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  • For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism by Sarah M. Pike
  • Lisa E. Dahill (bio)
For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism. By Sarah M. Pike. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 293pp. $34.95

To what great purpose does your life contribute? Why and for whom does your voice in the world truly and clearly matter? These are questions that animate the deep soul-searching of adolescents discerning their lives' trajectories, questions that in 2017 inspired my university to change the name and focus of its required religion course for incoming students from "Introduction to Christianity" to "Religion, Identity, and Vocation." Our sections fill with earnest, eager young people, many of them first-generation college students, for whom these questions are a gateway into new possibilities for their own lives, as well as to the breadth of a university education preparing them to engage the needs and complexities of the world.

In her 2017 book, For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism, Sarah M. Pike, a professor of comparative religion at California State University, Chico, has opened a window into an extraordinarily motivated and focused subset of these adolescents: those willing to leave behind the usual markers of the good life in North America and head into dangerous, at times illegal territory in protesting the destruction of forests or other landscapes and/or the mistreatment of animals in captivity. In doing so, these activists shape lives that bear many religious markers even as they may foreswear the religious traditions in which they were raised. Simultaneously, these forms of spirituality expand the boundaries of most Western religious rituals, communities, and practices to include encounter with and transformation by creatures and forces of the more-than-human world. In seven chapters rich with interview and email quotes from her young adult subjects, Pike dives deeply into the contours of how "radical eco-activists" develop the values and visions that guide their actions, how they actively shape the spaces, communities, and rituals of protest that give focus and purpose to their lives, and how their relationships with humans and non-humans blur some boundaries and sharpen others, as these activists attempt to inhabit a vision of harmonious human connection to the larger natural world. This study builds on Pike's earlier scholarship on pagan and neo-pagan religious communities, expanding here to attend to the tangible spirituality of activists from many backgrounds. Specifically, the book's emphasis is on "the ways in which spiritual orientations and experiences are intertwined with other shaping factors as young adults come to believe that they must put their lives on the line for nonhuman animals and the natural world." This centering in questions of spirituality allows Pike to challenge the often negative media portrayal of eco-activists as immoral, perhaps even "domestic terrorists," as she attempts to show the "deep spiritual connections and moral commitments" that motivate these young people's acts of protest (4). Indeed, she desires to show some of the shapes of the "sacred relationships [humans] have with other species and the sacred duties and responsibilities we consequently owe them" (5).

In her Introduction, Pike lists seven trajectories she sees as having converged in the forms of ecological activism she is studying: American nature religion, as traced by Catherine Albanese, Bron Taylor, Evan Berry, and Mark Stoll; the secular U.S. and global environmental movement beginning in the 1960's; the philosophy of deep ecology developed by Arne Naess and colleagues; additional forms of activism [End Page 271] emerging from the 1960's, such as civil rights, feminist, antiwar, and gay rights movements; contemporary paganism and neo-paganism; indigenous cultures and post-colonial perspectives; and contemporary forms of anarchism, such as those animating the Occupy Wall Street movement (8–9). Above all, as her title already indicates, she is curious about the overarching metaphor of the "wild" in the lives, actions, and spiritualities of her subjects: i.e., how their lives root in forms of wisdom much more ancient than the religious traditions that gave rise to Western civilization and the industrial/digital economies that keep it going. Thus, she notes, "many...

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