It's time for a sober appraisal of this "movement" and the effectiveness of its tactics, in particular where the nonviolence code is concerned. Nonviolence is reactive, a negative objective - however, it's becoming increasingly clear that the tactics employed by the EF! movement can be better described with a positive, pro-active term - namely, ass-kissing. It's time to face the fact that ass-kissing is not an effective tactic for social change.

Nonviolence is a potentially empowering concept, not to be confused with complacent ass-kissing, which helps reinforce traditional hierarchical relationships within society instead of challenging them. Nonviolence started out promisingly as a genuinely radical alternative to the moribund carcass of mainstream environmentalism, but has since become effete and formulaic, a masturbatory exercise in defeat.

Earth First! cannot be an effective movement and continue practicing the brand of nonviolence it currently professes. Our numbers simply aren't sufficient. Even at large campaigns with a couple of hundred people, only a fraction are willing to risk arrest or defy the police.

A prime illustration of this is the '97 Headwaters campaign. The rally was nothing more than a party, and the political dialogue there was virtually indistinguishable from that which might be overheard at the local McDonald's. Even the local papers recognized the rally for what it was: a gathering of nostalgic, harmless liberals, about as intimidating as the Promise Keeper's. In fact, the organizers were so terrified that this rally would be mistaken for an actual protest that they were compelled to provide their own security force, dubbed "Peace Keepers," although "Ass-Kissers" would have been a more appropriate term. Their primary function seemed to be to remind the participants that they were there to party, not to protest.

The next day, about 200 people walked from the California Department of Forestry (CDF) in Fortuna to the entrance of Pacific Lumber's property. The next few hours entailed listening to a variety of watered-down, uninspiring propaganda that would have had us believe that our presence was impeding the progress of Maxxam. The fact was that no logging was planned that day, but that was all right because it was a "Good Action."

More excellent examples of this sort of risk-free activism can be found in an October 9 Headwaters action alert. The action alert begins with a greeting from the Headwaters basecamp and almost immediately launches into a self-congratulatory, delusional rave about giant puppets and street theater shutting down Maxxam. After wading through an ocean of generic EF! rhetoric, I saw a paragraph that caught my eye: "Immediately after the rally cleared out, we transformed into basecamp and dove right into action. On Monday the 15th, 200 folks marched from CDF in Fortuna to the Newburgh road gate, where 15 women held a line across the gate, and wood elves hiked around to the road above.

"The Humboldt County Sheriffs and California Highway Patrol stood stone-faced as we rallied, ranted and prayed, until reinforcements arrived in riot gear and got into military formation. After removing activists from the road above, the police focused on the crowd who were peaceably assembling and allowing police vehicles to pass. They declared us an illegal assembly and ordered us to disperse by threatening us with chemical agents! We circled up to seek consensus but at the last moment the police charged us and most of us moved." In my opinion, this one paragraph says more about the present state of our "movement" than the last 20 issues of the EF! Journal put together.

As anyone who is actually out on the front lines will tell you, we are badly in need of some new tactics and some type of long-term revolutionary strategy that links our actions with those of other resistance movements around the globe. The fact that the authors of the above-mentioned Headwaters action alert went out of their way to actually boast about obeying the police shows that the real priority of most activists is not protecting the Earth but protecting the reputation of Earth First! as a law abiding, nonviolent protest group that "plays by the rules."

At Headwaters rallies, people shout things like, "We're not extremists, we all have jobs, we all pay taxes; we're not against logging, we just want to see it done differently." Signs that read "Jail Charles Hurwitz" and "End Lawless Logging" are everywhere. In 1998, as we teeter on the brink of total ecological devastation, this type of liberal ass-kissing is intolerable. Asking the system that created Charles Hurwitz to punish him can only be described as pathetic; if Hurwitz ever went to jail it would only be as a shill for the capitalist system whose very raison d'Ωtre is resource extraction.

Let's return to the text of the action alert, "On Thursday, 21 activists locked down in cement-encased lock boxes across Fisher road, the controversial site of the last two September Headwaters Rallies. Again, authorities ordered us to disperse, which we chose to do willingly as a sort of Akido move."

Akido is based on the concept of leading your opponent, of harmonizing with your opponent's charge and turning their aggression against them. Yet nowhere in this flyer is it ever explained how this clever "Akido move" was used against the police; in fact, it is never mentioned again. This is because no Akido move ever took place and the self-styled "Earth Warriors" of Humboldt County are only trying to make themselves appear heroic, when their actions clearly betray their lack of revolutionary courage and their cringing obedience to authority. The police did the leading in this situation and the crowd scattered, probably because most of them were new recruits under the insidious influence of the power-tripping liberals who try to set policy for the entire environmental movement.

What is this policy? Ostensibly, it is contained in the nonviolence code, the holy scripture that liberal environmentalists adhere to with all the religious zeal of any fundamentalist fanatic, seeking to convert those who have not yet "seen the light" - at least until the letter of the law conflicts with the single most holy precept conceivable to the "believer," ass-kissing. Not coincidentally, the only rule included in the nonviolence code that doesn't explicitly call for ass-kissing is also the rule most EF!ers have no compunction about breaking: We will not run. Oh, yes - we will run, and darn fast, when cops or loggers are after us. The Headwaters nonviolence code, aside from being archaic and ineffective, can be downright dangerous when used as a shield for cowardly behavior. Strict, dogmatic adherence to a nonviolence code often endangers the safety of fellow activists who place themselves in vulnerable positions at the mercy of hostile forces with only their "support group" as protection.

An excellent example was an action at Dillon Creek this year. A young EF!er locked down to a water truck that blocked the roadway leading to the sale units. When the loggers arrived, about half of the support team fled, leaving about six of us. The loggers opened up a valve and began dumping water on the poor kid's head. We still had them out numbered, and I tried to convince everyone to band together and shut off the water. No one would back me up, and I wound up facing two loggers alone. I nearly got my ass kicked for nothing, as they physically prevented me from shutting off the water and finished emptying hundreds of gallons of water upon their unfortunate target who had been abandoned by most of his support group.

Then, they chased one of our number through the woods and hit him with a shovel. Another protester was thrown on the ground. Later, when I chastised my fellow blockaders for not forcing them to shut the water off, one of them looked at me aghast and said, "That might have provoked violence." I don't think he was joking. The fact is, the loggers did get violent - but not with the people who stood up to them. Subservience is no guarantee of personal safety; in fact it is an insult to the memory of effective nonviolent movements whose members risked life and limb standing up to and defying their oppressors. None of the great, successful nonviolent movements were ass-kissing in nature; they were developmental and progressive, not dogmatic and inflexible. The very notion of resting on one's laurels is antithetical to the idea of calling something a "movement." People in Earth First! need to become familiar with the history of nonviolent resistance before they begin to espouse a political philosophy they cannot even claim to understand.

Further evidence of the depraved toadying that passes for activism can be seen in another of the fascist rules included in the nonviolence code: We will not destroy any property. How can a creed fashioned with the ostensible aim of preserving the Earth even acknowledge the idea of "property"? This is an inescapable paradox, and a fatal flaw in our strategy. Clearly, this movement is suffering from an identity crisis.

For too long we have relied on gurus and ideologues to define us and our shared philosophy. Deep ecology is an intellectual concept about putting the Earth first created by college professors who are environmentally radical but politically reactionary and who are pushing their own reformist political agenda that will never take us far beyond fairly limited forms of lawful protest and lobbying.

Are we willing to concede to this kind of tyrannical manipulation?

There is a police-like mentality at work that should frighten anyone concerned with real social or ecological change. The movement must be what we decide it should be, not what self-appointed leaders decide for us, especially when these decisions were made in a different era. This type of intellectual browbeating would be inexcusable in an effective social movement. It's time to jettison the nonviolence code and allow this movement to be redefined in the terms of its actual participants.