Part Two: The Earth Liberation Front: The Burning Rage of a Dying Planet

In part two, Margaret finishes talking with Sarah Marshall about the eco-radicals and arsonists of the late 90s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Whole Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People did Cool Stuff show
that comes through your headphones while you're walking the dog.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is
Sarah Marshall. Hy Sarah, Hello, I'm.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
So happy to be here, especially as someone who grew
up as a tween ignorant about all of this but
wanting to find an excuse to live in a tree
for over a year.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Earthworce would have been the better group than the Earth
Liberation Front the thing that you can live in for
a year, as the Earth Liberation Front of solitary confined.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Oh god, I our producer, you're getting straight in it's
me Hy Sophie. Sophie.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Sophie's kind of a big deal around here.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
That was really that was really funny.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Funny list than the audience listeners.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
I won't know why it's really funny, but just know
it's really funny.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, And that's what's fun is having inside jokes that.
Oh wait, the whole point of a podcast doesn't make
the listener think that they're part of the end whatever. No,
the point of the podcast is education and entertainment and
helping us do that is our audio engineer danel Hi
danel Hi, dannelh. Danel Our theme music was written for

(01:21):
Spyon Women and this is part two in a two
part are about the Earth Liberation Front, a group, a
leaderless group that did an awful lot of damage to
Earth destroyers that was very contentious at the time. It's
probably very contentious still. But it's kind of interesting to
watch the way that mainstream media talks about it these days,

(01:43):
because it's a little like, well, maybe we're all about
to die and we should do this, you know, Like
even like mainstream media's was just a little bit like,
this is probably not the right way to go about it.
I'm running out of my is like that's they could
see the facade crack. I don't know, I'm grinning while

(02:04):
I say this, maybe because it's.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Kind of funny. Yeah, I mean, the question of who
gets called an extremist in American media is very interesting,
right because it's clearly all about what kind of an
extremist you are, and they're like certain extremists who were
in favor.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Right now yeah, no, totally, And there's like all this
the FEDS who are currently leading and I'm completely ill
to get to that at the end all right, where
we last left our heroes, they were being hippies tagging
we don't like America on rest stops. They were tagging

(02:45):
five hundred and four years of genocide around Columbus Day,
and then burned down a truck, and so they hadn't
really done much yet, but they were starting to. The
fires at the Ranger Station were started by people from Warner,
and soon they expanded into the largest and most prolific
cell of the ELF in the US and possibly the world.

(03:06):
But I'm not entirely certain about that, and I've seen
an awful lot of narratives about exactly who did this,
or rather who was behind it. On some level, we
like kind of know, right because almost everyone involved has
pled guilty, But some of them have basically said I
pled guilty to some shit I did and some shit

(03:27):
I didn't do, because they're like, hm, I was going
to go to prison for the rest of my life
unless I said I did it, including things that I
didn't do. And that's a whole separate thing about the
way that the judicial system makes people lie. But in
the end, there are almost twenty people arrested in connection
to this particular cell of the Earth Liberation Front most

(03:48):
about ten years later, and every narrative picks a different
sort of like ring leader or whoever to blame, partly
because they're all like, who's the leader, who he was
in charge? Because people can't wrap their fucking head around anarchists.
It's hilarious. The narrative I find most convincing is that

(04:09):
this cell started from late night talks at Warner Creek
and about what was happening to the planet and what
needed to be done. That's the one I've been going with.
But I've heard a lot of narratives around this, And
in that narrative, there's this punk guy, Jacob Ferguson. Sometimes
he's called the leader. He was. Certainly it's undoing, so
if that's how we define leader, we can go to that.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
But generally.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
He was a quiet man and sort of a bad boy.
He did drugs and he played punk rock, and he
was angry, and he had like a lip ring and
septim ring and stuff. Imagine a bad kid, white kid
from a rough background in the nineteen nineties, and you
have successfully pictured Jacob Ferguson.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
All right, yeah, I see him.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah, And supposedly it all started when basic. It was like,
y'all talk a lot of shit, but are we gonna
do anything? And his nickname was a donut.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
Why I don't know, because cops can always find him.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, it should have been a sign to everyone all along.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Oh no.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
And then there was this older hippie anarchist. His name
was William Rogers, also known as Avalon. I think his
name is face, yeah, right.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Like because it was his favorite Brian Faerie song Avalon.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
I actually don't know that reference. But Avalon is a
mythical island lost in the fog. Sometimes uses like a
shorthand for the old ways, for the pagan world before
Rome civilized England and start all the fucking nonsense we're
dealing with today. And I I like it. I don't know,
because I'm a sucker for mythology and magic and shit,

(06:00):
and I'm really good at blaming everything on England. But
I'm going to go a step further and blame everything
on the Roman Empire.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
Fair enough.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Just look at him, I know, look at them. Avalon
was a venerable old man. He was thirty years old
in nineteen ninety five. All the media is always like
the old guy who led it, because he's the one
who gets pegged as the leader of everything because he's
older than everyone. He was thirty years old in nineteen

(06:29):
ninety five when Warner Creek started. He'd already been involved
in Earth First for a few years. He'd been living
out of his truck, going from protest to protest to organize,
and at one point he lived in a snow cave
with three other people in Idaho as part of an
Earth First encampment shortly before Warner Creek. So he was
one of the more experienced people who showed up to
Warner Creek. He gets called the mastermind of the whole

(06:52):
thing by the government. It's possible. We don't know. And
one reason we don't know is because everyone well, cause
there's assatual limitations on terrorism, and even the people who've
confessed are a little tight LittD about some shit. But
after his arrest, Avalon kills himself in jail, and so
we don't know his position on a lot of things.

(07:16):
The government, they're pretty old fashioned, and I've seen the
oldest white male be assumed to be the leader before.
It Just you know, there's a group of people, you're like,
who's in charge?

Speaker 1 (07:27):
And you just like I was gonna say, it's like
when you're at dinner and people get like, give give
the oldest man there the check, when it's when it's me,
the tiny blonde person.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, absolutely don't.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
They don't even like look at the name on the
credit card. They just they just automatically assume it's like
the eldest white man there.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, like hello, mister Sophie.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
And in this case, it's kind of interesting because like,
if I die, don't do that. You can blame anything
that I would consider ethical on me. You can just
like whether or not I did it. Like I have
a friend who once got convicted of like doing all
of the black block destruction at this protest that probably

(08:18):
like thirty people where I'm making this number up. I
wasn't there, but probably it would have taken a lot
of people to do that much damage. And one one
person got convicted of all of it, and he's just like, yeah, sure,
totally I did all of it. I'll take I'll take
the social capital. I already did the jail time, you know.
Christ Yeah, anyway, avalon the government, you know, decides this,

(08:43):
probably him, but I don't know. However, the cell started.
It started. They burned up a truck at a ranger
station because they didn't like the forest services complicity and
old growth logging, and that was their first fiery thing. Right.
Soon enough, this group gets called the family, and there

(09:04):
are almost no references to the actual people in this
cell referring to it as the family. This is what
the Feds and the media refer to it as it is.
It's possible that they occasionally call themselves the family, but
like in all the discovery, there's not a lot of that.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
And do you think that's because the media knows that
something sounds more sinister if you call it by something
that in the recent past has been preceded by the
word manson.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yes, I genuinely think that that is what's going on.
There's this whole thing later where some of the defendants
like are just being edge lords and start playing into
that when they're like already in prison. But whatever. So
they are the most successful cell, their liberation front, and

(09:55):
their security culture is top notch. They took their shit
serious across dozens of fires and actions. There wasn't a
single bit of DNA evidence that was ever brought back.
They wore socks over their shoes to disguise their footprints.
They wipe down everything for their fingerprints. In order to
assemble what they needed. They'd build these clean rooms like

(10:18):
they'd rent a hotel room and then put a tent
inside the hotel room, and then put on painter suits
and then go into the tent.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
They took their work very seriously. Someone probably avalon the
government alleges as much. And I see no reason why
to let anyone else take the credit or blame for
this rode. A zine called It's very evocative title setting
fires with electrical timers, which I.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
Love because that could also be like somebody's MFA the
asso say uva yeah totally, and like movement, yeah totally.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
And so this zne was a modern dance masterpiece, and
it talked about some dance moves that I am one
hundred percent not going to talk about on air, and
that I have avoided even reading the zine. The zine
came out and suddenly it was harder for the government
to map out which cells did which action because they
all used the same technology. They also didn't all know

(11:20):
each other, or they didn't see each other very much.
Most of them dropped out of the movement to avoid
putting anyone else at risk and avoid drawing attention to themselves,
and it was a lonely life. They passed notes to
each other by all getting the same book and then
like building ciphers that are like open the dispossessed and
turned a page blah blah blah, line number word, blah
blah blah.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
You know. Wow.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, they were early adopters of encrypted email. They used PGP,
but more than that, they would leave notes for each
other in the drafts folder of a shared email address
that they would log into only at public libraries.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
This is real, like mission impossible type stuff.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh. Absolutely, they're one of these people who was on
the run for twelve years has like some wild shit.
We're going to get to one of them at least
lived in Canada the entire time, and we just sneak
across the border for actions and then sneak back home,
which is probably a good like alibi. I wasn't even
in the country. It is a pretty strong.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
In all their actions, no one was killed or harmed.
They went through elaborate efforts to make sure of that.
And on Beltane nineteen ninety seven, pretty early on They
released their sort of inaugural communicae, and I'm going to
read it. Welcome to the struggle of all species to
be free. We are the burning rage of this dying planet.

(12:43):
The war of greed ravages the earth, and species die out.
Every day. ELF works to speed up the collapse of industry,
to scare the rich, and to undermine the foundations of
the state. We embrace social and deep ecology as a
practical resistance movement. We have to show the enemy that
we are serious about defending is sacred. Together, we have
teeth and claws to match our dreams. Our greatest weapons

(13:05):
are imagination and the ability to strike when least expected.
Since nineteen ninety two, a series of Earth Nights and
Halloween smashes as mushroomed around the world. Thousands of bulldozers,
power lines, computer systems, buildings and valuable equipment have been composted.
Many ELF actions have been censored to prevent our bravery

(13:25):
from inciting others to take action. We take inspiration from
the Luddites, levelers, diggers, the autonom squatter movement, the alf,
the Zapatistas, and the little people. Those mischievous elves of
lore authorities can't see us because they don't believe in elves.
We are practically invisible. We have no command structure, no spokespersons,

(13:48):
no office, just many small groups working separately, seeking vulnerable
targets and practicing our craft. Many elves are moving to
the Pacific Northwest in other sacred areas. Some elves will
surprises as they go. Find your family, and let's dance
as we make ruins of the corporate money system.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
What I love about that is how it, you know,
brings in the legacy of you know, the we folk
and the fairies of.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Avalon.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
I guess really where we have this, you know, contemporary
idea of fairies is like very cute and feminine, and
I guess, you know tinker Bell is part of some
kind of heredity because she'll kill a bitch. But that really,
like the legacy of the magical creatures that folklore told

(14:43):
of was that they were part of nature and if
you turned your back on them at the wrong moment,
they could destroy if they felt like it, and that
that was part of their mischief. And I don't know,
I love that. I mean, I feel like the earth
needs protectors, but sort of showing where you are in

(15:06):
the legacy of that not that not that the goal
is to convince the people who are trying to arrest
you of the righteousness of what you're doing. But it's
it's it's convincing. It's literature. I think, you.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Know, it's really well written. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. I
really actually when you're saying, how like, you know, fairies
in such a scene as like feminine? Now right, but
one of the really the more I read medieval history,
the more I realize that the feminine was terrifying to
the medieval year of mind. It was the feminine claims

(15:40):
a lot wildness. It was unpredictability and violence, and like
you know, it was cool.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
And the other thing I love about this is they
specifically say we have no command structure. The FEDS spend
They're still trying to wrap their head around who is
in charge.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
Augh, I love it.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
In nineteen ninety seven, the ELF moved on to not
what they're most famous for, but what they're best at,
the thing that you can point and say they accomplish
their strategic goals. Here, the Elf saved horses. You see,
thank god. Yeah, there are these wild horses living all

(16:24):
over the US. Especially out west in Nevada and Wyoming
in particular, and kind of like eastern California, like all
the high, dryish parts of the country that are kind
of flat. And I've read eighty two thousand horses currently.
I've read two hundred thousand horses currently, probably the answers
in between those I don't know. And this population of

(16:46):
horses is under management of the Bureau of Land Management,
which is not my favorite governmental institution. Their population is
managed by them being rounded up and theoretically adopted out
to loving homes, right, because there's only so many wild
horses that can live in the planes and stuff, right,
so they you know, the nice version of the story,

(17:08):
the version of the story that's like, oh, they plant
six trees for everyone they cut down, is that they
round up these horses, the extra ones, and they adopt
they find adoptees, and they you know, the government's like, oh,
we make them do all this paperwork. We show up
like three times before they can resell, like you know,
ah blah blah blah.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
They go to a nice farm up state.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, that's what was actually happening, according to an awful
lot of journalism, but not according to the BLM. What
was happening was that they were basically being adopted and
then turn around and sold to slaughterhouses. Yeah, mostly they
were being sold to one slaughterhouse because there was more
or less only one operating in the US at the time.

(17:50):
It was called Cavel West. Horse meat is not served
in the US Traditionally, it is outright banned and a
ton of states. This didn't stop slaughterhouses from slaughtering horses
and selling the meat internationally. Even though there was no
national you couldn't sell the meat nationally. Eventually, this was

(18:11):
officially stopped in two thousand and seven. It wasn't actually
technically banned, but what happened was all the slaughterhouses had
to be inspected, and the government didn't put money aside
to inspect the hot orse slaughter houses, so it was
effectively banned.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
So what happens now is that tens of thousands of
horses that are exported alive to slaughterhouses in other countries.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
But oh okay, so wait are like are French people
eating wild caught American horses? Not to pin it all
on the French.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
But American horse meat is often considered a delicacy in
countries that eat horses.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
It feels kind of wrong when it happens to us.
I mean, it's fine for Americans to plunder other countries
because that's a natural order.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Go to war against France.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Let they know that all the things put in American foods,
I don't think. I don't think you want. I can't
even imagine what's an American horse food.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yeah, the wild cut, that's the thing.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, they've gorged themselves on soda cans and.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
And all the things we put in our soil that
we're not supposed to put it in our soil.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
And you know what, they don't gorge themselves on because
all of these things are carefully constrained and don't litter.
All of them are totally an Yeah. But I'm also
lying because we have no knowledge of whether or not
they're environmentally sustainable. The things that we're about to.

Speaker 4 (19:36):
Talk about, no idea, but here they are anyway.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
And we're back. So overall, the US shares the English
language country taboo on horse meat. However you feel about
horse meat, it's still fucked up that people are opting
these horses just to sell them to slaughter houses. Yeah,
and if you're only judge for moralities. Legality, Well, it's
also not legal to do so. The FBI put together

(20:11):
a team of three hundred agents working around the clock
to get to the bottom of the corruption within the
BLM and their complicity and the illegal horse slaughter programs.
Just kidding. In the end, they put three hundred agents
together to arrest the people who stopped the illegal horse
slaughter program, the Earth Liberation Front. They decided to address
this problem directly. On July twenty first, nineteen ninety seven,

(20:34):
the elves went to Redmond, Oregon, to the only West
Coast horse slaughterhouse I've also read the only one in
the country, I'm not certain, and they burned it to
the ground. No horses or people were injured in the process.
This slaughterhouse was never rebuilt. On November twenty ninth, nineteen
ninety seven, elves led about five hundred horses and fifty burrows,

(20:57):
which were donkeys for US East Coast people let them
free at a BLM wild Horse Corral and Oregon in
the fittingly named town of Burns, Oregon, and then they
burned that corral to the ground. A Syrian American software
engineer named Joseph Dibbi designed and planned the incendiary that
destroyed the wildhorse slaughterhouse, and later in two thousand and one,

(21:19):
he would burn another BLM wildhorse facility or he only
did the one, and he's one of the people who
later pled guilty that says that he did some of
the things that he pled guilty to. And yeah, across
the West, the ELF set wild horses free in direct
response to the slaughterhouse pipeline. I've read a few different
accounts that claim that these actions forced the national conversation

(21:42):
on the issue and led to the two thousand and
seven ban. That might be true, but I also know
that they specifically and directly saved thousands of wild horses
lives and stopped the only place that people were selling
their wild horses to illegally. And then then they did
the thing that got them famous. Yes, if you've ever
thought about the Earth Liberation Front a radical environmentalists, and

(22:05):
you picture a picture of building on fire, there is
a photo from Veil that is the picture that you're
thinking of. They burned down a huge chunk of veil,
the busiest ski resort in the country. Oh wow, Yeah,
without hurting anyone that's impressive. Yeah, this is their big one.
This is their biggest is twelve million dollars fire. Most

(22:27):
of their fires willow half a million million.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
In nineteen ninety eight, Veil was set to expand eight
hundred or two thousand acres. I've read both into Lynx habitat,
and there was this huge movement against it all the
like grassroots local people like getting together to be like, hey,
don't you think your ski resort's big enough and maybe
the links and the natural world get a little bit

(22:52):
of stuff. And they were like, we don't think that,
and so environmentalists sued and they lost. The court sided with.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
They were like, white people love almost dying, so yeah,
you know.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
And then Robert came in and was like, well what
if they actually die sometimes and then just make it
slightly more dangerous self correcting problem. But on October sixteenth
they start cutting. On October eighteenth, smelves arrived. They actually
I think this one they actually showed up earlier and
tried to do it, I think probably on the sixteenth,

(23:28):
but they didn't succeed for one reason or the other
and had to go back down the island and then
come back later on October eighteenth, Samelves arrived. They got
snuck in a snowstorm, but regardless, they made their way
up the mountain in the middle of a fucking snowstorm
and they burned twelve million dollars of buildings.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Two hunters had been sleeping in a free standing restroom
on the property Avalon, according to the Denver Post, opened
the bathroom door to check to see if anyone was inside.
He saw the hunter, So they didn't burn that building,
which implies that they checked every building for people. The
fire absolutely could have spread and killed those two men,

(24:06):
but it was also the night of a wild snowstorm
and none of the fires spread at all, And so
a lot of the allegations by the government, which are understandable,
is that fire is notoriously uncontrollable in some ways, right,
and it absolutely could have spread. However, there are thousands
of actions over the years that this is happening in

(24:26):
which no one was injured, So I think it's not
a coincidence. Yeah, the first responders knew it was arson
because these were individual fires that were not connected to
each other. There was not one big fire that destroyed
everything was very carefully done. The only evidence that they
left it all was some quickly melting footprints, and they
probably had socks over the shoes, and they sent a

(24:50):
communicate the next day from a Denver library. However, this
fire did not stop Vale's expansion. What it did stop
up was the local environmentalist movement that was working to
fight veil. There were people planning civil disobedience on the
mountain that night, according to one thing I read, And

(25:10):
it never happened, right because the buildings caught fire, and
the local environmentalists had their houses raided, and everyone got
paranoid and divided and just did it fucked things up,
and the family and the elf attacked timber companies and
paper mills, they attacked genetic engineering research facilities, they attacked
suv dealerships and logging machines. Other cells across the country,

(25:34):
burned subdivisions under construction and like McDonald's and shit like that.
All the while, the anarchist movement in the Northwest is
ramping up, and then it kind of kicked off onto
the world stage with the World Trade Organization protests in
Seattle November nineteen ninety nine. And at these one day,

(25:55):
I'm going to do a hole thing on WTO and
the anti globalization movement. But today's not that day, but
environmentalist teamsters, hippies, punks, and everyone descended on the city
of Seattle to stop world leaders from carving up the
world to exploit basically these free trade agreements that are
basically like, how do we avoid economic protections and developing

(26:18):
nations so that the developed nations can more effectively extract
their resources, which is a thing that has a direct
and calculable body count. And I think that's worth understanding
because then, like what ends up happening, right is the
infamous Black Bloc entered the American stage, anarchists wearing all
black and masks directly attacked corporate property, smashing at McDonald's

(26:41):
and shit like that. And before that.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
When Americans pictured an anarchist, that they just have a
mental image of Sacho and Vanzetti.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
I think so. I think that the overall assumption about
what an anarchist is was like mad Bomber until nineteen
ninety nine when it became punk in a throwing a
brick at a Starbucks.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
When it became day to night.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Look, yeah, and both are things that anarchists do. Both
are tiny portions of like like anarchists back in the
day would be like, I have killed a king who
had personally overseen three hundred of my friends shot in
the streets, which is why Katano Breshi went and killed

(27:25):
King Mberto too, one one of the amberdos.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
You know.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
It was like and so people are like this violent anarchists,
and you're like, the man who killed a king who
had just killed three hundred of this man's friends. Yeah,
that's where the violence is, is the anyway?

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Whatever?

Speaker 3 (27:41):
Well, and you know, and then they are the anarchists
who are just filling in potholes because the city of
Portland doesn't feel like doing it.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
When I think of the average anarchist activity, it is food,
not bombs. That is the activity that I can say
more anarchists have done than anything else is give free
food to people who need food, which is, to be fair,
something the American government treats is incredibly dangerous, inexplicably, but
it's true. I was reading that in Houston they're having

(28:08):
trouble with the court cases against the food nut Bumbs
defendants because they can't find enough jurors who think that
arresting the food nut Bumbs people with made any sense.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Well that's exciting.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah. So the wto protests, some people wearing all blacks
through some bricks, through some windows of corporations that were
killing people in other countries. And plenty of current and
future elves were at these protests. Some of them met
in the streets and fell in love. A bunch of

(28:40):
them grew and sold weed to finance all the arson
So if you're wondering, the only thing I found about
how they financed the arsen Some of them were like
software engineers, and some of them were like growing and
selling weed. One activist who got involved around this time
was Daniel McGowan. He's one of the more famous elves
because a camera crew followed him as he awaited his trial.
So there's this documentary called If a Tree Falls from

(29:02):
twenty eleven that tells his life story. In the year
two thousand, they reached their peak. It seems like in
terms of membership and or actions, I count fifteen actions
by one list across the country. Only some of them,
maybe most of them were the family, but I'll run
through some of the other folks. At least some of
the other folks who were caught a lot of people

(29:23):
who did this stuff just were never caught. There's a
man named Trey Arrow. Did you ever hear about Trey
Arrow in Portland as a kid. No, let me talk
you about this local celebrity from twenty years ago.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
It's our cool name.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Though I know he legally changed his name to Trey Arrow.
He chose it.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
That's even cooler.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
He chose it. And then like as he would get
in court, they would keep being like, whatever his old
name is, and he kept being like, I have already
done all the legal paperwork. My name is Trey Arrow.
Like the legal entity you're referring to is not on
trial anyway. East he was famous for three things, at

(30:03):
least famous in Portland. In July two thousand, there was
this protest downtown outside the US four Service office trying
to stop logging at a place called Eagle Creek, And
so Trey just free climbed the building with no ropes
or anything, on the spur of the moment, and then
lived for eleven days on a nine inch ledge on
the building. What.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, the LEGE party is shocking to me. The climbing.
I'm like, yeah, people do that sometimes. Why not have fun?
The LEGE is stressing me out?

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah? No, I think in the end people like got
him ropes and stuff, but I'm I actually don't. I
don't know, okay, that feel. But I moved it town
shortly after all this.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
Yeah, yeah, Well it's funny because in the end I
was yeah, oh, I was just gonna say it. Yeah,
it's funny because I was born here and then we
lived in Honolulu and came back here in the summer
of two thousand and one, so there's this like five
year blank spot where I don't know, but it yeah,
I guess remember coming in like anyone cool was living

(31:08):
on a lege. I know that was how I got
out of my uh my, my, my, my service.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
But no, you have this is just your all aspect.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
For someone who wants to live on a lege. Yeah yeah, really,
I was sneaking back and I'm the one who rides
the containers back and forth across the Pacific. It's not
for sex trafficking victims. It's for people who need an alibi.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you you got out of
your service, but but other people didn't. And Eagle Creek
was saved not by him alone, but his actions did
draw fuck ton tent of attention to the cause like
every day's newspaper was like, is the hippie with no

(31:54):
shoes still on the ledge? Yes, he's still on the ledge.

Speaker 4 (31:59):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
The next thing that he was famous for is that
cops dropped him out of a tree sit in October
two thousand and one. He was tree sitting. I've talked
to some people who knew him, and he wasn't up
there with like ropes. He was like, oh shit, this
tree needs saving. I'm running up this tree. And then
he's like jumping from tree to tree as people like
try and cut down these trees and stuff, and they

(32:23):
would like blast shitty music and stuff at him to
keep him from sleeping. And he fell sixty feet and
he survived. He broke his pelvis in his ribs.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yeah God.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
And then he became famous for a third thing that
wound up overshadowing the other ones. He and three other
people burned some logging trucks and claimed it for the
Earth Liberation Front. One of them got caught and snitched
out the other three. Two of those remaining three got
caught and then Trey Arrow I think was like a
broken pelvis, but I'm not sure the timeline here. He

(32:58):
fucked off up to Canada and lived on the right.
He was on the run for more than two years.
But then he I guess he just couldn't help himself.
He saw injustice and he had to do something. So
he got arrested in Canada while shoplifting bolt cutters. And look,
if you're on the run, gets someone else's shoplift your
bolt cutters.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
I mean, and why didn't he already have bolt cutters?

Speaker 2 (33:23):
I think you, I think you get rid of them
after each action. Ah, and then you can't buy them
because then there's a record of them havn't been bought.
But yeah, I know you think that this man is
just made of bolt cutters.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
He he gives big bolt cutter energy. Yeah, totally, Like
come on.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
And so he was arrested and he was eventually extradited.
There's a big fight. He was like, I'm not going
to get a fair trial in the US. What are
you talking about? And they were like, we're sending you
to the US for Canada. We don't give a shit.
And he spent a year in federal prison.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Oh god, which from what I understand, can be even
worse than the regular kind.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Another arson case was more Eugene tree Sitters, Critter, and
Free were their names. I don't think they legally changed
their names to these. And they burned some trucks at
an oil company and some SUVs at a dealership in
the year two thousand, but cops were surveilling them already
and caught them right off. Critter got five and a

(34:26):
half years in prison. Free got for doing some damage
at a dealership, got twenty two years and eight months
in prison.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, this made almost no one happy. Like, people weren't like,
we love this punk anarchist kid who sets things on
fire that he doesn't like very p people were of
that point of view, and awful lot of people were
of the point of view of like, twenty three years
in prison for this, you know. So there was an
eight year campaign and in two thou eight his sentence

(35:01):
was reduced to ten years, and in December two thousand
and nine he was released. God there are more cases
like that, but that's just to give some sense of it.
The family was the biggest sell, but it wasn't the
only one.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
I feel like it's ridiculous to act like there's very
much rhyme or reason to overly harsh sentencing a lot
of the time. But is the idea that like, if
we crack down on suv dealership crimes, then we can
stop them from doing anything more impactful than that.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
I think, So like this is around, Well we're gonna
talk a little bit about the cases against them, but basically,
like the whole thing was the government was like, this
is the biggest deal in the country. Within a couple
of years, the FBI is going to say outright that
the ALF and the ELF are the biggest domestic terrorist
threat in the country. And this is like shortly after

(35:52):
nine to eleven. The not free. He was arrested before then,
but like they come out and say, our biggest terror
domestic terror threat is the ELF. That's never heard anyone,
and like everyone who like lives in New York City
is like, I just saw people jumping out of a building.
What are you trying to tell me is terrorism right now?
You know?

Speaker 3 (36:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:12):
And there's actually there's actually some interviews with FBI agents.
There's one FBI agent who is a big part of
doing their case in particular, was on this podcast series
called burn Wild that the BBC did, and she talks
about how it was politically motivated. The sentencing and the
whole thing, just like how much attention was put into it,

(36:36):
And there's other people who are saying like, yeah, like
it was industry lobbying. Basically, infrastructure is the stuff that
is like we don't realize how much of a fence
they put around it, Like we don't realize how much
you're not, Like, I mean, we see it a lot

(36:56):
with what's happening right now with pipeline protests, right and
the the crazy sentencing that people are facing for civil
disobedience to try and stop fossil fuel infrastructure that is
literally killing us all. But the oil must flow is
like the foundation of the American state.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Yeah, apparently, which I as a little kid, you learn
all this stuff that you're like, I guess grown ups,
no more complicated stuff, And then you grow up and
you're like, no, they don't. They just ignore it. Right,
there's a finite number of dead dinosaurs, but let's not worry.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
About it totally. And that is what all of this
is around, is like people trying to grapple with whether
or not they're taking seriously. Like if we sit there
and say this is happening, global warming is real, what
can be done and this is not necessarily the answer. Like,
one of the reasons I wanted this episode is to

(37:53):
talk about what did and didn't work, about what they did,
what they did and didn't accomplish, how it did and
didn't impact different things. But considering like, the thing that
we are up against is apathy slash like sticking your
head in the sand. But the only way to save

(38:14):
the planet is to buy things from advertisers.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
God, it's going to be something horrible. I just know it.
I just know it.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, I hope it's an ad for buying a new car.
Here you go, and we're back from cynically engaging in
the thing that pretty much everyone does, which is whatever.

(38:49):
In two thousand and one, the family hit two more
targets on the same night in two states, and then
they stopped. They called it quits, not because they got caught.
They quit because, as best as I can understand it,
they fucked up. They still never hurt anybody, not physically,
but they weren't all happy with what they had done.

(39:13):
On May twenty first, two thousand and one, the Elf
burned an office and thirteen trucks at a tree farm
in Oregon because they believed that that farm was growing
genetically engineered poplar trees. They were wrong. That had been
the previous owners. The current owners used traditional methods. They
also burned down the office of a genetic engineering researcher

(39:36):
at the University of Washington. The fire spread and destroyed
an entire and unrelated research library. Burning libraries and terrorizing
random tree farmers was not on their agenda. Everyone is
a bit cagy about exactly how it went when they
met up to talk, right, because everyone wants to only

(39:59):
say what they say and not what other people said,
because people have decent security culture.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
But near as I can tell, the group was split.
Some folks wanted to keep going, maybe even escalate, and
other people threw in the towel and the group disbanded.
In the end, about twenty people had done about forty
five million dollars in sabotage wow and destroyed the only

(40:25):
horse packing plant on at least the West Coast. Other
cells and individuals carried on for years across the country,
but the peak had passed before September eleventh, and before
the crackdown against them. Pretty much the FBI didn't forget
about them their elephantine that way, they announced that the

(40:47):
ELF and the ALF were the number one domestic terrorist
threat in the country. Terrorism. Of course, this is shortly
after nine to eleven is the biggest boogeyman word in
the English language. Funding for anti terrorism is at an
all time high. So by labeling this terrorism, two things happened.
One they got a fuck ton more money, and two
they had to show results. And now you might think, oh,

(41:12):
I don't know, the far right movement that I just
killed one hundred and sixty eight people in Oklahoma City
in nineteen ninety five might be a place of direction
some energy, or the anti abortion extremists who were killing doctors. No, okay,
well hear me out. Those are all Republican types I know. Okay,
but what about environmental arson like the nine thousand acres

(41:33):
of old growth that had just been burned. Nah, No,
it was aimed at the anarchist group that had never
heard anyone and had already stopped.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
Well, I guess if you have to show results, it's
ideal to pick people who aren't currently doing anything, because
then you can allege that you were the reason for that.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Totally God. The FEDS called this operation Operation Backfire. The
activist called it the Green Scare a period of heightened
and almost cartoonishly evil repression of environmental and animal rights
activists that absolutely filtered out to like those of us
in the above ground environmental movement.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
You know.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
For example, there's this alf guy, Animal Libration front guy.
He's an Indigenous man named Rod Coronado. He'd sunk some
whaling chips in the eighties. He'd fire bombed a ton
of shit and spent five years in prison in the
nineties for it. So he'd done it, you know, and
then he kept doing it. He sabotaged a lion hunt
in two thousand and four and did eight months for it.

(42:36):
And in two thousand and three he was giving a talk.
Someone from the audience asked him how he'd built the
incendiary devices that he had used, that he had already
been convicted of and served time for. Is the kind
of thing you're supposed to be able to talk about
once you've done the time, you're allowed to talk about
the crime. That's why it rhymes. He answered the question.

(42:58):
Three years later, in two thousand and six, during the
height of the Green Scare, he was arrested for having
answered a question from the audience. In two thousand and
three and he spent a year in prison for it. What,
which is why I'm not going to talk about how
they did any.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Of the shit they did.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, God, later this man will spend four months in
prison because he accepted a friend request on Facebook from
Mike Rozell, one of the founders of Earth First.

Speaker 3 (43:27):
This would also be a great thing for people freaking
out about the First Amendment to focus on, but obviously
instead they're bothered by their nieces disliking their Facebook posts.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Right totally. One kid, Chris McIntosh did five thousand dollars
of damage to McDonald's by like lighting the roof on fire,
and he was given eight years in prison for five
thousand dollars with a damage.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Well that McDonald's. You know, there are our culture's most
vulnerable subjects.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Di Irish they said, I hate crime, and then there's
this other group of people who are a story in
and of themselves that I'm not gonna The short version
is the FEDS put an infiltrator into the anarchist movement
who built up her own cell of the Elf. They
never did anything. She bullied them into making plans to

(44:21):
blow up a dam. Over the course of years, and
you can see in all of the transcripts that come
out because she's tapping everything right, She's like basically like,
come on, don't be a pussy, and everyone's like, we
actually don't want to do this, and she's like, you're
gonna do it. They're all arrested. One of them, Eric McDavid,
was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He had literally

(44:43):
not done anything. After nine years in prison, his conviction
was overturned when it was revealed that the FBI had
withheld thousands of pages of evidence from the trial that
would have potentially been like, hey, this is clearly a
frame up. You know.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
I do not claim to have a nuanced understanding of this,
but the way conspiracy chargers work in this country feels
very counter toed sort of the basic facts of human nature,
which is how a lot of our law operates, you know,
but the right because like the basics are that, like
from the second that a criminal conspiracy becomes like from
the second you become implicitly part of it. Like if

(45:23):
I'm in a room, if you and me and Sophie
are like, let's j walk, yeah, yeah, if so, if
Sophie's like, I want to make a run for it
to cross the street, and.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
I am from Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Well I'm thinking of like that's.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
I'm like, I'm like, I'm from lah.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
That sounds like.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Right, It's like it's it's fine. Yeah, But like say
that we go on a on a road trip with
our scariest friend who starts talking about, you know, a
plan to rob a bank, and we're doing the thing
that human beings do where you like don't necess really
take something seriously, or you look out for yourself and

(46:03):
are like, maybe you're going to do that, but I'm
not going to be a part of that, or maybe
this will blow over. I don't know, but we don't
affirmatively remove ourselves from the potential conspiracy. And then if
they rob a bank all by themselves, then we can
be co conspirators in that, you know.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, or even if you take legal actions that would
be otherwise legal in furtherance of that, Like if I
was like, h hey, wouldn't it be cool if we
reached up into vending machines and took the soda out,
you know, and then like later you become a vending
machine repair person and you look up a schematic, you know,

(46:46):
you can, you can combine two acts of free speech
and create a conspiracy. Not a lawyer, but I have
done a lot of research about this particular thing for
some reason, Like I was around during the goddamn Green Scare.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
Yeah, well yeah, right, And and that's probably a more
a better working understanding of the law than you could
get in a lot of law schools. Yeah, it's actually
news you can use.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah totally. But yeah, so this had happened to Eric McDavid.
Eventually his conviction is overturned and he's released after what
nine years in prison and all of that started happening. Well,
actually the infiltrator joined in two thousand and three, but

(47:34):
the two thousand and six is the arrest, which is
after the family case is cracked. But just to paint
a picture of the Green Scare, the family, though, is
who the Feds really really wanted. They had no idea
how to find them, they had no evidence, and they
started out with about a dozen agents on the case
and is ramped up to three hundred agents working on

(47:54):
this case. People were refusing to testify in front of
grand jury and spending months in jailer as a result.
Someday I'm going to cover grand juries on this and
it'll be one of the most infuriating episodes. In two
thousand and one, in March, a punk show in Portland
was raided and the attendees were arrested and questioned about
the elf. Some of them were like charged initially with

(48:18):
kidnapping an officer because of like I think they tried
to keep the cop out, or someone closed the door
after the cop came in, or like some fucking nonsense.
That case fell apart.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Cops can't open doors. Everyone knows that.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
No, they need help.

Speaker 3 (48:36):
They're very fragile.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Punks in Portland in two thousand and one were being
harassed in some case attacked by cops while walking around
the street. Cops would be like, are you an anarchist
from like their patrol cars, and then like Jesus, sometimes
jump them. But the Feds had nothing. Nothing was going
to happen unless one of the arsonists snitched. One of
them snitches. It was Donut the bad Boy. The Feds

(49:03):
had a suspicion he was involved, and he'd been arrested
for car theft on one of the nights of one
of the arsons that wasn't him, Like one of the
I think one of the arsons that Free and Critter
had done. And so they brought in Jake, mister Donut himself,
and they lied to him. Cops and feds lie, it
is literally their job. It is probable that the arsonists

(49:27):
would have been caught if everyone had remembered that cops
are lying to you if they're talking. They listed off
all this stuff they had evidence against him about, like
the car theft and drugs and stuff he did hard drugs,
and then at the end they were like, and the arsons,
you will spend the rest of your life in prison

(49:49):
if you don't tell us about the arsens, which we
totally already know about, and you have to wear a
wire and go around to all your old friends and
get them to confess to.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
It.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Took him twenty minutes to decide, and he gave in.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
I think there's something very statistic about, you know, a
country where you know, the FBI sort of law enforcement agencies. Generally,
the culture and or cult of masculinity that we have
is so obsessed with solidarity and not betraying your buddies,
and then when you know, when they've decided to marginalize

(50:27):
a group of people, as less than a human. The
first thing they do is, you know, basically make it
impossible for people to not betray each other's trust. No,
that's a something quite evil about it. Yeah, and they're
like proud of it.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
In a tree falls, you can watch one of the
FEDS who is involved in this. He has a shit
eating grin on his face as he's talking about what
he did. He thinks he is so clever, and he
was like he succeeded, right, But it's yeah, it's just
so interesting to me that like pretty big into honesty
as like an ethical concern, because I think that everyone

(51:03):
needs to be able to make decisions with the best
available information. And we have completely accepted not just that
police use violence obviously that is a contentious issue, but
how much it is a crime to lie to cops
and it is not a crime for cops to lie
to you, and that's just like normal and accepted that
the state is constantly lying to us like it's his job.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
Yeah, you know, and that is the kind of thing
that if you accept that as part of a functioning society,
then you can accept a lot of other things. You know,
totally none of it good. Yeah, So they put a
wire in his baseball cap, and they send them around
the country to talk to old friends, and he gets

(51:50):
them to talk about the crimes. He's less like, hey man,
what do you think we did on the night of
you know, blah blah blah nineteen ninety seven. He's like, oh, man,
I got a hangover almost as bad as the night
the morning after the night of July seventh, nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
What were we doing in that night? Yeah, what were
we doing? Instead he did it kind of like he
was like he would just get people to say things like, hey,
stop worrying. They don't have any DNA connecting us to anything.
The only way that we'll go down is if someone talks.
So he gets them to confess. But not like I

(52:29):
carried the jug up that hill or whatever the fuck
I mean. I haven't read all the transcripts. I've read
like bits of them, but that's what I pulled out
of it. M On December seventh, two thousand and five,
six of them were arrested across the country all at once.
It soon was thirteen indictments, six women and seven men.

(52:49):
A bunch of people fled avalon the supposed leader. He
was arrested. He was also the first to get out
of prison because on December twenty first, the solstice, he
wrote a note and then put a plastic bag over
his head, and his note read to my friends and
supporters to help them make sense of all these events
that have happened so quickly. Certain human cultures have been

(53:13):
waging war against the Earth for millennia. I chose to
fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, cigarros,
cliff rose, and all things wild. I am just the
most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have
made a jail break. I am returning home to the Earth,
to the place of my origins. Bill twelve, twenty one

(53:35):
oh five, the Winter Solstice. I almost did that without crying.
Of the ten initial defendants, six took cooperating plea deals.
They snitched each other out. Four of them did not.
Nathaniel Block, Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, and Johanna Zacher all

(53:58):
refused to cooperate, or rather, they took non cooperating plea deals.
They didn't take it to court. They said, yes, I
did it, and I will tell you everything that I did,
and I will not tell you anything that anyone else did.
And here's the thing about cops line. The ones who
turned on each other for later sentences did not receive

(54:19):
later sentences. There is an excellent analysis in a proper
spreadsheet form available from the publisher Crime Think, in an
essay called Green Scared that's worth checking out, and just
google Green Scared Crime Think and you'll get it. The
non cooperating defendants got an average of almost seven years
in prison. The cooperating defendants got an average of seven

(54:40):
and a half years and they had to do those
years in prison without the support of the movement that
they had sold out. In essence, they sold their souls,
but not for pennies, but for checks that bounced. Suzanne Savoy,
one of the cooperators, later told a doctor documentary team,

(55:02):
I never in my life thought I'd be cooperating with
the FBI. I always thought I would be able to
stay strong and stay true to my values and beliefs.
But I guess sometimes you aren't as strong as you think.
And I say these things because I'm not trying to
point a finger at her and be like, see she's weak,
she sucks, Like am I right? Rather, she's right when

(55:22):
she says that when no one knows what they would
do in that situation. It's the classic George Orwell, rats
in a cage on your face situation. And that's why
it's worth pointing out cops are lying. The deal they
are offering you is not the deal they are offering you.
They'll say they'll take the rats in the cage off

(55:43):
your face if you just talk. They don't. The thing
that gets the rats in the cage off of your
face is movement support, prison support and movement lawyers, the
kinds of people who don't tend to work with people
who have cooperated with an investigation. Daniel McGowan was sent
to a special terrorist prison, a communications Management unit or CMU,

(56:06):
and he was He was convicted of being like a
lookout twice. That was his big thing, you know. So
he sent a special terrorist prison and in special terror
prison you get one fifteen minute call per week and
you get one visit per month behind class. Later he
got out and he was in a halfway house and

(56:28):
he wrote an article for the Huffington Post about CMU's
about contact communications management units, and he was arrested for it.
Political pressure got him released the next day later. In
two thousand and nine, Justin Salons was arrested in China
for making hash out of wild marijuana. He was like,
on a family trip to Italy and he was like, shit,

(56:50):
I'm going to come back to the States where doesn't
like the US, And so he went to China. But
you know, a boy's got to eat. So he was
making hash and wild marijuana and selling it. He spent
two years in Chinese prison before he was extradited to
the US and then he served the sentence.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Better than making hash out of wild horses.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
That's right, that's right. Rebecca Rubin self surrendered in twenty
twelve from where she'd fled to in Canada. Both took
plea deals, but neither informed on anyone. Both took that
non cooperating and I'll tell you what I did. And
then Joseph Dibby, he's the most recent arrestee. He's actually

(57:34):
out again too. Though he told his father what he
was facing, right, He was like that I think him
in trouble, and his father was like, well, it's time
to go home. So he went to Syria, which had
no extradition treaty to the US, and in order to
get out, he fucking mission impossible, this shit. He gave

(57:56):
his cell phone to someone to drive to Canada with,
and he like got in another cart. I think he
had more than one car as a software engineer. And
he got in another car and then like took off
and I think like had to like lose a tail
by like driving. He says, he was like, look, I
was a piece of delivery driver. I know how to drive,
you know. He like loses a tail and gets himself

(58:17):
to Mexico and I think crosses on foot into Mexico,
and ugh. He boards a plane to Syria. He lives
in Syria and he's doing all this environmental engineering work.
He does amazing work and like biodiesel and this all
this stuff right, and then the Syrian Civil War breaks
out and he's like, this is not safe. I will

(58:39):
die if I stay here, and so he goes to
Russia to wait out the war. But the war in
Syria keeps not ending. In Russia, he did environmental work.
He wound up married, but then at one point he
leaves the country. He like flies to South America for
business I think, to help like a worker cooperative of
some kind. And then on the way back through Cuba,

(59:00):
flying back to Russia in twenty eighteen, biometrics pick him
up and the Cuban authorities arrest him, oh God, torture
him just like almost kill him from dehydration, and then
hand him over to the US, where while he was
in jail, a white supremacist broke his jaw and permanently
disfigured him. In the end, Joseph he wound up sentenced

(59:27):
to time served in November twenty twenty two, and he
never informed on anybody, and he the judge's speech about
it is actually really interesting and it's kind of like, hey,
like fire is not the solution, but mass incarceration is
pretty bad. And also you're doing all this like work

(59:47):
where like he was developing these carbon capturing KELP buoys
in coordination within indigenous communities in Alaska. He's a fucking
cool guy as far as I can tell him.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
Never met him.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
And there's one woman, Josephine's Sunshine Overacre, who is still
on the run the fedes of no clue where she is.
Her mother once helped host fugitives in Canada, men who
are escaping the draft from the US, and her mother
is proud of her or wherever she is. Jake mister
Donut didn't do any time for the arsons. Instead, in

(01:00:28):
twenty eleven, he was arrested for possession and manufacture of
heroin and sentenced for five years. And I haven't mentioned
all of the non family prisoners, but there's one ELF
prisoner that I'm aware of who's still in jail in
the United States, and he's a trans man named Marius Mason.
He was I believe the first person to transition in
federal custody, or at least the first man to transition

(01:00:48):
in federal custody. He was arrested for arsons in Michigan
when his husband, with whom he'd done those arsons, snitched
him out. She was married to this man named Frank Ambrose,
who was caught disposed evidence in a dumpster and he
rolled right away on his spouse. There's an active support
campaign for Marius that's worth checking out. Long term prisoners

(01:01:09):
are often forgotten, and they should not be. Most of
his support comes from the anarchist community, which makes sense,
but I would argue, at the end of the day,
all of us live on planet Earth and it is
getting hotter, and there's an awful lot of people who've
tried to address that in whatever ways.

Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
They know how.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
A lot of people have given up everything in the
fight for the earth, and they deserve our support, whether
or not we specifically think that their tactics are what
should be emulated. But I would argue, right now, no
one knows what the fuck will work. Yeah, that's my

(01:01:46):
rousing conclusion.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
I feel like if we knew, we would be doing it. Yeah,
this is like a very random citation, but you know
how things get stuck in your head, especially if you
encounter them around her before the age like twenty one. Yeah,
there's the movie The Constant Gardner. Okay, it has a
dedication I know, has a dedication in the credits, which

(01:02:09):
you know has been long enough that I forget who
this is about or why, although I once knew, But
it goes for a Vett Peter Powley, who lived and
died giving a damn, And that like has stuck in
my brain, is like the idea of like living and
dying giving a damn, and that you know, if we're
talking about activism of whatever kind, it's always about or

(01:02:33):
it should always be about giving a damn, And that
it feels like you know, whatever that means to you
that we are currently in some kind of ideological war
between giving a damn and not yeah, which is maybe
overly simplistic but feels true to me.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
No, because I think we're it's sometimes we want to
not give a damn, partly because we don't know. There's
the things that we think might work but are dangerous,
and then there's the things. But then on some level
we're also like, we just don't know, we don't know
what will work.

Speaker 4 (01:03:10):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
There is one way of looking at these folks is
like the only reason it didn't work is that it
didn't keep going. There's another way of looking at it
as saying this disrupted and broke up a growing radical
environmental movement, you know, or a grassroots environmental movement like
what happened with Veil. But on the other hand, you

(01:03:31):
could also it just it galaxy brains up and up
and up and keeps flipping back and forth, and you know,
because you're like, oh, well, it disrupted the environmental movement
in Veil, and then you're like, well, yeah, but that
movement didn't succeed. It had already lost and the cutting
had started. And then you're like, yeah, but this didn't

(01:03:52):
succeed either, you know. And the thing that is a
no brainer for me is not playing into the division
between above ground and underground movements. The people who deserve
the blame for environmental destruction are the people who are
destroying the planet, not people who are fighting against that destruction,

(01:04:15):
even though some of those people are fighting against it
in ways that we don't approve of. And that goes
in all directions. You know, that's the part that I
feel clear on. But I absolutely, I mean one, never
get your advice about strategy from fucking talking head in
your ears. I'm very aware of how parasocial, Like, of

(01:04:36):
all of the I have avoided talking about shit that's
happened in the past twenty or thirty years. I usually
talk about things that happened a long time ago. And
one of the reasons is that I don't want people
to think that they listen to a podcast and know
what to do, you know, yeah, oh yeah. But I
chose to do this episode because I think that it
is the kind of thing that is like, it's worth

(01:04:58):
people thinking about what is necessary to try and address
the problems we're facing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
But I don't know, yeah, or or you know, or
to question the assumptions we have about what does and
doesn't work, because yeah, you know, I think that the
time has passed for looking for a single answer because
we don't have a single problem totally.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
And I mean, in some ways it's also just how
do we want to live? How do we what was
the constant gardener living and acting like you give a
damn yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
Live, living and dying giving a damn yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
And I think overall, the slow hard work of day
in and day out movement building and the slow hard
work of I think that overall, that is what I choose,
and I just I want to not choose to condemn
people who pick differently as long as people are living

(01:05:53):
and dying like they give a damn, they get it wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:05:56):
Right, And that's you know, I mean, that's the thing
that if we fall into the sort of FBI versus
activists quote unquote legal versus quote unquote illegal mindset, then
suddenly it becomes respectability versus caring totally.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
And then yet, like you know, people like no one's
no one's an angel in these stories, you know, like
people are doing things like don't burn libraries down, you know, yeah,
they knew it too, but they knew it too late.

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
Yeah, I don't know. And yet, you know, you compare
that to somebody like the Weathermen, who I feel like
blew up quite a few people, and it's like, you know,
that's intentionality is still very important.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
I think the Weathermen only ended up blowing up themselves.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Okay, see, I'm just my history here is very casual.
I'm sure you're right. I know you're right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:00):
I'm only eighty percent on this, but I believe that
the only I get.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
My history from Forrest Gump.

Speaker 2 (01:07:05):
So yeah, now, I'm like, this is the kind of
thing I, of all people, should know off the top
of my head.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
But but it's it's definitely there's more all over your
head than in my.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
But they certainly were less directly caring about Like the
social movement that they came out of had far less
of a problem with armed violence than the social movement
that their celebration front came out of. But it's also like,
I don't know, I could talk about this all day. Yeah,

(01:07:42):
what is dead we should talk about? Is you wrong about?

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
What?

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
A segue? Thanks?

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
Yeah, you're wrong about I hope is sometimes about cool
people and sometimes about people who tried, and sometimes about
people who you just don't know what they were thinking,
but they had to have been thinking something, and so
I'm like in an overly philosophical frame, So I'm like,
what is your wrong about? But yeah, I do a

(01:08:14):
podcast calls You're wrong about. It's a show where I
have rotating guests where every couple weeks somebody comes on
and tells me about a chapter in history that is
commonly misunderstood, or I tell them about a chapter in
history that is commonly misunderstood and that I have stayed

(01:08:35):
up late too many nights thinking about. And it is
very preoccupied with the question of how do we live
and die? Giving a damn? And I feel like my
answer is that, or one of my answers is that
we study history because the questions were trying to answer
now are the same questions often that have bothered people

(01:08:56):
for as long as we have a written record of
people being bothered by questions. And one of the other
themes is that you don't have to be smart to
deserve a nice life, which is a thing that we
don't realize we believe in America until you argue against it.
I think, and then I have a show called You
Are Good, where we talk about movies and the feelings

(01:09:21):
they give us and how we learn how to define
ourselves by watching whatever we could find on VHS or
on a random streaming service, and how we shape ourselves
with little bits of culture like a hermit crab. Those
are my shows.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
I love that concept and I think about that all
the time, about the way that we see who we
can be based on the heroes that we see in
media and how they define us and how we become
them as we age. And yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
Yeah, yeah, And I feel like you know, there is
it's nerve wracking to make media and want people to
hear what you're saying and also not put too much
stock in it and to find, you know, answer their
own questions and not act like any one person talking
in their ear has the answers. But yeah, yeah, you're

(01:10:18):
making that media that can help people find the people
that they can model themselves after on the show. So
it's so nice to come visit and be a part
of it a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
Well, you should listen to the person whispering in your
ear when she tells you to go listen to Well,
if you like this, podcast. You'll like Sarah's podcasts, and
you should also give all of your money to our animals,
not animals as like a general concept, but specifically the

(01:10:52):
three of us, just our pets.

Speaker 3 (01:10:56):
I've been influenced by this YouTuber who's giving like chicken
hearts and freeze dried muscles to her cat, and I
really feel like my cats have probably been suffering in
silence on their mediocre diet. So yeah, it's very true.
It's an issue facing our country.

Speaker 2 (01:11:12):
My dog eats the fanciest kibble that's still kibble that
I can still buy in the town I live in,
and is really picky about it, and it's like, really
the fancy kibble again. And I told the vet that
he doesn't like his food all that much, and she's like,
what do you give him? And I was like the
following that I'm not being paid to advertise, I'm not

(01:11:34):
going to say. And she's like, but that's the good stuff,
and I was like, I know, I can't even get
it at the grocery store. I have to go to
tractor supply. I've probably told this story on this podcast before,
but I think about it all the time because I
feed him every day. And every day is like maybe
later when I'm hungry.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
So funny, but if.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
You want to hear me write about my life, and
I actually, for example, I did a substack post a
couple weeks ago as you are looking for this, called
how can we Stare at the Sun or how to
confront the Unimaginable? And it's about, you know, it's the
stuff that I try not I try to keep it
mostly like history focused when I talk about this, whereas

(01:12:15):
this is an essay where I talk more about how
do we look at mourning the death of winter and
how do we look at what actions we feel are
appropriate to take? So you can check that out on
my substack that's free. Half of my posts are free.
The other half you have to give me food with
which to buy dog food for my dog, and those
are the ones that are more personal. And then I'll
also say you should listen to Hood Politics with prop

(01:12:37):
which is on cool Zone Media and is one of
my favorite news shows because cool Zone Media doesn't miss
and they don't pay me to say that. Well, I
guess they on some level pay me because I am
hired by cool Zone Media, but I just actually genuinely
like the shows that we produce and I'm proud to
be part of it. So if you guys think to
plug that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:59):
Yeah, all right, that time's too perfect.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
We'll see you next Monday. Bye, Ronye.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.