For the Wild: Psychological Roots of Radical Eco-Activism – Interview with Sarah Pike

We’re excited to share a new interview with ISSRNC scholar and former Board President Sarah Pike. In this interview conducted by noted animal ethologist Mark Bekoff, Dr. Pike talks about her latest book, For the Wild, and some of the backstory to the book and her work on ritual and eco-activism.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the interview:

A few months ago, I discovered a book by California State University’s Dr. Sarah Pike, a professor of comparative religion and humanities at their Chico campus, called For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism. Once I began reading it, I couldn’t put it down—my marked-up book looks like a Jackson Pollack painting—as she weaves in stories of a wide variety of activists and the development pathways by which they rewild their lives and their hearts and “go feral” to “shape the past into something new.”

I was intrigued by the many ways in which Dr. Pike’s analyses normalize behavior patterns such as tree-hugging that far too often are written of as being “radical” when, in fact, radical activists aren’t really “outliers or outsiders” and their passion and actions are easy to understand and explain when individual childhood landscapes are unraveled. I’m thrilled Sarah could take the time to answer a few questions about her highly original book.

You can read the full interview here at Psychology Today.