Christopher Manes
Key Player
Former associate editor, Earth First! JournalIn her book Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (published by the University of Arizona Press), nature writer Susan Zakin observes that Christopher Manes, a former Earth First! Activist and associate editor of the Earth First! Journal, wrote a 1987 article for the Journal using the pseudonym “Miss Anne Thropy.” The article argues: “As radical environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem, but a necessary solution” to what he viewed as human destruction of the earth.
In 1990 Manes wrote Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization, in which he called for a severe reduction in the earth’s human population — and the elimination of fossil fuel use, cattle production, and commercial logging, among other policies. Since then, Manes has withdrawn from the Earth First! movement. “I was pretty radical back then,” he says, “But you grow up.” Manes more recently began advocating animal welfare from a religious perspective. He wrote Rediscovering the Spirituality of Animals in 1997.