Still, even some in the movement found him beyond the pale. Murray Bookchin, a philosopher and environmental theorist, called him an eco-fascist for statements that appeared to prioritize animals over people, like when he seemed to endorse famine in Ethiopia and immigration restrictions in the United States as means to reduce the human population. (In both cases he had misspoken, he said.)
There was at times a method to his madness: Mr. Foreman argued that his stridency gave room to mainstream groups, or even less-aggressive direct-action organizations like Greenpeace, to negotiate in Washington; they could point to him as the extremist alternative.
“We will not make political compromises,” he wrote in 1980 in the first issue of the Earth First! newsletter, which he expanded into the Earth First! Journal. “Let the other outfits do that. EARTH FIRST will set forth the pure, hard-line, radical position of those who believe in the Earth first.”
It soon emerged that the F.B.I. agent had encouraged the sabotage, essentially trying to entrap Earth First! in a felony, and most of the charges were dropped. Mr. Foreman eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for giving the agent two copies of his book “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching” (1985), an action that prosecutors said constituted conspiracy to commit a crime.
The stress of the legal proceedings nevertheless created fissures in the organization, as did the arrival of a new, younger cohort of activists who wanted to inject social justice issues into Earth First!’s environmentalism. Mr. Foreman, who called himself “a redneck for the environment,” had never shown much interest in left-wing politics, and in 1990 he and his wife, Nancy Morton, publicly split with Earth First!
The group, they wrote in a letter to its members, had become dominated by an “overtly counterculture/anti-establishment style.”
“We feel,” they added, “like we should be sitting at the bar of a seedy honky-tonk, drinking Lone Star, thumbing quarters in the country western jukebox, and writing this letter on a bar napkin.”
