Security Tight as Meeting on Ecology Opens

An academic conference on “revolutionary environmentalism” featuring former members of groups linked to fire bombings and vandalism began peacefully -- amid heavy security -- at Cal State Fresno on Thursday.

The first day of the controversial two-day gathering generated some strong rhetoric, however. Asked in a news briefing how far he would go to advance his cause, one of the invited guests, a convicted arsonist, responded, “How far will the government go to degrade the environment?”

But the speaker, Rodney Coronado, who served 3 1/2 years in prison in connection with an arson at a Michigan State University laboratory in 1992, said, “Any fears of violence are from the far right.”

The conference, open to professors and students, featured sessions in which academics exchanged ideas with militant advocates of environmental safeguards and animal rights.

According to informal estimates by university officials, the conference attracted 250 or more university faculty, staff and students to the morning and afternoon sessions. An estimated 600 people crowded into an evening session open to the public.

Critics on campus and in the surrounding farm communities had expressed safety concerns in recent weeks, fearing that extremists would be drawn to the event.

Others questioned whether conference organizers, primarily from the political science department, were more interested in environmental advocacy than in advancing scholarly research.

Michael Becker, however, a political science lecturer, expressed dismay that the controversy before the conference overshadowed important issues on the agenda.

He said the daytime sessions were “a very sober academic discussion with activists about the more radical wing of the environmental movement.”

“The activists see themselves acting in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau or Martin Luther King, engaging in civil disobedience to bring attention to the killing of animals, the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of species,” Becker said.

“One of the continuing questions from students is, ‘What are these CHP officers doing on campus?’ ” Becker said, referring to the law enforcement officials surrounding the conference center.

Some students and professors objected to the entire affair. Robert Gonzalez, an undergraduate business major, equated the activists’ presence with a visit by the Ku Klux Klan.

“They shouldn’t be allowed here,” Gonzalez said. “Having the radical environmentalists here is condoning their actions and lending them legitimacy.”

Others complained that the conference’s organizers made too little effort to ensure that a diverse range of opinions would be represented.

Bruce S. Thornton, a professor of classics and humanities and one of the biggest critics of the conference, said he hopes the flap will lead faculty to establish guidelines for future academic gatherings. “Can we, as a faculty, develop guidelines that show academic responsibility as well as academic freedom? That’s what I’d like to see come out of this,” he said.

But Steve Best, one of the speakers and the chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Texas, El Paso, praised the university. “Fresno State is the most courageous university in the country for holding this conference. Throughout history, property destruction and civil protest has been part of our heritage. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with the Boston Tea Party.”