The Big Lump

By Mike Roselle

What is it with animal rights? Why are animals always right? Why are humans always wrong? Why is it wrong to eat an animal when they eat each other? Why do some people who protest animal cruelty cut the balls off of their kitty cats and keep seventeen dogs in the backyard and feed them soy pellets?  I went to a big animal rights conference in Los Angeles last year hoping find Paul Watson and was confronted by large color pictures with blood and gore, movies that would make John Watters puke with lots of sad eyed animals. But not much about climate change and deforestation, the two dangerous trends that are more of a threat to animals the world over than any slaughterhouse or chicken farm. One activist left the room in tears when I mentioned that I was going to help Jake Kreilick Barbeque some bison at his wedding, but I think she may have been a friend of the bride to be.

Floyd and I are staying in a cinderblock hotel in Ashville North Carolina. It’s the kind of place that has those hard green bananas in the lobby along with the cornflakes and low fat milk. I think they take the bananas away if they start to get ripe so people won’t eat them, and they trade them in for more hard green bananas. This is how they can afford to give you a room with a “Continental Breakfast” for $40. Usually Floyd and I sleep on couches, but everybody in Ashville seems to have a cat and Floyd is allergic to cats. Last night we were at the Home of Rodney and Heather Webb in Hot Springs North Carolina and Floyd had to sleep in the car because they have more animals than Dr. Doolittle. The Web family was the founders of Activists With Aprons, the legendary revolutionary vegetarian catering service and makers of the only edible whole-wheat vegan biscuits on planet earth.  Rodney also plays a mean banjo.

Last night we had a few pints at the Barley Micro Brewery in downtown Ashland with Marrianne and Matt from Appalachian Voices, Ray Vaun  from Wild Law, Lamar Marshall from Wild South, Tracy from the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, the Kelly and Josh from the Dogwood Alliance, some folks from Mountain Justice Summer and cousins Carla and Carrie-Wells. Carla, like Andrew George who we had visited earlier in the week in Chapel Hill, was an intern for Lamar Marshall from Wild Alabama (now Wild South). Anyone who can survive an internship with Lamar deserves a medal, and there are quit a few of them around. Lamar is known to use his interns for draft animals on his Alabama farm. Andrew is teaching at UNC and uses LOOWBAGGER.ORG in his classes to illustrate what can happen to your career if you don’t get a good education.  Carrie-Wells is part of some outlaw underground feminist guerrilla group called the Rebelles. This was a very dangerous group of activists and lawyers who have stopped quite a few timber sales, coalmines, power generators and other bad projects through the South.

When it comes to dangerous fanatics, it is the lawyers and the activists that the timber industry, the coal industry and the corrupt government agencies fear most. They spend millions of dollars and countless thousands of hours responding to comments, appeals, and requests for information, not counting defending themselves in court from the litigation that these groups have initiated. They also spend many millions more on advertising countering their claims and doing damage control. Even during the last six years, when everbody seemed to believe we would be denied access to the courts because of the Bush administration’s rulings, and after it was widely report the dissent was being criminilized years, these groups have filled a large number of successful lawsuits that has drastically reduced logging on public lands and made it harder to build new coal fired power plants or locate other destructive developments in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. They also are quit vocal in their dissent, and not afraid of using non violent civil disobedience, as was seen by last years Mountain Justice Summer Campaign. Naturally they are routinely vilified by the extractive industries but seem to enjoy widespread support in the communities that they work in. And unlike the situation you see all to often in other regions of the country, these groups, from the anarchists of Katuah Earth First! to the Lawyers at Wildlaw work closely together on their common goals.

While we are talking about dangerous activists, with the arrests for arson of over a dozen activists across the country and a few more being sought as fugitives, I have heard a lot of talk about the FBI’s prosecution of the Earth Liberation Front. From reading the blogs, you’d think that this new “Greenscare” petrifies everybody in the environmental movement. However, I don’t see many people holding back on the important work that they are doing on the grassroots level even though many people I’ve spoke with know at least one of the alleged perpetrators. The reason for this I believe is twofold. First, the ELF is basically viewed as an animal rights group. Some of their targets were aimed at developments that threatened wildlife habitat, but one was a facility that processed wild horses, and most conservationists I know are not fond of feral domestic horses defoliating the grasslands and deserts of the west. The second reason is that I haven’t talked to any reasonable person who thought committing acts like burning down a ski lodge was going to help protect the Lynx in Colorado. The targets chosen for arson were perplexing to me, and seemed to blur the lines that distinguishes our movement from animal rights groups like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal Liberation Front, and of course serves to associate all of us with violence.

The problem with this blurring of distinctions between animal welfare and wildlife habitat protection, and of the lumping of all grassroots environmental groups with the violence of the animal rights movement, and you can see this by looking at websites like the Center for Consumer Freedom, is that the industry loves to lump us together. In this way, veganism and protecting a roadless area are both framed as an attempt by violent, radical fanatics to rob citizens of their individual freedom. And while conservationists are generally sympathetic to many of the goals of the animal rights movement, such as regulating factory farms, banning the leg hold trap and the killing of predators, most support hunting and fishing, many own guns, and certainly not all are vegetarians. (Last week in Tennessee, an organic farmer-activists served me road-kill venison for breakfast).

This lumping strategy is an attempt to marginalize the conservation movement and the timber industry has been using it for decades, attempting to portray all environmentalists as “hippy vegetarian backpackers from California”. Now with an ongoing media frenzy over the new indictments, the Wise Use Think Tanks are having a field day trying to connect all the dots. Fortunately, the media doesn’t seem to be buying it. But they should be paying attention to the resources that the federal government is committing to spying on grassroots environmental groups, and the constitutionally questionable methods they are employing to monitor peaceful organizations.

In spite of all the hype, violent political tactics have always been rare in the US. And this has been especially true in the environmental movement. What should be truly surprising to us is that there are not more Americans going around looking for energy executives and corrupt politicians with rocket launchers given our much-discussed propensity for violence and easy access to weapons. According to recent reports in the news media, the current financial cost of environmentally inspired crimes in the US since 2000, when the anti environmentalist and their monkeys in Congress started keeping records is about 200 million dollars. From what we have seen, most of the crimes on the list were not related to the environment at all. Most of the crimes actually were arson for non political reasons The exceptions like the infamous Vail Fire in Colorado are even more rare. While this proves that eco saboteurs really are out there, it also shows how few they are and how limited their operations.

My first reaction when I heard the news that the FBI had busted the Earth Liberation Front was to remember the FBI from personal experiences when they filed criminal charges against Judi Barri and Darryl Cherney for planting the bomb that nearly killed them both, and their unethical conduct during the Arizona Five case in Tucson where Dave Foreman and four others were arrested for planning to cut down transmission lines to a nuclear power plant. As in both of those cases the principle people involved in the roundup were well known, respected members of the environmental movement. The witnesses against them were proven to be unreliable and downright dishonest. There are other similarities as well, as with the FBI whipping up hysteria in the media with the unsupportable claims that environmental terrorists are the most dangerous internal threat to national security and they had arrested the ringleaders. In such an atmosphere a fair trial for the growing list of defendants will now be difficult or impossible.

My second reaction was more complicated. I had always believed as an organization the ELF was a fiction, a group connected only by the Internet. I knew that most of the crimes stated in the oft repeated statistics were not politically motivated or connected to anything, just part of the background of usual property crimes. Most of the cases that were attributed to the ELF were based on graffiti left at the crime scene. And of course some of them were followed by press releases where the ELF took credit. Some of the acts were overtly political, and whether or not they merit being labeled terrorism, the Vail fire was certainly a dramatic and violent crime under any definition, and should not be confused with arson.

In the recent past, a few  activists, such as Jeffery (Free) Luers, convicted under the new laws against “eco-terror” and serving a long prison term have been unrepentant. Perhaps the neo-con nut cases are right for once, and you are now seeing the first of a new generation of eco-soldiers who can stand up to the test of true combat and confinement. This was never part of the romantic Monkey Wrench Gang scenario, whose perpetrators never got caught, and this was the ultimate lesson of the Arizona Five; What do you do when you are caught? As of this writing some of the defendants are either talking to the authorities or admitting responsibility for some of the alleged incidents mentioned in the indictments. There will be much more to this story as more information is released, and if you want to learn more Portland Indy Media has been providing excellent coverage of this rapidly unfolding and very disturbing situation.

There are many other troubling issues about this case. While a few real crimes were evidently committed, the Government is clearly overreacting. We are seeing what amounts to a witch-hunt. Given the history of the FBI and the fact that so many people know at least one the defendants, the risk that innocent people will be caught up in this expanding investigation is very high. There are grand juries being empanelled and subpoenas being issued to just about anyone who had any connection to the alleged perpetrators. The amount of time and money the FBI has spent to infiltrate local activists groups to both gather intelligence incite violence is alarming. It displays a gaping disparity in the way certain crimes are treated. Burning a SUV or even a condo is treated more severely than armed carjacking or manslaughter. It is certainly treated less severely than poisoning a creek or illegally felling a grove of thousand-year-old trees, and the Feds have certainly committed more resources to finding those for burning and unoccupied sky lodge in Vail than they have committed to finding out who placed the bomb in Judi Bari’s car.

When the FBI was employing thousands of agents and infiltrators to monitor the largely disbanded American Communist Party in the late fifties they had only a few agents in their civil rights division assigned to investigating a wave of murders and church bombings targeting civil rights workers in the South. Of course the FBI actually had many more agents assigned to monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. than they did the KKK and the White Citizen Council in Alabama. This latest witch-hunt against environmentalist is similarly misguided. The resources of the FBI need to go into preventing environmental crimes and prosecuting with at least equal vigor those who break environmental laws, threaten an intimidate environmentalists, or who cause irreparable harm to our planet and our health.

As Tom Hayden has said; historically, it was inevitable that when people are deprived of a voice, and refused the ability to make an impact, when the government uses all of its power to isolate and humiliate them, people will adopt more militant tactics. While I am now personally opposed to violence in any form, I believe these defendants deserve our support, and they deserve the protection of our constitution, and if convicted they deserve the status of political prisoners. They are not terrorists, and any punishments they receive should fit the offenses for which they have been charged.