Dave Foreman

Activist/author Edward Abbey's legacy lives on in his best-selling books and now in director ML Lincoln's lively documentary. Lincoln pays tribute to Abbey and the environmental movement he inspired, reenacting his "monkeywrenching," and interviewing notable eco-warriors and present-day activists.

Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were falsely arrested for car-bombing themselves on May 24, 1990 while on an Earth First! musical organizing tour for Redwood Summer. They sued the FBI for violations of the First Amendment, claiming the FBI knew they were innocent but arrested them to try to silence them. Having survived the bomb but now stricken by cancer, Judi Bari, a leader of the movement to save California's old growth redwoods, gives her on-camera, deathbed testimony about the attempt on her life and her colorful organizing history with the radical environmental movement Earth First.

A recruitment video created by Earth First! in 1990 to promote their Redwood Summer initiative.

"Earth First! - The Politics of Radical Environmentalism" documents the rise of the controversial eco-activist group, Earth First!, as told by its founders, its admirers and its opponents, including rare interviews with its founders, Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle and Howie Wolke. Earth First! burst onto the environmental scene in the 1980s, engaging not only in civil disobedience to protect America's wilderness from exploitation, but ecotage - the destruction of heavy equipment, roads, and mills involved in deforestation. The movement become heroic to some, infamous to others, by scaling and occupying 200-foot tall old-growth trees to frustrate the plans of timber companies; and for "tree-spiking," hammering iron spikes into standing trees as a threat to the machinery of any mill that dared to process it. Earth First! includes rare footage of ecoteurs engaging in their exploits on camera.

A compilation of Earth First! shows from 1986.