DEEP ECOLOGY Shortly After Founding Earth First!, Foreman and His Comrades Also Immediately Seized on and Adopted Deep Ecology As Earth First!’S Natural Philosophy
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Radical Environmentalism: the New Civil Disobedience?
Seattle Journal for Social Justice Volume 6 Issue 1 Fall/Winter 2007 Article 35 November 2007 Radical Environmentalism: The New Civil Disobedience? Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sjsj Recommended Citation Hernandez, Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia (2007) "Radical Environmentalism: The New Civil Disobedience?," Seattle Journal for Social Justice: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 35. Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sjsj/vol6/iss1/35 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Publications and Programs at Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Seattle Journal for Social Justice by an authorized editor of Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 289 Radical Environmentalism: The New Civil Disobedience? César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández1 God said, “I have given you every seed-bearing plant which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree that bears fruit with seed. It will be for your food. To every wild animal, to every bird of the sky, to everything that creeps along the ground, to everything that has the breath of life, I give every green plant for food.” So it was. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Book of Genesis2 We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. -
RELIGION, ENVIRONMENT, and INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Course Overview and Syllabus (Sampson Final 7-27-10)
RELIGION, ENVIRONMENT, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Course Overview and Syllabus (Sampson Final 7-27-10) At a time of peak oil (Kunstler 2006), climate disruption (IPCC 2001, UNEP 2009), and "ecological overshoot" by which human demands on the natural environment exceed the earth's carrying capacity and ability to recharge (Catton 1980), compounded by exponential population growth and the rapid industrialization of countries such as China and India, global humanity is living beyond the planet's ecological means. Early warnings were sounded in such environmental classics as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb (1968), and The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers (1974; recently updated and reissued [2004]), preceded two decades earlier by Aldo Leopold's propounding of a land ethic in his classic A Sand County Almanac (1949). Fast forward to today and the United Nations' Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) has determined that some 60 percent of the world's vital ecosystem services are seriously degraded (see also Foley 2010). The many manifestations of environmental breakdown-in the mass extinction of animal and plant species; in pollution of the oceans, waterways, and skies; in the devastation and toxic pollution of fossil fuel and other mineral extraction; in the massive soil loss and chemical and animal waste pollution from industrialized agriculture and the factory farming of livestock; in over fishing of the seas; etc.-have been documented in a vast and expanding literature (see McKibben 1999, Wilson 2002, Kunstler 2006, Speth 2008, Orr 2009, and Brown 2009 for but a few prominent examples). -
Disaggregating the Scare from the Greens
DISAGGREGATING THE SCARE FROM THE GREENS Lee Hall*† INTRODUCTION When the Vermont Law Review graciously asked me to contribute to this Symposium focusing on the tension between national security and fundamental values, specifically for a segment on ecological and animal- related activism as “the threat of unpopular ideas,” it seemed apt to ask a basic question about the title: Why should we come to think of reverence for life or serious concern for the Earth that sustains us as “unpopular ideas”? What we really appear to be saying is that the methods used, condoned, or promoted by certain people are unpopular. So before we proceed further, intimidation should be disaggregated from respect for the environment and its living inhabitants. Two recent and high-profile law-enforcement initiatives have viewed environmental and animal-advocacy groups as threats in the United States. These initiatives are the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) prosecution and Operation Backfire. The former prosecution targeted SHAC—a campaign to close one animal-testing firm—and referred also to the underground Animal Liberation Front (ALF).1 The latter prosecution *. Legal director of Friends of Animals, an international animal-rights organization founded in 1957. †. Lee Hall, who can be reached at [email protected], thanks Lydia Fiedler, the Vermont Law School, and Friends of Animals for making it possible to participate in the 2008 Symposium and prepare this Article for publication. 1. See Indictment at 14–16, United States v. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA, Inc., No. 3:04-cr-00373-AET-2 (D.N.J. May 27, 2004), available at http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nj/press/files/ pdffiles/shacind.pdf (last visited Apr. -
From Disney to Avatar: Nature & Spirituality in Popular Culture
From Disney to Avatar: Nature & Spirituality in Popular Culture SECTIONS REL 3938: Tuesday, 1:55-2:45; Thursday, 1:55-3:50; Florida Gym 220 INSTRUCTORS Professor Bron Taylor (Ph.D.) Email: [email protected] Office: Anderson 121 Office hours: Tuesday 3:15-4:30 p.m., and Thursday, 4-5 pm (by appointment by the end of the immediately preceding class period) Susan Shaffer (M.T.S.) Email: [email protected] Office: Anderson 121 Office hours: Wednesday 11-2 p.m., and by appointment DESCRIPTION Course Description Focusing on the period since Walt Disney began making animal-focused documentaries and animated films in the 1930s, up through the blockbuster motion picture Avatar (2009), this course examines religious, spiritual, and political dimensions of artistic productions, scientific representations in museums, and other cultural inventions (such as theme parks), in which nature takes center stage. We will explore the cultural tributaries, influences, and controversies such productions engender, for they constitute important ways that environmental ethics, and quests for environmentally sustainable livelihoods and lifeways, are expressed and promoted. The course will enhance students’ abilities to interpret these cultural productions and their evocative power and explore their own reactions to these social phenomena. Purpose and Objectives 1) complicate and thus make more critical and sophisticated what students understand by terms like religion, spirituality, nature, and popular culture. 2) provide students with an understanding of different ways to study beliefs, perceptions, and practices related to what people variously construe as religion or spirituality. 3) illuminate the ways in which religion, spirituality and nature-related values are constructed, expressed, and contested in popular culture. -
Green Heathenry: an Interview with Bron Taylor1
Green Heathenry: An Interview With Bron Taylor1 Bron Taylor is presently a Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida and an Affiliated Scholar with Oslo University’s Center for Environment and Development.2 His work has been published in numerous journal articles, books and the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. His most re- cent book, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (hereafter DGR), represents Taylor’s position as an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests span the fields of environmentalism, religious studies, ethics and sociology. As such, his work primarily addresses the questions re- volving around the “conservation of the Earth’s biological diversity and how hu- man culture might evolve rapidly enough to arrest and reverse today’s intensify- ing environmental and social crises, and all the suffering, that flows from these trends.”3 This interview is an attempt to bridge the gap between modern Hea- thenry and Taylor’s work—to uncover what connections exist between the two’s differing understandings of the sacrality of nature. In your book Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Fu- ture, you go to great lengths to establish Henry David Thoreau’s corpus of work in its rightful place as the earliest of American expressions of Dark Green Religion (hereafter DGR). In your summary you even offer readers a provocative question to ponder: “To which social groups would Thoreau have been drawn had he been living and writing around and after -
The Eco-Terrorist Wave (1970-2016)
THE ECO-TERRORIST WAVE (1970-2016) By João Raphael da Silva Submitted to Central European University Department of International Relations In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in International Relations Supervisor: Professor Matthijs Bogaards Word Count: Budapest, Hungary 2017 CEU eTD Collection 1 ABSTRACT The present research aims to shed light on the geographical and temporal spread of the ecological typology of terrorism – hereinafter referred as “Eco-Terrorism” – through the lens of the David C. Rapoport’s Wave and Tom Parker and Nick Sitter’s Strain Theories. This typology that has posed high levels of threats to the United States and the European Union member States remains uncovered by these two theoretical frameworks. My arguments are that, first, like many other typologies previously covered by the above-mentioned theories, Eco-Terrorism spread. Second, “Wave”, “Strain” or “Wavy Strain” should be able to explain the pattern followed by Eco-Terrorism. Making use of the “Contagion Effect” as an analytical tool, the present research found that, like in other typologies, as an indirect way of contagion, literary production has played a crucial role in the spread of Eco-Terrorism, with a slight difference on who was writing them. Eventually, they became leaders or members of an organization, but in most of the cases were philosophers and fiction authors. In addition, it was found that the system of organization of the ALF and the ELF contributes to the spread. As a direct way of contagion, aside from training like in other typologies, the spread occurs when members of a certain organization disaffiliate from an organization and found a new one, and sometimes when two organizations act in cooperation. -
Gaian Earth Religion and the Modern God of Nature by Bron Taylor
Gaian Earth Religion and the Modern God of Nature By Bron Taylor Arnel Reynon photo Illustration, stock.xchng 12 SUMMER 2011 rofound changes are under way in that these activists generally perceived Dark green religion UHOLJLRQDQGHWKLFV6FLHQWL¿F nature as sacred and imbued with intrinsic Dark green religion (which some call Punderstanding regarding the evolution value (namely, value regardless of whether dark green spirituality) involves percep- of the universe and the biosphere is humans found a species or ecosystem tions that nature is sacred and has intrinsic competing with and in some cases sup- useful to them) and that these movements value; beliefs that everything is intercon- planting ancient worldviews based on ZHUHVLJQL¿FDQWO\LQÀXHQFLQJHQYLURQPHQ- nected and mutually dependent; and deep beliefs in invisible divine beings. Evolu- tal politics and growing globally. feelings of belonging to nature. Dark green tionary theory even offers plausible From there I branched out and looked at religion is usually rooted in, or at least explanations for traditional religious environmental movements around the coheres with, an evolutionary understand- beliefs; typical among these are that: (1) world, such as Kenya’s Green Belt “tree ing that all life shares a common ancestor, survival favors precautionary alertness to planting” Movement (which eventually led and it generally leads to kinship ethics predatory agents in nature and does not to its founder, Wangari Maathai, winning because all life is, therefore, literally penalize the perception -
Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality: from Deep Ecology to Radical
Religion (2001) 31, 175–193 doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0256, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part I): From Deep Ecology to Radical Environmentalism B T Earth and nature-based spirituality is proliferating globally. In Part I of this study, I argue that although participants in countercultural movements often eschew the label religion, these are religious movements, in which these persons find ultimate meaning and transformative power in nature. Focusing on the deep ecology movement, I further argue that (1) experiences of nature spirituality are evoked by practices as diverse as mountaineering, neo-shamanic ritualising and states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens; (2) earthen spiritualities are often contested and may be viewed as inauthentic or dangerous by practitioners of other forms of nature spirituality; and (3) despite significant diversity, a sense of connection and belonging to nature (sometimes personified as a transforming, if not transcendent power) unites these cross-fertilising and sometimes competing spiritualities. Part II examines additional forms of nature-oriented religion, searching further for continuities, discon- tinuities and ironies among its diverse forms. 2001 Academic Press Question: ‘What are your spiritual beliefs?’ Answer: ‘Well, I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. Look at the sun. If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals’ Mikhail Gorbachev (1997) Monkeywrenching or ‘ecotage’ is ‘a form of worship toward the earth. It’s really a very spiritual thing to go out and do . -
Greenpeace, Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front: the Rp Ogression of the Radical Environmental Movement in America" (2008)
University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Senior Honors Projects Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island 2008 Greenpeace, Earth First! and The aE rth Liberation Front: The rP ogression of the Radical Environmental Movement in America Christopher J. Covill University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog Part of the Environmental Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Covill, Christopher J., "Greenpeace, Earth First! and The Earth Liberation Front: The rP ogression of the Radical Environmental Movement in America" (2008). Senior Honors Projects. Paper 93. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/93http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/93 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island at DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Greenpeace, Earth First! and The Earth Liberation Front: The Progression of the Radical Environmental Movement in America Christopher John Covill Faculty Sponsor: Professor Timothy Hennessey, Political Science Causes of worldwide environmental destruction created a form of activism, Ecotage with an incredible success rate. Ecotage uses direct action, or monkey wrenching, to prevent environmental destruction. Mainstream conservation efforts were viewed by many environmentalists as having failed from compromise inspiring the birth of radicalized groups. This eventually transformed conservationists into radicals. Green Peace inspired radical environmentalism by civil disobedience, media campaigns and direct action tactics, but remained mainstream. Earth First’s! philosophy is based on a no compromise approach. -
The Strategy of Radical Environmentalism
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Summer 2008, Vol. 10, Issue 4. THROWING A WRENCH INTO THINGS: THE STRATEGY OF RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM Teale Phelps Bondaroff, University of Calgary Introduction: The current focus on Islamic terrorism has resulted in a lack of awareness of other forms of terrorism. Similarly, the focus on external non-conventional threats to security has meant that domestic threats are being overlooked. One such instance is that of the threat posed by radical environmentalist organizations, such as Earth First! (EF!)1, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and the Sea Shepherds Society. These organizations, which premise themselves upon the assertion of “No compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth!” have declared themselves Mother Nature’s armies and navies and represent the militarization of the environmental movement.2 The operations in which they engage, of which there have been more than 600 in the United States and Canada since 1996, have been responsible for an estimated $100 million in damages.3 Though the impact of these operations pale in comparison to those of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon in 2001, they represent a growing trend in environmental organizations, and a growing non-conventional societal threat. The threat is especially real in Canada where many groups find their origins in Canadian-born organizations such as Greenpeace. 1 The name of the ‘Earth First!’ includes the exclamation mark, which places emphasis on their commitment to action. 2 Jonathan I. Lange, “Refusal to Compromise: The Case of Earth First!” Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54 (Fall 1990), p. -
U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington
U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, D.C. 20535-0001 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NATIONAL PRESS OFFICE November 19, 2008 (202) 324-3691 www.fbi.gov REWARD INCREASED FOR OPERATION BACKFIRE FUGITIVES Washington, D.C. – Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced an increased reward for information about fugitives being sought for their role in a domestic terrorism cell. Specifically, the FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of Josephine Sunshine Overaker, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, Justin Franchi Solondz, and Rebecca Rubin. These individuals were members of the domestic terrorism cell, referred to as “The Family,” whose criminal actions included vandalism, animal releases, arsons and attempted arsons across Oregon, Washington, California, Wyoming and Colorado. “We appreciate the assistance of our domestic and international law enforcement partners in this ongoing fugitive search,” said Executive Assistant Director Arthur M. Cummings, II, FBI National Security Branch. “These individuals are terrorists –regardless of their political or social message – their actions were criminal and in violation of federal law. The FBI has remained vigilant in the search for these individuals and will make every effort to apprehend these fugitives and bring them to justice.” From 1996 to 2001, these individuals conducted a range of criminal actions throughout the United States in the name of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. They were responsible for at least 25 domestic terrorism criminal actions totaling over $80 million in damages, including the largest eco-related arson in history, a $12 million dollar arson at the Vail Ski Resort in Vail, Colorado. -
MIAC STRATEGIC REPORT 11-28-2008 Anarchist Movement
Matt Blunt Mark S. James James F. Keathley Van Godsey Governor Director, DPS Colonel, MSHP Director, MIAC S E R V IC E PROTECTION A N D MIAC STRATEGIC REPORT 11-28-2008 Anarchist Movement This Strategic Report analyzes the Anarchist Movement and related Anarchist activities. The majority of this in- formation is open source and can be located in many anarchy related websites. RECIPIENTS ARE REMINDED THIS DOCUMENT IS A STRATEGIC REPORT; THE INFORMATION THEREIN SHOULD NOT SERVE AS THE BASIS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATIVE ACTIVITY. History The first known usage of the word Anarchy appears in the play “Seven Against Thebes” by Aeschylus dated at 467 BC. The heroine, Antigone openly refuses to abide by the rulers' decree to leave her brother Polyneices' body unburied, as punishment for his participation in the attack on Thebes. In this context, anarchy is referenced as a refusal to abide by government decree. According to Harold Barclay (a professor in anthropology and notable writer in anarchist theory), long before anarchism emerged as a distinct perspective, human beings lived for thousands of years in societies without gov- ernment. It was only after the rise of hierarchical societies that anarchist ideas were formulated as a critical re- sponse to and rejection of coercive political institutions and hierarchical social relationships. Thomas Jefferson spoke of his respect for a society with no government. "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.