The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism ed. by John Davis (review)

Reviews 169 The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism. Edited by John Davis. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1991. 272 pages, $14.95.) For ten years the EarthFirst!Journalchronicled the adventures, cognitions, and concerns of a radical environmental movement that had no membership (or at least refused to maintain membership roles), and held the quixotic goal of saving our last wildlands—at any cost. The contributors were diverse, the writing eclectic, the message urgent, the voice strident, stentorian, and occa­ sionally alarmist. The ultimate effect of page after page of reports of unbridled environmental rape—to borrow a favored phrase—was invariably infuriating. In spite of that single goal the issues delineated and debated in thejournal were multifaceted, and break into categories that form the organizing chapters for The Earth First! Reader: accounts of protests and direct actions, land use conflicts, critiques of the status quo, deep ecology, ecosystems and biodiversity, and spiritual matters. A final chapter contains essays on the ten-year accom­ plishments of the movement and its methods. Each of the essays originally appeared in the EarthFirst!Journal. During Earth First!’s ten years of activism the media was often quick to dismiss the organization as a group of fringe radicals. But the list of writers assembled here suggests otherwise. The writers are Ph.D.s, lawyers, philoso­ phers, and some of the leading thinkers in their fields. You will find between these pages Ed Abbey, Bill Devall, Gary Snyder, Gary Nabhan, Reed Noss, George Wuerthner, to name but a few. The greatest shortcoming of the journal, and a subsequent problem here, is that it tended to deliver its sermons to the choir. As Stephanie Mills notes, the converted feel a mounting frustration: “The only reahzed good of this cause may be the vitalization it affords. ... It may be that all we accomplish ... is the slight delay in the wholesale destruction of our wilderness.” Let this not be the case. Buy this one for a friend, your library, yourself. Read it selectively, as was always the case with the journal, and don’t attempt the reading in one sitting— it will make you too angry. If you’re still not convinced read Paul Watson’s accounts ofraids on pirate whaling ships and Pacific drift-netfleets—this is high adventure at its best, and read “This is Pro-Life?”,a pertinent essayon the Roe v. Wade controversy. But the best reason to pick up this collection is that Earth First!’s message is too important to ignore. D. E. McIVOR Utah State University ...