The New Republic
THE TERRORISTS NEXT DOOR.
House Arrest
by Michelle Cottle
Post date 07.26.01 | Issue date 08.06.01
Watching young children pedaling their bikes through the sparkling new subdivision of Island Estates, you'd never guess that four of these suburban dream homes were torched by arsonists in the predawn chill on December 30. Nor can you tell which cheery white house on Casey Lane had threatening graffiti sprayed across its exterior in red paint. "`Burn the Rich,' or something like that," recalls a neighbor (who, like everyone else in the area, requested anonymity). "Everybody was really very scared. My daughter is eight years old, and when we were driving by she actually saw the scrawl."
Right after the attacks, members of a radical environmental group claimed responsibility, warning in an anonymous Internet posting that the fires were part of an escalating war on suburban sprawl. "I didn't want to tell the kids," recalls a mother of four who says she and her husband had bought a house but had not yet moved into the neighborhood back then. "But then the phone started ringing ... and it was all over the news." The FBI was called in, and in February investigators arrested four of the alleged perpetrators, all of them area teens. Three have since pled guilty to arson conspiracy. Welcome to the modern ecoterrorism movement. Ecoterrorism (or "economic sabotage," as its advocates prefer) once primarily targeted industries--timber, mining, nuclear power--seen as particularly egregious despoilers of the environment. But lately the movement has fixed on a new target: suburban sprawl. Now a range of targets from SUV dealerships to two-story brick colonials are at risk. Since January of last year, ecoterrorists have torched more than a dozen new homes across Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, and New York.
The irony is that, for the most part, the arsonists (those who've been apprehended, anyway) look an awful lot like the people whose houses they're putting to the match--upper-middle-class, pro-environment, and local. In Boulder last year, a young man charged with setting fire to a new town-house development turned out to live across the street, a beneficiary of the same suburban sprawl he now sought to deny other kids. (Though all parties involved with the case agreed not to ask about motive, the arson was widely considered an act of ecoterrorism.) Similarly, a man recently arrested in Phoenix for torching homes around a nature preserve lived on the edge of that preserve himself. And the four teens charged with the Mt. Sinai fires were middle-class and hailed from the surrounding burgs. As Gregg Easterbrook explained in these pages (see "Suburban Myth," March 15, 1999), the strongest anti-sprawl sentiment often comes from those who, having reached the promised land of single-family detached homes with two-car garages, want to keep out new arrivals. What's changed is that this resentment of new development has assumed the moral mantle of the environmental movement. And it has turned violent.
As ideological crusades go, ecoterrorism is relatively new. Greenpeace captured public attention in the 1970s with its harassment of whaling ships. But the movement didn't really emerge in the United States until the early '80s, with the founding of Earth First!. The organization was the brainchild of Dave Foreman, a former bigwig in the Wilderness Society who felt that mainstream environmental groups had betrayed the cause by signing on to a 1979 decision by the U.S. Forest Service to protect only 15 million of 80 million acres of undeveloped public land from logging, mining, grazing, and other economic activities. Foreman and a handful of like-minded activists quit their jobs and started Earth First!, taking as their guru Edward Abbey, an ex-forest ranger and author of the 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey's tale of four quirky anarchist Luddites who roam the countryside committing sabotage in the name of Mother Earth as they plot to blow up the Glen Canyon dam was entirely fictional. But it fast became the bible of radical greens. As a nod to Abbey, Earth First! introduced itself to the public in the spring of 1981 by unfurling a sheet of black plastic down the center of the Glen Canyon dam to create the appearance of a giant crack. A couple of years later, the group stepped up its "monkeywrenching" with the introduction of tree spiking, a process whereby anti-logging activists hammer long metal spikes into trees marked for lumber. The spikes don't harm the trees but can shatter a saw blade, making it difficult and expensive--and dangerous--for lumber companies to harvest in spiked areas. In 1985 Foreman published Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. An in-depth how-to for economic saboteurs, Ecodefense (now in its third edition) includes sections on spiking roads, burning machinery, building smoke bombs, trashing billboards, cutting fences, plugging waste-discharge pipes, trashing condos, sabotaging computers, and, of course, avoiding arrest.
By 1992, many in Earth First! were pushing for the group to renounce criminal acts. But just as Foreman et al. had abandoned the mainstream to work outside the law, an Earth First! group in Brighton, England, formed a pro-sabotage spin-off called the Earth Liberation Front. Patterned after the slightly older Animal Liberation Front, the ELF isn't technically an organization at all but more of a philosophy and a set of operating principles. Decentralized and nonhierarchical, ELF members function in small, independent cells--like the Irish Republican Army, explains ELF spokesman Craig Rosebraugh. According to Rosebraugh, anyone can be part of the group if he or she shares the ELF's beliefs and operates according to three broad guidelines: "Work to cause maximum economic damage to entities profiting from the destruction of the natural environment"; "Educate and reveal to the public the atrocities being committed"; and "Take all necessary precautions against harming life." ELF members communicate and recruit via the Internet: Anonymous dispatches claiming responsibility for acts of sabotage are sent to Rosebraugh via an e-mail router that disguises their origins, and Rosebraugh--who skirts legal trouble by claiming he is not actually a member of the ELF, merely a sympathizer--then posts the messages on the official ELF website and notifies the media. This decentralized structure makes it exceedingly difficult for law enforcement to track down ELF perpetrators. Oregon police now claim to know the identity of three ELF leaders. But, although the "group" has taken credit for dozens of major and minor crimes since it began operating in the United States in 1996, only five related arrests have as of yet been made.
This is a big problem, because, despite its cute acronym, the ELF has pioneered a form of ecoterrorism dramatically more dangerous than mere monkeywrenching. Though members still pursue traditional acts of ecosabotage--smashing windows, jamming locks, slashing tires--arson has become their weapon of choice: The ELF website now features a meticulously detailed manual on how to make and plant incendiary devices. And along with this expansion of destructive means has come an expansion of targets--university labs, genetically modified crops, horse corrals, political headquarters, banks, and, increasingly, private homes. The ELF's most infamous (and costly) attack was the October 1998 fire at the Vail ski resort, which caused some $12 million in damage. All told, the group boasts it has cost enemies of the environment some $37 million. The FBI considers it among the nation's leading domestic terrorist threats.
The public's assessment has thus far been more charitable. Rosebraugh is invited to speak at universities and conferences around the country. During the rash of fires in Phoenix, the Phoenix New Times ran a story about how many local residents, though they disapproved of the arsonists' tactics, empathized with the underlying impulse. In May NPR aired a commentary by an Arizona writer who said she was rooting for the arsonists: Having seen the once-pristine meadow around her cabin ruined by a tacky new megahome, this woman had "walked the land for months, debating arson" herself and now wanted to send the idealistic firebugs "money for matches."
None of which should come as a great surprise. Americans have always displayed a fair amount of hypocrisy in our environmentalism. We want our water, land, and air to be protected; we just want other people to make the required sacrifices. So, too, with our quiet suburban cul-de-sacs and vacation homes in the Rockies: Once we have ours, we want to make sure no one builds theirs next door. And if they do, well, send "money for matches." Which brings to mind the old joke: What's the difference between a developer and an environmentalist? A developer is someone looking to build a house in the woods; an environmentalist is someone who already lives there.
Rosebraugh denies that this is the sentiment motivating the ELF's attacks: "The issue here is not that families are building more dwellings to have a roof over their heads and be able to live healthy lives." Rather, it is a matter of excess. "All of the targets have been large, luxurious, wealthy homes, ranging from $500,000 to upwards of $1.5 million," he says. In fact, much of the ELF's anti-sprawl message sounds like a virulent strain of class warfare masquerading as environmentalism. Various post-arson communiques from the group have railed against "future dens of the wealthy elite," "the white male industrial and corporate elite," and "building homes for the wealthy" while a third of the Earth's people "are either starving or living in poverty." Says Rosebraugh: "[T]here is no reason in the world, no justification in the world, for having that sort of display of greed and pure power and wealth. Meanwhile, maybe just a mile away, people don't have proper access to health care and nourishment because they don't have any money."
There are at least two fundamental flaws in this rationale: First, burning down new luxury homes does exactly zero to help poor people, whether they are one mile away or 1,000. Second, Rosebraugh's claim isn't true: While the ELF may have started out targeting only extreme displays of "greed and pure power and wealth," it has been working its way down the economic ladder. The most expensive homes in Island Estates listed for around $500,000. Most sold in the $350,000 to $400,000 range--pricey, but typical for Suffolk County (and much of Long Island, for that matter). As one Long Island soccer mom frets, "Who knows where they'll draw the line?"
he more you look into the ELF, the less its good (or even ambivalent) press seems remotely warranted. Rosebraugh and others reject the "terrorist" label. "That applies to what actually harms life," says Rosebraugh. "The ELF has never harmed an individual in its history." True, the group sets fires at night when buildings are vacant, and all the targeted homes have still been under construction and unoccupied. But the ELF's escalating violence is clearly intended to cause terror, making people and businesses too afraid to locate in certain areas. Moreover, as FBI agent James Margolin notes, it's simply a matter of time before some firefighter or hapless bystander falls victim to one of these blazes. Similarly, the ELF's contention that it is targeting developers rather than homeowners is flat-out foolish. Even if the developer (or the developer's insurer) takes the full financial hit, it's the family planning to move in (and others in the area) who ends up scared of every bump in the night.
Moreover, despite the destruction they cause, many anti-sprawl arsons aren't even taken seriously as political statements, because it's hard to know to what extent such actions are driven by ideology and to what extent ideology has provided a cover--sometimes after the fact--for essentially random crimes. Folks around Mt. Sinai were certainly frightened by the neighborhood fires. But they dismissed the perpetrators as "a bunch of punk kids" with "nothing better to do on a Friday night." Then there's the Phoenix arsonist, Mark Warren Sands, who apparently didn't start out as an ecoterrorist at all. In a secretly taped confession to a friend, Sands claimed he was driven by graphic nightmares to burn down the first home (located right behind his own). According to his confession, he torched the same house a second time out of spite, then burned another house to throw police off the trail. Suddenly, area residents were buzzing about the mysterious ecoterrorist, and the press identified him as an avatar of the movement; articles told of the many locals sympathetic to Sands's apparent political ideals. All the commotion evidently spurred Sands to set fire to five more houses before he was caught. None of them, needless to say, was his own.
MICHELLE COTTLE is a senior editor at TNR.
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