Lamar Marshall takes a slow pull on a Corona, narrows his brown eyes to a squint and takes aim at Alabama’s corporate despoilers and government land wreckers.

“My ambition is to wake up them ol’ boys out there and save the ancestral landscape,” he says. “The blood and bones of my forefathers nourished those old trees they’re cutting down.”

Sitting next to him, Ray Vaughan knocks back a shot of Jim Beam and nods in agreement, while Ned Mudd grins wickedly, swilling a pale liquid that looks like tequila.

Meet Alabama’s Redneck Environmentalists, three homegrown hell raisers bent on saving their state. They curse. They bully. They pack guns.

When it comes to protecting Alabama’s endangered species, cleaning up the state’s polluted rivers and preserving its forest wilderness, these boys shoot straight and they go for the heart. In the seven years they have been working together, Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan have sued the State of Alabama, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service—countless times. They have also taken on Alabama’s power companies, timber companies and industrial farmers.

Lately, they’ve been winning. It’s the combination of good science, innovative tactics and unconditional love of the land that makes this trio successful, says Jasper Carlton, executive director of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation in Boulder, Colorado.

“Against all odds and with no support from mainstream groups, these three homespun boys are providing the model the national environmental movement sorely needs,” Carlton says.

Alabama, the fourth-most biodiverse state in the nation, needs them, too. It has more fish species than any other state, and more snakes, aquatic snails and mussels than any other place in the world. Yet many environmental groups rank Alabama dead last for environmental protection. Industrial clear-cutting, pesticides, dam building and agribusiness are causing one of the worst extinction episodes in the United States—twice as many extinctions as any other continental state, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Alabama has slashed its native longleaf pine forests to near extermination and replaced them with pine plantations destined for pulp. Development has destroyed half of Alabama’s wetlands, and the state holds the nation’s third-most polluted county.

“Alabama is a perpetual Third World,” Vaughan says. “We’ll do anything for a buck, and all we want is a buck.”

In a state where 30 percent of the adult population is illiterate and the average per capita income is the lowest in the nation, more is at stake than ecosystem destruction. The self-described Redneck Environmentalists are also fighting oppression. Mudd calls the enemy “the aristocracy of power.” Marshall calls it “carpetbagging corporations” who come to Alabama, take the money north and leave the pollution. Until the state’s hunters, anglers and rural residents grasp the significance of the loss, he says, little will change.

Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan are not bosom buddies who drink together all night every night. They are too different—too independent and ornery—for that kind of relationship.

“We always get along,” Marshall protests with straight-faced innocence. “I’m very tolerant.”

At fifty, he is a true Alabama native. A descendent of Cherokee Indians, a hunter, trapper and karate black belt, Marshall lives in a 140-year-old cabin deep in the forests of northwestern Alabama, where he publishes Wild Alabama, a periodical that’s as much a movement as a magazine. E. O. Wilson, the acclaimed Harvard naturalist, calls Wild Alabama< and Marshall “the thin green line in Alabama.” Marshall’s mission is saving the Bankhead National Forest from the Forest Service. The agency is systematically destroying “the crown jewel of Alabama,” Marshall says, converting its forests to loblolly pine and choking its streams with sediment.

He met Vaughan and Mudd in 1992 at a University of Alabama conference. Before their presentation, The Lighter Side of Environmental Law, the duo pulled out guns to get the students’ attention. Attracted by their “kick-ass style,” Marshall knew these were kindred souls who shared his goals for Alabama’s environment.

A Montgomery attorney, Vaughan, thirty-eight, has been hacking away at natural resource atrocities in Alabama for a decade. Among his victories are two cases against the infamous 1995 timber salvage rider. In 1993, he and Mudd published part one of The Gonzo Guide to Environmental Law, a work in progress that offers advice ranging from how to take advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to “what to do when the empire strikes back.” An imposing man at six feet four inches and 235 pounds, Vaughan is at heart a bird lover with a particular weakness for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. He is the founder and executive director of WildLaw, which Earth First! founder Dave Foreman calls the best conservation law office in the country. Vaughan is Marshall’s exclusive attorney.

Mudd, forty-seven, also an attorney, is a card-carrying member of the Universal Pantheist Church and a Birmingham musician who has produced ten albums, most of them in a genre he calls “redneck electronica.” A director of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, he crafted a successful lawsuit that forced the EPA to address the effects of damaged water systems on all threatened and endangered species, prompting Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to call Mudd “some kind of unwanted force of nature.” What drives Mudd is the daily assault on Alabama’s richly diverse streams and wetlands by “out-of-state marauders” bent on demolishing it all for money. He also confesses to a passion for Cahaba lilies in bloom.

To fight the destruction of their state’s environment, Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan have devised an effective division of labor. Mudd is the thinker whose innovative legal strategies are the genesis of much of the trio’s success. Vaughan is the relentless lawyer who takes the cases to court. Marshall is the perennial plaintiff. “I take on anybody and everybody,” Vaughan says. “Litigation is my business and business is very good.”

No government agency knows that better than the Forest Service. At odds over timber sales, clear-cutting, herbicides, road building and converting native forests to tree farms, the Redneck Environmentalists have filed more than sixty cases against the agency in Alabama. After taking a beating at first, they claim a victory rate of about 80 percent over the last three years.

One ongoing case involves a program to trade around 6,000 acres of national forest land to strip-mine coal operators. In exchange, the public would get scattered parcels of logged-over land. Instead of considering the entire exchange as one project, however, Forest Service officials began trading 200 and 300 acres at a time. Instead of a full environmental study, they did a series of more cursory environmental analyses, avoiding any consideration of the project’s cumulative effects.

The lawsuit filed by WildLaw and Wild Alabama has temporarily halted the Bankhead National Forest land exchange program. Because the case is still in active litigation, Forest Service officials declined to comment on it. A federal judge is scheduled to rule sometime soon.

Another frequent government target is the Department of the Interior. Vaughan and WildLaw have fought Babbitt for six years over the Alabama sturgeon, an ancient anadromous species that haunts the Alabama River system. Babbitt erroneously declared the three-foot fish extinct after federal biologists botched a captive-breeding program by killing the only female available. This spring, Alabama’s congressional delegation lined up behind Babbitt in opposing sturgeon protections, trying unsuccessfully to attach a rider to a Kosovo relief bill.

Vaughan persisted. WildLaw recently reached an agreement requiring the Department of the Interior to list the Alabama sturgeon (which despite Babbitt’s announcement still holds on in a few Alabama rivers) as a candidate for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. It’s not a complete victory, says Vaughan, but it does avoid putting the sturgeon “off in some critter purgatory” while lawyers duke it out in court.

The campaign to save the sturgeon is a typical Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan battle, says Carlton, whose Biodiversity Legal Foundation is a copetitioner for listing. “They fought to save the most uncharismatic species you can imagine simply because it was in trouble,” he says. “Without them, it would have been written off and gone extinct. I think they are real heroes.”

In addition to engendering dread among government agencies, their penchant for in-your-face confrontation has generated some wariness of the Redneck Environmentalists among other environmental organizations. Most groups try to work with agencies and corporations, turning to litigation only when all else fails, says Ken Wills, a natural resource planner with the Alabama Environmental Council. Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan are not coalition builders.

Having different styles is good for the environmental movement, says Taylor Barnhill, a program director for the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition in Asheville, North Carolina, a group that counts Marshall’s Wild Alabama organization among its members.

“Sometimes we need a porch dog, sometimes we need someone in a coat and tie,” he says. “As in nature, diversity is healthy.”

Bob Tate, incoming president of the Alabama Audubon Council, welcomes Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan to go after polluters and the Forest Service any way they want. Their work has actually made Audubon’s job easier, he says.

“They make us seem a lot more credible. People would a lot rather talk to us than them,” Tate says.

The Redneck Environmentalists do not always return this esteem. They have openly trashed their mainstream colleagues as “eco-weenies” and “limousine environmentalists who have paid a terrible price for a seat at the table.” The old-guard groups have engaged in an economic and policy dialogue instead of sound science, Mudd says.

“You can’t negotiate the facts,” he says. “They had their chance and they failed.”

Mudd compares the environmental movement in Alabama in the 1990s to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The goal is to engage the public, to create a society of activists.

“It’s broader than people. We’re raising issues of equality and justice for all species. It’s not a battle. It’s a war,” Mudd says.

Not every skirmish is in the courtroom. Marshall and Vaughan are working with Alabama officials to pass a wilderness act that would protect state lands from development and roads. They hope to designate more than 40,000 acres under a bill endorsed by the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club and Citizen Action of Alabama.

The Redneck Environmentalists are also lobbying federal officials to designate nearly 260,000 acres of Forest Service­managed land and 61,000 acres managed by other federal agencies as wilderness. That would include the Little River, Alabama’s only waterway without permitted pollution sources. The Little River forms a 600-foot canyon in northeastern Alabama, the deepest gorge east of the Rocky Mountains. Now a national preserve, Vaughan says about 3,000 acres of the area should be given federal wilderness protection, a step he says represents the last hope for the endangered green pitcher plant. He recently went to court to stop road building by “some local bubba contractors” who were running a bulldozer through the pitcher plant bog.

The federal lands that are not eligible for wilderness protection should be managed to at least preserve their biodiversity, Marshall says. The Bankhead National Forest, the largest of Alabama’s four national forests, has waterfalls, hemlock forests and 400 miles of canyons carved by the last ice age. It supports beavers and bats, bald eagles, darters and snakes galore.

With national forests representing less than 3 percent of Alabama’s 3.3 million acres, it’s no place for “the federal boys to play their chain saw games,” Vaughan says. He wants all 660,000 acres of national forest in Alabama to be managed without commercial logging.

The Forest Service is moving toward greater ecosystem protections, says Gary Pierson, planning director for the Forest Service’s Southern Region. He predicts far less timber cutting in the future. But an end to all logging is not compatible with the agency’s goal of restoring forests to their natural condition, Pierson says.

So far, the Redneck Environmentalists are making their case civilly—through the regulatory process of revising Alabama’s forest management plans. They have invested $100,000 in scientific studies as part of a citizens’ alternative for managing Alabama national forests. The citizens’ alternative will emphasize protections for sensitive areas and endorse “zero cut,” a national campaign to eliminate logging on national forests.

If ever there were an appropriate place to end commercial logging on national forests, it is Alabama, says Barnhill, the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition program director.

“Here we have a tiny rag of a remnant of public land with some of the most diverse aquatic ecosystems in America,” he says. “What is the sense of cutting trees on these public forests?”

Marshall, Mudd and Vaughan are starting to take their successful tactics beyond Alabama to national forests in Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia. How they fare will depend, in part, on how carefully they craft their lawsuits, Barnhill says. He attributes some of their success in Alabama to “extreme violations” of federal regulations by Forest Service officials.

Despite a handful of recent actions in neighboring states, Mudd says, his focus will always be Alabama. The state offers endless opportunities to develop strategies to protect local species and habitats that can be used by activists throughout the nation.

“I can pick my fights right here and they translate everywhere. I’m thinking locally, acting nationally,” Mudd says.

Vaughan seems appalled by the prospect of turning his Alabama victories into a career as a national environmental attorney.

“What’s happening in Alabama is a national tragedy and a disgrace. This is home. If we don’t take care of the places we love, no one else is going to do it for us,” he says. “Besides, I love a challenge.”

For Marshall, Alabama is both an ancestral and a spiritual home. His greatest accomplishments, he says, are not legal but cultural victories involving his rural neighbors. The better they understand his passion for preserving history and habitat, the better able they will be to find their own ways to protect them.

“To know where we are from is to know our ancestral birthright,” Marshall says. “When we truly experience the land that they knew, we can find our sense of belonging.”