What Eugene’s ’90s-era eco-sabotage movement means today: Q&A with author of new book

When a ranger station in the Willamette National Forest went up in flames, it divided the environmental activist community — as New York-based journalist and sociologist Matthew Wolfe writes in his new book “Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage.”  

Published in June, Wolfe’s nearly 300-page book chronicles a radical environmental movement whose unapologetic “us versus them” ideology led to a series of arsons targeting both public and private property in the 1990s and early aughts. 

As the U.S. branch of the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, emerged in Eugene in 1996, activists drove from their Whiteaker bungalows into the national forests to decry timber sales. 

Two of the so-called elves tried to burn down the Detroit Ranger Station with a plastic water jug filled with a kerosene-scented liquid, but managed only to set a truck bed on fire. A couple of nights later, with the help of a third elf, they tried again at the Oakridge Ranger Station, this time driving away from a red glow as the building burned. 

“Some were quick to condemn the arsons, believing them an unnecessary provocation that made environmentalists seem like heedless extremists,” Wolfe writes. “A little monkey wrenching was harmless mischief, but setting fire to government buildings was a dangerous, reckless gesture that threatened to quickly get out of control.” 

Similar acts of arson and vandalism continued across the western United States for several years before coming to an end as the FBI, in the aftermath of 9/11, shifted its central mission to counterterrorism. By 2005, 19 elves had been charged in connection with 20 incidents that caused more than $40 million in damage, according to Wolfe’s reporting. 

Wolfe’s book explores how the group’s actions fractured conservation and environmental movements — a divide that has taken on new forms in an era of climate change. It’s a theme readers gathered to discuss with him at a sold-out event Thursday at Hodgepodge Books in Eugene.

A few hours earlier, Wolfe stopped by the Lookout Eugene-Springfield newsroom to chat with me about how that history still shows up today, where rifts persist within the environmental movement and between environmentalists and the timber industry. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Ashli Blow: What drew you, as a New York-based journalist, to a story that began in Eugene?

Matthew Wolfe: Seeing news reports as a kid in the Bay area. I grew up in a school that taught about global warming and about destruction of the rainforest and all these kinds of incoming catastrophes that were happening. I remember thinking that, we were presented with all these horrible problems, and the solutions that we were sort of being asked to undertake to solve them were so small — stuff like: take shorter showers or turn off the lights when you leave a room. 

[At the time], I was kind of like, I don’t know how I feel about what they’re doing, but at least they’re taking it seriously. They’re sort of taking action that seems commensurate with the scale, the problem that we’re facing. At the same time, what they were doing wasn’t quite working, and ended up kind of destroying themselves and destroying the movement. So there was a lot to dig in there.

Then some years, a number of elves were arrested in the mid-2000s and a lot of them actually became fugitives. And so one of the fugitives, who opened the book, Joseph Dibee, was arrested in 2018, and it kind of gave me an opportunity to go back and reassess the ELF. 

This is a book in part about desperation from a group of young people who wanted to see more tangible action from environmental groups whose “ambitions shrank.” Many went on to regret what they did, but what does their frustration say about the power of industry? And how are you seeing that frustration reemerge, as in climate advocacy? 

In a lot of different arenas there’s this sense of frustration and the sense of a system that doesn’t really let people have a voice or where people feel frustrated. I think this was a feeling that was less common in the ’90s when the ELF was active, where I think what they felt at the time was the sense of, as you say, desperation, about needing a feeling that traditional politics wasn’t cutting it, that there wasn’t a way to make change the right way. 

I think a lot of the problems that we’re facing come from the fact that corporate power and global capital hold outsized amounts of influence on how our government runs. And we’re all aware of that, and we’re all frustrated by that, and we all feel like there’s not enough we can do about it. 

What has struck you as the lasting influence the Earth Liberation Front has had on the environmental movement and on the way the public and businesses view environmental activism? 

I think it did a lot to damage the environmental community in Eugene, and it had a short-term or negative influence on radical environmentalism. It was very destructive. I think in the long term it’s a little bit too soon to tell. I mean, in writing the book, I was kind of curious about how right now people in the climate movement, and a number of movements, are sort of trying to figure out what tactics work, are trying to figure out when it’s difficult to make change through legal means, whether there are situations in which it’s important to go outside the law. The ELF is an interesting case study of people experimenting with a tactic that was illegal and dangerous and worked for a little bit, but may have not worked in the long term.

The Oakridge Ranger Station being burned left a deep wound beyond the environmental movement. The first time I went there as a journalist myself, the arson was among the first things a ranger told me. Also, as a journalist in this community, I have noticed that there is lingering fear among people who work in the timber industry, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management employees, foresters, who tell me they are afraid to talk with me and have their name published because of radical environmentalists. It makes me wonder: Is this a divide we can ever repair? As a sociologist, where do you think we go from here? 

Eugene’s a particularly tricky case. There are a number of people who came to Eugene for the trees. And some of those people are here to cut down the trees, sometimes in an environmentally responsible way. And then there are people here who came to enjoy nature. And given Eugene’s long history of radical counterculture, you’re going to have those two parties in conflict with each other, and this is a particularly hot spot for that. 

As far as a resolution, I’m not sure. You have two groups that are incentivized to be antagonistic. 

In your book, you write about a time “Americans found common ground” on “the desire to keep our planet livable.” This is in reference to the national reckoning in the 1960s after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water and Air acts. What were you thinking reflecting on this era? 

So interesting, because environmentalism is such a partisan issue right now. And it was so interesting to read about a moment in which, when it was first emerging, there was this general consensus that everybody sort of agreed, like, yeah, this is kind of a no-brainer. If we’re hurting ourselves or we’re hurting nature, let’s put some checks in place.

The one part about that that feels optimistic is if we were all on the same page with regards to a desire to keep a healthy planet. There’s always the potential to return to that. It’s not something that’s inherently antagonistic.

The central question on your book jacket is, “Facing the end of the world as we know it, exactly what kind of resistance is justified?” Did you find an answer?

No. You mentioned people who were traumatized by what the ELF did, and that’s very real. I mean, there were some people who felt unsafe for a very long time. It would be easy to say that violence never works. It would make it morally simpler. But sometimes it does, and sometimes I think we can, unless you’re, you know, the most hardcore pacifist. Sometimes it’s justified. I think it really comes down to sort of a case-by-case basis. But it’s always tricky and sort of frightening territory to enter into, because the stakes are just so high.