Earth First!

LEADER: Dave Foreman

USUAL AREA OF OPERATION: United States; worldwide

OVERVIEW

Earth First! (EF) is a radical environmentalist organization that defines itself as an anarchist political movement. During its first years, they promoted peaceful protests and educational campaigns on environmental conservation, trying to draw the attention of the press and local communities to the need of protecting forests, rivers, and species from pollution and destruction caused by human activity. They also tried to promote, unsuccessfully, the approval of new biological preserves. However, EF rapidly assumed an extremist attitude as new members and its founders started preaching "direct actions" against mining, logging, agricultural, and oil companies, as well as against bioengineering and pharmaceutical research laboratories. Examples of the most radical actions by EF's activists range from sabotage, destruction of property, hate mail, telephone harassment of employees, arson, physical aggression, tree spiking, and bombing.

EF claims to be a non-hierarchical movement, promoting and supporting, through its journals and a bulletin exclusive for its affiliated members, the formation of local organizations to sponsor a specific local cause, either as Earth First! chapters or with a different name. Therefore, hundreds of Earth First! units are spread through the United States and several other countries. Many other extremist organizations were also the result of EF's spin-offs. Some of them coordinate and carry on legal activities, whereas others promote illegal and even criminal acts. EF's branches may come temporarily into existence as a result of specific projects or as new organizations, such as Bioengineering Action Network, Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers Video Project, Friends of the Wolf, Direct Action Fund, Direct Action Network, Cascadia Forest Defenders, Earth Liberation Front (ELF), Animal Liberation Front (ALF), etc.

HISTORY

David Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, and Bart Koehler founded Earth First! in the early 1980s. EF history is divided in two phases. The first one (from 1980–1986) was characterized by public protests against logging, hunting, as well as the promotion of an ecological philosophy known as "Deep Ecology." This philosophy, developed by Arne Naess, George Sessions, and Bill Devall, assumes the equal value and significance of all life forms, including humans, in the context of the ecosystem. These ideas led EF to create the slogan "No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!" Another source of inspiration for the EF founders, especially for Dave Foreman, was the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. The novel tells the story of four environmentalists who decide to organize a radical group to sabotage and vandalize human enterprises, which they perceived as disruptive to ecosystems in the American Southwest.

Mike Roselle replaced Foreman as the editor of the EF Journal in 1990, inaugurating the second phase of the organization with a much stronger emphasis on the direct-action approach and on decentralized leadership. This loose non-hierarchical approach was aimed at giving EF a new face as a movement rather than an organization, in an attempt to dilute legal responsibility by actions promoted by activists from different chapters or "bioregions." Finally, the Journal's publication started being rotated among several EF bioregions, with a progressive escalation in radicalism, offering tactical information to saboteurs, lists of targets (buildings, equipment, and persons) under article titles such as "Why I Set Fire at Romania Chevrolet" and "Most-Wanted Eco-terrorists: The Biotechnology Industry." In spite of the claims that not even affiliation is needed, they also publish another bulletin exclusive for affiliates.

EF tells its own history as follows: "The idea of Earth First! emerged in a VW bus in the great Southwestern desert in the spring of 1980. Inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold's land ethic, and, most of all, Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang, a group of activists, fed up with mainstream environmental organizations, pledged 'No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!' Environmental activist Dave Foreman, ex-Yuppie (Youth International Party), Mike Roselle, Wyoming Wilderness Society representatives, Bart Koehler and Howie Wolke, and former Park Ranger Ron Kezar were traveling in Foreman's VW from the Pincate Desert in northern Mexico to Albuquerque. Enraged at the sellout by mainstream enviros during the RARE II (the Forest Service's Roadless Area and Review Evaluation—an ongoing process recently undermined by the Bushies) meetings, the activists envisioned a revolutionary movement to set aside multimillion-acre ecological preserves all across the United States. Suddenly Foreman called out, 'Earth First!' The next thing you know, Wolke says, 'Roselle drew a clenched fist logo, passed it up to the front of the van, and there was Earth First!'"

"From the beginning, Earth First! has been an anarchical movement. Really, Earth First! is a tribe existing in autonomous, consensus based groups who oppose the ignorance and destruction of industrial society and share a vision of a free, natural existence. No bureaucracy, no lobbyists, no organizational spokespersons, not even any membership. Earth First! happens when a group of committed activists decide together to stop further destruction of life. Independence Day 1980 marked the inaugural Earth First! Round River Rendezvous …"

They also list with pride the names of ecoactivists serving time in jail for crimes such as harassment of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) shareholders; use of explosives to target nuclear facility power lines; sabotage of a dam construction site; damaging equipment at a chicken processing plant and destroying eggs of thousands of chickens; conspiracy to commit arson and possession of incendiary devices to destroy SUVs; attack of the managing director of HLS; aggravated assault on federal agents; escape; and bank robbery—funneling money stolen from banks to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation—; and property destruction of the homes of multiple HLS affiliates.

PHILOSOPHY AND TACTICS

Earth First! Journal is the main propaganda vehicle of the organization, inviting people to meetings and teaching them how to organize. They regularly publish ongoing activities, new projects, and the agenda of EF meetings. The journal also sets the tone for EF policies and sister-organizations. In its own words, "To avoid co-option, we feel it is necessary to avoid corporate organizational structure so readily embraced by many environmental groups." The implication is that nobody else in EF—besides the perpetrators of a given felony—will be criminally responsible by their acts. This is an attempt to avoid charges of conspiracy, as illustrated by Foreman's arrest by the FBI in the past. Nevertheless, EF not only sponsors such criminal acts as morally justifiable in its directaction propaganda but also supports and raises funds for those under prosecution or serving time in prison. Therefore, there is not an EF central headquarters, but there are numerous EF chapters and other organizations under different names. However, as fundraising is necessary, EF also has organized foundations to raise funds such as Earth First! Foundation (later changed to Fund for Wild Nature), Trees Foundation, and the Earth First! Direct Action Fund. These organizations are legal, tax-exempt foundations that ask for contributions in support of EF projects and activities—including from other foundations and entrepreneurs. These foundations then funnel resources to the various EF projects and direct-action performances as well, such as tree sitting, tree spiking, road blockades, sabotage, lawsuits, and saboteurs, legal defense in the courts.

EF followers are provided an ample list of issues to adhere to or fight against, which ranges from dietary changes (stop eating meat) to others also shared by mainstream environmental organizations such as recycling non-organic materials, the use of alternative renewable sources of fuel and energy, protection of ancient forests, and stop whaling. Concerns about genetically modified foods are an issue still in discussion by the scientific community and the public health authorities from many countries. Earth First! agenda however is not open for discussion on this issue and opts for their direct-action doctrine and "monkeywrenching" tracts against biotechnology companies.

LEADERSHIP

DAVE FOREMAN

Dave Foreman was born in 1947, and first became involved in politics in college during the 1960s, when he founded the New Mexico branch of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization that supported the Vietnam War. After graduation in 1968, Foreman started dedicating himself to environmental protection. Between 1973 and 1980, he worked as Southwest Regional Representative for the Wilderness Society, in New Mexico. From the late 1970s until 1980, he was the director and lobbyist of Wilderness Affairs in Washington, D.C., and a board member for the New Mexico chapter of The Nature Conservancy. Disillusioned with the mainstream environmental movement and the outcome of the Second Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE II) by the United States Forest Service, which authorized the opening of thirty-six-million acres of forest for logging in 1979, he quit his job in early 1980 and founded Earth First! with his friends Mike Roselle, Bart Kohler, and Howie Wolke in Aprilofthatsameyear. He also actedaseditor of the Earth First! Journal from 1982 until 1988, and published in 1985 the first edition of his book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, teaching sabotage techniques. The FBI arrested him in 1990 on charges of conspiracy in the attempt to sabotage a power line that feeds a water pumping station in Arizona. After his release, he stopped acting as spokesman for EF, and in 1991, he co-founded the Wildlands Project with the purpose of establishing protected wilderness areas in the United States. For two years (1995–1997), he was one of the directors of the Sierra Club organization. He co-founded in 1997 the Wilderness Alliance (WA) and in 2003, he and other WA's directors founded the Rewilding Institute to develop and promote conservational strategies in North America.

Direct-action tactics, such as tree spiking, aims at breaking chain saws, which also works as booby traps that can seriously hurt and maim workers operating such tools. "Ecotage," or monkeywrenching, includes destruction of bulldozers and research laboratories, arson of construction sites and condominiums, planting bombs in dams, cutting power lines, harassment of logging and biotechnology companies' employees and shareholders, hate mail and telephone harassment of employees' families, and physical violence. It also includes civil disobedience actions as tree sitting to gain time for legal suits to advance through the judiciary system, and public protests to obtain ample publicity and to denounce corporate environmental malpractices such as illegal dumping of chemical wastes in soils and rivers.

Earth First! also promotes an annual rendezvous to celebrate their accomplishments and sponsors local workshops at chapters' discretion to debate specific issues and actions. EF also promotes rap music groups sympathetic to the EF cause, books written by extremist environmentalists, and promotes animist religious ceremonies aiming at leading its followers to identify themselves with trees and animals through mystical experiences.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

In 2002, the FBI defined eco-terrorism as "the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by environmentally-oriented sub-national groups for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature."

The U.S. Patriotic Act of 2001 defines domestic terrorism as "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, and appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping…." Under this Act, Earth First!, along with some of its sister-organizations, was considered an eco-terrorist organization due to its extremist actions in violation of the criminal laws of the United States.

The ActivistCash.com is a web site maintained by the Center for Consumer Freedom, an organization that monitors and provides information for individual donors about the funding sources of radical organizations and their activists, through the IRS documentation analysis. Individual contributions are sought by EF among the public, through the EF press in their respective interlinked web sites. The Fund for Wild Nature claims that "The Fund relies on individual contributors like yourself, and your friends. We accept donations of cash, stock or other financial assets."

KEY EVENTS

1989:: Mark Davis, Marc Baker, and Dave Foreman were arrested by the FBI. The first two, on charges of attempt to cut power lines, and Foreman on charges of conspiracy.
1990:: Judi Bari and Darryll Cherney, two EF activists, were seriously injured when a pipe bomb blows off. The FBI and local police arrested the two of them a few hours after the explosion.
1991:: Bari and Cherney started a civil lawsuit against six FBI agents and three Oakland police officers on charges of false arrest, unlawful search and seizure, and violating their civil rights.
2002:: The Grand Jury at Oakland Civil Court decided in favor of Cherney and Bari and determined a $4.4 million compensatory award to be paid by the FBI and the Oakland police.

ActivistCash.com denounces the eco-terrorist character of Earth First! and its spin-offs organizations such as ELF and ALF, highlighting the illegal activities and declarations of several of its members, such as Rodney Coronado, a convicted arsonist, who replaced Dave Foreman for some time as the spokesperson for the organization. According to this source, Coronado had declared in an issue of EF Journal about "the sixty-eighth raid on fur farms since 1995…. There have been nearly that many raids on genetically engineered crops. All the federal agents in the United States will not stop more actions of this sort." ActivistCash.com publishes an extensive report on the EF and other extremist eco-terrorist movements and organization, citing their own respective publications, books, and statements to the press, showing the strong misanthropic feelings of these eco-extremists as well as their bias against mainstream scientific research and governmental environmental policies.

PRIMARY SOURCE
Truth Is Still Elusive In 1990 Pipe Bombing

When the pipe bomb went off in their Subaru wagon in May 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were in Oakland, driving from California's North Coast to stir up support for demonstrations to stop the logging of ancient redwood trees.

Almost immediately, they concluded that someone had tried to kill them. They were, after all, rabble-rousing leaders of the Earth First movement, which had clashed repeatedly with loggers by blockading logging trucks, sitting in trees and shouting at rallies. Both had received written death threats and reported them to the police, Ms. Bari just weeks earlier. A year before, a logging truck had rammed her as she sat in a car.

But just hours after the blast, as Ms. Bari lay in a hospital bed with her pelvis crushed, she and Mr. Cherney, who was slightly wounded, were arrested by the Oakland police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The authorities concluded that Ms. Bari and Mr. Cherney had accidentally bombed themselves. They accused the pair of transporting the bomb for use in some act of environmental sabotage.

The charges were dropped six weeks later for lack of evidence. But the furor over what has become known as "the Judi Bari bombing" has raged for the last 12 years, even beyond Ms. Bari's death from cancer in 1997, overshadowing the radical environmental movement as no other incident has.

A federal lawsuit brought by the pair against the F.B.I. and Oakland police ended last week, when a jury found that the authorities had violated their civil rights and awarded $4.4 million to Mr. Cherney, 46, and Ms. Bari's estate.

The decision, however, is unlikely to quell the longstanding debate over who did it, and whether the authorities were justified in assuming that the pair had carried the bomb.

The bombing has also continued to cast a large shadow of controversy over Ms. Bari and Mr. Cherney and environmentalists in general in communities that depend on forests for jobs.

The F.B.I. long insisted that there was ample reason to suspect the pair: Earth First had espoused tactics like sabotaging logging trucks or spiking trees to damage saw blades, and the F.B.I. said it had suspected Ms. Bari and Mr. Cherney of downing power lines in Santa Cruz a month before the bombing, though they were never charged.

Even as the possibility that Ms. Bari was the target of someone she knew personally hovered in the background, law enforcement authorities through the years continued to say they had reasons to believe she and Mr. Cherney were transporting a bomb. Ms. Bari, until she died at age 47, and Mr. Cherney, the star witness in the trial, continued to say the F.B.I. framed them, maybe even bombed the car, so that it could blame the Earth Firsters, besmirch their reputations and cast a cloud over the burgeoning radical environmental movement.

Indeed, like Ms. Bari, who was maimed by the bombing, Earth First has never fully recovered from its aftermath. The bombing—and the arrests—have forever since been mentioned in references to the group, along with terms like "fringe" and "marginal."

Ms. Bari and Mr. Cherney, who continued to be strident voices for Earth First and for their vindication in the case, remain controversial figures in California's redwood country. The local weekly newspaper in the North Coast, The Anderson Valley Advertiser, has repeatedly mocked their federal suit and accusations against the authorities as a "scam."

Even the outcome of the trial, which left the large question of who is responsible for the bombing untouched, is unlikely to quiet much of the debate.

In a victory for the environmentalists, the trial exposed contradictions between F.B.I. investigators and the agency's crime laboratory over whether the bomb was under the driver's seat or, as investigators said, behind it, visible to the car's passengers before it detonated.

The Oakland police testified that they based their arrests on the F.B.I.'s findings, and the F.B.I. agents vigorously denied misleading the Oakland police. But both agencies admitted they had amassed intelligence on the couple before the bombing.

Evelyn Nieves

Source: New York Times, 2002

Conversely, the EF and other extremist environmentalist organizations are not in shortage of support from several segments among both the news media, college faculty, and writers. The University of Arizona Press published on its web site the prologue of the book Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement by Susan Zakin, wherein she tells about the arrests of Dave Foreman by the FBI in his home on May 30, 1989, and how the FBI had infiltrated an agent in the organization who actually coaxed Peggy Millet and three other activists into cutting a power line near Salome, Arizona. The author suggests that the FBI was in shortage of domestic terrorists in the 1980s, therefore starting to stalk "tough-talking nature lovers like Dave Foreman" because he was an "obvious choice when the agency had to justify its whopping $35 million-a-year counter-terrorism budget." Zakin also describes a more controversial event that occurred on May 24, 1990, when Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were severely injured when a bomb planted under the front seats of Judi's car went off, in Oakland, California. The FBI claimed that Bari and Cherney had accidentally set off a bomb that they made themselves, and arrested them. A judge, however, rejected the FBI allegation and the charges were dropped. Bari, who had her pelvis blown apart by the explosion, and Cherney, sued the FBI and the Oakland Police for framing them—a lawsuit that took 12 years to be concluded. Judi Bari died from cancer before the court decision. In 2002, a jury decided that six from the seven defendants have violated the U.S. Constitution's First and Fourth Amendments by arresting the complainants, conducting unlawful searches of their homes, and carrying out a defamatory campaign in the press, calling Earth First! a terrorist organization and the two victims of the car bombing of "bombers." The director of the Equal Justice Program at the Howard University School of Law, Nkechi Taifa, said on the occasion of the verdict that, "The jury verdict is yet another indication of what is in store should Ashcroft's plans to loosen the longstanding Levi guidelines become a reality," adding that such guidelines "were implemented to curb FBI abuses uncovered during the Senate investigations of the mid-'70s …"

SUMMARY

Earth First!, several autonomous chapters, and its sister-organizations have divided public opinion and fostered the formation of organized centers of opposition against its doctrines and direct-action tactics throughout the last twenty-five years. As new extremist groups as ALF and ELF carry on the violent agenda preached by this organization, Earth First! seems to be trying to change its public image to something closer to a mainstream environmental organization.

Earth First!

OVERVIEW

HISTORY

PHILOSOPHY AND TACTICS

LEADERSHIP

DAVE FOREMAN

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

KEY EVENTS

PRIMARY SOURCE
Truth Is Still Elusive In 1990 Pipe Bombing

SUMMARY

SOURCES

Web sites

SEE ALSO

Earth First!

OVERVIEW

HISTORY

PHILOSOPHY AND TACTICS

LEADERSHIP

DAVE FOREMAN

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

KEY EVENTS

PRIMARY SOURCETruth Is Still Elusive In 1990 Pipe Bombing

SUMMARY

SOURCES

Web sites

SEE ALSO

PRIMARY SOURCE
Truth Is Still Elusive In 1990 Pipe Bombing