Circles of Community, Strategies of Inclusion

Chapter Six analyzes the efforts of activists to create community by bringing together people with different agendas and backgrounds and the resultant tensions and conflicts that come about in the process. I look closely at activists’ work to connect environmental and animal rights activism with concerns about social justice, especially with regard to people of color. Activist gatherings are imagined as free and open spaces of inclusivity and equality and yet they set up their own patterns of conformity and expectation. This chapter looks closely at how putting the “Earth first” comes in conflict with “anti-oppression” work and vice-versa, as activists try hard, drawing on empathy and compassion, to decolonize their communities and dismantle patriarchy and transphobia within their movements.

“Liberation’s Crusade Has Begun”

Chapter Five explores the interweaving of music, Hindu religious beliefs, and activism motivated by rage in the context of hardcore punk rock. In this chapter, I describe the unlikely convergence of hardcore punk rock, Krishna Consciousness, and animal rights in youth subcultural spaces in order to understand how the aural and spiritual worlds created by some bands shaped the emergence of radical animal rights. At times these music scenes nurtured the idea of other species as sacred beings and sparked outrage at their use and abuse by humans. Bands made fans into activists who brought the intensity of hardcore to direct actions in forests, at animal testing labs and mink farms, and against hunting and factory farming.

Into the Forest

Tree-sits and similar actions are simultaneously rites of passage and rites of protest as activists’ deepening commitments to other species are shaped by love and feelings of kinship in the context of forest activism. Activists create protests as spaces apart, as the larger-than-human world becomes more real to them and the human society they were born into becomes more distant. In these spaces, they seek to decolonize and rewild what has been domesticated and colonized. Their vision is one of a feral future in which the wild takes over cities and suburbs, as well as their own bodies and souls, reversing the destructive movement of a doomed civilization.

Introduction

Introduction The introduction provides an overview of the book by placing it in the context of the environmental humanities, religious studies, youth culture studies and ritual studies. I offer definitions of rites of passage and rites of protest and describe my sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork experiences and participant-observation.

Childhood Landscapes of Wonder and Awe

Chapter Three focuses on the experience of wonder within the landscape of childhood and introduces the notion that activists’ inner histories composed of memories and childhood experiences are brought to and emerge during activist gatherings and direct actions. The extent to which the remembered childhood landscape is imbued with wonder may affect the strength of activists’ grief over destroyed landscapes and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. At activist gatherings and direct actions, activists revisit and reconstruct childhood experiences. Rather than severing their lives from childhood, some of them engage in a creative re-working of childhood experiences by creating a deep ecological politics of action.

Conclusion

In the book’s Conclusion, I explore what it means to act “for the wild” and “for the animals” throughout one’s lifespan. Radical animal rights and environmental activism can be seen in relation to other radical protests of the early twenty-first century, including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline protest, as well as anti-government protests on the Right. I conclude by suggesting what this study has, in the end, to say about youth culture, ritual, memory, and contemporary spirituality in the contexts of radical environmental and animal rights movements and broader political and social shifts in the early twenty-first century. These movements are significant signs of changing times as human and other-than-human communities face and respond to powerful social, political and climate challenges.

Rites of Grief and Mourning

Through the study of grief over lost places, tree friends, whole species, and human comrades, I suggest that protests can be understood as rites of mourning. Memories of childhood wonder, feelings of love and kinship for other species, empathizing with oppressed human communities, raging at injustice with hardcore bands, all make the loss of friends and other species keenly felt as activists face the realities of mass extinction and climate change. I explore their experience of environmental devastation and species loss as a kind of perpetual mourning from which they cannot escape. And yet, in all this loss, many of them find hope for a primal future, beyond the human.

Freedom and Insurrection around a Fire

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to activists’ lives and work and provides background on the communities I most often interacted with. It consists of a thick description of an Earth First! gathering I attended and the anti-fracking protest that took place at the end of the action.

At the Turn of the Millennium

Chapter Two lays out some historical context for the other chapters by charting the convergence of youth culture, North American spiritual and political movements, and environmental and animal rights activism. Radical activism among young adults emerged from the conjunction of a number of historical forces such as anarchism, Paganism and deep ecology. These forces shaped the particular ways activism has come to be expressed within the radical environmental and animal rights movements of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America. In this chapter I suggest that activists travel through networks of affiliation.