Already Active ELF Extending Range

Jan. 30, 2001 -- The Earth Liberation Front has carried out more than 100 acts of destruction in the last five years, wreaking $37 million worth of damage. To date, police have one suspect, and the group, leading a rising wave of environmental extremism, is promising to escalate its attacks.

Last week, investigators got their first break, arresting Frank Ambrose, of Indiana, in connection with a tree spiking incident for which the ELF claimed credit. Law enforcers, however, are not calling it a major breakthrough in their five-year war with the elusive activists.

"It's always a positive when there is some success," said Tom Lyons, a U.S. Forest Service special agent in charge of law investigation in the Northwest. "That can only help to deter and show law enforcement agents' intent to deal with this issue nationwide. It's well publicized that organizations like ELF operate in small cells around the country, and this man's ties [to ELF] are the subject of speculation."

The "elves" of the ELF have become more and more active since they claimed responsibility for setting fires that caused $12 million worth of damage at the Vail Mountain ski resort more than two years ago. According to the activists and the law enforcement agencies that battle them, there's likely to be a lot more of their costly mischief.

"This year, 2001, we hope to see an escalation in tactics against capitalism and industry," ELF said earlier this month in a communique to Craig Rosebraugh, the Portland, Ore., man who acts as unofficial spokesman for the group. In the statement, ELF also claimed responsibility for a fire at a lumber company office in Glendale, Ore., that did $400,000 worth of damage.

Crime fighters in the FBI and the Forest Service are taking them at their word, especially considering that the Bush Administration has been talking about opening the national parks to mining and logging and stepping up the search for oil in the Alaska wilderness.

"It's a question that's been on my mind and on a number of people's minds," said Kim Thorsen, Forest Service department director of law enforcement and investigation. "The new administration's policies are different from those in the past. It's very possible that this coming summer season is going to be very contentious, if we start cutting more trees and we start mining. It's an issue we're going to have to be very aware of."

David Szady, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Portland division, said that ELF has already begun to increase its activity, noting that though there was nothing as spectacular as the Vail incident last year, 2000 was the group's busiest yet.

Apocalyptic Environmentalists, Political Cynics

ELF claimed responsibility for 16 fires last year at construction sites for luxury homes in Colorado, Arizona and New York, and law enforcement officials link them to the Anarchist Golf Association, which destroyed two grass seed research centers in Oregon. The group is also blamed for a fire at a Forest Service tree biogenetic research site in Wisconsin. In all, they claimed responsibility for $2.2 million worth of damage in 2000.

While Thorsen seemed ready to link the possibility of more "ecotage" to the policies of the administration in Washington, at least one person who has studied the movement sees no reason to believe that ELF cares at all who is in the White House.

Bron Taylor, a professor of religion at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who has studied the radical environmental movement for more than a decade, said that one of the defining elements of the activists is their political cynicism.

"With these guys, I don't think they look at any administration as being better than any other," Taylor said.

Taylor, who has published dozens of articles in scholarly journals dealing with various aspects of the environmental movement, said he gained his understanding of the activists not just from their public statements and actions, but from numerous interviews, many conducted anonymously with people he said he believed were ELF members.

"You can't understand these guys if you don't understand the ethical and spiritual motivations behind them," Taylor said. "There are continuities between their ethical and spiritual motivations, and those that have motivated the environmental vanguard for the last 125 years. You have grafted onto that a particular reading of environmental science and of governmental politics that tends to be on the one hand apocalyptic in terms of its view of the environment and on the other deeply cynical in its political analysis."

Violent Terrorists or Religious Radicals

He describes their reverence for nature as a religious feeling related to the beliefs of Native Americans in which all living things have souls and are seen as sacred.

According to Taylor, "deep ecologists" such as those in ELF have a firm belief in three essential tenets: That ecosystems have an inherent worth that cannot be judged in relation to human needs; that human actions are bringing the earth toward mass extinctions; and that political action is insufficient to bring about the wholesale social changes needed.

Because of their rejection of the possibility that government will make the kind of policy changes they deem necessary, ELF activists are not concerned about swaying public opinion, in Taylor's reading of the group. Their goal, he says, is to create a situation in which it is simply unprofitable for lumber companies to cut down trees or construction companies to build luxury "trophy homes" in wild areas.

While this makes them ready to take actions that are considered by much of society to be radical, their reverence for nature and their belief — whether articulated or not — that life in any form is sacred, keeps them opposed to intentionally harming other people, even their ideological opponents.

"It is a laugh to me when they call us violent or terrorists," Lee Dessaux, a hunt saboteur said in a 1997 interview quoted in Taylor's article "Religion, Violence and Radical Environmentalism: from Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front" in Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence. "I say, if we were, don't you think we'd have killed people by now?"

They still haven't either killed or seriously hurt anyone in more than 100 incidents over five years since they burned a truck at Forestry Service office in Oregon, but law enforcement officials fear it is only a matter of time.

"They keep saying that we're not going to hurt anyone, and I think they're sincere, but what happens is you can't control the zealots — we saw that with [Oklahoma City bomber Timothy] McVeigh," Szady said. "Our other fear is that someone is going to be killed accidentally."

Expanding Scope, Extending Range

Not only has ELF picked up its pace, it seems the "elves" have also begun to branch out and move around the country. Whereas early on their ecotage was primarily directed at the logging industry, and primarily in the Northwest, their recent campaign against suburban sprawl brought them attention in the Northeast.

"These people are popping up all over," Szady said. "The names can change, but we think the people are the same."

To date, it seems that the FBI and others trying to catch the "elves" haven't been able to find out for sure, though. Szady refused to say whether the FBI has had any success attempting to infiltrate ELF, but there have been no arrests in any of major the incidents for which "elves" have claimed responsibility.

"We have to take a very coordinated effort on the local, state and federal level, with all involved agencies working together," he said. "We're also hoping to get cooperation from the people in those organizations who might feel that some members have stepped over the line."

The Indiana arrest, carried out by state Conservation agents, shows that various law enforcement organizations are cooperating in the fight against ELF, but doesn't mean an end is in sight.