Wolke, Howie, and Dave Foreman, Memo to “The Hardcore” (July 1980). Environment & Society Portal, Multimedia Library. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/5678.
Howie Wolke and Dave Foreman look for a core group of people to run the new organization. They attach a draft platform and suggest the publication title Nature More: The Newsletter of EARTH FIRST. The name invokes Lord Byron’s verse:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
They propose a program of creating ecological preserves, raising environmental consciousness, and keeping the environmental movement from straying too far from its ideals:
The time has come to inject new vigor, new tactics, and an old-fashioned radical ideology into the increasingly stagnating environmental movement. We are tired of making political compromises in order to look “reasonable.” We are tired of always being on the defensive. And we are tired of letting a bunch of corporate, bureaucratic, and political madmen force the environmental movement to justify protecting a few meager remnant tracts of America’s wild country. Someone needs to speak for the Earth!
—Howie Wolke and Dave Foreman
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