ABSTRACT
One of the defining features of the 1990s in Britain was large-scale popular campaigning against the construction of new roads. In the late 1980s the then Conservative government, siding with the roads lobby in the 'great transport debate', announced a massive 23 billion euros programme of new road building across the length of the country. Protesters, variously motivated but united by the belief that road-building would create more traffic congestion not less and that the swathes of countryside lost therefore to development would be sacrificed in vain, placed themselves bodily in the way of construction. The diverse and detraditionalized nature of protest-movement spiritualities resists their easy categorization into a single label, but nevertheless certain themes predominate suggesting two broad types of Eco-Paganism. The decision to build a new road creates, in effect, the space in which alternative lifestyles and spiritualities can flourish, albeit temporarily.
