Dave Foreman is a self-described radical environmentalist, Co-founder of Earth First!, and a leading defender of "monkey-wrenching" as a direct-action tactic to slow or stop strip mining, clear-cut logging of old-growth forests, the damming of wild rivers, and other environmentally destructive practices.

The son of a United States Air Force employee, Foreman traveled widely while growing up. In college he chaired the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and worked in the 1964 presidential election campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater. In the 1970s Foreman was a conservative Republican and moderate environmentalist who worked for the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. He came to believe that the petrochemical, logging, and mining interests were "extremists" in their pursuit of profit, and that government agencies—the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and...