A subversive nature: Radical environmentalism in the late-twentieth-century United States

This dissertation is a history of the radical environmental movement. More specifically, it is the history of a particular idea – that nature has a moral worth equal to humans – in the late-twentieth century. This central tenet of radical environmentalism put the movement at odds with liberal humanism, and the social justice movements that liberalism inspired. This essay traces the growing split between what radical environmentalist Dave Foreman called an "ecological worldview" and a "social justice worldview" from its origins in the 1960s to its climax in the 1990s. Radical environmentalism embraced the New Left critique of the liberal state, and the anarchist leanings of student activists who advocated small-scale, decentralized communities as an alternative to industrial capitalism. But radical environmentalists rejected the New Left's focus on human freedom.;Radical environmentalists questioned the fundamental ethical premises of American liberalism: its trust in rationalism and its moral commitment to people. They offered, instead, the idea of a natural order beyond complete human understanding, an order that implied strict limits to human behavior. Radical environmentalism constituted a trenchant critique of the liberal democratic state, but it led to troubling positions on questions of social policy, from Native American cultural sovereignty to immigration. By the 1990s both the strong critiques and the controversial social positions of environmental radicals had migrated to the mainstream environmental movement, which had long rejected radical arguments while nevertheless supporting many of the basic premises from which radicals made those arguments.;Radical and mainstream environmentalism shared the same fundamental principles, and radicals simply pushed those principles to their ultimate conclusions. Whether they were expressed in moderate or radical terms, the principles that grounded environmentalism set the movement apart from liberal democracy. That divide demonstrated the ways in which liberal democratic politics could not always adequately address debates arising from urgent moral convictions, and in which the story of the environmental movement is distinct from that of late- twentieth-century American liberalism.