Episode 6: The Line

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And what rights does a dead body have? That is horrible. Bad people is back. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Quick note before we begin, this episode contains some strong and offensive language. In the summer of 2020... Dave Warden and his son were hunting deep up on Mount Jefferson. It's one of the most dramatic peaks in Oregon's Cascade Mountains, a sharp point flanked by dense forests.

The 29th of my son's birthday, we went bow hunting up there on Mount Jeff, and we were chasing bull out with the bow and arrow. We were camped right at the base of the lion's head prior to my son and I. We stayed the night. He was so tired I couldn't get him out. I just sat and watched him all night, watched over him, watched the fire. And I got to tell you, a full moon came up behind Mount Jeff. And it was red out there, you know, it was just red. But at first I seen a little light.

If I woke my son up and said, hey man, you up a hole? Should I grab my gun? I said, it's too late. And then pretty soon, I seen another. And that big red moon come up behind that mountain, I gotta tell you, I'll never forget it. If you live in wildfire country, which is most of the western United States, you know what a red moon or a red sun means. It means there's a big wildfire burning somewhere nearby.

you're going to be choking on smoke for a few days or a few weeks. Or it might mean something worse, that a fire might be coming for you. In the summer of 2020, in Dave Worden's part of the world, That red moon was a warning. The fire was coming. The winds changed. Coming down over this hill and down Prince Creek right there, it sounded like a train. The whole world changed.

Dave and his son rushed back down the mountain as the flames reached the edge of the only place he'd ever called home. And then all hell broke through us. We drove through hell. for 35 miles to get out of here. And we had everything that we ever worked for. I left every, we left everything. It's all gone.

Dave lives in a little town called Detroit, Oregon, which is in the middle of the Willamette National Forest. It's in this forest The government says that the so-called family set its first couple of arsons in 1996. In January 2022, Producer Georgia and I headed down to the government-run Detroit Ranger Station. It was the site of the second ELF target. Prosecutors say that early in the morning...

on October 28, 1996. A Forest Service truck in the parking lot was on fire and spray painted on the side of the Ranger Station and other vehicles in the lot were the words Earth Liberation Front. Later, the government says an incendiary device was found on the roof of the building, but it had failed to go off. They say Josephine Sunshine Overacre was there that day.

And as we try and piece together her role in this story, we wanted to see it. We're headed towards Detroit. On the drive there, I can't help but notice how fire has transformed this place. I recognize it because everything looks different. In the last few years, wildfires have been ripping the western United States apart. Entire towns lost. Burned to the ground. Homes lost. People killed. It didn't used to look like this.

And when you drive through Detroit now, you wouldn't even know a town was here. But then you'll see a brick chimney and then another chimney. And this starts to feel more like a cemetery. Like, these chimneys are all gravestones to climate change. And then we get to the ranger station. This is probably the stuff that's closed because of wildfire, so like this map. There's nothing about the arson, though, when we're there.

Just information about all the areas still closed off because of those forest fires two years before. And it goes way back. Closed because of the fire. Yeah. So it's funny to think that like... Wildfire closed this whole area, you know, just a couple years ago, but when Elf was here, they used fire. When the Earth Liberation Front lit their fires around America,

They wanted people to know just how serious they were about seeing their demands met. They wanted people to know that they were willing to take things a lot further than other environmental activists had. This series is a lot bigger than the story of the fires the ELF lit and the consequences those fire starters paid. At its heart is a moral question. How far is too far to go to save the planet?

And it's something we've asked nearly everyone we've spoken to. Where, I guess, is the line for you? Like, how far are you willing to take things? I think anything that doesn't actually alienate.

the participation of the majority of others. This is Paul Rogers, an environmental activist in the UK. The ethical constraints of each society are defined by that society, and it will be... foolish to go beyond that point you'll be surprised what people will tolerate under the circumstances we're facing a rising ecological crisis if we if people don't act they will die This is Burn Wild, Episode 6, The Line. I'm Leah Satille.

There's a school of thought in activism that says that all movements need a radical flank to succeed. Chelsea Gerlach. Martin Luther King had Malcolm X. The Civil Rights Movement had the Black Panther Party. Successful movements for social change are often accompanied by a radical wing that is willing to take things a bit further. And that can push the needle. And that was what the ELF and the so-called family were trying to do.

Making this series, we've heard from a lot of people who said that they had a line to never injure anyone. And they never did. But we've heard something else too. Do you ever get the sense that... if they had gotten away with the arsons, that it was going to go further than that? Yes. Yeah, I think so. FBI agent Tim Suttles. Yeah, I think it would have continued to escalate. Daniel McGowan. But I can't...

I'm really uncomfortable talking a lot about what other people said or did. But Daniel would talk about his own path, his own escalation of tactics. You could look at like my activist career, like, okay, he did it, let's protest it. He wrote letters to congressional representatives. Okay, he protested. Oh, he did civil disobedience. Okay, he did pieing. Oh, he broke windows. Well, what comes after arson? Like, killing people?

And I'll be honest, I thought about it. I talked about it. I was like, is this what's next? It was discussed, not in any real way, not in any planning way, but I had a lot of theoretical conversations. And I was just like, yeah, it's not me. To be honest, I was kind of horrified by it. I didn't want to kill people. I didn't want to injure people. I felt like what happened is I got to my no-no point really fast. I mean, we're talking about like two years, you know?

And there was a certain part of me that wanted to, like, step it back in the sense of, like, hey, you want to sabotage some logging roads? And people were like, yeah, you don't step it back from arson. And I just... And I, at the time, had a little bit of regret and been like, damn, you know, I wish I would have just like, I wish I would have just like on some level not been so fast to accelerate the tactics.

The more militant a tactic doesn't necessarily mean it would be more effective. I think we were creating sympathy for our opponents. I think we were playing into like a boogeyman role. We were not inspiring people, I mean, in enough numbers. to do things themselves. I mean, you know, in time, after reading my indictments, I realized, holy shit, a lot of these actions are the same people. That was sobering for Daniel. We're a tiny group of people.

I mean, how many people were inside? 17? Something like that. It didn't inspire a bunch of people. You know, we turn around and there's like nobody else. They turned around and there was nobody else.

It's a powerful thing to hear from Daniel, someone who was sucked in pretty quickly by radical activism. Not only did people not join up and start lighting fires of their own, the Earth Liberation Front seemed to only bring heat. onto the wider environmental movement. Chelsea Gerlach. In Vail in particular, unbeknownst to us, there were activists on the mountain the night of the arson preparing to do civil disobedience.

And so, of course, they were the first suspects. They had the FBI at their door and their offices and homes ransacked. cops were knocking on doors and asking questions and now everyone's suspicious of each other and of course everyone was thrown into confusion and chaos and immediately everyone's suspicious of

Okay, we're having an organizing meeting. Who's the FBI agent in the meeting? Because we know there is one. The disruptive impact that that had made it impossible for them to continue with their organizing efforts. It pretty much destroyed the movement. That mattered. We all had made our decision to do a different type of activism to remove ourselves from the above-ground community.

But it was not fair of us to not pay more attention to the impacts our actions would have had on environmental activists. I think our action destroyed the local environmental movement. It's hard to admit that, and really sad to me that an action that I took had that impact on people. We went to the FBI with these claims, that as the FBI were looking for leads, groups were infiltrated.

In a statement, they told us, the FBI works within the confines of the United States Constitution. Retired FBI agent Jane Quimby was one of the main players in the operation that busted the family. It was Jane who put Chelsea in prison. You know, the Vail Ski Resort expanded even bigger and better than it might have if they hadn't burned down what they burned down.

So I don't think that they necessarily really achieved their goal. It brought a lot of tension to the movement. ELF spokesperson Leslie Pickering. Do you have any regrets about anything that you've been a part of? Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, they haven't always made the best decisions. But in terms of, I think, what you're asking, no. You don't.

A lot of people want us to apologize for what happened and don't think there's anything to apologize for. I mean, no one was even hurt. So what is there to really apologize for? There's no apologies that need to be made. On our side, it's just not a fair question to be asked, to apologize. I have nothing to apologize for.

In this series, we'd set out to try to figure out who the ELF and the so-called family were. And we wanted to understand more about two characters who kept the ELF case open for all this time. Two people who've been a mystery. Just mugshots on the FBI's most wanted domestic terrorist page. Joe DeBay and Josephine Sunshine Overacre. And we'd learned a lot from Joe, but...

We weren't getting very far on sunshine. And then in autumn 2021. So I was surprised for you. I called Georgia. Oh my God. Every month I send out a monthly newsletter. Articles and essays I write. It's like morning here and I was just drinking my coffee and I checked my email. I noticed I had a new sign up. And there was this email and it just, it was a name and it made me think like... that name is rare enough and i am looking for someone with that name so i wrote and i just said

Hi, apologies for the very random email. I just saw you subscribe to my sub stack this weekend. Is this by chance Elizabeth Faye? Well, I just got an email a few minutes ago that said Leah. Yes, I am Elsbeth Overacre Faye, Josephine Sunshine Overacre's very own mom. All this time, I'd been searching. Oh my goodness! I'm lost! Suddenly... We feel like we might be getting somewhere. I just can't believe it. On the day we went to Detroit, Oregon.

and stopped by the ranger station, we passed by miles and miles of burned forest. Whole towns burned to the ground by recent wildfires. It was on this day that we'd met Dave Warden. who you heard at the beginning of this episode. Watching the red moon rise and hearing a fire-so-massive approach, it sounded like a train. When we pulled up alongside him, he was standing amidst a burned-out landscape.

rebuilding his home. He calls his wife Michelle over. Michelle, get over here. I need some more soundbitings. Dave and Michelle both grew up here. They're a high school sweetheart. They've lived here all of their lives. But in 2020, they had to flee. They lost everything, including their home. It's all gone. What is it lit by? Could you describe it? The house. Two-story, kind of boxy. We loved it, though, because...

sunrises there to the east you know we have our coffee. If you're doing something on global warming I can tell you after living here for 50 years it's been only I would say in the last five years that every summer we've had so much smoke. up here because of fires that it's like you're either in your house or you're driving down the hill trying to

Get some clean air because it wasn't that way growing up as a kid. So I absolutely think global warming and the summers have been getting hotter and hotter. Lots of the towns around here, like lots of the towns in rural Western Oregon. or logging towns. Dave told us, yeah, he's worked as a logger for most of his life up in the mountains around Detroit, or in the sawmills right here in this area.

Station fire in the 90s. It was the Earth Liberation Front claimed it. And they remember when the Earth Liberation Front were lighting their fires. They feel like they're hurting the big corporations, I'm sure, but really it's the little people that suffer that can't.

You can't hurt them guys. It's got to be another way. As a logging family, Dave and Michelle tell us that the restrictions that have been introduced on logging, some of those in the wake of blockades like Warner Creek, have really impacted them.

they got all these woods shut down they can't won't let me out here you know let us out here so we lost our way of life what we do and what we've always done they're happy because the woods are shut down they do not want them opened up these are our woods

We went through a lot to live this life right here. I logged all over the Pacific Northwest. I mean, it's a lot to be here. It takes a lot to live this life we live. We don't know anything else. So, yeah, I've got some opinions because we were here.

50 years. And just like with some of the radical activists we've spoken to, who express a physical pain at the loss of the forests, I notice that same pain pass across Michelle and Dave Warden's faces. This forest... was their home the environment as they go too far i appreciate where they're trying to go with it yeah i know about the global warming i don't have no doubt however we're here living this life we could all sit down together

Because no one's listening. No one gives a shit. He talks about the wooden homes that even environmentalists live in. He calls them stick homes. And he's a guy who, right now, has no home. It feels like there should be a happy medium because we love the forest. We love the woods. I mean, I'm part indigenous. You have no idea what we lost. You know, they're living in sick homes.

I'd like to see one environmentalist show up over here and show a little affection for our pain. But maybe they would see. Everybody's doing something to try to make a go. And tell me you ain't burning fossil fuel. Tell me you ain't doing things. You know, these folks are living in stick homes. They're doing all this. But man, they sure run a ramp through this canyon, man.

They tried to destroy our lives. That's what they accomplished, in my view. That's his experience with environmentalists, he says. And he's no big corporation, no massive polluter. He's a guy who's felt the impact of climate change more acutely than anyone else we've spoken to in this series. And he thinks he should be allowed to cut down the trees.

Today, activists have proven that they don't need to light fires to get attention. And in Europe, there's one environmental movement that has absolutely dominated the public's attention. Extinction Rebellion, or... XR for short. They're about disruption, not destruction. I have been interested in how things change for a long, long time. Dr. Gail Bradbrook is a scientist and activist. She's one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion. And understood that change wouldn't come about without...

Mass civil disobedience. Power doesn't cede without a demand, right? For XR, true mobilization is a numbers game. It's about having broad-based appeal and getting enough people out in the streets to put on something big and bold and massively disruptive. It kind of reminds me of trying to roll a snowball together, you know.

To get any kind of momentum takes a while, and then when it gets big enough, it sets off on its own. And that's how it's felt. In October 2018, Extinction Rebellion started getting that snowball together in a pretty dramatic way. They took five bridges across London, cutting off traffic into the city in what would be one of the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK in decades. We knew if you only took one bridge, no one would be bothered, right?

This is Roger Hallam, also a co-founder of XR, though he no longer holds any formal role with the group. We'll get to that. It was the daring outrageousness of it, right? Here's London. They're going to take the bridges with 5,000 people. 1,000 people on each bridge. We don't even know whether they're going to turn up or not. We're still going to do it. What the fuck? This is the end of the world. Let's take some risks. Bang. This is Extinction Rebellion.

We don't do things by halves. Bang, bang, bang. We thought that maybe 100 people would come and 1,000 people came and we thought, ooh, seems like something's happening here. People wave multicolored flags with slogans like, no fun on a dead planet. and Rebel for Life, alongside the XR logo, an hourglass, and a circle. Some locked themselves together and chanted. The following year, there were more protests.

blocking off the capital's main shopping and financial districts. A thousand people get arrested for the first time since the suffragettes, and it remains non-violent. And it's got a British at their best doing wacky things, really, playing pianos and God knows on bridges, right? We're not doing boring, revolutionary crap. We're doing, you know, let's have a laugh and, you know, have some music. It was all a little bit winging it.

Extinction Rebellion is non-violent, mass civil disobedience. They've been brought up, without our asking, in many conversations for this series. Like when we got on a call with Scott Stewart. who works in terrorism intelligence. I started out as a tactical intelligence officer with the Army. Scott first worked with the Army, then at the Diplomatic Security Service, and now works at a private security company for high network.

worth individuals and organizations. Basically investigations and do assessments. on groups for the threats that they pose. While making this series, we've considered whether climate change can count as an ideology when it's based in fact. Scott thinks so. He talks about grievance narratives. I think that we need to really pay attention to the grievance narratives. When you do that, it's easy to see how people can become really mobilized to the point of violence.

And without prompting, Scott brings up XR. You know, groups like Extinction Rebellion and just that kind of apocalyptic grievance narrative that they have. Actually, this is their declaration of rebellion. Humanity finds itself embroiled in an event unprecedented in its history, one which, unless immediately addressed, will catapult us further into the destruction of all we hold dear.

This nation, our peoples, our ecosystems, and the future generations to come. The science is clear. We are the sixth mass extinction event, and we will face catastrophe if we do not act swiftly. As you follow those grievance narratives, you can kind of see how people that kind of adopt them can be mobilized to violence. It's not a far step for someone who's a true believer. to develop the understanding that violence is necessary to stop this greater evil that is going to happen.

I want to ask a question, though. I mean, in my reporting on the far right, the grievance narrative can be, you know, so many different things. It can be that the federal government is inherently corrupt and shouldn't own land or, you know, it can be racist. I'm curious. though with climate change is that a grievance narrative i mean we know that this is a huge threat and

you know, scientists continually, you know, through the two years that Georgia and I've been working on this, so many reports have been issued about the time to act is now. Tell me. If you see that as much as of a grievance narrative, because to me, narrative implies that maybe there's a bit of fiction to it. Well, no, no. And it's how it's being presented. It's one thing to kind of put the truth out there.

about what's happening, right? You can convey the facts. But it's another thing, when you start portraying it in a way that is overly kind of dramatic and dire, I don't think that everyone... who participates in Extinction Rebellion is going to become a terrorist. I think a lot of them are just kind of well-meaning individuals that want climate change to be addressed. I don't believe all of them necessarily hold on to the entire concept of overthrowing the current global system.

that the XR founders do. However, when people hold on to the narrative and really believe it deeply, and then they become very frustrated that their legal protest activities aren't making a difference. And so that has a tendency to drive them towards more extreme behaviors. And they justify it based upon, you know, the direness of that grievance narrative.

Well, there's some interesting terms in there, aren't there? Dr. Gail Bradbrook, one of the XR founders. Overthrow society. I find it a little bit ridiculous. Like, who's going to be overthrowing anything? You know, the system... it doesn't need overthrown it's overthrown itself looking at food systems collapse, the multi-breadbasket failures of what the academics talk about. When food systems collapse happen, this is when people riot and the collapse of civilisation is a possibility.

These aren't extreme views that Extinction Rebellion is sharing. Yeah, some people may move from writing to their MP to... coming to Extinction Rebellion and gluing themselves to the road, whatever, to block in oil refineries. And some people might go underground. and start to sabotage oil infrastructure, I think...

Again, if it's done as carefully as possible without the intention of any harm, I think these are all acts of protection. That people are taking this kind of action needs to be seen in context. As Greta says, be led by the science and go and read it, and then you'd be as scared as we are. Do you think that there is a danger that after the blockades that aren't harming people, that they could then take things further and we could see...

things that are physically harmful to people. Again, I want people to understand that people who are defending their lands across the world die every day. You know, there are people protecting their rivers, their land, the indigenous people are having their land stolen off them right now. They stand in the way of these, you know, whether it's palm oil plantations or mining or for fossils, fuels or whatever, and they get killed. That's what happens. There may be acts of self-defence within that.

I don't know how this is going to go. What we need to do is stop it. And what we're talking about is the extremism, the potential extremism of protesters and those defending their lands. And it has to be seen in context. It's absolutely about self-defence.

But where Extinction Rebellion is seen as extreme by some, to others, it's the opposite. They say they don't have to hide. They'll protest in broad daylight and they'll do it by the thousands. Which is the opposite of what ELF member Daniel McGowan saw after their fires. They weren't being joined by anyone. And yet... When we spoke to him, it was clear that XR still sticks in his craw. Oh, I wanted to ask you something. I was surprised you guys didn't bring it up to me.

I thought you were going to hit me with the, like, what do you think of Extinction Rebellion? Well, I was just literally thinking. It's all theater, right? I think they're kind of perceived as kind of just doing that activist thing, holding signs.

I mean, I know they're not taken seriously amongst radicals, but I'm talking about just society in general. When people see that on TV, I think they just kind of suck their teeth and go on. Did we ask about your thoughts on some of the movements today, I guess?

first and foremost, being Extinction Rebellion. They're getting a lot of coverage. They're getting a lot of coverage. I think that's what they exist for, isn't it? Paul Rogers of Green Anarchist Magazine. Outrage is publicity stunts. Don't, mate. meaningful social change. You never did that. No, we would be sneaking around at night with balaclavas on, yeah.

Making this podcast, it really seemed like everyone has an opinion on XR, including those Georgia met at the protest camp in Staffordshire, England. A lot of things that get called direct action nowadays, I would say, are very... big media stunts. Performatively, they don't actually challenge anything. They don't actually cause any meaningful stoppage of work, any meaningful damage to an organisation that is causing harm.

are you talking about like things like xr yeah things like xr but like it's it's i think it's shifted the whole language like anything anything the way you sort of like have a target that you then do a thing to do if people call it a direct action it's like well is it like did you tangibly impact their financial bottom line like did you stop things being made no well

Was it direct action? I don't know. I'm interested in that and in what role that plays in the pacification of movements, in this change in what people understand as direct action. Some days I feel like there are more people who want to do something and other days I feel like people are just more overwhelmed now that actually no one knows what to do and this pacifying of like what actions you can do to stop things.

has in a way made that worse because people feel like they'll just do just just do anything just do something and it'll it'll make a change i think that's dangerous like i think that's my big critiques of xr it's just like lots of people just going out and just being like well i'll just do something lying in the road it's going to make a difference you know it's not Well I think they've got some reasonable points there to be honest.

We took the criticisms we've heard to XR co-founder Dr. Gail Bradbrook, who has herself gone further than most of the XR protesters. She's broken windows at Barclays Bank and the UK Transport Ministry. Whenever I explain to people why I've broken two window panes... And I take them through it. And at the end of it, I would say, why on earth have I only broken two window panes given what we're dealing with?

I think it comes down to theories of change and how you think change happens and where you most feel that you could be effective and what other responsibilities you also have in your life.

And if XR are controversial, one of their other founders is very controversial. When we spoke with terrorism analyst Scott Stewart, he brought up Roger Hallam, one of the co-founders of XR you heard earlier. Here's a quote from the advice to young people as they face annihilation. Scott reads part of an essay Roger wrote. Public order will break down and it will happen quickly because people get hungry. People will break into stores and into houses and take what they can.

and kill those who stand in their way. The end point of social collapse then is war played out in every city, every neighborhood, every street. The essay talks about a gang breaking into your home. There's references to rape. Torture. Murder. They'll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change. That's what I would call an apocalyptic.

grievance narrative based on the science of climate change. So you would classify him then as an extremist? Yes. We asked Roger about Scott's comments, and in an email, he told us, Welcome to reality, Scott. Quote from that other terrorist, Sir David King. former chief scientific advisor to the British government in 2021. We have to act quickly. What we do, I believe, in the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity.

As a trained sociologist, I would interrupt this Oxbridge speak as billions will be slaughtered and starved to death. Roger Hallam is provocative. That's his whole shtick. But he goes way beyond pointing at the fact that polar ice is melting and fires are tearing up the planet. He sparked fury when it was reported that he said certain members of parliament...

should have bullets put through their heads. And outrage when he made comments about the Holocaust. Roger told us, I did not say that people should have bullets put through their heads. On the Holocaust comments, I have done over 150 interviews, and this was three words.

taken out of context, I was having an argument with the journalist who refused to emotionally connect with the injustice of what we are doing to the poor in the global South. It is self-evident that I am neither anti-Semitic nor belittling the Holocaust. In 2020, XR distanced themselves from Roger, issuing a statement of separation, stating he no longer held any formal role in the movement.

Since then, Roger Hallam has started several new movements that aim to be even more disruptive than XR. You might have heard of Insulate Britain, which campaigns to ensure homes are insulated to be low energy. And Just Stop Oil, which... Kind of does what it says. Under his steer, protesters block oil terminals and motorways at rush hour. One day last summer, before we'd spoken to Scott, Georgia had ridden her bike down to Roger's office. When Georgia had arrived, he was on a Zoom call.

You're dead as well. And then there's a sweet spot in between. Now, no one actually knows where that sweet spot is. But as a general rule of thumb, it's a lot higher up than you think. Roger tells me how he came to be an activist. I mean, I've been an organic farmer for 20 years, so I suppose my relationship to the earth is something like grudging respect. I've got a pretty intimate knowledge of what nature is. I did have a sort of penny drops moment.

when it rained every day for seven weeks. So I lost 15 acres of vegetables in four weeks, about £100,000. 20-odd people lost their jobs, and I had a semi-nervous breakdown. It is sort of shatters your humanistic sort of pretense, as it were, that everything's fine. And it was at that point where I knew in a visceral sense we're heading for mass starvation.

We asked Roger about the actions of the Earth Liberation Front 20 years ago. What those guys failed to do was to get to takeoff, right? Whatever, 10 or 20. people do is never going to change history only changes history to the extent that it lights a fire right i'm not making a moral judgment of what they did i'm just saying that it's highly unlikely that it was ever going to create takeoff

The optimal design is this civil resistance rapid mobilisation model, which is totally possible at the present moment, because unlike 20 years ago, as we all know, everyone's, you know, shitting themselves now. And that's what he's doing with his new movements. What he was doing on that Zoom call, trying to get people on board. If you want to save the next generation, this is absolutely what you want to be listening to, right? You don't want to be listening to another podcast about...

you know, why killing salmon is a bad idea. Everyone knows killing salmon is a bad idea, right? The key question of our time is how the fuck are we going to survive? You can basically say the next generation would... two percent of the american population mobilized engage in an intense interrelationship between high level disruption and intense mobilization so if you're just doing one or the other you're not going to get anywhere

Earlier in the series, you heard from Rupert Reed. He was also on the ground floor of Extinction Rebellion. But he's gone in a different direction too. The reality is that a lot of people feel that there are significant barriers of entry. for them with radical environmental activism. But unlike Roger, advocating for actions that are more disruptive than XR, Rupert argues that for direct action to really work needs to be more mainstream and moderate.

Everyone should want to join in. He calls this the moderate flank. The environmental movement has been doing quite a good job recently of trying to be more inclusive towards people of colour, towards people from historically oppressed groups. But it, I think, has not done such a good job of being inclusive towards people with differing political opinions. And it's not done a terribly good job either, frankly, of being inclusive towards people from a different class background.

What I want to see and what I believe will occur is a much larger mobilisation of people who are more moderate than, say, Extinction Rebellion, but more radical than almost any other existing... mainstream groups. So I don't think that most people need to engage in non-violent direct action. If we had a lot more people

being determined, for example, that their employers or the institution where they spend most of their time should be serious about moving really fast to reduce its climate and biodiversity impacts. That would be a game changer. If we're going to win, we need a hell of a lot more people on board. As opposed to the radical flank effect, I'm trying to create this moderate flank. The climate movement has to be ready to grow exponentially.

And that means it can't be puristic. It can't just be the same old insiders. And if that makes people feel uncomfortable, well then get ready to feel uncomfortable. We have to lower barriers to entry. We have to wonder what activism might look like going forward as the heat slowly gets turned up under the planet. As we all start to feel a little bit more like we're lobsters in a pot of simmering water. Five years ago...

No one knew the name XR before they burst onto the streets with their direct action and disruption. So what comes after? As the next incarnation of environmental groups find themselves asking the same questions Chelsea, Daniel, Joe, and maybe Sunshine once did. What's the most effective way to bring about change? How far? is too far to go. Where we're at now, you've got a world that is talking about this is real. Former spokesperson of the Earth Liberation Front, Leslie Pickering.

The science is real and we need to do something about it and then not a whole lot of follow-up while the clock is ticking. So that's a stressful situation that creates desperate people. But I believe... If people aren't satisfied with the kind of movement towards change that they feel needs to happen, then sooner or later you see people finding other ways to bring that change about. If things don't change, someday we might be doing something besides destroying property and I don't want to be...

pointing the finger at those people and saying you're not justified. Because we've tried so many things all along the way. Every now and then, you hear about violence being committed in the name of the environment. In Mexico, a group called Individualists Tending to the Wild, inspired by Ted Kaczynski, have mailed bombs to people. This year in Scotland, a man planted a bomb filled with nails in a park in the name of that group.

group. I live in Oregon and last year we had the temperatures got to 115 degrees Fahrenheit and a bunch of farm workers here died. die in the heat. So this is the thing, right? They didn't die. They were killed. XR founder Dr. Gail Bradbrook. People aren't just dying. The decisions that people are making are killing people. It's not as direct as going up to somebody with a gun and shooting them of course but it's resulting in people's deaths. Do you think that we could see more...

militant actions as climate change becomes more desperate. The ante may get upped a bit. Well, I would hope the ante gets upped, but I think there are different ways to up the ante. There can be... that fierce protection energy that can be misplaced into activities that risk life and that may happen but i think What's really needed in these times is for people to wake up to their own agency and to our togetherness. That work is in some ways softer. It's relational.

And it's not always as appealing to those that want to feel that they're doing something out there and getting something done. It doesn't need every person to be the proverbial, gluing yourself to the building thing. Even if it feels like a really small act of repair, you know, go and plant some... wildflower bulbs in a in a place to help help nature you know we're a keystone species we're ecosystem engineers we're here to make it more beautiful go and do a piece of that and find your agency

Do it for selfish reasons, because it's joyful. We have heard about so much destruction, so it's refreshing to hear what Gail's saying. That maybe a softer approach gives each individual person some semblance of control. And violence ultimately turns human beings into enemies. And that's how wars start.

We asked Roger Hallam. Do you worry that violence could be something that people would resort to in an act of desperation? People can be as desperate as hell, but it doesn't mean they turn to violence.

the degeneration of violence is really the adoption of a philosophy that justifies othering so as soon as your philosophy can justify saying that someone's intrinsically a fucker then you're along the road saying that you can kill that person to answer your question will they or won't they well you know it's pretty indeterminate right but the race is on the race is certainly on

that the civil resistance methodology needs to prove its worth in the next two to three years. Roger told us about the dangers of othering. People we've spoken to for this series have told us similar things.

that they've been othered or looked down on by environmentalists, or seen the activists as middle-class, woke urban liberals who are projecting their values onto rural or working-class life. In Klatskenai, Oregon, where the Earth Liberation Front lit the fires at the tree farm, people's definition of environmentalism comes from that particular time in history. They remember things like Warner Creek and the fire at the Poplar Tree Farm. Did it color how people thought of environmentalists? Yeah.

I think it did. Debra Steele-Hazen, the former editor at the newspaper in Klatskenai. Most people that work in the logging and fishing industry consider themselves conservationists. You know, they consider they're doing a good job at sustaining the resource. So they look at it differently than, you know, within what they consider the more extreme kind of environmentalists.

Right, and tell you you're raping the forest when you know that four or five generations of your family have degrees in forestry from Oregon State University and are sustaining this resource. So you take it personally when people come in and tell you how to live? Yeah, you bet. I do. They probably should have to come and live in the community and work here. Mike Seeley, the mint farmer. And see...

really what people are like. We're all just trying to make a living and we're trying to do it right. They need to understand that we all want this to be around for a long, long time. And Michelle and Dave Warden. standing outside the burnt shell of their house. They don't live in our world. I don't know where they're at, what they're doing, but it's not out here.

And some of the members of the family and activists from that time have told us how sure of themselves they once were. There was a certain arrogance with activism. Tim Lewis and Eugene. There was a certain self-righteous bullshit that goes on. Well, how do I know that? It's because I was that myself. I was this arrogant, self-righteous son of a bitch. I was pretty insufferable. I pretty much thought I had all the answers.

And Chelsea Gerlach. What an insufferable, self-righteous jerk I was. I had a degree of certainty about my view of the world and didn't feel any... need to listen to other perspectives, was certain to the degree that I was willing to force my will on others. The certainty they were on the right side wasn't only on the part of the Earth Liberation Front either.

Jane Quimby, the FBI agent who would go on to charge and arrest Chelsea Gerlach and see to it that she and the other members of the family were locked up. It was really challenging but a lot of fun to put a major case like that together. She made it no secret she wanted these people brought down. You know, at the time, you're really hard-charging. You're thinking, gosh, this is the biggest thing ever, and what these people did is so wrong. And something she said stuck out to Georgia and I.

As I've maybe mellowed a little bit, you know, some of these folks, I would rather maybe at this point sit down and have a beer with them as opposed to putting handcuffs on them. Months later, as we talked to Jane for what we thought would be the final time. Georgia and I wondered how serious she was about that. Would she really sit down and have a beer with the person she worked so hard to put behind bars? Turns out, yeah, she meant it.

Next time, the retired eco-terrorist and the retired FBI agent who jailed her sit down together for the first time in 20 years. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. And talk. That's even some, you know, funny, some of my friends that I'm talking, they're like, you're doing what? Burn Wild is presented by me. Leah Cittilli. Co-written by me and the producer, who's Georgia Cat. Fact-checking by Rob Byrne. The theme is by Echo Collective.

Composed, performed, and produced by Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermont. And recorded, mixed, and produced by Fabian LeSueur. The brilliant composer and sound designer Phil Channel has taken that theme, and along with new compositions, he's created the sound for this series, including some pretty cool field recordings in the trees. Podcast script recorded and engineered by Slater Swan at Anjuna Recording Studio. Series Studio and Mixing by Sarah Hockley.

The commissioning executive is Dylan Haskins. The editor is Philip Sellers. Burn Wild is a BBC Audio Documentaries production for BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Sounds. Please subscribe so you don't miss an episode and leave a review to help other people find us. I'm Adrian Dunbar, and this is a story about a time in Irish society when nothing was ever quite what it seemed. It was shock and horror that anything could actually happen like that in the Phoenix Park. It was wrong, unviolet and obscene.

Welcome to Obscene, the Dublin Scandal. There's nothing fires up the imagination in a small country more than the idea there's someone wandering around who's going for anyone. We couldn't believe that this culprit for these crimes would have been associated with the most senior law officer in the country. country. If this thing is what we think it is, it would bring down the government. Listen to All of Obscene, the Dublin Scandal first on BBC Sounds.

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