Journal for the Study of Radicalism

Introduction: Environmentalism, Radicalism, Activism

Morgan Shipley — 2024-04-30

Nature Spirituality and Negation

Roger S. Gottlieb — 2024-04-30

A negation is an aspect of current unfree, irratiional society that can lead towards radical transformation. Spiritality, at least of the socially engaged type, can function as a negation. Nature spirituality has for millenia been a form of spirituality that offers an alterantive to the human ego--and thus of sources of oppression and injustice-- as a sturcture of consciousness and action. What is the fate of nature spirituality in the face of the environmental crisis? Despite fundamental shifts in the traditional experience of nature--expecially our confrontation with loss, degradation, and extinction-- some forms of negation remain.

Between John Brown and Eugenics: The Radicalism of Forest Preservation in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts

Dan McKanan — 2024-04-30

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a diverse group of activists and conservationists in metropolitan Boston enacted legislation that created the nation's first state parks, and set in motion the dramatic reforestation of the eastern United States. Though this story is less well known than the creation of the national parks, it deserves more attention because it shows how it is possible to restore biodiversity in all the places where we live, work, and play, including landscapes that have been significantly disrupted by human activity. Because the activists in this story had ties to both the abolitionism of the previous generation and the eugenics of the next, it is a case study in the shifting nature of American radicalism. The "radicalism" of one era can easily metamorphose into the mainstream of the next, or even into a new radicalism of a seemingly contrary stamp.

Karen Coulter and the Religious Roots of Radicalism in North America

Amanda Nichols — 2024-04-30

Radical environmentalist and Earth First!er Karen Coulter has devoted her life to activism. A closer examination of Coulter’s work illuminates the complex and often overlooked connections between religion and radicalism that have shaped the North American environmental movement. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival research, I provide a biographical account of the history, motivations, and outcomes of Coulter’s radicalism. Early successes in anti-nuclear activism fueled her passion, and she went on to join Greenpeace, Earth First!, and later co-founded Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project. Coulter’s journey elucidates much about the cultural milieu of her time, including about the trajectory of radicalism in North America. Through her activism, Coulter has fostered diversity and inclusion and worked to mitigate issues of social and environmental injustice. It is her spiritual connection to nature, however, that has kept her engaged and fighting for the protection and preservation of earth’s species biodiversity and ecosystem viability.

Mushroom Dialectics: Green Capital, Nature, and the Politics of Eco-Militancy

John Maerhofer — 2024-04-30

This article rethinks the parameters of eco-militancy through a historical lens while also providing a context for building radical ecological struggle that emphasizes system change over static reformism. Building upon the work of such figures as Andreas Malm, Carylon Merchant, and David Pellow, I argue that the legacy of the ecological guerrilla has been obscured by the rise of mainstream environmentalism, which aligns itself with multinational capital in order to accentuate the view that militant activism is incongruous with the development of an ecosystemic society. As such, what is missing in both orthodox critiques and leftist assessments of radical environmentalist groups, like those associated with Earth Liberation, is that eco-militancy compels us to revise our conceptions of nature outside of the exchange-value rationale of capital and the romanticized adaptations of biocentrism that underlie the current form of climate justice.

Environmental Radicalism

Claudia J Ford — 2024-04-30

This paper provides a framework for environmental radicalism that includes a description of the revolutionary actions needed to reimagine justice as the foundation of the human relationship to self, Other, and the planet. A commitment to revolutionary action is not inherently destructive, it is intrinsically creative. Besides, revolution is the only way in which humans can realize environmental futures of any kind. Revolution is the means by which humanity might step away from the current destructive trajectory of environmental and social exploitation of self, Other, and the natural world. To understand environmental radicalism in the context of revolution requires a re-definition of environmental radicalism. This new definition must be framed in terms of two key principles: first, the disassembling of white supremacy and its belief systems that are the foundations of environmental dysfunction, and second, a commitment to justice within an epistemology of environmental care and wisdom.

The time for environmental radicalism is now. We face existential environmental crises that will bring rampant injustice along the way to annihilation. In this paper, we demonstrate that the history of mainstream environmentalism is a narrative of failed moderation. We develop both a new definition of, and a framework for, a family of environmental radicalisms. We also discuss what it would look like to implement a radical environmental agenda, demonstrating that the moderate environmentalism of the political left has been part and parcel of the environmental status quo, rather than a force helping us to move toward right relationship between humans and the environment. To exit the path of environmental destruction and declension the environmental field itself must be liberated from notions of tepid moderation and timid change in movement towards environmental revolution and radicalism. Environmental radicalism requires a profound understanding of the oppressions of white supremacy in service to dismantling unjust systems and creating possibilities for a less ruinous and more just future for people and for the Earth.

Radical Strategies: Cultivating Eco-consciousness Through Wonder and Psychedelic Experience

Lisa Sideris — 2024-04-30

Recent scholarship suggests the benefits of psychedelic experiences for cultivating environmentally-friendly attitudes and behaviors. Key dispositions induced by psychoactive substances—feelings of interconnection, diminished ego-centric perspectives, or positive feelings of smallness and humility—are also central to many accounts of wonder and awe. Putting scholarship on psychedelics together with research on wonder and awe underscores a set of pro-environmental values and orientations that are often reported among radical environmentalists who identify strongly with nature and nonhuman life. Altered states of consciousness, attained through psychedelic substances, intense experiences of wonder, or both, may be instrumental in discerning the root causes of the environmental crisis and breaking through the grief, anxiety, and paralysis that often comes with confronting it. Moreover, I argue, some inherent limitations of wonder might be addressed and potentially overcome through use of psychedelics.

Nature Spirituality, Environmental Movements, and Radical Politics: A Conversation with Professor Bron Taylor

Morgan Shipley — 2024-04-30

Review of The Ghost Forest

Bron Taylor — 2024-04-30

Not applicable for this book review essay

Book Review of The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism

Robert King — 2024-04-30

Review of This Radical Land by Daegan Miller

Eva-Maria Swidler — 2024-04-30

A book review.

A Review of Grocery Activism: The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota

Ellen Ahlness — 2024-04-30

Review of The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements by Kimberley Kinder

Robert Kyriakos Smith — 2024-04-30

Review: The Collected Works of Errico Malatesta, Volume III, A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897-1898.

Wesley Bishop — 2024-04-30

Review of "The Collected Works of Errico Malatesta, Volume III, A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897-1898."