Part II Earth First!

The internal war between the preservationists and the environmentalists

First a non apology apology. I am sorry part II of this essay took 3 weeks instead of the one week I said in the 1^st essay, but I really needed to turn some ideas over in my mind and figure out how to structure it so it flowed reasonable well. Like a baby, writing will be birthed when it wants to be birthed. :-)

Earth First! for those who don’t know is a radical wilderness preservationist group started in the late 70s whose sole focus was on saving pristine wilderness areas from development. It was irreverent and beholden to no political party or creed. It certainly wasn’t woke, and Edward Abbey got in trouble with those who were then called “politically correct” for writing articles against immigration on wilderness preservationist grounds. The most famous action of the 1^st generation of Earth First was rolling out a plastic “crack” on the Glenn Canyon dam.

Like all good things this was not destined to last, and the carefree, humorous, deeply radical in the best sense of that word which means “root” Earth First! movement was infiltrated by commie social justice warriors. This started in the 1980s but was a constant back and forth struggle over a 30 year period. During this period I came of age in northern Michigan and loved and still love the wilderness with every fiber of my being. My parents were arts and crafts hippies when I was growing up and I went to Oberlin College in the 1980s, a hotbed of left radicalism even then, so it was a natural I got involved in the “radical environmental movement.” We had a local on campus Earth First! Chapter and did some actions like protesting a speech by a west coast Democrat whose son or daughter went to Oberlin who was notorious for bad environmental policy. At this point “environmentalism” was still fun, and while the focus had shifted in the direction of leftism it wasn’t too unbearable, some of the old Edward Abbey fuck em’, “Earth bats last,” “rednecks fer the environment,” spirit still persisted. In other words Earth First! was then still a wilderness preservationist movement focused on local wilderness areas under attack by the machine.

Random 80s era Earth First graphic I found on the internet

Flash forward 20 years to the early 2000s and I was still a hippyish leftoid into stuff like co-ops, the antiwar movement, and of course the wilderness that I would have called “the environment.” in those days. I was living in California at the time, and when I heard from an old college friend that Earth First! needed “forest defenders” to go out in the woods to stop the clear cutting of 2000 year old, old growth Redwood trees I packed my bags and headed to Arcata California where the actions were based from. At first it was exhilarating being in the vast California coastal forests where ferns grow as tall as a man facing off against the loggers. But when I stayed longer I noticed a split in the movement, there were people who would stay in town write press releases, fund raise, and conduct training. Most of these people were what we called uber p.c. in those days, which was proto-woke. Those of us who went into the woods and blockaded roads and did tree sitting had a separate subculture that was crustier and more gutterpunk than the office crowd we would call “townies.” I didn’t know it at the time but what I was witnessing then was the beginning the split I called out in the 1^st part of this series between environmentalists v.s. preservationists. The townie proto-wokers made life miserable for those of us trying to get out in the woods and get er’ done. They would constantly call meetings and berate us about “how sexist the group dynamics” were, how we needed to read more feminist literature, etc. This of course caused tremendous infighting, rancor, and burnout if they weren’t Feddie agents of COINTELPRO, they were their useful idiots. Most of us crusties actually doing the work couldn’t wait to get out of the meetings and back to the woods. For a while the townies held the power of the purse over us, but we started doing our own fund raising and managed to spend more time in the woods and less in town.

Your intrepid author back in his scruffy lefty Earth First! “activist,” days. Still scruffy. :-)

A good story for around the campfire, but what’s the point? The point is the townies are what I now call environmentalists they were utopian leftists more interested in social engineering than the fate of an individual tree or stand of trees. For those of us who were doing the work out in the woods it was personal, we were trying to save individual groves of Redwood trees, and we even gave the trees individual names. Perhaps that sounds corny, but the point is like all wilderness preservation work it was personal and deeply meaningful for us. Though most of us identified as some kind of left “anarchist” what we really were, were reactionary Luddities against the machine. For more on this read the 1^st essay in the series,

Fast forward to today and the “environmentalists” have mostly won, “Extinction Rebellion” may at first look like old school Earth First!, but it is nothing of the kind, they have slickly printed signs, their own slick logo, and fawning coverage by the corporate mainstream media. If they are not an NED internal color revolution to advance the agenda of living in ze pods and eating the ze bugs they fulfill the same function that Uncle Ted tried to warn us about in The Systems Neatest Trick. The preservationist holdouts are few now, but they are still out there and Deep Green Resistance would be an example. Like old school Earth First they are not woke, Derick Jensen has gotten in all kinds of hot water for battling grooming tendencies in the queer theory movement. Like most smart preservationists he realizes it is not just the wilderness under attack, but human/nature itself.

So my final point here really is that if you consider yourself a reactionary or a conservative you can be a preservationist, it foolish to side with corporations like the establishment faction of the GOP does just to stick it to the woke cultural Marxist social engineers. Let’s rebuild a non-leftist movement to preserve the last wild places and to preserve human nature which is under assault by the machine.

Postscript the Glenn Canyon Dam is apparently going to be removed, there is always hope and a white pill even in the darkest hour. Courage my friends!