Eugene Weekly: "Flames of Dissent" part 5

FLAMES OF DISSENT:
The local spark that ignited an eco-sabotage boom — and bust
BY KERA ABRAHAM

Part V: The Ashes

More than a decade ago, a 21-year-old Lacey Phillabaum danced barefoot in a blue sundress on the downtown Federal Building lawn. A recent UO graduate, eco-radical writer and defender of the old-growth trees at Warner Creek, she jumped with other activists to the live lyrics of Casey Neil's "Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations."

Nine and a half years ago, an emboldened Phillabaum watched a truck roll within arm's length of a fellow activist during a forest defense protest on a highway near Detroit, Ore. Less than a month later, she and other Earth First! Journal editors defiantly perched in doomed downtown Eugene trees until police pepper-sprayed them down.

Seven years ago, after quitting the journal, Phillabaum joined the protests against the WTO in Seattle. As the host of Tim Lewis' documentary Breaking the Spell, she later defended the actions of the black-clad anarchists who looted and vandalized corporations they'd viewed as destroyers of the Earth.

Five and a half years ago, Phillabaum acted as the lookout during the arson of a University of Washington horticulture center — a crime she committed in concert with her new boyfriend, Stan Meyerhoff, and other activists. On the same night in Clatskanie, Ore., eco-radicals torched the offices and trucks of Jefferson Poplar Farm. The coordinated arsons, executed in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, were intended as a statement against genetic engineering.

But by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a combination of mounting paranoia and infighting had shattered Eugene's eco-radical scene like glass in storefront windows at the Battle of Seattle. Phillabaum and Meyerhoff moved first to Bend and later to Charlottesville, Va., where she wrote for an alternative newsweekly and he studied engineering. They appeared to be on a straight path, their criminal past left in ashes.

Until December of last year, when the FBI busted Meyerhoff for participating in nearly a dozen of 20 environmentally motivated sabotage acts across the West between 1996 and 2001. Phillabaum turned herself in soon after and began working as an unnamed cooperator with the feds. (The bust may explain why she called off a freelance assignment for EW on "sustainable" beef production last winter. "I am having some heavy family problems," she wrote in a Feb. 24 email, "and I thought they were clearing up but they are not." As recently as Autumn 2006, Phillabaum was listed as a copy editor for Eugene Magazine.)

Today, Phillabaum is facing three to five years in jail — or 25, if federal prosecutors can nail her as a terrorist — because she'd slipped, even briefly, from the Earth Day of above-ground activism into the Earth Night of underground sabotage.

Phillabaum is one of 12 defendants who have pleaded guilty to a flare of environmentally motivated arsons in the federal sting known as Operation Backfire. One targeted activist has pleaded not guilty, another committed suicide in jail, and four are fugitives. One more, the government's first informant, lives in Eugene and has not been indicted. The cooperators face recommended sentences of three to about 16 years (for Phillabaum and Meyerhoff, respectively), but federal prosecutors have said they will try to tack 20-year "terrorism enhancements" onto each sentence.

The 10 defendants before the Oregon courts are scheduled for sentencing in April. Washington defendant Briana Waters will face trial in May, and Phillabaum and Jennifer Kolar — whose plea deals may hinge on their testimonies against Waters — are to be sentenced in July.

The domino effect of the arrests and cooperation agreements have been surreal for local eco-radicals who knew the defendants. Generally speaking, second only to the community's disdain for the authorities is its disappointment with the cooperators. Most loathed is Jake Ferguson, the apparent ringleader of the eco-saboteurs and the feds' primary informant, who still walks free; U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut has said that prosecutors haven't yet decided "what to do with him."

Nearly as resented is Meyerhoff, apparently the feds' secondary informant, followed by Phillabaum and Kolar, who likely began working with authorities around spring 2006. Many local eco-radicals are likewise upset with Chelsea Gerlach, Kevin Tubbs, Kendall Tanksersley, Darren Thurston and Suzanne Savoie, who had begun cooperating by July.

Most of the community insiders who spoke with EW maintain their support for Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Nathan Block and Joyanna Zacher, who struck an unusual deal with prosecutors allowing them to confess to their own crimes without incriminating others, and Olympia resident Briana Waters, who maintains her innocence.

"What's upsetting is how quickly people are folding and how namby-pamby and weak Earth First! looks when you compare it to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, where people have held out for decades without talking," said former Earth First! Journal co-editor Jim Flynn. "It just makes our movement look weak and soft and middle-class. For people like me, who have spent years in the movement, it's embarrassing. How will we recruit new people?"

But another movement veteran, former Earth First!er James Johnston, attacks not the cooperators but the people who criticize them. "It's a bunch of dimwits who talk a big talk about arson and anarchism and a bunch of other crap," he wrote by email. "Now they don't seem to have anything better to do than make up bunch of lies about the people who actually did the arsons and ARE taking responsibility for it."

Johnston, an ex-boyfriend of Phillabaum's, sat next to her at the Dec. 11 sentencing hearing in Eugene. Other activists in the courtroom avoided them both.

Eugene's eco-radical era was a fire that blazed through town for half a decade, bringing together Earth First!ers, anarchists, artists, feminists and animal advocates who rejected authority and envisioned a freer, greener world. Their flame manifested in art projects, housing cooperatives, forest defense campaigns, anti-globalization rallies, independent media and, notoriously, the flare of environmentally motivated arsons.

By mid-2001 that eco-radical fire had consumed itself, sputtering out as activists split over dogmatic differences and personality clashes. In subsequent years federal surveillance pressed down like a fog, nearly extinguishing the remnant embers.

How did this fire, and Operation Backfire, change the local activist landscape? What grew from the ashes?

It may no longer be so radical, but Eugene's environmentalist community continues to nurture seeds sown at the peak of the movement in the late '90s. Volunteers with the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team (NEST), a group formed out of the Fall Creek forest defense campaign, still scout for red tree vole nests in an effort to battle timber sales on public lands. Cascadia Wildlands Project, a forest advocacy group founded in 1997 by James Johnston, regularly brings legal challenges to federal logging projects; Jim Flynn is CWP board president, and another former EF!J co-editor, Josh Laughlin, is director.

The eco-anarchist TV show Cascadia Alive! ended in 2004, but Tim Lewis is currently working to archive the shows for the UO library, and his documentaries of the Warner Creek blockade and the WTO riots are now available on DVD. Green Anarchy magazine, launched around 2001 by Robin Terranova and other local radicals, still publishes out of Eugene, while Earth First! Journal, which was headquartered locally from 1993 to 2001, has moved to Tuscon, Ariz. The journal struggles to stay afloat, with about one-third the subscribers it had in 1997.

In the Whiteaker neighborhood, eco-anarchist hangout Icky's Teahouse is gone, but Tiny Tavern carries on. The Ant Farm, an activist crash-pad, has folded, but the Shamrock House remains, with its "Free Wall" covered in anarchist art. The Jawbreaker gallery, founded by Warner Creek activist Stella Lee Anderson, still hosts alternative art shows, and the daffodil bulbs Kari Johnson planted in the shape of an anarchy symbol on a 4th Avenue lawn more than a decade ago still appear every spring. Food Not Lawns, the urban gardening movement founded by local activists Heather Coburn and Tobias Policha in 1999, has now gone national; Coburn recently published a book about it under the name H.C. Flores.

And though the arsonists who set fire to Willamette National Forest in 1991 have yet to be caught, the trees of Warner Creek still stand. Tim Ingalsbee, the "godfather" of the mid-1990s campaign against salvage logging, perseveres in his effort to get the site permanently protected as a research area.

Much like the Warner Creek salvage controversy, Operation Backfire illuminated two very different ways of viewing a burnt landscape: as a disaster to be cleaned up and salvaged, or as a natural cleansing, providing nutrients and light for rebirth. The bust seems to have dampened local eco-radicalism, stalled ELF actions, weakened Earth First!, and possibly even chilled progressive activism of all kinds. But Eugene remains a hub of eco-activity, and as sure as wildfires will continue to blaze through forests, stoking controversies in their wake, environmentalists will keep battling the forces of planetary destruction, their tactics evolving with the shifting political landscape.

Is eco-sabotage terrorism?

On April 10, federal prosecutors will try to convince Judge Ann Aiken that it's appropriate for them to try to tack 20-year "terrorism enhancements" onto the sentences of the 10 Operation Backfire defendants who have pleaded guilty before the federal court in Oregon. Prosecutors have indicated that, if Aiken gives them the green light, they'll try to pin each of the defendants as a terrorist during their individual sentencing hearings. They'll likely do the same before the court in western Washington, where two more have pleaded guilty and a third awaits trial.

If prosecutors succeed, Lacey Phillabaum's recommended sentence of three to five years, the shortest proposed jail term for an Operation Backfire defendant, could become 25 years. Her boyfriend Stan Meyerhoff's sentence of almost 16 years, the longest proposed term, could become 36.

James Jarboe, chief of the domestic terrorism section of the FBI, told a House subcommittee in 2002 that "The FBI defines eco-terrorism 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."

The key word in that definition is "violence." The 20 acts of eco-sabotage in the Operation Backfire case did not physically harm anyone, and evidence suggests that the saboteurs took extreme precautions to that end. "Not hurting people is such a part of every one of those people's philosophies," said Eugene activist Stella Lee Anderson, a former girlfriend of defendant Kevin Tubbs.

Yet few within the movement are willing to assert that local eco-anarchists in the mid-'90s were nonviolent by principle. "There's a lot of ways to define the words violence and nonviolence, and people couldn't get on the same page for what that meant to them," said Eugene eco-activist Cecilia Story. "Some people thought filling up a soaker gun with urine and spraying it at cops was really violent. Other people didn't. We would talk about things like that for weeks."

Prosecutor Stephen Peifer, however, suggests that the question of violence is moot in this case. Under a federal law titled "Acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries," anyone who "creates a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to any other person" by damaging property within the U.S. may be subject to the terrorism sentencing enhancement. "That's what we're working with," Peifer said. "The word violence doesn't come into play."

Still, many people — including Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon — are reluctant to call the eco-saboteurs terrorists. "As we know terrorism today, mass murder on the scale of the trade towers and the Pentagon, perhaps it would deserve a more specific label," DeFazio said, adding that the eco-arsons were "a destructive, stupid, criminal thing to do." — Kera Abraham

Thoughts from the trenches
Eugene eco-radicals weigh in on Operation Backfire.

Did the sabotage actions have their intended effect of waking up the public to environmental issues?

Jim Flynn sees some actions, like the arson of the Cavel West horsemeat plant (which was never rebuilt) and the BLM wild horse releases, as valid. "I think sabotage is a perfectly good way to grab people's attention," he said. "Ethical monkeywrenching, if done thoughtfully, can be an effective tactic." But, he added, the general public might not make the link between eco-sabotage and its political motives. "I think sabotage has lost its meaning in this country and people see it as terrorism," he said. "This country has a big problem with arson for any reason. I don't know why that is."

Chris Calef agrees that some actions may have been somewhat effective, but he cites others as ill-conceived, such as the arsons of the Oakridge Ranger Station, which incinerated years of Tim Ingalsbee's research, and the University of Washington horticulture center. "They destroyed some endangered seeds next door," he said of the UW arson. "Nice going."

In the case of the 1998 arson of the Vail ski resort, Stella Lee Anderson said, "They public's looking at it and thinking, 'Oh my gosh, that poor ski resort.' They don't see the forest that was destroyed for the ski run. They public's just stupid and lazy and ignorant and for the most part, they just don't care."

But forest defender Shannon Wilson hangs onto the hope that the actions weren't in vain. "Maybe when people read the stories and articles about these indicted folks some of them might stop and think about why these highly educated and idealistic young people risked their freedoms and life for such things as wild lynx, wild horses, ancient forests, wilderness, and our life giving biosphere," he wrote by email. "Perhaps they will think long enough to question their 'American dream' of building a 4,000 square foot McMansion with the 600 square foot redwood deck with two SUVs in the garage parked next to their 50 foot motor-home along side their 20 feet speedboat and their two all terrain vehicles on the edge of a once wild river. I believe that this is why these folks risked everything. They attempted to wake the people out of their 'American dream' nightmare that is destroying all life on this planet."

But Jeff Hogg, who spent nearly six months in jail for refusing to testify to the federal grand jury, doubts that the eco-sabotage actions woke anyone up. "They drew the attention of people who were already paying attention, and the people who aren't think they're a bunch of crazy criminals," he said. "I think [Operation Backfire] is gonna have a pretty chilling effect on a lot of activism."

How do you feel about the primary informant, Jacob Ferguson?

Tim Ream suspects that Ferguson may have been a federal provacateur all along. "I just don't know how else you can burn millions of dollars of property and not get indicted," he said. "Especially when you're the one link that brings everything together … I just can't understand why the guy who looks to me like the ringleader smack addict is driving around in an SUV and living free."

Tim Lewis, who lived across the creek from Ferguson in Saginaw, saw him as extremely self-determined: "If he needed heroin, he could get it. If he needed a woman to live with him and pay rent, he could get it." In Lewis' view, Ferguson didn't crack out of weakness or spite, but for his kid. "That's the only thing I ever saw Jake give a shit about, was his son," he said.

Cecilia Story is still creeped out by thoughts of Ferguson during the years he was secretly recording conversations for the FBI. "Wearing a fuckin' wire into my community? That is so not OK," she said.

But Heather Coburn is willing to cut Ferguson a little slack. "He's as much a victim of the system as we all are," she said. "I still have dreams about Jake where he redeems himself. He comes back the way he used to look — he was into Aikido, he was a vegan, he was really kind and funny. What a heartbreaker." But now, local activists shun him. "When he goes walking down the street, he's like a ghoul," she said. "Jake is volatile sometimes; he's a Cancer. But he's not a violent person … I've never, ever been afraid that Jake was gonna hurt me. A lot of people try to paint him as sinister. He isn't; just maybe stupid."

Is it fair to blame the other Operation Backfire cooperators, given that they risked their freedom in an attempt to further their cause?

Shelley Cater feels upset and betrayed by the cooperators, even as she has some compassion for them. "If you can't stand by your convictions, then you shouldn't have been there in the first place," she said.

Although he's "pissed off" at some of the cooperators, Tim Lewis has a problem calling them snitches; they were the activists most willing to walk their radical talk. "I can look back at [the saboteurs] and what they did and say, 'Fuckin' A, man. They were kickin' ass.' These cats were out there in the middle of the night doing what they did … I think it's noble. I think it's very noble. I have a lot of respect for them."

James Johnston is not willing to condemn anyone, short of Ferguson, for cooperating. "I'm withholding judgement because I don't know anything about it," he said. He also worries that so-called "snitches" could face violence in jail. "Inmates don't have anything better to do than learn all they can about the people they live with," he wrote by email. "And they do routinely kill and maim other inmates justly or unjustly labeled as 'rats' and 'snitches.'"

How did the bust affect Eugene's eco-radical community?

Fire ecologist and activist Tim Ingalsbee has mixed emotions. "At this point I am dangerously ignorant of all this ELF stuff," he said. "I am aggrieved that good people are going down … I am genuinely saddened, and in deep denial." But he also feels that the saboteurs did real damage to the eco-radical movement. "This is kind of a pattern: These opportunists who think their heart is in the right place, but their brains certainly aren't," he said. "That is the danger with libertarian anarchy. It's completely unaccountable … While we [above-ground activists] are trying to educate the larger community, you [underground saboteurs] undermine the action, and you make all of the community activists targets."

Shelley Cater said the shared sense of persecution may have laid to rest old beefs that now seem petty by comparison. "Operation Backfire has gelled people in this town in a way I haven't seen them gel in a long time," she said. "The evil's so huge now that people are compelled into action … We are a battered community. Everybody's suffering some kind of grief. But it's made the strong stronger. The people who are dedicated are still in the fray… Our survival nature is coming to the fore."

Kari Johnson has drawn lessons from the peak and crash of Eugene's eco-radical scene. "I have learned to not accept other people's strategies if they aren't working," she wrote by email. "I won't let an individual jockey for a power position … I've also learned that rallies and marches and such aren't so effective at changing the minds of the rulers as they are at changing the minds of the participants." She complains that media have taken the eco-sabotage angle and made a "cowboys and [I]ndians story out of real life," leaving out the less sensational characters — the old, the young, "the weirdos and the moms," — and the positive, quirky things the local eco-radical community did, like forging art alliances and forming a Red Rover line against the riot cops. "It comes down to young white black-clad folks who destroyed property worth money," she wrote by email. "How can anyone who wasn't here make any sense of it?"

How did the bust affect the larger environmental movement?

"There is renewed activism and involvement, not only in EF!, but also in the National Lawyers Guild, grand jury education projects, prisoner support networks, indymedia, etc.," Jim Flynn wrote by email. "The movement cannot be killed simply because of the fact that the planet is being killed. Time and time again people will rise up when they realize their life support is being cut off … At the end of the last decade many enviros became involved in the anti-globalization movement which continues to this day. With the election of Bush, many enviros are also now civil rights activists, even more so after the busts."

Humboldt State sociologist Tony Silvaggio, who lived in Eugene for years and knows several of the defendants, sees the bust in the context of a larger neo-conservative attack on progressive activism. "It's destroying the institutions and communities in Eugene. The government's guilt-by-association and divide-and-conquer approach has really succeeded," he said. "They're out to crush dissent, period. They've targeted this movement because it's an easy target; Al Qaeda is fuckin' hard. They need to show results. They need to show the American people that 'There are terrorists out there, and we caught them.' … Where is the mainstream environmental movement in any of this? Where is the labor movement? If we let this go, 10, 20 years down the road, any traditional protest activity is gonna be labeled as terrorism."

"It's not hard to imagine environmental radicals coming out of this about as popular as Al-Qaeda in the mainstream press," wrote Chris Calef by email. "However, just as the factors that led up to anti-American sentiment abroad are rooted in world history and American foreign policy, so is the background to this case quite complicated and justified on both sides. The public has a right to be concerned about people who burn buildings, there's no doubt about that. But conscientious middle-class kids, like most of these were, do not just up and decide for no apparent reason to risk their freedom by engaging in clandestine political sabotage. The environmental issues that motivated these acts are very real, and as yet unresolved. If there were tens of thousands of mainstream liberals out in the streets every day demanding resolution on global warming, oil dependency, nuclear proliferation, and so on, then we probably wouldn't see these kids feeling the need to take desperate steps like the ones that got them in so much trouble. It's easy to blame the immediate culprits, but until the problems get solved, I think it's fair to expect that more and more young people might make similar choices. Calling them 'terrorists' and locking them away isn't going to solve anything."