What is Nature Doing?: Radical Environmentalism and the Role of Nature

Abstract

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, such as deep ecology and ecofeminism, as both philosophical and political discourses. 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 (Doherty et al. 2007: 806; Rootes 2003; Hay 2002: 4). Radical protests emerged first in the United States out of frustration with the perceived bureaucratising of mainstream environmental organisations such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, which began to adopt lobbying methods and policies that were more conservative and acceptable to government and industry, and their failure to achieve environmental goals (Doherty 1999: 278; Brulle 2000: 198; Carter 2007: 155). Earth First!, one of the first activist networks to explicitly adopt direct action, put it thus:

are you tired of namby-pamby environmental groups? Are you tired of overpaid corporate environmentalists who suck up to bureaucrats and industry? Have you become disempowered by the reductionist approach of environmental professionals and scientists? (Earth First! n.d.)