The Transition Movement discussion

Chapter 28. Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the Means?

For comments about chapter 28

Bron Taylor, professor of religion and nature, environmental ethics, and environmental studies at the University of Florida, and a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich Germany.

This chapter, like the previous one, and several others in the book, examines the intersection of the book’s sustainability subject with that of morality and ethics. Taylor starts his introduction by asking

Has the time come for a massive wave of direct action resistance to accelerating rates of environmental degradation around the world – degradation that is only getting worse due to climate change? Is a new wave of direct action resistance emerging, one similar but more widespread than that sparked by Earth First!, the first avowedly “radical” environmental group?

The radical environmental movement, formed in the U.S in 1980, promoted civil disobedience and sabotage as tactics, and into the 1990s, “when the most militant radical environmentalists adopted the Earth Liberation Front name”, increasingly resorted to arson.

Taylor reports that militant environmentalist groups can be found throughout the world. (view spoiler)[ “… and are increasingly fused with anarchist ideologies.” This pejorative reference to anarchism may admittedly carry forward from the words of the organizations themselves, but should not be thought to be representative of anarchist philosophy in general, which has recently been examined in this useful review. (hide spoiler)] Taylor then wonders “whether direct action resistance is becoming unambiguously revolutionary, or perhaps even purposefully violent?”

The chapter is very interesting and well-written, dealing with the following topics: the radical outlook of the 2011 Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet conference; the premises underlying an ethical analysis of resistance to laws and policies; the various types of resistance which are available, and what the outcome has been when these have been actually implemented in the past (thus evaluating their efficacy); and the question of whether the time has come when large numbers of people should be making a moral choice to begin active resistance against policies and power centers in the contemporary developed world.

I found the historical information about radical environmentalism of interest, because many of the organizations mentioned (Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, Deep Green Resistance) I’d never heard of (or forgotten); and also because an organization that I donate to (Center for Biological Diversity) was mentioned as a descendant of radical environmentalism, via the more mainstream 1989 Greater Gila Biodiversity Project.

Just to wrap up a short summary of this chapter, three more points: (i) Some of the early radical environmental groups expected and welcomed the collapse of modern society because of its own unsustainable weight; and a revolutionary stream of these groups have found hope in any action they believe will promote this collapse; (ii) Taylor rejects the more violent forms of resistance, judging them to be fanciful in their supposed goals and ultimately counterproductive (though unless I missed something, he does not go so far as to call them immoral); and (iii) he documents the history of the anti-timber company campaign in the Pacific Northwest to halt deforestation, particularly of extreme old-growth timber stands. The tactics this campaign employed were very aggressive, and often illegal, and included actions such as tree spiking, blockades, destruction of logging equipment and other forms of sabotage. The campaign increased public awareness of the issues involved tremendously, and was ultimately successful when the political pressure generated caused the Pacific Lumber Company to eventually give up its attempts to harvest ancient redwood groves, sell most of the timber rights they held to the state of California, and eventually to go bankrupt.