A Fire in the Belly of the Beast: The Emergence of Revolutionary Environmentalism

Introduction: Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3

Barely out of the starting gates, on the heels of the bloody and genocidal century that preceded it, the 21st century already is a time of war, violence, environmental disasters, and terrorism against human populations, animals, and the Earth as a whole. This omnicidal assault on life is waged by powerful and greedy forces, above all, by transnational corporations, national and international banks, and G8 alliances that hire nation states as their cops, juntas, hit men, dictators, and loan sharks to extract natural resources, enforce regimes of total exploitation, and snuff out all resistance. These menacing forces are part of a coherent system rooted in the global capitalist market and “representative democracy” currently in the final stages of the privatization and commodification of the natural and social worlds.

The net result of millennia of western culture, and roughly two hundred thousand years of the reign of Homo sapiens as a whole, is hideously visible in the current ecological crisis involving dynamics such as air and water pollution, acid rain, genetic crop pollution, chemical poisoning, species extinction, rainforest destruction, coral reef deterioration, disappearance of wetlands, desertification, and global warming.1 This planetary crisis is caused by forces that include human overpopulation, hyperdevelopment, mass production, overconsumption, agribusiness, militarism, and a cancerous greed for power and profit that consumes, entraps, or kills everything in its path.

With the exception of a few sparkles of democracy, egalitarianism, and enlightenment, western cultural development is a dark stretch of hierarchy, domination, and destruction, all predicated on the pernicious ideologies and institutions of statism, classism, sexism, racism, speciesism, and anthropocentrism. Despite great works of philosophy, music, art, and architecture, regardless of brilliant advances in science and technology – much of which was built on the backs of the enslaved and exploited -- the western world (which claims superiority over all other cultures) has created few social forms deserving the name “civilization.” Rather, it spirals headlong toward barbarism, self-destruction, and oblivion. Indeed, the very concept of “civilization” is problematic as the western world has defined it in antithesis to everything wild, non-domestic, animalic, primal, emotional, instinctual, and female, all forces to be subdued and conquered.

As the global temperatures climb, icecaps and glaciers melt, sea-levels rise, and forests fall, the short-lived human empire has begun to devour itself and implode like a collapsing white dwarf star. The Earth itself – the bulk of which has been domesticated, colonized, commodified, bred and cross-bred, genetically engineered, cloned, and transformed into forces of mass destruction -- is refuting the myths and fallacies of Progress, Development, Science, Technology, the Free Market, and Neo-Liberalism, while demonstrating the inherent contradiction between capitalism and ecology.

This book is a rebel yell. It is a manifesto for a new social movement that we call “revolutionary environmentalism.” It stands in solidarity with all struggles outside the western world and northern hemispheres, but it calls for a revolution within. As the Earth Liberation Front once stated in a communiqué, “Welcome to the struggle of all species to be free. We are the burning rage of a dying planet.” Fed up with apathy, lies, and excuses; driven by passion and anger; moving through the night in black clothes and balaclavas; armed with the healing fire of resistance; the Earth Liberation Front is just one of many radical groups attacking exploiters and monkeywrenching nihilists who would trade in cultural and biological diversity for another mansion or yacht.2 These guerilla warriors are joined by people of color protesting chemical poisoning of their communities, Chipko activists protecting forests in India, the Ogoni people fighting Shell Oil in Nigeria, and countless other indigenous peoples -- from Central Africa and the Amazon Basin to the Canadian subarctic and the tropical forests of Asia and -- fighting pollution, mining, deforestation, biopiracy, oil and gas drilling, agribusiness, and other forms of exploiting humans, animals, and the Earth.

Global in its vision, Igniting a Revolution nonetheless arises from the belly of the beast, from the “core” states that control their “satellites,” from the corporate command centers – above all, the u.s. -- of the great imperialist powers.3 This book is shaped by the era of “global terrorism,” the so-called “clash of civilizations,” struggles over dwindling natural resources, and the intensification of state repression against “eco-terrorism,” liberation movements, and dissent of any kind. Igniting a Revolution was conceived amidst the smoke and rubble of 9/11; it was written during the blasts of 3/11 (Madrid, 2004) and 7/7 (London, 2005), assembled throughout the u.s. terrorist war against Iraq and the encroaching fascism of phenomena such as the u.s.a. PATRIOT Act and u.k. “rules of unacceptable behaviors,” and finalized under the spectral shadow of ecological disintegration, biological meltdown, and impending global chaos.

Increasingly, calls for moderation, compromise, and the slow march through institutions can be seen as treacherous and grotesquely inadequate. With the planet in the throes of dramatic climate change, ecological destabilization, and the sixth great extinction crisis in its history (this one having human not natural causes), “reasonableness” and “moderation” seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as “extreme” and “radical” actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate. After decades of environmental struggles in the west, we are nevertheless “losing ground” in the battle to preserve species, ecosystems, wilderness, and human communities. Politics as usual just won’t cut it anymore.4

Origins of Western Environmentalism

“Environmentalism,” a term developed in the modern western world, is an articulated philosophical and political concern human beings have with the destructive impact of their societies and lifeways on their surroundings and the natural world that sustains them. Most improbable in societies that respect and live in harmony with nature, environmentalism is a symptom of a disease. It is a manifestation of a dualistic outlook whereby human beings see themselves as apart from nature, view it as mere resources for their use, and seek to bend it to their will. Ecological lifeways in harmony with nature are primal, but environmentalism is a modern development.5 Environmentalism is a necessary step toward healing the pathologies of a destructive and domineering society, but some forms of environmentalism, as we will show, only treat the symptoms of disease while others seek to eliminate its cause.

There are many histories of environmentalism appropriate to various national, geographical, or cultural settings, such as may be found in Australia, Asia, england, Finland, Germany, or the u.s. Our brief narrative here only touches on a few points relevant to traditions in north Amerika and Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, but verges toward a broader international (though mostly western) narrative.6 Ideas, tactics, groups, and movements often flow from one nation to another, such that by the 1990s western environmentalism – which is simultaneously a general name and multiple tendencies – becomes an international movement that connects with indigenous struggles in the southern hemispheres and expands on a planetary scale.7

While one can always find antecedents to any “beginning,” environmentalism emerged as a prominent new social concern in the u.k. and u.s. during the first half of the 19th century, largely in reaction to the social and environmental destruction wrought by capitalist industrialization processes. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in London, the urban setting became a grim, overcrowded, polluted, smog-choked, disease-ridden prisonhouse of squalor and ugliness. In his poem, “Jerusalem” (1804), William Blake decried the city’s "dark satanic mills," and in novels such as Hard Times (1854) Charles Dickens vividly portrayed the hellish lives of the urban poor. In protest against encroaching industrialization, groups of English weavers known as Luddites took up their sledgehammers in 1811 and attacked the machines that mass produced inferior products, eliminated their jobs, and destroyed their communities. The state crushed the burgeoning social movement, handing out death sentences for sabotage, and industrialization rolled right along under the banner of Progress, Democracy, and Freedom.8

As various radials and social reformers organized against the destructive effects of industrialization on working classes in cities such as London and Manchester, a new sensibility emerged in the late 18th century, championed by Romantic poets, artists, and thinkers who were concerned with the impact of capitalism on the beloved countryside and forests of england. Within the belly of the industrial beast, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and others observed with alarm how both outer and inner worlds were threatened by mechanistic science, the technological onslaught, and the ruthless commodification of nature and human relations. Following the lead of Rousseau who declared everything natural free and good (before corrupted by society), they praised nature as the antithesis to all that was rotten in modern life, and extolled the beauty and divinity of the wild.

In the early 19th century, Romanticism spread from england to amerika where it took on similar form in the guise of “Transcendentalism.” Millennia after Native Americans lived with reverence for the Earth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir embraced a similar pantheistic outlook. They rejected the prevailing Puritan ideology that saw nature as evil and repulsive, as something to be conquered not contemplated, and they spoke rapturously of the divine spirit manifest in all things. They extolled mountains, rivers, and forests as sacred and essential to authentic life, unlike the existence corrupted by the teeming crowds, breathless pace, and gross commercial values of cities. They understood that the “temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism” (Muir), such as represented by railroad, lumber, mining, land, and farming interests, were rapidly colonizing the wild and exploiting the Earth. In their writings and speeches, Transcendentalists encouraged aesthetic and spiritual appreciation of nature, sparked public awareness about the widespread “war against wilderness” (Thoreau), and launched an American tradition of environmental legislation and protection.

The evolution of “environmentalism” in the u.s. provides an instructive case study of the complexities and politics of the discourse and movement. According to a standard narrative, amerikan environmentalism emerged in the 19th century when privileged white males such as Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, and various conservationists became active in education and legislation efforts.9 The story continues by relating how later figures, such as Aldo Leopold carried the baton of a budding new movement, emphasizes the importance of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1963), then finally brings the tale to a climax by describing the sea of white faces demonstrating in the streets on the first Earth Day in 1970.

Although we have certainly oversimplified, the basic outlines of this history have been told often, and it is important to note that this narrative leaves out two important facts. First, many of the founders and pioneers of amerikan environmentalism were classist, racist, and sexist, such that their spiritual attunement to nature did not free them from pernicious prejudices of the time.10 Early environmentalists, prosperous white men, contrasted a “vigorous manliness” ethic in the pursuit of wilderness to the “effeminate” weakness” of city life. Romantics, primitivists, and anti-modernists, they celebrated the “savage virtues” that the man of leisure cultivates in the canyons and forests of wild amerika. Their emphasis on rugged individualism and solitary journeys into wilderness hardly encouraged social awareness or activism. During heady political times of slavery, civil war, and genocide against Native Americans, some naturalists, such as Muir, remained apolitical and even misanthropic. Thoreau, in contrast, participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave Law, supported John Brown and his party, and encouraged tax resistance and civil disobedience in general. He thereby stands out as an early eco-radical, one with a holistic outlook that encompassed both wilderness and social justice issues, and who exerted a great influence on the politics of civil disobedience and direct action associated with radical environmentalism.

Amidst the struggles of oppressed groups and the Dickensian horrors of industrialization, the nineteenth century understanding of “environment” in the u.s. was that of a pristine wilderness, such as could be enjoyed exclusively by people of privilege and leisure. Unfortunately, this elitist and myopic definition discounted the urban environment that plagued working classes, and it set a regressive historical standard that has come under fire but still stands.

The nature/urban dualism was far less rigid in england, however, where many 19th century champions of wilderness protection and nature were also vigorous social reformers. William Blake deified wilderness but also repudiated slavery and championed racial and sexual equality. Octavia Hill (1838-1912) founded the National Trust, an influential nature preservation society, as she worked to improve housing and increase public spaces for the poor. Radical prophet, poet, pacifist, and labor activist Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) advocated vegetarianism, anti-vivisection, women’s liberation, and gay sexuality, as he organized campaigns against air pollution and echoed Thoreau’s call for the “simplification of life.” Similarly, Henry Salt (1851-1939) was a socialist, pacifist, and champion of social reform in schools, prisons, and other institutions. He was also a naturalist, vegetarian, proponent of animal rights, and early animal liberationist. In 1891, he formed the Humanitarian League, which set out to ban hunting as a sport. This organization was a forerunner of the League against Cruel Sports (founded in 1924), as well as modern hunt-saboteur groups from which emerged the Animal Liberation Front (see below).11

Clearly, the understanding of “revolutionary environmentalism” will vary according to one’s definition of “environment.” If the definition focuses on “wilderness” apart from cities, communities, and health issues, then it will exclude the plight and struggles of women, people of color, workers, children, and other victims of oppression who work, live, play and attend school in toxic surroundings that sicken, deform, and kill. If, however, the definition of revolutionary environmentalism is broadened to include environmental justice (see below) and indigenous struggles against corporate exploitation and imperialism -- which bring to the table key issues of race and class -- then the contributions of Native Americans, Black liberationists, Latino/as, non-western peoples, and others can be duly recognized and integrated into a broader and more powerful resistance movement.

One must look to the 19th century roots of modern environmentalism to understand why in the u.s. and elsewhere the environmental movement is still comprised predominantly of middle class or elite white people. Tragically, narrow definitions of the “environment” and ideologies such as elitism, racism, sexism, and misanthropy persisted throughout the 20th century and surfaced in movements such as deep ecology and Earth First! Such attitudes – while not endorsed by all deep ecologists or Earth First!ers and which by no means capture the complexity of their positions and politics -- were not exactly welcome mats for women, workers, and people of color, who regardless were preoccupied with their own forms of oppression and survival needs.

A second problem with the standard historical narrative of amerikan environmentalism is that it leaves out the important roles played by oppressed and marginalized groups. Far before Rachel Carson, African-American abolitionists opposed the use of chemicals such as arsenic being used to grow crops. Women’s chapters in the Sierra Club and Audubon societies played a significant role in furthering the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Women were not only wilderness advocates but also urban environmentalists. These activists included the “sewer socialists” of the late 19th century who militated for better sanitation conditions in cities; Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), a pioneer of occupational health and safety; and Jane Addams (1860-1935), whose activism on behalf of women, children, workers, and people of color was inseparable from her push for better housing, working, and sanitation conditions.12 Anticipating by six decades the environmental justice movements that emerged in the 1980s (see below), Grace Fryer and other “Radium girls” sickened from radium poisoning sued the company responsible and raised awareness about the dangers of this deadly substance.

Modern radical groups have roots in forgotten social histories, such as we see in today’s environmental justice movement. Similarly, well before the sabotage and monkeywrenching actions of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Earth First!, Native nations, rebellious slaves, abolitionists, Luddites, suffragettes, and others damaged machinery, destroyed property, and set buildings ablaze. Contemporary direct action and civil disobedience tactics, moreover, have immediate roots in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and of course reach back to militants such as Gandhi, Thoreau, and Tolstoy. Thus, the modern environmental movement hardly emerged in a vacuum, nor did it evolve without deep imprints from intense struggles over class, race, and gender.

The Ferment of the 1960s

Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1963), is often credited with sparking the modern environmental movement. It captured the attention of the nation with its vivid prose and dire warning of the systemic poisoning effects of newly invented pesticides, especially DDT. In an era that promoted “better living through chemicals,” DDT and other deadly substances were spread liberally across the land, from the suburban lawns of New Jersey to the agricultural fields of California where migrant workers toiled and had first hand knowledge of their deadly effects. Carson’s book prompted President John F. Kennedy to order the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine her claims against pesticides, and, despite ferocious opposition from the chemical industries, her research was vindicated and DDT was eventually banned – although the use of countless other deadly chemicals thereafter increased and continued to poison soil, crops, animals, rivers, and human communities and bodies.

Exclusive focus on Carson’s great achievements tends to cloud the importance of other contemporaries. In the 1950s, for instance, Murray Bookchin wrote numerous articles and books on the poisoning of the environment and food supply by nuclear testing, pesticides and herbicides, and various additives and preservatives.13 During the same period, he also merged anarchism and ecology in a new revolutionary framework he later called social ecology, which argued that all environmental problems are deep-rooted social problems and therefore demand far-reaching social solutions. Biologist Barry Commoner also protested against nuclear testing in the 1950s, warning of the dangers of radioactive fallout, and he helped bring about the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty. A national figure, Commoner wrote on a wide range of issues including pollution, the dangers of fossil fuels, and alternative technologies. His books, such as The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (1971), provided clear understandings of the “laws of ecology” and how modern society recklessly violated them. Populist and progressive, Commoner provided another early attempt to connect environmentalism to left-wing politics and broad social agendas.

Yet it is clear that the modern environmental movement did not arise because of Rachel Carson, or a few other key individuals (including David Brower). It emerged and sustained itself in the larger social context of the 1960s, as shaped by the struggles of the “new social movements” (radical students, countercultural youth, Black liberation, feminism, Chicano/Mexican-American, peace, anti-nuclear, and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transsexual).14 These movements, in turn, arose amidst the turmoil spawned by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s. During the 1960s, however, Blacks and a number of white radicals rejected environmentalism as a bourgeois concern, elitist and racist cause, reactionary primitivism, and even dangerous diversion from the hard-won focus on civil rights and the Vietnam War. The political mindset was dominated by humanist and anthropocentric concerns, and even “progressive” figures and groups were unprepared to embrace an emerging new ethic that challenged human species identity as the Lord and Master of the wild. As they began to take shape in the 1960s, environmental concerns were – and mostly remain – “enlightened anthropocentric” worries that if people do not better protect “their” environment, human existence will be gravely threatened.

End Notes for Page 1

1 The claim that we currently are witnessing an advanced ecological “crisis,” upon which the argument for revolutionary struggle rests, means that there is an emergency situation in the ecology of the Earth as a whole that needs urgent attention. If we do not address ecological problems immediately and with radical measures that target causes not symptoms, severe, world-altering consequences will play out over a long-term period. Signs of major stress of the world’s eco-systems are everywhere, from denuded forests and depleted fisheries to vanishing wilderness and global climate change. As one indicator of massive disruption, the proportion of species human beings are driving to extinction “might easily reach 20 percent by 2022 and rise as high as 50 percent or more thereafter” (Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life. New York: Knopf, 2002). Given the proliferating amount of solid, internationally assembled scientific data supporting the ecological crisis claim, it can no longer be dismissed as “alarmist”; the burden of proof, rather has shifted to those “skeptics,” “realists,” and “optimists” in radical denial of the crisis to prove why complacency is not blindness and insanity. Science itself is calling for radical change. For reliable data on the crisis, see the various reports, papers, and annual Vital Signs and State of the World publications by the Worldwatch Institute. On the impact of Homo sapiens over time, see “The Pleistocene-Holocene Event” at: http://rewilding.org/thesixthgreatextinction.htm. On the serious environmental effects of agribusiness and global meat and dairy production/consumption systems (which include deforestation, desertification, water pollution, species extinction, resource waste, and global warming), see John Robbins, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World. Berkeley CA: Conari Press, 2001. The environmental impact of militarism and war is another often overlooked, but critical factor, as militaries and warfare are major contributors to air pollution, ozone depletion, polluted rivers, contaminated soil, use of land mass, consumption of energy and resources, release of toxic, radioactive, and chemical waste, and of course the threat of nuclear holocaust. See Rosalie Bertell, Planet Earth: The Newest Weapon of War. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2001.

2 See, for instance, how ExxonMobil has aggressively lobbied the Bush administration to block alternative energy approaches and maintain fossil fuels as the dominant energy source for the future, “The Hydrogen Hypocrites,” http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/oil/2003/
0211hy.htm.

3 In solidarity with the language of resistance used by many Black liberationists and anti-imperialists, throughout this introduction we substitute “u.s.,” “Amerika,” “england,” and “u.k.” for “US,” “America,” “England,” and “UK,” and graffiti the names only of these two major imperialist powers.

4 See Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995; and James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

5 Whereas some indulge in mythologizing and romanticizing past cultures, it is a well-known fact that massive environmental destruction is not caused by modern western societies alone, but rather was characteristic of numerous earlier societies that hunted animals to extinction and laid waste to their surroundings to the extent their technologies allowed. See Jared Diamond, Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Viking, 2004; Charles L. Redman, Human Impact on Ancient Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999; and Vernon Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975

6 Needless to say, in our limited space here, we cannot possibly discuss in detail key individuals, groups, and concepts important to the history of western environmentalism. We are tracing some of the streams that feed into the river of revolutionary environmentalism as we define it, and many other histories and perspectives are needed for a fuller picture. This focus means that we are more concerned with providing a broad sketch and conceptual framework rather than a critical assessment of every figure and development we mention.

7 On the topic of global environmentalism, see Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History. Cartersville, GA:Longman, 1999. The differences between Northern and Southern forms of environmentalism is discussed by Ramachandra Guha, Juan Martinez-Alier, and Juan Martinez in Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan Publications, 1997.

8 As they are so often misunderstood, it is important to emphasize that Luddites were not about mindless attacks on machinery or reactionary fears of “progress,” but rather rejection of a mechanistic approach to life, care for craftsmanship, and concern over threats to core values such as freedom and dignity. For an illuminating account of Luddites past and present, see Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing, 1995.

9 For an example of a standard, single-focus narratives on the history of u.s. environmentalism, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. To read an alternative, far broader account that links environmental and social history by including the fight for safe working and living conditions and the struggles of women, labor, and others, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993. Marcy Darnovsky provides an excellent social history of environmentalism in her essay, “Stories Less Told: Histories of US Environmentalism,” Socialist Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, October-December, 1992, pp. 11-54. Darnovsky notes that “Too sharp a a focus on wilderness blurs the environmental significance of everyday life … In limiting their scope as they do, the standard [environmental] histories contribute to still-widespread associations of the environment as a place separate from daily life and innocent of social relations” (28).

10 See Dowie, Losing Ground.

11 Salt’s book, Animal Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), was pioneering both in its use of the term “rights” (in an english culture dominated by utilitarianism no less), and its holistic vision that presents human and animal rights as inseparable elements of moral progress. Salt also was a key influence on Gandhi, and thereby on subsequent history, in two key ways: his book, A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886), prompted Gandhi to return to vegetarianism (this time to honor ethical reasons not religious tradition) and thereby formulate a wider ethic of life; and he introduced Gandhi to the works of Thoreau, thus spreading the tradition of civil disobedience.

12 On the early role of women in the emerging environmental movement, see Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 1991.

13 See, for instance, Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment. New York: Knopf, 1962 (published under the pseudonym of “Lewis Herber”).

14 For a historical and critical analysis of new social movements, see Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

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