Radical Environmentalists Research Articles

Monstrous Ecology: John Steinbeck, Ecology, and American Cultural Politics

In the collection of essays, and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches (1997), a range of scholars establish that was an environmentalist. They remain strangely uncomfortable with their assertion, however. Warren French, for instance, asks, How green was John Steinbeck? Did he simply pay lip service environmental preservation or did he work effectively toward mitigating ecodamage? (282). Similarly, John H. Timmerman concedes that ethical action is the work of revelation: make readers mindful of our despoliation of the land but remarks that regard a specific program rectify that course, however, this ethic, at least as delineated in America and Americans, is found wanting (312). Joel Hedgpeth seems disappointed that Steinbeck is always apologizing for saying bad things and reassuring us that he still loves us all (306), and Eric Gladstein and Mimi Reisel Gladstein are unhappy that stops short of excoriating an environmental abuse when he does not want brand the Japanese fishermen or Mexican officials who permitted the dragging [of the ocean floor] as criminals in Sea of Cortez (169). Beyond simply diagnosing as an ecologically minded writer who did indeed waffle when it came environmental activism, how else might Steinbeck's relationship ecology and environmentalism be investigated?1 The most immediately obvious ways move forward, it seems, would be change the mode of critical inquiry from one of diagnosis evaluation and broaden the focus of such inquiry until it allows recognition of the complex ways in which environmentalism interacts with other key elements of Steinbeck's work. In the spirit of such a methodological shift, the purpose of this article is investigate the ways in which the three critical concepts of environmentalism, ecology, and culture consistently interact through the mediator of monstrosity throughout Steinbeck's oeuvre. Investigating the ways that monstrosity mediates the interactions of environmentalism, ecology, and culture constitutes one way of escaping a diagnostic approach Steinbeck's environmentalism that ultimately offers a much broader understanding of how viewed the workings of American mass culture, why his ecological worldviews and environmental activism stopped where they did, and exactly how high the stakes were for potential radical environmentalists in the mid-twentieth-century United States.2 Monstrosity and Monstrous Figures Near the beginning of Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), writes that his purpose in traveling across the continent is to rediscover this land, repeatedly using monster as a metaphor represent largeness and mystery (6, 24). This simple invocation of monstrosity, however, is hardly the author's first engagement with the subject or indicative of his deep understanding of the concept. In actuality, Steinbeck's use of monstrosity reveals a rather surprising familiarity with its historicity and its deep connection politics, in the sense of both broad state/civic governance and in the negotiation of smaller interpersonal relationships. engaged monstrosity, in fact, as early as 1933 in To a God Unknown, with a remarkable grasp of how monstrosity has functioned historically. A significant portion of the novel's plot is haunted by the Renaissance belief that monstrous birth defects-children born with tails, with extra limbs, with mouths in the middle of their backs -are caused by the wayward imaginations of expectant mothers (99).3 In addition his recognition of its historical tradition, Steinbeck's treatment of monstrosity's politics almost perfectly demonstrates that monsters are ... political beings who are chosen with deliberation do quite specific narrative and social work, including the clear mapping of the edge[s] and normal center[s] of social groups and the strengthening of the communal body through killing the monsters-in as public and showy a way as possible (Ingebretsen, Monster-Making 26). …

The Efficiency Imperative: Five Questions

To oppose capitalism often means to oppose the economic principles that it promotes, nominally at least. Radical environmentalists and a number of Marxists share a special disdain for one of those key principles: economic efficiency. A closer examination of their misgivings, however, suggests that their estimation of the concept is constrained by the role they believe it plays in capitalist production — a nexus between efficiency's descriptive understanding and its prescriptive value that needs to be severed if the latter is to be fairly appraised. Once we jettison the notion (held by market advocates) that efficiency is a universal imperative of production that capitalism perfects, as well as the notion (held by many radical environmentalists and Marxists) that it is part and parcel of capitalism's drive toward crisis and self-destruction, we are left with a disarmingly mundane proposition: post-capitalist economies ought to produce efficiently, other normative considerations permitting.

THREAT ASSESSMENTS AND RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

Recent claims that Radical Environmentalists are becoming increasingly likely to deploy weapons of mass death are characterized by a selective reading of the facts, a failure to apprehend significant differences among radical groups, and injudicious speculation. A more careful analysis of the likelihood of violence emerging from radical environmentalist, animal rights, and green anarchist groups requires an analysis of the differences that characterize these groups as well as their intersections. Such an analysis suggests that among these three groups, only green anarchism can provide a possible ideological rationale for the use of weapons of mass death, but even in this case, there are many reasons to doubt they will utilize such tactics.

Terrorism, radicalism, and populism in agriculture

Preface. 1. Introduction to Radical, Populist, and Terrorist Agriculture. 2. Understanding How Radical Agriculturalists Think: Postmodernist Philosophy. 3. Antiglobalists. 4. Radical Environmentalists. 5. Luddites. 6. Animal Rightists. 7. Agrarian Populism and Farm Fundamentalism. 8. Populist Mythology. 9. Farm Organizations, Protest, and Populism. 9. Farm Organizations, Protest, and Populism. 10. Summing Up: Costs and Cures. Index.

Beyond Designed Capture

There is a conventional wisdom about the origin of public range management in the American west that draws most of its evidence logically, but nevertheless circumstantially, from decades of subsequent policy. It is shared by advocates across the political spectrum, from conservative elected officials and ranchers to radical environmentalists. That conventional wisdom distracts the many individuals who have attempted to understand range policy, and it hampers recent attempts at range policy reform. Narrowly, the conventional wisdom concludes that the institutionalized management privilege of cattle ranchersover all other users—thecaptureof range management—was according to the design of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. In so concluding, the conventional wisdom contributes to the more general idea that forces are at work to make the colonization of a policy area by a particular interest the inevitable result of politics in a liberal democracy.

Academic Responsibilities and Representation of the Ok Tedi Crisis in Postcolonial Papua New Guinea

Since the start of the Ok Tedi mining project in Papua New Guinea in 1981, Broken Hill Proprietary has operated it. Weak environmental protection laws and a series of ecological disasters have endangered the greater Ok Tedi and Fly River socioecological region. A grassroots indigenous popular ecological resistance movement made an out-of-court settlement with the mining company in Melbourne in 1996. Early in 2000 the indigenous movement took Broken Hill Proprietary back to court in Melbourne to block the company's attempt to abandon the Ok Tedi mine. Research started with Wopkaimin subsistence ecology in the 1970s. Later the political ecology of the Ok Tedi crisis was evaluated, as was ecological change in social terms; both are illustrated through the politics of cultura and ecological representation. After the successful convergence of radical environmentalists and indigenous popular ecological resistance against the Ok Tedi mine, research shifted to liberation ecology to study the emancipatory potential of struggles and conflicts against environmental degradation. The responsibilities of academics conducting research in the Ok Tedi crisis are examined. The Ok Tedi crisis challenges the proposition that academics can act as honest brokers through mining companies to negotiate deals for local communities. Academics engaged by mining companies as consultants or employees must work according to managed science and circumscribed briefs. The approach of critical liberation ecology, which directs research to community empowerment, represents a freedom of critical inquiry only available in the academy.

Manufactured Vulnerability: Eco-Activist Tactics in Britain

This article examines the development of tactics in radical environmentalist protests against new roads and other environmental issues in Britain during the 1990s. These tactics depend heavily upon the technical creativity of protesters. Their repertoire has been influenced by British traditions of non-violent direct action and by tactics used previously by radical environmentalists in other countries, notably Australia. This form of non-violent direct action is defined here as manufactured vulnerability because of its reliance on technical devices to prolong vulnerability. Much evidence in this case confirms past studies of how new action forms are developed. Evidence also suggests that development of tactics in radical environmental groups is particularly likely to be influenced by latent networks of activists and cross-national diffusion.

Is global warming a serious issue?

There's been a remarkable amount written lately on the subject of global warming. Depending on whom you read, it's either the greatest disaster in human history or a conspiracy against big oil trumped up by radical environmentalists. As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

A template for transition: How mitsubishi and the rainforest action network found the natural step

Abstract When Randy Hayes, executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, suggested to Tachi Kiuchi, former CEO of Mitsubishi Electric, that he investigate The Natural Step as a tool to move his company toward more sustainable business practices, Hayes began a dialogue that led to a landmark agreement that offers lessons for both corporations and environmentalists. The Natural Step, a set of industrial ecology principles first enunciated by Swedish cancer physician Dr. Karl Henrik Robert in 1989, provided a framework for negotiating this broad agreement. Equally important was the use of credible mediators to bridge the huge gap that existed between radical environmentalists and members of a corporate family once described as the “world's largest industrial and financial empire.” Bill Shireman of Global Futures, with assistance from Armory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, took on the role of mediator and helped shepherd talks that produced one of the most thought-provoking agreements ever approved by former corporate and environmental group adverasaries.

L’institutionnalisation de l’environnementalisme aux Etats-Unis remise en cause par l’écologisme

Environmentalism was rapidly institutionalized in the early seventies. With a body of environmental laws, specific institutions and powerful lobbies in Washington, mainstream environmentalism was designed to handle environmental problems efficiently. This approach has been criticized by radical environmentalists who question the dominant anthropocentric social paradigm for the sake of other species. It has given rise to a form of biocentric fundamentalism, precluding any policy based on compromise, jeopardizing American democratic tradition.

Ecological Morality and Nonmoral Sentiments

Radical environmentalists have often characterized Homo sapiens as a cancerous mutation, heedlessly devouring the planetary body that nurtured and sustains it, and thus veering toward its own destruction and that of its ecosystemic host. If this bleak scenario is to be reversed, a key ingredient of our collective rescue must be a mix of scientifically informed insight into the consequences of our assaults upon the planet; a clear view of our duties to our species, the ecosystem, and the future; and finally the motivation to do what that duty demands of us. Of these, the third, motivation, and the sentiments that support it, has arguably received the least attention. In several of his essays, J. Baird Callicott has enriched Aldo Leopold’s visionary land ethic with the insights of critical and normative ethics, thus bringing Leopold’s vision into the arena of philosophical debate and scholarship. To his credit, Callicott has recognized the essential role of moral psychology to a cogent environmental ethic. Although I share Callicott’s conviction that an environmental ethic cannot stand without a theory of sentiments, I dispute his suggestion that David Hume’s theory of moral sentiments adequately functions in this role.1 To the contrary, I contend that Humean moral sentiments are more likely to reinforce anthropocentrism and alienate humans from nature. If moral senti-

‘Monkeywrenching’ and the processes of democracy

The practice by radical environmentalists of ‘monkeywrenching’ ‐deliberately interfering with industrial and commercial activities that are judged to be destructive of the natural environment ‐ has been claimed by critics to be a form of ecological terrorism. Despite there being some features in common between monkeywrenching and terrorism it is misleading to see the one as a form of the other. Rather, monkeywrenching is far more accurately represented as a form of civil disobedience. That being so, it is important to consider whether, in the Western societies where it is practised, it is consistent even with the prevailing rather weak understanding of democracy. I argue that it is and, indeed, that its selective use may serve to strengthen the democratic process in polities where acts of civil disobedience are seen not as thuggery against the rule of law but as directing our attention to the need for reform of particular laws and related social practices.

Some pitfalls of ‘manstream’ environmental theory and practice

Radical environmentalists consider the environmental crisis to be ultimately one of culture and character. However, in analyses and strategies for social transformation, non-feminist greens have generally accepted the Patriarchal conception of human motivation, which is based on a rational, impersonal (read ‘Masculine’) model of ‘Man’. Thus, it is implicitly assumed that the motivations underlying the environmental crisis are ‘greed’ or ‘self-interest’ (deemed rational motives in Western Patriarchal culture). Owing to this male-centred perspective on human nature, green strategies have ultimately relied on an appeal to reason. This, at least, has failed relative to the accelerating pace of environmental destruction.