from Eugene Weekly
Flames of Dissent
The local spark that ignited an eco-sabotage boom — and bust
STORY BY KERA ABRAHAM. PHOTOS BY KURT JENSEN.
In a high-profile sweep that began on Dec. 7, 2005 and continues into the present, the federal government indicted 18 people for a spate of environmentally motivated sabotage crimes committed in the West between 1996 and 2001. No one was physically hurt in the actions, mainly arsons against corporate and government targets perceived to be destroying the planet. Yet the FBI is calling the defendants "eco-terrorists" and seeking particularly stiff sentences for the five remaining non-cooperators, whose trials are pending. Eight defendants have pled guilty, four are fugitives and one committed suicide in jail.
Segments of the American public have glanced at the mug shots inked into newspapers and seen dangerous eco-fanatics who belong behind bars. But here in Eugene, where most of the alleged saboteurs have lived, those faces are familiar to hundreds and dear to many. In recent months, EW spoke with more than a dozen local people who described the accused as compassionate, Earth-loving people, influenced by a time that also shaped Eugene.
Five years after the last act of arson, the so-called Operation Backfire arrests have sparked the national media's curiosity. That attention, beaming like a headlight through a fog of paranoia, tends to obscure the other regrowth that sprouted from the ashes of Eugene's eco-radical era.
This five-part series attempts to tell that story.
Part I
In Defense of Cascadia:The Warner Creek campaign
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| CASCADIA FREE STATE, NOVEMBER 1995 |
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| TIM INGALSBEE, CATIA JULIANA AND THEIR DAUGHTER KELSEY CASCADIA ROSE JULIANA IN CASCADIA FREE STATE |
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| KEVIN TUBBS WITH HIS DOG |
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| KEVIN TUBBS IN HIS BIPOD |
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| JAKE FERGUSON |
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| THE END OF TIM REAM'S HUNGER STRIKE AT THE FEDERAL BUILDING |
Mick Garvin lay calmly on his side while three tons of steel heaved toward him. It was the morning of Sept. 10, 1995, and the sun hadn't yet hit the north face of the mountain. The air was chilly on Garvin's face, his right hand cold against a steel chain. He was locked into the gravel road.
Jake Ferguson and two others sat stoically in front of Garvin, forming a soft barrier between the human lock-down and the machine, while another dozen forest activists rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and gathered around. Independent filmmaker Tim Lewis circled the scene with his video camera, and resident pikas, tiny bunny-like mammals with long whiskers, scurried under boulders and squeaked. The Forest Service road grader heaved closer, knocking away a large rock and rising up with a moan. The blade stopped about 10 feet from Ferguson's military boots.
Garvin looked at the backs of the heads protecting him, gazed up at a snaggly old Doug fir and felt a warm wave of gratefulness. The 37-year-old had been doing forest defense work for years, but never before had he seen activists hold their ground like this. A state trooper summarily informed them that they could be arrested, and a Forest Service officer turned to Garvin. "Are you going to leave?"
"No." And she couldn't make him. He was locked into a "Sleeping Dragon," a concrete-reinforced 55-gallon drum buried in the road and covered with a metal fire door. Garvin's arm ran through a hole in the door and down a pipe into the drum; his chained wrist was clipped to a pin at the bottom. The road grader couldn't proceed without rolling over him, and he wasn't about to budge.
Secretly, Garvin hoped the standoff wouldn't last much longer. Fluid was collecting in his hand, making it swell, and if his fingers fell asleep he wouldn't be able to open the clip to get out. But if the grader got past him it would roll toward Bunchgrass Ridge, where ancient trees were slated for sawing; he was willing to risk his life to prevent that. Garvin settled against the cold metal door and rolled a cigarette.
Finally, the road grader made a clumsy retreat down the mountain. And in the seasons that passed before Forest Service vehicles again tried to cross that line, the rag-tag road blockade became one of the longest-running acts of civil disobedience in U.S. environmental history. It also brought together a small crew of eco-anarchists who would later develop bigger, more explosive plans.
One autumn afternoon four years earlier, humans had crept into this corner of Willamette National Forest. They slipped past towering fir trees dry from a long summer drought, placing incendiary devices at the border of a roadless area set aside as endangered spotted owl habitat. The flame grew into a torrent of fire that swept through 9,200 acres— a third the area of Eugene — over the next two weeks. The Forest Service spent $10 million battling the blaze before snow finally put it out.
Forest Service investigators never caught the arsonists who sparked the Warner Creek Fire, but to environmentalists the motive was obvious. They strongly suspected timber industry insiders hungry for access to protected old-growth or even Forest Service firefighters looking for work. Such arsons had become a pattern in the West, in keeping with the Forest Service adage: "The blacker the forest, the greener the paycheck."
In Eugene, UO doctoral student Tim Ingalsbee was itching to help. He'd fought fire with the Forest Service every summer for years, but had hung up his hard hat in 1990 after concluding that fire suppression throws forest ecosystems off their natural rhythms. Now, as the agency batted about plans to cut down old-growth trees in the name of fire safety, the 30-year-old environmentalist saw a chance to redeem himself. "All those years fighting fire — I could pay back that bad karma with good works defending this place from salvage logging," he reasoned.
In November 1991, Ingalsbee hopped on a Forest Service tour bus to check out the still-smoldering forest. There he met Catia Juliana, a bright-eyed woman who was monitoring logging projects for Southern Willamette Earth First!, an eco-radical group with a bent towardmonkeywrenching. By the next spring Ingalsbee and Juliana had formed a sister group, Cascadia Earth First!, and walked every foot of the burn. Their masterpiece, Alternative EF in the Forest Service's draft environmental analysis, supposedly stood for "ecology of fire" — but secretly represented Earth First!. "The symbolism went right by them," Ingalsbee said. "I took the pleasure of seeing 'EF' 400 times in the final document. We fantasized about hacking into their computer and adding the exclamation points."
Willamette National Forest Supervisor Darrell Kenops didn't go for it, instead deciding in October 1992 to "salvage" log 40 million board feet of timber from the burn. Outraged Earth First!ers performed a Halloween skit in front of Kenops' office, depicting the salvage proponents as monsters on trial before Mother Nature. Local media ate it up, and an unprecedented 2,300 citizens sent comments to the Forest Service opposing the Warner Creek logging plans. When that didn't work, Ingalsbee tried a new line of defense, founding the Cascadia Fire Ecology Project to educate the public on the science of burned forests. As the instructor of a popular UO class called Envisioning Ecotopian Communities, he also quietly inspired dozens of students to join the cause.
For a moment in the summer of 1995, Ingalsbee's fight appeared to be over. U.S. Magistrate Thomas Coffin had struck down the Forest Service's salvage plan on the grounds that it illegally rewarded arson; the ruling just needed a signature from Judge Michael Hogan. But Hogan stalled long enough for Congress to pass a salvage rider that opened the Warner Creek burn and thousands of other forests to expanded logging.
On Sept. 6, when Hogan declared Coffin's ruling moot, Cascadia Earth First!ers were ready to execute Plan EF!. "They left the courtroom and went straight up the mountain," Ingalsbee said. "They sat in the widest, levelest part, which was the logging road, and they kept vigil 24-7."
The buzz spread quickly in eco-radical circles, attracting a core group of activists to Eugene. Among the first was Tim Ream, who'd heard about the Warner Creek campaign at an Earth First! gathering outside Arcata, Calif. When he hiked into the charred Cascadian forest, where spotted owl pairs had returned to fledge their young, he made a personal vow to defend it.
Ream linked up with Tim Lewis, a lanky 40-year-old filmmaker who'd joined a 33-mile march into the Warner Creek Fire area. When Lewis saw the passion on Forest Service Road 2408 — activists pickaxing the dirt, their hands blistered, standing firm against the "freddies," as they called law enforcement — he knew he had his next film project. His footage of the blockade, narrated by Ream, would become the documentary Pickaxe.
UO student Jeff Hogg, an Earth First! activist who had taken Ingalsbee's class, began supporting the campaign through the Survival Center, a campus organization dedicated to social and environmental activism. So did Lacey Phillabaum, an art history major who reported for the radical campus newspaper The Insurgent. Fellow Insurgent reporter James Johnston, who she was dating, also lined up for the cause. Cecilia Story, a graphic designer from Colorado, joined a march into the forest and was hooked the moment she saw the ancient, lichen-draped trees slated for cutting. "My heart just broke," she said. All four were in their early twenties.
Meanwhile, the four co-editors of the Earth First! Journal unapologetically trumpeted the blockade. One of those editors, Jim Flynn, had moved with the magazine to Eugene in 1993, establishing its headquarters in a tucked-away green ranch in Glenwood. Journal volunteers Stella-Lee Anderson and her boyfriend Kevin Tubbs, both in their mid-twenties, helped set up the first camp.
A hardass drifter with a criminal past, Jake Ferguson, tattooed and camo-clad, with long brown dreadlocks whose natty ends looked like they'd been dipped in peroxide, showed up ready to do something meaningful. Guarded, somber and glassy-eyed, he seemed to be either on hard drugs or in the first stages of recovery. Not the type to talk about hippie shit like magic and rainbows, Ferguson wanted a revolution and stuck at the camp longer than anyone else. "He was committed to something for awhile," Anderson reflected. "Warner Creek was healing for him. A time to start anew."
Today, some Warner Creek veterans reserve the worst kind of nouns for Ferguson: snitch, sociopath, loser, pyromaniac, junkie. They're disgusted with him for ratting out fellow forest defenders for crimes committed in later years. But others, especially the staunchly nonviolent Ingalsbee, would be most appalled by what the defendants had allegedly done.
Glasses askew and dark curls wet with sweat, Tubbs grappled with a boulder the size of a small child. He'd been working Road 2408 with the activists for days, pickaxing a 10-foot-wide, 15-foot-deep trench — big enough to fit a school bus in. The boulder would be another obstacle to keep out vehicle-bound loggers and freddies.
Behind the trench line and out of police reach, a new kind of freedom took root. The eco-rads erected two tarp-covered teepees, one for sleeping and the other for cooking. They rigged a fort complete with a drawbridge using downed logs left by loggers and built two video platforms in trees, from which they could survey the freddies and scope the surrounding clearcut-scarred hills.
The activists began to lose their identities as Americans and pledge their allegiance to Cascadia — their bioregion, home of the ancient pines and dizzying stars, wherein all people could become wild again. They dubbed the blockade Cascadia Free State and themselves Cascadia Forest Defenders, adopting nature-inspired aliases like Lupine, the Dog and Madrone.
And they made love, as free wild creatures do. The couples let the fecundity of the forest sluice into their relationships, while the single activists flirted and hooked up. Juliana realized she was pregnant while hiking near Kelsey Creek, a bubbling blue salve in the Warner Creek burn.
"Love in the barricades — how can you get more romantic?" Ingalsbee recalled with a grin, sitting in a Eugene café while the rain drizzled outside. His and Juliana's daughter, Kelsey, is now 10.
Of course, some moments of the blockade sucked: the weeks of nonstop rain, the blizzards, the days when stale bagels were dinner. "It was just like any summer camp, where there were long periods of boredom," remembered Johnston, now a clean-cut policy analyst for Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.
But even in those soggy times, a sense of common purpose kept the forest defenders going. They agreed by concensus not to do anything to scare off public support, like hurt a freddy or blow something up. The unspoken line was somewhere near petty vandalism: picking the trench in the road, even throwing buckets of shit at the Oakridge ranger station under cover of night. "Violence would take away from what we were doing," Anderson explained, "and property destruction was distracting from the goal in mind."
So the activists got creative, making a perilous wager that loggers and Forest Service agents would value human lives more than those of trees and animals. They pinned themselves under parked cars, locked their arms into concrete-filled barrels, fastened their necks to the backs of logging trucks. Tubbs helped build a "bipod," a platform propped on two poles as tall as a ranch-size house and counterbalanced by cables anchored to the road. If a freddy even nudged the structure, the activist on the platform could come crashing down.
"At the time, yeah, I was scared," Johnston said. "The stuff that we were doing was not safe." But in the course of the blockade, no one was seriously hurt.
This brand of forest defense, aka "Warnerization," was catching on. Eco-radicals learned to climb trees, tie knots and generally piss off authorities at "action camps" across the West. Oregon activists confronted logging operations in the coast range and southwest Siskiyous while interstate eco-rads set up blockades in Idaho, Colorado and Montana. Their commitment to peaceful civil disobedience drew supporters of diverse ages and backgrounds, even inspiring one former Indiana congressman to get himself arrested.
But the escalation of forest activism also produced a backlash, particularly among people dependent on timber money. One logger threatened to fell a tree on the forest defenders while they begged him to spare the old growth. Forest staff allegedly cut the cable on Tubbs' bipod one night while it was unmanned, and drunken men from the nearby town of Oakridge drove up to the trench line to talk belligerent smack.
Forest Service officials generally left Cascadia Free State alone, but they were uneasy. "It's more difficult for officers than people think," said Forest Service Special Agent Sher Jennings, who was assigned to monitor the Warner Creek campaign in its last season. "They're trying to do what they think is right, and they don't want anyone to get hurt. It can get pretty trying."
Although one reporter suggested that the Cascadia Forest Defenders may be domestic terrorists, the notion didn't stick. Front-page stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post depicted peaceful eco-radicals taking a stand for the forest, and Cascadia Free State attracted hundreds of visitors, including a bus full of Vermont schoolchildren and the president of The Audubon Society.
The campaign pressed on in the city as in the forest. Supporters in Eugene's bohemian Whiteaker neighborhood collected food and supplies for the camp, while mainstream environmentalists kept up pressure on the Clinton administration. The four EF!J co-editors, who later included Phillabaum, cranked out copy in Glenwood, spreading Warner Creek news to eco-radicals across the nation.
Tim Ream staged a hunger strike on the cold concrete plaza of the downtown Federal Building, consuming nothing but juice and vegetable broth throughout the cold and rainy autumn. "Frat boys and angry timber people" would sometimes threaten him, Ream said, but others brought talismans and prayers. On the 70th day he flew to Washington D.C. to lobby Congress, returning to Eugene to break his fast five days later. On the last night of the strike Ream's supporters fasted with him, pitching more than 20 tents on the Federal Building plaza.
Winter came upon Cascadia Free State fast and cold, sinking the teepees deep in snow. But even as their numbers dropped, the activists kept vigil, gnawing on stale bread and making music around a wood stove. Supporters lugged food and supplies five miles uphill in snowshoes, scanning for the Earth-emblazoned flag that flew above the fort. Sometimes they heard coyote-like yet distinctly human howls floating out of the woods: Aw-oooooo!
In July 1996, on the one-year anniversary of the salvage rider's passage, Portland musician Casey Neil sang "Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations" while eco-radicals danced barefoot on the Federal Building lawn. Then Phillabaum, ponytailed and hairy-pitted in a blue sundress, took the mike.
She told the crowd about the "magic" she'd discovered at Warner Creek: cotton-cloud sunrises and mesmerizing moons, wild irises and cold mists blowing off waterfalls, a balmy June night when she hiked naked with other women and heard a spotted owl hoot for the first time. "It feels right," she said.
Ten years later, many in that crowd would see her as a traitor.
About 100 eco-rads, clad in camos and muddy dresses, made a wide circle in a sunny forest clearing. Ingalsbee and Juliana grinned as they stepped down the grassy aisle, newborn Kelsey in the bride's arms, while the wedding guests sang "Give Yourself to Love."
The couple wore green garlands: Ingalsbee's atop two long, sandy braids, Juliana's on a cascade of wavy brown. The officiator, a maternal-looking woman in a flowy dress, clipped together the chains encircling the bride and groom's wrists, locking them in an Earth First! handfast — "so the freddies won't rip us apart," Ingalsbee said. Then newlyweds and guests made a vow together: "From this day forward, I will commit myself to respect and defend all things wild and freeeeee!"
They'd barely finished when a short woman with brown dreadlocks stepped forward. People were still needed at the blockade, she announced rather sternly. The fight to save Warner Creek wasn't over yet.
Two weeks later, on Aug. 16, 1996, Anderson was ambling in the woods when an urgent message crackled through her walkie-talkie: A bulldozer was headed down Road 2408. She made a dash for the blockade, scrambling up hills strewn with rhododendrons and laurels, and thrust her hand into a pile of rocks in the road, a faux lockdown. Three other women were already secured EF! style, their arms stuck into concrete-filled barrels.
The officers told the activists that their year-long vigil was over: The Clinton administration had bowed to public pressure and backed away from hundreds of controversial logging projects, including Warner Creek. But without proof on paper, the women wouldn't budge. They thought it was a trick.
Forest Service agent Jennings, for one, was worried: She claimed that there was a fire in another part of the forest, and firefighters could only reach it via Road 2408. "We had a pretty high sense of urgency," she recalled by phone from her current office in Seattle. "However long they wanted to lie there, we had to get around them. And we couldn't get around them without taking out an old growth tree."
While a bulldozer tore down Cascadia Free State, Forest Service officials removed the activists from their lockdowns and arrested them. Jennings also arrested two Register-Guard reporters who had come to cover the raid, seizing their film and notes.
Three days later, an elfin man dressed like a tree hyped up a crowd of supporters in downtown Eugene. The activists were thrilled about the logging project's cancellation but pissed about the raid; they wanted to show solidarity with the four arrested activists. "Free the Warner women!" they chanted, marching en masse to the jail, which shared walls with the court. When they arrived at the security checkpoint and an officer informed Ream that only one person would be allowed in for the arraignment, Ream turned to the crowd. "How many of you think that you are the one?" he shouted.
Hoots all around. The eco-rads erupted into a chant of "No justice, no peace," Phillabaum straining so hard that a blue vein popped out in her neck. Some of the protesters started banging on the metal detector and then walked right through.
It was on. Someone pulled out a harmonica; others started drumming, jumping and chanting "Cascadia Free State!" as if they were still in the woods instead of a jailhouse lobby. An officer stepped into the fray and swayed around like a buoy in rough waves. Some protesters, sensing the danger here, started up a new plea: "No violence!" It wasn't clear whether they were addressing the officials or their fellow protesters.
And then, as quickly as it had churned up, the protest calmed. The activists sat on the ground and locked elbows. Police began the arduous task of detaching them one by one, dragging limp bodies into the jail, sometimes by the hair. A new chant rose: "Arrest them; don't beat them up!" Protesters grabbed at the heels of their detached comrades and reached for last-minute kisses, shrieking and crying. A single tear ran down the cheek of a young male officer standing guard.
Inside the jail, the activists refused to identify themselves or their friends. They dead-weighted when jail staff tried to move them; they wouldn't eat or sign papers. Eventually the guards threw them into big holding cells, one for the men and one for the women. The women out-sang the men, having a broader repertoire, but the men wrote a new song and smuggled it out on paper plates.
Within five days all of the activists were released. The "Warner women" were convicted of misdemeanors, later downgraded to violations, and the jailhouse protesters for criminal trespass. A year of rough forest living, perilous protests, heavy campaigning, mass arrests and constant vigilence had frayed many nerves, but they'd done it: They'd saved Warner Creek.
The forest defenders rode that wave of euphoria into urban Eugene, where many would rent cheap warehouses and keep the activist flame burning. "When people came down from Warner Creek as victors, there was a lot of power there," Lewis said. "And that power came down on Whiteaker."
The fire would only burn hotter.
Check back next week for Part II: Eco-Anarchy Rising.
Flames of Dissent
The local spark that ignited an eco-sabotage boom — and bust
STORY BY KERA ABRAHAM. PHOTOS BY KURT JENSEN.
Part II: Eco-Anarchy Rising
White powder exploded onto Randy Shadowalker's chest and face. He couldn't breathe; his throat and lungs felt like they'd been set on fire from the inside. The 31-year-old eco-activist fell to the ground, clutching a maple branch in his hand, only to be roughly ordered back up by the policeman who had shot him with tear gas powder. Coughing and drooling and dripping snot, he struggled to his feet and staggered through a cloud of tear gas, the cop shoving his bony body from behind.
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| EUGENE POLICE USED PEPPER SPRAY ON PROTESTERS, JUNE 1, 1997 |
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| ONE OF THE MAPLE TREES CUT AT THE BROADWAY AND LINCOLN SITE, JUNE 1, 1997 |
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| TRAVERSING A LINE 185 FEET UP, FALL CREEK 1998 |
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| ON THE SET OF CASCADIA ALIVE! |
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| TAKING IT TO THE STREETS, EUGENE 1998 |
It was the morning of June 1, 1997, and hundreds of Eugene citizens had gathered downtown to witness the cutting of 40 large trees to make way for a parking garage. Inside the fenced-off lot, Earth First!ers and Cascadia Forest Defenders perched in doomed trees: sweet gum, bigleaf maple, black walnut, redwood. While the cops outside the fence pushed back the crowd, those inside plucked the protesters out of the trees with a fire truck lift, blinding them with pepper spray. Down came Lacey Phillabaum, Jeff Hogg, Mick Garvin, Josh Laughlin and others. A logger followed the fire truck, cutting each tree after its occupant descended.
Jim Flynn, about 30 feet high in an old sweet gum, was the last one left. A fireman and two police officers emptied about a dozen canisters of pepper spray on him in roughly an hour, twisting his foot, pulling his hair, cutting his pants to spray his bare leg. When he finally came down, Flynn peeled off his chemical-drenched clothes and stood with his arms outstretched as the cops blasted his body with a fire hose. The water just spread the burning oil; every inch of his skin was on fire.
Tim Lewis peered at the scene through a video camera, digging Flynn's Jesus Christ-like pose. He would air this footage on Cascadia Alive!, a public access TV show that he and fellow activist Tim Ream had started up 10 months ago, in the last weeks of the Warner Creek road blockade. The eco-radicals would gain some major public sympathy points from the protest — and the city would think twice before taking out a swath of old trees again.
Cascadia had brought its act to town.
Whiteaker in late 1997 was a hot hash of radicals. There were the forest defenders, mostly twenty- and thirtysomething hippies high on the victory of Warner Creek; the gutter punk anarchists, who rocked out on loud music and white drugs; and the resident artists, who'd been coloring up the neighborhood for years. Icky's Teahouse, a grimy free-for-all joint on Third and Blair, was a hangout of choice for all three.
It was a time of intense community-building for the eco-anarchists, who roved between neighborhood hot spots like Tiny Tavern, Out of the Fog café, Scobert Park and a crop of housing co-ops. Warner Creek vet Stella-Lee Anderson launched the Jawbreaker gallery to showcase neighborhood creations, and artist Kari Johnson painted post-apocalyptic feminist visions on Whiteaker walls. Johnson led eco-activists to tear up a parking space and turn it into a community garden — Joni Mitchell's dystopic vision in reverse — while Critical Mass bikers, empowered by their numbers, reclaimed the streets from cars. Activists shared knowledge at "Free Schools" and guerrilla info shops, neighbors swapped clothes at a community free space and Food Not Bombs brought free vegetarian meals to local parks daily.
"I think everybody had their own vision of what was going on," Johnson said, "but what I saw tying it all together was making an alternative to hierarchical, capitalist society, and trying to have a communalist ethic."
As the community knit itself tighter, independent media projects beamed Whiteaker's energy out to the world. Eco-radicals including Tim Lewis, Cindy Noblitt, Randy Shadowalker and Robin "Rotten" Terranova produced the weekly live TV show Cascadia Alive!, featuring a hodgepodge of guest ranters, musical acts, indie activist footage and call-in segments. The show also aired footage from local CopWatch activists — namely Lewis, James Johnston and Kookie-Steve Heslin — who dogged Eugene police with their video cameras.
"Cascadia Alive! was really putting grease on the fire of the activist scene," Shadowalker said. "People started coming to us for news. The local media feared us; the cops feared us. But every time they tried to mess with us, it just grew the army of resistance."
That surge of creative, autonomous energy attracted fresh new blood to town, eco-anarchists ready for action. They'd heat up not only the streets of Eugene but also the surrounding forests, staging direct actions and road blockades that would make Warner Creek seem vanilla by comparison.
The activists worked busily in the rosy light of a May 1997 dawn, stringing two ropes across a highway near Detroit, Ore. — one roughly 3 feet off the road and the other about 75 feet high. The structure was designed so that if a vehicle hit the low rope, two women dangling in harnesses from the high rope would fall. They were protesting the Sphinx logging project in the Santiam watershed.
Right before they finished setting up, the lookouts down the road started screaming. A truck was rolling down the highway, and it didn't show signs of stopping. When it came within 70 feet of the rope, Shannon Wilson — a determined forest defender who had been a core part of the Warner Creek blockade — stood in its path. The truck slowed to about 5 miles per hour and swerved around him, coming so close that he was able to smack its headlight, and finally stopped. The shaken activists lowered the women to safety, gathered their gear and split.
"I didn't see a lot of those people after that," Wilson said. "They were too scared to do anything. It basically killed the campaign."
Lacey Phillabaum would remember that near-fatal moment in a Nov.-Dec. 1998 Earth First! Journal editorial: "I have seen an activist come nose to grill with a Mack truck at a protest and believed for an endless moment that the trucker would not stop." An activist had recently been killed by a logger in California, and Phillabaum was beginning to question the "cultural promise" of civil disobedience: that if eco-activists nonviolently laid their bodies on the line, no one would willingly harm them.
Fear of injury hadn't slowed the Cascadia Forest Defenders, who harnessed the Warner Creek energy to protest a string of timber sales in the late '90s, their names Oregonian poetry: First and Last, Horse Byars, Red 90, Olalla Wildcat, China Left, Winberry, Growl & Howl. They'd saved some trees and mourned the rest.
But none of those campaigns stand out like the Fall Creek blockade, launched in spring 1998 to stop the Clark timber sale in Willamette National Forest. The dominant crew at the camp was a group of crusty, itinerant punks in their teens and early twenties, some of them happy just to have a free crash-pad and food. Others, however, were experienced activists out to save trees by any means necessary.
The Fall Creek tree-sitters generally rejected the unspoken code of nonviolence that had guided the Warner Creek campaign just a few years earlier. They fought with Forest Service officers (or "freddies," as they called them), pissed on them from the trees, even staged a fake hanging to freak them out. Some of the punks trashed the camp, letting their dogs fight and hump and tear up the forest understory. Tree-dwelling flying squirrels burrowed into their sleeping bags, ransacked their food and fell into their compost buckets. At times the activists got dangerously drunk hundreds of feet off the ground, and once a propane tank blew up in a tree-sit.
Earth First!ers and Cascadia Forest Defenders, sensing the hard edge, generally distanced themselves from the campaign while still supporting it with food and supplies. The tree-sitters were, after all, braving freddies and foul weather to keep chainsaws out of the forest. Dubbing their camp Red Cloud Thunder Free State, the Fall Creek tree-sitters embraced their role as the outcasts of the Earth First! movement, viewing themselves as the real revolutionaries — the ones who were ready to push beyond civil disobedience.
As punks defended the forest and eco-anarchists rollicked in Whiteaker, the Eugene-based Earth First! Journal editors — including Jim Flynn and Lacey Phillabaum — put the local movement into a larger context. They gathered news of civil disobedience and eco-sabotage actions in Europe, South America, Asia and all over the U.S., examining the intersections of labor, civil rights and anti-consumerism movements. Earth First! was growing, if painfully.
The EF!J ran a feature called "Earth Night News," which announced sabotage actions claimed by the Earth Liberation Front and other covert actors. ELF had been conceived in England in 1992, when eco-activists decided to sever controversial sabotage actions from the civil disobedience-oriented Earth First!. The Sept.-Oct. 1993 EF!J introduced ELF as "a movement of independently operating eco-saboteurs."
Earth Night actions spanned the globe, but in the late 90's an especially methodical cluster struck the Pacific Northwest. It began on Oct. 28, 1996, when arsonists torched a Forest Service pickup truck in Detroit, Ore. They also attempted to burn down the ranger station, but the fuel-filled plastic jug on the roof didn't ignite. Spray-painted on the building was a tag American police hadn't seen before: "ELF."
Only two days later, arson struck the Forest Service ranger station in Oakridge, Ore. The building burned from the four corners into the middle — seemingly a professional job. The father of the Warner Creek campaign, Tim Ingalsbee, was crushed: years of his documentation of the Warner Creek Fire had been in that building.
Arsons followed at several BLM wild horse corrals, a slaughterhouse, a wildlife research station, a Vail ski resort, a forestry office in Medford, a meat company in Eugene. No one was hurt in any of the actions, but communiqués condemned the targets as "Earth-rapers" who deserved what they got.
The EF!J also ran "Dear Ned Ludd" columns, which offered detailed tips for carrying out sabotage actions like tree-spiking, electrical tower blow-outs and arsons with time-delayed fire-starters. A disclaimer noted that EF! didn't necessarily endorse such enterprises, but the journal's overall tone was supportive.
Ingalsbee argued with the EF!J editors about celebrating arson. "Fire is a mystical force that you release; you better be prepared to deal with the consequences," he said. "You set up other humans to come attack you." But many of the journal's contributors defended ecotage, viewing property destruction as a wake-up call to the self-obliterating masses.
Phillabaum grew weary of so much debate and so little action, and after three years she left the journal, publishing her official sign-off in the March-April 1999 issue. "I've found and discarded all sorts of different visions of this movement, seeing us as everything from nonviolent revolutionaries to disgruntled, dysfunctional outcasts … [but] I think the depth of our passion and the sincerity of our commitment is what distinguishes Earth First!," she wrote. "I look forward to seeing you again soon — on the frontlines."
The concept of righteous sabotage was blowing up among Eugene's most hard-core eco-anarchists and their out-of-town allies, who staged increasingly bolder riots: throwing bricks through banks and McDonald's joints, trashing the Nike store on 5th Avenue, lighting fires in Dumpsters and setting up confrontations with police.
Disrupting traffic and smashing property were sure-fire ways to bring the cops; the media would invariably follow, providing the anarchists with free press. Some of the rioters would wear Zapatista-inspired bandanas which, besides obscuring their identities in front of police cameras, told the world that at least some Americans were ready for revolution. "Global capitalism is everybody's problem, and nobody's doing anything about it," reasoned activist Chris Calef. "If it's violence and mayhem [that bring attention to the issues], then fuck it."
EPD Detective Bob Holland remembered those days as tense. "We saw a huge influx of out-of-town anarchist types: real scary, hard-core, punk-lookin' people who were clearly not from Eugene," he said. "There was all this tension going on in the Northwest, and here in Eugene we seemed to be at the epicenter."
The police weren't the only ones to take on the punks. Whiteaker vigilante Dennis Ramsey, a self-described ex-anarchist then in his mid-40s, viewed the eco-anarchists as "organized mayhem in the guise of liberty" who were trashing the neighborhood. He and others convinced the landlord of Icky's Teahouse not to renew its lease, shutting it down in the summer of 1997. Ramsey then turned to the task of cleaning up Scobert Park, which he saw as a drug-infested "crime magnet," and joined a successful neighborhood push to temporarily close it. Eco-anarchists responded by setting up tents and occupying the park.
Vandals targeted the Red Barn, a local natural food store then owned by Ramsey's former girlfriend. "I let [the anarchists] know, eye to eye, that if they pulled that shit on me I would murder them in the streets," Ramsey said. "For the first time in my life, I had to carry a concealed weapon."
As riots became more regular in Whiteaker, black-clad badasses began to bait law enforcement. "People were very empowered," activist James Johnston explained. "We were gonna fight the police." And the CopWatch activists would videotape it.
"We kept on seeing night after night the Tim Lewis stuff [on Cascadia Alive!]," EPD Detective Holland said. "The way it was cut and edited, we were like 'Wait a minute. It didn't happen that way.' So we started our own video unit." Holland and Lewis had a few silent confrontations at protests, each man videotaping the other.
The cat-and-mouse game would take a grave turn on June 18, 1999, during what started out as an anti-globalization event. The leaders of the industrialized world were meeting in Cologne, Germany, and activists planned protests in 160 cities. Local organizers had notified the EPD ahead of time, promising to be peaceful; in response, police scaled back their planned presence and closed off Willamette Street.
Hundreds of people showed up, reveling in the joy of smashing VCRs and computers in the street. Soon the protesters began roving, looking for nefarious corporations to target. Some rioters started jumping on cars and breaking windows of businesses they deemed evil — a bank, a furniture store, Taco Bell. A few looted 7-Eleven and brought out beer for the hot and hungry crowd. "People felt like the energy was there to crack the system, find the break in the dam, start a revolution," Lewis said.
About four hours into the riot police confronted the protesters at Washington-Jefferson Park, shooting tear gas powder at them — but the wind blew back toward the police. "After a few minutes the cops were just wandering around in a cloud of tear gas," said Rob Thaxton, an anarchist who was at the scene. "People started throwing rocks and other things at them."
A group of more than 100 rioters ditched the police and roved on for several more hours, looping between downtown and Whiteaker. They figured that as long as they stayed together the cops couldn't mess with them, but if they split up they'd be arrested. When they reached 7th Avenue and Jefferson Street, police made their move, throwing the rioters to the ground, pepper-spraying and arresting them.
Thaxton stood there and watched, furious, then picked up a big landscaping rock with plans to smash it through a squad car window. When a cop came running toward him, Thaxton threw the rock at the cop "to try to deter him." He was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon.
The police, for their part, had learned a lesson: to increase their "stand-by" presence at all rallies, even the ones that were supposed to be peaceful. "We met people halfway on this one and got burned really badly," EPD's Holland said. "That really influenced the way things happened later on. It just seemed like the anarchist community was ready to go to war with the cops."
In a sense, they were. The eco-anarchist community had built up its power like tinder in the streets of Whiteaker, with the ambitious goal of snapping Americans out of their destructive, consumptive, self-imprisoning cycles. They wanted to ignite a revolution.
Soon, the world would notice.
Check back next week for Part III: Eco-Anarchy Imploding
Flames of Dissent
The local spark that ignited an eco-sabotage boom — and bust
STORY BY KERA ABRAHAM PHOTOS BY KURT JENSEN
This is the third piece in a five-part series providing local context for a surge of environmentally motivated sabotage crimes that flared across the West from 1996 to 2001. Since December 2005 the federal government has indicted 18 people for the crimes, mainly arsons, in a sweep known as Operation Backfire. Of those indicted, 12 have now pleaded guilty, four are fugitives and one committed suicide in jail. One has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
None of those indicted have agreed to speak with EW as they await sentencing, but most were connected to Eugene's eco-activist scene in its peak years. Except in cases where they have left a record, we minimize their mention here.
In an effort to include more voices in this part of the story, EW has agreed to protect some sources' identities by using their activist names, or in one case, changing a name altogether.
Finally, we use terms such as "eco-radicals," "Eugene anarchists" and "anarcho-feminists" loosely throughout this text. While generally referring to the shifting community of people who concentrated in the Whiteaker neighborhood, resisted authority and fought for environmental and social causes, the terms are imprecise. Anarchy by definition is autonomous and unorganized; statements about the community in general do not necessarily apply to every individual associated with it.
Part. III: Eco-Anarchy Imploding
Kari Johnson surveyed the chaos through a pair of swim goggles, a bandana over her nose and mouth to filter the tear gas, and steered her partner, Randy Shadowalker, through the teeming streets of downtown Seattle. He peered through the lens of a small hand-held video camera, recording the Nov. 30, 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization.
An estimated 50,000 people had descended on the city to resist a global economy that, from their perspective, treated workers, nature and consumers as mere cogs in a money-making machine. A small group of those protesters, mostly darkly clad young anarchists known as "the black bloc," destroyed the property of corporations that they felt represented the evils of globalized capitalism.
What Johnson witnessed remains etched in her memory seven years later: A mainstream news van with its tires slashed, its metal body covered with graffiti. The smashed-in window of a jewelry store, its alarm blaring, its diamonds exposed. A man splayed spider-like on the wall of a corporate shoe store, bear-hugging the letters one at a time — N, I, K, E — then ripping them off and tossing them down to a cheering crowd.
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| Randy Shadowalker salutes the camera, while kari johnson shows what she's made of |
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| Tim Lewis with blair, 2000. Photo: cheryl reinhart |
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| jeff "free" luers and carol berg |
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| heather coburn saving seeds. Photo sascha dubrul |
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| lacey phillabaum defends the black bloc. Photo breaking the spell |
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| warcry at the battle of seattle. Photo breaking the spell |
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| stella lee anderson at zip-o-log mill protest |
Johnson periodically shuttled Shadowalker's tapes to Tim Lewis and Tim Ream, charismatic activists who'd been stirring up the anarchist scene in Eugene. The two Tims spent the night of Nov. 30 in a Seattle editing studio, jacked up on adrenaline as they cobbled together a 35-minute video called RIP WTO N30. By 2 pm the next day they were selling the film, a choppy but intense sampling of the heaviest day of WTO protests — most of it recorded by Lewis himself — at five bucks each in the streets. From there, it would make its way to news outlets throughout the world.
Maybe media took their cue from Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, who publicly blamed the property destruction on Eugene anarchists just days before resigning, or from Eugene Mayor Jim Torrey, who lamented to reporters that Eugene was "the anarchist capital of the United States."
Whatever the reason, it seemed that national media had made their collective decision: Eugene anarchists were responsible for vandalizing downtown Seattle, provoking police to assault nonviolent protesters and paralyzing the WTO convention. Reporters for 60 Minutes, Harper's and Rolling Stone swooped on this small city, inviting the notorious anarchists to explain their behavior at the Battle of Seattle.
And while a few loud-mouthed, hard-talking men stepped up to the task — most dominantly Tim Lewis, Tim Ream, John Zerzan, Robin Terranova and Marshall Kirkpatrick — many others within the local eco-radical community rolled their eyes. Hundreds of WTO protesters from Eugene were peaceful, they noted, and people from all over the country had joined the black bloc. Of the 570 protesters arrested at the WTO protests, Seattle police identified only four from Eugene.
"I don't think five or six Eugene hoodies went up there and shut down the city of Seattle," Shadowalker said. "Media attention after the WTO gave birth to what I call the Anarchy Rock Star, and all these other people got tuned out."
Those other people were the feeders and the feminists of the movement, the planters of gardens, the militant vegans, the artists and techno-geeks, animal lovers, labor advocates and zine-writers.
They had come together in the late '90s to oppose the government, corporations and cops — all the institutions they saw destroying free spirits and wild places. And after the WTO protests, they were finally getting international attention for it. "Then it came down to what we wanted to do with that," eco-radical Chris Calef later reflected by email, "but it turned out we had very little agreement amongst ourselves on the specifics."
That discord manifested in internal debates about gender roles within the movement, violence versus nonviolence, anarchists versus green hippies and the typical dramas of a cliquish community. "All the while we're dealing with police informants and infiltrators and state oppression that served to exacerbate the distrust," Calef added, "and basically just pour gas on the fire."
From the end of the Warner Creek forest blockade in 1996 to the sentencing of Jeff "Free" Luers in June 2001, Heather Coburn saw eco-radical women doing the work that was most critical to the movement but drew the least media attention: housing, feeding, educating and entertaining the growing masses of activists. "During the heyday of anarchism, even though it was the camo-clad men doing most of the talking, almost all of those projects were being bottom-lined logistically by women," she said.
Coburn was among those unsung heroines. In 1998 she and two others took on the lease for Ant Farm, one of several communal pads where hundreds of scrappy activists crashed over the next three years. She ran an all-women's show called "Vaginal Discharge" on the pirate radio station Radio Free Cascadia and co-organized the "Free Skool" classes that spread activism skills throughout Whiteaker. As a volunteer with Food Not Bombs, she scavenged surplus food from local businesses and served it to hungry people in neighborhood parks. In 1999 she and a friend dug a garden into Scobert Park and launched an urban gardening movement called Food Not Lawns.
Another caretaker of the movement was Shelley Cater, a friendly single mother then in her 30s who managed Out of the Fog, an organic coffee house by the Amtrak station. Cater invited Fall Creek forest defenders to hold meetings in the café, opened her 5th Ave. home as a campaign headquarters, shuttled donated food and supplies to the aerial village and relieved tree-sitters between rotations. The Fall Creek activists, mostly males under 25, started calling her "Mom."
A few stalwart women also hung up in the trees — including a woman called Warcry, a smart and fiery activist who'd come to Oregon after sitting in the redwoods of California's Headwaters Forest. She relished the Fall Creek activists' fuck-y'all, flag-burning attitude, so different from the peacenik vibe at Headwaters. "In Northern California you couldn't burn an American flag," she said with a laugh. "Right up the road in Eugene, it was kind of expected of you."
But not all Fall Creek women felt safe in the forest. According to an article in Earth First! Journal ("Confronting Oppression, Aug.-Sept. 2001), men were doing most of the cool engineering work — hoisting platforms into the trees, stringing rope bridges between the tree-sits, teaching one another to use the climbing gear — without passing that knowledge onto their female counterparts. Worse, some creepy dudes were allegedly harassing and sexually assaulting women, but male activists weren't willing to kick out offenders who had valuable skills. "We became pessimistic and depressed with the situation," wrote the article's anonymous authors.
In early 2001 the women took a stand and asked four men to leave Fall Creek, two of them for good. During a "gender-bender" month, only women occupied the tree village, teaching each other forest survival skills while men in town organized funds, gathered donations and brought them food — albeit reluctantly. "The men were totally against that," Cater said.
In Eugene, the gender divide was only getting worse. One woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation — we'll call her "S." — became alarmed around 2000 when an eco-anarchist allegedly commented that he would rape a woman for the revolution. S. launched what she called an anarcho-feminist counter-movement, criticizing and publicly shunning the activists who she felt were fostering abuse — a list that started small, but widened to include even well-known feminists such as Heather Coburn and Kari Johnson. "There was a lack of analysis of white, male, able-bodied, hetero privilege," S. said. "There's no way a movement can sustain itself if it's not built from the bottom up and if all of us haven't addressed our cultural oppression."
The anarcho-feminists' work did prompt some people within the movement to make changes. Most media and activist groups adopted anti-oppression policies, and the question of privilege became one that every activist confronted. But not everyone appreciated it — least of all Tim Lewis, who was perhaps the biggest target of the anti-patriarchy movement. "There was a major attack on men by women who felt like men had too much power in the community," he said. "Some men left town because they were literally threatened with murder or having their balls cut off."
The turmoil fueled debates that blazed across a growing number of home-grown independent media forums: on the public-access TV show Cascadia Alive!, which aired weekly from 1996 to 2004; on anarchist philosopher John Zerzan's show, Radio Anarchy, which began on Radio Free Cascadia and continues today on KWVA; in the pages of Earth First! Journal, which was based in Eugene from 1993 to 2001, as well as in Green Anarchy magazine; and in the films and reports produced by Cascadia Media Collective, which Randy Shadowalker launched in summer 2000.
The media surge stoked more discontent from behind-the-scenes activists who felt that the movement's largely hard-edged spokespeople didn't accurately represent them. Shadowalker saw a cliquish, badder-than-thou attitude begin to dominate the eco-anarchist scene, alienating its natural allies on the left — people who sympathized with the movement but lived within the mainstream. "When that [alliance] was gone, the spell was broken," he said. "It almost went poof."
Other eco-anarchists saw liberals as unnecessary allies, hopelessly trying to reform a political system whose very existence they opposed. "People were tired of being told what to do or how to act by these PC motherfuckers," Lewis said.
Compounding the internal strife, federal investigations made Eugene anarchists edgy, paranoid and suspicious of infiltrators. An ongoing string of incendiary crimes in the Pacific Northwest brought the FBI magnifying glass ever-closer to Eugene, directing a hot beam of surveillance onto the scene.
On Dec. 25, 1999, arsonists placed gift-wrapped buckets of fuel rigged with kitchen timers around the Monmouth, Ore. offices of lumber company Boise Cascade, burning the place to ashes. Days later the arsonists explained why in a communiqué sent to ELF spokesman Craig Rosebraugh: "Boise Cascade has been very naughty. After ravaging the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Boise Cascade now looks toward the virgin forests of Chile. Early Christmas morning, elves left coal in Boise Cascade's stocking."
Five days after the Boise arson, saboteurs toppled a BPA tower near Bend.
Activists report that police closed in on the scene — tailing them after demonstrations, snooping outside their punk parties, snapping photos of them in the streets. Tim Ream, convinced that the feds were preparing to raid his house, nailed legal statutes pertaining to searches on his front door. "What does it mean to hang out with your lover in your house when you feel like you're being bugged?" he asked. "It's a weird space to live in."
Lacey Phillabaum sat somberly in front of a bed of poppies in Whiteaker, her face darkened by night shadows, and justified the black bloc's behavior at the Battle of Seattle. "There's nothing in the world like running with a group of 200 people all wearing black," she said, blue eyes fixed on a point beyond Tim Lewis' camera, "and realizing each of you is anonymous, each of you can liberate your desires, each of you can make a difference right there."
It was mid-June 2000, just days before the premiere of Lewis' documentary about the combustible trinity: Eugene, anarchy and the WTO — then called Smash!; now titled Breaking the Spell. Anarcho-feminists had been calling Lewis an attention-hogging sexist for months, and now he figured he better get a woman to host his film. Phillabaum, an articulate and bold activist who had been an EF!J editor from 1996-1999, was an obvious choice. She would later regret agreeing to it.
It had been a heavy couple of months. Phillabaum and others, under the banner Eugene Active Existence, had organized the Seven Weeks Revolt!, a roster of community education, street theater and resistance rallies that actually spanned about eight weeks. It kicked off around April 24, when more than 100 people gathered in front of the Lane County Jail to hold a candlelight vigil for jailed Philadephia journalist and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Police alleged that protesters blocked traffic, ignored orders to disperse and, in one instance, kicked a burning can at them. Protesters, in turn, accused the cops of showing up in excessive "robo-gear," intimidating and assaulting them. Police fired rubber bullets at one demonstrator and arrested eight.
Eugene anarchists became the boogeymen of the Northwest, repeatedly blamed for police overreactions at protests. When a group of Eugene radicals joined more than 300 demonstrators in Portland during a May Day march, some 100 cops fired beanbag shots and slammed horses and ATVs into the mass, injuring at least 20 people. Portland's police chief blamed Eugene anarchists for the excessive police presence, just as cops in Tacoma, Wash., cited rumors of Eugene anarchist mischief when explaining why 350 cops showed up at a canceled steelworkers' union protest in March.
In the wee hours of June 16, 2000, activists Jeff "Free" Luers and Craig "Critter" Marshall drove from a northwest Eugene warehouse to the Joe Romania Chevrolet dealership on Franklin Boulevard, where they set fire to three pickup trucks in protest of gas-guzzling culture. After they drove away, Springfield police pulled them over for a busted headlight at the request of undercover Eugene police who had been following the pair. That day, Eugene police raided the warehouse where Luers lived and Chris Calef was leaseholder.
The next night, after Lewis' documentary Smash! premiered on the UO campus, masked activists in black marched toward the Lane County jail to rally for Luers and Marshall. Police again showed up in riot gear, arresting about 40 protesters who linked arms in resistance. Police broke them up with pain holds and pepper spray; one officer allegedly hit a professional videographer in the head with a flashlight.
The following day marked the one-year anniversary of the June 18, 1999 protest, and activists held another protest rally downtown. Police arrested 37 demonstrators, and an officer struck a KLCC reporter with a baton on the head, the blow landing on her headphone band.
In August 2000, the Eugene police released a report absolving themselves of all wrongdoing during the Seven-Weeks Revolt! protests.
A spate of federal laws stiffened the penalties for eco-sabotage during those volatile years. As the FBI's counter-terrorism budget grew, Joint Terrorism Task Forces increasingly looped local cops into the surveillance of radical environmentalists. The May 1999 Juvenile Justice Bill made it a federal crime to share information on bomb-making and created a central database called the "Animal Terrorism and Ecoterrorism Incident Clearinghouse." In March 2001 the Oregon House passed two bills expanding the definition of organized crime to include sabotage against animal enterprises and the timber industry, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Warcry noted these developments in an article in the Earth First! Journal ("The Criminalization of Ecology," Aug.-Sept. 2001).
Still, eco-sabotage burned hotter across the Pacific Northwest. In September 2000 arsonists singed the EPD's West University Public Safety Station, and four months later the Superior Lumber offices in Glendale, Ore., burned to the ground. On March 30, just as Luers was about to go to trial — "Critter" Marshall had already pleaded guilty and received five and a half years — eco-anarchists attacked Joe Romania Chevrolet a second time, damaging more than 30 SUVs. ELF claimed responsibility in a March 31 communiqué, noting that although Luers and Marshall had been charged with torching the same lot a year earlier, "The techno-industrial state … cannot jail the spirit of those who know another world is possible."
Less than two months later came the double whammy, the biggest arson the anarchists had seen since the 1998 blaze at the Vail Mountain ski resort. On May 21, 2001 activists burned an office and 13 trucks at Jefferson Poplar Farm in Clatskanie, Ore. On the same day, they torched the office of a biochemist who was doing research on genetically engineered poplar trees at the University of Washington. ELF claimed responsibility in a June 1 communiqué, linking the two arsons and denouncing GE tree research.
On June 11, 2001, Judge Lyle Velure sentenced Luers to 22 years and eight months in Oregon State Penitentiary for arson at the Romania dealership and attempted arson at Tyree Oil Inc. in Whiteaker — a penalty stiffer than that handed to some rapists and murderers. More than a slap on the wrist or even a rap on the knuckles, it was as if Velure had chopped off the hand of Eugene's eco-anarchist community.
More blows followed in quick succession: In July 2001, Italian military police shot and killed a masked protester at the G8 trade summit in Genoa. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, followed by the free-speech-chilling PATRIOT Act. Eugene anarchists would help light one more arson in mid-October, burning down a hay barn and releasing 200 horses and burros from the BLM Wild Horse Facility in northeast California.
Eugene's eco-radicals may have been aware of the arsons, and some even impressed, but few say they suspected that the saboteurs were members of their own community. "Half of the arsonists were good friends of mine at one point or another while the actions were going on," Heather Coburn said, "and I had no idea."
She still has a hard time accepting that that one of her own housemates was involved in just about all of the sabotage.
It wasn't just the sabotage crimes and their consequences that squelched eco-anarchy in Eugene. Most involved activists agree that by mid-2001, Eugene's eco-anarchist scene had imploded on its own.
One exception was the Fall Creek activists, who hung tough in the trees even after an environmentalist lawsuit forced the Forest Service to dramatically reduce the size of the planned logging in order to protect the red tree vole. They hung on until Zip-O-Log Mills finally gave up its plans to log the remaining 24 acres. In 2003 they finally came down from the tree village, having spared 96 acres of forest from chainsaws since "Free" Luers made the first tree-sit in 1998.
Meanwhile, Eugene's eco-radicals moved on to other endeavors. Some moved away and kept up their activism elsewhere. Some stayed and pushed forward with above-ground environmental projects based out of Eugene. A few ended up in prison; still others moved on to college, families, mortgages, 9-to-5s. And although the movement's dissipation saddened some activists, it also sparked new endeavors. "For me, the most radical things we did were in the process of falling apart and then getting back together as individuals," Coburn said.
But four years after the movement deflated, it would return to haunt everyone involved — dragging 10 activists who thought they'd moved on with their lives before federal courts in Eugene. The feds hadn't closed the books on the eco-anarchists yet.
Check back on Dec. 7 for Part IV: The Bust.
Dec. 9, 2006 marks the 25th year of Mumia's unjust incarceration. We will be
