Those Wild ‘n’ Crazy Westerners : COYOTES AND TOWN DOGS: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement, <i> By Susan Zakin (Viking: $23.50; 483 pp.)</i>

Earlier this year, around the time that President Clinton introduced his compromise plan to save the spotted owl and timber jobs in the Northwest, several television newscasts aired a curious piece of film footage. It showed two bearded, scruffy-looking men in flannel shirts, furiously flailing away at each other next to a logging truck while a woman tried to pull them apart.

The newscaster said it was a fight between a logger and an environmentalist. Just looking at the picture, however, it was impossible to tell which was the environmentalist and which was the logger. I don’t think the environmentalist was identified as a member of Earth First!, but I automatically assumed he--whichever one he was--belonged to that radical group, which cultivates a roughneck, rowdy image and rejects what it considers to be the effete tactics of mainstream environmentalism.

Like most Easterners, I really never understood Earth First!, although I had been following environmental issues for many years and even had talked a number of times with Dave Foreman, one of its founders. I knew what they did, and, more or less, why they did it. But I never understood what made them tick.

Now I do. Reading Susan Zakin’s “Coyotes and Town Dogs,” a sprawling, rollicking and, ultimately, melancholy history of Earth First!, is like spending a week around a campfire with its hard-core “buckaroos,” drinking heroic quantities of beer, singing scatological songs and plotting the next foray into eco-sabotage.

The “coyotes” of the title are the Earth Firsters, mostly Westerners, mostly self-styled rednecks, who believed in direct action to protect the trees and rivers and didn’t mind having a little fun while they did it. The “town dogs” are the mainstream environmentalists, the lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, New York and San Francisco who wear suits, sit at desks and work through the system to preserve and protect the environment.

Zakin, a journalist by trade, is a fair-minded observer who clearly sees the flaws and failings of the Earth Firsters and the accomplishments of the Sierra Clubs and Wilderness Societies. But there is no doubt where her heart lies--it is with the irreverent, anarchistic, trouble-making coyotes. Her environmental perspective is firmly rooted in the West.

Foreman and the other guiding spirits of Earth First! drew much of their inspiration from the writings of the late Edward Abbey, particularly his novel “The Monkeywrench Gang,” which celebrates nature, freedom, drinking, sex and sabotage against billboards, bulldozers, dams and other objects that desecrate the natural world. The rise and fall of Earth First! uncannily mimics the fortunes and fate of the fictional gang, and Zakin’s book reads in many ways like a nonfiction version of Abbey’s.

“Coyotes and Town Dogs” opens with the dramatic, early morning FBI arrest of Foreman and several of his colleagues for conspiracy to blow up a power line associated with the Central Arizona project. It concludes, more than 400 pages later, with their trial (Foreman’s was postponed) and, for some, imprisonment. The pages in between are packed with dozens of mini-biographies of Earth Firsters and other players in the environmental movement, past and present, including Abbey. The book details Earth First! campaigns and tactics and grapples with its somewhat scrambled intellectual underpinnings. It juicily describes escapades such as a drinking and whoring expedition to Mexico that culminated with the actual founding of the movement. It mournfully describes the betrayal of the group by friends turned FBI informers.

Zakin is a good but somewhat undisciplined writer. Similes and metaphors litter her pages as thickly as golf balls on the grass of a driving range--and many are as strained as that one. While she brings up ethical questions about the methods of the radicals, particularly tree spiking and the physical threat that presents to loggers, her overall tone is one of moral ambiguity. She seems unsure of just what, if anything, the movement accomplished. At one point she says that Foreman “gave purpose to a whole generation of college students”; at another she says the activists didn’t save anything besides trees and “even that is debatable.” She does not examine the group’s contribution to the ugly polarization of the Northwest over the future of the ancient forests.

It also would have been useful if she had assessed the significance of the Earth First! phenomenon--what, for example, it tells us about the future of radical environmental politics. In his book “The Rights of Nature,” Roderick Nash speculated that today’s environmental radicals may be in the same position as the radical abolishionists in the early 19th Century. The abolitionists were a ridiculed and reviled minority, but their passion and engagement eventually led to the Civil War. If we ignore the environmental radicals, Nash warned, we may be surprised by another disruption of domestic tranquillity. This interesting issue is not raised by Zakin.

But perhaps there is, in fact, no lasting significance to the Earth First! movement. If Zakin’s portrayals are accurate, most of the main characters in the group, while passionately committed to defending the earth, were emotionally or socially wounded men and women. Some came out of or belonged in the counterculture of the 1960s. Many were escapees from unhappy homes or unhappy marriages. Most seemed to be floundering in life, frantically seeking a cause, a family, an identity; needing to prove their manhood or womanhood. At the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these likable, idealistic young people had made a botch of their lives and that Earth First! will be remembered as no more than a fascinating footnote in the history of environmentalism.

Still, they had a terrific run. And “Coyotes and Town Dogs” is one terrific read.