Dark Green Religion and Radical Environmentalism

Some of the following slides both reference specific individuals and aspects of radical environmentalism that

were discussed in Dark Green Religion.

Others provide images that illustrate, somewhat impressionistically, the political, ethical, and spiritual

bricolage that characterizes the movement .

William C. Rogers, aka Avalon

Vail Colorado Ski Resort Building, set on fire in 1998 by Avalon & others in the Earth Liberation Front

Bioregional Deep Ecology and Radical Environmentalism

• Spiritual Biocentrism ~ The earth and its life processes are sacred - but Western religion & philosophy foster anthropocentrism that leads to an. . .

• Extinction Crisis fueled by

the greed of corporations and . . .

• Corrupt Governments which

refuse or otherwise fail to arrest

these extinctions

Binary Associations in Radical Environmentalism and Deep Ecology

GoodForaging (small-scale organic

horticultural) societies

Animistic, Pantheistic, Goddess-Matriarchal, or Eastern Religions

Biocentrism/Ecocentrism (promotes conservation)

Intuition

BadPastoral and Agricultural Societies

Monotheistic, Sky-God, Patriarchal, Western Religions

Anthropocentrism (promotes destruction)

Reason (especially instrumental)

More Binary Associations Good

Holistic Worldviews

Decentralism

Primitive Technology

Regional Self-Sufficiency

Anarchism/ParticipatoryDemocracy

Radicalism

BadMechanistic & Dualistic Worldviews

Centralization

Modern Technology

Globalization and International Trade

Statism, Corruption, Authoritarianism

Pragmatism

Grief and anger over the destruction

of nature fuels movement passions.

Social criticism, history, ecology,

and myth fuse in a radical worldview

which shapes political priorities,

and justifies lawbreaking

Ecological Analysis fuels the ubiquitous Apocalypticism, found in movement literature,

poetry, and music

• e.g., “Time Bomb,” “Ghost of a Chance,” “Disorder,” and “End of the World.” (see sound section for downloadable music)

We who can still hear the jaguar

scream

We dream of a day when all things wild will again be free…

It is a dream we will fight for until the day

we die

Ecological Analysis fuels the ubiquitous Apocalypticism, found in movement literature,

poetry, and music

• e.g., “Time Bomb,” “Ghost of a Chance,” “Disorder,” and “End of the World.”

The Myth of the Fallfrom a Foraging Paradise

• Agricultures destroy or force the conversion of indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature

• Agricultures replace foraging societies and their place-based gods and nature spirits and ethics of kinship toward all life forms, with sky-gods.

To re-harmonize humans in nature we must re-sacralize our perceptions of the earth.

Resacralize earth by promoting animistic and pantheistic perception through . . .

• The Arts – poetry, prose, music, dance, visual art

can evoke proper spiritual perception• Ritualizing

– recovering and re-inventing green religion

• Ethical Action– defending the earthen spiritualities of

surviving indigenous nations

Roadshows as Wilderness Revival Meetings

The Council of All Beings

. . . ritualizing toward a kinship ethic with non-human nature

Advanced Ritual Workshops

. . . deepening proper spiritual perception

Direct action

. . . binding people with each other and the natural world

Radical Environmentalism and Bioregional Deep Ecology

~ A “bricolage” of spirituality, ecology, and radical political

ideology

Songs like “I am an Animal” (Dana Lyons) express the kinship ethic and anti-

anthropocentrism of the movement.

(see favorites/sound)

Radical Greens v. Bioregionalists ~ Differing Strategic Priorities

Radical Environmentalists:

Engage the Destroyers – Resist!!!

Bioregionalists:

Promote sustainable lifeways

Dave Foreman – Prophet of Radical EnvironmentalismMonkeywrenching or “ecotage” is “a form of worship toward the earth. It’s really a very spiritual thing to go out and do . . . You are a religious warrior for the Earth.”

Gary Snyder – Architect of Bioregional Social Philosophy

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air firewood, boy, the more spiritual the world is”

Let our Action Be our Prayer . . .

‘cause if you haven’t done everything imaginable, you haven’t

done shit!

Fortress Wall, Warner Creek Blockade, Oregon (USA): The year long blockade was eventually successful in blocking a large timber sale 1993

Spiritual Warfare . . .

Voodoo doll to scare loggers, who are often conservative

Christians.

PAGAN PENTAGRAM ~ some radical environmentalists are self-consciously pagan.

Cove Mallard, Idaho

. . . Earth First! Army Corp of Engineers . . .

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Barricades made from trees cut for

logging roads, rearranged to

blockade the loggers from access to the

large timber sales in Idaho (USA)

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Album Cover . . . note the burning

bulldozer in the background

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Live Wild or Die urges a feral

revolution of desire, anarchist

rebellion, and inflammatory

tactics.

This is the cover of its premier

issue (1989)

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Drawing rubric from European

paganism and the model from the

most militant EF! Activists, “Elves” in

the UK form the Earth Liberation

Front (1992)

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The swiftness of deerThe vision of eagle

The strength of bearThe sureness of cougar

The stealth of snakeThe wildness of wolf

Guide these steps of mineMy hand as it releases

These flames of life’s hopeToward that which would

destroy us all.“Destroy what destroys you!”

Bioregionalism

Consecrating Home, and Venerating

Earth, through

sustainable living

Bioregionalism’s focus. . .• Premise: those who live in a place can

better learn its and nature spirits and sustainable lifeways than people far away

• Goal: Redraw political boundaries to cohere with those of different ecosystem types

• Hope: overturning nation-states in favor of decentralized, regional, community self-rule.

Bioregional Strategy: Promote sustainable lifeways

• Promote regional identity and activism through:– bioregional congresses and local groups– Permaculture and Organic Agriculture– pagan ritualizing– Bioregionally-oriented wildlands

advocacy

Relative optimism or Apocalypticism shapes the strategic choices:

• Could catastrophe be averted through human action?

• Can governments play a positive role?• Does hope lie only after the collapse of

industrial civilization and the destruction of modern technology?

Bioregionalists are slightly more hopeful than radical environmentalists

– They generally expect that industrial society will collapse, but are less sure this will occur dramatically and with great suffering

– They retain some hope we can learn our way toward sustainability, rather than have it forced upon us by ecological collapse.

Yet, Apocalypticism

reigns among virtually all

radical environmental

activists and most

bioregionalists.

Is there an international ‘Radical Environmentalism’

and ‘deep ecology’ movement?

Colin Campbell’s theory of the ‘cultic milieu’ is

illuminating in this regard.

Campbell: The West as ‘breeding ground’ for a ‘Cultic Milieu’ . . .• . . . the “the cultural underground” of Western

Civilization including “all deviant belief-systems and their associated practices including heretical religion and deviant medicine and science.”

• Cultic groups are generally tolerant and receptive to each other’s beliefs >> syncretism . . .

• they share a mystical tradition emphasizing that “unity with the divine can be attained by a diversity of paths”

Expanding on Campbell’s theory, Radical Environmentalism and Deep Ecology movements can be viewed as a bricolage of spiritual epistemologies and traditions, as well as of countercultural political ideologies and movements

Re. Spiritual epistemologies. . . ‘earthen spirituality borrows widely:

Mountain epiphanies• Muir and all of Deep Ecology’s developers and

earliest proponents, were mountain climbers.• Naess, estranged from people, found solace and

connection in nature, and felt “love” from the mountains with which he identified.

• Deep ecology intellectuals are often drawn to Spinoza and pantheism.

Arne Naess, and other deep ecologists and radical greens urge us to re-discover the animistic perceptions of our childhoods, claiming they are still present among tribal peoples. Naess states the epistemological premise so common in the movement:

“To do this we must spend time in mountains, or where ‘free nature,’ can stimulate a sense of oneness, wholeness, and identification with nature.”

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Such episteme, and the general radical environmental myth, fuel the impulse to borrow from Native American cultures and spiritual practices, as well as eastern religions, which are viewed as superior to western societies.

Taoism and esp. Buddhism influence the West’s spiritual countercultures, perhaps nowhere as significantly as in bioregionalism and radical

environmentalism.~ e.g., Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, John Seed, Dolores LaChappelle,

Michael Soule, Reed Noss, to name a few.

‘Earthen Spirituality’ is contested in multiple ways, and criticisms of such appropriation have altered practices in the radical environmental movements.

• Sacred objects sometimes removed• Sweat Lodges become “sacred saunas”• Activists turning to own heritages, as much as

possible.• Yet shared ritual is common, as with prayer

and purification during litigation.

Other ways ‘Earthen Spirituality’ is contested:

• Battles between Indian and Non-Indian activists and Christians opposing their ‘paganism.’

• Activists, sometimes clumsily, try to express solidarity with Native Americans (at least ones they believe are still connected to the land and its spirits).

These slides are from the campaign to prevent

telescopes from being constructed on Mt.

Graham in Southeastern Arizona (1993).

Environmentalists and Native Americans in their

own ways believed the project would desecrate a

sacred place.

The Vatican Observatory

was involved in the project

which intensified

the religious dimensions

of the conflict

Despite some criticism,

Native American images and

practices remain important in dark

green spirituality.

North America as Turtle Island

Turtle Island &

totem salmonin a mandala inspired

by religions of the

far east

The desert's austerity “distinguishes it, in spiritual appeal, from other forms of landscape,” and is more effective than mountains at overturning human arrogance.

Abbey called himself an “earth-ist” and was a pantheist who “saw the spirit in all things” (Loeffler) . . .

And resonated with Daoism, considering it ancient nature-based spirituality, calling “the Tao te’ Ching is the best goddamned book ever written.”

Desert epiphanies (Edward Abbey)

• “Decisive” or important impetus for some involved in dark green religion.

• Peyote “sets one up spiritually to understand the sacred quality of this planet . . . It puts one in direct contact with another wave-length with the universe and one immediately intuits that the entire planet is the living organism in which we are members” (Jack Loefler, “Ed Abbey’s best friend”)

• Only extended, solo camping provided equally powerful spiritual perceptiveness, according to many radical environmentalists.

Hallucinogens (or ‘Entheogens’)

An “Ecotopian Holy Trinity” song, sung by

the late Judi Bari and her comrads,

lauded the spiritual

teachings of marijuana,

magic mushrooms, and

“big old trees.”

• Critically and increasingly influential,

~ practitioners spread its ritual resources widely in green circles.

~ Drawing on putatively European sources, it is seen as less problematic than forms drawing on indigenous societies.

(Neo) Paganism . . .

Deep Ecology Ritual goes international ~ this graphic is from a tabloid announcing a 1994 “Workshop for All Beings” in Poland.

Time for an Entmoot . . .From Entmoot,

the title of Washington

EF!’s Newsletter,

1994

Here is another example of the

ecelectic bricolage of

dark green religion, and

also, of the influence of the

arts in inspiring it.

Wicca is often in co-production with neo-paganism, and incorporated into dark green spirituality

~ E.g., the Spiral Dance ritual spreads the metaphysics of interdependence.

~ Songs and art challenge patriarchy within and outside of green subcultures.

… Wicca & Spiritual Ecofeminism

Political Tributaries• From the ‘old and new left’, and anti-

nuclear and anti-war movements . . .

• To themes of “freedom” prevalent in the Western world

• To individualist, libertarian forms common in many Western states. . .

Political Tributaries (cont.)

• increasingly, anarchism, which . . .

• best fits the myth that a centralizing, totalitarian agriculture is destroying nature and everything spiritual.

• Legitimizes priority on local politics

• De-legitimizes centralized governments reinforcing Direct Action rationale

Radical Affinities• Almost any radical perceived to be green

and an opponent of a globalizing industrial civilization is honored. – Mumia abu Jamal, and Move, are looked to as an

outbreaking of nature religion among Americans of African heritage.

– AIM activists– Traditional Indians resisting development or

displacement (e.g., the Hopi traditionalists)– Wangari Mathai and the Kenyan Greenbelt

movement, and . . .

The antiglobalization movement has many affinities with dark green religion and many of its supporters are radical greens. This photograph is from the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, which catapulted the movement into public consciousness.

Hoping for the Collapse of Industrial Civilization as the only path to

egalitarian, ecologically sustainable, societies (sometimes aided by anarchist revolution and even

terrorism)

… but some want to

accelerate the process

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If you can BAKE A CAKE . . .

. . . you can MAKE A BOMB

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One anarchist version of radical

environmentalism.

Glen Canyon Dam, 4963 AD,

after the collapse of

industrial civilization, wildness is

returning . . .

… hopeful apocalypticism

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5-6Quietly passed around during the 1997 National Earth First! Rendezvous in Northern Wisconsin

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"Joan of Arc and the 19th century abolitionist John Brown employed violence and gave their lives in struggle. These visionaries were

considered demented by their contemporaries, but are now revered. It may be that the Unabomber will be looked upon similarly, as a kind of

warrior-prophet who, as Arleen Davila wrote, `tried to save us.' To un-learn our illusions is to begin to save ourselves . . . Return to Wild

Nature - Destroy the Worldwide Industrial System - FREE TED KACZYNSKI."

The preceding slide is from a flyer passed out at aradical environmental gathering in the mid 1990s.

The opposite side proclaimed:

Return to Wild Natureand had these words:

What are we to make of all of this? .

• What are the impacts of such countercultural spirituality and politics?

• There have been many specific successes we could point to that have been won by these movements.

• But their greatest influence may be just beginning, for . . .

As argued in Dark Green Religion, Nature spirituality is not just for

radicals anymore.It is altering the political and ecological

landscape around the world.and entering the culture’s main

streams.

Increasingly found in survey research are

• intrinsic value of nonhuman nature

• ‘organicism/animism’

• ‘natural rights’

• to a lesser extent ‘pantheism’

Organizations are proliferating that are grounded in and promoting of such spirituality

• Native Plant Societies (wild ones)• Butterfly gardeners• Biodiversity defense and

restoration groups• Seed Saving , community

supported agriculture, sacred agriculture movements (to name just a few)

. . . increasingly articulate biocentric values and discuss positively the important “spiritual” value that nature has for Americans when defending new, forest protection policies

Even the U.S. Forest Service’s Leaders

For example, introducing a book on ecosystem management by his

employees, USFS Chief Jack Ward wrote . . .

“Nature-based spiritual beliefs are generic to all [forest] users, whether holders or nonholders of sectarian religious beliefs . . . diverse types of nature-based spirit-renewing benefits . . . are common across all types of users, whether a timber cutter, a hunter, a member of an environmental organization, a hiker, or a Native American.

Dark Green Religion does have a radical branch and increasing impacts around the world.

The question remains, what will the extent and timing of its future influences?

Ecological Analysis fuels the ubiquitous Apocalypticism, found in movement literature,

poetry, and music

• e.g., “Time Bomb,” “Ghost of a Chance,” “Disorder,” and “End of the World.”

Time bomb (Dana Lyons)sorder (Casey Neil)