PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS
‘monkey-wrenching’, or ‘ecotage’ (illegal actions such as tree-spiking and
sabotaging bulldozers).^9 Our knowledge of Earth First! (USA) is rather murky
because secrecy veils much of its (often illegal) activity. It is profoundly
anti-institutional, with a highly decentralised structure of around a hun-
dred groups, each with fifteen to twenty activists, plus supporting groups,
and around fourteen operational centres co-ordinating national initiatives
(Rucht 1995 ). Groups are autonomous, determining their own campaigns
and raising their own finances. No one individual speaks for Earth First!.
There are various organs of co-ordination and communication, including
amagazine, an annual meeting and an activist conference. Earth First!
has gained considerable attention and notoriety for its theatrical attention-
seeking stunts, such as perching in trees destined to be chopped down for
logging, and, most of all, for its acts of ecotage. Activists have gone far
beyond the limits of civil disobedience by repeatedly destroying the techni-
cal equipment of companies engaged in logging, drilling, electricity supply
and surveying. Whereas Greenpeace breaks the law infrequently, preferably
where there is no moral ambivalence about the act and only when it has
carefully calculated the impact on its public reputation, Earth First! is proud
that it flouts the law and relishes any media backlash directed against it
(Rucht 1995 : 80). Indeed, it has attracted a highly critical response from the
American media and from other environmental groups, even attracting vio-
lent counter-attacks, including a pipe bomb under a leading activist’s car. By
theearly 1990s, Earth First! was badly split by ideological divisions between
theolder generation activists such as Dave Foreman, who emphasised a nar-
row ‘deep ecology’ zeal for wilderness and biodiversity issues, and a younger
generation who disliked some of the misanthropic sentiments of the first
group, preferring to develop a broader social agenda (Lee 1995; Doherty
2002 :158–60). Eventually, Foreman and his allies departed, allowing Earth
First! todevelop a wider environmental justice agenda. Earth First!, with its
democratic, decentralised structure, its commitment to direct action and
willingness to operate outside the formal political system, is a clear exam-
ple of aparticipatory protestgroup. During the 1990s, Earth First! groups
were formed in Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. Ironically, inspired
bythedirect action movement in the UK (see below), a new shadowy mili-
tant group called the Earth Liberation Front emerged in the USA, claiming
responsibility for numerous ecotage acts, notably a range of arson attacks
on developers and logging companies (Doherty 2002 :160).
Most groups fall within the second category of grassroots group. They are
based in a local community and are usually formed by residents as a ‘not in
my back yard’(NIMBY) response to a proposed LULU, such as a new road or
incinerator, or from concern about the health risks of an existing hazard,
such as a polluting factory or pesticide-spraying. These groups are usually
participative and rely heavily on voluntary action, membership subscriptions
and fundraising. Membership is likely to reflect the local base of the group:
middle-class in an affluent area; working-class in poorer communities. A