Common Roots and Entangled Limbs: Earth First! and the Growth of Post‐Wilderness Environmentalism on California's North Coast

Abstract

Conflicts over the protection of redwood trees on California's North Coast are often depicted as following the trajectory of the radical wing of the larger American environmental movement, in which “radical” refers to the sharpness of the boundary drawn and defended between human despoliation and pure nature or “wilderness.” Earth First!—an environmental organization characterized by their slogan, “No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!”—is often depicted as simply the leading edge of this deepening rift between nature and culture. I argue, on the contrary, that the Earth First! branches on California's North Coast should be understood as making bold, if incomplete, attempts to cast off the problematic nature–culture dichotomy and to define social justice and ecological health as struggles with a common root. By moving beyond wilderness, the North Coast Earth First! offers the promise of a truly radical movement, by which I mean one which truly confronts capital's interlinked degradation of both natural and human communities. This article examines the efforts by the North Coast Earth First! to inscribe a new community of activists and timber‐workers joined in the struggle to contest corporate claims on the redwood forest. It explores the ambiguous effects of activists' “embodied” and “home‐based” practices on this budding alliance, particularly the ways in which such practices also have alienated workers by redefining the redwood forest as the exclusive property of the activists' themselves.