Rik Scarce - Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Updated Edition

Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Updated Edition — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Updated Edition" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...90

ECO-WARRIORS

ECO-WARRIORS

UNDERSTANDING THE RADICAL
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

UPDATED EDITION

RIK SCARCE

FOREWORD BY DAVID BROWER

First edition published 1990 by The Noble Press, Inc.

First published 2006 by Left Coast Press, Inc.

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Updated edition copyright 2006 by Rik Scarce

First edition 1990 by Rik Scarce, published by The Noble Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59874-028-8 (pbk)

Library of Congress Control Number 2005928675

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following:

Pages 244: Beauty of Things, copyright 1951 by Robinson Jeffers, Vulture, copyright 1963 by Garth Jeffers and Donnan Jeffers, from Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

244245: Hurt Hawks, copyright 1928 and renewed 1956 by Robinson Jeffers, from Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. 246: Bear, copyright 2005 by Gary Snyder from Left Out in the Rain. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers. 247248: Holy Cow by Kathy Minott, reprinted with permission of Kathy Minott. 248: The Dying Mouse in the North Cascades by Michael Robinson, reprinted with permission of Michael Robinson. 250: Bad Wolf by B. N. Koehler, reprinted with permission of B. N. Koehler. 252253: You Cant Clearcut Your Way to Heaven by Darryl Cherney, reprinted with permission of Darryl Cherney.

For Petra and Alexander

CONTENTS

PART ONE TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING

PART TWO: WHO WOULD DARE?

PART THREE: ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM IN PRACTICE

PART FOUR INSPIRATION AND THE FUTURE

David Brower

More than a quarter-century ago I wrote, We still need conservationists who will attempt the impossible, achieving it because they arent aware of how impossible it is. Today, some people within the environmental movement possess a firm grasp of the impossibility of their task, yet they persevere. They are the conscience of the movement, although some people who are silent as they watch environmental destruction prefer to label them as environmental radicals. An ecological reading of recent history, however, shows that the truly radical actions are perpetrated by those who have given us acid rain, the greenhouse effect, decimation of species, and who pillage ancient forest, mountain, and ocean treasures without considering their incalculable damage to the Earth and the future.

Those who lay waste to wild places and wild beings increasingly face the ire of the new environmentalists. For the most part the old guard of the environmental movement stand still, waiting for just what, I do not know, having left it long ago. Meanwhile the new guard generate the motion within the movement. They provide the constant new breath people are craving, the freshness of innovative tactics, strategies, demands, and resolutions. Such is the energy behind any movement. If we close off ourselves from creatively confronting challenges and refuse to learn anew, how can we expect to engage others? Nothing is stirring, not even a mouse, in the stagnant pool of Conventional Wisdom. We need new ideas coming into light upstream, from the springs of fresh water.

The new guard do share some traits with the old: up to a point they beg to be heard and plead with regulators and lawmakers for something better than just a charade. But unlike their predecessors, they abhor the next step, compromise. This is by choice. They much prefer to sit down in front of bulldozers, sit up in trees, break out of the polite conservationist mold, and intervene to expose a cruelty to living things that is hidden behind a cloak of product safety and progress. They are determined to protect and restore the Earth.

The new guard place Earth first and immoderate human wants far down the list. They recognize the intricacy of the web of life and the challenges of living as part of it rather than apart from it. They are too late and too few to reverse past destruction, but these people spend little time wringing their hands about it. Those who call them Cassandras forget that Cassandra told the truth. They do not qualify for worse epithets: coward, unbeliever, unhopeful, doubter, negativist, or realist (We march toward annihilation under the banner of realismRichard Barnet). They are optimistic enough to think something can be done. They do not want to be like the practical man who has made all his decisions, but lost the ability to listen, and is determined to perpetuate the errors of his ancestors.

Someone calls me a pessimist in this book because I once was fond of quoting Allen Morgans prediction, What we save in the next few years is all that will ever be saved. The optimists in the environmental movement note the nearly three decades of dust on that statement. Millions of acres of unspoiled land have been dedicated to preservation in the last quarter-century, but millions more have been released for development, and the attack on wilderness boundaries continues. There are still some fair ladies, but too many faint hearts, to succeed in winning them. Those fair places and the legitimate denizens are being lost at an ever-increasing rate to clear-cuts, over-grazing, dams, condominiums, pipelines, pavement, oil spills, acid rain, ozone holes, and complacency.

Yesterdays warriors smugly lean back in their chairs and insist that only a slow, deliberate course of action for the protection of the environment is satisfactory. Ninety million acres of wilderness saved, they say, and good work is being done to protect more; the bald eagle and buffalo were brought back from the bring of extinction; whaling is on the decline. Such successes take time, they say, time and compromise. Direct actionwhen the new guard go to the source of an environmnetal ill and attempt immediately to end the travesties being perpetrated thereonly hinders compromise. Those who protest by carrying placards, sitting in trees, or vitiating the implements of destruction are ideologues in the eyes of the moderationists.

My half-century-plus of involvement with the movement prevents my being convinced by the cool rhetoric of the over-confident. I do not suspect that I ever will be. The white noise behind their words sounds like a materialistic mantra. More, more, more, it spiritlessly drones on, more money, more comfort, more microwaves. We can have more, more more while saving more and more wilderness.

We cant. Something is seriously askew in the optimists equation, and I think it has its basis in ecology, specifically in the rate of change that the Earths ecosystem can absorb and still maintain itself. Natural change in nature happens slowly, with rare and usually local exceptions, like surprise crashes of asteroids. Human-caused changes, as we now know, can occur with devastating rapidity. It takes millions of years to turn the plants of bygone eras into pools of petroleum and clumps of coal. However, in perhaps two desert tortoise life spans we humans made our own deadly fossil brew, spewing the poisons into the air and spreading them over our seas and shores. That more, more, more depends upon non-sustainable energy supplies, depleted and un-repletable stocks of rare and precious minerals, farmed-out croplands, and air and water that is no longer fit for human consumption: more environmental sacrifices for more stuff. They make unattainable the sustainable society we like to talk about.

Next page

1234567...90

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Updated Edition»

Look at similar books to Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Updated Edition. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Joe R. Feagin

Liberation Sociology

Christy Peterson

Earth Day and the Environmental Movement: Standing Up for Earth

Leslie James Pickering

The Earth Liberation Front 19972002

Brendan Prendiville

Environmental Politics in France

Christopher Rootes

Environmental Movements: Local, National and Global

Mike Roselle

Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action

Anthony J. Nocella

A Historical Scholarly Collection of Writings on the Earth Liberation Front

Woodhouse

The ecocentrists: a history of radical environmentalism

Aric McBay

Full Spectrum Resistance, Volume One: Building Movements and Fighting to Win

John P. Clark

Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community

Feather

Blowing the lid : gay liberation, sexual revolution and radical queens

Kate Davies

The rise of the U.S. environmental health movement

Discussion, reviews of the book Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Updated Edition and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.