ABSTRACT
From 1987 to 1990 internal and external factors promoted the use of environmental blockading across the United States. This chapter situates this development in the changing political economy of the timber industry as well as increasing contradictions between government policies regarding conservation and resource extraction. It provides a history of the emergence of the “Timber Wars” in Oregon, Washington, and California and of blockades in Texas, Arizona, Florida, and elsewhere. The causes and outcomes of deepening divisions between environmentalists and logging workers are examined. The chapter evaluates the crucial role of blockading in making the protection of old-growth forests a major national issue as well as its ability to protect individual places. It demonstrates that 1990 was the point at which the results of the previous six year’s capacity building enabled EF! to launch its first long-term protest camps and mass forest defense campaigns during Illinois’s Shawnee blockade and California’s Redwood Summer. The chapter also examines how shifts in the goals of activists and the role they assigned to ODA led to a major split in the Earth First! network regarding strategy, sabotage, and approaches to normative protester behaviour.
