“Ecocentrism, Humanism, and the Wilderness”: Roundtable on *The Ecocentrists* Pt 3

Keith Woodhouse’s excellent study of radical environmentalism probes what it means to take a commitment to wilderness in and of itself as the core of one’s thinking and activism. A commitment to the integrity of the wilderness taken to this deep a level leads the activists he studies to scorn the tradition of liberal democracy and even humanism itself, understood by Woodhouse as a belief in human reason and in human actions premised on satisfying human needs above all else. As such, the book raises profound questions about environmental thought; it is sure to be a gateway text for a new generation of intellectual historians of environmentalism. It raises challenging questions for anyone considering contemporary politics and social thought more broadly, as well.

In large part, Woodhouse’s book is a study of the Earth First! movement, the activists of the 1980s and 1990s famous for direct action. They were the folks linking arms across roads to stop bulldozers or locking themselves to roadbuilding equipment. Eventually, like-minded ecocentric radicals were tree-sitting, spiking trees (the most controversial tactic because it potentially harmed loggers), and cutting down poles supporting power lines to energy plants. The protesters’ ingenuity took baroque forms, culminating in “locking down” in which blockaders would insert their arms through metal tubes encased in concrete-filled, half-buried barrels and handcuff themselves to each other. They put their bodies on the line, quite literally, sometimes going to prison or facing assaults from angry loggers. Woodhouse wants to figure out what made theses ecocentrists tick, and the answer, he concludes, is both inspiring and troubling. Inspiring because, at their best, ecocentrists imparted an invigorating moral clarity, “a call for humility, precaution, and the inclusion of nonhuman interests in human decision-making” (288). However, they also could be misanthropic and remarkably rebarbative in their social commitments, with Dave Foreman of Earth First! musing on starvation in Ethiopia as a positive response to overpopulation, Edward Abbey’s consistent hostility to immigration (a sentiment widely shared among many environmentalists, as Woodhouse makes clear), and the suggestion in Earth First! Journal in the 1980s that the potential for large-scale deaths due to AIDS was a source of “ecological sanity” (196).

The ecocentrists’ opposition to essentialism mirrored that of their postmodern contemporaries but with a biocentric, or deep ecological, twist. They refused to ascribe a superior moral status to humans and believed that nonhuman nature deserves as much respect as humanity and shares an equally valid claim to protection (104-105). They did not actually see humans apart from nature, Woodhouse points out, but they rejected the Enlightenment faith in reason and the material and social progress that has flowed from it. In this conviction, they arrived at some of the moral and philosophical premises salient on so much of the progressive left of our times (perhaps uncomfortably for the left). However, what happens when you forsake humanism? To what do you cling for ballast? The heroic activism of the Earth First!ers seems to draw from the same well as so much post-1960s radical activism, and yet it is not directed to principles of human equality and social justice. The ecocentrists were anarchists, but they did not imagine that a world of social harmony would blossom once state institutions were eradicated, as did the social ecologist and anarchist Murray Bookchin, who makes a brief but vital and stimulating cameo in the book, as he became a vocal critic of Earth First! for its anti-humanist views and its tendency to lump all humans together, the oppressed along with the capitalists, in a common pool of iniquity (192-203). Nor did they appeal to theories of community organizing and grassroots leadership such as those advocated by Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and the generations of radical participatory democrats they have inspired, from feminist and gay rights activists to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo.

What separates the Earth First! tree spikers from Ammon Bundy and his far-right crew of transgressors on federal lands? Both believe the federal government is oppressive and both justify claims on federal land—Earth First! to defend wilderness, Bundy in favor of the grazing rights of private farmers at sub-market prices. Why is one claim valid and the other not? The rightists appeal to supposed constitutional principle. The ecocentrists appeal to wilderness.

Woodhouse has many key points to make, but the central theme of his study, to which he loops back on a regular basis, remains wilderness, the foundation upon which the entire logic of ecocentrism is built. It is the endangerment of the wilderness, imagined in its inviolable purity, that drives ecocentric thinking and activism. Consider the Redwoods. As Woodhouse points out, loggers have cut down redwoods whose age could be counted in centuries and which supported canopies far up in the sky that sprouted their own ecosystems, with several feet of soil on some branches hosting ferns, shrubs, even other trees—essentially, new forest growing in the sky. The peculiar power and strength of wilderness areas like the redwood forests of the West Coast but also their poignant vulnerability to human industrial progress gave rise to what Woodhouse calls “crisis environmentalism” in the 1970s—the sense that population growth and industrial degradation had reached a tipping point leading to global ecological disaster (68-69). The sense of crisis justifies much, including a long tradition of social radicalism and civil disobedience that goes back to the great nineteenth-century naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. It is what motivates contemporary environmental radicals such as the University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher who spontaneously bid nearly $2 million for drilling rights on federal land—a decision for which he paid with a nearly two-year prison sentence. He argued that violating the law was the “lesser evil” than allowing oil and gas drilling that would abet climate change (283). Thoreau was grounded in a Transcendentalist mysticism compounded of romanticism and Unitarian theology. What distinguishes the ecocentrists, at least in this telling, is their appeal to the trackless wilderness, and this is what both intrigues and baffles Woodhouse.

He insists that the ecocentrists ultimately are loyal to an idea, for the conception of wilderness they deploy is almost wholly intellectual. In this, Woodhouse follows his mentor, William Cronon, whose essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” is cited often in the book. He begins his book with the paradox of the “wilderness boundary” in the federally managed Weminuche Wilderness in southwestern Colorado, a place he came to know when he served as a Forest Ranger before entering graduate school. When they reached the boundary, regulations required trail crews clearing debris to exchange motorized equipment for horses and mules, chainsaws for handsaws and axes. It was a wholly artificial barrier, created by authorities in order to fashion a sacrosanct wilderness within a wilderness that would allow Americans to explore nature free from the disabling conveniences of modern civilization. For Woodhouse, the perils and promise inherent in wilderness lie at the heart of ecocentrism. What happens when you cross the boundary between civil society and the wild? Or, in the case of the ecocentrists, what happens when you forsake liberal humanism for a philosophy grounded in the belief that “people were no more important than any other living things on the planet or than the ecosystems those things inhabited” (x)? “Wilderness constituted a moral boundary as much as a geographical one,” Woodhouse points out (125).

The Earth First! founders drew inspiration from the idiosyncratic writer Edward Abbey, who joined their movement. Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang about a hardy band of lawless and anarchistic eco-saboteurs who engage in sabotage against the developers intruding into the wilderness inspired their methods and the model of undirected, leaderless, and decentralized activism they adopted. Abbey cuts an important but indistinct and problematic figure in the book. He seems to have been both an anti-immigrant misanthrope and a charismatic leader. One wants to know what lay behind Abbey’s monkeywrenching, what larger commitments. In an interesting chapter on the land policy fights in the 1980s, Woodhouse notes that Earth First!’s antipathy to incremental reform and inside-the-system lobbying by establishment environmental groups led them to see Ronald Reagan’s zealous pro-business Interior Secretary James Watt as essentially no different from Democratic officials who only pretended to be “friends of the environment”–the kind of careless equation of right-wing extremism with liberal moderation that is the purity symbol of modern radicalism (156). Unbelievably, the radical eco-centrists briefly saw the possibility of some sort of convergence with the free-market theorists who followed in the wake of the “Sagebrush Rebellion” of pro-development western state legislators’ intent on returning federal lands to state control. The free marketers showed the radicals just how unprofitable many leases on federal land were; the leases made sense only by the logic of bureaucratic funding and political gamesmanship. More significantly, however, the free-market libertarians, Woodhouse argues, shared the ecocentrists’ skepticism of the human capacity for rationality and planning. Human reason was simply insufficient to plan the disposition of economic resources on the scale liberals wanted; rather, the free market operated as a natural system that would allow a healthy balance of resource distribution based on the logic of supply and demand, need and want. It is the market, not human reason, that would create a kind of economic equilibrium akin to an ecosystem, a natural order beyond the ken of human reason (179-80).

It is an interesting point; as it was, the ecocentrists never made any significant linkage with conservative free marketers. They shared a disdain for rationality applied through bureaucratic mechanisms, but the ecocentrists were the starker Darwinians, seeing no teleology and no logic in nature. An earlier generation of humanists, of which Bookchin the social ecologist and anarchist, seems a legatee—liberal Unitarians who authored the “Humanist Manifesto” (1933) and even the conservative New Humanists who declared man’s intuition of moral discipline to be above and beyond nature—confronted the question of how to define values in a secularizing age. They believed that civilization is a set of ideas only and set about trying to justify theirs. Woodhouse’s tale of ecocentrism suggests their challenge remains open, as does the conviction that we ground ourselves on a chosen conception of civilization—or, as it were, wilderness. “In all of the debates around Earth First!, the question just out of reach was about the objective and moral limits of people and nature,” Woodhouse observes. If moral order exists in non-human nature, then humans must learn the lesson of restraint and humility. That is, if wilderness is a world apart, humans need to heed its call, however that may be interpreted. However, as Woodhouse points out, if humans are a part of nature, then “environmentalism became primarily a philosophical question about what sort of world the majority of humans wanted” (208-209).