The Ecocentrists
A History of Radical Environmentalism
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- $41.99
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed to be in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world?
In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse offers a nuanced history of radical environmental thought and action in the late-twentieth-century United States. Focusing especially on the group Earth First!, Woodhouse explores how radical environmentalism responded to both postwar affluence and a growing sense of physical limits. While radicals challenged the material and philosophical basis of industrial civilization, they glossed over the ways economic inequality and social difference defined people’s different relationships to the nonhuman world. Woodhouse discusses how such views increasingly set Earth First! at odds with movements focused on social justice and examines the implications of ecocentrism’s sweeping critique of human society for the future of environmental protection. A groundbreaking intellectual history of environmental politics in the United States, The Ecocentrists is a timely study that considers humanism and individualism in an environmental age and makes a case for skepticism and doubt in environmental thought.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Woodhouse offers a deeply researched and thoughtful reappraisal of the ideas and tactics of the radical environmentalist fringe that, driven by a sense of crisis, broke away from the larger environmental movement in the 1980s. The first half of the book details the rise of modern environmentalism as a political and cultural force, emanating from relatively small but determined bands of conservationists led by figures such as the Sierra Club's David Brower. Woodhouse carefully traces the reversals, contradictions, coalitions, and rifts in the environmental movement, which, by the early 1970s, was professionalized and transformed into a powerful political lobby. In the 1980s, movement veterans frustrated by trade-offs in the cause of wilderness protection hardliner Dave Forman lamented that "for the one sweet plum of the Alaskan National Monuments, failed to sue" to contest Forest Service recommendations preserving only a paltry amount of roadless wilderness. Earth First!, founded in 1980, is an exemplar of this movement, with its ecocentric worldview that places human beings in moral equivalence with nature. Insightful and well-grounded in the literature, this is required reading for historians of environmentalism and modern political movements and, for the general reader, a stimulating introduction to an urgent area of popular concern.
