By That Green Union Guy - September 18, 2026
It is becoming almost a cliche that humanity, not to mention life on Earth, faces an almost unprecedented disaster. It’s not an outrageous take that human civilization currently faces a polycrisis of rising inequality, ecological breakdown, climate catastrophe, and festering deepening far right authoritarian fascism. Even mainstream opinion now accepts, albeit reluctantly (in some quarters, at least), that neoliberal capitalism has failed to deliver on its unrealistic promises of “abundance for all driven by unfettered markets”. Furthermore, due to the breakdown of capitalism’s ability to “manufacture consent”, it can barely pretend to contain its inherent contradictions.
This would seem like a golden opportunity for the left to offer a coherent and credible visionary alternative. However, much of the western left laments at its alleged sorry and weak state, because it has (thus far) failed to bring about a long promised “revolution” (at least according to Marxist-Leninist metrics). Certainly, if the historic mission of the left is to seize state power and use it to usher in “a dictatorship of the proletariat” (an important step along the road to the ideal workers’ paradise according to them), it is failing miserably.
On the other hand, if one looks at the growth of anti-systemic and inherently (if not consciously) libertarian (socialist) critiques of the status quo and the dominant capitalist paradigm, these have been growing and deepening for decades. This is evident if one looks at issue-based polling that consistently indicates that the overwhelming majority of people (in the United States of America, at the very least) have progressive-left views on most issues. This is true in matters of labor and ecology, particularly, as evidenced by the high support for the Green New Deal (which polls even higher among union members than the general public), limited and reformist though the Green New Deal may be. So how is it that the far right has been ascendant and increasingly successful at contesting with centrist forces for political power?
The answer to this question lies in how both centrist and rightist political forces successfully use dishonest framing to divide and conquer the working class (which is anything but monolithic or unified in its beliefs) and silo the leftist forces that would challenge it into competing issues and interests. This is certainly true of both the labor and ecology movements. No starker illustration of this can be seen in how Donald Trump was able to convince mainstream opinion that the “woke” left (which includes those pushing for a phase out of fossil fuels) has “abandoned the working class” (personified specifically in the form of out of work Appalachian coal miners), and parlay that into aiding his first of two electoral victories.
The key to defeating the far right, not to mention centrist, political machine includes challenging and exposing the mythology behind divide-and-conquer frameworks. This is especially true of the urgency at defeating attempts to pit workers (most of whom care about the environment) and environmental activists (most of whom are working class based on their relationship to capital) against each other. Fortunately, the broader left has been learning how to do this, particularly since the Occupy Movement successfully reintroduced class analysis to the American mindset.
However, as any experienced anticapitalist knows, progressive movements can only take us so far if they don’t challenge capitalism. Most reformist movements actually do although in mostly small, imperfect and incomplete ways, thus while well intentioned, aren’t nearly enough to do the job. Meanwhile, as any libertarian socialist is keenly aware, attempting to collaborate with, or even capture, state power—no matter how revolutionary the expressed goals of those capturing it may seem—such efforts inevitably result in recreating the oppressive capitalist and authoritarian structures said “revolutionaries” claim they seek to abolish. State socialism, even if “ecosocialist” are also a dead end.
This leaves libertarian socialism as a viable path, and in matters of labor and ecology, the ideal option, in my opinion at least, is revolutionary green unionism and/or green syndicalism. What is revolutionary green unionism and/or green syndicalism?
The author assumes that readers of this book are sympathetic to, or are at least knowledgeable of, anarchism.
Anarchism, broadly defined, is inclusive of “socialism without the state”. Green anarchism (which is not wholly, or necessarily even predominantly primitivist or anti-civ)[1] is therefore inclusive of “ecosocislism without the state”. Anarcho-syndicalism as a means involves class struggle, particularly at the point of production, towards the end of libertarian-communism (or at least, that was the professed goal of the syndicalists of the Spanish Revolution of 1936), therefore green-syndicalism as a means involves class struggle to achieve the end of libertarian ecosocialism or libertarian ecocommunism (I won’t waste time defining the distinctions. They do exist, but are not particularly important or relevant to this book).
That’s green syndicalism in theory, but what does green syndicalism look like as a praxis? One potential example is offered by the Industrial Workers of the World, i.e. the Wobblies, and what’s more, the organizational model comes from more recent history, rather than the IWW’s vaunted and much romanticized “golden age” (meaning its first 20 years).
The opening paragraph of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or “Wobblies”) reads:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth. (emphasis added)
Those italicized final seven words clearly establish the IWW as a revolutionary green union, and some—including myself—would argue that they firmly established it—at least in praxis—as a green syndicalist union, one of the few—if only—such organizations in the world (thus far).
But what is revolutionary green unionism?
That question had, hitherto 2013 (at least) remained unanswered.
It’s worth noting that those italicized words were conceived by none other than Judi Bari, Utah Phillips, and Jess Grant, all three of whom played significant roles in one of the IWW’s biggest (and least taken credit for) green syndicalist organizing campaigns, namely the struggle to oppose the destruction of the northwestern California’s old growth redwood forests from 1985-2008. That this campaign is not known as an IWW organizing campaign (inclusive of, but not strictly limited to solidarity unionist workplace organizing among timber workers), is largely due to it being much more widely recognized as an Earth First! campaign, which is historically accurate, but also historically incomplete, and also attributable to the stubborn persistence of the capitalist created “workers versus (woke) environmentalists” mythology.
During the first decade, at least, the efforts always included IWW involvement, including that of a chartered IWW branch (unofficially known as Earth-First! - IWW Local #1) whose charter members include Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney, a number of other Earth First! activists (who worked in various industries) and at least three lumber industry workers (and more would join later). Bari had joined both the IWW and Earth First! at roughly the same time, in summer of 1988, though she had at least a decade’s prior experience as a rank-and-file union militant in the greater Baltimore area.
For these reasons, the Earth First! activism in northwestern California always had a revolutionary green unionist praxis, one which consistently and successfully undermined the timber capitalists’ tried-and-true playbook of pitting precarious timber workers against radical environmentalists, no matter how much the employers tried (and tried hard they did!)[2]
It was this revolutionary green unionism and direct-action radical environmentalism (which Bari wrote about in her, sadly no-longer-in-print book, Timber Wars) that drew my attention as a young college graduate looking for direction having subsequently entered the working class (note to armchair sociologists: just because one earns a college degree does not mean they’re automatically exempt from wage slavery). I would soon go on to meet Judi Bari (in 1995), and join the struggle.
Among those involved in those campaigns, I was probably one of the strongest true believers in the green syndicalist angle of it (though Judi Bari called it “revolutionary ecology”, instead), perhaps to the point of being annoying to my fellow activists and organizers. It was also how I found the IWW and subsequently joined it.
In the brief two years I got to (occasionally) struggle alongside Judi Bari (along with hundreds of others), I have many fond memories, though none is closer to my heart than when approximately a dozen of us (including Bari) were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in defense of Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County of northwestern California. Sharing a police wagon with Bari for an approximately 45-minute ride to the county courthouse in Eureka from Carlotta, we sang numerous songs. The highlight was Bari leading us all in singing Solidarity Forever, and I recall vividly that she knew every word to every verse. She was behind in her IWW dues at the time (it’s a long story, too complicated for this book), but she was a Wobbly through and through to the end.
Truthfully, while I strongly believed in revolutionary green unionism, I had much to learn about it. Judi Bari explained it well enough, but I was caught up in the hustle and bustle of all that was going on, and while I was fortunate for her friendship and mentorship, what nuggets of wisdom she imparted—often while we were engaged in the throes of struggle—were brief and fleeting (Bari had much to do in the struggle, on top of raising two daughters as a single mother, and embroiled in lawsuits against the FBI and Oakland Police who had attempted to pin the blame on her for a car bomb assassination attempt on her life, and I was but one of hundreds of people regularly working with her in these ongoing struggles). Bari had imparted some of the theory and practice in her writings in Timber Wars, but so much of it was published in dozens of fragments in various hard-to-find rural community newspapers, many of which aren’t necessarily well archived. Bari was only too happy to explain it me if I asked, but opportunities were rare, and I hesitated to do that in many instances that presented themselves, because I was self-conscious as it was, and didn’t want my already starry-eyed admiration for the incredible force of nature she was stray into obsessiveness.[3]
Then, in late 1996, Bari announced that she was dying of terminal breast cancer, and she likely wouldn’t live out the following year (she would pass away in March of 1997). The last time I saw her alive, in February 1997, was at an organizing meeting in Willits, California (in the middle of Mendocino County, where she then lived with her daughters). Approximately three dozen Earth First! organizers—including myself and at another IWW member who went by “Boomer”—gathered to plan the Summer and Fall campaigns to oppose the Maxxam-controlled Pacific Lumber’s assault on Headwaters Forest (which we would ultimately succeed in preserving, at least for now).
The three-hour meeting covered many topics, including direct action strategy, logistics, legal support, potential direct-action targets, outreach, and messaging. I wanted to discuss the green unionism prong of the strategy. When I raised the issue, another young activist spoke up and asked the question, “why do we need to care about what the loggers think; aren’t they as guilty as their bosses for killing the trees?” At this point, Judi Bari (who was physically weakened and obviously dying of the cancer, but was nevertheless still full of her characteristically righteous piss and vinegar) was next “on stack”, as activists in such meetings say. I expected her to thoroughly educate this young, naive dude. I looked over at Boomer, and he returned my glance with a knowing look, which said, silently, “this oughta be good!” Instead, Judi looked straight at me, and said, “Get ‘em, Steve!”
Wait…WUT?!?!?
I remember raising my hand to speak. I also vaguely remember Darryl Cherney beating me to the punch, quite calmly and diplomatically for him (Darryl, can occasionally be quite hotheaded), and my head was in a fog anyway, so any attempts to form coherent words—let alone sentences—at this point would have been pointless. Those were Judi Bari’s final words to me, and the meeting soon ended. I had wished for a chance to ask her, “I’m honored, scared witless, clueless as a newborn babe, so…WHAT DO I DO?!?”
Though I never got the chance, and it took me over a decade to figure it out, I would go on to carry the torch she passed to me (in a sense). That decade would include (briefly) meeting Tony Mazzochi, an oil worker and union activist who coined the phrase “just transition”, and having a brief and tiny, but nevertheless formative role in the alliance between Steelworkers and environmentalists that would feed into the intersectional revolt at the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November of 1999 (and the alliance would later give birth to the Blue Green Alliance, though hundreds of others played larger and more significant roles—for better or worse—in that process).
For the most part, however, in the ten years following Bari’s death, while my involvement in the IWW was heavy, my efforts at green unionism lay largely dormant. That is, until one day, almost ten years later, I decided to write a book about Bari’s organizing and the history of Earth First! - IWW Local #1. That process took four years (and there were many wrong turns and dead ends involved in that part of the journey, too). I finally completed writing that book in 2012. However, it still remains unpublished (in hard copy, at least. It can be read online in various places), largely because it’s a lengthy and complex narrative that’s difficult to edit without losing essential details in the process. I still have hopes of publishing it in physical book form, someday.
All of those efforts aren’t for nought, however, because they led directly to the establishment of the IWW’s eco union caucus (IWW EUC) in 2013.
The IWW Eco Union Caucus was cofounded by myself and two other Bay Area IWW members. Its purpose, broadly and generally defined, was to develop the theory and praxis to the words that were added to the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, “and live in harmony with the Earth”, because, although those words define an essential piece of the IWW’s overall mission, since their addition (by a popular vote in 1991 by the IWW membership), they’d never been truly defined or hashed out. One of the primary goals of the caucus is to carry on the green unionist efforts of Judi Bari and others like her.
We quickly established and built the website ecology.iww.org to help flesh out that theory and practice, as well as apply it to various struggles where class struggle and ecological struggle intersect. Much of the work of maintaining that site and providing its content (including many of the writings that comprise this book) over the years has been my own. Much of that writing is based on numerous struggles and efforts to apply the organizational models Judi Bari and Earth First! - IWW Local #1 developed from their own experiences to these contemporary struggles.
I tend to be harshly critical of my own work, and I would assess the results as “mixed”. While I firmly believe that work has thoroughly and adequately defined what revolutionary green unionism is, (and it’s helped many of those struggles for the better) I’d also humbly admit that the reach of those efforts has been small: both within the IWW and also throughout the working class generally.
I likewise humbly admit I’m a far more skilled writer and theoretician of revolutionary green unionism than I am an organizer of it. That said, there are few people who are the latter, and that’s largely due to the limited knowledge of revolutionary green unionist theory, let alone praxis. This is beginning to change, for the better. Although the mostly complete collection of books (in the English language, at least) on green syndicalism and revolutionary green unionism takes up approximately one linear foot (three decimeters for those of you measuring in metric) of space on my bookshelf, most of them have been published in the past decade. There are a growing number of shorter news articles and academic writings (not commercially available in book form) and technical journals as well. The IWW EUC has managed to republish (or at least, link to) much of the latter on ecology.iww.org as well. Clearly the audience and receptiveness to the theory and praxis has grown and continues to do so.
This book is an attempt to raise awareness of revolutionary green unionism and/or green syndicalist theory as well as how it can work in practice. I do not claim that it contains all of the answers. It may even include claims that could later prove to be erroneous. I also do not claim that the ideas I present here are either 100% consistent, nor are they necessarily “ideologically pure” (by ecological, socialist, libertarian, green syndicalist, or revolutionary standards—if absolute such purity exists, and I generally believe it does not).
It is an attempt to walk the talk and make the road by walking it, wherever it seems to want to go. Obviously the end goal is libertarian eco-socialism (though even that defies precise blueprints and specifications). The direction has been partly determined by struggles past (including the “Green Bans”, Lucas Plan, and Earth First! - IWW Local #1 in a green syndicalist context, but so much more from the general history libertarian socialist movements which are far too numerous to list here). It is informed, also, by multicultural and intersectional struggles for liberation from white settler colonialism, many of which do not fit comfortably into neatly delineated, and largely Eurocentric preconceived ideological boxes. I also admit that my experience is limited by my own ignorance of global struggles in these arenas not documented in the English language, which is admittedly a shortcoming of this book.
All of that said, while I don’t offer these writings as the answer to everything, I have experienced enough to be confident that they are an essential piece to the much greater and complex puzzle. They are a beginning of the foundation of what could be a much greater edifice of resilient liberatory ecosocislism—one that offers an answer to the polycrises we currently face.
If nothing else, I offer these ideas as pieces of something that others, including yourself dear reader, can build upon, as we struggle to abolish the wage system and live in harmony with the Earth.
End Notes
[1] I am not the least bit interested in engaging in sectarian squabbling over the “ownership” of green anarchism. Primitivists and anti-civvers have a right to make their arguments over whether or not green anarchism must reject “technology” (however that’s defined) and “civilization” (ditto). I happen to disagree with their hardline positions, even though I accept some of their positions on finer points (though only to an extent), and that will be evident in some of their chapters in this book. I have less disagreements with the social-ecology / libertarian-municipalism variant of green anarchism, as advocated by Murray Bookchin and now practiced (to an extent), by the PKK, but nonetheless, as the readers will see, I have my disagreements with them as well. These are to be expected. Libertarian socialism, in practice is useless if it devolves to sectarianism and dogmatic ideological purity. I am prepared to “die on the hill”, however that green anarchism is much more than either primitivism and/or anti-civ or social ecology.
[2] That’s not to say that Judi Bari was the first person to propose Green Syndicalist ideas. As the reader will see, such ideas were beginning to take root in the UK, Italy, Australia, and elsewhere at least a decade and a half prior to Bari’s entry into Earth First! and the IWW. Within the IWW itself, a relationship between Earth First! and itself had already begun. However, Helen Keller—yes, the very famous historical figure who’d been stricken with deafness and blindness during to a childhood illness—was probably the IWW’s very first green syndicalist. Her radicalization resulted from her observations (as a young adult) that disabilities happened in much higher numbers in working class communities due to their proximity to industrial manufacturing sites, particularly factories and foundries. She wrote about these experiences in an essay titled, “Why I Became an IWW.” Meanwhile, Ralph Chaplin, who wrote the lyrics to “Solidarity Forever” and created the IWW’s famous “Sabo Cat” mascot—among many of his contemporaries—had deep contempt for the capitalists, not only because of their exploitation of the working class, but their “despoilation of Mother Nature” due to their greed.
[3] On top of all of that, even though the San Francisco Bay Area is close enough—at least by automobile—to northwestern California, the latter is still very remote, and I didn’t, in those days, consistently have access to a car. Plus, there were numerous other labor, environmental, and political struggles at play closer to home, and I had to be mindful of making a living.