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THE BITTER relationship between campaigners for animal rights and scientific
researchers took a potentially lethal turn in Britain in June, when car
bombs were aimed at vets working at Porton Down, a government biological
research establishment in Wiltshire, and at Bristol University. Two weeks
earlier in California, the biter was bit. In Berkeley, two activists working
with Earth First!, a group that takes direct action to defend redwood forests,
were hurt by a bomb that had been planted in their car.

What motivates those working in defence of all animals to set out to
kill human animals? The sabotage tactics of British animal rights groups
have been copied by other smaller groups around the world. But the theory
behind action ‘to protect the natural world’ has largely come from the US.

The idea of ‘Deep Ecology’ was first named there. Tracy Catelman, a
staff member for Earth First!’s Redwood Summer campaign, describes this
as ‘respecting all species are equal and having the right to exist; to try
to understand that and in a deep sense to really live that every day’. This
grassroots definition summarises some much more theoretical, even theological,
writings on the subject. All maintain that all species are equal, and that
human beings have no special rights over other species.

Earth First! arose from this concept of Deep Ecology, and from the novels
of Edward Abbey, such as Desert Solitaire, celebrating the great American
wilderness. It is a loose federation of activists campaigning against the
modern exploitation of natural resources – some under the slogan ‘Back to
the Pleistocene’. Its views can be extreme: for example, founder member
Dave Foreman, writing under the pseudonym ‘Ms Anthropy’ in the Earth First!
journal, suggested that the Ethiopian famine should be allowed to run its
course and that the AIDS pandemic is a blessing in disguise. Both are part
of nature’s way of reducing what he continues to describe as ‘this human
pox that’s ravaging this precious planet’.

The journal has always advocated sabotage to prevent encroachment on
America’s wilderness. Foreman wrote Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching,
a handbook on how to sabotage activities such as logging trees. One favourite
method was ‘spiking’: driving long metal or ceramic spikes into trees to
render them valueless as timber. Foreman is currently on bail charged with
planning to destroy power lines to a pumping station in Arizona.

The group revelled in its uncouth image: accounts of its summer gatherings
in 1986 and 1987 focused on the amount of drunkenness – some members described
themselves as ‘Rednecks for Wilderness’. Other ecologists, however, began
to take Earth First! seriously, especially when the statements on AIDS and
Ethiopia were reinforced by pronouncements against immigration to the US.

For example, the well-known environmentalist Murray Bookchin of the
Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont launched a barrage of mordant criticism
against the Deep Ecologists. ‘There is a distinct failure among the people
responsible for thinking out the theories behind Earth First! to understand
their responsibility as intellectuals . . . They blame all of humanity without
any understanding that humanity is at war with itself . . . In their view,
if you’re not biocentric you’re anthropocentric.’ Some Deep Ecologists,
for example, cannot even see why we should distinguish wolves from the rubella
virus.

After Bookchin’s onslaught Dave Foreman and other Deep Ecologists involved
have now conceded that their statements on AIDS and Ethiopia were mistaken,
but as Bookchin says: ‘It took a year to pull out enough teeth and finally
get the issue laid on the table. And I would say frankly that some of them
even now have some very reactionary views.’

Meanwhile, the movement itself changed its style and tactics as more
and more people decided to take action on environmental issues. In May 1987
a worker at a sawmill in Cloverdale, California, suffered serious injury,
including two severed veins in his neck, when a band saw snapped on a ceramic
spike in a tree. Catelman counters: ‘He didn’t blame it on Earth First!.
It turns out that some dude from Los Angeles who was camping did it. And
the guy was not even going to come to work that day because the saw was
in such bad shape. It’s the only injury ever recorded.’

In April this year, Darryl Cherney, Judi Bari and Northcoast California
Earth First! issued a statement ‘ . . . renouncing the tactic of tree spiking
in our area. Through the coalitions we have been building with lumber workers
we have learnt that the timber corporations care no more for the lives of
their employees than they do for the life of the forest.’ Bari and Cherney
are the two activists whose car was bombed in May.

Ironically, the two Californians are part of a shift towards peaceful
action in the American wilderness preservation movement, which increasingly
takes Martin Luther King as its hero in place of anonymous saboteurs.

Dorrie Wilsnak of the War Resisters League in New York, who has organised
nonviolent protest for many years, comments: ‘The bombing has galvanised
more people. Lots of young people from here are now going to Northern California.
It is a real culmination: the environment and animal rights have become
the way in which young people look at their life and say, ‘How can I live
this nonviolently?’ They say: ‘I really believe these things I read of Gandhi,
and how can I put them into practice in my life? I don’t want to eat meat
any more, I don’t want experiments on laboratory animals.’

Michael Lewis of Earth First! Alaska gives an idea of how other regions
feel about this change in attitude: ‘Well, ain’t that a kick in the head!
. . . Our job is to stand, defiantly, with monkeywrench (and finger) held
high, in the face of the logging truck, the bulldozer, the cattle herd,
the Congressman, the journalist. We are the last stand. It is: No compromise
in defence of Mother Earth . . . ‘

Californians will vote in November on two measures to restrict felling
of the remaining primeval redwood forest in the state. The lumber companies
have responded by increasing the rate of cutting while they can. California
Earth First!, in turn, is organising a ‘Redwood Summer’, modelled on the
‘Mississippi Summer’ of 1964, when hundreds of people joined peaceful protests
against racism. They agreed to a code of nonviolent conduct for the protests
of the Redwood Summer, invoking the spirit of Martin Luther King’s leadership
of the protest 25 years ago. The calendar of activities for the Redwood
Summer, with its workshops on responding to provocation without violence,
matches the schedule for the Mississippi campaign of 1964.

This is more than a phase in the long-running campaign on California’s
forests. Redwood Summer staff member Ed Denson comments: ‘ . . . among the
activist community this is recognised as really a very important movement.’

But a contradiction remains with the tendency to ‘blame all of humanity’
that Bookchin identifies in Deep Ecologists. Catelman says: ‘If I had to
draw a line between saving a species and a few human lives or a few jobs,
I would definitely go for saving the species.’

When told about the Porton and Bristol bombings, Catelman reacted: ‘Wow!
My response to that is that people feel like they’ve tried everything they
can and that the world’s so crazy right now that you have to do crazy things
to get people’s attention. It’s not something that I personally would do
but I can’t condemn it until we know who did it and why they did it.’

Suggestions that such people should work through the democratic process
are wasted. Those who want to save the redwoods or the rabbits want to do
it now.

In California, a citizens’ action petition to restrict the future cutting
of ancient redwood forests will be voted on in November. The immediate result
has been that logging companies have increased their cutting of forests
to remove as many trees as possible before the ballot.

In Britain, too, the threat of legislation can stimulate the activity
to be restricted. It only takes two or three embittered individuals to turn
their frustration into a wave of destruction. A movement of thousands, on
the other hand, can and will intervene directly and nonviolently when due
process is seen to fail.

Earth First! in California promises a new summer of love in place of
a summer of Semtex. In Britain – where animal rights have much the same
place in the political scene as wilderness does in the US – the personal
safety of vivisectionists may well depend on the movement against their
work growing stronger and more confident.