In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The atomic energy issue may, in fact, be the one to bring us all together. Nothing else short of war threatens the survival of the human race with such awesome Wnality. No other question cuts so deeply to the core of how we live, work, breathe, and make political decisions. —Harvey Wasserman, writer, activist, solar power advocate, is the author of Solartopia! And with Bob Fitrakis, he exposed voting irregularities in Ohio in the presidential election of 2004. Earth First! Dave Foreman october 1981 The early conservation movement in the United States was a child—and no bastard child—of the Establishment. The founders of the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the wildlife conservation groups were, as a rule, wealthy pillars of American society. They were an elite band—sportsmen of the Teddy Roosevelt variety, naturalists like John Burroughs, outdoorsmen in the mold of John Muir, pioneer foresters and ecologists on the order of Aldo Leopold, and wealthy social visionaries like Robert Marshall. No anarchistic Luddites these. When such groups as the Sierra Club grew into the politically e¤ective force that blocked Echo Park Dam in 1956 and got the Wilderness Act passed in 1964, their members were likely to be physicians, mathematicians, and nuclear physicists. To be sure, in the 1950s and 1960s a few oddball refugees from the American mainstream joined the conservation outWts. But it was not until Earth Day in 1970 that the environmental movement received its Wrst inXux of real antiestablishment radicals as antiwar protesters found a new cause—the environment. Suddenly, in environmental meetings beards appeared alongside crew cuts—and the rhetoric quickened. The militancy was short-lived. Along with dozens of other activists of the 1960s who went to work for conservation groups in the early 1970s, I discovered that a suit and tie gained access to regional foresters and members of Congress. We learned to moderate our opinions along with our dress. We heard that extremists were ignored in the councils of government, that the way to get a Senator to put his arm around your shoulders and drop a wilderness bill in the hopper was to consider the conXicts—mining, timber, grazing—and pare back the o¤ending acreage. Of course we were good patriotic Americans . Of course we were concerned with the production of red meat, timber, and minerals . We tried to demonstrate that preserving wilderness did not conXict all that much with the gross national product and that clean air actually helped the economy. Our moderate stance appeared to pay o¤ when the Wrst avowed conservationist since Teddy Roosevelt took the helm at the White House in 1977. Suddenly our colleagues— Foreman / Earth First! 155 self-professed conservationists—occupied important and decisive positions in the Carter Administration. Editorials proclaimed that environmentalism had been enshrined in the Establishment, that conservation was here to stay. A new environmental ethic was at hand: Environmental Quality and Continued Economic Progress. But although we had access—indeed, inXuence—in high places, something seemed amiss. When the chips were down, conservation still lost out to industry. But these were our friends turning us down. We tried to understand the problems they faced in the real political world. We gave them the beneWt of the doubt. We failed to sue when we should have. But the moderate, subdued approach advanced by the major conservation groups contrasted with the howling, impassioned, extreme stand set forth by o¤-road-vehicle zealots, many ranchers, local boosters, loggers, and miners. They looked like fools. We looked like statesmen. Who won? They did. “What have we really accomplished?” I thought. “Are we any better o¤ as far as saving the Earth now than we were ten years ago?” I ticked o¤ the real problems: world population growth, destruction of tropical forests, expanding slaughter of African wildlife , oil pollution of the ocean, acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, spreading deserts on every continent, destruction of native peoples and the imposition of one world culture (European), plans to carve up Antarctica, deep seabed mining, nuclear proliferation, recombinant DNA research, toxic wastes. It was staggering. And I feared we had done nothing to reverse the tide. Indeed, it had accelerated. And then: Ronald Reagan. James “Rape-’n’-Ruin” Watt is Secretary of the Interior. The Forest Service is Louisiana-PaciWc’s. Interior is Exxon’s. The Environmental Protection Agency is Dow’s. The cowboys have the grazing lands, and God help the hiker, coyote, or a blade...

Share