The Monkey Wrench Gang

Earth First ! literature is sprinkled with the word monkeywrenching ' - its euphemism for direct action . As explained by Earth First ! Journal the act of throwing a monkey wrench into a complex social mechanism is a means of striking at the Earth 's destroyers at the point where they commit their crimes

Among the strategies pioneered by EF to impede logging was tree-sitting where an EF ! volunteer would camp out on the branch of a tree slated for cutting - sometimes for several days - while EFers on the ground brought supplies and carried away

garbage . The idea was that loggers would avoid trees thus occupied . EF member Julia "Butterfly " Hill holds the record for the longest tree-sit to date between 1997 and 1999 , she spent 728 days in the crown of a 180-foot-tall California Redwood tree in to save it from the saws of the Pacific Lumber Company

Another favorite tactic of EF was to camp out on logging roads , thus obstructing vehicle access to cutting sites . EF activists would also pile branches , rocks , and felled trees across the roads as improvised barricades

Green peace and Earth first

Unlike Greenpeace , Earth First (EF ) is not an incorporated nonprofit It

has no board of directors or officeholders who take responsibility for its actions . Indeed , it has no formal leadership , preferring to think of itself as a movement ' rather than an organization According to EF Monkey wrenching is a step beyond civil disobedience . It is nonviolent , aimed only at inanimate objects , and at the pocketbooks of the industrial despoilers . It is the final step in the defense of the wild , the deliberate action taken by the Earth defender when all other measures have failed , the process whereby the wilderness defender becomes the wilderness acting in self-defense

Distinguished author , activist , and ecologist Kirkpatrick Sale discuses...