'A message etched on broken ships': radical environmentalism and extreme ecometal

The radical environmental organisation Sea Shepherd has benefited from conspicuous support from the music and creative industries, including from bands who operate within the heavy metal genre, a genre not known generally for its environmental commitment. This chapter investigates why Sea Shepherd might be the organisation of choice for heavy metal bands who do express a concern for the fate of the more-than-human world. When trying to explain such a choice, this chapter argues that ecometal bands and Sea Shepherd share a politics of transgression. By looking at three specific transgressions (of the norms of anthropocentric humanism, politics, and gender), Paul Willis’s notion of ‘homology’ (2015), and critical concepts from ecocriticism, this chapter demonstrates that such shared transgressions allow for an accommodation between environmental politics and metal’s musical aesthetic.