For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
(Pennsylvania), and 2013 (North Carolina); Wild Roots, Feral Futures in 2013 (Colorado); the Trans and Womyn’s Action Camp 2014 (TWAC, California); and the Animal Rights conference in 2009 (Los Angeles). These gatherings, usually held annually, are primarily for sharing information and experiences, creating community, getting various kinds of training, and airing conflicts. The Earth First! Rendezvous and TWAC gatherings usually include preparing for and engaging in direct actions, such as blocking a road to a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) site. In each instance I contacted the organizers in advance, explained my project and let them know that I would not be making any recordings, visual or audio, during the gatherings, because anonymity and privacy are important to activists. I have used pseudonyms or “forest names” for my interlocutors, depending on their preference and have disguised other identifying features. In the case of well-known activists, such as those who have served prison sentences, I have usually retained their real names so as to be consistent when discussing references to them in the news media and elsewhere. I did not interview or contact any minors; instead, I focused on young adults’ reflections on their teenage years.
I participated in all aspects of activist gatherings: I used gathering ride boards to find riders to travel with me to gatherings, ate meals in the communal dining areas, prepared food, washed dishes, went through a street medic training, volunteered in the medic tent, learned how to climb trees, went to workshops and direct action trainings, learned chants for protests, and held signs and sang chants at protests.
As a participant and observer I often struggled to balance my two roles. In many ways I blended in with activists in terms of my values and interests. I consider myself an environmentalist who travels by bicycle as much as possible, who does not own a dryer, who composts, reuses, and recycles. As a long-time vegetarian, vegan food and arguments for veganism and vegetarianism were familiar to me. My own story intersects with the stories of activists at a number of other junctures as well. At nineteen, while in college, I became involved with nonviolent direct action during the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s, participating in antinuclear collectives and protests in Kentucky and North Carolina. During those years I was introduced to some of the practices used by contemporary environmental and animal rights organizations, such as nonviolent direct action, talking circles, consensus decision making, and affinity groups. In the early 1980s, I spent many hours at punk rock and hardcore shows. A few years later I entered graduate school, earning a doctorate in religious studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I also minored in women’s studies and taught in I. U.’s Women’s Studies program while finishing my dissertation on contemporary Pagan festivals. In these and other ways, I was involved with practices, movements, and ideas that shaped radical environmentalism and animal rights activism a generation later.
On the other hand, I was an outsider at activist gatherings, not currently working on a direct action campaign and over twenty years older than the majority of participants. I did not blend in. There were activists around my age, but not many, and some participants probably suspected I was spying on them, even though it is unlikely someone trying to gather intelligence on activists would look like me. Informants such as “Anna,” a twenty-one-year-old FBI agent who infiltrated an ELF collective, do their best to blend into the crowd, which I did not. My visibility as an outsider was both an asset and a liability. I was not privy to some of the more secretive conversations, especially involving actions, and thus missed out on negotiations and concerns at that level of involvement. On the other hand, being treated a bit suspiciously worked in my favor in that I was less likely to be told about anything illegal. I made it a point not to ask about underground actions, only those actions activists had already been sentenced for or that were public, above-ground, and covered by the news media. All of these experiences had a profound influence on how I related to what I heard and saw during my research and have contributed to how I have written this story about radical activism.
My age and life experience turned out to be useful. Because of a stint working in restaurants as a young adult, I could easily follow directions and make myself useful in community kitchens at gatherings. Given years of dealing with a variety of classroom dynamics, I handled situations that required a calm demeanor, such as helping in the medic tent or filling in as a police liaison when the assigned liaison was needed elsewhere during an action. No doubt the police treated me differently as well. As I became more familiar to the communities by participating in all aspects of the gatherings, most activists eventually seemed to accept my presence. They were open with me in as many ways as they were suspicious of me, and many of them shared details of their lives, explaining what mattered to them and why in ways I could understand.
For the Wild is very much the result of intersubjective understandings that emerged from my conversations with activists and from the interfaces of my sensory, embedded experiences with activist communities. You will read my view of what emerged from our conversations, checked against other sources and other views. Any attempt at objectivity would be fragile and incomplete, and mine is no objective portrait of activism, although I try to fairly represent multiple views on most issues. No doubt activists would tell some of these stories differently. But their narratives would be multiple and varied too. Like me, many of them moved in and out of campaigns, returning to work and school in between, while others remained full-time activists. Some of those I spoke with had only been involved for a few months or were attending a protest for the first time, while others drew from many years of experience on campaigns to save wild places and nonhuman animals. There is no central organization in the anarchistic groups I learned from and participated in, no authority to turn to for an official interpretation. Meaning and authority in these movements emerge from what is happening on the ground, between people, in concert with landscapes and other species, and in essays about movement strategies and practices online and in print.
In addition to interviews and participant observation, I draw on three different kinds of primary print sources: published memoirs by environmental and animal rights activists, such as Paul Watson’s Seal Wars; print publications such as the Earth First! Journal and Satya: Vegetarianism, Animal Advocacy, Social Justice, Environmentalism; and self-published, photocopied, and usually anonymous “zines” that I picked up at gatherings. These zines ranged from reprints of activist publications to self-authored essays such as those collected in the zine Reclaim, Rewild: A Vision for Going Feral & Actualizing Our Wildest Dreams. The final type of primary source was online documentation of actions and gatherings, including photographs, videos, and written accounts of actions and news stories on activist websites, particularly the Earth First! Newswire.41
Activists whom I met at gatherings or whose articles I read in print and online are incredibly diverse and difficult to generalize about. While there are well-known figures in these movements, such as Earth First! founder Dave Foreman or PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, they are as likely to be criticized as emulated. Renowned activists like Jeff Luers and Marius Mason (formerly Marie), who served time in prison, were often referred to with awe and respect by other activists I met. But the communities I spent time with are leaderless; they have policies (such as nonoppressive behavior) that participants mostly agree on, but no central organization. In what follows, I describe and analyze important trends and common views and experiences. While my observations will not fit every activist, it is my hope that activists will recognize their communities as I have depicted them and that I have accurately captured many of the values and experiences they share.
From the distro table: zines.
In my journey through the worlds of activists, two concepts have particularly troubled me: “nature” and “the wild.” I try to use these words in the ways activists use them. But “nature” and “the wild” are, of course, constructions situated within a particular set of late modern conditions, including nostalgia for an imagined past in which humans lived more harmoniously with other species. “Nature” might be seen to include toxic chemicals and clearcuts as well as human beings, even human beings who have no respect for other species, but obviously this is not what activists mean when they refer to “nature.” When activists say they want to protect nature or are “for the wild” and “for the animals,” they mean they want to protect trees, animals, and relatively wild places from human interference to the greatest