THE most striking phrase in Jonathan Aitken’s broadside against the press last week was the one culminating with the phrase: the simple sword

THE most striking phrase in Jonathan Aitken’s broadside against the press last week was the one culminating with the phrase: “the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play”. Mr Aitken was casting himself as a crusader, and not just any old crusader. Charles Secrett, director of Friends of the Earth, which pulled out of direct action at Twyford Down after an injunction threat, feels it is now possible to work with elements in Earth First! “Frankly, they have grown up,” he notes, arguing that activists are now far more likely to plan actions with care, rather than “jumping in and alienating locals”.”Relations between direct action activists have improved Un-ited we stand, divided we fall.”. “We have never stopped a road that they have started building,” Burbridge says, “although it seemed as if we could in Glasgow.”Torrance is disillusioned, fearing that “Britain will soon be called London. made up of one big urban sprawl.” Both despair of Britain, citing inner-city poverty, environmental decay and declining civil rights.Despite his departure for Sweden, Burbridge is inspired byGlaswegian green activism and believes that radical campaigners can make it too difficult and expensive for companies to damage the environment.But others see co-operation and non-violence as the way forward.

The Government may have cut the motorway programme and dropped plans to widen the M25 to 14 lanes but activists have been defeated at Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill and the M11. In 1984, for example, Canadian Earth First! placed more than 11,000 ceramic nails, all potentially lethal for a chainsaw-wielding worker, in threatened spruce trees in British Columbia.Burbridge has been arrested “more times than I can remember” and imprisoned twice Both he and Torrance admit failures. The attraction was Earth First!’s activities in North America, where the slogan “No Compromise in Defence of Mother Earth” was used to justify sabotaging vehicles and machinery.The US movement was formed in 1981 by activists who felt that existing environmental groups had become too distant from “grassroots” campaigning and too ready to compromise with government and industry.Their most controversial tactic has been “treespiking”, where spikes are driven into trees to prevent them being felled or processed in sawmills. Torrance recently left to live in the Australian Bush, while Burbridge is to exchange inner-city Glasgow for the forests of Sweden.As 19-year-old students disillusioned with Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, they founded the UK organisation four years ago.

It grew rapidly and now has more than 60 local groups and thousands of committed activists. Pressure is mounting for a more extreme strategy.Militants associated with the underground group’s journal, Do Or Die, are circulating other activists with copies of Ecodefense, a US guide to “monkeywrenching”: techniques for destroying earth-moving equipment, burning down advertising hoardings and even sinking whaling ships.Group members are also being urged to go for tougher tactics in valedictory messages from the two founders of UK Earth First!, Jason Torrance and Jake Burbridge, who after years of activism are leaving to live in the wilderness. Last Wednesday’s High Court ruling that livestock export bans are illegal has depressed activists, who overlap with animal-liberation campaigners. Although the movement has had an impact, many supporters say they are exhaust-ed after years of struggle and the Criminal Justice Act has created a powerful legal weapon against direct action. Timber yards and peat extraction sites as well as road projects have been damaged.

A recent assault on the Department of Transport, where tens of thousands of pounds’-worth of computer equipment was destroyed, has been seen as a revenge raid by Earth First! radicals in response to the demolition of houses in east London to build the M11 motorway extension, although no one has claimed responsibility.The group both in Britain and in the US has been deeply split on strategy, with a militant wing arguing for an increase in sabotage and moderates suggesting that mass Gandhian-style non-violent direct action is the best way forward.This weekend’s gathering at a farm near Swindon, the group’s first for two years, will, organisers admit, involve “a lot of soul- searching”. Based on the US group of the same name and launched with a blockade of the Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent, Earth First! has been the prime mover behind the massive wave of anti-roads protest which has spread across Britain.
But sabotage has been on their agenda also. At least the younger delegates at Leicester (many of them postgraduates kept under by an older generation of crusties) seemed to recognise that endless talk of post-Fordism, or definitions of the city as “a unique, ongoing time-space event”, are selling the profession short.The man at the bar had no doubt of his sociological usefulness “John Major says this is a nation at ease with itself. We don’t think it is, and that’s our job: to be difficult, to show what kind of society this really is and will become You’ll see: our time is coming round again Cheers.”.

SUPPORTERS of Earth First!, Britain’s most radical environmental group, are meeting this weekend to decide whether to intensify their campaign of direct action from non-violent protest to “ecotage” or green sabotage. The problem is translating this surveillance work into language the rest of us use, or can comprehend, or don’t find rebarbative. At this empirical end, the risk isn’t loony extremism but nerdy obviousness: is the world much the wiser for the papers given lastweek on traffic calming, eating out in the North, live telephone sex calls (an ethnograpic survey), population trends in Cornwall, and the role of the toilet in the modern city?But one fashionable area of research is surveillance, and surveillance is something which sociology, at best, can still do expertly, monitoring, interpreting, freezing the frame. One session included an excellent paper, by Jayne Mooney, challenging Home Office statistics on violent crimes against men and women, and there was another provoking talk, by Sue Lees, on the high incidence of, and psychology behind, pair- and gang-rape. There are titles such as Intimations of Postmodernity, Decentring Leisure and even Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production – more Tony Parsons than Talcott Parsons.But old-style surveys continue, not least in newer areas such as gender studies. A look round the books on display – and as the profession has grown, so has the number of texts being produced, even though print runs average a mere 400 for hardback and 2,000 for paperback – suggest a similar preponderance of the post-structuralist. I sat through one deconstructionist session unsure whether it wasn’t just a spoof: a young theoretician called Joost Van Loon, in his paper on “Chronotypes of/in the televisualisation of the 1992 Los Angeles riots”, declaimed, in a mere 20 minutes, on nomadology, geo-philosophy, the spatiality of discourse, the discursivity of space, redistantiatiation, performativity, responsivity and de-foundationalisation – but not on LA.