From tree-spiking old-growth forests to "cracking" desert dams, Earth First! redefined environmentalism in America. Susan Zakin's fast-paced tale of these scruffy radicals and their suit-and-tie counterparts in Washington, D.C., has been described as an unholy marriage of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. The hipster cowboys who founded Earth First! were the first people to sound the alarm on globalization, extinction, and other major environmental issues that face us today. Zakin's gonzo yet impeccably researched account of the rocky trail leading to the morning when FBI agents rousted Earth First! founder Dave Foreman from his bed at gunpoint is essential reading for anyone who cares about mountains, deserts, and freedom.
When a literary agent called me "the female environmental Hunter S. Thompson." I was afraid to tell anyone in case they would wonder if I was in the habit of ingesting pituitary gland extract or wrecking rental cars. (Hey, it was just a dent! That one time...)
With that disclaimer, my first book, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First and the Environmental Movement, shows the influence of Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Edward Abbey. I grew up in the heyday of the New Journalism and I shared Abbey's romantic ideas about freedom, along with his outrage over the destruction of the American landscape. Abbey told me in an interview that examining the natural world leads us to the important questions, and I share that belief even now.
But I had no ambition to be a "nature" writer. I wanted to be a novelist.
I had taken the old-fashioned route of becoming a journalist to "learn how to write." In 1984, I moved out west. I got my first big magazine assignment, which landed me in jail. Fortunately, the article led to the publication of Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement by Viking.
I did a lot of magazine journalism after this book came out, but by 2001, I was pretty burned out. The arguments over wilderness in the American West hadn't changed since Bernard DeVoto wrote his column for Harper's in the 1940s. (The arguments were replayed by John Ford in the 1961 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, which is lovely and still worth watching.)
In 2001, I applied for a fellowship that would send me to the island of Madagascar, which is to evolution what Florence is to art. To my surprise, I got it.
What I found surprised me. Madagascar was imbued with paradox. The vast basin and range felt strange yet familiar to American eyes. The island contained eighty percent of the world's chameleon species, and an array of odd-shaped plants that you thought only existed in your dreams. The music was played on stringed instruments from Shangri La. Street kids and gem smugglers hustle down the streets of the capital.
Life felt seamless. And, using traditional methods of study (a French boyfriend) my language skills took a quantum leap.
In other ways, Madagascar was not so different. On the remote Mangoky River, streamers of smoke accompanied us like wraiths. The forest was burning. We saw smoke nearly every day, sometimes more than once. Slash and burn farming was Madagascar's version of the suburban sprawl infecting Tucson, where I had lived since 1991.
If the ecologist Raymond Dasmann was right and World War III was industrial man's war on nature, la guerre was definitely fini. Not for everyone: plenty of people cared about nature for its own sake, whether it was beautiful or not. (People who lived in planned eco-communities indistinguishable from Disneyland. People who got excited about "trading pollution credits.")
But for me, it had always been about something else.
I edited an anthology called Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth. I wanted to broaden the definition of "environmental" writing to include fiction, and journalism, and edgy writing that had character and plot, and didn't fall within the bounds of political correctness. I wanted a literature of ruination.
I wrote an essay for a book of photographs of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Practiced what I had been preaching.
I began working on a novel about a young man named Victor Kamara. He's swept up in a coup, and at the age of twenty-six, he becomes the de facto leader of a West African nation. When we meet him, it is fifteen years later and he's living in a Virginia suburb. When U.S. authorities begin deportation proceedings, and his supporters in Grand Mare come calling, the question "Who is Victor Kamara" suddenly becomes more urgent.....a British journalist tells the story, and where the two men's lives become intertwined, they love and betray each other....
