Abstract:
In July 2000, federal agents raided an environmental action camp created to prevent logging in Mt. Hood National Forest, Washington. High above the forest floor, activists constructed an intricate platform made of rope and plywood that swung back and forth between two large conifer trees. Thirteen people occupied oversized hammocks supported by the makeshift web. If the trees or ropes were cut, these forest defenders would have fallen to their deaths. Seventeen-year-old Emma Murphy-Ellis, known to her forest friends as “Pitch,” held off the federal agents for almost eight hours, at one point placing a noose around her neck and threatening to hang herself if they came closer. Reporters snapped photos, as her precarious body became the center of the action. Activists described the raid by government agents as “not just an assault on a political action, but the desecration of a sacred site,” and for this reason called for extreme responses that entailed putting their bodies at risk for the forest.
Philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour argues in The Politics of Nature that the proper task of political ecology is to “multiply matters of concern” and disrupt the ordering of classes of beings by multiplying unforeseen connections and brutally varying their relative importance.” (27).
My talk will explore the ways in which young environmental activists reconfigure their relationship with trees and other nonhuman species and the extent to which they disrupt and vary the usual classification of things and beings in the logging country of the Pacific Northwestern U. S. Important resources for activists’ reconfiguration of these relationships include North American forms of Paganism and Native American traditions as well as Christianity.
Through ruptural performances in treetops and on logging roads, forest activists follow political scientist Jane Bennett’s call to elevate “the status of the shared materiality of all things.” In activists’ press releases and other writings, spotted owls and redwoods become “actants” in Latour’s sense. However, activists also fall into what Latour identifies as the fallacy of Nature as a unified other when they depict “the wild” in opposition to civilization in a battle for the future of life on this planet. While their ritual practices often undermine this tendency, it nevertheless creeps back in at the edges of protest spaces and in encounters with other human publics, such as reporters and law enforcement. My paper will explore the tension between these two tendencies--one that blurs boundaries between organisms and the other that sharpens them--and the ways they get worked out in the spaces of forest action camps and in the public sphere of courtrooms and media representations. Ritual actions and gestures vary in “effectiveness” at constructing new collectivities/assemblages across these different contexts and in these different configurations of relationships between human and nonhuman bodies.