Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Karen Coulter and the Religious Roots of Radicalism in North America

2023; Michigan State University; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/jstudradi.17.2.0051

1930-1197

Amanda M. Nichols,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

Born in 1958, Karen Coulter grew up during a period of marked social change in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement, which was already in full swing, and the second-wave feminist movement, which began in the early 1960s, influenced the social milieu of her childhood and shaped her perceptions about social justice. The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) also inspired an increased awareness of environmental issues among the general public during the 1960s.2 Coulter's mother first introduced her to the idea that humans alter their environments, and the concomitant call to limit the human penchant for dramatic alteration of the natural world colored Coulter's childhood and early adolescence.Coulter's lifelong commitment to activism began at age 11, when she testified as part of Wild Horse Annie's children's campaign in front of the Nevada State Legislature on behalf of the Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Protection Act.3 It was not until several years later, however, that Coulter became deeply engaged in environmental activism. In early 1980, while she was enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Coulter learned about a plan for the inception of the MX Missile in Nevada and Utah.4 Development of the infrastructure necessary for the missile's mobility was a central concern for anti-nuclear activists focused on the MX project. Apprehension primarily revolved around the widespread destruction of Western landscapes that was projected and would likely transpire during the construction of the rail system necessary for the missile's transportation. When she learned that this proposed project would directly impact the hills outside of Reno, Nevada, which she called home, Coulter became involved in anti-nuclear protests, participating in direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience against the MX project.Her “not in my backyard” (NIMBY)-inspired anti-nuclear activism continued into the mid 1980s, when the anti-nuclear movement began to dissipate in the United States due to the ebbing of the Cold War. Exhilarated by early successes during the MX project, which included President Ronald Reagan's abandonment of the infrastructure necessary for the mobile missile system in 1982,5 Coulter became committed to environmental protection through activism and civil disobedience, and readily turned her focus to other environmental justice concerns.After the MX project, Coulter became a campaigner for the well-known environmental organization Greenpeace and later joined the radical environmental movement Earth First! (EF!), a movement she was still active in as of 2023. In 1991, she co-founded Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project, a nonprofit environmental organization fighting to protect old-growth forests and to prevent logging in roadless areas in Oregon. Throughout her activist career, Coulter has worked to foster diversity, fighting to make movements more inclusive (especially in terms of gender and ethnicity) and to bring awareness to various forms of social and environmental injustice. More than anything else, Coulter emphasized, it is her spiritual connection to nature that has kept her engaged in activism and fighting for the protection and preservation of Earth's biodiversity and ecosystem viability.A closer examination of Coulter's life and work, I argue, illuminates two important points about the cultural milieu of her time, including and especially about the trajectory of radicalism in North America. First, Coulter's activism, much of which falls under the definition of “radical” activism, reflects changing sociopolitical trends in the United States, and provides a unique lens for viewing radicalism during this particular historical moment. Radical activism—activism that incorporates civil disobedience, sabotage, and, in some rare cases, violent tactics—has been used by numerous individuals and groups in the United States and beyond to influence social and political change. As Bron Taylor has shown, radical activism includes a “bricolage of diverse religious, political, and scientific beliefs” and may be understood as a form of dark green religion—a belief system that “considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care.”6 Coulter's transition from anti-nuclear activism in the mid to late 1980s into more disparate forms of radical activism aggregated under the broad label of “the environmental movement” is representative of a widespread—and often overlooked—shift that occurred in environmental movements, and especially their most radical forms, during that time.Second, Coulter's work elucidates the complex and often overlooked connections between religion and radicalism that have shaped the contemporary North American environmental movement. By providing a detailed account of her activist engagements, I show how religious beliefs and practices informed, and in many ways helped to set the tone for, common forms of social and political activism during the Peace Movement and beyond. Moreover, Coulter's life story shows how, for her and for many other environmental activists, religious or spiritual beliefs grounded in a deep understanding of biological interdependence and affective connections to the earth influence pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, and sometimes lead to radical forms of activism focused on protecting and preserving the health and stability of the biotic community.7Karen Coulter was born in Portland, Oregon, on 22 April 1958 to Walter and Carolyn Coulter. When she was five years old, her parents divorced and her mother, who won custody, moved them back to where her family was from, in New York. When Coulter was eight, her mother remarried and the family, which then also included four older stepbrothers, relocated to a suburban home on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada.Growing up in the Nevada hills was formative. At an early age, Coulter “intuitively rejected the social milieu” and could not relate to her family or their “keeping up with the Joneses” suburban lifestyle. She intimated her ongoing discomfort with societal norms and described herself as a socially disconnected child who was unpopular in school. Instead, Coulter related to nature. She detailed the various adventures she had in what she fondly referred to as “my hills” and said that she “escaped the house as much as possible” to go hiking. Coulter developed an intimate relationship with the Nevada landscape, recalling that she “spent a lot of time in nature . . . I was very attached to that—it [became] part of my soul.”The endless wild ranges and mountains of western Nevada offered ample space for Coulter to roam. Her experiences there, which included numerous close encounters with wild animals, kindled a deep understanding of human connection to nonhuman animals and the broader environment. Scholars including Marc Bekoff and Bron Taylor have described these eye-to-eye encounters as experiences that have the potential to lead to a profound recognition of agency and value in nonhuman animals.8 Taylor underscores that these encounters tend to be common among ardent environmentalists, and aptly labels them “eye-to-eye epiphanies.”9 “It's [experiences] like these,” Coulter said, “that make me relate to the wild. It's like wow, you're like me. It's not a big difference. We [humans] are just animals.”In addition to her early experiences in the Nevada hills that cultivated deeply felt connections to the environment, both of Coulter's parents fostered her love of nature. Her father, who had remarried and moved to southern California, remained involved with and supportive of Coulter throughout her childhood. When he discovered her affinity for horses, he arranged for Coulter to take riding lessons in Topanga Canyon. He also introduced her to classical music from Debussy and Ralph von Williams that he believed “mimicked nature” and took her to see symphonies, chamber music, and plays. Her mother was influential in other ways, including through her own “occasional spurts of being engaged” in environmental activism. Coulter recalled fondly, for instance, a play called “Alice in Blunderland” that her mother wrote in 1970 for the first Earth Day. The play, she said, was about the need to avoid phosphates and detergents, and Coulter played the part of Alice. Coulter's mother also fostered her love of nature by supporting her passions for art and literature. When she found that Coulter related deeply to Marguerite Henry's novel Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West (1969), a retelling of Wild Horse Annie's fight to save wild Mustangs from extinction, her mother took her to a book signing and presentation by Wild Horse Annie.10 “I walked up to have my book signed and to have a conversation with her and she . . . conscripted me into her children's campaign to save the horses,” Coulter said. This moment was critical, as it marked the beginning of Coulter's lifelong commitment to activism.Coulter readily acknowledged the influence that her parents’ support played in facilitating her love of the nonhuman natural world. But she also made it clear that it was not their influence that governed her affinity for activism.For Coulter, that “stirring inside” would dramatically influence her life and future work, leading her to a lifetime of activism through which she devoted herself to the protection and preservation of wild nature.In the fall of 1976, Coulter enrolled in the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. When she arrived, she was disappointed with the party campus environment and what she described as the low intellectual caliber of the courses. She remained at Oshkosh for one academic year, and then, in the fall of 1977 and following the advice of her father, she enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Sometime during her first two years at Reed College she attended her first civil disobedience training. The training was for a protest at the Trojan Nuclear Power plant, located on the Columbia River near Rainier, Oregon. “I didn't actually go to the action, which I now feel guilty about,” Coulter said. “I thought it was important to graduate and finish my school before I got arrested.”In 1980, however, everything changed. Walking through Eliot Hall, Coulter noticed a newspaper article in the main display case about the MX Missile being planned for Nevada and Utah. “I read [the newspaper], and I looked at the little map about what [area] this would cover, and I was appalled. Not in my backyard! Strong impulse. Like, ‘NO! Not in MY hills you don't!’”In the summer of 1980 Coulter returned to Nevada to work for the Census Bureau. One of her colleagues there knew that she was “really infuriated about the MX Missile” and told her about a meeting that would take place nearby called Nevadans Opposed to the MX Missile. She eagerly took down the details for the meeting and decided to attend. Coulter recalled that during the meeting, they circulated an application for an internship with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization that “promotes lasting peace with justice, as a practical expression of faith in action.”11 She took a copy of the application, filled it out, and submitted it, never expecting to hear anything back. “I had no experience as an activist,” she said. “I wasn't even firmly anti-nuclear per se. I didn't really know much about it. I was just scared of nuclear war.”Coulter was the only internship applicant from Nevada. The AFSC, she said, thought it was very important to hire someone from Nevada for the position, so she got the job. The AFSC invited her to come out to a training program in San Francisco to receive background information about nuclear weapons. She described being presented with files full of anti-nuclear information and said that reading them and “becoming educated” about the threat of nuclear weapons “was enough to make [her] anti-nuclear.” After she read the files, she said, “they sat me down and said, ‘here is what it is—bear witness. Because we are Quakers, and we bear witness non-violently. What do you think about that?’” When Coulter responded in the affirmative, the AFSC hired her, an act, she said, which was “a huge leap of faith on their part.”When the Carter administration first proposed the MX, Coulter said, a majority of people were supportive of it because they believed it would bring jobs to Utah and Nevada. By the time Coulter began working for AFSC in 1980, however, opposition to the plan had risen dramatically in the region. As Henry Richard Marr III detailed, momentum from the peace movement of the 1970s “did not vanish after the Vietnam War”; rather, it “laid the groundwork for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s.”12 By 1979, “opposition to the MX basing plan soared in Utah and Nevada, as residents worried about becoming the targets in a nuclear war.”13Importantly, religious resistance played a major role in shifting regional and nationwide public perception about the MX project. Widespread religious opposition around the development of the MX began in 1981, though it was not without challenges. As Glass showed, religious groups were often at odds because of the economic opportunities and jobs provided by production processes. In Catholic religious orders, for instance, “opportunity for employment outweigh[ed] many other considerations.”14 Other problems abounded. At the Franciscan Center run by Barry Stenger, members opposed to the MX threatened to pull their funding.15 In Las Vegas,Despite these challenges, “twenty-six of the thirty-seven [Catholic] priests in southern Nevada” came together on 2 April 1981 and spoke out against the use of the MX missile.17 Opposition was intensified when, in May 1981, the Mormon Church also released a statement of public opposition to the MX project.18 Others from various religious groups, including the Fransicians and Protestants, followed suit, with most support coming from outside the Great Basin.19In 1982, Robert Jay Lifton documented the “increasing number of spiritual leaders and array of denominational backgrounds . . . speaking out . . . on the pernicious nature of nuclear weapons . . . [and] in strong support of individuals who stand apart from the state in a posture of resistance.”20 In his 2004 article “MX: Democracy, Religion, and the Rule of Law—My Journey,” pacifist activist and co-founder of Utahans United Edwin B. Firmage documented his own role in beginning a dialogue between Otis Charles, the Episcopal Bishop of Utah, and the Mormon First Presidency. Therein, he detailed the widespread efforts to get Mormon leadership to oppose the MX and thanked those who aided in the process, naming many who, he said, might not otherwise receive credit for their efforts.21“The most consistently voiced religious objections,” however, came from Native Americans and specifically from the Shoshone.22 In 1979, the Western Shoshone Sacred Lands Association publically condemned the MX on the grounds that they “had a duty to protect the homeland given to them by the Creator.”23 Glass showed how American colonization of Shoshone land and people and American civil religion shaped Shoshone “civic loyalties.”24 The duty to protect their homeland, Glass argued, “frame[d] Shoshone responsibility to land and people as a religious obligation.”25 Others have also noted the cooperation between Shoshone and other groups in Nevada, including white ranchers and the Church of Latter-day Saints.26When Coulter first came on the scene in mid 1980, this was the rich and established milieu in which she arrived. When she agreed to join the AFSC, they sent her to work on the Great Basin Alliance MX1 as support for the movement under the direction of Baker, Nevada, citizens and leaders of the Great Basin Alliance, Joe Griggs and Jo Anne Garrett.27 With the permission of Reed College, Coulter took a semester off, put her undergraduate thesis on hold, and went to work with the alliance for six months. “This was an amazing launch into activism for me,” she recalled.In early 1980, with financial backing from Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC), a group made up largely of mainstream, liberal Protestants, Griggs had begun a traveling road show aimed at countering public displays and undermining the proclaimed benefits of “missiles on wheels.”28 The roadshow traveled to large cities around the country, and spoke in places of religious worship, protesting the MX missile and the development of nuclear weapons more broadly. Griggs and Garret had also formed a robust and nonhierarchical alliance, primarily made up of local individuals whom they trained to disseminate anti-nuclear information in an effort to shift public perception about the MX. Each individual in the alliance, Coulter said, was empowered to be autonomous, although people often worked in groups to facilitate public outreach and dissiminate information to the community. Among other tactics, Coulter recalled putting up flyers in grocery stores aisles that provided neutral, factual information about the MX and posed critical questions to citizens such as “What will you do as a rancher when your ranch hands leave to work on the MX missile project?” Coulter indicated that this type of small-scale, information-driven action significantly contributed to Nevadan residents’ opposition to the missile.Another important tactic of the Great Basin Alliance that Coulter detailed was its emphasis on fostering community connections and relationships in an effort to promote citizen engaged activism. She recalled, for instance, accompanying Griggs when he went to speak with local ranchers about how nuclear waste runoff from the MX project might affect the underground reservoir that they used as their primary water source. None of the ranchers showed up, Coulter said. Instead, they sent their sons, thereby making a clear statement about their disinterest in the issue. Undeterred, Griggs and Coulter informed the sons about the potential impacts of the MX project, speaking directly to the effects that this could have for their ranches and, by extension, their livelihood. “They were sitting out in the middle of nowhere on the tailgates of their trucks kicking the dirt the whole time we talked to them,” Coulter said. When they finished speaking, however, each one of the sons agreed to communicate what he had learned back to his father. “We didn't know if anything would come of it,” Coulter said. A short time later, however, someone mysteriously filled with concrete a number of the test holes that the Air Force had dug to provide water access for the project. “They just took action themselves! It was very exciting,” Coulter said, assuming the farmers were the saboteurs.After working in Nevada with the Alliance during the summer and fall of 1980, AFSC sent Coulter to San Francisco to help plan a speaking tour that was to take place in the early spring of 1981. With the AFSC's help, Coulter organized the tour which focused on the environmental impacts of the MX missile.29 After she finished working on the speaking tour, Coulter returned to Reed College to complete her senior thesis. Reflecting on her time with AFSC in 2020, Coulter spoke very highly of the organization, and praised the supportive and inclusive environment the organization fostered.The religious foundation that informed the teachings of the Great Basin Alliance and the training that Coulter received are of particular importance. Though she was not, and had never been, a Christian, let alone a Quaker, Coulter acknowledged the ways that her own activism was shaped by the alliance's religious affiliation and teachings. Among other beneficial lessons, she said, was that the alliance helped to educate her about social and economic disparity, which helped her to become more holistic in her thinking. “I am forever indebted to the Great Basin MX Alliance for that,” she said.Despite a waning interest in the subject matter she was studying, Coulter returned to Reed College and graduated with her degree as a double major in English and Psychology in spring 1981. In the year and a half that followed, Coulter went on to work at a series of internships and odd jobs, many of which focused on anti-nuclear activism, public interest research, and social justice. These roles included a six-month internship with the anti-nuclear organization Citizen Alert, which was based in Reno, Nevada. While working for Citizen Alert, Coulter conducted outreach in eastern Nevada and organized another speaking tour. While there, she also wrote an article for Liberation News Service, the underground, far-left, anti-war press founded in 1967 primarily as a means of disseminating information about the Vietnam War. This piece, Coulter recalled, aimed to draw public attention to “broken arrow accidents,” nuclear weapons accidents not reported to the mainstream media.30After the internship with Citizen Alert ended in fall 1981, Coulter returned to Portland and began to volunteer and participate in activism around the city. She canvased for a number of local environmental groups including Oregon Fair Share, a multi-ethnic organization founded in 1980 that promoted economic and social equality.31 She was briefly involved with a citizen group called the Alliance, which tried but failed to establish an alternative city-based people's government in Portland, and she also worked with Oregon State Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG), an investigative, grassroots public organization that advanced the special interests of citizens.32Even at this early point in her activism, Coulter's radical inclinations were already taking shape. This is evidenced, in part, by her involvement within organizations aimed at political and social reform, but also by her willingness to speak out publicly—and without fear of the potential repercussions—in a highly politicized publication for the express purposes of disseminating information about the dangers of nuclear weapons.Spurred by growing protests against the MX, President Ronald Reagan was due to make a decision about the future of the U.S. land-based missile system sometime in the fall of 1982. Coulter, who was living on her mother's houseboat on the Little Willamette River at the time, recalled her concern about the impending decision:The decision, which came in October 1982, may have saved Nevada and Utah from the mobile missile system, but it did not eliminate the target on Western landscapes. Instead, the military installed 36 of the Peacekeeper missiles in Minutemen silos across the Western United States, putting Russian targets on a number of other Western states.33 For Coulter, however, the victory was “sort of like my green light for continuing to be an activist. That was a fairly crucial moment [for me], to see that we could actually accomplish something.” This event marked the beginning of a turning point in Coulter's life. After traveling in Nepal for six weeks in the fall of 1983, Coulter returned to Portland and threw herself back into activism.Coulter's early success in antinuclear activism, as well as her deep commitment to peace, motivated her to get involved in other nuclear debates. In 1983, Coulter began working with Northwest Action for Disarmament (NWAD), a nonviolent civil disobedience group acting against nuclear weapons production in Portland. Coulter attributes much of what she knows about nonviolence to the training in consensus-based organization and direct action protesting that she received while working with NWAD. Among the most important actions Coulter participated in with NWAD—and the first of what might be considered as her “radical” activism—were the White Train blockades.Beginning in the 1950s, the United States transported nuclear weapons across the country via “White Trains.” These trains “looked entirely ordinary . . . except for . . . multiple heavily armed boxcars . . . [with] DOE guards” armed with rifles, machine guns, or grenade launchers.34 Also referred to as the “Armageddon Express,” the trains were often painted white and were extremely slow-moving, maxing out at approximately thirty-five miles per hour.35 The national hub for U.S. nuclear trains and “the nation's only assembly point for nuclear weapons” was, and remained as of 2023, the Pantex Plant located just outside of Amarillo, Texas.36 One of the most common routes for White Trains carrying nuclear weapons was between the Pantex Plant and the Trident submarine base located on Puget Sound, in Bangor, Washington.37In early 1984, NWAD planned a blockade to stop the White Train in Portland. They were in communication with organizers from Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, who were, at the time, monitoring the White Trains. Ground Zero was a Catholic-Worker-affiliated organization that was founded by James and Shelley Douglass in 1975 to stop the Trident Submarine and Missile System in Washington.38 In the mid 1980s, the Douglasses began to turn their attention to weapons transport and were tracking the movement of White Trains across the nation. They contacted local organizations and peace groups and helped to facilitate prayer vigils and nonviolent direct actions, including blockades, around the country by providing information about the trains’ routes.39 The breadth of this nationwide network of activists not only underscores how pervasive activism that we might today call “radical activism” was during the anti-nuclear movement, but it also shows how deeply intertwined radicalism was with religious belief and practice during the Peace Movement. NWAD knew the trains’ paths because of Ground Zero, Coulter said.The problem, however, was that no White Train blockade had ever been successful. “Every time before,” Coulter explained, people along the train route “jumped off the tracks at the last minute because it appeared the train would not stop, so the train operators were used to people not staying on the tracks.” Being run over was not the only risk when blockading the White Trains, though. Protesters were at some (albeit minimal) risk of being shot by the armed guards on board the train, but there was a high risk of arrest.On 24 February 1984, Coulter and other NWAD protesters planned to blockade the White Train in Portland, Oregon. Coulter recalled that there were about 150 people present at the protest, and fifty of those were willing to be arrested. Coulter described her own experience from that blockade: “I was in one of the groups right in front . . . The train came and it came within inches of us before it stopped. That was really profound for me. I was terrified,” she said. This blockade, which marked the first time a White Train had been successfully stopped, delayed the train from reaching its destination at the Kelso train depot for approximately two and a half hours.40 Coulter was arrested for the first time during that action, along with thirty-two other blockaders. All the protesters were released when the railroad company, Union Pacific, declined to press charges.41Following NWAD's first successful blockade, White Train protests became increasingly common in 1984. During the spring, they began to garner national media attention—so much so, in fact, that Jim Douglass was featured in an article about the trains in People Magazine on 21 May 1984.42 Later that year, on 27 July 1984, Coulter participated in a second White Train blockade with NWAD, this time near Vancouver, Washington. Coulter said that more than 200 people gathered to blockade the White Train, with fifty of those willing to be arrested. Newspaper records from July 27 and 28 indicate that her recollection was good: The reports estimated that between 170 and 200 protestors were present and documented 49 arrests.43 Coulter said that they positioned people along the track before the blockaders to flag the train down before it got to them. She also noted that among those blockaders present who agreed to sit on the tracks were a number of individuals from a Christian affinity group who were willing to martyr themselves on the tracks. Among those, Coulter said, was a wheelchair-bound individual, who insisted that he should not be removed from the tracks under any circumstances. “They were completely serious, so that strengthened the resolve quite a bit to stay on the tracks,” Coulter said. This willingness to incur bodily injury or even death for the cause exemplifies both the “depth” of commitment these activists showed and the “shadow side” of dark green religion, which can, and often does, “precipitate or exacerbate violence.”44When it did stop, the Union Pacific train security workers were the only cops there and were greatly outnumbered by the protestors. Before she was arrested, Coulter recalled being removed from the tracks, being placed aside, and then going back to sit on the tracks a total of eighteen times. Her defiance, along with that of the other protesters, halted the train for an hour and a half, from 11:25 a.m. until 1:05 p.m.45 Coulter was eventually arrested along with other members of NWAD and members of Ground Zero, including Jim Douglass. Coulter would go on to help organize another blockade, which took place on 22 February 1985 in Vancouver, Washington, and amassed nearly 600 people.46 All 106 blockaders, including Coulter, were arrested and charged with trespassing.There were many other White Train blockades in the United States between 1984 and 1987, and not all of them ended without incident. In September 1987, for instance, a protester at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in northern California was, according to Messman, intentionally run over when the conductor “gathered speed” at “the sight of nonviolent protesters.”47 Though the victim, Brian Wilson, survived and eventually recovered, the train severed his legs and fractured his skull.48In a landmark decision in 1985, a Kitsap,