In early 2021, during the depths of the pandemic, a slim, provocatively titled book became a surprising hit. How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Swedish scholar Andreas Malm made the case for a more radical form of environmental activism that, he argued, matched the severity of the crisis we face. If rising temperatures and biodiversity loss pose an existential threat to the planet, why aren’t more people putting their bodies on the line?
Though the book was not a how-to manual—there is in fact nothing in it about blowing up pipelines—the message was clear. The contemporary environmental movement, despite some notable successes, such as stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and building a formidable divestment campaign (modeled on the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s), had not come anywhere near to achieving its goal of curbing climate change or holding those most responsible, i.e., fossil fuel companies and the banks that fund them, accountable. Malm’s logic was relatively straightforward; if these tactics have failed and the window to make a difference really is closing, it’s time to try something new.
The book was widely reviewed (the Financial Times named it one of the best books of the year, and Malm was interviewed on the New Yorker radio hour), and, if nothing else, Malm punctured the polite discourse surrounding the acceptable limits of political action. A film that took the book’s title literally—it follows the story of a group of activists who blow up a pipeline in West Texas—was released two years later. But though it often went unmentioned, Malm was drawing on a much longer tradition, one that has periodically attempted to redefine the trajectory of environmental politics.
In 1998, an essay similar in spirit to Malm’s appeared in the Earth First! Journal. Titled “Beyond Civil Disobedience,” it opened with a thought experiment, in which the author—writing under the pseudonym “Snap Dragon”—asked readers how they’d respond to an intruder breaking into their home to kill their family. The options were: Make a banner and call the media, call a lawyer and file for a restraining order, or chain yourself to the front door. (And the answer was that none was sufficient.)
The piece was written by Chelsea Gerlach, the youngest member of the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, a highly secretive group of eco-saboteurs who engaged in a series of spectacular acts of property destruction between 1996 and 2001. Relying mostly on primitive incendiary devices, the activists set fire to government buildings on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land, released wild horses from captivity, toppled transmission towers, and, in their most audacious and consequential act, incinerated the Two Elk ski lodge at Vail resort, which was planning to expand into the White River National Forest—including 700 acres of old-growth forest.
The Vail arson—which was carried out in October 1998 by two of the group’s members, including Gerlach, and caused $12 million in damage—put the ELF on the map. But, as Matthew Wolfe points out in Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage, not always in the way they had hoped. The Vail attack was widely condemned on nightly newscasts and across the nation’s op-ed pages (The Wall Street Journal called it a hate crime). But the group also drew the ire of much of the environmental community, with the Environmental Defense Fund castigating the action as “an outrage” and Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman describing the activists as “nitwits”; Foreman even implied that they may have been working on behalf of industry.
Among law enforcement officials, however, the Two Elk fire had the effect of raising the ELF’s profile. As Wolfe notes, the group, “once unheard of, was suddenly on the lips of every special agent in the Bureau.”
Although the ELF celebrated property destruction, the group made a point of never targeting people—they were going after the corporations, government agencies, and research institutions they believed were responsible for wreaking havoc on the planet. But it was a distinction that made little difference to authorities in the United States, particularly after the attacks of September 11, when “ecoterrorism” was declared one of the top threats to national security, second only to Al Qaeda. (Alaska Congressman Don Young even speculated, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News on September 12, that the attacks had been carried out by ecoterrorists.)
Eventually, after a nearly decade-long FBI investigation and, crucially, the participation of one of the cell’s founding members who turned on his fellow comrades, all but one of the ELF activists were hunted down and charged with a variety of crimes, which were compounded by domestic terrorism enhancements. Most eventually agreed to cooperate with the federal government in exchange for the possibility of a more lenient sentence. (Julia Overaker, who took part in the very first act of arson at a ranger station in Oregon, has never been captured.)
It is a harrowing story, particularly the fateful denouement, long after the ELF members had moved on from their radical pasts to embrace more conventional forms of political engagement. At the time of their arrests, one of the former Elves, as they referred to themselves, was working as a caregiver for disabled adults. Another was doing legal aid work for victims of domestic violence. A third was applying to medical school.
Part of the deal they had made with one another was that they’d never talk about what they’d done. By the time Jacob Ferguson—a recovering heroin addict with a young son to support—showed up unannounced to reminisce with his friends, wearing a wire concealed beneath his baseball cap, nearly all his fellow activists had renounced the tactics they used in their younger days. This may explain why some ultimately broke their own rule not to discuss the past; but they also trusted Ferguson, who many felt was least likely to become a snitch. As Wolfe writes, “Having spent years living a double life as a member of the ELF, Ferguson was now living another, one in which he systematically betrayed many of those closest to him.”
Wolfe’s riveting account of the ELF’s rise and fall—based on over a hundred interviews, footage from a documentary project that was never finished, Freedom of Information Act records, and the forensic recreation of the events in question—is not a morality tale. He’s not really interested in passing judgment, and he draws sympathetic but not uncritical portraits of the activists and the law enforcement agents who pursued them. At times, the ELF comes off as a band of reckless crusaders destroying historical archives maintained by the Forest Service and severely damaging a research lab at the University of Washington that focused largely on environmental restoration. But with hindsight, and an understanding of our current political and ecological predicament, it is difficult not to conclude, as Wolfe does, that the ELF members were not only “uncomfortably prescient about our collective inability” to deal with one of the world’s most pressing problems but also, in some ways, voices crying in the wilderness (or as Wolfe puts it, “little people doing things in the dark”).
Wolfe entertains the argument that all forms of property destruction are unacceptable because they undermine the rule of law central to a functioning democracy (or as David Marchese put it in his New York Times interview with Malm, “How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?”). But then Wolfe turns the question around and asks, “What happens to faith in the law when the law permits cataclysm, when a system begets its own, slow destruction?”
The ELF emerged out of the ferment of radical eco-politics and animal rights activism of the 1980s and 1990s, much of which was aired, and argued over, in the pages of Earth First! Journal. Earth First! was formed in 1980 and adopted the irreverent, monkey-wrenching ethos of its patron saint, Edward Abbey (Abbey’s bestselling novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, was published in 1975). In some ways, it laid the groundwork for the ELF’s more combative approach to environmental politics. Earth First! was not unwilling to engage in sabotage: tree spiking, pouring sand in the gears of machines tearing up forests, and occupying land that it felt should be protected were its preferred methods (and it is worth noting it also became a target of the FBI).
But for Gerlach and other members of the ELF—many of whom got their start working for more mainstream organizations—even Earth First! came to be seen as too timid and too concerned with lobbying for change through the formal political process. As knowledge and understanding of the ecological crisis deepened, so did the sense that the activist community—particularly big green groups like the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund—was not prepared to lead the way. The stakes were now too high.
So, in October 1996, Ferguson and Overaker, who were on-and-off romantic partners, burned a Forest Service ranger station in Oregon. And spray-painted a message on a nearby utility shed claiming ELF credit for the action. This was the cell’s opening salvo, and even they were surprised that they’d pulled it off. They slowly recruited other like-minded members who were not only down with the cause but willing to essentially lead double lives.
But going underground and committing crimes that are likely to turn most people off—arson, it should be noted, is a felony—is not an easy way to launch a movement. To the extent that the ELF was a political project, it did not give much thought to long-term goals or building power. Its focus was action. William Rodgers, known as Avalon, was in many ways the group’s intellectual leader and liked to say, paraphrasing a Chinese proverb, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.”
So what did it all add up to? Wolfe doesn’t devote much time to pondering the ELF’s legacy, but its members’ eventual disillusionment with their own tactics—and failure to achieve lasting change—seems to speak for itself. This sense of defeat, and worsening ecological crisis, was only compounded by the bitter recriminations, paranoia, and distrust that gripped Eugene’s anarchist community after it was revealed that Ferguson had embedded with the FBI. Rodgers—who several years before had been accused of groping a 14-year-old girl at an Earth First! gathering, creating further divisions within the activist scene—would take his own life in prison.
Ferguson, shunned by his peers—one anarchist zine essentially put a bounty on his head—tried to return to some semblance of a normal life. He got a job as a mechanic. But, deeply depressed and alienated from the community that had once kept him afloat, he soon fell off the wagon and started using heroin again (he eventually served a four-year sentence for selling drugs). It is hard not to conclude that by the time the last ELF member was apprehended in 2018, the group had left little more than destruction in its wake.
Wolfe’s intimate portrait of the ELF focuses on the roughly five-year period in which the group was most active, as well as the FBI investigation that followed. But in the book’s final pages, he touches on the battle at Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017, in which thousands of “water protectors” descended on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to protest construction of an oil pipeline, and the prosecution of two activists who tried to sabotage it using welding torches and rags soaked in gasoline. Scanning the political horizon since Trump’s ascendance—which has dovetailed with a brutal crackdown on legal protest and an attempt to equate anti-fascism with domestic terrorism—Wolfe rightly notes that environmentalism has suffered “the worst losses in its history.”
There’s a curious omission, though, in his gloss of more recent environmental campaigns. Just a few years after the ELF members were sentenced in 2007, a group of climate activists gathered in Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the Keystone XL pipeline, an infrastructure project that would have significantly increased the amount of oil transported from the tar sands of western Canada to the Gulf Coast. A revolving cast of volunteers from across the country spent two weeks getting arrested in front of the White House in what was later described as the largest act of civil disobedience in the movement’s history, contradicting, in some ways, Wolfe’s assertion that in the wake of 9/11 and the ELF convictions, “The public … had turned hard against illegal forms of protest.”
It was also just the beginning. Along the proposed pipeline route, activists and landowners came together to protest the pipeline. In rural East Texas, an elaborate tree sit was erected on private land that TransCanada, the company behind the project, was attempting to seize through eminent domain. An unlikely coalition of ranchers, Tea Party Republicans, radical environmentalists including former Earth First! members, and somewhat reluctant green groups was forged.
In 2015, Obama canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, handing the movement a major win. (He also fast-tracked the southern portion of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast, a decision that tends to get scrubbed from the narrative.)
This was in many ways the sort of mass movement that ELF members dreamed of sparking—one that inspired thousands of ordinary people to risk arrest to defend the planet. (And it did not end there. Many Keystone XL organizers went on to play a part at Standing Rock, and some would go on to work for Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign.)
Looking back at the history of the ELF today, it can be easy to forget that only a decade ago, the political landscape seemed far more expansive. Sometimes it’s worth remembering—even in the face of seemingly insurmountable ecological and political crises—that victories, even if only temporary, are still possible.
