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Title: Violence and Earth First! Author: Dave Foreman Date: March 1982 Language: en Topics: Earth First!, historical, Radical history, environment, Environmental activism, ecology, non-violence, non-violence, violence, not anarchist Source: Retrieved on 23 December 2014 from [[http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bron/re/Foreman--violence(editorial)2(4)4(mar82).pdf]] Notes: This text was transcribed by http://uncfc.org, an anti-industrial student group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Violence is as American as cherry pie. — H. Rap Brown
One could expand Rap Brown's comment to this: Violence is as human as
the opposable thumb. But the question we as Earth lovers must face is
whether violence is every justified in defense of Mother Earth against
those who would destroy her for their short-term material profit and
power thrills. As I said to the slimy little suppository representing
the Mountain States Legal Foundation during a panel discussion in Denver
last fall, "If you come home and find a bunch of Hell's Angels raping
your wife, old mother, and eleven year old daughter, you don't just sit
down and talk balance with them or suggest compromise. You get your
twelve gauge shotgun and blow them to hell."
Many environmentalists, however, say violence, whether against machines
or people, merely perpetuates the whole violent, destructive cycle, that
Earth rape is due to our violent nature, that the only way we can break
the violent cycle is to step out of it ourselves, to use only passive
resistance against those who would destroy Earth and us.
This, of course, is the approach advocated by Ghandi and Martin Luther
King. I admire it. Unfortunately, I am still an animal; still a caveman
despite my Levis and boots. I can not turn the other cheek. That just
seems to me to be a good way to get a sore face. If you could protect
and old growth Douglas fir forest in Oregon from logging by spiking a
few trees, would you? If you could save the last of the blue whales from
extinction by ramming a pirate whaler, would you? If you could save the
Washakie Wilderness from roads and oil rigs by sabotaging a rig or
bulldozer, would oyu? If you could stop an acid rain polluter in Ohio by
dumping human sewage over his desk, would you?
Just as most of us have our price (I'll sell out for a hundred grand a
year, if anyone's listening), most of us have a point of no return where
we'll fight back. I think many of us have already reached that point.
EARTH FIRST! does not advocate violence or monkey-wrenching. That is an
individual choice. And in a diverse society there are many choices. Some
of us may choose to fight for the Earth by wearing high heels and
lobbying for the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C. Some of us may choose
to engage in nonviolent peaceful protests such as blockading the route
into a wilderness area in order to bar oil rigs. Others, with a thinner
veneer of civility, may choose another approach. I can respect and
understand all of these people. I wish them well.
Violence against machines is a personal decision. No one can make that
decision for anyone else. EARTH FIRST! is, I hope, large enought [sic]
to contain all this diversity.
If we report on the activities of monkeywrenchers, it is not because we
want you to do it, too. But there are people out there trying to save
their Mother from rape and their story must be told also.