Common Roots and Entangled Limbs: Earth First! and the Growth of Post-Wilderness Environmentalism on California's North Coast

Conflicts over the protection of redwood trees on California's North Coast are often depicted as following the trajectory of the radical wing of the larger American environmental movement, in which "radical" refers to the sharpness of the boundary drawn and defended between human despoliation and pure nature or "wilderness." Earth First!—an environmental organization characterized by their slogan, "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!"—is often depicted as simply the leading edge of this deepening rift between nature and culture. I argue, on the contrary, that the Earth First! branches on California's North Coast should be understood as making bold, if incomplete, attempts to cast off the problematic nature–culture dichotomy and to define social justice and ecological health as struggles with a common root. By moving beyond wilderness, the North Coast Earth First! offers the promise of a truly radical movement, by which I mean one which truly confronts capital's interlinked degradation of both natural and human communities. This article examines the efforts by the North Coast Earth First! to inscribe a new community of activists and timber-workers joined in the struggle to contest corporate claims on the redwood forest. It explores the ambiguous effects of activists' "embodied" and "home-based" practices on this budding alliance, particularly the ways in which such practices also have alienated workers by redefining the redwood forest as the exclusive property of the activists' themselves.     

Simplexity and the Reinvention of Equifinality

Some earth surface systems apparently exhibit deterministic chaos, where small differences in initial conditions produce increasingly divergent results. This casts doubt on the venerable concept of equifinality, whereby surface features converge to similar forms. However, chaotic systems exhibit a broader-scale order, and their complex patterns occur within well-defined limits. This broad-scale order arising from smaller-scale chaos produces simplexity, where simple rules and regularities emerge from underlying complexity, when the broad-scale structures are independent of the fine-scale details. Chaos precludes equifinality, sensu stricto, at certain scales, but simplexity produces equifinality at others. Simplexity is illustrated in a case study of soil-landform relationships.     

Reviews

Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women's Struggle in a Male‐Defined Revolutionary Movement ,Haideh Moghissi, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994, 217 pp., $59.95.

La Beauté menacée: anthropologie des maladies de la peau en Iran , Niloufar Jozani, Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1994, 317 pp., illustrations, tables, Bibliography, Index.

Iranian Cities: Formation and Development ,Masoud Kheirabadi, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991, xiv + 132 pp., illustrations, glossary, and appendixes.

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Myth and Mobilization in Revolutionary Iran: The Use of the Friday Congregational Sermon , Haggay Ram, Washington, D.C.: The American University Press, 1994, xiii + 250 pp., $59.00 cloth.     

Defining and Contesting Environmental Justice: Socio-natures and the Politics of Scale in the Delta

Abstract:  This article examines a contemporary process intended to "identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California" ( Delta Vision 2008 , http://deltavision.ca.gov/AboutDeltaVision.shtml ). Environmental injustices in the Delta are exacerbated by connected conflicts between knowledge and power, over the scale at which "environmental justice" and the "Delta" are understood through public policy. The rejection of environmental justice and the socio-natural in the Delta Vision process represents how contemporary policy processes are recreating and reenacting the power/knowledge dynamics that have defined the Delta, placed it on a path to ecological collapse and injected high levels of social and racial injustice in its landscape over the past 150 years. Our article combines an ethnographic and a historical geographical approach that contributes to the literature on environmental justice and scale and links with the literature on water governance and power to advance the task of defining environmental justice from the academic and policy perspectives.     

A Feasibility Study for the Investigation of Submerged Sites along the Coast of Slovenia

Maritime investigations along the Northern Adriatic coast have traditionally focused on the Roman and later archaeology. However, studies of post-glacial sea-level change and shoreline displacement suggest there is significant potential for the discovery of sites close inshore dating back to the early- to mid-Holocene, c .9000 BC onwards. A feasibility study for the investigation of submerged sites along the coast of Slovenia was undertaken in 2005. Here we describe the project rationale and research design, the survey and recording methods used, the logistical problems encountered, the results obtained (regardless of age), and the prospects for future research in the region.
© 2009 The Authors