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3. The Feminization of Earth First!
- Syracuse University Press
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57 3 The Feminization of Earth First! IWW/EF! Local 1 and the Convergence of Class, Gender, and Radical Environmentalism Commentators Larry Martel and John-Henry Harter identify the loss of union power in the woods of the West Coast of North America as the primary factor behind the recent crises in the forests. Martel argues that getting there requires nothing less than “a vast union machine in the woods” to ensure that workers “can no longer be blackmailed by the companies into trading off job and livelihood security for ancient-growth preservation” (1997, 34). Finding durable solutions to habitat destruction requires a reexpansion of unionization and a restoration of bargaining strength, according to Martel and Harter. As they see it, this is the best way to allow workers the power necessary to refuse divisive “jobs versus environment” strategies and hold companies accountable for both job loss and biodiversity destruction. Forest workers must be in a position to strike over jobs, wages, working conditions, and ecologically sensible practices. This cannot be done in the absence of organization. “More to the point, until strike capacity is increased, there will be tremendous pressure to harvest ancient growth, because there is no other more effective counterbalance to forest corporate profit imperatives than a union being able to stop work to enforce its demands” (Martel 1997, 34). Martel suggests that environmental activists need to develop friendly relations with forest workers and goes so far as to argue that environmental canvassers could be trained as union organizers. His recommendations are strikingly similar to those actually attempted 58 • Green Syndicalism by Judi Bari and IWW/Earth First! Local 1. Unfortunately Martel makes no mention of this real organizing effort and the stunning obstacles it faced. Among the more interesting of recent attempts to articulate solidarity across the ecology and workers’ movements were those involving Earth First! activist Judi Bari and her efforts to build alliances with workers in order to save old-growth forest in Northern California. Bari sought to learn from the organizing and practices of the IWW to see if a radical ecology movement might be built along anarchosyndicalist lines. In so doing she tried to bring a radical working-class perspective to the agitational practices of Earth First! as a way to overcome the conflicts between environmentalists and timber workers that kept them from fighting the corporate logging firms that were killing both forests and jobs. The organization she helped form, IWW/Earth First Local 1, eventually built a measure of solidarity between radical environmentalists and loggers that resulted in the protection of the Headwaters old-growth forest, which had been slated for clear-cutting (Shantz 1999b). Wilderness Fundamentalism and the “Rednecks for Nature” Emerging from the threatened landscape of the US Southwest in 1980, Earth First! (EF!) almost immediately established itself as the extreme edge of North American environmentalism. Arriving during a low ebb in the cycle of environmental activism, Earth First! provided an important voice for wilderness preservation against prevailing views that reduced nature to “our resources and private property” (Idaho Farm Bureau Federation, quoted in Short 1991, 181). Their position of “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth” quickly made them the bane of land developers, cattle ranchers, logging companies, the US National Park Service, the US Forest Service, and other environmentalists (Lange 1990; Short 1991). The group’s founders, most notably Dave Foreman, viewed confrontation and agitation as the only means to awaken an increasingly [3.84.7.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:10 GMT) The Feminization of Earth First! • 59 lethargic environmental movement that was clearly failing to protect wilderness ecosystems (Short 1991). Earth First! vigorously attacked mainstream environmentalists for being too close to the political establishment and too ready to make compromises that were not in the best interests of wilderness ecosystems. In place of a “granola-crunching” pacifist image of environmentalists , which they were quick to deride, Earth First!’s founders identified themselves as “rednecks and cowboys for wilderness” (see Lange 1990; Short 1991). Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s Earth First!, with its extreme rhetoric and public commitment to direct action and “monkeywrenching,”1 served as a striking symbol of a renewed radicalism in environmental politics. Armed with a broad sense of humor, they transformed the character of environmental protests by engaging in lively guerrilla theater, blockades, “tree sitting,” and threats of sabotage2 (Lange 1990; Short 1991). The group signaled a potentially important and necessary radicalization of environmentalism , both through its ecological sensibility...