Hella Nation - Evan Wright [46]
“The most important thing about the Manifesto,” Wingnut insists, “is that Kaczynski says ‘we.’ He says ‘we’ believe, ‘we’ are revolutionaries. The Manifesto was written for everyone.”
Through the medium of his Manifesto, Kaczynski and Wingnut found each other. They shared a certain symmetry. Kaczynski wrote it while living alone in a shack; Wingnut read it while living alone in a tree. When Wingnut mentions Kaczynski’s use of the word “we,” he sounds a bit like a teenage girl at a concert who believes the singer performed the love song just for her.
IN 1975, EDWARD ABBEY published The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel that fictionalized the real-life exploits of four radical activists who roamed the West in the 1960s sabotaging machinery and property to defend the environment. “Monkey-wrenching” entered the lexicon as a verb meaning basically to sabotage property in defense of the environment. Abbey himself was cited as an inspiration behind the radical environmental group Earth First! when it was founded in 1979 with the motto “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.”
By 1985, Earth First! members pioneered the use of tree sits to protect forests from logging. Many in Earth First! also advocated (and no doubt practiced) monkey-wrenching, including driving spikes into trees, which pose the threat of serious injury or death to loggers. Though spokespeople for Earth First! disavow monkey-wrenching, the Earth First! Journal website sells Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, coedited by one of the group’s cofounders, Dave Foreman.
Doug Peacock, the ex-Green Beret medic and a Vietnam vet who was a member of the actual “Monkey Wrench Gang” on which the 1975 book was based, argues that the radical environmentalism, including monkey-wrenching, he practiced in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t go far enough. He believes the only hope for saving the environment lies in dismantling the entire system. When I spoke to him shortly after the WTO protests, Peacock said, “I’m right up there with those Eugene kids when it comes to throwing bombs at the system. Out of monkey-wrenching came Earth First! and out of Earth First! came anarchy. Monkey-wrenching was never enough by itself to take on the system. I see new hope in the upswing of the anarchist movement. I thank those kids for doing what they did in Seattle.”
Anarchism as a political philosophy was originally more concerned with the deleterious effects of the state on the human condition than the harm-fulness of technology. In the nineteenth century, when anarchism became fashionable in England, it was embraced as much as an aesthetic and moral philosophy as it was an actual political movement. If the point of anarchism was to explore the untapped potential of humankind free from the tyrannies of the state, the next logical step would be to imagine the liberated, natural human in harmony with wild nature. Technology, like the state, came to be viewed as a tyrannical force that corrupted humankind and nature alike. Mary Shelley—daughter of seminal anarchist thinker William Godwin and wife of anarchist-inspired poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—would pen the original horror story of technology, Frankenstein.
Utopian anarchist thought and the musings of Romantic poets permeated the back-to-nature spirit of 1960s environmentalism. While Earth First! activists adopted, or at least talked about, use of militant, destructive tactics like spiking trees, the idea of anarchism as both means and end of the environmental movement didn’t take root until the 1990s.
Wingnut’s hero, Ted Kaczynski, advocated waging war against technology, corporations and the political order in order restore humankind to its proper state of subservience to nature. Where Mary Shelley’s fable about Dr. Frankenstein’s monster served as warning about the dangerous effects of technology