[to] sabotaging machinery and harassing firms' employees" (O'Riordan 9). The reformists, however, engage in "active nonviolence" ranging from demonstrations and disruptive civil disobedience to the general refusal "to do anything which could be construed as participating in injustice" (Kelly 27). They are, clearly, radical in comparison to the rest of the population of the industrialized nations.
The two philosophies produce, of course, very different kinds of social movements. On the one hand there is the Greenpeace movement, founded in British Columbia in 1971, which engaged in direct, nonviolent action against specific targets. The dangerous, dramatic actions of this group were the source of the public image of radical environmentalism but, as the organization grew and acquired greater structure and power, factionalism also arose. Numerous Greenpeace splinter groups were formed that engaged either in similar actions or in so-called revolutionary action but all of which based their approach on more 'extreme' philosophical grounds. And even these later formations split as well with such groups as Friends of the Earth, for example, spinning off even more radical variants such as Earth First! and Friends of the Sea. It is these groups (and, to a lesser degree, Greenpeace itself) that are most commonly identified as the radical environmental movement--even though there are broad disagreements among them and their spheres of action may not overlap at all. Their views derive from several different philosophies but they do share the central proposition that "human society, as it is now constituted, is utterly unsustainable and must be reconstructed according to an entirely different socioeconomic logic" (Lewis 2). These groups reject, therefore, any compromise with the current system and "denounce anyone seeking merely to reform, and thus perpetuate," an intrinsically flawed society (Lewis 2).
The other branch of radical en...