The notion that industrial civilization is not worth the benefits didn't originate here in the Northwest. Nor is its story confined here. Yet while researching the article, I returned to our neck of the (old-growth) woods time and time again. Earth First!, the ecological monkeywrenchers who gave us tree-sits and tree-spiking, did some of their most famous work in the timber belt of Oregon and Northern California. Their descendants in the ELF torched McMansions and GMO crops in the suburbs of Portland and Seattle. John Zerzan, the original anarcho-primitivist, lives and teaches in Eugene. A little further inland, in the mountains of western Montana, Ted Kaczynski hid from society as he built his bombs.
One of the central paradoxes of the Northwest is that we are close to, and often reverent of, nature and yet the economy built here after white settlement has been dominated by extractive industry. That is not an irreconcilable conflict - as I'll cover in later posts, loggers have often considered themselves stewards of the land - but it is difficult to deal with for many people. It's easy to feel disgust and anger at the sight of clearcuts or dams or vistas of suburban shitboxes encroaching on what still feels like a very wild place. Combine that with the Western USA's history as a breeding ground for wild ideas of all political stripes and you get the perfect recruiting ground for anti-civilization radicals.
That's my psychoanalytic introduction - now pop on over to Sea Lion Press and learn the harder facts.
