For Star subscribers: The ex-Tucsonan launched two environmental movements: the radicalism, civil disobedience and 'monkeywrenching' of Earth First, and the 'rewilding' movement to protect massive blocks of nature for wildlife.
The former Tucsonan launched two groundbreaking environmental movements: the radicalism, civil disobedience and"monkeywrenching" of Earth First in the 1980s, and the"rewilding" movement to protect massive blocks of nature for wildlife in the decades since then. Both movements proved influential, serving as a springboard for tree-sitting protests and land planning efforts that persist today, not least the Tucson area's Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan.
Foreman died in his Albuquerque home after a several-months battle with a lung illness. He had remained involved in conservation issues until the end, advising groups such as the Rewildng Institute, which he founded as a think tank to develop longterm land conservation plans, said John Davis, the institute's director and an associate of Foreman's for 37 years. Foreman's conservationist career spanned half a century.
Back in Foreman's Earth First days, Outside magazine called him"arguably the most dangerous environmentalist in America." 'Confessions of an Eco-Warrior'Born in Albuquerque, Foreman was a fourth-generation New Mexican whose family had come west in Conestoga wagons, Zakin wrote. "As I loosened my tie, propped my cowboy boots up on my desk and popped the top on another Stroh's, I thought about RARE II and why it had gone so wrong," Foreman wrote in his his 1991 book,"Confessions of an Eco-Warrior."
"We all revered Ed Abbey," said Lewis, now Linda McNulty and board chair for the Tucson Audubon Society, speaking of the essayist-polemicist who authored"The Monkey Wrench Gang" about a group of eco-raiders plotting to blow up Glen Canyon Dam."He had this romantic, fierce love of the West, and we revered that. Earth First was going to be the Ed Abbey Monkey Wrench Gang in real life.
One was Paul Hirt while he was a University of Arizona student from 1981 to 1992. He found refreshing Earth First's motto of"no compromise in defense of Mother Earth," recalled Hirt, now an Arizona State University professor emeritus of history. High-profile prosecution By blockading roads, sitting in old-growth trees, filing appeals of timber sales and other steps, they stopped some timber sales in the Pacific Northwest, a gas-drilling project in Wyoming, and, temporarily, an oil drilling project in New Mexico. In one day in 1988, they held rallies, road blockades and other forms of protests at close to 100 sites across the country.
The group eventually fractured on two fronts, however. First, in 1989, the FBI arrested Foreman and four Earth First colleagues, accusing them of attempting to use a cutting torch to destroy a power line tower feeding energy for a pump station for the Central Arizona Project. They were also prosecuted for earlier damage to power poles supporting power lines that fed two uranium mines and for cutting ski-lift poles at a ski resort near Flagstaff on land the Navajo and Hopi tribes consider sacred.
Foreman's view was"those things are laudable goals, but they're not what we're focused on. While those issues need support, those are distinct issues needing their own groups," Davis said. Foreman's biggest conservation legacy was helping other conservationists realize it’s not enough to save small, isolated parcels of wildland, Davis said."We need to connect big wild areas, thinking big in terms of large cores, wildlife corridors, top predators," Davis said.
Foreman advocated limiting immigration to the number of U.S. residents who leave the country each year, a policy that the Sierra Club had adopted in 1989 but rescinded in the 1990s after drawing huge protests. Of Foreman's Guatemala statements, Davis said,"Dave should have realized that those words would have been construed as racist, and he should have tempered his language there. Those words come across as callous, but he would have been at least as callous in talking about white people who have big families."
Depriving Latino people south of the border from coming here and improving themselves is racist, Avila said."What if people coming here, bringing a different perspective on how to address climate, water management, production of food" improve things, he asked.
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