Radical Environmentalism

Nature, Identity and More-than-human Agency

J. Cianchi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137473776
• eBook ISBN: 9781137473783
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Radical Environmentalism: Nature, Identity and More-than-human Agency provides a unique account of environmentalism - one that highlights the voices of activists and the nature they defend. It will be of interest to both students and academics in green criminology, environmental sociology and nature-human studies more broadly.

1

Defending Nature

Introduction

This book is about the relationships between radical environmental activists and the nature they are defending. It contributes to green criminology and nature–human studies more broadly, by exploring how radical environmentalists explain their encounters with nature, and how these encounters influence, shape and sustain their commitment to environmental campaigning.

Radical environmentalism is a phenomenon that emerges in the 1980s, borne from disillusion with the perceived failures of the mainstream environmental movement (Carter 2007: 157–60; Potter 2012) and as a ‘last-ditch’ effort to prevent environmental harms (Doyle 2000: 45). It also arises in response to the perceived failure of sovereign states and the international community to establish adequate protection and regulatory mechanisms, and enforcement resources to police environmental harms and crime (see for example, White 2011; Nurse 2013; Stretesky and Knight 2013).

The radical environmental activist lifestyle can be dangerous, uncomfortable and frightening (for example Scarce 2006; Heller 2007; Krien 2010). Such activists are willing to undertake what for most of us would be an unacceptable level of discomfort, disobedience and confrontation. Their tactics include forms of law-breaking such as trespassing on facilities to record breaches of environmental laws and conditions, blockading entrances to logging coupes, locking themselves on to industrial equipment and placing themselves in small inflatable boats between whalers and their prey. The activists’ actions may extend to sabotaging industrial equipment such as logging trucks and bulldozers, and sinking whaling ships. Their campaigns have resulted in violence, arrest, criminal records and incarceration. The state, affected industries and the media frequently portray such activists negatively, and their actions and perspectives seem largely incomprehensible to other people, including less radical environmentalists. Yet they maintain a passionate commitment to an activism that challenges socio-legal definitions of acceptable forms of political protest.

What is it that motivates radical environmental activists and what is the source of their commitment? In this book, I argue that the answer lies in profound experiences of nature that fundamentally alter how they understand themselves, their fellow activists and the world. Environmentalism is at heart a contest about the meaning of nature and the social construction of activism, deviance and harm. What becomes an environmental problem is ‘shaped by different understandings of the nature-human nexus’ (White 2008: 4). The contests that are the subject of this book are fought, literally and figuratively, on the margins, in spaces where what is deviant and what is criminal are fluid concepts, subject to local perspectives and international normative pressures.

In Tasmania, where this research was conducted, concepts about what forms environmental activism ought to take are defined and enforced aggressively by the state. For the state, nature is often seen as an economic resource that exists to serve human needs. To put nature above humans by taking action against harvesting or mining environmental resources is a betrayal of the pursuit of human progress and economic growth. Old-growth forests, for example, are cash crops like any other that provide employment, sustain communities and achieve economic rewards. Activists who interfere with the lawful, state-sanctioned work of loggers are liable to be portrayed as deviant at best and criminal at worst.

Radical environmental activists, however, seem to reject the constraints placed upon them by the power of the state and the corporations. They present alternative visions of the value of the nature–human relationship. They argue the more-than-human world is entitled to flourish irrespective of human need, treating nature as a resource simply for human consumption is ‘deviant’, and harming nature by, for example clearfelling old-growth forests and killing whales, is an environmental crime. They protest such harms in the hope that society will ‘catch up’ with them and recognise their claims, before nature is irrevocably damaged.

This book presents interviews with 22 forest and whaling activists, in which they tell powerful and moving stories about their engagement with nature. Their narratives provide fascinating insights into the lived experiences of radical environmentalists and their distinctive cultures and perspectives. The interviews reveal communities of conscientious and sophisticated campaigners who draw global attention to environmental destruction.

Crucially, what emerges from these interviews is a perspective that recognises the personhood of non-humans. It is an animist perspective that gives rise to a deeply held moral obligation to defend nature, in which the chief concern is how to behave respectfully towards more-than-human nature. This is what establishes radical environmental activism as a unique phenomenon. It is a manifestation of political resistance in which the illegal and dangerous tactics employed are understood as appropriate and necessary from the radical environmentalist perspective.

In this chapter I introduce the reader to green criminology and environmental sociology, the traditions I draw on to guide my investigation. I also explain the motivations that energise the project, before outlining how the book is organised. This book is written as an account of an empirical research project, and in this respect it is as much a narrative about the doing of a criminological and sociological inquiry, as it is a presentation of my interviews with activists. In this spirit the book is written as a journey told by three voices: the technical description of the research, my encounters with the activists and, most importantly, the activists’ voices themselves.

Green criminology

Green criminology is concerned with the study of environmental harms and crimes and their effects upon the planet, including both humans and the non-human. Since the 1990s it has become a broad tradition with a diversity of empirical interests and theoretical perspectives (see, for example, Lynch 1990; Beirne and South 2007; White 2008; South and Brisman 2013; Walters et al. 2013; and White and Heckenberg 2014). With its roots within the critical criminology tradition (Brisman and South 2012) green criminologists are concerned not only with challenging conventional understandings of environmental crime and the political economy within which it occurs, but also with calling attention to the dissenting voices, such as those who in this case challenge what constitutes deviancy in the context of defending nature.

White (2013a: 17) notes, somewhat wryly, that green criminologists tend to define green criminology according to their conception of how they are going about it, but the defining character of the field is that green criminologists argue the importance of environmental and ecological issues (White 2013a: 26). This involves documenting the how and why of environmental crime and harm. An important part of this is exploring the meaning of such crime and harm, because, if we do not know what they mean, ‘we will be powerless to have much of an impact on them’ (Brisman 2014: 30).

To meet this interpretive challenge, green criminology identifies the ‘multiple discourses – often in competition with each other’ that describe environmental issues, including those raised by activists (Natali 2013). A central discourse within criminology is justice. White (2008: 14–23) describes three approaches to justice within the green criminological context: environmental justice, a human-centred approach in which environmental rights are seen as an extension of human rights; ecological justice, in which rights are extended to the complex ecosystems of which humans are a part; and species justice in which non-humans are recognised as having inherent rights that exist independently of human needs (see also Benton 1998). In terms of a green criminological justice orientation, this framework can be viewed as a continuum from a human-centred criminology in which the victimization of humans, within the context of environmentally harmful activities, is the key concern, to a non-anthropocentric approach that extends its concerns to the whole biosphere (Wyatt et al. 2013: 4).

This framework has implications for the kinds of questions that green criminologists ask and the kinds of answers they seek. It also has epistemological implications for the kinds of knowledge systems we take seriously. In this respect, this book takes a non-anthropocentric approach for two reasons. First, radical environmental activists are calling attention to injustices against ecosystems and individual species. Second, there is a need to challenge the perspective, often taken by the social sciences, that humans are separate from nature and that nature is little more than a passive backdrop against which human affairs and environmental contests are staged. In this book I want to explicitly take into account the experience of nature as an actor.

The phenomenon of environmental activism, and the role that activists and environmental non-governmental organisations perform by highlighting and ‘policing’ environmental harms and crimes, has received attention from green criminologists (see Potter 2012; White 2011, 2012; Natali 2013; Nurse 2013) and sociologists (Doyle 2000; Scarce 2006). Indeed, environmental activism is an important phenomenon for green criminology. State and transnational environmental organisations and movements play a significant role in the social construction of environmental harms and crimes by, for example, mobilising social and political pressure over state and international governance agencies and industries, and monitoring, policing and prosecuting environmental offenders. With respect to radical environmentalism, the contest over what represents deviance in relation to environmental policies and practices and radical activists’ readiness to engage in law-breaking, makes it a suitable subject of criminological analysis. However, empirical research into radical activism, particularly ethnographic studies, remains relatively underdeveloped.

Conventional criminological approaches that focus upon environmental crime (including harm), regulation, deviance, activism and the social construction of environmental issues, assist us to understand the radical environmentalists’ consternation at environmental destruction, the workings of their communities, strategies and campaigns, and their relationships with other actors. However, such approaches have not explained sufficiently what gives rise to such a profound sense of injustice that it impels someone to adopt a radical environmentalist lifestyle. This question requires us to dig deeper and investigate the philosophical origins of the radical activist’s motivation, where ‘philosophy is always the driver of action: it is intertwined with how we perceive the world around us, our location in this world and what we feel ought to be done to preserve or make the world a better place’ (White 2008: 4).

My research investigates whether, for forest and whaling activists, nature is an active, as opposed to passive, participant in the construction and shaping of their identity and activism. The standpoint I take is that humans are thoroughly and inextricably entangled in their lifeworld, a world that is in a constant process of creative unfolding, and in which meaning making is a product of humans’ entanglement with nature.

Environment and sociology

Our experiences of nature can shape our self-identity and affect how we act in the world. Human societies and cultures, traditional and modern, are fashioned and constrained by their relationships with nature at both a practical level, such as the management of land, food, water resources and waste disposal, and at an abstract level, such as our conceptualisations of non-humans, wilderness, and our mythologies and religions.

Environment has proved a difficult theme for the sociology to embrace (Murdoch 2001; Walker 2005: 78). Sociology has struggled to incorporate the environment into its purview beyond a greening of traditional sociological theories, within a paradigm that emphasises human separation from nature (Stevens 2012). The contribution of the physical environment to human action has long been acknowledged within sociology (for example, Weber wrote that when imbued with subjective meaning, non-human phenomena may be recognised ‘as elements within social action’ (Giddens 1971: 147)), but humans are conceived as separate from the world and the non-humans that inhabit it; the material world has meaning to the extent that it is imbued with socio-cultural ideas. In other words, the constituents of nature are ‘passive participants in this great human drama’ (Lockie 2004: 26).

While environmental sociology has been recognised as a legitimate branch of sociology since the late 1970s (Catton and Dunlap 1978), thirty years on, ‘societal-environmental interactions remain the most challenging issue, and divergent approaches to them the source of our most fundamental cleavages’ (Dunlap 2010: 15). In 1978 Catton and Dunlap argued that sociology is restricted to an anthropocentric paradigm (what they called a human exceptionalism paradigm), which makes it difficult for sociologists ‘to deal meaningfully with the social implications of ecological problems and constraints’ (1978: 42). Environmental sociology, they argued, should operate within a non-anthropocentric paradigm that recognises the human species as one of many interlinked within the systems that sustain life. Some social scientists have taken up this challenge of course. Notable among them is the anthropologist Tim Ingold whose writing engages with nature–human entanglements:

Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we walk, the ever-changing skies, mountains and rivers, rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit and the tools we use, not to mention the innumerable companions, both non-human animals and fellow humans, with which and with whom we share our lives? They are constantly inspiring us, challenging us, telling us things. (Ingold 2011: xii)

There are three motivations that underpin the research. First, I have a genuine interest in the people who have made the decision to engage in radical, or direct action, environmental campaigning. Radical environmentalism is an outlier on the continuum of political and social responses to environmental harm. This is worthy of research at a time when nature (and humanity) is under threat from the challenges presented by anthropogenic climate change, destruction of biodiversity, pollution and overpopulation.

The second motivation behind this inquiry is the conviction that criminology and the other social sciences have not taken into account sufficiently the experience of nature as an actor, something I have engaged with previously as an outdoor educator and in my own journeying in the outdoors. This investigation is an opportunity to test empirically the usefulness of the concept of nature as an actor.

The third motivation is to find out whether the kinds of relationships and experiences that radical environmentalists have in nature might contribute to learning about how experiences of nature affect the way people conceptualise and relate to it. It is concerned with how radical environmentalist perspectives might contribute to a reconsideration of respectful relations with nature and associated concepts of environmental harm, crime and deviance.

Organisation of this book

The first three chapters provide an account of the landscape through which this inquiry travels. The remainder of this chapter introduces the reader to nature–human experience through descriptions of three personal encounters. Chapter 2, which explores the literature about radical environmentalism, establishes the scope of the inquiry and describes the two activist groups that are its subject. There is remarkably little scholarship about the relationships that radical activists form with the nature they are defending, yet my experiences of nature suggest that this might be a significant factor in initiating and sustaining radical environmentalism. This gives rise to the inquiry’s two research questions, one relating to activists’ lived experiences of nature, and the other dealing with the identity and meaning processes arising from their engagement with the nature they are defending. Two activist groups are selected as research subjects: forest activists in Tasmania (where I lived at the time) and Sea Shepherd activists who visit Tasmania on their passage to and from campaigns in the Southern Ocean.

Chapter 3 is devoted to the development of a conceptual framework that assists me to shed light on the research questions, design the research and undertake the analysis. The challenge set by the research question is to inquire into the role of nature (in particular the nature being defended) in activist self-identity and action. Three concepts are chosen to guide the inquiry. The first is nature. At face value nature seems an obvious and easy concept to define. It is, however, a conceptual container that is asked to do a lot. Care is taken, therefore, to establish a definition that meets the challenges set by the research question. Environmentalism is a contest of ideas about the meaning of nature, but of course nature denotes more than culturally derived meanings, and represents the organic and inorganic constituents of our planet. Nature, as it is used in this book, is a relational and cultural achievement that combines the physical and the imaginative.

The inquiry sets out on its journey with the proposition that the participants are affected by their experiences of nature. Self-identity, as a product of autobiographical narration and rationalisation, becomes the gauge with which to measure, as it were, nature’s capacity to act ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Author
• 1 Defending Nature
• 2 What is Nature Doing?: Radical Environmentalism and the Role of Nature
• 3 Nature, Identity and More-than-human Agency
• 4 ‘I Talked to My Tree and He Talked Back’: Activism, Nature and Meaning-making
• 5 Encounters with Activists
• 6 Radicalisation: Activist Journeys to Direct Action Campaigning
• 7 Transcendence: Experiences of Nature that Transform Activist Identity
• 8 Connection: The Formation of Relationships with Nature
• 9 Communication: Dialogic Relationships with Animals, Plants and Landscapes
• 10 Grief from the Destruction of Nature
• 11 Alive to the World: Interconnection, Kinship and Responsibility
• References
• Index