Editorial

by Lacey

Across the country this summer, an unprecedented number of accounts of violence have filtered into the Earth First! Journal office.

In the Cove/Mallard area of Idaho, a three-month long road blockade was attacked on August 18. During that night, unidentified assailants used gasoline to set afire barricades made of logging debris. At least one small explosive device was thrown at the protester's camp. One day prior an individual surveying the Noble timber sale was surrounded and assaulted by employees and subcontractors of Shearer Lumber, the private company logging the area. He was threatened, shoved and struck in the back before being forced to leave. Local activists believe that Shearer employees and subcontractors also started the fire at the blockade.

Confrontation and violence is, of course, not new to the Cove/Mallard campaign. In 1993 a protester was severely beaten by a logger. Though convicted, the assailant received a shorter sentence than many nonviolent protester have served.

Over the mountains and along the stretch of coast to southern and central British Columbia, the situation has been much the same. Local resource extraction groups have stepped up the vehemence and violence. In July, IWA, the loggers' union, blockaded the Greenpeace ship Moby Dick in the Vancouver harbor. North of there, in Bella Coola, that vehemence turned physical when a local logger pushed around a Forest Action Network (FAN) activist, causing her to fall into the harbor. Later that night, a FAN videographer had her camera wrenched from her hands and thrown into the water. Clearly, the Bella Coolan version of the wise-use movement, VOICE of the Mid Coast Community (VOICES), is gaining momentum. At one VOICES meeting a local stood up and said that FAN's ship Starlet should be bombed. At another meeting a Burson-Marstellar (now known as NPR) representative advised VOICES on developing a public relations campaign to galvanize the anti-environmental movement.

Perhaps the most alarming case of violence against an activist involves an attack in the Ozarks on July 31. A long-time lead activist, working on a streamside monitoring program, stopped by a remote spring to meet some reporters. Instead, she encountered four young locals, between the ages of 18 and 22. One of the two men in the group recognized the activist and started harassing her. As the activist got in her van to leave, the two men broke the car window, jumped her and beat her with sticks and a canoe paddle. After the beating, the men taped the activist to her seat with duct tape, stuffed and taped a Sierra Club anti-mining flier in her mouth, punctured her car tires and abandoned her. She sat there for 12 hours, fearing a heart attack, until a friend found her. Since the incident, she writes, "Trauma and shock have had a grip on my life... I feel terribly vulnerable."

Such harassment and intimidation are becoming all too common in the Ozarks. Not long after the first attack, on August 20 a dead cat was mailed to another activist. His address was cut out of the same Sierra Club anti-lead mining flier.

It's hard to dismiss such a rash of anti-environmental activity as unrelated. In both British Columbia and the Ozarks, environmental activists know that local opposition is being organized into a whole new beast, one which is not adverse to using violence. While its true that activists have often been subject to violence, harassment and intimidation (witness nothing less than the bombing of Cherney and Bari), it would be tardy of us to look away from patterns of activity. The message of property rights and rhetoric of anti-environmentalism is being heard and actively spread. There is truly a campaign against environmentalism and environmentalists on this continent. For our own safety, we must evaluate with level heads and open hears why this message is striking a chord with a disproportionate number of people.

As pristine habitat and wild places become rarer, their monetary value increases exponentially, and the pressure to extract resources also rises, faster than the actual extraction taking place. The extractors and their employees are willing to go to more extreme measures, including violence and threats, to extract commodities before they are preserved or taken by someone else.

The rhetoric of the wise use movement, which cloaks the extract-at-all-expenses mantra in the language, myth and culture of the West, is hitting a nerve with many. The moral flaunting and self-righteousness of environmentalism, meanwhile, is alienating. We must make it clear that our fight is against those in distant places who profit disproportionately for the extraction of our wild lands, and not against the lifestyles of this generation of workers in the West. As long as the battle can be painted as tree-hugger versus decent, hardworking Westerners, those calling the shots will manipulate workers into a frenzy of hate.