Earth First: Environmental Apocalypse by Martha F. LeeReview by: George SessionsEnvironmental History, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jul., 1997), pp. 368-370Published by: Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985357 .

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368 Environmental History

In the end, the environmental opposition prevailed, winning the battle against the landfill but losing the war to preserve their traditional political authority. Poor blacks and whites no longer saw this group as fit leaders who had the entire community's interests at heart. For Crawford, this political overhaul is no cause for celebration as it failed to bring about any racial reconciliation.

In researching the story, Crawford relied primarily on interviews with the partici- pants and his account is driven by personalities. Although the protagonists emerge vividly from Crawford's memorable thumbnail sketches, they often take on the ap- pearance of stock characters; the slimy landfill operator, the naive-but-feisty house- wife turned environmental activist, and the opportunistic machine politician, who in this case happens to be African-American. Crawford's style is certainly engaging; one need not be well versed in environmental politics to be drawn into the drama.

Although Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek is a journalistic account of a contem- porary event, history weighs heavily in the analysis. Crawford persuasively links the animosity toward entrenched elites in this case to the legacy of plantation culture. As such, the landfill battle becomes no less than a replay of Reconstruction, a quest among African-Americans to wrest political authority from an entrenched landed aristocracy.

Indeed, it is the historical component of the analysis that marks the book's most valuable contribution to the growing body of literature about environmental racism and the environmental justice movement. By demonstrating how easily outside in- terests can enter a community to exploit historic social rifts, the study offers a sobering reality check to activists and scholars alike who envision environmental justice as a cause that will transform social relations let alone generate a united front against corporate polluters.

Reviewed by Andrew Hurley. Mr. Hurley is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the editor of Common Fields: An Environ- mental History of St. Louis (University Press of Kansas, i997).

Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse. By Martha F. Lee. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syra- cuse University Press, 1995. xiii + 208 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $16.95.

In comparing her new book Earth First! with Susan Zakin's Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (Viking Press, 1993), Martha Lee claims that Zakin's book lacks objectivity: it is journalistic, unsystematic and anec- dotal, and Zakin is sympathetic to the movement and is a friend of Dave Foreman. Further, it fails to focus on Deep Ecology, which Lee claims has been the basic philosophy of the Earth First! movement. Lee's book makes an important contribu- tion in that it is undoubtedly more objective than Zakin's in its systematic accounting of the facts surrounding the development and activities of Earth First!, although Zakin's exhibits much more historical depth and understanding of the environmental issues.

Lee analyzes Earth First! primarily through political categories, and as essentially a religious/political phenomenon. Her use of the categories "millenarianism and

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Book Reviews 369

apocalypticism" to describe Earth First!'s two contending factions is heavy-handed and overbearing to the point of irritation, and while these categories occasionally produce interesting insights, more often they result in bizarre distortions, non sequi- turs, and gross oversimplifications. This raises questions about the overall objectivity of her scholarship.

Lee is adamant that Deep Ecology has been the philosophy of Earth First! al- though she admits that most EF!ers read very little Deep Ecology philosophy, and that specific mention of Deep Ecology did not appear in the E. E! Journal until 1984. It is rather painful to read about some of the shocking positions taken by Dave Fore- man, Christopher Manes and others in the E.E! Journal. Foreman, for instance, argued in one piece that even a nuclear war would not be that damaging to the earth and would hasten the end of industrial society. Since many, but not all, of these articles appeared under various pseudonyms, this leads to speculation as to whether Foreman, Manes, and the others were merely exercising their rights as individuals to the free expression of radical and shocking (and perhaps misanthropic) ideas; whether these ideas were meant to express the philosophy of Earth First!; or whether they thought they were expounding ideas which were the natural outcome of Deep Ecol- ogy philosophy. If the latter, they were radically mistaken in their understanding of Deep Ecology philosophy as espoused by Arne Naess and other Deep Ecology theo- rists.

Lee accurately points out that Edward Abbey's ideas, expressed mainly through his novels (and his association with Earth First!) "had inspired the founding of the move- ment" (p. 126). Given that "since Earth First!'s inception, Dave Foreman had served as its prophet and leader" (p. 105), together with Foreman's idolizing of Abbey, the predominant philosophy and ideology of Earth First! throughout the 198os is best described, not as Deep Ecology, but rather as an idiosyncratic, somewhat misan- thropic Abbey/Foreman version of ecocentrism, coupled with a monkey wrenching/ "rednecks for wilderness" image that some people found offensive.

The Foreman/Earth First! phenomenon is best understood not by strained and forced comparisons with fundamentalist apocalyptic groups such as Islam, as Lee proposes, but rather by the "radical amateur" role it played in the on-going saga of the development of the American conservation and environmental movements as de- scribed by Stephen Fox in John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Little, Brown, 1981). Viewed from the perspective of Fox's analysis, there is a striking continuity in the "radical amateur" conservationist tradition extending, in its main phase, from John Muir through David Brower to Dave Foreman. In response to the rise of managerial and bureaucratic environmental organizations during the 1970s, Foreman and Earth First! reasserted the role of "radical amateur" taken by Muir and Brower, which revitalized a demoralized environmental movement dur- ing the Reagan era.

By 1990, Earth First! underwent a major upheaval, as Lee points out, with Dave Foreman and others of the Foreman faction leaving, and the Roselle/Bari faction with its "emphasis on social justice" taking over the organization. As Lee puts it, "the social justice faction thus established itself as the new Earth First!" (p. 145). In a guarded way, Lee seems to endorse this shift as a more humane expression of the movement which resulted in a new and better Earth First!

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370 Environmental History

As a counterpoint to that view, one might consider what Deep Ecology theorist Arne Naess has called the "three great grassroots movements," the ecology move- ment, the social justice movement, and the peace movement, that have come to- gether in the latter half of the twentieth century to form the intemational Green movement for social change. Naess has said that "considering the accelerating rate of ecological destruction worldwide, I find it acceptable to continue fighting for eco- logical sustainability whatever the state of affairs may be concerning the other two goals of Green societies." Supporters of the Deep Ecology movement, he claims, should focus their efforts on issues relating to the ecological crisis.

Based on Naess's analysis of the relationship between the ecology and the social justice movements, the Foreman faction of Earth First! was on the right track in focusing on ecological issues. In other words, no useful purpose was served by the Roselle/Bari faction redirecting the focus of Earth First! toward social justice con- cerns.

Reviewed by George Sessions. Mr. Sessions is editor of Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (Shambhala Publications, i995). His three articles on the relation of ecology and the social justice movement appeared in the 1995-1996 issues of The Trum- peter.

An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West. By Donald Worster. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. xii + 151 pp. Notes, index. Cloth, $32.50; paper, $15.95.

Donald Worster's four provocative essays in An Unsettled Country were delivered as the 1992 Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico. They are polemical and ruthlessly critical, but also stimulating and stirring. Intended for a general audience, they serve as an excellent introduction to the work of one of today's most distinguished environmental historians.

Three interrelated themes come up consistently in this collection. One is Worster's practice of history as a moral art. This is nowhere clearer than in his essay on the place of animals in the work of western historians. It is the special responsibility of environmental historians, he asserts, to reveal the past relationships between humans and animals. And what does the examination of the western past reveal? "A veritable holocaust," a merciless war waged against the animals, the creation of "a landscape littered with skulls and bones, drenched in blood" (pp. 70, 71). Historians have not considered the moral implications of this war because they have held the same in- strumental view of nature as the hunters. The imperative of environmental history, in other words, poses a moral question. Historians, says Worster, need to confront their own "anthropocentrism."

Worster's insistence that environmental history must be centrally concerned with this question of human domination is a second theme that runs through these essays. "The technological domination of nature,; he argues, leads to not only to dominion over the animals, but to "the domination of some people over others." In his essay on "'Water as a Tool of Empire," he faults historian Norris Hundley "and most of his

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