Dave Foreman Obituary

Dave Foreman, who died last week aged 75, was an American radical environmentalist who helped to found the radical environmental group Earth First! He was throughout his life a controversial figure, but also a fearless champion of non-human life on Planet Earth.

Foreman was born into a military family in New Mexico. He started his career as an activist by campaigning for the unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and he spent the 1960s being active in Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing group opposed to hippies and the peace movement, although he also worked as a teacher in Zuni Indian reservation. He briefly joined the US Marines - whilst the Vietnam War was raging - but was dismissed after going AWOL. 

By 1973 though he was working for Wilderness Society, a venerable Washington based group that mainly campaigned for the preservation of Federal lands. Despite the seventies being 'the decade of the environment' Foreman became disillusioned with the professionalisation of the environment movement and it's increasing reliance of alliances with government and big business. It was on a weekend expedition away from DC that idea for Earth First! was formed. The story has been somewhat mythologised, but what everyone agrees on is that Foreman was hiking in the Pinacate Desert with four friends and lamenting the state of the Big Green groups when Foreman suddenly called out 'Earth First'. The group had a name and, thanks to Foreman's friend Mike Roselle, a logo of a clenched fist. To this would be added the motto 'no compromise in the defence of Mother Earth'

A huge influence on Earth First! was the writer Edward Abbey and his book The Monkey Wrench Gang. The story was a neo-Western in which the four heroes wander the American South-West blowing up logging, mining, and construction equipment. Earth First! was never to be that radical, but the emphasis on action over lobbying, decentralised organisation over national structure, and campaigning in the wilderness rather than the Capitol, was to be the hall mark of the new group. 

The groups first action was to roll a fake crack down the Glen Canyon dam. Glen Canyon was the legacy of a Faustian pact by the Sierra Club and the government, where they agreed to not oppose the flooding of the canyon in return for dams in the Grand Canyon being cancelled. Unfortunately, they agreed the bargain before they'd seen Glan Canyon, and only then realised their mistake. Destroying the dam had been an ambition of Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang too.

Earth First! soon moved on from publicity stunts and radical conservation proposals, to taking direct action, mainly to preserve ancient forests. When road blockades didn't work they went into tree sitting, and then to the more controversial tactic of tree spiking. 

The annual gathering of the organisation was called the Round River Rendezvous, named after an Obijwa myth. Given Foreman's background there was not surprisingly a right-libertarian vibe to EF! in those early years, which earnt it the nickname 'Rednecks for Wilderness'. Foreman helped fuel this idea with controversial statements such opposing giving food aid for the Ethiopian famine and opposing immigration into the USA. But as the eighties rolled on more left-wing anarchists started to join EF! leading to tensions with the old guard. At the 1987 Rendezvous Edward Abbey was heckled, which did not go down well with Foreman. 

These tensions resulted in a debate between Dave Foreman and the political philosopher Murray Bookchin. Bookchin's theory of social ecology was in many ways the opposite of the Deep Green philosophy Foreman had adopted. however, their correspondence remarkably produced more light than heat, as resulted in the book Defending the Earth. Foreman apologised for, and clarified his more controversial views, whilst Bookchin spoke of his admiration for Foreman as a champion of the Earth. Differences remained. Bookchin was suspicious of the anti-humanism in Deep Ecology, whilst Foreman was concerned that many anarchists were 'anthropocentrists'. Nor did he believe conservation could wait until 'after the revolution'.

By the time the book came out though Foreman was about finished with Earth First! but in 1990 he was still closely enough associated with them for the FBI's COINTELPRO to try to set him up. FBI special agent Mike Hain joined the group and befriended Foreman and others. Hain planned a mission to bring down power lines to a nuclear power station. The FBI agent bought the cutting equipment himself and drove the team out into the desert, where the SWAT team was waiting to arrest them. Foreman was not on the raid himself, but was arrested on conspiracy charges. He acquitted of the more serious offences but given a suspended sentence for the misdemeanour of giving a copy of his book Ecodefence: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching to an FBI informant. The Bureau in the end spent $2 million discrediting Foreman and Earth First!

In 1991 Foreman co-founded the group that became known as the Wildlife Network, a more mainstream conservation organisation aiming to preserve the diversity of wild places. In 1995 he completed his journey from the mainstream to the radical fringe and back when joined the board of the Sierra Club, one of the Washington based Big Green organisations Earth First! had been created to oppose, although he was to leave again before the decade was over though as once again his views on immigration caused controversy.

In 1992 Foreman had coined the term 'rewilding' and this is what he dedicated his energies to in the last two decades of his life. He set up the Rewilding Institute with the aim of doing more than just preserve what was left of America's wild places, but instead to bring back apex predictors and create a more diverse wilderness. Like Earth First!, rewilding was an idea that was to go far beyond what Foreman initially envisaged.

That indeed is the dilemma of Dave Foreman's life. Despite being a distinctly right-wing libertarian with some extremely conservative views, he ended up being the catalyst for groups around the world that have mainly been embraced by people with diametrically opposed political views. Personally, I am one of them, but if we are to indeed save, and rewild, the Earth we need people from across the political spectrum to care for the environment. If everyone on the political right was a Dave Foreman, we'd be in much better situation than we are.