Earth First!

Earth First!

Founded	1980
Founder	Dave Foreman Mike Roselle Howie Wolke
Focus	Environmental protection
Location	Active in over 19 countries
Origins	Southwestern United States
Method	Direct action
Slogan	No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth!
Website	http://earthfirstjournal.org

Earth First! is a radical environmental advocacy group^[1] that emerged in the Southwestern United States in 1979. It was co-founded on April 4, 1980^[2] by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron Kezar.^[3]

There are Earth First! groups in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Belgium, Philippines, Czech Republic, India, Mexico, France, Germany, New Zealand, Poland, Nigeria, Slovakia, Ireland, Italy, and Spain.^[4]

Inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold's land ethic, and Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, a group of activists composed of environmental activist Dave Foreman, ex-Yippie (Youth International Party) Mike Roselle, Wyoming Wilderness Society representatives Bart Koehler and Howie Wolke and Bureau of Land Management employee Ron Kezar pledged, "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!" while traveling in Foreman's VW bus from the El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve in northern Mexico to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Provoked by what they considered a sell-out by mainstream environmental advocates during the "RARE II" (the Forest Service's Roadless Area Review and Evaluation) planning process, the activists envisioned a revolutionary movement to set aside multi-million acre ecological preserves all across the United States. Their ideas drew on the main concepts of the new science of conservation biology, which scientists like E.O. Wilson had developed over the past twenty years, but which mainstream environmental groups had been slow to embrace. All of this came together after a grueling hike, as the men headed toward Albuquerque. "Suddenly Foreman called out 'Earth First!' The next thing you know," Wolke says, "Roselle drew a clenched fist logo, passed it up to the front of the van, and there was Earth First!"^[3]

The early years

During the group's early years (1979–1986), Earth First! mixed publicity stunts (such as rolling a plastic "crack" down Glen Canyon Dam) with far-reaching wilderness proposals that reportedly went beyond what mainstream environmental groups were willing to advocate (with conservation biology research from a biocentric perspective). The group's proposals were published in a periodical, Earth First! The Radical Environmental Journal, informally known as the Earth First! Journal. Edward Abbey often spoke at early gatherings, and his writings were an inspiration that led him to be revered by the early movement. An annual gathering of the group was known as the Round River Rendezvous, with the name taken from an Ojibwa myth about a continuous river of life flowing into and out of itself and sustaining all relations. The rendezvous is part celebration with art and music, part activist conference with workshops and accounts of past actions. Another project led by the organization at this time was the creation of a tax-deductible fund, then called Earth First! Foundation, which was established with the aim of providing financial support for research, advocacy and education by Earth First! activists. The fund was later renamed to Fund for Wild Nature in 1991.^[5]

In the spring of 1985, a nationwide call to action in the Earth First! Journal brought Earth First! members from around the United States to the Willamette National Forest of western Oregon, to take action against Willamette Industries, a logging company. Finding logging road blockades (carried out by Corvallis-based Cathedral Forest Action Group) were offering too short-term a protection, Marylander Ron Huber and Washingtonian Mike Jakubal devised tree sitting as a more effective civil disobedience alternative.^[6]

On May 23, 1985, Mike Jakubal made the first Earth First! tree sit.^[7] When U.S. Forest Service law enforcement official Steve Slagowski arrived, Mike Roselle, Ron Huber and others were arrested sitting at the base of the tree in support. This first tree sit lasted less than a day—Jakubal came down in the evening to look over the remains of the forest that had been cut down around him that day, and was arrested by a hidden Forest Service officer—but the tree-sitting concept was deemed sound by Earth First! members. Huber and Jakubal, in the company of Mike Roselle, brought the concept to the June 14 Washington EF Rendezvous;^[8] on June 23, a convoy of activists arrived at Willamette National Forest, and set up tree platforms^[9] in "Squaw/Three timbersale",^[10] a location the group thought was threatened with imminent destruction. While at one point, up to a dozen trees were occupied, a July 10 clash^[11] took down all the trees with platforms except for Ron Huber's as the other sitters had gone for an overnight meeting elsewhere. Huber remained in his tree, dubbed Yggdrasil, until July 20 when two Linn County sheriff's deputies were lifted in a crane box^[12] and wrestled him from the tree.

Later, from about 1987 on, Earth First! became primarily associated with direct action to prevent logging, building of dams, and other forms of development which Earth First! finds may cause destruction of wildlife habitats or the despoliation of wild places. This change in direction attracted many new members to Earth First!, some of whom came from a leftist or anarchist political background or involvement in the counterculture. Dave Foreman has related that this led to the introduction of such activities as a "puke-in" at a shopping mall, a flag burning, heckling of Edward Abbey at a 1987 Earth First! rendezvous, and back-and-forth debates in the Earth First! Journal on such topics as anarchism, with which Foreman and others did not wish to be associated. Most of the group's older members, including Dave Foreman, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, Christopher Manes, George Wuerthner, and Earth First! Journal editor John Davis, became increasingly uncomfortable with this new direction. This change reportedly led several of the founders to sever their ties to Earth First! in 1990. Many of them went on to launch a new magazine, Wild Earth, and a new environmental group, the Wildlands Project. Roselle, on the other hand, along with activists such as Judi Bari, welcomed the new direct-action and leftist direction of Earth First!.

Starting in the mid-1980s, Earth First! began an increasing promotion of and identification with "Deep Ecology", a philosophy put forward by Arne Næss, Bill Devall, and George Sessions, which holds that all forms of life on Earth have equal value in and of themselves, without regard for their utility to human beings.

Earth First! since 1990

Since 1990, action within the Earth First! movement has become increasingly influenced by anarchist political philosophy. The change also brought a rotation of the primary media organ in differing regions, an aversion to organized leadership or administrative structure, and a new trend of identifying Earth First! as a mainstream movement rather than an organization. In 1992, the push of Earth First! toward being a mainstream movement caused members who refused to abandon criminal acts to start a militant offshoot called Earth Liberation Front.^[13] From the 1992 EF RRR gathering's late night bon-fire discussions the Earth Liberation Front was "formally" born, as young militant activists debated the effectiveness of civil disobedience activism tactics in light of the ever increasing destruction of the planet Earth by human activity. Elders of the Earth First movement gave their blessings to this newly formed strike team known as ELF to be a more extreme option for industrial society to contemplate if more moderate environmental measures were not heeded. ^[14] ELF became the extremists of the environmental movement, just as the Earth First movement itself was created for a decade earlier to be, "you (Boise-Cascade Lumber) either listen to the Sierra Club or a bunch of Earth First'ers will down here locking themselves to your buildings & desks while holding constant protest demonstrations!"

   Occupations of forest timber sale areas and other threaten natural areas was a common strategy of Earth First whereas dozens of people would physically lock their bodies to trees, bulldozers, desks or even a redwood stump lock-box carried into Californian Congressman's Frank Riggs office in 1997 part of the ongoing HeadWaters Redwoods protests!  [15]  Earth First'ers arrestee's often were tortured by arresting police officers with pepper spray, pain compliance holds, police dogs and at gunpoint before being removed from specially created lock-down boxes (metal tubes with rebar in middle where activists would handcuff self upon) to or bicycle U-locks around their necks to the target object.  Earth First beliefs encouraged the individual to self-identify with all life of this bio-sphere known as Earth as their extended self psychological which enabled a person to sacrifice themselves physically and endure great pain as well willing to die to defend the last wild lands behind them from destruction.  Mass occupations such as "Free Cascadia" where Earth First occupied the burnt forested mountains of Oregon for 11 months, enduring weather & law enforcement raids to remove them from barricades, trenches and tree-sits built throughout the arson created timber sale, ultimately saving this wild land.  However the attempt to occupy the old-growth timber sale Sugarloaf Mountain in southern Oregon in 1995 did not succeed where the USFS declared 30 square mile an exclusionary zone and arrested anyone on sight within, enforced with over 100 federal agents with helicopters and the elite US Army Ranger trained LEO squad known as "Camo-Feddies," hundreds of activists were arrested, at the end they witnessed one tree requiring 9 log trucks to carry it out. [16]  Earth First responded by immediately occupying the next nearby timber sale "China Left" in early October 1995, placing two "Dragon Lock-boxes" into both ends of the valley's only road, a large hole was dug into the roadbed where an oil barrel with a PVC pipe horizontal place within & rebar stuck through barrel into pipe where activist would lock their arm upon and the oil barrel is buried in quick drying cement in/around and a 1/8 sheet plywood cemented on top to hamper digging out of the barrel lock-box known as a Dragon.  The female Earth First'er known as 'Ocean' held the road for a day as police attempted to remove this human reinforced blockade, as Earth First dug in literally further down the valley starting a year long occupation protest where even a pickup truck was turned into a lock-box blocking the only bridge, to defend these last wild salmon spawning streams and old-growth forest where they began.   
    From 1992 to 1998 the largest timber sale in U.S. Forest Service history the "Cove/Mallard Timber Sale" in Idaho was occupied by Earth First with aid of nearby private land bought by an former land developer turned activist, again Earth First was able to save most of this threaten wilderness area.  During the Cove/Mallard occupation over 350 people from 12 countries were arrested, slowing the project from a planned 200 clear-cuts & 7 new roads built into wild untouched lands down to only 2 roads and 37 clear-cuts. June 1993 Earth First stopped construction of the Noble Road by erecting elaborate multi-layered barricades which even included U.S. Forest Service vehicles, quickly in the night in an para-military fashion traveling over 17 miles through wild mountains dodging patrols of LEO's whom were informed of the planned demonstration.  CNN covered this event where 27 activists were arrested, the first "Tripods" (3 30ft logs placed in triangle loosely tied together with a blanket to keep the activist warm as they sat 20 feet above) were placed over extensive trenches which had 4 activists buried in quick drying cement and two activists who locked themselves by their necks with U-locks to front axle of responding vehicles to reinforce the road blockage.  U.S. Forest Service responded with shooting at fleeing activists and raid the private land with an M-16 armed SWAT team searching for "tree-spikers" and/or 'the individual whom resembled BigFoot and had attacked a USFS 4x4 with spears & rocks a few weeks earlier.' [17] 
   The first acknowledged death of an Earth First'er was September 1998 in northern California's Redwoods when a huge 300+ year old Redwood tree was cut down by a Pacific Lumber logger fell down upon the Earth First activist David Chain, he died instantly.  David was engaged in the Earth First tactic known as "cat & mouse" whereas activists would move around inside active logging cutting units to create unsafe conditions for timber to be harvested by physically putting human bodies in path of trees being cut down, he died with a peaceful expression on his face as if he listening to a far off voice.  [18]  The HeadWaters campaign is to protect the last old-growth Redwood tree forests in northern California from being logged by Pacific Lumber Co. which was bought out by an hedge-fund company Maxxim whom broke up the lumber company & planned to liquidate its assets including the old-growth forests held in reserve for hundred years already.  HeadWaters has been an ongoing protest for over 15 years.   
    Most activists of Earth First had already tried more moderate forms of environmental/political activism and decided to become more involved in pursuit of real action which created results other than letters to the editor or mere protest signs.  Earth First activists such as 'Llama' of the Great Lakes Earth First chapter in Chicago, had been involved in college activism for years, traveled to D.C. and other capitols lobbying government officials and even received letters from President Clinton thanking him upon his "efforts to save the wild lands of America."  Another Earth First leader 'Fawn' was raised Republican in a middle class family, but upon witnessing the vast clear-cuts in National Forest lands many people are inspired to acts of selflessness "in defense of Mother Earth." [19] 
   Most members of Earth First! liken themselves to a decentralized, locally informed activism based on communitarian ethics while Earth First adversaries characterize the group as conducting a form of terrorism.[20] One of the early critics of Earth First!'s change in tactics later accused the FBI of deliberately introducing the concept of Non-Violence to the group.[21]  

In various parts of the country, individual citizens and small groups form the nuclei for grassroots political actions, which may take the form of legal actions—i.e. protests, timber sale appeals, and educational campaigns—or civil disobedience—tree sitting, road blockades, and sabotage—called "ecotage" by some Earth First! members, claiming it is done as a form of ecodefense. Often, disruptive direct action is used primarily as a stalling tactic in an attempt to prevent possible environmental destruction while Earth First! lawsuits try to secure long-term victories. Reported tactics include road blockades, activists locking themselves to heavy equipment, tree-sitting, and sabotage of machinery.

Earth First! was known for providing information in the Earth First! Journal on the practice of tree-spiking and monkeywrenching (or ecotage) which have led to reports of injuries from such tactics, although no evidence that Earth First! was involved in related activity.^[22] In 1990, however, Judi Bari led Earth First! in the Northern California and Southern Oregon region to renounce these practices, calling them counterproductive to an effort to form a coalition with workers and small logging businesses to defeat large-scale corporate logging in Northern California.

Judi Bari Car Bombing

In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi Bari's car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally exploded. Bari contended that extremists opposed to her pro-environmental actions had placed the bomb in her car in order to kill her. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence.^[23] Bari died in 1997 of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland, California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million.^[24] Eighty percent of the damages were for violation of their First Amendment rights by the FBI and police, who tried to discredit them in the media as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing remains unsolved.^[24]

A documentary movie about the court case, entitled The Forest for the Trees, was released in 2006. It was directed by Bernadine Mellis and is available on Netflix and other movie sites. Bernadine Mellis' father is one of the lawyers featured in the documentary.

On March 21, 2011, a U.S. federal judge in California ordered the FBI to preserve evidence related to the car bombing. The FBI was planning to destroy all evidence in the case.^[25]

Earth First! in the UK

The Earth First! movement in the United Kingdom started in 1990, when a group in Hastings, Sussex organised an action at Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent. It grew rapidly, and many groups formed, with or without the EF! name, over the next years.

The first big Earth First! actions happened in 1992 and focused around the importation of tropical hardwood. The first major action had happened in December 1991 at Port of Tilbury. The second major action, the Merseyside Dock Action, attracted between 200-600 people who occupied Liverpool docks for two days. This action coincided with the Earth First! roadshow, in which a group of UK & US Earth First!ers toured the country. Other early campaigns also focused on timber-yards, most notably the Timbmet yard in Oxford.^[26]

There are now various regional Earth First! groups, the EF! Action Update has been joined by the EF! Action Reports website^[27] and a yearly Earth First! national gathering.^[28] At the first gathering in Sussex the debate focused on the use of criminal damage as a protest technique. Earth First! decided to neither 'condemn nor condone' criminal damage, instead it focused more on non-violent direct action techniques. Some people at the gathering coined the term Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which became a separate movement which spread back to the US. Actions involving criminal damage did happen often under cover of night and were typically done under an ELF banner and attributed to elves and pixies, or the Earth Liberation Faeries, giving a distinctly British feel to the movement.

Major growth in the direct action movement started with a concurrent focus on roads, and a protest camp at Twyford Down was started, against the M3 in Hampshire. Whilst Earth First! groups still played an essential part, other groups such as the Dongas tribe soon formed. Alongside SchNEWS, such publications as the Earth First! Action Update,^[29] and Do or Die^[30] were means of communication between the groups. The movement grew to other road protest camps including the Newbury bypass, the A30 and the M11 link road protest in London, where whole streets were squatted in order to slow down the construction work. Later the focus widened to other campaigns including Reclaim the Streets, anti-genetics campaigns,^[31] and Rising Tide. More recently, there have been groups such as Peat Alert!^[32] and Plane Stupid.^[33]

The UK Earth First! groups differed considerably from the U.S. groups as reported in a ten-year retrospective of the Earth First! by two of the founders Jake Bowers and Jason Torrance:

“

We knew EF! US's original hardline "rednecks for wilderness" attitude wouldn't appeal here, so we set out to build a group that combined radical action and social justice to protect Britain's few remaining natural places.[26]

”

Seeing ecological and social justice as part of the same thing, plus organising along anarchist lines and bringing in other radical & militant struggles, mixed with audacious actions and real radicalism spread the EF! ideal to other countries and helped morph the US movement.

Sabotage Involving Earth First Members

Telluride Ski Resort

Vandals identifying themselves as members of Earth First forced the closing of the Telluride Ski Resort in Mountain Village, Colorado using a chemical to write messages on 11 greens, such as "Earth First!", "Hayduke lives" and "Ron you pig".^[34] In relation to the incident, the Telluride Times Journal received a letter signed "Earth First" stating that the ski lift had been sabotaged with a welding gas applied to the lift cable that weakens the metal.^[34]

Fairfield Snowbowl Ski Resort

Earth First! member Mark Davis pled guilty in Federal court to malicious destruction of property at the Fairfield Snowbowl Ski Resort near Flagstaff, Arizona.^[35] Davis had been charged with, "using a torch to cut around the base of the top pylon of the main chair lift at Snowbowl on Oct. 25, 1988."^[36]

Nuclear Power and Weapons Plants

Earth First! member Mark Davis was sentenced to six years in prison for conspiring to damage the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Facility, and the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.^[35]

See also

• Conservation ethic
• Green anarchism
• Green syndicalism
• Hayduke
• List of environmental organizations

Notes

Further reading: books about Earth First!

Books about the early Earth First!

• Davis, John, ed. The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism (1991) (ISBN 978-0-87905-387-1)
• Foreman, David. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (1991) (ISBN 978-0-517-88058-6)
• Foreman, David. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (1985) (ISBN 978-0-9637751-0-8)
• Manes, Christopher. Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (1990) (ISBN 978-0-316-54532-7)
• Scarce, Rik. Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement (2006) (ISBN 978-1-59874-028-8)
• Wall, Derek. Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements (1999) (ISBN 978-0415190640)
• Zakin, Susan. Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (1993) (ISBN 978-0-8165-2185-2)

Books about the post-1990 Earth First

• EF! Publications. Do or Die - Voices from the Ecological Resistance (ISBN 0-9545662-0-3) (ISSN 1462-5989)
• Bari, Judi. Timber Wars (1994) (ISBN 978-1-56751-026-3)
• Lee, Martha. Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse (1995) (ISBN 978-0-8156-0365-8)
• Scarce, Rik. Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement (2006) (ISBN 978-1-59874-028-8)
• Wall, Derek Earth First and the Anti-Roads Movement (1999) (ISBN 978-0-415-19064-0)
• Chadwick, Paul "Concrete: Think Like A Mountain"
• King, Elli (Editor) LISTEN: The Story of the People at Taku Wakan Tipi and the Reroute of Highway 55 or The Minnehaha Free State(2006)

Books critical of Earth First

• Arnold, Ron. Ecoterror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature (1997) (ISBN 978-0-939571-18-5)
• Bradford, George. How Deep is Deep Ecology? (1989) (ISBN 978-0-87810-035-4)
• Clausen, Barry. Walking on the Edge: How I Infiltrated Earth First! (1994) (ISBN 978-0-936783-12-3)
• Coleman, Kate. The Secret Wars of Judi Bari (2005) (ISBN 978-1-893554-74-0)

Documentaries about Earth First!

• Pickaxe, based on the 1990s Earth First!-led "Cascadia Free State"
• In 2009 EF!, along with the ELF, were the subject of a documentary called Green With A Vengeance.
• A 2011 documentary on the ELF and EF!, entitled, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.
• Becker, Michael; Gamboa, Stephen (2007). "Testify! - Eco-Defense and the Politics of Violence". Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy 3 (1). 

References to Earth First! in entertainment media

• The Lost World (1997 film) refers to Earth First! in the following dialogue:

External links

• Earth First! Worldwide
• Earth First! Journal
• Earth First! Newswire
• UK Earth First!