Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse

A fascinating premise--that the radical environmental group Earth First! can be understood in religious terms, as a millenarian movement--gets an unfortunately thin treatment in Lee's study. Millenarian and apocalyptic movements anticipate the end of the era, with the former looking toward the coming of a new age, the latter envisioning the end of the world. Earth First! fits dramatically into this framework, with its adherents predicting environmental collapse: as Earth First!er Christopher Manes writes in Green Rage, ``The understanding of radical environmentalism... begins at the end, the end of the world as we know it, the meltdown of biological diversity that our industrial culture has recklessly set in motion.'' Lee defines Earth First!'s social activists, such as Mike Roselle, as millenarians because they believe in educating and thus converting new activists to saving the earth; and deep ecology purists, such as Dave Foreman, as apocalyptics who believe that activists must focus on preserving as much biodiversity as possible before the inevitable crisis of industrialism. Lee, a political science professor, tells the story of Earth First! and its 1990 split into these two factions, but never takes her thesis further than this definition of terms. The curious reader is left wanting a clearer explanation of what Lee finds religious about Earth First! (Dec.)