everything sucks is not an argument
Orion Mag:
The nexus between the green anarchists, the Earth Liberation Front, and those ensnared in the government's investigation is not perfect. Several of the defendants don't claim to be advocates of the green anarchy movement now, if they ever were. And some of them, it seems, had not thought through the intellectual justifications of their actions in a formal sense—perhaps they just felt in their gut that things like SUVs and animal slaughterhouses and plantations that grow genetically modified trees were wrong. Whatever their motivations, their actions and rhetoric match up quite well with the principles of the green anarchist philosophy.
If they are in need of intellectual mentorship, Eugene's green anarchists have a resource close at hand. John Zerzan is in his sixties, a graduate of Stanford and San Francisco State University and one of the foremost anticivilization thinkers in the world. In the '60s he was a Marxist and a Maoist and a Vietnam protester and a devotee of the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic scene. He now believes that Paleolithic humans and the few remaining primitive cultures provide the best models for how humans should subsist. His books include Elements of Refusal, Future Primitive, and Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections. He is an editor of Green Anarchy, which calls itself "an anticivilization journal of theory and action." He was a confidant of Theodore Kaczynski during the Unabomber trial.
On a sunny afternoon last summer, I sat down with Zerzan on his shady back deck. His house is small and tidy, a wooden bungalow that sits near a busy one-way just south of the Whiteaker neighborhood. I asked him if he thought too much had been made of the Eugene anarchists after the WTO riots.
"60 Minutes was here. You can't say that would have happened just because we have a good idea," he said. Then he switched to the recent indictments. "All of the people who have been arrested in this thing used to live here in Eugene. There was a lot happening here, and that whole neighborhood [Whiteaker] was the key part. Now it's quieter."
I had never before spoken with Zerzan, although I knew that he lived in Eugene; around town, he's taken for granted in the way that minor celebrities who live in small cities often are. He has a salt-and-pepper beard, straight bangs, and a quiet, almost patrician demeanor that I found disarming. He seems younger than his age.
I asked him if he thought the arsons outlined in the government's indictment had done any good. He pointed out that most of the actions were followed by anonymous communiqués explaining precisely why the actions were taken. The combination of action and explanation can be quite powerful, he said.
Zerzan clearly struggles with the question of violence. Of Kaczynski, he said he found him "lacking in the basic kind of human connection that most people have." He hopes that the anticivilization movement will prevail without great bloodshed, although he quickly adds "my anarchist friends mainly laugh at me for being too hopeful." Humans, he believes, may very well forge a new way of living on Earth, or, rather, return to old ways of living on Earth, before utter environmental collapse imposes a Malthusian end.
"You can't make the revolution happen by promising people less," he said. Then he swept his hand out in front of him, taking in his house, the sound of cars and trucks hurtling past, the hum of the city, of human civilization. "You can't say all of this is more. This is becoming more sterile and cold and fucked up by the minute."
Down at Sam Bond's Garage, in the heart of Whiteaker, organic beer is served up in old jam jars. Tots in hemp smocks frolic on the wooden floor. A black t-shirt hangs on a wall sporting a skull and crossbones on the front and "Whiteaker" in pirate scrawl beneath.
It's a Sunday night in June, and the place is filling up fast. There's a disco ball hanging from old wooden rafters in the eatery's barnlike interior space. Two large ceiling fans beat the air, but a thermometer on the wall reports eighty-three degrees nonetheless. The usual customers, the ones who just came by for beers or a bite to eat or to chat with friends, seem a bit bewildered by the gathering crowd. A middle-aged man shoulders up to the bar to settle his tab and a young woman inquires if he's here for the rally. When the man asks what rally, she says, "It's for Free Luers. He got twenty-three years for burning up three SUVs." Soon the hall is full, a standing-room-only crowd of perhaps two hundred.
Jeffrey "Free" Luers is a skinny kid from suburban Los Angeles who is serving his fifth year in prison. In 2000, when he was twenty-one, Luers and an accomplice were arrested for setting fire to three SUVs in the middle of the night at a car lot near the University of Oregon (a separate action from those included in the Operation Backfire indictment). A Eugene judge sentenced Luers, who refused all of the government's plea bargain offers, to nearly twenty-three years in prison. The authorities say they made an example of Luers to forestall further crimes; activists say they made a martyr of him. Luers remains unrepentant. In a recent message to his supporters, he said, "I got careless, I got sloppy. I slipped up. I got caught."
I find a seat at the bar and order an ale. An acquaintance recognizes me and squeezes over to say hello. He points to a man sitting at a table in the center of the hall. Amid the young tattooed-and-pierced set and the older pony-tailed-and-sandaled set, this man is conspicuous. He looks as if he just walked in from an engineering convention. He has a conservative haircut, wears chino slacks, and keeps his reading glasses tucked in his left shirt-pocket. He's perhaps in his late sixties, and sits next to his tastefully dressed, bespectacled wife.
"That's Luers's dad," my friend says, and then pauses. "Just think—he'll probably never see his son out of prison again."
[snip]
The Operation Backfire Indictment is sixty-five pages long and identifies the first building the Eugene arsonists burned down as the Oakridge Ranger Station, just up the road from Eugene. On the night of October 30, 1996, a motorist saw the flames and called 911. When firefighters drove into the parking lot, nails stuck in the tires of their trucks. The building was too far gone to save. By morning, it was a pile of cinders.
The Oakridge arson was one of the first subjects I wrote about after returning to my native Northwest. I had just left a job as a newspaper reporter on the East Coast, and had taken another job, editing a small magazine that covers National Forest issues. Nothing like this had ever happened in Oregon. People were shocked.
Within the region and throughout the federal government the presumption was immediate. This was the work of environmental extremists. Two nights earlier, someone had torched a Forest Service pickup truck at a ranger station seventy miles to the north, and had left graffiti including "Forest Rapers" and "Earth Liberation Front." They had also scrawled the letter A with an extended crossbar—the symbol of the anarchist movement. No one claimed responsibility for the Oakridge fire, but many people assumed both acts were done by the same people.
Dan Glickman, President Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture, who oversaw the Forest Service, told reporters then that he had "absolutely no tolerance for individuals or groups that engage in terrorism." Jack Ward Thomas, who was chief of the Forest Service, said, "This is what people do who do not understand how to operate in a democracy."
But to me, and to many in the mainstream environmental community, these assumptions made no sense. At the time of the arson, environmentalists had just scored a major victory in the steep forestlands just a few miles away from Oakridge.
In the early 1990s, the Forest Service had proposed a salvage-logging project on the slopes bordering nearby Warner Creek. The area had burned in 1991, leaving behind a patchwork of both blackened wood and healthy trees. When a Eugene judge ruled the Forest Service's plan legal under the notorious Salvage Logging Rider in 1995, protesters sprang into action. They built barricades, dug trenches, and fashioned makeshift structures to keep logging equipment out. Then, in the summer of 1996, after activists had maintained the blockade for nearly a year, the Clinton administration ordered the Forest Service to shelve its plans to log Warner Creek (and more than 150 other controversial sales around the West).
So why would an environmentalist of any stripe decide, just months later, to burn down the Oakridge Ranger Station?
Aboveground activists did all they could to distance themselves from the act. The Oregon Natural Resources Council, fearing a public relations disaster, offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who provided information leading to the conviction of those responsible.
Years passed with no arrests. There were rumors that the fire had been an inside job, the work of a disgruntled employee. The Forest Service built another ranger station, a fetching structure with two stories and broad eaves, in exactly the same spot where the other had stood.
Then, last summer, Kevin Tubbs, one of the six who accepted the government's plea bargain offer, owned up to the deed.
At the Warner Creek blockade, Tubbs, curly-haired and deeply committed to the cause, had kept vigil atop a structure built from logs; if anyone tried to move the thing, he said, it would collapse and send him falling down the steep mountainside to his death. In Eugene's federal courtroom, wearing standard-issue Lane County Jail garb, with close-cropped hair, and looking a little middle-aged, he admitted to this:
On the night of the arson, he drove two fellow activists, Ferguson and Josephine Sunshine Overaker, east from Eugene to the vicinity of the Oakridge Ranger Station and dropped his passengers off. According to the account read in court by U.S. assistant attorney Stephen Peifer, Ferguson and Overaker placed incendiary devices around the ranger station. They threw nails onto the parking lot to slow down emergency responders and then the three drove back toward Eugene. They took back roads to avoid detection. They paused at a covered bridge near the town of Lowell and tossed the gloves they had used while committing the crime into the dark waters of a reservoir. The incendiary devices worked as intended and the ranger station was destroyed.
Despite Tubbs's confession, Timothy Ingalsbee, one of the leaders of the Warner Creek effort, still has trouble accepting the notion that environmentalists burned down the ranger station. Tall and lanky and gentle of manner, Ingalsbee holds a doctorate in environmental sociology from the University of Oregon. After the Warner Creek battle, he had wanted to work with the Forest Service to establish the site as a permanent wildfire research station within the National Forest system. "What the fire did was to destroy that opportunity," he said.
"I had excellent professional relationships with the Oakridge Forest Service staff, and after the fire that ended."
Mainstream environmentalists reacted with the same sense of puzzlement and disgust to the majority of the attacks described in the Operation Backfire investigation. And while many on the left are critical of the aggressiveness with which the federal government has pursued the case—viewing the millions spent as evidence of the Bush administration's overzealousness in its war on terror and a convenient distraction from the failings of the administration to counter real terrorists—virtually no one in the environmental community believes the attacks have done anything but harm.
"It's bad for our cause all around. It stinks," Rocky Smith told High Country News in the days after the Vail attack. Smith, a Colorado environmentalist, had worked tirelessly to fight the Vail expansion through legal means. "There are lots of reasons to hate Vail," he said, "but not enough to justify arson."
So, why? Those who are directly involved in the cases—those who are under indictment or who have accepted plea bargains—won't talk about motives. Most of those who are closest to them won't say anything either. Government prosecutors have indicated that there may be more indictments, and many activists are afraid to talk openly about the actions and those who allegedly committed them.
It's hard, though, to escape the conclusion that the main motivation of the Eugene arsonists was sincere, passionate conviction.
"I believe these arsons were a result of total frustration," one Whiteaker activist who knows several of the defendants told me over coffee. "It's just very painful to witness, so clearly, the rape of the planet."
Consider the story of Bill Rodgers. He was forty at the time of his arrest, making him the oldest of those indicted in the Operation Backfire investigation. Authorities describe him as a ringleader in the group of arsonists—they say he served as a sort of mentor to Gerlach, for one. Police arrested him last December at the modest bookstore and community center he ran in Prescott, Arizona. Two weeks after his arrest, he put a plastic bag over his head and suffocated himself.
In a farewell letter, he wrote, "Certain human cultures have been waging war against the Earth for millennia. I chose to fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, saguaros, cliff rose and all things wild. I am just the most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have made a jail break—I am returning home, to the Earth, to the place of my origins."
Here's what activists like Rodgers believe: They believe we face a crisis of mass extinction, caused by civilization. They believe the atmosphere is being spoiled, the climate pitching on the verge of ruinous change, because of civilization. They believe our bodies are being poisoned and so are our spirits, by civilization.
They've considered the state of the planet and they've decided against some hopeful half-critique. They've looked all the way down into the pit and, rightly or wrongly, come to the conclusion that the whole damn thing is undeniably, irretrievably messed up. The government is wrong, mainstream culture is wrong, the tokenist sellout environmental community is wrong, civilization itself is wrong.
The green anarchists are historical determinists, as are Marxists and Christian fundamentalists. Their worldview is based on more, though, than extrapolations of weighty political treatises or divinations of holy texts. It is based on the work of scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Jared Diamond [Dex - what?] and respected, peer-reviewed biologists and climatologists and ecologists the world over whose work suggests that human activity is having a calamitous effect on the Earth's natural systems.
Globalization. Capitalism. Greed. Civilization. Call it what you will. It will end, the green anarchists insist, whether by means of environmental collapse, violent revolution, or the collective enlightening of human consciousness.
"We are now witnessing the final days of Western Civilization," declared a recent posting on the Portland Independent Media Center website. "As this civilization decays around us—as the wars spread and the natural disasters increase in frequency—and as those trapped by western culture slowly break from their cognitive dissonance and open their hearts and minds, a new reality will begin to reveal itself. Our task is to let this transformation take its course, and to speed it along where we can."
History is littered with historical determinists who were convinced the revolution was just around the corner. A few were right, most were wrong. And history is full of social upheavals in which true believers decided the cause was so great that they would step beyond the boundaries of law. Some have been vindicated by history, some scorned.
When I consider the ELF arsonists, I find myself thinking of the militant nineteenth-century abolitionist John Brown. So appalled was Brown by the institution of slavery that he tried to spark a revolution. He thought all that was needed was a firm nudge and the whole South would erupt in a slave rebellion. He was wrong, and was caught. His actions enraged the southern populace, and the system against which he struggled prosecuted him, convicted him, and hanged him.
At the time he was viewed as a crazed visionary whose quixotic strivings had changed nothing. But as the forces of abolition gained strength—as the real revolution unfolded—he became something much more potent. He became a symbol. Over the course of decades, what was first considered lunacy and extremism came to be regarded as courage and righteousness.
Years from now, when we have a clearer understanding of the full damage we have done to the Earth, is it possible the ELF arsonists will be remembered in similar fashion?
Cold and flu deaths! Rickets! Starvation! Infant mortality! Cannibalism! It's Paleoriffic!
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