Disruption Is Activists’ Business
Boise Cascade Corp.’s regional headquarters burned to the ground the night before Christmas. When the smoke cleared, the only thing left was a communique from the “elves” of the Earth Liberation Front, who chortled that they had “left coal in Boise Cascade’s stocking.”
“Boise Cascade has been very naughty after ravaging the forests of the Pacific Northwest . . . [and] now looks toward the virgin forests of Chile,” the message said. “Let this be a lesson to all greedy multinational corporations who don’t respect ecosystems. The elves are watching.”
Actually, the elves were just catching their breath.
A week later, they torched Michigan State University’s agricultural research department, destroying years of work on genetically engineered crops. Then they burned down a house in a new Indiana housing tract that purportedly threatened a local water supply.
More recently, the ELF claimed responsibility for vandalism at the University of Minnesota, where 800 genetically engineered oat plants were overturned. Then they sabotaged construction vehicles--”large yellow machines of death,” in ELF parlance--and sifted salt into piles of dry cement destined for a controversial highway project in Minneapolis.
They have left no fingerprints, no identifiable tire tracks, no shoe prints likely to match anyone’s feet. The gasoline mixture they use cannot be identified. Pipe bomb components have been traced to the stores where they were purchased, but no one can remember who bought them.
Their only public presence is a tall, stone-faced vegan baker in Portland, Ore., who has been called to appear before a federal grand jury Wednesday to either name the people who keep sending communiques to his ELF press office or risk 18 months in prison on contempt charges. Craig Rosebraugh, 27, already knows what he’s going to say: He has no idea who they are. And if he did, “I’d sit in jail for 18 months before I told them.”
This is the new face of radical environmentalism, which has moved beyond the simple monkey-wrenching and tree-spiking techniques of the timber wars of the 1990s. By adopting tactics of the Animal Liberation Front, known for its clandestine releases of research animals and fur-farm minks, the ELF’s intent now is to inflict as much financial harm as possible on corporations whose interests are deemed at odds with the environment.
And in that they have been very successful.
“They pick times and places where no one expects them to be,” said David Tubbs, the FBI’s former counter-terrorism chief. “They’re able to go in and accomplish what they want to accomplish. They leave very little behind except chaos.”
An October 1998 blaze set at a Vail, Colo., ski resort scheduled to expand into prime lynx habitat caused $12 million in damage. The price tag for the fire at Boise Cascade was estimated at $1 million.
Sabotage by the ELF “is designed to effect change where it counts in our capitalistic society, in the wallet,” the group said in a recent communique.
To most in the mainstream environmental community, the ELF has become a growing annoyance--or worse. “I think the Earth Liberation Front’s a bunch of nitwits, myself, if they’re not actually working for industry,” said Dave Foreman, the co-founder of Earth First, who literally wrote the book on “ecotage” with his 1993 “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.” (The term was first coined by novelist Edward Abbey in his 1975 novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” It refers to a wide variety of nonviolent tactics--such as putting metal spikes in trees to damage saw blades and sabotaging logging equipment--committed in the name of wilderness protection.) Foreman since has given up radical activism to become head of a mainstream group dedicated to wilderness expansion.
The attack in Vail had the effect of ending community opposition to the expansion, and Vail Resorts Inc. proceeded with leveling trees three days afterward. A restaurant destroyed in the blaze was rebuilt 5,000 square feet larger--with graceful old raw timber trucked in from Montana. The mainstream environmental group that had planned a peaceful blockade to halt the bulldozers instead had to cancel its protest, and several leaders were hauled in front of a grand jury.
“The upshot was it did not affect our operations at all,” said Paul Witt, a spokesman for Vail Resorts. “It unified the community to say that we can solve our own problems. We don’t need these outside people coming in and destroying our livelihoods and our backyards in order to make a point.”
For Catherine Ives, it has been harder to move on. On New Year’s Eve, she drove to her office at Michigan State to find it and much of the rest of the Agriculture Hall in flames. By the time the fire was out, there was $1 million in damage to the building. And every slide, paper, lecture note and book Ives owned was gone.
Ives administers an agricultural research program that received a $2,000 grant from Monsanto Co. Ives’ program, the ELF said, was forcing developing nations in Asia, Latin America and Africa to switch from natural crops to genetically engineered sweet potatoes, corn, bananas and pineapples.
“Cremate Monsanto, long live the ELF. Go on to the next GE target!” said the communique Rosebraugh e-mailed afterward to news media across the country.
In fact, Ives said, the money Monsanto contributed was only to send five African scientists to a conference on biotechnology. Most of the department’s work, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, involves training scientists in developing countries and biotechnical research aimed at promoting insect and virus resistance.
“It’s shocking when somebody does this to you,” she said. “I lost basically everything that has allowed me to be a professional over the last six, seven years.”
An Activist’s Activist
On a drizzly day last month in Portland, the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse was packed with young men and women who had come to support Rosebraugh as he testified before the grand jury for the fifth time since 1997.
Each time, the questions were essentially the same. Do you know who was responsible for the release of 10,000 minks at a Mount Angel, Ore., fur farm in 1997? How did you receive the communique claiming responsibility for the fire at Boise Cascade? Why was this name and number found in this person’s wallet?
Rebuffed by Rosebraugh’s steady refusal to answer most questions, Assistant U.S. Atty. Steve Peifer occasionally threw him an easy one: What does “vegan” mean?
On that, Rosebraugh is an expert. He operates a vegan bakery, producing goods that are completely free of animal products--including eggs, milk and butter. Rosebraugh has been an activist on behalf of animal rights since his community college days, when he prepared a paper on animal research.
Since then, Rosebraugh has lectured against animal research at schools across the West, organized two national “freedom tours” to launch protests at primate research centers and been a fixture on the local animal-rights scene.
Just ask Dr. Jane MacPherson, who was conducting neurological research on cats at Portland’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Rosebraugh and his colleagues staged a protest by knocking on her neighbor’s doors to inquire whether they knew that she tortured cats.
It is because of this, he believes, that the Animal Liberation Front first contacted him in 1997, claiming credit for releasing the 10,000 minks. That was followed by announcements that the ELF and the ALF had joined forces and were conducting joint operations and a series of new actions: a fire at a Redmond, Ore., horse slaughterhouse; a wild horse release at a Bureau of Land Management corral in Burns, Ore.; and a $500,000 fire at U.S. Forest Industries in Medford, Ore. Other more recent attacks have left damages totaling more than $15.6 million.
Rosebraugh has insisted that he has no way of knowing who is sending him the communiques. But he has been happy to publicize them because he agrees with them.
“I want people to understand these are not random acts of lawlessness but actions that have a definite purpose, and that is the end of abuses and exploitations,” he says. “People are tired of spending an incredible amount of time and energy to try and have campaigns legally that basically get nowhere at all. Individuals in the ELF want to see results. They want to pick up where the law is leaving off.”
Outside the courthouse, a young woman holding a banner said she came because she believes in what Rosebraugh is doing. “He helped me to see that laboratory research is just wrong.
“One of the videos he showed us had a live cat, unanesthetized. There are two doctors. They held the cat. . . . They had a sharp implement like a scalpel, and they held its head and they scraped its head, they cut through the skull and they took out part of the brain. The cat was convulsing for about 30 seconds.”
Her voice began to falter, tears streamed down her face. “Nothing like that should be done.”
Later that day, Patti Strand, a Dalmatian breeder and executive director of the Portland-based National Animal Interest Alliance, pulled out a file on Rosebraugh, going back to 1996: Arrested for chaining himself to the entrance of the Seattle Fur Exchange; arrested in a protest at the Washington state primate center; arrested at the New England primate center at Harvard University; arrested at a UC Davis protest.
“Instead of talking like regular folks who want to solve a problem, it seems like we are dealing with religious zealots, and to all of them we are evil,” said Strand, whose group includes researchers, breeders, livestock producers, fur farmers, rodeo promoters, hunters and others targeted by the animal rights movement.
“To me, somebody who truly cared about animals would be involved with animals, working with animals, caring for them,” she said. Rosebraugh, she added, doesn’t even have a dog.
In February, federal agents raided the home Rosebraugh shares with three roommates, as well as his former offices at the downtown Liberation Collective--a mix of social justice groups dedicated to peace, feminism, animal rights and the environment. According to court documents, they seized Rosebraugh’s computers and boxes of other items, ranging from media address books and videotapes to “underground periodicals,” phone bills, letters, Internet passwords, a journal and e-mail communication reportedly regarding “MSU” and “WSU” (Michigan State and Washington State universities have been targets of ELF and ALF).
“A substantial amount of computer evidence and other records was seized,” Peifer said in an interview. “I’m personally optimistic, based upon that evidence, that we now know a great deal more about how the ELF and the ALF and similar people operate.”
Vail Fire Shows Sophistication
There are several theories about how the Vail ski complex--perched on a ridge 11,207 feet high--went up in flames Oct. 18, 1998, including that firebombs were dropped from an aircraft or that the resort’s director of public relations did it.
How else do you explain how someone got several hundred gallons of jellied gasoline up a steep trail in the middle of the night; set off a series of firebombs, virtually simultaneously, across a half-mile-long swath; designed the fires so the alarms wouldn’t go off until the buildings were fully engulfed, and then got back down the mountain undetected?
Officials called it the costliest and most sophisticated crime of its kind in U.S. history.
But despite a federal grand jury that has exhaustively questioned everyone known to be on the mountain that night, there have been no arrests.
As an example of just how difficult it is to prosecute the clandestine actions mounted by the ELF and the ALF, take the case of the 1997 pipe-bombing of a Salt Lake City mink-feed plant.
Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--aided by local police--were able to get confessions from two brothers, Douglas Joshua Ellerman, 21, and Clinton Colby Ellerman, 22. Both agreed to plead guilty and testify against three other defendants in exchange for reduced sentences.
But because there was little direct forensic evidence tying anyone to the crime, the other defendants who went to trial were acquitted.
The pipe bomb pieces couldn’t be linked to anyone. The bombers had gone to a telephone booth and played a distorted tape-recording of their voices, claiming responsibility on behalf of the ALF. No possibility of an identification there.
At the trial, defense lawyers argued that the Ellermans were trying to save their own skins and couldn’t be believed. In the end, said Assistant U.S. Atty. David Schwendiman, some jurors probably were reluctant to convict the three defendants, ages 21 to 34, in a case that hadn’t injured or killed anyone. They had been indicted on 14 counts of bombing and attempted bombing of a building used in interstate commerce and using an explosive device to commit a crime of violence. They would have faced mandatory sentences of life in prison.
No Traceable Organization
Dealing with ELF and ALF activists is “no different than dealing with other forms of terrorism,” Schwendiman said. They work in small cells, without any central, traceable organization. Their actions are carefully planned. They wear shoes that are much larger than their feet. Gloves, masks, hoods. The kinds of devices that leave very few, if any, traces.
How do you make a case like this stick? “The answer’s really simple: You just get lucky,” Schwendiman said. “You put pressure on people. But unless somebody comes forward, I mean, the bombs don’t say anything.”
As the Utah case went to trial in September, this message was printed by the Earth First Journal, which regularly covers the exploits of the ELF and the ALF, although it doesn’t endorse them: “All that remains to be seen is whether the struggles for the defense of North America’s last wild places and its indigenous humans and nonhumans will survive police repression or be intimidated into compromise and submission.”
The author was 33-year-old Rod Coronado, a Yaqui Indian from Northern California and one of the most infamous underground activists of the 1990s.
By the time he was in his early 20s, Coronado had sunk whaling boats in Iceland and begun launching a series of attacks against logging sites, fur stores and billboards in the United States and Canada. His five-state campaign against the fur industry, launched in 1991, began with a $62,000 fire at Oregon State University’s experimental mink farm.
Coronado was arrested in 1994 when a package containing items stolen during an ALF raid at Michigan State was traced to him. He served 3 1/2 years in prison and is now living in Arizona, where he continues to speak out on behalf of the ALF and the ELF.
“We have the ATF and the FBI all trying to paint us as terrorists,” Coronado said. “We’re not wild-eyed terrorists, we’re just young kids who are disillusioned with the system and are trying to do something about it, and ultimately nonviolently.
“We do these things not because we like to break into buildings [but] because we don’t believe in what’s being done to the Earth and what’s being done to animals.”
Rosebraugh said “the people that engage in these actions are intelligent enough to realize the American public is not going to support what they do. Their No. 1 goal is economic change, pure and simple.”
The fire at Vail, he said, “was a $12-million loss. Their insurance covered it, but I don’t know an insurance company in the country that can suffer a $12-million loss and not raise their rates. . . . The message was, if there are going to be corporations that try to exploit and destroy our environment, there are going to be individuals out there who are going to try and stop them.”
