Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed to be in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world?

In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse offers a nuanced history of radical environmental thought and action in the late-twentieth-century United States. Focusing especially on the group Earth First!, Woodhouse explores how radical environmentalism responded to both postwar affluence and a growing sense of physical limits. While radicals challenged the material and philosophical basis of industrial civilization, they glossed over the ways economic inequality and social difference defined people’s different relationships to the nonhuman world. Woodhouse discusses how such views increasingly set Earth First! at odds with movements focused on social justice and examines the implications of ecocentrism’s sweeping critique of human society for the future of environmental protection. A groundbreaking intellectual history of environmental politics in the United States, The Ecocentrists is a timely study that considers humanism and individualism in an environmental age and makes a case for skepticism and doubt in environmental thought.

"Insightful and well-grounded in the literature, this is required reading for historians of environmentalism and modern political movements and, for the general reader, a stimulating introduction to an urgent area of popular concern." - Publishers Weekly

"His book is strongest when it contextualizes radical environmentalism in relation to broader ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, anarchism)....Recommended." - Choice

"This outstanding and extensively researched work, covers a wide range of ideas and personalities; an essential addition for all environmental collections." - Library Journal (starred review)

"In the era of climate change, Woodhouse wonders if the ecocentrists’ narrative of crisis is the only one that can create a clear-eyed view of the problem, as well as the political and popular will to mobilize against it." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"A well-crafted expansion of our understanding of the environmental movement, and it reminds us that, while there are
no easy answers to our current moment of environmental crisis, we are not the first to have wrestled with the difficult questions about human freedom and our relationships with the more-than-human world." - H-Environment

"A superb history of radical environmentalism in the United States." - New Republic