From shirts, hats and fleece, to outerwear, music and accessories- we have all the merchandise you’ll ever need! Earth Crisis 'All Out War/Firestorm' 12'.
Next up Karl tell us there will be no compromise in defense of the environment as Bulldog belts out the intro to the first earth crisis song ever written - Ecocide. The sing alongs are the most intense after firestorm. Ben Reed(wearing an awesome Thrasher shirt) does a full 10 point flip into the crowd and Mckaig has to pull him back on stage.

Few movements did as much for hardcore as straight edge did, and few bands embraced straight edge hardcore harder than Syracuse’s Earth Crisis. Both of those points are explored in Straight Edge: A Clear Headed Hardcore Punk History, a new book by Tony Rettman, also the author of NYHC: New York Hardcore, 1980–1990. Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from the book right now, a chapter on none other than Earth Crisis featuring interviews with the band as well as members of Strife, Shelter and more.

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EARTH CRISIS: A FIRESTORM TO PURIFY

TracklistAll Out War (1992) All Out War Stand By Ecocide No Allegiance Firestorm (1993) Firestorm Forged In The Flames Unseen Holocaust Eden Demise Due to the spreading impacts of COVID-19 we are operating with limited functionality. Shop Official Earth Crisis Merch, Vinyl Records, Shirts and More. 100% Authentic Merchandise & Vinyl.

Karl Buechner: I felt that the generation of straight edge before us had taken the vehicle of straight edge and broken the windows out, run razors over the seats, and pushed it into a ravine. They wanted nothing to do with it—so it was our duty to pull it up out of there and rebuild it.
Greg Bennick: In 1989, I was at Syracuse University. I was sitting in my dorm room. My new friend DJ Rose walked in with his friend Karl and said, “We’re going to start a band, and we’re going to call it Earth Crisis.” Karl was being quiet and seemed sort of odd. I just said, “Cool name.” We all looked at each other and they left. It was a weird Napoleon Dynamite kind of moment.
DJ Rose: I moved to Syracuse right after I got out of college in the summer of ’89. Karl and I used to skate; he played bass and he thought we should start a band. We met Dave Stein and Steve Reddy over in Albany, they were two very serious individuals. They were vegans, and they educated us on animal rights. That made us want to push hard in that direction. Karl got together a ragtag group of people, and I named the band Earth Crisis. We practiced two or three times.
Karl Buechner: Our name traces back to the Steel Pulse album of the same name. I thought that album cover artwork really encapsulated a lot of things that our band would stand against. Whether conventional or biological or nuclear, there was a lot going on in that cover.
DJ Rose: We got a chance to play a show in Utica, New York. We played two or three songs, and then we covered SSD’s “Glue.” You know you’re reaching your target audience if people go off for that song. That was the beginning and the end of my role as the vocalist for Earth Crisis. I wasn’t really interested in being in a band. I wanted to book shows in Syracuse, and bring the bands to town that I wanted to see.
When I told Karl I didn’t want to be in the band, he got super bummed. I think he holds a grudge against me to this day. I don’t think he realized Earth Crisis would have died on the vine if I continued to be the singer. I don’t have that anger Karl has, and I don’t have the tenacity to stay on point with the message like he has. It was Karl’s band and vision from the beginning. After I left, he pretty much stole the entire lineup of this Syracuse band called Framework. He became the singer and made Earth Crisis as it’s known today.
Greg Bennick: Fast-forward a few years to about 1993, and I was at a Kinko’s with my friend Bill Baker. He was doing a label at the time, Incision Records, and was making plans to release a record by this band Earth Crisis. He put on the demo tape at 3 a.m. in Kinko’s while we were manifesting zines at “low cost,” if you know what I mean. It was a very ’90s hardcore moment! I don’t remember ever being that blown away by a demo. It was so heavy, the sound was so different, and the band was so intense.
I loved them so much right from the start, because I felt they were saying, “Fuck you! We do not care what you think! Our initiative is veganism and animal rights. If you stand in our way, we’re going to mow you down!” Who had ever done that before? I truly believed Earth Crisis was going to be the bastion of changing the entire world over to veganism.
Karl Buechner: We came from listening to New York hardcore bands like Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front, and Warzone. The first Cro-Mags record, The Age of Quarrel, leaves you thinking, “These guys are down with Hare Krishna one hundred percent.” When you listen to Agnostic Front, you think, “Wow, these guys are patriotic and believe in law and order and self-defense.” Warzone is saying the world is crumbling around us, and we have to become our own tribe. We took those philosophies, approaches, and commitments, and built off them to create our own ideas about how we wanted to present our band.
Lins Cuscani: We all dug that first Earth Crisis EP, All Out War. We saw it as something different, adding the values of the animal rights slant to the straight edge scene. Many straight edge kids in this country were vegetarian anyway; it was a natural progression to get into something musically and lyrically harder and also to support an ideology also so far removed from the norm. Personally, it was important to not only to be positive for myself, but to be positive to all living creatures. Earth Crisis gave everyone a different perspective on the whole straight edge thing, and made us more aware of our diets, lifestyle, and duties to other living species. This scene gained a lot of support, with a plethora of bands like Blood Green, Vengeance of Gaia, Slavearc, and Canvas becoming the focal point. A number of fanzines and record distributors sprang up also.
Karl Buechner: I think people were very ready for Earth Crisis and vegan straight edge. That’s why so many other bands like Green Rage, Canon, or Gatekeeper came up at the same time. There were vegan straight edge bands all over the country, and then, eventually, all over different continents.
Toby Morse: Earth Crisis and the metal-edged, vegan straight edge really seemed to break up straight edge into different sectors.
Jeff Terranova: I personally wasn’t digging the ’90s militant vegan straight edge because it didn’t sound like hardcore to me. It was just that jud-jud riff over and over again. I would have been more into it if it was just actually Slayer up there. Imagine Tom Araya of Slayer singing about veganism the same way he sings about Satan? I came into hardcore from metal. In metal, everything was fantasy. When I crossed over into hardcore, everything was based in reality and that’s what appealed to me. Then hardcore turned into metal, both in its sound and the lyrical content. These bands wrote songs about blowing up mink farms and killing drug dealers. Are they really going to go out and kill drug dealers? Probably not. Where do you draw the line between reality and fantasy?
Karl Buechner: I am not a documentary filmmaker. I am not an author or an investigative journalist. I’m a musician into animal rights. I think the thing that makes Earth Crisis different from a lot of bands in the worlds of hardcore and metal is that the songs that we write contain some science fiction–esque speculation.
Andrew Kline: I’m an Earth Crisis fan. I love Earth Crisis, and I love the guys in the band. We toured with them a lot. But their take on straight edge is much different than Strife’s. We were never about separation or violence. We were always about acceptance.
Lins Cuscani: Vegan straight edge made some of us less tolerant to others, not only from the outside but also within our own scene. It created positivity on one hand, but division on the other.
DJ Rose: Lines got blurred. People associated Earth Crisis with the hardline straight edge thing from a couple years earlier, but Earth Crisis was vegan straight edge—not hardline. Some kids where we lived in Syracuse claimed hardline, but we were antagonistic toward them. None of them are vegetarian anymore. What

Earth Crisis Firestorm Shirt