from the pages of industry pamphlets into mainstream political discourse was the result of intense industry lobbying. The campaign also worked to insert itself into academic debate; the first article about “environmental terrorism” to appear in the journal Terrorism was authored by an executive of Contingency Management Services.9 Within two decades ecoterrorism became the FBI’s top domestic terrorism priority. In 2003, the American Legislative Exchange Council published a pamphlet (amounting to model legislation) titled “Animal and Ecological Terrorism in America” in an effort to transform the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 into the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The latter was ultimately ratified in 2006, preceded by a series of Senate and House committee hearings on ecoterrorism.
The radical environmentalist movement that industry sought to vilify is made up of a variety of groups, organizations, and networks. A few of the more recognizable names, those implicated in Operation Backfire, include the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and Earth First!10 ALF, ELF, and SHAC are British imports that arrived in the United States in 1979, 1996, and 2004, respectively. ALF announced its presence in the United States by freeing five animals from the New York University Medical Center.11 Earth First! was founded in 1979 by Dave Foreman, a popular figure in the environmentalist movement who penned Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching in 1985; his book details “ecotage,” tactics for sabotaging machinery in order to disrupt industry activities. The groups are tied together in a number of ways: tactics, philosophy, shared members, and declarations of solidarity—not to mention being the co-subjects of government hearings, investigations, and reports.
James Jarboe, the FBI’s domestic terrorism section chief, defines ecoterrorism as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target often of a symbolic nature.”12 As a carbon copy of the FBI definition of domestic terrorism, the terms “environmentally” and “environmental” are scribbled in, either attached to or in place of, “politically” and “political.” Republican Senator David Vitter, present at many of the hearings on the subject, lauded the application of terrorism to the actions of environmentalists. Echoing the testimonies of employees and executives who described the terror they felt as a result of direct action, he concluded, “I think it is absolutely appropriate. You look up the definition, and this is what terrorism is about. It is using violent and illegal activity to try to intimidate people, scare people into submission to go along with these extremist political agendas. That is basically the dictionary definition of terrorism.”13 Matters, however, were not so straightforward.
Despite causing approximately $110 million in damage in a suspected 1,100 cases, the actions of radical environmentalists have never resulted in a single death. The care taken by the movement’s organizations to not “harm any animal (human or otherwise)” led some within government and elsewhere to chastise those who would equate direct action with terrorism as engaging in “excessive name calling.”14 While I address the attempts to deflect charges of terrorism below, what is at issue here is the manner in which direct action and its practitioners were marked as terrorist in light of a lack of fatalities. Arguments that one ought not call another a terrorist if there is no trail of dead implies that the identification of a political motive alone is not sufficient for recoding violence as terrorism. How was this impasse circumvented? What provided proponents of the institutionalization of ecoterrorism with an avenue through which to authoritatively and legally (i.e., in legislation) code environmentalists as terrorists?
The first maneuver involves including violence to property in the definition of (eco)terrorism. The owner of Superior Lumber, the target of one of the arsons with which McGowan was involved, described the destruction of his property as producing a feeling of terror.15 Here, property is intimately tied to one’s body and livelihood, the destruction of which could have devastating impacts. In government hearings, acts of property destruction were regularly compared to murder.16
If not wholly convincing, the movement’s apparent disdain for private property acted as the basis from which arson and vandalism were delineated as fundamentally anti-Western acts, the motivation for which could only have a foreign or un-American source. In a statement to a House Subcommittee hearing on Ecoterrorism and Lawlessness in National Forests, one executive forcefully asserted that the environmentalist movement is
disdainful of fundamental American values, including the rule of law, private property rights, free enterprise, and democracy.… [They] detest American businesses, our free enterprise system, our environmental policies, our use of animals for food and medical research, our judicial system, our elected officials, and many other American institutions and values.17
Others emphasized that radical environmentalists are, in essence, “human-hating treehuggers” who renounce “the view of the Greek philosopher Protagoras that ‘man is the measure of all things.’ ” In effect, they want to “destroy civilization as we know it.”18
Certainly various segments of the environmentalist movement align themselves with “the East”—a largely reappropriated and mythologized notion of a space and culture untouched by technology, which, among other things, speaks to the whiteness of which the movement has repeatedly been accused.19 Various authors within the movement alternatively trace its roots to the Indian Vedas (1500 BC) that denounce the eating of meat, the Jains (circa 500 BC) who wore covers over their mouths so as to not accidentally swallow insects, and, later, Buddhists. Furthermore, they chastise the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in equal measure—for claiming that god gave man dominance over the earth, which they see as the root of “an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive [Capitalist] system.”20
Conversely, there is a contingent within the movement that aligns it with the very American philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They characterize environmentalist thought as the “most recent expressions of the centuries-old minority tradition in Western philosophy” that showcases and embodies the “highest ideals of Western society.”21 Others still connect their lived environment to US nationalism. In the 2011 documentary If a Tree Falls, which documents, in part, McGowan’s story, Bill Barton of the Native Forest Council stumbles upon a felled old-growth tree and longingly muses that it “probably sprouted just about the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
To counter the potential that Americans might identify with the movement or its goals, its opponents further characterize the movement as anti-Western by conjuring the brown-Arab-Muslim-other: “They think they are heroes and crusaders for justice, just as the September 11 hijackers thought of themselves in this way.” Moreover, radical environmentalists might prove even more dangerous. The movement’s action against Huntingdon Life Sciences, whose animal testing practices broke various protection laws, succeeded in having financiers divest from the company. In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the company’s counsel claimed that in “attacking the integrity and independence of the US stock market system … [SHAC] had succeeded where Osama bin Laden had failed.” In effect, within the familiar faces of these white Americans exists a “homegrown brand of al-Qaeda,” a threat so dangerous to American interests and values that only a racialized terrorist identity construct could communicate its gravity.22
The Sound of Hate
On the morning of August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek. He opened fire, killing six people. Another four were wounded before he turned his weapon on himself. One victim’s relative recounted the massacre:
It was not the American dream of Prakash Singh, who had only been reunited with his family for a few precious weeks after six years apart. When he heard gunshots that morning, he told his two children to hide in the basement. He saved their lives. When it was over, his children found him lying in a pool of blood. They shook his body and cried “Papa! Get up!” But he was gone.23
