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- [00:00]
Dave Foreman
Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless.
- [00:03]
Gordon Caddick
And if you haven't made the switch.
- [00:04]
Alec Opperman
Yet, here are 15 reasons why you should.
- [00:07]
Gordon Caddick
One, it's $15 a month.
- [00:09]
Alec Opperman
Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three, no big contrast. Four, I use it.
- [00:15]
Dave Foreman
Five, my mom uses it. Are you, Are you playing me off?
- [00:18]
Narrator/Interviewer
That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try.
- [00:20]
Gordon Caddick
@Mintmobile.Com Switch upfront payment of $45 per three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com hello everybody.
- [00:31]
Marshall Poe
This is Marshall Po, the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a survey service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Gordon Caddick
Hello, New Books Network. My name is Gordon Caddock and I have a very brief message before we get going. If you're hearing this, it's because you've discovered cited syndicated across the nbn. Now cited is a reference to academic citation. So I think this is a show that you're going to like. We have a whole new season and it is called Green Dreams. Green Dreams is telling stories about influential environmental theorists and exploring the impact that they have had on environmental move. Sometimes for good and other times for ill. You're going to find the episodes across the network, but if you like this, I really recommend that you subscribe to our main feed. That way you won't miss an episode. You can find that wherever you find your podcasts or@sightedpodcast.com that's cite podcast.com okay, on with the show. Do you live in Toronto, Ontario? Well, if you do, you should come out to our upcoming live event. It is Oct. 2 from 7pm to 9pm at Society Clubhouse, which is at 967 College St. There'll be some free food and drink and admission is free. We'll talk about green dreams a little bit and then have a panel on environmental journalism. I'll be part of that panel alongside two excellent reporters, Stefan Hostetter, who is co host of Green Majority Radio, and Fatima Syed, who is Ontario reporter at the Narwhal. After that panel, we'll do a few more things and then just mix and mingle. You can find further details linked in the show notes. So if you're in Toronto and you're interested in meeting our team and also other environmental focused journalists, researchers and activists, well, this is the event for you. Okay, on with the show. I'm Gordon Caddick and this is C. I'm an environmentalist who isn't really into the environment. You're not going to catch me camping. My partner even tells people I'm afraid of trees. That may be a bit hyperbolic, but it's not entirely off the mark. I would much rather spend my time in the city. Environmentalism, for me it's always been kind of intellectual. You see, climate change is this existential threat to humanity and it harms people, especially the most vulnerable. So this doesn't have anything to do with my ability to go on scenic hikes. It is not really about nature at all. It is about the social and most of all it is about our economic system. This thinking made me something of an outlier back in my Vancouver days. That's a place that's known for being pretty outdoorsy. And back then I was a very involved environmental activist. I even co founded a major environmental group at my university. So I was in the scene. And because I was in the scene, I got a call from this guy who ran a prominent environmental organization. He was doing some studies on the side and for his dissertation he wanted to interview young environmental leaders. He wanted to interview me. I accepted. The first question he asked in this research interview was about loving nature. I did not have a whole lot to say. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I remember him looking at me a little bit funny. I was definitely an outlier in this dissertation. Maybe that's why I actually wasn't an especially Effective environmental campaigner. Maybe I was too intellectual, maybe I was too anthropocentric. You see, the thing I've learned is the most effective environmentalists, they tend to actually like nature. They actually feel something for the non human world. But you know, I gotta say, in my defense, there is an inverse problem. Some people love nature so much, they're maybe a little too biocentric. Their environmentalism is about protecting the non human world. And humans, well, we're just the problem. That's what our episode is about today. It's about a long standing debate. One of the deepest fissures within environmentalism historically and into the present day. It's the divide between anthropocentric environmentalisms and biocentric ones. This episode's green dreamer was squarely on Team Biocentric. Actually, he was Mr. Biocentric. If biocentrism needed a team captain, he'd be it. His name was Dave Foreman. After the break, Alec Opperman and I bring you episode three, the Green Monkey Wrench, Dave Forman's guide to ecological sabotage. I want to tell you about another show you might like. Threshold is a Peabody Award winning documentary podcast about our place in the natural world. Over five seasons, host Amy Martin has traced the history of the American bison, trekked across the Arctic to explore a region experiencing monumental environmental changes, and examined the tension between oil drilling and conservation and its consequence for a warming world. In their latest season, Threshold takes listeners on a sonic tour of our planet. You'll meet flowers that can hear their pollinators, coral larvae that use sound to find their reefs, and turtles long considered silent but with rich acoustic lives. What does it mean to truly listen to non human voices? And what is the cost to our planet if we don't? Guided by scientists, artists and those on the cutting edge of bioacoustics, Threshold is handing the mic over to nature to discover the power and promise of listening. You can find Threshold wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, back to your regular scheduled programming. Alec Opperman and I bring you the story of Dave Forman and the formation of Earth first.
- [08:15]
Dave Foreman
When you wake up looking into.357 magnums.
- [08:18]
Alec Opperman
Like that.
- [08:20]
Dave Foreman
You begin to think that what's going to happen to you is what's happened to aim of the Black Panthers. It's just going to be summary extra execution.
- [08:31]
Gordon Caddick
It was the morning of May 30, 1989, when the FBI came for Dave Forman. They were after him because Forman had convinced conservationists across the United States to become eco warriors. And as he told A group of supporters. Afterwards, the FBI wanted to stop him.
- [08:52]
Dave Foreman
They were trying to intimidate me, and they did. I am scared. I am intimidated. I'm not gonna shut up.
- [09:04]
Gordon Caddick
But this was indeed the beginning of the end of Forman's brand of activism. This was a militant conservationism that stressed the inherent value of nature, and it committed Forman to protecting that nature at almost any cost.
- [09:28]
Narrator/Interviewer
Dave Foreman did not begin a conservationist. He was a conservative redneck from New Mexico who wore a cowboy hat and blue jeans. The Foremans were a military family, and as a teenager, Dave campaigned for Barry Goldwater and later for the Vietnam War.
- [09:47]
Gordon Caddick
After university, Foreman enlisted in the Marines, but it didn't work out. He was excessively hazed, had a nervous breakdown, and was eventually discharged. The young Foreman then went on searching for a new life. He found it at a Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico. He then started backpacking and kayaking. And he met people in the environmental movement who inspired him to become a conservationist.
- [10:14]
Narrator/Interviewer
In 1972, he started working with a non profit called the Wilderness Society. He became a field representative.
- [10:21]
Alec Opperman
He made very little money and spent a number of nights sleeping in his car while on the road, going to community meetings and whatnot.
- [10:29]
Gordon Caddick
This is Keith Makota Woodhouse, an environmental historian at Northwestern University. He's the author of the A History of Radical Environmentalism. The book profiles a number of radical environmentalists that were especially active in the 80s and 90s, among them, Dave Forman. So Woodhouse is going to be a guide through Forman's story.
- [10:51]
Narrator/Interviewer
But as Woodhouse tells us, Forman wasn't a radical just yet. Back when he was with the Wilderness Society, his work was more reformist.
- [11:00]
Alec Opperman
He was out there looking at specific areas, particular places, roadless areas that were viable wilderness areas that could receive designation by Congress as official wilderness.
- [11:13]
Narrator/Interviewer
Foreman and the Wilderness Society work to preserve great swaths of undeveloped land in the United States, like tens of millions of acres of Pacific old growth. These are complex ecosystems with trees that sprouted during the Roman Empire.
- [11:28]
Gordon Caddick
The Wilderness Society pressured state and federal lawmakers to protect these areas. But to make that happen, they really need to gin up political support. So they send representatives like Foreman to rally local communities.
- [11:42]
Alec Opperman
So it was very sort of piecemeal, very local work, working with communities, sometimes working against communities, but doing the work of organizing and going to meetings and talking to people and trying to rally support for this one particular area, in this one part of this one state to receive stronger protections. He seems to be somebody who publicly was loud, brash inspiring, confrontational. His public Persona was very much as a fiery speaker who strode across stage and yelled a lot and railed against the powers that be in industrial society. And off stage, in one on one encounters, he was sort of the opposite. Quiet, philosophical.
- [12:40]
Gordon Caddick
Forman was a thoughtful, well read thinker, immersing himself in environmental philosophy. But he was also a formidable fighter in the trench warfare of environmental struggle.
- [12:53]
Narrator/Interviewer
And he was good at it. That meant he got the attention of the Wilderness Society brass back in D.C. so they brought him to the nation's capital for a big promotion. But in D.C. things were less trench warfare and more suit and tie policy wonkery.
- [13:10]
Alec Opperman
Longtime conservation organizations, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, et cetera, were orienting themselves towards a world in which they needed to have a strong lobby in Washington D.C. good relationships with legislators, a presence in the courts, etc. And that was the sort of trend of conservation in the 1970s when Forman was working for the Wilderness Society.
- [13:37]
Gordon Caddick
The Wilderness Society asked Forman, why don't you be our Director of Wilderness Affairs? It was a lobbying job. So Foreman ditched the cowboy hat and blue jeans. To understand what Foreman would be working on in Washington, we have to step back a few years. The Wilderness Society wonks had been really focused on an obscure but important, important government survey, something called the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation, better known by its acronym, RARE.
- [14:13]
Alec Opperman
This all grew out of the Wilderness act of 1964. The Wilderness act in 1964 very quickly designated over 9 million acres in the United States as congressionally mandated wilderness. And then it directed the Secretaries of the Interior and of Agriculture to conduct wilderness inventories.
- [14:33]
Gordon Caddick
The government could expand the federally protected wilderness areas through those inventories, like rare. RARE was a survey of roadless areas within the national forest system. It looked at 56 million acres. To be precise. The government would decide what of that to protect and what to open up for logging and other development. So RARE was like a tug of war between conservationists and industry.
- [14:58]
Narrator/Interviewer
Before Foreman even got there, the Wilderness Society had already lost the tug of War. In 1973, the feds decided to protect only 12 of the 56 million acres. It was so little that conservation groups sued. They won, and so the process would have to start over again. Four years later, the creatively named Rare 2 began. And by this time, Foreman was on the scene and ready to fight.
- [15:29]
Gordon Caddick
With rare 2. A new administration offered conservationists hope. They saw a potential ally in President Jimmy Carter. But this was the 1970s. The economy was rough and the US was under an OPEC led oil embargo. So the American oil and gas industry accused conservationists of playing into the hands of Arabs by cutting off potential sources of fuel.
- [15:52]
Narrator/Interviewer
Foreman and his colleagues won 15 million acres in Rare 2, a slight bump.
- [15:56]
Alec Opperman
From Rare 1, but still, according to conservationists, not nearly enough. A relatively small portion of all roadless lands in national forests for wilderness. Everyone was disappointed. All of the major conservation groups were.
- [16:11]
Gordon Caddick
Disappointed in the results, and that meant more legal wrangling.
- [16:16]
Alec Opperman
A lawsuit was filed against the rare 2 process, but not by the Sierra Club, not by the Wilderness Society, but by a guy named Huey Johnson.
- [16:24]
Narrator/Interviewer
Johnson was Secretary of Natural Resources for the state of California. So this lawsuit wasn't coming from the Wilderness Society. In fact, the Wilderness Society thought Johnson's lawsuit was too extreme.
- [16:37]
Alec Opperman
They thought that it would unnecessarily upset their political allies in Congress at a time when a number of other major fights were going on. In the end, what Foreman and others on the ground saw was a massively disappointing Rare2 process that came out of a process of political compromise and then a conservation movement that actually tried to prevent a lawsuit from being filed to stymie that disappointing process. And that, for Foreman, was the last draw.
- [17:13]
Dave Foreman
I began to feel, along with other people, that the environmental movement was steadily losing its passion and its soul. People working for environmental groups who had started out as volunteers, impassioned amateurs, were becoming professionals and were becoming more concerned with careers, with salaries, with status, and with access to high places for the intrinsic value of access to high places. And while that was going on, we were asking for less.
- [17:49]
Narrator/Interviewer
In 1980, just a few years after Rare 2, a disillusioned Dave Foreman left the Wilderness Society.
- [17:58]
Gordon Caddick
Foreman felt that he had to return to the ugly trench warfare of environmental struggle because the Washington based conservationists just weren't doing any good. As he wrote in his memoir, what.
- [18:11]
Narrator/Interviewer
Have we really accomplished? Are we any better off as far as saving the earth now than we were 10 years ago? Some of us began to feel it was time for a new joker in the deck.
- [18:28]
Gordon Caddick
That new joker would come in the form of an environmental group that wore no suits and made no compromises. We'll talk about them in a bit, but first let's talk about the ideas that got him there. Let's talk about the radical environmental philosophy that Dave Forman had been reading.
- [18:46]
Narrator/Interviewer
This was a philosophy that made Forman believe that environmentalism can't be about conserving an acre of land here or an acre of land there. It had to be about a lot more. It had to be about dismantling the industrial system.
- [19:01]
Dave Foreman
I think what we have to recognize is that we're all tied into the system in some way or another. We're all part of the industrial monster that's killing the world.
- [19:14]
Narrator/Interviewer
This is foreman at a 1986 talk at UC Berkeley.
- [19:18]
Dave Foreman
And I've thought long and hard on how to extricate myself from that. I think the wisest answer I've heard comes from Arnie Ness, who's a philosophy professor in Norway who coined the term deep ecology.
- [19:32]
Gordon Caddick
Deep ecology. Arna Ness coined the term in a 1973 essay. That essay compared deep ecologies to shallow ones. According to Ness, it's something like shallow ecology fights for clean creeks for kids to play in. But deep ecology fights for the inherent worth of the creek itself. Plants, parasites and all.
- [20:04]
Alec Opperman
Deep ecology, the simple version of it is that it's the belief that there is no moral hierarchy between people and non human nature, that we should not morally value human beings and human civilization, human societies more so than the non human world.
- [20:22]
Dave Foreman
You don't have to justify the preservation of grizzly bears or rainforests for people, that they have a right to exist for their own sake. We aren't trying to save backpacking parks. We aren't trying to clean up the air so we have nice scenic views of the Grand Canyon. We're trying to help evolution continue.
- [20:49]
Gordon Caddick
Forman's deep ecology was rooted in a serious love of nature. He described that love to the anarcho primitivist philosopher Derek Jensen. In an interview, Forman told Jensen, my.
- [21:02]
Narrator/Interviewer
Desire to protect wilderness comes from passion, from an emotional identification with wilderness. This may seem an alien concept on first blush, but for somebody who knows a place, who can sit in the desert or sit underneath a 500-year-old tree and try to pick up some wisdom from it, I don't think it is alien. I feel sorry for people who don't have that identification with nature because they're living half a life.
- [21:27]
Gordon Caddick
That sounds quite progressive. In some ways it is. Deep ecology certainly progressed beyond the garden variety conservationism of the day. It emphasized the importance of biological diversity, the interdependent web of life and the dignity of non human species.
- [21:44]
Narrator/Interviewer
But if you push on that philosophy, it might lead you to regressive places. Because when you set up that dichotomy that one half of your life is nature and the other half is the civilization destroying that nature, well, you might end up hating one of those halves.
- [22:07]
Dave Foreman
Sooner or later things are going to have to crash. I think we're In a car going 90 miles an hour down a dead end street with a brick wall right in front of us and we're trying to look for the brakes. And I don't think there are any.
- [22:20]
Gordon Caddick
This tape is from an oral history project from the New Mexico History Museum. It's called Voices of the Counterculture in the Southwest. And the oral history with Forman is bleak. It's an interview that makes clear there's a fine line between rejecting anthropocentrism and just being misanthropic. Forman seemed to be crossing that line. He yearns for, I quote, human insanity running its course.
- [22:47]
Dave Foreman
I sometimes tell people that I think if you look at the human race not as the consciousness of the Earth, but rather as the cancer of the Earth, that we're a disease ecologically here, that maybe nature has evolved some of us as antibodies. And that's the only way I can explain why some of us love wilderness and other people have no conception at all of it.
- [23:11]
Gordon Caddick
If humanity is a cancer, then who are these antibodies that Forman is talking about? Earth First. A radical environmental group that Forman co founded after leaving the Wilderness Society.
- [23:24]
Alec Opperman
The story goes that essentially the crushing disappointment of of rare2 was what finally pushed Forman and several other conservationists, all of whom worked for major organizations like the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, to want to do something different.
- [23:41]
Dave Foreman
The people who started Earth first decided that there was a need for a radical wing of the environmental movement, a wing that would make the Sierra Club look moderate. Somebody has to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be to be done.
- [23:56]
Alec Opperman
So there was a. A meeting at a ranch in Wyoming in, in the summer of 1980 when a number of. Of people conservationists got together and decided they wanted to found a new group called Earth First. Earth first with an exclamation mark. I'm. I'm saying it with the rising tone because there's always a mandatory exclamation mark at the end of it. The idea of Earth first. Was, was to hit the accelerator and to try to, to pursue a maximal agenda for environmental and especially wilderness protection. And increasingly to do so using tactics outside of the repertoire of conventional political reform.
- [24:40]
Dave Foreman
Earth First. Is the only activist green group around, if you want to look at it that way. The others are debating societies.
- [24:48]
Narrator/Interviewer
This is Forman circa 1987, from an Earth first documentary directed by Chris Mains.
- [24:54]
Dave Foreman
Action, Action of any kind. And let our action set the finer points of our philosophy. We don't have to figure it all out. We don't all have to be pure. We all don't have to be saints on this planet to do something. For.
- [25:18]
Narrator/Interviewer
Earth First's debut, direct action targeted the Glen Canyon Dam.
- [25:22]
Gordon Caddick
If I knew I had a fatal disease, I would definitely do something like strap dynamite on myself and take out Glen Canyon Dam.
- [25:29]
Narrator/Interviewer
Glen Canyon stretches over 160 miles across Utah and into Arizona. Or it did before the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966. The dam drowned the canyon and created Lake Powell in its steady that's become a major tourist attraction. A place where families water ski. The lake is often referred to as the jewel of the Colorado River.
- [25:54]
Gordon Caddick
But for Earth first, they described the lake as cold and dead. Foreman also said that the dam was something like Darth Vader would create. He saw it as a symbol of the destruction of wilderness and of the technological ravishment of the West.
- [26:11]
Narrator/Interviewer
I see this as an invasion.
- [26:15]
Gordon Caddick
These look like creatures from Mars to me.
- [26:18]
Narrator/Interviewer
This is Edward Abbey, a novelist who is quite influential to Earth First. In this short film, you can see the cowboy hat wearing conservationist standing in the desert in front of a giant gray dam.
- [26:30]
Alec Opperman
I feel no kinship with that fantastic structure over there.
- [26:36]
Narrator/Interviewer
No sympathy with it whatsoever. This was shot on March 21, 1981. Abby gathered there with Foreman and 75 other members of Earth First.
- [26:48]
Alec Opperman
One of the very first Earth first actions, I don't know if you call it an action stunt is probably a better word, was to drape a 300 foot long plastic black plastic line down the face of Glen Canyon Dam. And from far away, it was supposed to look like a crack in the dam.
- [27:06]
Dave Foreman
Let's all focus our attention on the crack on the dam and at the count of three, I'll yell free the Colorado as loud as we can and maybe the spirits will be with us and we'll really put a crack in it. One, two, three.
- [27:24]
Gordon Caddick
To be honest, this crack is not that impressive. It basically just looks like a long black trash bag hanging over the side of the dam. But the stunt did bring Earth First a lot of media attention. So Forman says that over 75 Earth Firsters joined the movement.
- [27:46]
Narrator/Interviewer
Earth first was fond of another tactic to save the monkey wrenching.
- [27:51]
Alec Opperman
So the term monkey wrenching comes from the Edward Abbey novel the Monkey Wrench Gang, which is published in the 1970s. And it's the story of a band of eco saboteurs who go around the Southwest, stymying development efforts.
- [28:08]
Narrator/Interviewer
Monkey wrenching was a call for industrial sabotage, and Dave Foreman provided the playbook. Where do People learn how to spike trees, damage logging roads, pull down power lines in a book co authored by Dave Foreman called Eco Defense A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching. I mean, I went through your book. You had a section here on disabling motor vehicles of all kinds, particularly heavy equipment. This is ed Bradley. For 60 minutes, jam the door at ignition locks with slivers of wood. Pour a gallon or more of water or brine into the fuel tank. Pour dirt, sand or salt or grinding compound into the oil filler hole. Pour a box of quick rice in the radiator. It's against the law.
- [28:54]
Dave Foreman
It is against the law.
- [28:55]
Narrator/Interviewer
It's a crime.
- [28:56]
Dave Foreman
It is.
- [29:01]
Gordon Caddick
After the break, we will talk about Earth First's most notorious act of tree spiking. I'd like to recommend a podcast from our colleagues at the Harbinger Media Network, Pullback. Pullback is a podcast that explores solutions to problems like climate change, income inequality, and many others. They look at things that are sometimes pitched as answers like, say, ethical consumption. Kylie Hewson and Christian Pugh ask, are these ideas real solutions or mere distractions? They released a season this summer all about climate change justice, and that is certainly a good complement to green dreams. So look for Pullback wherever you find your podcasts. And if you like them, check out other podcasts on the Harbinger Media network. That's@harbingermedianetwork.com okay, back to the show. This is cited. And I'm Gordon Caddick. Today, Alec Opperman and I bring you the story of Dave Forman and the creation of Earth First. As we mentioned before the break, Dave Forman's Ecodefense was a playbook for industrial sabotage. And the most notorious act of sabotage in that book was tree spiking. To spike a tree is to drive nails into it. It's supposed to prevent the tree from being logged. In the book, Forman gave detailed instructions on how to do it. He even suggested what kind of nails you should buy.
- [30:34]
Narrator/Interviewer
The first known case of tree spiking happened in the mountains of Oregon in 1983. Others followed suit across the Pacific Northwest and California especially. Obviously, it was very disruptive to the logging companies.
- [30:47]
Alec Opperman
And so the idea is at that point, the Forest Service and the logging company has either give up on cutting those trees down or go through the very arduous and expensive and time consuming process of actually reflecting, moving the spikes.
- [31:01]
Narrator/Interviewer
Tree spiking isn't really a threat to the tree, but it is a threat.
- [31:05]
Alec Opperman
To a saw blade or more notoriously, a potential threat to human beings as well. If a spiked tree were actually run through a logging mill.
- [31:18]
Narrator/Interviewer
In 1987, a saw at a mill in Cloverdell, California, exploded when it hit a spike. A worker was struck by the shrapnel and was hospitalized with a broken jaw, Missing teeth, and major lacerations.
- [31:34]
Gordon Caddick
Earth first said they weren't involved when they spiked trees. They warned the forest service so that this sort of thing wouldn't happen. The group claimed that this particular tree was actually spiked by a disturbed survivalist living in the area.
- [31:52]
Narrator/Interviewer
Still, the accident inspired public outrage against earth First. And their tree spiking. But they didn't back down in the face of that outrage. In response, Foreman claimed that what had happened to that worker was unfortunate, but he was still more concerned with old growth forests, Spotted owls, wolverines and salmon than those cutting down trees.
- [32:16]
Gordon Caddick
So they didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for the log. The earth firster, Darryl Cherney, even wrote a folk song Comparing loggers to the soldiers that killed Jesus.
- [32:27]
Dave Foreman
But when I think of the cross he was nailed to and the tree that was logged for the wood, I realized twas the loggers killed Jesus and it's time that we got them back Good. So spike a treat for Jesus Spike a treat for Jesus and Jesus will love you, you know. Spike a treat for Jesus Spike a treat for Jesus Someday to heaven you'll go.
- [33:03]
Alec Opperman
The initial reaction is very negative, Certainly from the logging industry and logging communities, and even from other environmentalists. A lot of mainstream groups don't want to be associated with this tactic.
- [33:14]
Narrator/Interviewer
One of those critics was Jay Harrer, the head of the national wildlife Federation.
- [33:19]
Alec Opperman
I reject out of hand. They're being environmentalist, they're terrorists, they're outlaws, and they should be treated as such. And then there are a number of politicians, Especially politicians from western states and states with a lot of public lands and public forests rail against it very publicly.
- [33:35]
Narrator/Interviewer
In Foreman's recounting, the actions worked. Timber auctions got canceled, and they made the whole process of clear cutting forests more expensive.
- [33:44]
Alec Opperman
I think that the plan was, was that there would be more and more and more and more people who supported Earth First. And its activities. And so there would be more and more and more sabotage to the point where it just became economically unfeasible For a lot of extractive industries to pursue business as usual, because the risk of sabotage, Losing equipment, losing time, et cetera, was just too high.
- [34:12]
Gordon Caddick
Tree spiking was disruptive, especially in the Pacific northwest. But it didn't stop the logging industry like foreman hoped and workers were becoming increasingly frustrated by these acts of industrial sabotage. They did not appreciate their livelihoods being threatened for the sake of protecting wilderness.
- [34:34]
Narrator/Interviewer
As Foreman's public profile grew, another side of his environmental philosophy came to light. He wasn't just reading deep ecologists like Arnones. He was reading the Ehrlichs. And he was reading Garrett Hardin.
- [34:47]
Gordon Caddick
In 1968, when Forman was in his early 20s, that's when Paul and Anne Ehrlich's the Population Bomb came out, as did Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. Both warned of the devastating environmental effects of an overpopulated planet. And both suggested population control measures, sometimes compulsory ones like sterilizations or restricting life saving food aid. By the 1980s, environmentalists had mostly stopped panicking about population. But Forman was trying to bring the panic back. In a 1986 interview with an Australian magazine, Forman argued against life saving flood food aid to address a famine in Ethiopia.
- [35:34]
Narrator/Interviewer
He said, the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia was to give aid. The best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let people there just starve.
- [35:50]
Gordon Caddick
In that same interview, Forman also advocated against immigration to the United States. And he wasn't alone in these nativist views. Other Earth Firsters, like Edward Abbey, also supported immigration restrictions. The cruelty and misanthropy gets even worse. Earth First's official journal published articles that celebrated the arrival of aids. One by Daniel Connor was titled Is AIDS An Answer to a Environmentalist's Prayer? Another was called Population and AIDS, and it was written by somebody calling themselves Ms. Anthropi.
- [36:37]
Narrator/Interviewer
It read, if radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like aids.
- [36:46]
Gordon Caddick
If humans are a disease on this Earth, then I guess our own diseases ought to be celebrated, at least for some Earthfirsters. That's where the logic of deep ecology seemed to take them.
- [37:02]
Narrator/Interviewer
It's almost like Earth first wanted to lose everyone. They had long been criticized by cattle ranchers, logging companies, working class loggers, mainstream environmentalists and lawmakers. Now, as their most misanthropic ideas came to light, radicals also started to disavow the group. Murray Bookchin in particular.
- [37:20]
Alec Opperman
Murray Bookchin was probably the most persistent and in many ways the loudest critic of Earth first. Initially. He's really responding to those controversial statements that Forman makes about famine and foreign aid and about immigration, and those understandably rub Bookchin the wrong way, as they did a lot of people.
- [37:40]
Narrator/Interviewer
Bookchin was an environmentalist From Vermont. He was a stocky and disheveled anarchist. He wore these frumpy cardigans and corduroy caps, the sort of things a kind hearted grandpa might wear. But in his writings at least, Bookchin wasn't all that kind hearted.
- [37:56]
Alec Opperman
Bookchin was a very prickly guy. He did not pull punches and he did not suffer fools gladly. And so when he started critiquing Earth first, he did so in very strong terms.
- [38:07]
Narrator/Interviewer
He called Earth First a wilderness cult, at best, intellectually frivolous, at worst. Foreman specifically was an eco brute.
- [38:16]
Alec Opperman
He called them eco brutalists. He called them fascists. And you know, he said they were basically the worst thing to ever happen to the environmental movement.
- [38:24]
Narrator/Interviewer
He attacked their underlying philosophy too. Bookchin wrote that deep ecology was a black hole of half digested, ill formed and half baked ideas, an ideological toxic dump.
- [38:37]
Gordon Caddick
Earth first was obviously focused on the earth, but Bookchin claimed they should have also attended to other structural issues in our society. Earth first disagreed.
- [38:47]
Alec Opperman
Earth first argues that issues of social justice are distraction from the most burning issues that we need to confront, which are those of habitat destruction, the destruction of wilderness, the loss of natural resources, and the erosion of non human nature on planet Earth. And Bukchen says the opposite. He says these things cannot be unbound. They're necessarily connected.
- [39:15]
Gordon Caddick
That bears repeating. It's not just that Forman neglected human systems in favor of natural ones. It's that he didn't see how those things were interrelated. He didn't see how the social structured the natural. Like capitalism, that is a set of social relations, obviously, but it structures how we understand the natural world, how we exploit that natural world, and who benefits from the exploitation. So the social and the natural, in this case, they can't be separated. That was Bookchin's core argument.
- [39:48]
Narrator/Interviewer
The social relations, the economic relations, the marketplace, have a more profound effect upon our relationship with the natural world than even our attitudes. Loving nature. That's a nice sort of attitude, sure, but it doesn't get you very far. That's what any leftist like Bookchin would tell you. But Forman said outright, we're not leftists. He didn't really rail against capitalism because capitalism wasn't his real target. Nor did he rail against inequality, racism, or other structural oppression. Human issues were not his concern.
- [40:28]
Gordon Caddick
Dave Forman railed against humanity in general, against civilization as such. His goal was to protect nature from a cancer, that cancer being all of us. So in his eyes, the working class logger and the logging company executives are really not all that different.
- [40:48]
Narrator/Interviewer
Bookchin rejected that. He proposed an alternative to deep ecology, a philosophy that would address the interrelatedness of the social and the ecological.
- [40:59]
Alec Opperman
A philosophy that he called social ecology. And social ecology is essentially his attempt to weave together environmentalism and social justice and to create a sort of an overarching philosophy that ties those two together, not only in terms of their sort of concerns and their prescriptions for how to address those concerns, but but really in terms of causes as well. He argues that essentially the root causes of environmental problems and inequity in the world is the same. Mistreatment of people leads to mistreatment of the natural world and vice versa. And because he was an anarchist, he thought that much of this in the end can be traced back to hierarchy.
- [41:41]
Gordon Caddick
Bookchin argued that we needed to do two things in tandem. We needed to stop dominating our planet and we needed to stop dominating each other. That was Bookchin's green dream. And he claimed that Dave Forman's green dream was actually a nightmare. In the end, it could only become ecological fascism. Dave Forman and Earth First. Weren't just alienating leftists like Bookchin. Remember, workers were also increasingly becoming frustrated with all this industrial sabotage. It just wasn't good politics. Even people in Earth first started to realize that people like Judy Barry.
- [42:26]
Alec Opperman
Judy Berry was an activist in Northern California and by the late 1980s was a leader of Earth first in Northern California.
- [42:37]
Narrator/Interviewer
Barry led a particular faction called Ecotopia Earth First. They were openly critical of foreman style activism, especially tree spiking.
- [42:47]
Alec Opperman
She believed in organizing and she came from a labor activism background. And she believed that organizing was the way to address the destruction of old growth in west coast forest, Pacific Northwest forests, and that you needed to have environmentalists and loggers working together. And tree spiking was fundamentally obstructive of that goal. There was no way that loggers were going to trust or work with environmentalists if they believed that environmentalists were spiking trees.
- [43:16]
Narrator/Interviewer
Barry also called herself a deep ecologist, but she wasn't as misanthropic as Dave Forman. She stressed that capitalism was the underlying problem, not people.
- [43:27]
Gordon Caddick
Capitalism exists by extracting profits not just.
- [43:30]
Alec Opperman
From the workers, but from the Earth by taking from the Earth more than it gets.
- [43:35]
Narrator/Interviewer
That's Barry from the 1993 documentary Biodiversity and the Dominant Paradigm.
- [43:40]
Gordon Caddick
So I think that the implications of.
- [43:41]
Alec Opperman
Deep ecology capitalism would have to go.
- [43:44]
Gordon Caddick
And that's one of the reasons I think we're such a threat.
- [43:47]
Narrator/Interviewer
For Barry, working class loggers and logging executives were not the same the loggers could actually become a useful political ally.
- [43:55]
Alec Opperman
Foreman came from a background and perspective where he just did not trust loggers or ranchers or any of the people who were doing the things that he believed were harmful to wilderness and harmful to the non human world. So he wasn't interested in pursuing Judy Berry's strategy and really kind of thought of it as naive.
- [44:17]
Gordon Caddick
Barry pushed Earth First. To take social and economic issues more seriously, and she called for civil disobedience rather than industrial sabotage. Old school Earth Firsters called her a sellout, and they told her to go back to the Sierra Club. But eventually, Barry's version of politics did start to take root in Earth First. And when that happened, well, Forman just couldn't take it anymore.
- [44:48]
Narrator/Interviewer
On September 22, 1990, Dave Forman and his wife announced their resignation in the Earth First. Journal.
- [44:56]
Alec Opperman
He basically styles it as a breakup letter to an ex lover. And he says, you know, I feel like I should be sitting nursing a beer at a honky tonk bar, thumbing quarters into the jukebox while I'm writing this breakup letter. And then he basically goes on about how, you know, this is just not my Earth First. Anymore. It's increasingly being populated and fueled by people who believe in. He certainly didn't use this word, but essentially what he meant was a more sort of an intersectional environmentalism. They're concerned about a number of different causes and believe that they can all be pursued together. Whereas I think that conservation has to be pursued on its own terms, exclusive of other interests and issues and causes. And he said, you know, this is just not the group that I'm familiar with and that I'm really in support of anymore, so I have to say goodbye.
- [45:57]
Gordon Caddick
Foreman wrote, we are conservationists. We are not anarchists or leftists. We are biocentrists, not humanists.
- [46:10]
Narrator/Interviewer
But in that same issue, Barry writes her own funny letter in response. She mimics Foreman's breakup letter style, but she makes it less Country Guy and Honky Tonk Bar, more New Left radical.
- [46:23]
Alec Opperman
She says, I feel like I should be sitting at a campfire, smoking a joint, listening to Bob Marley and writing this on the back of a rolling paper.
- [46:31]
Gordon Caddick
But if Dave Foreman wants a divorce from all the hippie leftist anarchist humanists on Earth First, I've got a few things to say.
- [46:41]
Alec Opperman
And then she sort of explains why, you know, she thinks that Forman is wrong and why she essentially agrees. And she says, you know, it's really not your time anymore.
- [46:50]
Gordon Caddick
So through these tongue in cheek letters, they have Their divorce. But it's Barry who keeps the movement. She stays in Earth First. And she reorients the group towards Earth A less misanthropic politics.
- [47:07]
Narrator/Interviewer
There was another factor that helped drive Foreman out of Earth First. Something that's been happening just below the surface of our story. Undercover, in fact. Remember where we began. In 1989, Dave Foreman woke up to three FBI agents with their guns drawn.
- [47:24]
Dave Foreman
What the FBI was trying to do to me when they came barging in to my bedroom at seven o' clock in the morning, pulling out their cock. 357 Magnums was to scare me.
- [47:36]
Narrator/Interviewer
The FBI had been spying on Earth first. For years. They tapped phones, used informants, and encouraged Earth Firsters to break the law. The FBI arrested Foreman and other Earth Firsters under trumped up charges that the group was trying to sabotage a nuclear power facility.
- [47:52]
Gordon Caddick
During the ensuing legal battles, Foreman's lawyers reviewed hours of wiretaps from the FBI. And they discovered an embarrassing moment. One agent told two others that Foreman isn't really the guy we need to pop. This is just the guy we need to pop to send a message. And that's all we're really doing. The tape went on and one of the agents went, uh, oh, we don't need that on tape. Oh boy.
- [48:16]
Narrator/Interviewer
So they wanted to make an example out of Foreman.
- [48:19]
Alec Opperman
He plea bargained his way out of jail time in 1989 after he was arrested. And part of the deal was that he would not actively promote monkey wrenching and ecotage to the same degree.
- [48:32]
Narrator/Interviewer
Judy Berry was also a frequent target of anti Earth first violence, violence that the FBI did little to address. In 1990, a pipe bomb exploded in her car. Also in the car was Daryl Cherney, that guy who wrote the Spike A Tree for Jesus song. But rather than investigate the perpetrator of the bombing, Oakland police arrested them for transporting the bomb. Barry and Czerny were eventually released, but the FBI never found the true perpetrator.
- [49:01]
Gordon Caddick
If the FBI wanted to slow down Earth First. Well, it worked. All that extra scrutiny just exacerbated the internal divisions that already existed within Earth First. More radical Earth Firsters left and created a group called the Earth Liberation front. So Earth first splintered.
- [49:26]
Narrator/Interviewer
After leaving Earth first. Forman mellowed out in some ways. In 1991, he apologized for suggesting Ethiopian children starve. He went on to create conservation organizations like the Rewilding Institute and the Wildlands Project. These are groups that want to preserve and expand wilderness and protect the non human life that lives in them.
- [49:49]
Alec Opperman
He does start to try to sort of reach beyond the immediate community of conservationists that he's used to working with. The only way to do that is to ally yourself with other users of the areas that you want to protect. He sees that, you know, the only way you're really going to do it on the scale that he wants to do it is to slowly build partnerships.
- [50:16]
Narrator/Interviewer
With the Wildlands project. Foreman partnered with a Mexican land commune to protect thousands of acres used by thick built parrots. He got local community members on board by promising an influx of eco tourists that would offset the loss of logging money.
- [50:31]
Alec Opperman
And so that's increasingly what he's involved in the 1990s and 2000s. So sort of ironically, right, he kind of comes around to, in some ways, in a very broad way, to Barry's way of thinking.
- [50:51]
Gordon Caddick
But Dave Foreman remained a misanthropic deepakologist through and through. And he never gave up his concerns with immigration and with population.
- [51:03]
Narrator/Interviewer
In 2015, he wrote a book called Man Swarm How Overpopulation is Killing the World. The book calls humanity a swarm of locusts. At no point in the book does Forman mention capitalism. So he never accepted the structural and labor oriented critiques of Barry and Bookchin. For Foreman, he'd always put the earth first, right until his death of lung disease in 2022. He was 75 years old.
- [51:36]
Gordon Caddick
Heartfelt remembrances flowed into the Rewildings Institute. The conservationist John Davis compared Dave Foreman to a giant tree that falls in an open gold growth forest. Dave is now like that mighty oak, fallen but nurturing new generations of trees and their defenders.
- [52:05]
Narrator/Interviewer
Barry died in 1997 from breast cancer. In 2002, the Oakland Police Department and the FBI had to to pay $4.4 million in damages to Barry's estate and to Czerny for how they handled the car bombing case.
- [52:26]
Gordon Caddick
Earth first never recovered after the bombing of Judy Barry and the exodus of founders like Dave Foreman. Today, the Earth First. Journal is still online and it does publicize tree sittings and encourages public pressure campaigns. But they no longer enjoy the kind of attention people like Barry and Foreman could muster.
- [52:54]
Alec Opperman
I think that Earth first shows us a lot of things. I think it shows us part of a sort of a dark side of conservation. You can trace a strain of nationalism and jingoism and anti immigration sentiment through the conservation movement from fairly early in the 20th century, all the way up to the early 21st century and all the way up to the present. And Earth first certainly participated in that, maybe in many ways because of Forman I think Earth First Also pushed the envelope on a lot of issues. They shifted the Overton window is what a lot of political scientists would say. The idea of zero cut on national forest, which is the idea that there should be no logging on any national forest, that's not something that's ever been achieved, but it was something that few, if any, major conservation organizations took seriously in the 1980s. And by the 1990s and beyond, you have groups like the Sierra Club that actually accept that as a possible position. Finally, I think, probably most obviously, direct action. I mean, Earth First. Was a group that saw direct action as not just a tactic, but also part of its sort of political philosophy. And I think that is something that has inspired a lot of other environmental organizations and maybe even to some degree inspired the sort of gradual growing presence of direct action in the climate movement today. You know, I think you see echoes of Earth first in that.
- [54:30]
Dave Foreman
Now, the logger who cut that old tree down, he was just going along with the mob. When asked why he did it, he answered, I was only just doing my job. I don't care what they do with the timber, as long as they pay me my price. They can go make a frame, hang a picture.
- [55:00]
Gordon Caddick
That piece was produced by Alec Opperman and myself, Gordon Katic, with additional editing from AC Rowe. We excerpted audio from a couple film documentaries about Earth First Earth Earth first the Antidote for Despair. That's by Andy Caffrey. And also Earth the Politics of Radical Environmentalism. That documentary is by Chris Mains.
- [55:37]
Dave Foreman
To heaven you'll go and Jesus will.
- [55:42]
Gordon Caddick
Love you, you know. And that's it for this episode of Green Dreams. Our technical producer is Jay Coburn. Dakota Coop is a graphic designer and said its theme song was composed by Mike Barber. Thanks also to Professor John Haltgren of Bennington College. He helped us understand the history of Earth first and the broader nativist tradition within radical environmentalism. If you want to learn more, check out his book from 2015 called Border Walls Gone Nature and Anti Immigrant Politics in America, cited as a project in collaborative academic journalism. That means we partner scholars, students and journalists together in production on this episode and in this whole series, we had research and consulting from Professors Imra Zieman and Tanner Murlies. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding to support this partnership. My own time was also underwritten in part by a grant from my Tax Canada Sighted is distributed on two podcast, the Harbinger Media Network and the New Books Network. Thanks also to our other media partners on this episode threshold and pull back. Check them out wherever you find your podcasts. For more and for a complete list of credits, visit the series page to Greendreams. You can find that@sightedpodcast.com and also linked in the show Notes. This has been a production of Sighted Media, the academic podcasting company.
- [57:17]
Narrator/Interviewer
For more, go to sightedmedia.com cat.