Tree-sits, barricades and lock-ons: obstructive direct action and the history of the environmental movement, 1979-1990

During the 1980s the protection of biodiverse places became a major global issue, one whose importance would grow in the decades to come. In part this resulted from efforts by Indigenous people in a variety of countries to protect and reclaim territories that had come under the ownership and exploitation of others via colonial dispossession. Challenges to dominant practices also came from non-Indigenous conservationists, alternative ‘back-to-the-land’ communities and others who had settled in rural areas and formed deep connections to land. Contention regarding resource extraction and development activities reflected and fed into a widening ecological consciousness, as broader communities turned their attention to the plight of forests, rivers and other places within their own countries as well as overseas. A significant part of what captured and shifted public awareness was a series of environmental blockades that were launched from the 1970s onwards. These events combined the use of Obstructive Direct Action (ODA) with protest camps to disrupt logging, clearing, mining and other activities. In providing a national and comparative history of campaigns in Australia, the US and Canada, this thesis examines how the environmental blockading repertoire was initially developed and embedded in each country. It establishes that through sustained, close and intense levels of protest within biodiverse environments activists created a tactical ‘toolkit’ that was eventually diffused globally to a variety of movements. The thesis draws upon a diverse range of sources and methods associated with social, political and oral history, as well as social movement studies, to contribute understandings and analyses concerning repertoires of contention. Through coverage of numerous campaigns it explores why certain tactics, strategies, forms of organisation and approaches to normative protester behaviour were chosen and adapted from existing repertoires, why some endured, and what shaped the rate and direction of innovation. Broad political, cultural and contextual factors as well as incidents, dynamics and geographies particular to specific events are identified as key drivers of development and differentiation. Such influences are explored alongside evolving and emerging collective identities, emotional responses, and cognitive aspects regarding how campaigners best thought they could achieve their objectives, as well as what those objectives should be. The thesis analyses a variety of odes of national and international diffusion of tactics and strategies and demonstrates that information sharing and translation from one context to another was rarely straightforward or automatic, but rather contingent and enculturated.