What is Radical Eco-Activism?
The Environmental Militants
By Svettlana Chatterjee
Radical environmentalists are people who are willing to use direct-action tactics to obstruct and prevent state-sanctioned activities that they perceive as environmentally harmful. ‘Radical’ refers to the extreme nature of the activists’ protests, compared with conventional political campaigning, rather than the political goals or ideologies that are adopted, although some organisations or networks may also be radical in this sense.
Direct action refers to a repertoire of campaigning strategies that are usually employed when conventional political pathways to prevent environmental goals have been exhausted. Strategies range from conventional forms of civil disobedience such as sit-ins and human barricades to forms of what is generally described by the activists as non-violent acts such as sabotaging or destroying property. A key tactic that characterises contemporary radical direct actions is the use of media-friendly incidents that manufacture activist vulnerability. This involves creating situations where activist safety is placed in the hands of the antagonist or law enforcement agency. Examples include sitting in tripods across logging roads, tree-sits, tunnels, ‘locking on’ to machinery, or placing anti-whaling protesters in small boats in the path of whaling ships.
Until recently, radical environmentalism had been a victim of its own success. Green ideas went mainstream years ago. Most major political parties in Western democracies (Donald Trump and the Republican Party notwithstanding) now accept the facts of climate change and have promised to respond. Environmentalism has also become part of the broader anti-capitalist movement, which is mostly characterized by a commitment to nonviolence and bottom-up change. As a result, climate activism that crosses from peaceful protests, like marching in the streets, to civil disobedience shutting down mines or monkey-wrenching machinery remains stubbornly small. There are no exact figures, but people on the inside have said that in the U.K. at least, it’s just a few hundred hardcore activists and a few thousand in the United States.
Radical environmental activism is a distinct form of environmental politics that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Australia and other countries with large wilderness areas, such as the United States and Canada, it is historically grounded in the perceived failure of mainstream environmentalism to preserve wilderness and the emergence of eco-philosophies. In the United Kingdom and Europe radical environmentalism has a less biocentric perspective and is guided by earlier protest movements that preceded it, such as anti-nuclear disarmament.
It is helpful to think of radical environmental activist organisations and networks such as Earth First! The Earth Liberation Front and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as being at one end of a continuum of activist tactics; at the other end are conservative environmental organisations that eschew direct action and use conventional social and political processes to achieve environmental goals (for example, the World Wildlife Fund/Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation). In the middle are organisations such as Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society that have increasingly used conventional processes but retain direct action within their tactical repertoire. For example, they may include within their organisations’ units that undertake investigations into environmental crimes.
Is radical eco-activism justified? The answer to that question could lay in the outcomes of their pressure and how successful they are. Will companies like Earth First! be able to pioneer a pathway for corporations to follow through with the green agenda or will they be seen as extremists that pushed too hard in the wrong areas at the wrong times? In history we have seen that all great revolutions require a certain level of pressure enforced by militants daring to demand justice, therefore we truly cannot conclude how far is too far and must wait to avail the results of this green revolution.
Works Cited
Ganguly et al. “The Next Wave Of Extremists Will Be Green”. Foreign Policy, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/01/the-green-radicals-are-coming-environmental-extremism/.
Greta Thunberg: The Teenage Eco-Activist Who Took The World By Storm. 2013, https://www.dw.com/en/greta-thunberg-the-teenage-eco-activist-who-took-the-world-by-storm/a-50018055.
“Radical Environmentalism”. En.Wikipedia.Org, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_environmentalism.
Thornton, James. “Radical Confidence: What Is Missing From Eco-Activism — Tricycle”. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 2012, https://tricycle.org/magazine/radical-confidence/.
What Is Nature Doing?. 2020, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781137473783_2.
