalism when she “fell in love” with the Bilston Glen tree-sit, one of the world’s longest running tree-sits. Bilston Glen changed her life.³ At the tree-sit she rediscovered her “inner child and this really sacred connection to nature that had been suppressed through the school system, through my own teenage angst and depression.” She felt at home in the woods, reconnecting with “the raw and the animalistic part of the human psyche that craves nature and to really be immersed. The thing that I really connected with the most was that I could live here, I could live in the woods and I didn’t have to pretend that I had to have a car and a house.” She started living at the tree-sit in her own treehouse and taking a bus to her college classes.

From then on, Nettle embraced her “weirdness”: “At twenty-one I was waking up from the nightmare of trying to be normal. In high school I was trying to be normal, but I was never normal, I’ve always been weird. I have to love that and accept that, that’s what fuels depression, when I try to fit into society’s box.” Life at the protest in the forest offered a community in line with her interests in Paganism, anarchism, and feminism. At the same time, her experiences there eased her inner struggles with depression and belonging.

Nettle first encountered the U.S.-based Earth First! Journal at Bilston Glen and attended her first Earth First! gathering in the United Kingdom. After graduating from college, she moved back to North America and began to tour with a jug band. During the tour she visited the Earth First! Journal collective and not long afterwards was hired there. She thought, “This is what I want to do forever,” and was a mainstay at the Journal for six years, which was when I got to know her at Earth First! gatherings.⁴

Nettle’s story reveals some common themes in activists’ accounts of how they became involved with environmentalism or animal rights. Some of the most important influences on radical environmentalism and animal rights during this time included anarchist anticapitalist movements, contemporary Paganism, and understandings of gender shaped by feminism, gay rights, and transgender activism. Nettle’s account of her attraction to anarchism and powerful connection to the forest points to the important convergence during the 1990s and 2000s of the anticapitalist movement with strains of deep ecology and biocentrism.

Radical activists charged and sentenced during the first decade of the twenty-first century for actions committed from 1996–2001 (during the FBI’s Operation Backfire) came of age at a particular moment in the history of Americans’ relation to nature and nonhuman animals, as well as to earlier liberation struggles, so I want to place their actions in a broader historical context. Young activists are influenced by books and films, lovers and friends, anarchist collectives like Food Not Bombs, ecology clubs and volunteer work for the Sierra Club, college courses on deep ecology and gender studies, contemporary Paganism and American Indian worldviews, the Occupy movement and social justice struggles, veganism and hardcore punk rock. Through these disparate activities and interests they find their way to gatherings and direct action campaigns in forests and on fur farms. In this fashion, activist movement through various gatherings, campaigns, and communities traces lines of affiliation and influence across regional, national, and international boundaries.

Like Nettle, Tristan Anderson exemplifies the ways in which many activists are situated within international, as well as American, networks of affiliation. In 2009, Anderson was critically wounded in Palestine during a campaign for Palestinian rights. Previous to his time in Palestine, he had traveled to war-torn Iraq with a circus to entertain traumatized children. He was involved with the Headwaters campaign to save redwood trees, Food Not Bombs, Nevada nuclear weapons test site protests, and a tree-sit in Berkeley to protect oak trees from being bulldozed for a new football stadium.⁵

The loosely organized national and international networks that activists move through also include street medics from mass protest marches in urban areas, Rainbow Gatherings, non-Native people who worked on reservations with Native organizers on a number of issues, other activist groups like Greenpeace, and guerilla gardeners from New York City who grow food in vacant lots.⁶ These networks consist of social justice as well as environmental and animal rights communities and organizations. The 2012 Earth First! Rendezvous, for instance, featured a workshop presentation by activists working with No More Deaths in Arizona. No More Deaths is a social justice coalition, composed of both Christians and non-Christians, providing water and food for illegal immigrants along the southern border of the United States. These activists presented a workshop that explored the convergence of environmental and social justice issues in this context.⁷

As these intersections suggest, radical activism of the 1990s and early 2000s emerged within a particular configuration of constructions of youth, feminism, global anticapitalism critiques, social justice concerns (including prison issues), Paganism, deep ecology and other biocentrist approaches within environmentalism, and changing understandings of the appropriate relationships between humans and other animals. Animal rights and environmentalism thus belong to a lineage of radical movements in North America, spearheaded by young people and dating back at least to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.

REGARDING THE NONHUMAN: A BRIEF HISTORY

OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

IN THE UNITED STATES

The historical trajectories of radical animal rights and environmentalism in North America are distinctly different, even though twenty-first-century activists often bridge both movements. Radical environmentalists emphasize “the wild,” while most animal rights activists are seeking “animal liberation,” which includes domesticated nonhuman animals. Radical environmentalists, for example, often sign their letters and communiqués “For the Wild,” while animal rights activists are more likely to invoke the slogan, “For the Animals.” The animal rights movement in the United States did not emphasize protecting wild animals until late in the twentieth century. Hunt sabotage, for instance, was not common in the United States among animal rights activists until the 1990s, although it was in Britain. A notable exception was Greenpeace, an environmental organization founded in 1971, which focused on direct action against whaling. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, activists in both movements were emphasizing the necessity of working together. During the period of my research (2006–2016), most issues of the Earth First! Journal, the most widely read radical environmentalist publication, included articles on animal rights issues and actions.⁸ Animal rights activists have been slower to encompass both struggles and combine efforts.

Although it has often shared common cause with the animal rights movement, radical environmentalism has a distinct lineage in the United States. It is particularly indebted to early influences such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism and the writings and lives of Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and naturalist John Muir (1838–1914).⁹ Like later environmentalists, Transcendentalists included Buddhist and Native American understandings of nature in their writing.¹⁰ Muir and Thoreau were sensitive to the “interdependence of all life,” rejected Christianity and anthropocentric views of nature, admired Native Americans, and underwent pantheistic and animistic experiences in nature.¹¹ Muir’s biocentrism was also influenced by Romanticism and Transcendentalism, as well as personal experiences in wilderness areas. Like other Americans in the late nineteenth century, Muir appreciated nature for being everything that civilization, and urban life in particular, was not. He recognized the intrinsic value of wilderness and the dangers human interests posed to its integrity. Like later radical environmentalists, Muir was devoted to wilderness protection, and his concerns were often in opposition to those of the U.S. Forest Service. Along with Thoreau, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), and Edward Abbey (1927–1989), Muir is considered by many activists to be one of the “grandfathers” of radical environmentalism.¹² Yet Muir, like other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wilderness lovers, viewed wild places as pristine and devoid of humans, especially indigenous people who had roamed and shaped the land long before the arrival of Europeans.¹³

Americans’ concern for “wilderness” untrammeled by civilization, and especially agriculture, grew during the nineteenth century and led to the creation of Yellowstone Park in 1872, the first time Congress put limits on the spread of agriculture.¹⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century, the fear and hostility many European Americans had felt towards nature in earlier eras was now leveled at cities.¹⁵ Nature appreciation became more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans began to react to disturbing consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanization. With more people living in cities at a distance from the wild, attraction to nature as a place of respite from urban life grew, as did urban dwellers’ support for national parks.¹⁶

Radical environmentalists share this attraction, while at the same time appreciating wild places and beings for their intrinsic value. A tendency of radical environmentalists to view opponents of wilderness protection as “desecrating agents” became a strategy from Muir on, according to religious studies scholar Bron Taylor.¹⁷ Taylor identifies a radical environmental lineage running from Muir and Thoreau through a number of early twentieth-century figures such as Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), David Brower (1912–2000), Ansel Adams (1902–1984), and Rachel Carson (1907–1964), who held somewhat pantheistic views of nature, even though their spiritual beliefs were not as explicit as Muir’s and Thoreau’s.¹⁸

By the 1950s, a more militant and anarchist version of this lineage appeared in the West, most significantly in the figures of poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder (1930–present) and writer Edward Abbey (1927–1989). Snyder’s back-to-the-land anarchism and Abbey’s pantheism and support for antidevelopment direct action were important precursors to later radical activism. The decade of the 1970s was key for the convergence of these important figures with conservation biology, deep ecology, and other shifts in the new discipline of environmental philosophy. Some of these developments came about in response to the publication of historian Lynn White Jr.’s famous argument identifying developments in medieval Christianity as “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967).¹⁹ Not long after the publication of White’s essay, the term deep ecology was coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, further developed by Bill Devall and George Sessions in their book Deep Ecology (1985), and adopted by Earth First!ers in the early 1980s.

Due to the spread of these and other views challenging anthropocentrism and promoting wilderness protection, American environmentalist organizations experienced rapid growth in the 1970s. They also became increasingly professionalized, hiring managers rather than activists. Some activists reacted against this trend, which they saw as diluting their cause, and chose more radical tactics. One of Earth First!’s founders, Dave Foreman, quit his job lobbying in Washington, DC, in 1979, and co-founder Howie Wolke was a disenchanted former forestry student.

Foreman and Wolke practiced tree spiking and other direct action, drawing inspiration from Edward Abbey’s fictionalized account of ecotage, The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975. Deep ecologists like early Earth Firsters! believed nature had intrinsic value regardless of its benefits to human beings. For them, preserving wilderness for its own sake became a moral matter, even a “religious mandate” in the words of Dave Foreman.²⁰ They adopted the language of holy war, or as journalist Joe Kane put it, “waging guerilla warfare in the name of Mother Nature.”²¹ Dave Foreman described their monkey wrenching tactics as “a form of worship towards the Earth” and his own role as “a religious warrior for the Earth.”²² In addition to the language of warfare, these years found environmentalists increasingly framing environmental issues as urgent, even on an apocalyptic scale.²³

Environmentalists from Henry David Thoreau to Earth First!’s Dave Foreman have also freely borrowed from and been inspired by indigenous cultures. The influence of Native American orientations to nature runs throughout radical environmentalist thought and practice, even when troubled by concerns about colonialism and cultural appropriation. Moreover, environmental and animal rights activists have sometimes fought side by side with indigenous people, as when activists supported Navajo and Hopi people at Black Mesa, a sacred mountain that was also the site of controversial strip-mining. As Gary Snyder described the coalition of Native and non-Native activists in Turtle Island, “defense of Black Mesa is being sustained by traditional Indians, young Indian militants and longhairs [hippies].”²⁴ Supporters of the Black Mesa Defense Fund, founded by Jack Loeffler in 1970, engaged in monkey-wrenching during the 1970s when a sabotage campaign was directed at the mine. Dave Foreman, one of Earth First!’s founders, was involved with the campaign at Black Mesa during the 1970s, before the founding of Earth First!²⁵ In other instances, activists and Native Americans have been at odds, as in the case of animal rights protests against members of the Makah (a northwestern U.S. tribe), whose cultural revival included traditional whaling practices.²⁶

Since the 1970s, there have been many cases of radical environmentalists joining Native Americans to protest threats to tribal lands, such as the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protest that began in 2016. RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountains’ and People’s Survival, organized to fight coal mining in Appalachia) members and friends traveled from Appalachia to North Dakota to work with Red Warrior Camp, a direct action camp at the Standing Rock protest.²⁷ I discuss issues of solidarity as well as tensions with Native people in more depth in Chapter 6.

In contrast to Earth First!’s campaign for wilderness protection, early animal rights struggles in the United States tended to be urban and focused on domesticated and lab animals. American animal activists inherited these emphases from British animal protection and animal liberation movements. From at least the eighteenth century on, animal rights activism in Britain coincided with other expressions of political and religious radicalism that were already present in towns and cities. The early twentieth century antivivisection movement in Britain appealed to feminists, labor activists, vegetarians, spiritualists, and other radical activists who posed alternatives to the social (and species) order.²⁸ Like contemporary activists, they saw themselves as the vanguard of social change, advancing a moral crusade. Animal rights was just one of many causes to be addressed in order to usher in a better, more civilized (and for some, more godly) society.²⁹

In a similar fashion, mid-nineteenth-century American “animal defenders” often held other radical political and social views and were inspired by Britain’s RSPCA (founded in 1824), the antislavery movement, and Darwin’s views on evolution set forth in The Origin of Species (1859).³⁰ As was the case in other nineteenth-century reform movements, women played prominent roles in animal rights advocacy during this period.³¹ Alongside other nineteenth-century reform causes, such as child welfare and temperance, a variety of organizations were formed in American cities to take up the plight of nonhuman animals. This included addressing slaughterhouse conditions, cruelty to urban workhorses, animal experimentation, and homeless animals. After the end of the Civil War, with the abolition of slavery on their minds, activists began a new campaign of rights advocacy, this time for nonhumans rather than human slaves. Not long after the end of the war, New York’s American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was founded in 1866, the American Humane Association (AHA) in 1877, and the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) in 1883. Debates emerged in and around these nineteenth-century organizations between those who advocated more humane treatment of animals (welfarists) and those who focused on the rights of nonhuman animals (liberationists). These debates would continue through the history of animal rights activism into the twenty-first century.³²

Although wilderness protection and animal rights were political and moral issues in the early part of the twentieth century, the late 1970s were watershed years for American environmental and animal rights campaigns. This development was due in part to increasing standards of living in the United States, more opportunities for contact with nature, a growing tendency to see nature and animals as having intrinsic value, and a sense of ecological precariousness described in widely read books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962).

Environmental and animal rights concerns sometimes converged in the 1970s, as in the founding of Greenpeace in 1971, an organization that campaigned against whalers and sealers as well as nuclear power and deforestation. Greenpeace engaged in direct action, putting activists’ bodies at risk for nonhuman animals and creating public spectacles, continuing the legacy of nineteenth-century animal rights movements.³³ After 1975, both animal rights and environmental activists became increasingly confrontational, or “radical,” largely out of frustration with above-ground activism that did not seem to be effective: animals continued to needlessly suffer and old-growth forests continued to be logged.

Radical animal rights and environmentalist organizations in the United States, gained significance in the early 1980s: both People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Earth First! were founded around 1980.³⁴ Factory farming and fur industries joined vivisection as central concerns of late twentieth-century animal rights activists. During the 1980s, PETA emerged as the radical face of animal rights in the United States, although other more radical groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) would appear on the scene a decade later and see PETA as too willing to compromise and not radical enough.

In its early years, PETA focused attention on primate experimentation and cosmetic testing at the same time that Earth First! engaged in direct action tactics to defend roadless areas in national forests. Both organizations sometimes created spectacles to attract news media attention during protests, dressing as animals or throwing pies at industry officials. For instance, the “Biotech Baking Brigade” threw a dumpstered chocolate cake in the face of a GM scientist at conference dinner.³⁵ An Earth First! gathering in 2007 ended with an action during which protesters stormed a store owned by a company building a dam in Mexico, with protesters dressed as clowns, otters, and beavers chanting outside the store.³⁶ For Earth First!ers engaged in these protests on the behalf of other species, forests and waters had inherent rights, while for PETA activists, primates in laboratories did as well. In their parallel histories, both Earth First! and PETA sought to decenter humans and broaden moral and political interests concerning the more-than-human world.

In the early 1980s, some Earth First!ers were dedicated exclusively to protecting wilderness in the United States, while others were fighting against the World Bank and fast-food restaurants that used rainforest beef, linking environmental and nonhuman animal concerns. The Earth First! Journal, published in various formats since the first years of Earth First!, became a central resource for networking and sharing information about environmental and animal rights struggles across the United States and internationally.³⁷ In the late 1980s, Earth First! was a substantial presence in struggles against logging in northern California, Oregon, and Washington, especially in campaigns to safeguard old-growth forests. Earth First!ers voiced concern for trees as well as the many nonhuman animal species that lived in and around them. Tree-sits and road blockades emerged as the most effective tactics during the forest campaigns of the 1990s. Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year tree-sit in a redwood called Luna brought tree-sits and threatened redwoods to national attention. After considerable coverage by local and national news media, Hill’s tree-sit eventually won modest protection for an area of old-growth redwoods.³⁸

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, most radical activists I met did not consider PETA to be radical, although Earth First! with its anarchistic organization continued to fit that moniker. PETA has a centralized organization, a significant budget, and celebrity sponsors while, true to its anarchist roots, Earth First! is decentralized, organized through collectives, and uninterested in celebrities. By the 1990s, more radical and clandestine movements (the ALF and the Earth Liberation Front [ELF]) that concentrated on property destruction and used tactics such as arson emerged from within and alongside PETA and Earth First! By the twenty-first century, pie throwing, theatrical urban protests, and other kinds of public disruptions existed on one end of the direct action spectrum, with hidden night-time lab raids and sabotage by hooded and masked activists on the other.

The ELF was founded in the United Kingdom in 1992 by Earth First!ers and the first U.S. action claimed publicly by the ELF took place in 1996.³⁹ Some Earth First!ers and other activists involved with forest campaigns on the West Coast, borrowing tactics from the ALF in England, began to engage in underground actions, including arson, during the late 1990s.⁴⁰ Around the same time that ELF emerged as the most extreme direct action wing of the environmental movement (using arson for property destruction, for instance, not a tactic adopted by most Earth First!ers), animal rights was becoming more militant as well. Many of the radical animal liberation actions of the 1990s were claimed by the ALF or by those who adopted ALF-like tactics of working alone or in small anarchist cells.

The ALF, founded in England in 1976 by Ronnie Lee, garnered media attention for acts of sabotage and animal releases and spread in popularity in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.⁴¹ From 1979 to 1993, the ALF was reportedly responsible for 313 incidents of break-ins, vandalism, arson, and thefts associated with animal liberation.⁴² Although law enforcement agencies and animal researchers see activists as dangerous, the ALF has explicit guidelines about taking precautions during actions to avoid harming humans and other animals.⁴³ The ALF typically functions as a decentralized, anonymous movement organized around informal and temporary cells, often as small as two people. As a leaderless movement, it has no offices or directors, no fundraising initiatives, and no employees. As one activist puts it in the film Behind the Mask (2006), “ALF only exists in people’s hearts and minds.”⁴⁴

During the 1990s, the hardcore punk rock subculture influenced radical animal rights and environmental activists, as bands like Earth Crisis and Shelter stressed the urgency of environmental and animal issues. Many young activists came out of this scene with its focus on anarchist anticapitalism critiques and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approaches to music, art, and social change.⁴⁵ These concerns were partially driven by a movement within hardcore referred to as “straightedge,” which advocated veganism and discouraged drug use, drinking, and promiscuous sex.⁴⁶ Many aspects of the straightedge scene helped to create an audience receptive to the message of animal rights. It was inspired by punk rock’s anarchistic critique of consumer capitalism and imperialism, the physical intensity of hardcore shows, and bands’ and fans’ desire to change a flawed world, especially a world characterized by the existence of animal suffering. These influences coalesced in hardcore scenes across the country during the 1990s at the same time that ALF’s message began to spread. I explore these developments in detail in Chapter 5.

The influence of hardcore on radical animal rights and environmentalism in the 1990s is just one example of the ways in which radical activism during and since the 1990s has largely been a youth movement, even though activists of all ages participate in protests. Most of the activists serving prison sentences at the turn of the twenty-first century were sentenced for actions committed when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. A large number of activists in the 1990s and early 2000s were introduced to activism through youth subcultures like straightedge, high school clubs, and friends, or during college through campus environmental and animal rights groups. As parental and family influences became less important in these extrafamilial contexts, young people were more likely to be exposed through friends and lovers to activist groups and campaigns. The personal and historical trajectories of young activists in the 1990s exemplify an ongoing dynamic in American culture of the societal marginalization of youth on the one hand and teenagers embracing marginalization and acting as agents for social change on the other.

MISFITS AND REBELS

Like Nettle, whose story I began with, many activists recall being teenage misfits or rebels who were seen and saw themselves as outsiders. Rod Coronado wrote to me from prison that during his teenage years he did not fit in and had “little interest” in what was popular with other teenagers: “Not a lot of teenagers thought it was cool to want to ‘save the whales,’ so I struggled with wanting to fit in . . . I simply could not focus on wanting things or a career while I knew whales were being slaughtered and baby seals clubbed.” Coronado heard about the ALF and became even more convinced that “the only career for me was as this sort of person.” During high school he recalls “simply biding my time until I was done with school and could join the struggles.” At seventeen, he left home and moved to Seattle to start working with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society, an activist organization focused on protecting marine mammals.⁴⁷ Like Coronado, many activists felt like outcasts until they found activist organizations, the vegan straightedge subculture, a school’s ecology club, feminism, contemporary Paganism, or other causes and movements that gave meaning to their ostracism and nurtured their activism.

Even when they felt at odds with other students, high school offered some activists a separate space away from parental influence in which activist identities could emerge. Chelsea Gerlach, who was sentenced in 2007 to eight years in prison on twenty-five charges, including arson at a Vail, Colorado, ski resort, joined her high school’s ecology club and was only sixteen when she experienced her first arrest for civil disobedience. In a 1993 South Eugene (Oregon) High School yearbook, her sophomore picture depicts her wearing a black T-shirt with white letters reading “RESIST.” In a short article about the school’s environmental organization she is quoted as saying, “Our generation was born to save the earth . . . if we wait until we’re out of school it might be too late.”⁴⁸ Between 1996 and 2001, Gerlach’s ELF cell was supposedly responsible for setting fire to more than twenty lumber companies, a wild-horse corral, and genetic engineering facilities.⁴⁹ For teenagers like Gerlach who find a high school niche and embrace their own identities as outsiders, who become involved with animal rights or environmental issues with teenage peers, high school and its associated extracurricular activities may serve as an important space in which activist identities are forged.

Like other social movements before them, radical environmentalism and animal rights in the United States have been significantly impacted by the historical contingencies of middle-class white high school and college-age youth at the turn of the millennium, even though not all activists come from white middle-class backgrounds. Post–World War II radical youth movements like the antiwar movement of the 1960s and the animal rights movement of the 1990s were in part made possible by a separate youth culture that developed in the United States during the decades after World War II. This separate youth culture developed not only as a market force, but also as a space in which the forces of capitalism could be questioned and challenged. In this historical trajectory, “teenager” and “youth” became charged and ambiguous categories. Youth culture made possible by high schools provided opportunities for young people to identify with their own visions and values.

The emergence of “teenage” as a special stage of life with symbolic and economic importance did not come about until the nineteenth century, even though urban youth groups appeared in America as early as the 1770s. The term juvenile delinquent was coined in the 1810s, a foreshadowing of what would become a difficult assumption to shake: that youth gathering in groups and/or outside adult supervision were socially and politically dangerous.⁵⁰ Representations of vulnerable and threatening youth from at least the nineteenth century on tended to identify teenagers as quintessential liminal or boundary figures. Cultural critic Henry Giroux argues that young people are “condemned to wander within and between multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness and difference. This is a world in which old certainties are ruptured and meaning becomes more contingent, less indebted to the dictates of reverence and established truth.”⁵¹ In this way, the demonization and othering of some youth created a space for dissent and protest in which taken-for-granted truths such as human exceptionalism could be questioned.

Teenagers accumulated economic and cultural power throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Although “teenager” as a category had emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was introduced in the popular lexicon only in 1941.⁵² Sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the term “youth culture” in a 1942 article; the magazine Seventeen aimed at teen girls was launched in 1944; and in 1945, Vogue magazine heralded a “teen-age revolution.”⁵³ After World War II there was a significant shift from what historian Oded Heilbronner calls a “culture for youth to a culture of youth.”⁵⁴ The culture of youth, recently empowered, would follow at least two divergent courses: those who embraced their market role and facilitated America’s economic and geographic expansion, and those who pushed for revolution against what they saw as an out-of-control industrial nation, both racist and imperialistic.

During the 1950s, teenagers increasingly came to inhabit a world of their own due at least in part to the growth of the high school and an expanding culture of teenage consumption. Their autonomy became a source of tremendous anxiety for the adults who had created high schools and the accompanying separate teen culture in the first place. With the baby boom (1946–1964), youth definitively displaced age as a source of power in the United States.⁵⁵ Even though the 1950s are often seen as being family oriented (at least for the white middle class), in fact, a parallel trend during this decade was the increasing importance of “extrafamilial institutions” in socializing the young.⁵⁶ For this and other reasons, teenagers were looked on suspiciously as being increasingly outside of adult control and inhabiting their own spaces.⁵⁷ From their parents’ perspectives, there was reason for concern, since it was often in these autonomous teenage spaces that teenagers encountered activism and other subversive activities.

Many scholars have identified “the unique susceptibility of youth to social change” as a shaping factor in youth activism.⁵⁸ According to historian Christopher Lasch, young social reformers in the early twentieth century were also in rebellion against the middle class.⁵⁹ This rebellion established a pattern for later youth revolts, such as those of the 1960s, that also rejected middle-class values. Youth activists have been characterized by scholars as educated, middle class, the offspring of loving parents who fostered independent thinking, and members of subcultures who are cynical towards the larger society.⁶⁰

In the 1950s, dissatisfaction with suburbia and capitalist ideals was simmering across diverse populations of American youth. The 1950s Beat movement of artists and writers and the involvement of youth (white as well as African American) in the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s are two examples.⁶¹ As anthropologist Margaret Mead explained the situation in an interview, the Beat generation consisted of young people “not interested in the kind of society we have.”⁶² Mead’s “uninterested” young people flourished in the 1960s, when protest movements took up many themes that remain salient to twenty-first-century activists, especially the rejection of middle-class aspirations.

By the 1960s, Americans in their teenage years and early twenties increasingly had autonomous lives and separate spaces in which to express and experiment with new political identities. Within these separate youth spaces, as in earlier eras, they also called into question structures of power and authority. Some white middle-class youth dropped out of college in the 1960s and 1970s to pursue a different kind of American dream than that of their parents. Many of them engaged in new forms of protest. The 1960s saw the emergence of environmentalism, feminism, radical politics, and unconventional expressions of religiosity, all of which were influenced and/or made possible by youth culture. These movements, with their roots in the 1960s, would later shape the concerns of radical environmentalism and animal rights activism.

The following sections offer a genealogical account of radical environmentalism and animal rights in the United States within the context of late twentieth-century youth culture. Here I focus on the emergence of radical politics since the 1960s, with a nod to earlier direct action movements, followed by a discussion of the feminist and antinuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s. I also explore later expressions of radicalism that draw from these movements, particularly anarchists’ involvement in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999. The third section explores anarchism in practice, such as Food Not Bombs and similar organizations, and its impact on environmental and animal rights direct action. Finally, I discuss the role of religion in youth movements since the 1960s, focusing on contemporary Paganism and radical environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

POST–WORLD WAR II ANTECEDENTS

OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY RADICAL ACTIVISM

After watching a documentary on the radical 1970s antiwar group the Weather Underground, in which one of the members explained he was so obsessed with Vietnam that he thought about it every waking moment, animal rights activist Peter Young realized that he felt the same way about caged and slaughtered animals. In a letter he wrote me from prison, Young recognized Weather as an important antecedent and inspiration for the animal rights movement of the 1990s.⁶³ In the 1960s and 1970s, rebellious youth, especially college students, flocked to the antiwar movement and serve as exemplars to late twentieth-century activists like Young. The 1960s helped to shape the course of radical activism in the 1990s and 2000s by providing models for action, often explicitly invoked, as in Young’s reference to Weather.⁶⁴ A 2005 book on the anticapitalist movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, makes this connection explicit in a preface by former Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn. One of the volume’s co-authors is Chesa Boudin, son of two Weather members.

Like 1960s youth movements, contemporary animal rights activism and environmentalism act as “the conscience of society,” attending to ethics and justice issues, rather than “bread-and-butter ones.”⁶⁵ Activists in the 1960s rejected the careers their parents saw as respectable. They believed that the social values of their parents’ generation were becoming increasingly irrelevant and irrational.⁶⁶ In this way, while youth-led political movements may involve a minority of the national population, they tend to be representative of more widespread sentiments.⁶⁷ Like Weather Underground, radical activists are the extreme wing of broader societal trends around environmental commitments and animal rights. And, like Weather, contemporary radicals link their issues of special concern with other struggles: feminism, antiracism, antiauthoritarianism, egalitarianism, moral purity, and anti-institutionalization.⁶⁸ Weather organized as collectives and made decisions by consensus, confronted “white privilege,” was adamantly opposed to racism, and supported gay rights and equality for women, at least in principle. All of these remained important concerns of activists I met in the 1990s and 2000s.

The Weather Underground was a largely (though not entirely) white middle-class youth movement of self-proclaimed “freedom fighters” challenging the U.S. government’s policies, especially those concerning the Vietnam War and African Americans. They modeled themselves after revolutionaries like Che Guevara, the Argentinian Marxist.⁶⁹ Weatherman Bill Ayers remembers that they “imagined that the survival of humanity depended on the kids alone . . . We wanted to break from the habitual and the mediocre, to step into history as subjects and not objects. We would combat the culture of compromise, rise up and act decisively on what the known demanded—we could think of no basis on which to defend inaction, and so our watchword was simple: Action! Action! Action!”⁷⁰ Weather Underground members were frustrated after petitions, demonstrations, and other above-ground strategies failed to bring about any real change. Some members came from the larger SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, founded in the early 1960s), but they thought SDS nonviolence modeled on the civil rights movement was ineffective. In order to “step into history,” they believed that more confrontational tactics were needed to resist American involvement in the Vietnam War and the oppression of African Americans.⁷¹

Weather was characterized by a tension common among contemporary radical activists: Weather members rejected dominant American values and institutions, but placed themselves within an American tradition of resistance going back to the Boston Tea Party. “In Weatherman,” recalls Bill Ayers, “we had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide.”⁷² And yet, they identified with an American activist lineage. They had read Malcolm X and their heroes and models were “Osceola and Cochise, Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey, Emma Goldman and the Grimke sisters.” According to Ayers, “We located ourselves in history and found a way at last to have a little niche at home.”⁷³ Looking back, claims Ayers, most Americans now “accept the importance of the Boston Tea Party, Shay’s Rebellion, Nat Turner’s uprising, Denmark Vesey’s revolt, John Brown’s attack, the Deacons for Self-Defense, the Freedom Riders, the theft of the Pentagon Papers . . . most of us can imagine ourselves throwing tea into Boston Bay or even throwing ourselves in front of that fateful bullet flying toward Martin Luther King Jr.”⁷⁴ In this understanding of an American tradition of radicalism, Weather and other earlier revolutionaries are all part of a legacy often invoked by contemporary activists who see themselves as heroes of a history not yet told.

After the Vietnam War ended and members of Weather surfaced from their underground lives, the group disbanded. Many of the activists who had protested war and racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s had by the mid-1970s turned to the women’s and environmental movements, including the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which I take up in the next section.⁷⁵ Two decades after the Weather Underground, radical environmentalists like the ELF would revisit some of Weather’s tactics: organizing into cells, emphasizing solidarity with oppressed minorities, issuing communiqués, building explosive devices, carrying out symbolic property destruction, living fugitive lives underground, and identifying with resistance movements in Latin America.⁷⁶

RELIGIOUS RADICALISM

Religious radicalism is also part of the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s that shaped the context out of which late twentieth-century radical environmentalism and animal rights emerged. Religious radicalism from the 1960s on includes Jews and Christians involved in the civil rights movement, radical Catholics like Philip and Daniel Berrigan protesting during the Vietnam War (while they were not young, their tactics of resistance were influential among young antiwar protesters), and Quakers and Neopagans in the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s.

Religious radicalism based on issues of conscience and social justice concerns has a long history in the United States, from nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionists to twentieth-century Pagan antinuclear protesters. The 1960s was a crucial time for the joining of religious commitment and radical action in the antiwar movement, alongside secular movements like the Weather Underground.⁷⁷ Catholic antiwar activists were among the most prominent 1960s religious radicals. For instance, radical Catholics in the Catonsville Nine engaged in a famous act of antiwar property destruction. They risked time in prison because they had to act; their moral commitments gave them no other choice. The compulsion to act would continue to echo through direct action movements of the 1970s and into the 1980s as similar moral concerns were taken up by environmental and animal rights activists.

In 1968, the Catonsville Nine (nine Catholic protesters, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan) took six hundred individual draft files from the Catonsville, Maryland, Selective Service office and burned them with napalm. Daniel Berrigan, who was also famous for pouring blood on the Pentagon steps, explicitly placed the protest in an American tradition of civil disobedience, including the Boston Tea Party and “abolitionist and anarchist traditions.” During the trial of the Catonsville Nine, Berrigan told the court that “From the beginning of our republic good men and women had said no and acted outside the law” and would be vindicated by time.⁷⁸ Another of the protesters, Thomas Lewis, “was not concerned with the law” but with the “innocent”; like the others, he believed that “a person may break the law to save lives.”⁷⁹ These protesters told the court that they could not rest, knowing that innocent people in Vietnam were suffering because of U.S. military actions. They argued to the jury that they answered to a “higher law” that took precedence over human laws.⁸⁰ These antiwar protesters felt that peaceable protests had failed and imperatives had been placed on them by the ongoing suffering of American soldiers and innocent people in Vietnam.

If there is one theme that unites many different forms of religious radicalism, it is the idea of “moral passion” that drives commitment to justice for other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. Animal rights and environmental activists belong in the context of this morally passionate American lineage of resistance to injustice. It is a lineage that runs through the antislavery movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar and Black Power movements of the 1960s, and the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s. On websites, at protest marches, and at animal rights and environmental gatherings, imprisoned activists’ numerous supporters have praised them as “warriors” and “abolitionists,” explicitly placing them in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, and other revolutionary leaders.

Social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement serve as important models for twenty-first-century activists. Henry Spira (1927–1998), an early animal rights activist who organized direct actions against animal testing, explains that “We wanted to adapt to the animal movement the traditions of struggle which had proven effective in the civil rights movement, the union movement and the women’s movement.”⁸¹ In a 2015 talk on “Purity Politics: How Animal Liberation Is Keeping Us from Animal Liberation” at the International Animal Rights Conference, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) activist Jake Conroy described the Black Panthers as the “most important social justice movement in the history of the United States.” When Conroy was released from prison (he was sentenced to four years for his role in SHAC), he sought out activists from the 1960s, including one involved with the Weather Underground. He spoke with them to better understand his own experience and the historical context for his work with the twenty-first-century animal rights movement.⁸² By emphasizing their place in an American lineage of social change movements, radical animal rights and environmental activists argue that their activism is on a historical scale with other liberation movements. They believe that decades from now, instead of being remembered as terrorists, they will be seen as freedom fighters, ahead of their time.

“OUR ENEMIES AND THEIRS ARE ONE AND THE SAME”

Politically motivated radical environmental and animal rights activists at the turn of the twenty-first century are committed to a far-reaching program of social change, as well as a future where animals and wilderness have rights and protections. They argue that their concerns intersect in important ways with racial justice and gender equality. Intersectionality was emphasized in activist communities I participated in, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6. Activists’ critique of American environmental policies and practices concerning nonhuman animals goes hand in hand with a denunciation of consumer capitalism, racism, imperialism, and gender and economic inequality. As the author of a “Report Back” from Earth First!s Rendezvous puts it, “Remember that our enemies and theirs are one and the same.”⁸³ For this reason, the biographies of many radical environmental and animal rights activists are characterized by involvement, often from an early age, with a variety of social change movements and social justice campaigns.

In 2000–2001, Lauren Gazzola became involved in SHAC, the campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences.⁸⁴ Three weeks before she planned to take the LSAT, she was arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” for her participation in SHAC. In 2006, Gazzola was sentenced to four years and four months in prison for “Conspiracy to Violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, Conspiracy to Stalk, three counts of Interstate Stalking, Conspiracy to Harass using a Telecommunications Device.”⁸⁵ The website she contributed to supported animal liberation, even though she herself was not involved in these actions. As she points out, “The speech on our website was indeed controversial. When anonymous activists liberated 14 beagles from the lab, we cheered. When protesters demonstrated outside lab employees’ homes, we applauded.”⁸⁶ After forty months in federal prison, Gazzola was released in 2010.

While in prison, Gazzola completed most of the work for an interdisciplinary MA in the “Law, History, and Philosophy of Free Speech and the First Amendment,” through Antioch University. After her release, she became involved with the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, working in the position of communications associate for publications, drafting press releases, writing newsletter articles, and managing the Center for Constitutional Rights blog. She continued to be outspoken about free speech issues around animal activism and the unconstitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) that allows for protesters to be prosecuted as “terrorists.”⁸⁷

Radical environmental and animal rights activism draws on a range of political currents, usually from the left of the political spectrum. Like Gazzola, Darryl Cherney, one of the leading radical environmentalists in the West Coast “Redwood Wars” of the 1990s, “was political right off the bat.” He worked on various political campaigns in New York City where he grew up from age eight on. He came to Earth First! with a music and theatre background, organizational skills, and an appreciation for working-class issues from living in New York. When Cherney met activist Judi Bari, an advocate of workers’ rights as well as forest protection, her combined interest in deep ecology and socialism was a natural fit.

Bari infused some Earth First! campaigns with a concern for workers’ and women’s rights. An article in Earth First! Journal describes “the second phase” of Earth First! during the early 1990s (following the original “rednecks for wilderness” phase with its emphasis on biocentrism) as a time of coalition building with loggers and other workers.⁸⁸ During the 1990s there was a marked split between some radical environmentalists who wanted to stay focused on wilderness protection and others like Bari and Cherney who felt that environmentalism had to be linked with other causes, such as anarchism, workers’ rights, and feminism.⁸⁹ Former Earth First! Journal editor Panagioti Tsolkas argues that “Judi Bari’s anti-capitalist analysis increased EF!’s appeal to crowds of college students and anarcho-punks.”⁹⁰ In the early decades of the 2000s, a tension between these emphases characterized radical environmentalist communities.

Activists who worked to link environmentalism with other causes during the late 1990s were significantly influenced by the presence of anarchists at forest action camps in the Northwest. Their concerns were also shaped by the emergence of anarchism at the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999, as well as around the Occupy movement of 2009. At the same time, radical environmentalists were involved with Seattle and Occupy, suggesting that anarchism and radical environmentalism have had a symbiotic relationship, influencing each other in important ways. According to Tsolkas, “While Earth First! (EF!) has never considered itself to be explicitly anarchist, it has always had a connection to the antiauthoritarian counterculture and has operated in an anarchistic fashion since its inception . . . it has arguably maintained one of the most consistent and long-running networks for activists and revolutionaries of an anarchist persuasion with the broader goal of overturning all socially constructed hierarchies.”⁹¹ The anarchist influence in environmental and animal rights circles meant that social justice concerns were increasingly foregrounded in the early twenty-first century.

Late twentieth-century anarchism in the United States did not become publically visible in the mainstream news media until the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. Since then, the number of Americans, especially younger Americans, identifying with anarchism has risen.⁹² Activists are exposed to anarchism through college organizations, friends, infoshops, Food Not Bombs, or at protests and in hardcore music scenes. When he was in college, Marten, a former activist with the Buffalo Field Campaign, became involved with a cross-section of loosely anarchist groups. A decade earlier, he was exposed to punk rock at age ten when his uncle took him to a Rancid concert. He became a vegetarian around age twelve after driving through stockyards on a family trip. Marten recalls that his father, an attorney, often complained about how flawed the justice system was. His father also gave him Edward Abbey’s fictionalized account of eco-saboteurs, The Monkey Wrench Gang, when he was a teenager. At college, Marten met “freegans” while dumpstering, was involved with the campus vegetarian/vegan society and Students Against Sweatshops, and read anarcho-syndicalist works and the writings of anarcho-primitivist writers John Zerzan and Kevin Tucker.⁹³ For Marten, all of these experiences validated “turning it all down as an appropriate response.”⁹⁴

The new anarchism that attracted Marten was built on classical anarchism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but was also influenced by a host of other factors, including radical feminism and the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico in 1994. Classical anarchism began to take shape as a coherent political philosophy within “the left wing of socialism,” according to Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin.⁹⁵ The anarchist slogan “No gods, no masters” expressed the view that socialism was not critical enough of the state and institutional power. Classical anarchists like Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) were concerned with capitalism and the suffering caused by the Industrial Revolution. From the 1880s through the Red Scare of the 1920s and the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s, large numbers of anarchists were politically active in the United States and Europe. Anarchist thought and practice spread from the United States to South America and Africa. It was expressed through a variety of experiments, including communal living, federations, free schools, workers councils, local currencies, and mutual aid societies.⁹⁶

Repression in the United States and by Communist governments in other countries, not to mention the rise of Nazism in Germany, resulted in most anarchist leaders being killed or disappearing by the 1940s. For these reasons anarchism became “a ghost of itself,” according to anarchist writer Cindy Milstein.⁹⁷ In the United States during World War II some anarchist ideas were “resuscitated” and influenced the Beat movement of the 1950s, expressed through the poetry of Alan Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, and other Beat poets.⁹⁸

The reemergence of anarchism in the United States came about through the 1960s counterculture and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also shaped by the following: radical feminism and gay rights movements; the Situationists (1962–1972) who advocated playful disruptions of the everyday; social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s (1921–2006) writings linking social and ecological crises; the West German Autonomen’s creation of communal free spaces and a masked black bloc in demonstrations in the 1980s; and the Zapatista rebellion in 1994.⁹⁹ Anarchist thought and practice played a role in various movements that developed after the 1960s, including radical feminism and gay rights, but especially the antinuclear movement.

In addition to anarchism, divergent forms of feminism, including anarcha-feminism, ecofeminism, and feminist spirituality, were important factors in shaping the direct action antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁰⁰ In addition to North American protests, women played an important role in the United Kingdom, especially at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a protest against nuclear weapons at a site in Berkshire, England, that ran for nineteen years.¹⁰¹ In many ways, the feminist movement was at the center of 1970s radicalism and was instrumental in creating a set of self-empowerment organizations and practices, such as health collectives and rape crisis centers run by women. Feminist activists also founded women’s studies programs at colleges and universities that would influence generations of young women and other participants in the antinuclear movement and environmentalism.¹⁰²

The nonviolent direct action movement that coalesced around antinuclear activism in the 1970s and 1980s is the most direct link between the countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and radical eco-activism of the 1990s. The antinuclear movement specialized in road blockades as well as other forms of protest and drew together feminism, anarchism, environmentalism, nonviolent direct action, theatrical protest elements, and in some instances, both Christian and contemporary Pagan spiritual currents. In the antinuclear movement, Quaker consensus decision making converged with anarchist organizing tactics such as affinity groups.¹⁰³ These practices, spread nationally by the antinuclear movement, carried on through twenty-first-century anticapitalist, environmental, and animal rights protests.

The Clamshell Alliance was the most influential expression of anarchist, environmentalist, and feminist countercultural tendencies in the 1970s. Clamshell was formed in 1976 to protest the construction of a nuclear power plant near Seabrook, New Hampshire. Clamshell was founded by Quakers and antiwar activists, some of whom had been involved in the civil rights movement. It picked up on anarchist countercultural tendencies from the 1960s, as well as Gandhian nonviolence from the civil rights movement, and Quaker commitments to consensus and community building.¹⁰⁴ Clamshell’s commitment to feminism encouraged women to take on leadership roles more than earlier movements had done.¹⁰⁵

The antinuclear movement in New England, Northern California, and elsewhere was often composed of “radical countercultural activists.”¹⁰⁶ They had been politically active in the 1960s, but moved to rural areas by the early 1970s, as part of the back-to-the-land movement. They spread ideas and practices about small-scale communities, grassroots democracy, nonhierarchical decision making, pacifism, and anarchism. Clamshell and other antinuclear groups brought together this older generation of former antiwar activists and participants in the 1960s counterculture with young urban activists. Although Clamshell was short lived, it served as a powerful model for later direct action campaigns. In the couple years of its existence, Clamshell trained thousands of activists in consensus decision making and nonviolent direct action, practices that spread across the country to other antinuclear struggles.¹⁰⁷

On the opposite coast from Clamshell, Abalone Alliance was one of the largest and most successful antinuclear campaigns. Abalone was formed in 1976 to protest the opening of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo, California. Like Clamshell, Abalone was composed of former peace activists as well as “radically ecologically oriented activists” from Northern California who had been part of the 1960s counterculture. Although Clamshell included prominent women leaders and a commitment to feminism and egalitarianism, Abalone was shaped by even stronger strains of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism. “Anarcha-feminism,” inspired by the work of anarchist writer Murray Bookchin and his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, was particularly important in Abalone’s development. The anarcha-feminists developed a movement culture that was very much like the culture of radical environmentalist gatherings of the 1990s and 2000s. They insisted that any anarchist revolutionary politics must also be feminist and sometimes referred to themselves as “ecowarriors.” Abalone also promoted leaderless resistance, a characteristic of radical environmental activism in the 2000s.¹⁰⁸

Like Abalone, twenty-first-century Food Not Bombs, infoshops, barter networks, tool lending libraries, community gardens, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement, and hardcore punk rock have been anarchist at heart. They have tended to be organized horizontally rather than vertically and have stressed grassroots communities and mutual aid. These anarchist expressions have perpetuated the stream of anarchist thought and practice running from the 1960s antiwar movement through the 1970s women’s movement and the nonviolent direct action antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Radical environmentalists in Earth First! were part of this mix and some of them were significantly influenced by the anarchist Wobblies (International Workers of the World).¹⁰⁹ Activist Panagioti Tsolkas claims that the journal Green Anarchy (2001–2008) “reshaped” Earth First!: “The GA movement and its magazine contributed significantly to developing the theory that surrounded EF!’s basic tenets.” The green anarchy movement was one of many “frequent crossovers” between Earth First! and the anarchist movement that led to young activists moving beyond the tactics of mainstream environmental groups.¹¹⁰ For all these reasons, by the end of the 1990s, anarchism had become the most influential political view among radical activists who linked environmental and nonhuman animal issues with social justice concerns and critiques of capitalism and the state.

THE NEW ANARCHISM IN PRACTICE

In addition to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and the 2011 Occupy movement, Food Not Bombs and street medics are two examples of anarchist networks that have played a role at radical environmentalist protests and gatherings. Several activists I interviewed were involved with Food Not Bombs, an anarchist organization that helped organize the logistics of the Seattle protests.¹¹¹ Since 1980 when it was founded by anarchists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Food Not Bombs has spread across the United States, feeding homeless people and protesters with vegan food from dumpsters and food banks. A mainstay at Occupy and other protests as well as some Earth First! gatherings, Food Not Bombs also helped arrange food for displaced people after Hurricane Katrina.¹¹² During Occupy Wall Street, Food Not Bombs, along with other anarchist mutual aid organizations, provided support for protesters. The Food Not Bombs Boston chapter, for example, served hot meals every day at the Occupy Boston encampment.¹¹³

Some activists became involved with radical environmentalism and animal rights activism through Food Not Bombs and other anarchist projects. In 2014 I spoke with Rabbit, an activist and Earth First! Journal editor, about his experience working with Food Not Bombs. Rabbit grew up in Los Angeles and was active in animal rights protests after graduating from high school. He was a part-time activist at first, what he called a “weekend warrior,” joining protests against Huntingdon Life Sciences. While in college at California State University, Long Beach, he volunteered with Food Not Bombs for four years. It was not until this period of his life that Rabbit came to a realization: “It shouldn’t have taken me twenty-three years to realize that if there’s food in a dumpster and there’s hungry people, that I can give it to them, but because of the way I was raised in society, it took me that long to realize.” As well as being involved with Food Not Bombs, Occupy, and animal rights demonstrations, Rabbit spent a year working on homesteads and organic farms, and visited the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas. After college, he volunteered as a canvasser and fundraiser for Greenpeace following the 2010 Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill.¹¹⁴ Like other activists, he traveled through these networks of affiliation, many of which were shaped by anarchism, before he became involved with Earth First!

Food Not Bombs is one of many direct links between radical environmental/animal rights activism and the Occupy movement. Like a number of young activists I met, Rabbit also credits Occupy with having a significant influence on his and others’ radicalism: “It got a lot of people off their asses, many people who had never protested. Since then I’ve done nothing but activism and know so many people for whom that is the way it is.” For Rabbit, Occupy was an “awesome way for people to learn skills: how to march, how to chant. I learned how to break into foreclosed homes and open up squats.” Aaron, another Earth First! activist previously involved with Occupy, had worked on the 2008 Obama campaign as a teenager. He was disillusioned by what he saw as “Obama selling out,” which led him to radicalism. Although he was in college, he would go to class during the day and then spend the night with the Occupy encampment at a park in his Midwestern college town. After his time with Occupy, Aaron became active in Earth First! and involved with the 2012 Tar Sands Blockade in Texas.¹¹⁵

In a similar fashion to Food Not Bombs volunteers, anarchist street medics serve protests like those of the Occupy movement and Earth First!, as well as helping in disaster-stricken areas. They also have links to earlier streams of radicalism. Street medics originated in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and were also involved with the American Indian Movement in the 1970s.¹¹⁶ Many of the early twenty-first-century street medic collectives formed to meet a need felt during the 1999 Seattle protests.¹¹⁷ Some medics have formal medical training and are nurses, physicians, or EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) but others are lay people who had been through street medic training. Street medics ran a training I participated in at the Wild Roots, Feral Futures gathering, and they staffed the medic tent and supported a protest action at an Earth First! Rendezvous I attended. But they also traveled to New Orleans to volunteer their services after Hurricane Katrina and to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Others worked in free community clinics in large U.S. cities. In 2015, some street medic collectives supported antiracism protests in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri.¹¹⁸ Activists circulate through these various anarchist sites of learning and practice, sharing information and connecting each other to like-minded communities.

In all of these examples—Food Not Bombs, street medics, Occupy, Seattle—anarchism serves as a worldview that allows radical activists to create meaning out of their lives by linking activist practices to a broader movement for social and political change. Environmental activism in the late twentieth century was shaped by the confluence of anarchism and deep ecology just as animal rights was shaped by anarchism and critiques of anthropocentrism. But religious and spiritual movements also played a part, even while most anarchists were suspicious of institutional religious expressions and particularly of Christianity.

YOUTH MOVEMENTS AND AMERICAN RELIGION

SINCE THE 1960S

So how might we situate religion within this story of youth-led direct action movements since the 1960s? Because adolescents are no longer children but not yet adults, their religious commitments are usually not fully formed, which allows them to be open to new ways of understanding the world. Moreover, young people feature prominently in a number of developments on the post–World War II American religious landscape, such as the growth of Asian religions, new religious movements, evangelicalism, and the rising ranks of the religiously unaffiliated at the beginning of the twenty-first century.¹¹⁹

Like many new religions, animal rights and environmental organizations sometimes actively court young people, as PETA does with its “PETA 2,” targeted at teenagers and billed as “the largest animal rights group in the world.”¹²⁰ Late twentieth-century animal rights activist Henry Spira urged his fellow activists to reach out to the young: “Our Coalition must connect with young people while they are still sorting out their values.”¹²¹ Conversion to new religions as well as to political and social movements like animal rights typically occurs during teenage and college years. One possible reason for this may be because teenagers are able to think abstractly and multidimensionally, calling into question received truths. However, because of “the yielding of the certainty of childhood,” they are not yet seen as fully formed adults.¹²² They are perceived as both vulnerable and potentially powerful because of their transitional status, unpredictable as they leave childhood behind and decide who they want to be, not necessarily following the dictates of their parents or other adults.¹²³

Because of this liminal position of being both powerful and vulnerable, young Americans have been seen as innocents at risk and as potential converts in the context of new religious phenomena. Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, for instance, was particularly concerned about the salvation of young adults. During revivals of the Great Awakening, the majority of conversions were young men and women, a fourth of them in their teens.¹²⁴ Moreover, three out of four converts in nineteenth-century evangelical revivals were young women.¹²⁵

In the 1970s, young adults were again imagined as both spiritually powerful and defenseless, sometimes posing a threat to other youth and to social stability. During the 1960s and 1970s, transplanted Asian religions and new religious movements gained popularity among a generation of youth open to spiritual experimentation. However, youth interest in these new religions was countered by the anticult movement of the 1970s.¹²⁶ Young converts were seen by many American adults, often including their parents, as victims of so-called cults, such as new religions like Krishna Consciousness, the Unification Church, and contemporary Paganism.

For new religions like contemporary Paganism, an umbrella terms that includes Witches and Druids, youth interest was a boon. While teenage religious experimentation was magical for the youth who found it, these occult traditions were also the target of a satanic rumor panic of the 1970s and 1980s. This perpetuated a sense that youth were “at risk” and reified societal stereotypes of “dark teens.” Young Pagans rarely followed their parents’ or neighbors’ religious identities, whether atheist or Christian, and so their beliefs and practices tended to be either demonized or trivialized.¹²⁷

Contemporary Paganism has a parallel history with radical environmentalism. Both emerged in the wake of the 1960s counterculture and focused on the Earth, attracting young Americans throughout the last few decades of the twentieth century. In addition to the new anarchism, late modern youth culture, and deep ecology, Paganism is another important factor in creating a context in which radical activism could thrive at the turn of the millennium.¹²⁸ Paganism has had a significant influence on radical environmentalism, especially Earth First!, although less so on animal rights. In the United Kingdom Pagans have been involved with antinuclear and antiroads activism, though less visibly in the United States.¹²⁹

Contemporary Pagan involvement with anarchist movements and direct action has its origins in the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Pagans, especially Witches, participated in Abalone Alliance protests against the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Reclaiming, a well-known collective of Witches that was founded in San Francisco, joined Abalone’s campaign. They held rituals in jail and at protests, even though by no means all protesters were Pagan. Contemporary Pagans were also active in the Livermore Action Group (LAG) protesting nuclear weapons development at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California between 1981–1984. LAG was feminist, anarchist, ecologically concerned, and included significant groups of both Christians and Pagans working together against nuclear arms. The influential feminist Witch and writer Starhawk participated in LAG, Abalone, and Earth First! protests. In her activism and writing, feminism, Paganism, and radical environmentalism are intertwined concerns.¹³⁰