What They Say About Us

DIY Culture And Direct Action

F.F. Ridley ‘Crusaders and Politicians’, Parliamentary Affairs , Vol.51, No 3, July 1998.

A special issue of ‘Parliamentary Affairs’ looks at why protest and politics outside parliament have grown while establishment party politics has declined. Ridley identifies the strength of protest, or ‘cause groups’ like ours, to lie in their moral appearance (not after personal gain), their displays of courage ( eg. tree-sitters and tunnellers) and their avoidance of institutional politics, which is viewed as corrupt and self-serving by the public.

“Cause groups are ... outsiders that do not fit into the established system of interest organisations / pressure groups which, with government, constitute the networks of policymaking. They are excluded because they have no ongoing concern with a set of material interests, no clientele that can be defined in such terms, and often no permanent organisation either. But they may also be outsiders by choice. This can be a tactical choice, as suggested above (e.g. to mobilise support that crosses socio-economic divisions as well as party-political lines ). It can also be a tactical choice to avoid being tarred with the brush of politics, since a political colouring is more likely to lose than win supporters.”

“their supporters may show unexpectedly strong emotions, displacing expected behaviour patterns and disrupting established ways of government - as did the Crusades many centuries ago.” !!

Darren Hoad, ‘Direct Action and the Environmental Movement’, Talking Politics , 10:3, Spring 1998.

This article discusses the nature of direct action, and argues that it is the reaction of social groups who find themselves marginalised by the political system.

“Activists themselves really fall into two camps; those who want to overturn the system and replace it with decentralised, democratic and sustainable alternatives (see Earth First! And Green Anarchist networks) and those who want to see the processes of liberal democracy refined, made more accountable, less secretive and obviously sustainable. In both cases direct action is seen as the means to their differing ends.”

“Much of the thinking which underpins environmental movements’ demands sees the institutions of the State as anathema. The state’s systems and processes are remote from the individual. They are actually responsible for unregulated growth and pollution and they are unable to acknowledge difference and alternative lifestyles.”

“An explanation for ... direct action is perhaps best rooted in the sense of isolation, disenfranchisement and the failure of the liberal democratic system to encompass variety and difference.”

The Anti-roads Movement

Brian Doherty 'Opposition to Road-Building'. Parliamentary Affairs , Vol.51, No.3, July 1998, Oxford University Press.

Doherty covers the Earth First! critique of Greenpeace/Friends of the Earth and looks at how the anti-roads movement mixes reformist NIMBYism and countercultural ideals.

He states that “The anti-roads movement is an awkward combination of a radical new social movement and a more specific reformist environmentalism.”

“The direct action groups helped to create a story, whilst the more moderate groups were able to fill the new political scenario with political meanings, arguing the case against roads on technical grounds. In turn, this also allowed for some surprisingly positive media coverage of the counter-cultural idealism of the direct action groups.”

Brian Doherty - b.j.a.doherty@keele.ac.uk

Looking at how ‘repertoires of action’ develop, Doherty argues that the example of the anti-roads protests “support the view that when new forms [of NVDA] emerge they do so as a result of interaction between movements and their opponents.” He defines the use of tunnels, lock-ons, tripods etc., as a ‘manufactured vulnerability’.

“Whereas previously barricades provided protection for protesters now the tripod exposes the vulnerability of the protester. It does not oppose force with force, but places the responsibility for the protester’s safety in the hands of the authorities.”

“If the authorities are not going to use violence on a scale sufficient to shock the public, how can protesters resist in such a way that maximises their effectiveness but also exposes the contrast between the force used by the authorities and protesters’ moral superiority? Eco-activists in Britain and elsewhere have used technical devices to manufacture their own dangers in order to make their bodies vulnerable. The use of tools is therefore more than simply a technical game; it is essential to the dual aims of making power visible by prolonging its exposure and attempting to change government policy directly.”

Brian Doherty , ‘Paving the Way: The Rise of Direct Action against Road-building and the Changing Character of British Environmentalism‘, Political Studies (1999), XLVII.

Here Doherty looks at how the radical environmental movement refutes the theory of ‘political opportunity structures’, which claims that “social movements form when ordinary citizens, sometimes encouraged by leaders, respond to change in opportunities that lower the costs of collective action, reveal potential allies and show where elites and authorities are vulnerable.”

He points out that the protesters at Twyford, for example, had little hope of success, and that “sites for protests were chosen based on the need to oppose the imminent destruction of valued locations rather than based upon an instrumental calculation over the longer term of the right moment to act.”

What the theory misses is that the passion and determination of the activists themselves can create a movement, “credit must be given to the inspiration provided by the movements’ early risers who established the Earth First! network and protested at Twyford Down with little hope of success.”

Wallace McNeish , ‘The Anti-Roads Protest in the UK: a Sociological and Political Analysis’, in Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference Bound Papers 1996 Available through inter-library loans from the National Library.

McNeish looks at the anti-roads movement according to the theories of Jurgen Habermas, who sees new social movements as forms of resistance to the ‘System’s colonisation of the Lifeworld’. The lack of public consultation over new road developments, for example, and the way in which the issue was dealt with by government as a technical one to be decided by experts, represents the encroachment of the ‘System’ on the life-world." The key to success for social movements lies in how well they express a 'communicative rationality' to oppose this encroachment.

“for Habermas the new social movements ... provide examples and prototype models for the possible birth of a new society that is predicated on equality, universal rights and radical democracy. The anti-roads movement fulfils each of these positive criteria in its base community like protest camps and free states, in its law-breaking NVDA, in its grassroots participatory orientation and in its refusal to abide by the state’s repressive laws or planning decisions."

Ben Seel , 'Strategies of Resistance at the Pollok Free State Road Protest Camp'. Environmental Politics , Vol.6, No.4, Winter 1997. Published by Frank Cass, London.

Seel uses the theories of the Marxist Antonio Gramsci to consider how far the 'core group' of protesters at Pollok represented a challenge to the 'hegemonic', or dominant, capitalist system.

"The ideological perspectives and strategies of the core group are best described as embryonic counter-hegemonic resistance, while at the same time their actions also contribute to a residue of reform."

He states that "the core group challenged hegemonic ideology and culture in four main ways. They challenged the legitimacy of ownership of land, the democratic status of Britain’s liberal-democratic polity, the notion of economic growth and 'infrastructure improvement' as being equal to development or progress, and commodity consumption as the route to personal satisfaction or happiness." However, they were only 'embryonic' because “long term strategic theory was not a central articulating principle amongst the core group.”

Earth First! (UK)

Each of these articles covers, to a greater or lesser extent, the EF! critique of Greenpeace and other Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations, the debates on non-violence and property destruction, the law, the media and personal lifestyle. They tend to position the philosophy of EF! UK in between deep ecology and social ecology, distancing it from its EF! US counterpart, and then examine how the political strategy relates to core principles. But remember, no-one speaks for you - even the Action Update can’t really be representative.

Ben Seel , 'If Not You, Then Who?' Earth First! in the UK, Environmental Politics , Vol.6, No.4, Winter 1997, published by Frank Cass, London.

In this short article Seel views Earth First! UK as part of the same 'embryonic counter-hegemony' as the Pollok Free Staters, being “perhaps the only part of the wider green movement today which asks questions of systemic rather than just reform-oriented scope.”

“Essentially EF! is concerned with trying to influence the future trajectory of 'progress' and 'development' through a mixture of green cultural alternatives and NVDA protest exposures and show-downs which try to show where power lies, whose interests it is being used in, and what is passing for ‘progress’ or ‘development’.”

Derek Wall , Mobilising Earth First! in Britain, Environmental Politics , Vol 8, Spring 1999, No 1. Published by Frank Cass. (also the book ‘Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement' , 1999, Routledge, London).

Derek Wall examines which structural influences enabled EF! to form at the time it did, although he recognises that “whatever the structural conditions, without the initial efforts of small numbers of innovators who ‘produce and propagate ideologies’ and mobilise other resources, movements are unlikely to emerge”.

“While greens may not merely seek redress of particular grievances but to create more fundamental transformation, without such concrete grievances or ‘mobilisation targets’ a green political critique may appear too diffuse and abstract to allow movement mobilisation. Such ‘targets’ act as symbols or points at which particular concerns collect together to reach a threshold where protest may occur.”

“Interview accounts suggest that the initial ‘cost’ of participation in direct action was perceived to be low, while the ‘benefits’ in terms of direct disruption, media attention, self-empowerment and solidarity creation were correspondingly high... the lack of facilitation [ government responsiveness ] and the absence of severe repression meant that EF! (UK) found it easier to raise fundamentalist demands.”

Jonathan Purkis , Daring to dream: idealism in the philosophy, organisation and campaigning strategies of Earth First! In 'To Make Another World: Studies in Protest and Collective Action' , Barker & Kennedy, 1996.

This article begins by describing an ‘ethical shoplift’ of mahogany, then uses that to explore idealism in EF! in three ways: philosophy, organisation and campaigning strategy. Purkis argues that EF! are novel in taking the 'problem' into the offices, shops and places which are usually separated from politics and struggle.

“whilst EF! as a group may concentrate on the most obviously 'criminal' companies, in their literature they may well also identify other 'suspicious' organisations and in their everyday lives activists usually monitor their own consumption patterns using ecological and other criteria. Consequently we can see a politicisation of everyday life and the emergence of a ecological notion of the ‘personal as political’ ... when this new sensibility is linked to direct action, it is possible to see a dual type of resistance - both symbolic and economic - to the prevailing economic and political culture, on a local and a global basis.”

“although EF! are being idealistic in then-long term vision of a society adhering to some of the principles of Social Ecology, in their day to day activism they show a pragmatism and a reflexivity of purpose as to what is feasible.”

Alex Plows , 'Earth First! Defending Mother Earth, direct-style', in George McKay’s 'DIY Culture' , 1999

Speaking as an activist, Plows analyses the different ethical and political ideas of EF! in a much more thorough, if also more personal way, bearing in mind that “EF! is defined by the people who make it up at any one given time” and “ideology is autonomous, autonomy is the ideology.” She argues that EF! is the opposite of a single issue campaign. “EF! aims to bring to the public’s attention the 'hidden' socioeconomic/environmental costs, the knock-on effects: ‘progress’ can only be defined as such because it is itself presented and evaluated in a 'single-issue' way.”

“On its Action Updates, EF! defines itself as ‘a convenient banner for people who share similar philosophies to work under’. This ‘similar philosophy’ is an appreciation of a shared ethical/political agenda with a fundamental target: while groups tackle, for example, intensive farming, the arms trade, road-building, these are the effects of a more insidious cause - ‘progress culture’. Capitalism, modernity, call it what you will - EF! challenges this dominant paradigm, the structure/values/structure spiral which promotes and perpetuates exploitative unsustainability, and terms it ‘progress’, ‘development’.”

“EF! links western ‘progress’ to an anthropocentric (human centred) value system. That is, society perceives itself as being separate to, and better than, nature, rather than an intrinsic part of it. EF! not only challenges this anthropomorphic value-system with direct action, but posits an alternative, holistic ethic as a replacement.”