Walking up the path to the Kirkridge Retreat Center outside Bangor, Pennsylvania in early July, you may have sensed something was afoot. Cars with license plates from far-flung states lined the driveway and wild-haired twenty-somethings mingled with kids, tweens and adults in their 30s, 40s and beyond.

A hand painted cardboard sign reading simply “EF!” would have directed you, with an arrow pointing to the activity. A blend of laughter, music, and fragments of conversations about climate catastrophe quickly sets the tone before you reach a folding table strewn with literature, hand sanitizer, masks and snacks.

“Welcome,” a smiling volunteer would greet you. “Are you here for Earth First?”

This summer, around 400 people found their way to a rural plot of land in eastern Pennsylvania to participate in the national Earth First! Gathering. Over the course of seven days, anarchists, abolitionists, environmentalists and more converged on Lenapehoking, the original name for the traditional homelands of the Lenape, the region’s Indigenous people.

For over 40 years, people have gathered under the banner of Earth First!, a no-compromise, direct action movement launched to confront ecologically catastrophic industries and policies. In opposition to “big green” nonprofits, Earth First! takes a more hands-on approach to climate activism. For decades, the movement has centered direct action – the tactic of physically blocking destructive projects.

Through protests, occupations, work stoppages, locking on to equipment, and sometimes property destruction and sabotage, Earth First! seeks to do what many other organizations don’t – directly intervene and confront the companies and policies that harm ecosystems.

While the movement is focused on environmental protection as its main cause, participants see intersecting struggles as equally important. Today’s Earth First! shares heavy overlap with antifascism, Indigenous sovereignty, queer struggles and autonomous movements.

Earth First!ers don’t claim to be members of a formal structure, but rather a network of people who share, and act on, a set of principles.

“It is not an organization, but a movement,” a website representing Earth First! reads. “There are no ‘members’ of EF!, only Earth First!ers. We believe in using all of the tools in the toolbox, from grassroots and legal organizing to civil disobedience and monkeywrenching.”

Though not a formal organization, Earth First! is organized. Each year for more than four decades, Earth First!ers have hosted a national gathering where movement participants, alongside people across a wide range of social movements, meet up to share info about the struggles they’re engaged in, host workshops and trainings, and build relationships. This year was the 44th time the meetup had happened since 1979.

Throughout the week, people hosted dozens of workshops and skill shares ranging from foraging wild foods to self-defense classes. Between teaching hard skills, organizers and participants hosted conversations about fostering solidarity with Indigenous communities, movement history, mentoring future activists, and more.

To kick off a week of workshops and education, Keshia Talking Waters and her mother Maria Lawrence shared the Lenape creation story and introduced attendees to the concept of Sovereign Science.

Talking Waters, founder of Sovereign Science, and Lawrence, a professor of science education at Rhode Island College, broke down to Unicorn Riot what Sovereign Science is, how it can help in our current context, and why they thought it was important to share Indigenous perspectives at the 2024 Earth First! gathering.

More than accruing skills and learning about theory, participants who spoke with Unicorn Riot were drawn to the event for the sense of community it offers. For some, this year’s event was their introduction to Earth First! as a movement, but others had been coming to gatherings for decades.

Regardless of how many times they had been to events or organized with Earth First!, though, community was a common theme that drew participants to the woods this year.

Organizing a national gathering for a decades-old movement is no small feat. Each year a different, autonomously organized group of volunteers find a location, set up logistics, arrange programming, and promote the event that draws hundreds of people for about a week in early July.

This year, organizers from New York took on the task and hosted the event. Unicorn Riot spoke to organizers to hear about the challenges and motivations behind putting in the effort to create the gathering this year.

Though the gathering acts as a focal point for the movement, Earth First! is active all year, organizing across the continent. Part of that activity includes the Earth First! Journal.

For as long as Earth First! has existed as a movement, the Earth First! Journal has served as its voice. An independent, collectively run print magazine and website, the Earth First! Journal acts as the public face of the movement, representing Earth First!ers through movement updates, discourse, debates, poetry, art, tactical discussions and more. Unicorn Riot spoke with two people involved with the Earth First! Journal collective – one who’s currently a member, the other a former editor – to learn about what the journal is and why they think it’s important to the movement as a whole.

After seven days of education, shared meals, and community building, participants broke down camp and headed home or, in some cases, continued traveling. Next year’s event will pop up somewhere else, continuing the long running tradition of the Earth First! Gathering.

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