Earth First!

Earth First! is one of the best-known radical environmentalist groups in the United States, and is also well known for tree-spiking and tree-sitting tactics used in its campaign to save old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

In 1980, David Foreman, an environmental lobbyist for the Wilderness Society, became frustrated with the ineffectiveness of “reform environmentalism” after a failed attempt to save 80 million acres of undeveloped land in U.S. national parks. That April, he and several colleagues, including activist Mike Roselle, set out for the Mexican desert and formed Earth First!, using Edward Abbey's 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, as an organizational and action blueprint. The novel tells of radical Southwestern environmentalists who burned billboards, sabotaged bulldozers, and planned to blow up dams.

Earth First! announced its presence on the environmental scene in 1981, when members stood atop the Glen Canyon Dam and unfurled a 300-foot black plastic banner down its face, giving the appearance of a deep crack, in an action dubbed the “Cracking of Glen Canyon Dam.” Two years later, working to save an old-growth forest in the Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon, Earth First! members set up a log roadblock to stop construction trucks. When that failed, Foreman acted as a human blockade and was dragged more than 100 yards by a trucker. Meanwhile, Roselle began to organize. Soon, small, regional Earth First! chapters sprang up all over the western United States. Like other, earlier environmental groups, Earth First! had no central authority. The chapters were connected only through the Earth First! Journal, published in Eugene, Oregon.

Throughout the early 1980s, Earth First! engaged in protests, propaganda, and traditional civil disobedience, using the logo of a clenched first and the slogan “no compromise in defense of Mother Earth!” Adept and media-savvy, Earth First!ers crafted pithy news-bites, such as “Save an owl, slice a logger,” and performed various stunts to keep its name in the news.

By 1984, members began pounding spikes into trees slated for logging; this dangerous tactic, known as “tree-spiking,” was intended to damage saws and sawmill equipment. In 1987, when George Anderson, a 23-year-old mill worker, was seriously injured by an 11-inch spike, some members chose to give up this technique in favor of other “monkey wrenching” tactics described in Foreman's 1985 book, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.

Foreman's how-to manual included instructions for “decommissioning” bulldozers, grounding helicopters, bringing down billboards; it also advocated pulling up survey stakes, blocking bulldozers, and tree-sitting as effective ways of protecting forests and wilderness from human invasion. The ultimate goal of these tactics was to target weak links in the logging industry and make logging difficult and unprofitable.

Early on, Earth First! had adopted “deep ecology” as its governing philosophy, meaning that members conceived of environmentalism in terms of entire ecosystems. As Earth First! grew, it became infused with countercultural politics and various spiritual ideas, such as paganism. Soon, the organization was rent by factionalism. In 1987, Foreman moved [Page 112]away from Earth First! to form the Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy (EMETIC), which was infiltrated by the FBI. Before his arrest for conspiracy to sabotage nuclear power stations (Foreman pleaded guilty in 1991), Foreman told Earth First! cofounder Roselle that he was “working on something more radical.”

By the 1990s, other members of Earth First! were leaving as well. In 1992, British members formed the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), believing Earth First! had become too timid, too invested in becoming mainstream. However, while ELF and similar groups conducted underground “ecotage,” Earth First! used its more moderate position to become the most recognizable group in the radical environmental movement. It is still active today, with chapters throughout North America, Great Britain, and Australia.

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