Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that sometimes people try to do things to stop the bad things. I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy, and with me today is a guest who's named Sarah Marshall.
Hi Sarah, that's true. Hi Margaret, I'm so happy to be here. Yay, as you do a cool thing.
Sarah is the host of You're Wrong about Did you ever go through a period where it was going to end with dot dot dot in the title.
I feel like there's like an implied dot dot dot and I've seen it rendered that way. It's like the question mark and who's the boss?
Do you think that? Every now and then they accidentally wrote it as who is the boss?
Or like who's who se the boss? Like who's the boss?
Is this? It's gotta be someone's. Is it yours? CAF? I wonder, I don't. It might have been a different It was one of these things, one of these very very simple the way that english and contractions work. Where I was working on this activist zine during occupy or whatever, and we were like put out a new zine every week with news, and my co editor was like, who wrote this fucking article and looked at me and was like it couldn't have been you. They used like, who's wrong,
and I was like, I wrote that one. We have not had much.
Sleep really, as we can see, my faculties are deteriorating.
Yeah, it is twenty eleven and occupy has destroyed all of our brains. But what hasn't destroyed our brains is our producer. Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi.
I just wonder Sarah. Question for Sarah. How many times are you having a conversation with somebody and do they go that could be something that people are wrong about maybe maybe you should do as a topic for your show. How often does that happen?
You know, I hardly socialize, so not that much, but like probably on average three times a month. And my my favorite is when it's on something that like, if you've listened to the show, it really like has nothing to do with anything we've ever talked about, but.
It's but it's a thing to you know what.
I'm sure people say this to you both where people are like, I'm sure there are too many podcasts already. I use you know, I'm sure you would you don't think people should start podcasts and I'm like, no, start your own podcasts and then you won't try and get me to do it for you.
That yes, yeah, yeah.
Also, I think you do socialize more than that that you think, because I saw you this week and I'm seeing you again.
That's true. Well that's the Sophie exception.
I'm like, I'm like, three times a month, honey.
Honey, how many Sophie, how many like hard introverts do you have in your life?
Like?
How many of us are you? Our primary socialization?
Well that's because that's because we all find each other. Yeah, fair enough, we all find each other. We're like, do you want to.
Hear like the center of the wagon wheel?
We're like, do you want to do something that's not overstimulating with me? Great, low stakes, let's go.
Yeah, one other over stimulant note. Our audio engineer is Danel.
It is Daniel Hi, Danel.
I love you, Hi, Danel Hi Danel. Our theme music is written for us by unwoman Sarah. Have you ever ever heard of the environment? Oh?
Yes, I'm in Portland, so we heard of the environment two years before everyone else.
That actually is oddly the theme of this whoops kind of because the next question I had written in my scripts. Have you ever heard of the Pacific Northwest? I have?
Yeah, I know of it, and it's works. I'm a fan.
How about the Earth Liberation Front?
I don't know, because I feel like when I was growing up, they were all kinds of environmentalist groups, but they all kind of blurred together in my little brain. So I honestly can't tell you fair enough. I don't know how how much you tell the public.
Did where did you grow up? You don't have to answer this. Oh, yeah, well I grew up outside Portland, Okay, so in the Pacific Northwest.
Yeah, in the Northwest, in the Portland I definitely call the Portland area home and Oregon in general. And then of course if you're in Portland, then like we claim southern Washington as kind of ours. Sorry Washington, but you get to come over here to avoid sales tax, so it's nice. And so, you know, to me, an iconic Northwesterner is famous for doing something that was dangerous to themselves.
And so my favorite is Harry Truman, the old man who refused to evacuate because of Mount Saint Helen's blowing up, and you know, apparently died in the blast like he wanted.
It was his choice.
M M. Well, that's sort of related to what we're going to talk about. It's definitely about people in the Pacific Northwest deciding to make some decisions that in some ways didn't go well for them and in some ways. But did we say they were going to yeah, exactly. They didn't really make the claim that they were getting out of it unscathed Magpie.
Am I right that maybe Sarah might know them better by their nickname the Elves.
Maybe it's like familiar, but in the sense of like I feel like, you know, if you go to the country Fair a few times, then like you overlap with people who have more serious thoughts, then let's eat mushrooms in the woods.
There is a non zero chance, this is a very high chance that many of the convicted terrorists were going to talk about today we're at the country Oregon Country Fair at some point or another. Amazing because today we are going to talk about a bunch of ecoanarchis, punks and hippies who in the nineties and into the early aughts caused millions of dollars in damages to earth destroying machinery all without killing or injuring anyone. They were branded
as terrorists. They were hunted for years. One of them is still being hunted today. Their movement, or at least the you know, the specifically late named Earth Liberation Front, fizzled out and their tactics remain divisive. I have no doubt that there, if there are people around to write history books one hundred years from now, they'll be seen pretty clearly as heroes, not as like the John Brown of the environment, because they didn't actually spark anything. That's
not sure. They sparked some very specific things, quite a lot of things, but.
I see what you did there.
Yeahs fire, Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
They are real flawed heroes. Their actions may or may not have been strategic. A bunch of them regret the choices that they made. However, a lot of what we have about them regretting the choices they made are them talking to judges who are deciding how many years they should send in prison. And I have a feeling people are more sorry for their crimes when someone is holding
a gun to their head. Sure, but they showed that some people are willing to go pretty fucking far in order to save the world from boiling, and we're going to talk about them. I'm excited, and don't worry. We're going to start with the French Revolution. Why not? Why not?
I'm always saying that, honey, can we have the French Revolution.
Let's just stop. It's on the way home. We have a French Revolution at home, and then the French Revolution at home is just the teen earrings that some hipster is wearing. So not because the French Revolution was so great. Does so many things start with the French Revolution, But because Europe colonize the world, so all of their random
ideas have outsized impacts. But we're going to start with a mathematician who served on the revolutionary committee in his neighborhood during the revolution and faced the same thing that many of the revolutionaries did, which was that he immediately almost got guillotined himself. His name was Jean Baptiste Joseph Free. He is not super important to this story, but I like drawing red yarn across a conspiracy board. That's basically
my job. And he ties into the French Revolution, which means after helping bring democratic ideals, so the West de you know, was arrested twice by the revolution was going to get guillotined, but he didn't. He said he did a lot of science, Like he writes papers with names like on the propagation of heat and solid bodies, And this is not the name of art porn to my knowledge. If someone makes it, it's still available. Yeah, he does
something really important to our story. In eighteen twenty four, he was like, hey, everyone, I did an awful lot of math, and the Earth should be way colder than it is based on how far away it is from the sun. Something is insulating us. Wow. Yeah, So he's a nineteenth century scientist, so he gets obsessed with blankets and insulation and he wraps himself in a blanket all the time for the rest of his life.
That's what I want to do. For different reasons.
Well, here's the reason to be careful with cozy core. He tripped on his blanket, fell down the stairs, and died.
Oh oh boy, you gotta take the blanket off sometimes. But I appreciate the dedication. Yeah, there is a literal and metaphorical lesson here.
Wait, I knew there was a thing I don't.
Like that, which is why we should destroy stairs. No other lesson could be learned from this No before he died, I just like going into the personal lives of these men, because it's never what people talk about. Ever married. He wrote a detailed description of how handsome and in love he was with a certain male doctor. So of course the internet is like, well, he was never married, and he made friends a lot of women, so he was a womanizer.
Mm hmmm, because straight men loved to hang out with women.
Yeah, there's the rare ones that do. And then half of us come out as trans So the next scientist in this chain of oh shit, global warming is actually happening, which we all figured out in the nineteenth century, and it took till the twenty first century before even people would admit it anyway, was a woman named Eunice Newton Foot, and no one listened to her because her last name was Foot. No, just kidding this. Because she was a woman,
she was also politically involved. Global warming has always been a woke conspiracy. In this case, she was American, and she was in the nineteenth century, and she was a white woman, so she was involved in all the US stuff at the style. At the time, she was a fierce abolitionist. She was into getting women some basic rights, and while we're at it, no one should be allowed to drink alcohol anymore. Two out of three, you know, Yeah, I'll take a partialll win.
Yeah.
I'll probably never directly cover the temperance movement on this podcast because it is not cool. People did cool stuff, but it ties into it all, Like there's all this stuff that around the turn of the century, like eugenics and temperance, that were like not the right wing issues
that you would picture them as today. Anyway, she married a feminist man, and since she was a woman and her science was like amateur right, because she was a woman, everything she patented she had to patent under her husband's name, because women didn't have enough legal rights to sue of her patents. She discovered the insulating properties of CO two, not in nineteen fifty six that she is not a liitch or a vampire to my knowledge. In eighteen fifty six,
despite what More wrote in her script. In eighteen fifty six, she presented her theory that quote an atmosphere of gas would give to our earth a high temperature, and if, as some suppose, at one period in its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must necessarily have resulted, So we've definitely
had time to prepare. Yeah, embarrassing, this is. I mean, they knew that CO two warmed the atmosphere before we started putting CO two into the atmosphere at scale with the industrial society.
Well may you put it that way? And to quote Jack Nicholson and The Shining, you've had your whole fucking life to think things over. What gets a few more minutes going to do you?
Now? Oh god, that's that is what's going to happen. So she had this theory and she went to go present this theory. But I'm just kidding. She didn't present her theory. She had to have a male friend present her theory because women did not present such things.
She had to put a bunch of docsins in a three piece suit and hope for the best.
Yeah, and the man who did present it started off by saying science was of no country and no sex. So the men in her life aren't like capitalizing off of her. They're actually supporting her, and they're really fucking annoyed about all this. Too good for them, Yeah, However, they're hanging out in friends of a woman, so clearly, well one of them's married to her, so I guess he's he's probably womanizing her.
Isn't woman eyes like say, woman is? It sounds like a term like martinize or simonize, like, you know, just a quick and easy process for turning someone into a woman.
That would be ideal. Let's push for it.
Yeah, yeah, one hour womanizing.
Yeah, the woman the Womanizer store or you know, it's all these horrible misogynists. Men go there thinking that something different is going to happen than what does.
Now there's an eighties comedy. Okay, so this is like one of those pieces of news where you're like, wow, humans are capable of both so much and so little. Like we discovered CO two would be a problem before we started doing the problem.
Yeah.
Next up is Vante Ernius, who is a Swedish chemist. He was an early birth control advocate, tying into that other problematic movement, eugenics. But in eighteen ninety six he was the first person to actually calculate global warming based on human cause CO two emissions. This is, you know, a couple decades into the CO two emissions and he's like, oh, let's math this out, and I put it together. He was as kind of a dick. He married one of his former pupils, which is essentially never a good look.
And then he wound up on the Nobel Prize committee and he just like played favorites and he got all of his friends Nobel Prizes and all of his enemies. I didn't get them. But he calculated global warming flawed. People do real interesting things. That should actually be the title of this show that can be your spinoff TV series. Yes, please give me the TV series. By the nineteen fifties,
you now get a Canadian this time. So we've got four different countries represented in this particular quick overview of people who called this a long time ago. And his name is Gilbert Plas and he started making a name. Oh yeah, totally. Also, okay, now to picture this man. This man is the ultimate like fifties stereotype man. He is a stamp collector, He has a classical music DJ and he worked on the Manhattan Project. What wow.
So this guy is like played by David Stratheron in the biopic.
I don't know who that is.
I hope he's mister goodnight and good luck God. I really sound like my mom these days, where he's like, instead of the person's name, you guess group for like the name of the thing you can first think of them being in.
So instead of Helen, time about you.
Yeah, Magpie usually doesn't get most references.
Nice I'm thinking of like David Strath Aaron I hope people agree with me, is like the archetypal, handsome, long suffering, thin lipped mid sanctuary man. He also played mister Lowenstein in A League of their Own. Oh yeah, that's relevant.
Okay, but I've seen the League of their Own and I've now looked him up. Yes, this man did play him.
Yeah, we did at the Academy. We've had We've had a good year.
We've done it.
Portland is a second rate city in many ways, but we're a first rate, second run movie city.
I'll have you all know. I did see a lot of good movies at the cheap theaters there.
But okay, so we have we have a serious man, if you will.
He starts making predictions about climate change that are more or less accurate now seventy years ago, there is someone doing the math that more or less lines up. So We've known about human caused climate change for a long long time. Yeah. Next, we're going to talk about the first ELF. People talk about the ELF, and they're usually talking about the main ELF, the Earth Liberation Front. But there was a different group of gorilla eco radical people,
probably just one guy, but had a group name. This ELF was called the Environmental Life Force. This is probably one man who did a few actions in nineteen seventy seven in California and Oregon. His name is John Hannah. He was a I don't know if he's still alive, but he was alive as of two thousand and eight. It was the last interview I read with him. He
was an anti war vet in the sixties. He'd gotten out of the military before the Vietnam War and then he went off to school to study marine biology to environmental stuff, but then he got caught up in the anti war movement, dropped out of school. He was in students for Democratic Society, but it wasn't radical enough for him.
So he had this whole elaborate plan where he was going to go to Thailand to hijack a B fifty two bomber and then like protest the war by blowing it up, not with people in it, but like landing it and then blowing it up. Cool. And then he didn't do it because he went to Thailand and was like starting to figure it out, and then he was like, oh, I'm I can't do this by myself and he went home. Later.
Our second tie into the Manhattan Project opposite side of it, he was a civilian deckhand on a ship that brought medical survey teams out to the Marshall Islands, which is where all the atomic bombs were get it had been tested right, and for decades afterwards they would go and use humans as guinea pigs to see what had happened to the people who had been exposed to all this horrible fucking mass death that the US had done.
If you want to know more about the Marshall Islands and just going to plug Jim's stouted series on it could happen here that he did on the Marshall Islands, check that out.
It is real good and it's where everything I know about the Marshall Islands comes from. Yeah, So he goes out there and he sees firsthand how everyone has been treated like human guinea pigs, and he's like, man, this is not increasing my theory about the US government and capitalism and it being good. In nineteen seventy seven, he's living in an agricultural area in California. I think he's living like later he's in Santa Cruz, but I think he's rural at this point. And his girlfriend is disabled.
She'd been exposed to pesticide while working at a cannery. One day, he's driving home and his crop duster plane flies over her head and he just gets a face full of pesticides before he can roll up the window. And he's recently been reading Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring and another book from a local professor about pesticides. He writes up a report of the incident for the agricultural commissioner, and nothing came of it, so he's like, all right,
I'm gonna do something about this. In nineteen seventy seven, he took the first action as the elf. This one has nothing whatever. I just he used an airgun to shoot out the windows of a vacation home of a county supervisor. And he did this because quote the action was in retaliation for the jailhouse death of Larry Williams, a young black inmate, he went into a diabetic shock
and died for lack of an insolent shot. The county supervisor whose windows he shot out the vacation home of later went on to be known a little bit more as Dianne Feinstein, who was mayor of Sanecisco. Yeah, and then US Senator and paved the way for the antediluvian rule of the country. Well, great timing.
I don't usually expect to get a Feinstein drop in this podcast.
Einstein, you can tell because I didn't even know how to pronounce her name. But what I also don't know how to pronounce are the names of all of our advertisers, because they're randomly generated, and if you have them is because capitalism is a nightmare machine that we're all trapped inside of and the machine is bleeding to death. Help me.
Here's some ads, and we're back.
And so the ELF, the Environmental Life Force, took credit for that attack on Feinstein's Feinstein Feinstein, Einstein, she's dead, yeah whatever. Then on May first, he tried to set fire to seven crop dusters at a local airport, which makes sense. They'd just been dousing him with poison. He's real careful to make sure that no one's hurt. He sets the timers to go off at two am. The napalm is constructed carefully and not to spread the fire. And I will not be talking about how he did that.
Thank you. That's going to come up a couple times. How I am not talking about some of this shit. We'll talk about why because people get arrested for talking about it, which is fucked up anyway. And then he waits around the crime scene, ready to intercept anyone who might show up who could accidentally get hurt. It's like an airport in the middle of nowhere, but he's like not taking any chances. He's like, I will go down before anyone gets hurt from my actions. Huh. I love that. Yeah.
He also didn't make the fire bombs right. The blasting caps go off, but not the napalm, and he pretty much just scuffed the paint on the planes. He writes this communica. Sorry, the elf writes this communica. He again almost certainly just him. But people want to have their things that they say. He wants to say that there's a whole bunch of them, so that's great. And he in the communicy is like listing off alternatives to pesticides.
Then he drove up to Oregon and bombed a paper company office in Oregon City fair enough on August first. And the reason he did this they owned a tree farm that sprayed herbicides and that herbicides were leaching into streams and killing salmon and shit. So locals had chained themselves to trees to try and stop the paper company. Right, so a helicopter sprayed all the activists with herbicide Jesus So John Hannah drove up there instead a small pipe
bomb at their offices. He was really unexcited about people being sprayed with chemicals. Again, no one is hurt in this case. He actually writes about how he was like he wasn't even like the later elf is trying to maximize economic damage. He's just trying to get attention, like draw attention of things. So it's like a small pipe
bom that like blows out a window. Then on November twenty second, nineteen seventy seven, the ATF and local SWAT arrested him in his house in Santa Cruz because they traced the copy machine that the communicats had been copied on, and basically, oh yeah, like there's a ways that copy machines like and printers actually leave specific like traceable information, and so they figured out where they were being printed off at went to the place and was like, hey,
then your employees have a problem with the environment and how it's been treated, and like his girlfriend worked there. Ah shit, Yeah. So he told them he'd acted alone, and then he says in interviews like as late as two thousand and eight, he's like, look, there's no statute of limitations on terrorism, so I'm going to continue to tell you that I acted alone, which is his like wink wink, nudge, nudge. Maybe I didn't act alone. I think he worked alone. Again whatever, not a problem, but
he got sentenced to five years in prison. After a bit he was out on probation. He genuinely sees what he did as counterproductive. This isn't a like I told the judge, Hey, Bud, I'm sorry, wish I hadn't done it. If I could go only I could take back, take it back, turn back time that song you know anyway,
m hmm. And one of the reasons he changed his mind is because he talked with one of the activists who've been sprayed with herbicide up in Oregon, and that person told him that after the bombing, the activist lost all credibility and the campaign fell apart. He became a strong believer in strict nonviolence. He also, and I think this strains credulity, he claims that he knew the founder of the next incarnation of the ELF over in the UK, and that he tried to talk the person out of it.
So let's talk about that next incarnation about fifteen years later. Is the main one we're going to discuss this week. The actual ELF, the one with more than one person in it, may or may not have gotten inspiration from the environmental life Force, but I can point to two very specific places it absolutely did come from. First First. You ever heard Earth First?
Yeah, I do. That's the group that I remember most being active or kind of knowing about tangjanctually in the mid two thousands when I was growing up.
Yeah, I did Earth First organizing in Portland in the mid twenty twere you were growing up, Yeah, yep. Earth First, which I've whatever. I'm pretty public about that. They're an above ground organization. I talked about them a bunch. If people want to hear me talk more about Earth First. I talked about them in my episode about Judy Berry, who was an anarchist organizer who was bombed probably by
the FEDS in the year nineteen ninety. I'm going to rudely split Earth First into two parts of its history, the original and then what it's been for most of its existence since the first version. The early years of Earth First had the unofficial slogan Rednecks for Wilderness. They were one organization in which its members did both non violent civil disobedience and also a whole bunch of sabotage. They called it monkey wrenching, and this is named after
a book by Sabbey Problematic Fave. Yeah, probably will do an episode about the monkey Wrenchers. At some point, two tensions started cropping up within Earth First First. There was this tension between the quote tofu eating anarchists who were also mostly actually rural and rednecks, but they were like more feminist, anti authoritarian, and lessened to the American flag and some of the some of but not all of the founders who are like the American flag is our symbol.
We are rednecks, just like Edward Abbey. We think it's cool to throw beer cans out the window while we're fighting for the environment, you know whatever. I have very low opinions of Edward Abbey. Someone I feel very bad. One of my friends like, you were gonna do an episode at Edward Abbey, and I'm like, I am not. He was a xenophobe who believed in close borders and very nim be whatever.
Anyway, Yeah, the libertarian river that runs through all this is you know, there are many rapids.
Yeah, totally, totally. So in the end, the Tofu Eating Anarchists one and the American flag Waivers left. This is many of the founders made this transition to this new version of the group or were always the Tofu Eating anarchists.
And when I've talked with people who are from that period, they say that there's these divisions are like kind of overblown and like really like one of the main histories of Earth First was written a while ago, and as written by a journalist who very very much was on the side of one of the original like redneck for wilderness guys and so like, it colors a lot of the Median narrative where people are looking for a split that wasn't whatever anyway, there's less bad blood than people say.
But there's another tension that could not last in an organization, the tension of having an above ground organization like Earth First. They don't have a membership roster and is decentralized, but they have meetings and they have gatherings, and they like do things in public, and they chained themselves to things and shit. Right, if you're doing that, you can't be
the same group that burns things at night. So you have this tension between above ground illegalism like tree sitting in roadblockades and underground illegalism like tree spiking and arson and you know, destroying bulldozers and stuff. The new earth First didn't condemn the underground stuff. They just didn't do it.
It was separate. Lots of imprisoned Arsenists came out of Earth First ranks, and Earth First and related organizations ran and run legal support campaigns for these prisoners, but it was distinct from Earth First itself. And this isn't like wink wink nudge nudge handwavings. It's true. I was involved in Earth First fair amount, and I never knew whenever people would get caught for felony stuff, I'd be like Holy shit, really, you know, mm hmm, because it was
separate Earth versus still around. Its slogan is no compromise in defense of the Earth. I like them that has probably come across. And then there's one another origin point where the Earth Libration Front gets its name, which is not I don't know why, I'm like picking a fight with this old guy who's probably whatever. They didn't get their name from the Whatever, the old one. They got it from the Animal Liberation Front. Mm. Ever, the Animal Liberation.
Front, yes, but weirdly only through a TC Boile story, which is an embarrassing way to learn about the world because it's about I feel like so many of his stories, we're just like I met a hot woman who was doing something strange and it's about like dating an alf activist.
Cool. Wait, if you think of the story, will you let me know what it is? I really like tracing representation of this type of group in fiction.
It's a short story called Carnal Knowledge.
Okay, okay, that perfect sounds dirty old man, but you know, yeah, oh yeah, carnal Knowledge. It does. It does.
Also the name of the movie where Jack Nicholson played a college student when he was like thirty nine years old. But that's a separate.
Issue of God. Yeah, so the Animal Liberation Front. My disclaimer here, I have been vegan for long enough that my veganism is old enough to drink at bars. I am overall supportive of the Animal Liberation Front and a lot of it's things, but my support is not without caveats in this and specifically, I have a lot of
issues with the way that vegan activism is done. I don't believe eating animals is inherently morally wrong, and I don't have an issue with people who hunt for food, and I support indigenous fishing and hunting rights in particular. I think that a lot of animal rights activism is too black and white, and I have issues with a lot of it. That said, when people rescue animals and give them new homes and care for them, I am happy. At the core of it. That is what the Animal
Liberation Front does. At the core of it is, you know, they go into places where they believe animals are being mistreated, and they take those animals out and they find them sanctuary. I will probably not do an alf episode. Maybe one day, I don't know. I'm going to speed run them really quick in the nineteenth century in England. Eh, speed run, I'm going back to ninth century. You had all of these teach kids to be nice to animals, organizations called
Bands of Mercy, which is a cool name. They stuck around for a while and then they petered out. Then in nineteen sixty three of the Hunt Saboteurs Association that in England they would go around and like fuck up staghound hunting events, which is not where people hunt staghounds, is when they use staghounds to hunt stags. I have no idea that that was the thing people did. It does seem like less cartoonishly scary and British than fox hunting. But yeah, wow, yeah, it was like, you know, you're
always rooting for whatever king to get gord. When this happens, it happened so rarely, so volunteers would start showing up in the sixties and blow hunting horns and put down false sents and shit to disrupt the hunts. Some of the hunt Saboteurs took up the name Band of Mercy and started slashing hunters tires and breaking windows and again whatever we're not talking about like the deer hunter in Kentucky, we are talking about a class based thing. In England.
In nineteen seventy three, they burned down a pharmaceutical research laboratory the Band of Mercy. In nineteen seventy four they burned down some boats that were seal hunting. Then they liberated six guinea pigs, the first direct animal liberation of the movement. Wow. And then something that happened that I think is really important, which gets at the core of the strategic complexity of this kind of action, happened. The hunt saboteurs were like, hey, these guys, ain't us about
Band of Mercy. We blow horns and stuff. We don't slash tires. That's a step too far, don't I mean whatever. They went from slashing tires to burning things down, But they also offered a reward to anyone who rated out the Band of Mercy, which is a classic. We agree with your morals, but not your tactics. Combined with the classic and we'll sell you out to the system we claim to hate in order to curry favor from that system.
In nineteen seventy six, some arrested Band of Mercy folks got out of prison and changed the name to the Animal Liberation Front. Which is certainly more hardcore. But Band of Mercy is a pretty good name, just saying it's fucking fantastic.
And with the animal liberation front, I really am stuck on the fact that they only needed two more words and then they could have been Alfie.
But now they're an alien that eats cats. Yeah that's good too. Wait alf must have come after this Alf's eighties, right, right, So it was alf named after that, I certainly hope. So yeah, I'm just gonna say yes, absolutely, it's head cannon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a complicated show, you know. Yeah, guy watched it as a kid and have not thought about it since. But I had an alf skateboard when I was in middle school. Nice and it was a he was skateboarding
on the skateboard. Oh so asive skateboard. Yeah, I always liked it.
When I'll say, you would have, as a kid, like a Spider Man costume and then there would be a graphic of Spider Man on the chest, And as a kid, I was like, this completely takes me out of it. What kind of a superhero would wear a smaller image of themselves on their own.
Clothes and yet here you are wearing a sweater with your face on it?
Does that sweater have your face on it?
No, but it has a whale with a neutral expression. This for the White Whale bookstore in Pittsburgh, and their mascot is a little whale who's just happy to be here.
I like to think. For the record, I did not know what was on the shirt before I said the joke that I made.
But I mean, like I on my best days, I feel like I'm just a whale, just you know, swimming around sifting out tons of krill with my Baileen.
Well, now I feel bad because actually one of the actions that didn't get claimed by the ALF, but was a very ALF, the action in the first one that happened in the US, I think, was a group of people who freed some whales in all kind of way. Yeah.
Well, the nineties in the Northwest were also a big time for whales. What with h Yeah, Cako, I.
Would say, in a way, Sarah, do you not blow us all out of the water.
Honey, honey. So the ALF, when they form, they laid out a structure that went on to define what the sort of leaderless resistance looks like. There's no central registry, there's no leadership. Anyone who adheres the basic guidelines can call themselves ALF. One of those central tenets is you have to adhere to that all precautions must be in
place to protect human and non human animal life. Above Ground groups started to form to support underground activists, like they had a press office and magazines and websites and legal support funds and all that shit. And they set about gluing locks, freeing animals, burning shit, slashing tires, spray painting, running targeted and focused activist campaigns to shut down vivisectors.
And within a few years ago at the US and so the ALF came out of the ALF, and it came out of Earth first, and I got one more foundation to describe that is as much of a bed rock as these ads are, the bedrock of being able to pay people a living wage to read history books about arsonists. Here's ads, and we're back. And we spent our ad time talking about the hot blacksmith in the classic film A Night's Tale.
We've used our time really well.
I think when we look back on the heyday of the Earth Liberation Front, it's easy to see it in the context of global warming, and they and the you know, that's how I started the episode. I clearly am framing it that way, and the participants did see it as related to global warming, but at the time time people were something talking about something more localized, the destruction of old growth forests and intact ecosystems. Before I moved out west and fell in with the forest defenders, I'd never
really seen a clearcut. You live out west, I'm you know, you've gone out and seen the clearcuts all around. Yeah. Yeah, they look like shaved patches on the mountains. You know, they look like a bad punk haircut. Less than four percent of the original forest the United States is left everywhere. Colonizers have gone. They have left this like absolute nightmare and it's wake. I grew up on the East Coast. I imagine that logging was done sustainably because that's what
I was told. I was told two trees are planted for every tree cut down. And actually on one of the documentaries that I watch were on this, I think is if a tree falls. I think that was the one. As a timber executive who's like six trees are planted for every tree we cut down.
We all used to get that commercial.
Yeah, it doesn't even how would you imagine that that would work? Then there'd be too many trees in the area, Like, yeah, they're like carrots. Yeah, I mean that's what they do, is that they replant monocultures and.
Then everyone would have the same lovely infrastructure we have in Portland.
Yeah by that, do you mean none? Sophie.
It's great because because now you know what's nice about Portland is it despite the fact that we're decimating the forest all around us, there's still enough old trees to crush people's houses all the time.
Yeah, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, it's something. It's nice that global warming can use the few remaining trees to crush people's houses in killing people. Yeah, actually did anything? Was that one? The phone on the cop car?
Yeah, that was a good one.
That When I was a kid, I imagine that loggers went into forest and cut like wine tree out of fifty so that the forest stayed intact. That they were like, oh, we want there to be a forest.
Yeah, me too. Yeah.
They go timber and they look really hot while they do it.
They do, and they have those heels on the boots.
They sleep all day, they work all night. They hang around in bars.
Yeah, so then they just actually clearcut acre after acre, and sometimes they say we're not clear cutting, it's selective cuts. After they would ban clear cutting in certain areas. And if you go out to these selective cuts, it is exactly the same as going out to a clear cut, only there's two trees per acre or something like that, and those trees, if you spend enough time out in the woods, those trees blow over because those trees grew up in a forest with trees around to block the wind.
So speaking of trees falling in people's houses, the National Forest Service is not in the business of protecting forests. That is not its job. I'm not even trying to slander it here. It is in the Department of Agriculture.
It is the National Forest Service with because of the timber sell program, is largely a big tree farm sold off to various timber companies, often at a loss to the taxpayers, because you can actually get a lot more money out of in tech forests through recreation and things like that, and very little of our timber needs come from the nation whatever. Anyway, It's like I was in earth first for a while. Has it come across so the wilam At National Forest is one of the most
beautiful places in the world. In nineteen ninety one, some arsonists, not the good kind, started a nine thousand acre forest fire in the cord Patch Roadless area in the forest,
which was a habitat reserve for the northern spotted owl. Basically, there was this culture war thing happening in the early late eighties early nineties about the spotted owl, where people were like, we want to cut down everything, and people were like, we'd rather didn't, and they were like, give us a good reason, and we were like, spotted owl nest there, and then the courts were like okay, and then the culture war was like, well then we hate the spot owl. Fuck the spotted owl.
It's what I like, vaguely remember that from like my earliest flickerings of consciousness. So like, conservatives loved to make weird jokes about the spotted owl, and I was like, I don't get it. Yeah, they've never changed. So as soon as this place, this in the Cornpatch Roadless area was declared a spotted owl sanctuary, someone burned it.
M h.
The Forest Service was like, sweet, the trees burned, we can sell them now in what's called a salvage timber sale, which is based on this entirely incorrect assumption that a burned forest is not a healthy forest, and uh can it's good to then take all the biomass out of it.
That's very depressing. But I also want to make my joke that they had a fire sail.
They did have a fire sale. Sorry, it's okay. I would bet a decent sum of money that the fire was started for the purpose of turning in savage sale. Light it and log it was the slogan attributed to
the timber companies. One of the things that happens a lot in logging is that the fines for like, for example, one timber sale that I worked on, when they accidentally quote unquote cut an old growth tree outside of the area that they're supposed to cut, they would get fined a couple thousand dollars on a tree that they sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah, so God, there's no and there's no criminal punishment, right, so they just do it.
Well, it's like when you see those signs that are like fine for striking and killing a highway worker seventy five hundred dollars and there have to be people who see that and are like, all.
Right, yeah, totally. So the arsonists who started that nine thousand acre fire was never caught. I am not sure the fire was ever really investigated seriously. Later in this story you're going to see like a teenager go to prison for eight years for doing five thousand dollars worth of damage to a McDonald's. Three hundred FBI agents working on a case to bring down one cell of the
Earth Liberation Front. I'm sure they had nothing better to do, but nine thousand acres of public land, all growth forests, totally I replate. Now, who cares whatever? So this timber sale, the salvage timber sale is set off huge protests. There was a five year campaign from ninety one to ninety five, which isn't five years, it's four years. But whatever. A burn forest is still a valuable ecosystem, and in the West in particular, forests are often fire ecologies designed to
survive and often thrive from burns. You know, I worked one salvage timber sale that we were trying to stop where the pine cones don't open unless there's a fire. You know, the new seeds like literally can't be planted until the fire goes through. That said, the kinds of fires that these are a different, different deal. But if you don't clear cut a burned forest and remove all the biomass and all the habitat, these forests can recover.
An activists knew that, and they started leading hikes through the burn area to talk about fire ecology. In early nineteen ninety five, they won in court saying that it shouldn't be logged. But then a Republican Congress passed the Salvage Logging Rider in nineteen ninety five, and this basically like it literally had to go through Congress to say no, we just want to cut everything we can in this
one particular area. Basically, basically this rider to a different bill said for the next year, any burn forest can be cut without any environmental review because but normally if you want to cut public lands, you have to at least go through environmental review process, which is where activists the glamorous stuff is the tree sitting in the road blockades, but the thing that actually saves the forest or the lawyers fighting that while the blockaders prevent it from being cut,
while the court is figuring it out. Whatever. The reason this was a rider this bill was because it was attached to a different bill. In this case, these fucking ghouls attached it to a bill giving money to Oklahoma City bombing victims. Oh my god.
See, every time we're nostalgic for the nineties, it's.
Like, yeah, nothing changes.
Yeah, the fashions just you know, waiver slightly, but that's about it.
Yeah, but we're back. We're back to it again already, right, Yeah, Actually I think we've already moved on eight.
Yeah, god knows. I think we're doing two thousand and three now.
Which is if I dress like two thousand and three, no one would come near me.
I got to get a newsboy cap if we're going to do my personal two thousand and three, which Sophie is already gravitating towards, so we can Sophie, we're going to be Newsy's this year.
Okay, that is a good style. I am all about the.
Nobody was saying it twenty years ago, but maybe it's finally time.
No, we should I was. I was saying to my sister in law the other day. I was like, I feel no emotional attachment to my wardrobe, and like it doesn't feel like me anymore. So maybe it's because it's not Newsy's enough.
Maybe you're Newsy's era.
Yeah, it's I I identify so deeply with the episode of Seinfeld where Curie and a later at a funeral and Elaine's like, I hate all my clothes. Yeah, it's like sometimes when you're at a funeral, that's the saddest thing you can think about.
Yeah.
Anyway, all right, we're all going to get newsboy caps.
Yeah, and then go out and do reacted. Yeah, so we reacted. The timber companies are like, let's fucking go. Who cares we kill the planet. We'll be able to buy new trucks. And this massive protest movement, it doesn't go away just because Congress told them that the law wasn't going to work with them anymore. It moved to a more sort of desperate direct action movement. Over six hundred people got arrested defending various forests in the area
that summer, just massive protests were everywhere. One of the main groups involved was a new group called Cascadia Forest Defenders. And it's not Earth First, but it's not not Earth first. The direct action environmental movement is like that where you'll just you know, Portland had the Cascadia Forest Alliance, Eugene
had the Cascady and Forest Defenders whatever. And because of all of this, the Forest Service only managed to sell a fifth of the billion board feet of timber that they'd hoped out of the salvage Rider because lawsuits and activists kept tangling everything up. And there was this particular fourteen acres sail Warner Creek and it's suddenly opened for logging. So a couple activists grab their toothbrushes and sleeping bags and run up the hill and they just stay there.
And then they keep staying there for almost a year, three hundred and forty three days on all through the winter, under eight feet of snow, and along the way, hundreds of people total, five hundred to one thousand people come to this encampment. They rip up the road with pick axes, which is, they build fifteen foot deep, ten foot wide
trenches in the road. They built a palisade wall like an Wild West town with a drawbridge and an observation tower, and they buried anchor points in the road to lock themselves too. These are called sleeping dragons, you know, because you can. You just grab a chain with a carabiner around your wrist and then you like run to a hidden point in the road, stick your arm into it and you can clip into this point and then they
can't take you out. They called it the Cascadia Free State, and they made a documentary about it called pick Axe. That's worth watching. It was made by the participants and it's all nineties camp quarter. It's kind of wild. It looked like shit what I saw it, And then now it probably looks cool and old and people do it
on purpose. Yeah, that's an artifact. Yeah. Two activists went to the federal building in Eugene and went on a hunger strike, all to protect this fourteen acre timber sale, or rather to make a bigger point and draw attention and build a community around this movement. The following summer, on August sixteenth, the Forest Service came in with heavy equipment and arrested seven people and tore the whole thing down.
One of the kind of wild things about these encampments is that they rely on like all this could anything you can do with a pickaxe over the course of months or a year can be destroyed in a few hours with heavy equipment, you know. But the timber sale was canceled, as were a ton of other salvage sales because everyone in the area, from the hippies to the little old ladies, were fucking mad about it. People kept
like storming offices. When some folks were arrested, their arrayment was held in secret, and so the activists outside were like, nah, it's not going to happen. Protesters forced their way into the jail and rioted in Eugene. This particular movement based in Eugene, Oregon is going to have a worldwide impact. It basically brings hippie anti capitalism into the modern era.
It rebirths the US direct Action, anarchist movement, which later goes on to influence a ton of stuff through the anti globalization movement and up through occupy and onward.
Well, well a lot has come out of Eugene.
Yeah, and protesters spent a lot of time in these makeshift shelters in the snow, holding off the federal government, and they got to talking. You know. There's like only a couple of them that stick around all winter, and they're like, Hey, what is necessary and what is ethical and what is strategic? How do we stop not just this timber sale, but the death machine of global capitalism.
So a ton of people from this group formed the most prolific so of the Earth Libration Front, and they met each other there and they grew close on a road in the middle of nowhere, buried under snow. Meanwhile, after a decade of ecotage, Earth First formally splits from the underground action. This is now we're we're playing fast and loose with time here. Now we're back to nineteen ninety two in Brighton, England, where a lot of punk stuff comes from. And they were like, all right, if
you're doing above ground shit, you're Earth First. If you're doing ecotage, which is their like cool word for sabotage in the name of the Earth, then you're the Earth Liberation Front and good luck to you. But you're not us. The Animal Libration Front had gotten its legs in England, so it makes sense enough that the E Left died two. In April nineteen ninety two, the Earth Libration Front made its first attack, or at least the first one with
a communicae. They attacked a peat company called Fizzins that was destroying peat bogs, which are a non renewable resource, something that is only just now coming to mainstream like attention. Like you know, people used to always like use peat, muscle, lot and gardening, right, and people are moving to alternatives because they're like, oh, Pete Moss doesn't come back. I had no idea, Yeah, Pete Moss doesn't come back. Don't use it. Coconut something the thing no one can sayar
qar koar. It's like Creed Brett and trying to remember his job title quabbity quall. Yeah, I have no idea what word you're trying to say?
Cook?
Is it?
Like is the coconut right? Yeah? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, Yeah, I've probably never said it aloud. I've just like, I know, I mean, I've been free to gardening articles. Yeah. And I think this is actually an example of the kind of thing that the Earth Liberation Front is doing, is being about thirty years ahead of its time and confronting issues that at the time were like what who cares?
And now people are like, oh, we care, because we're all about to boil h This magazine called Green Anarchist, not to be confused with the US magazine Green Anarchy, put out this first communicate, all our peat bogs must be preserved in their entirety for the sake of the plants, the animals in our national heritage. Cynically donating small amounts will do no good. The water table will drop and the bogs will dry out and die unless it is preserved fully. And so the ELF spreads across Europe and
the rest of the world. Most of the narratives around the Earth Libration Front collapse the whole movement down to a few people, especially this cell that we're going to talk about called which gets called the family, which is sketchy. If you're ever naming your own group, don't name it the family. Yeah, And we're going to collapse the narrative down to them a little bit too, for three reasons. One it is narratively convenient. Two we know the most
about it. And three well, because not everyone involved in all these actions has been caught, and there's no statute of limitations on terrorism charges, so I really to dig into some of these things, you know. But fittingly enough, the first recorded ELF action in the US was on Columbus Day, and it was some graffiti about colonization five hundred and four years of Genocide was spray painted in one place, elf was spray painted another place in Eugene, Oregon,
naturally perfect. And then, because they hadn't really nailed their security culture yet, for a few days later, all along the I five corridor, just in a single direction, gas stations and McDonald's had their glues locked with five hundred and four years of genocide and Earth Liberation Front and fuck corporations and all that jazz. Then a week or so later, the first fire that they're famous four happened
was nineteen ninety six. It's in the forest outside Detroit, Oregon, the other Detroit as it's often, Yeah, this one has a lake.
Yeah.
It's like people were like, which Portland, And you're like, unless you live in Maine, no one's going to ask which Portland? You mean, truly, come on, you guys, like, but it's a capital, and you're like, yeah. Anyway, in the forest outside Detroit, Oregon, a US Forest Service pickup truck was burned down and incendiary device was found on the roof of the ranger station, but it never ignited, and just like that, the US Earth Liberation Front kicked off.
As for how that went, we'll talk about it on Wednesday and just like that, honey, Hi, you know like my Cliffhanger. No, it's an you didn't get it. There's the Sex of the City remake is called it's called it.
Just like that.
I get really excited when I do know pop culture reverence.
You did not need to know this pop culture reference, but when you said it, it was meant to be.
My first thought hearing all this is that these are movements that, because they felt fully by the time I was a teenager, I just assumed had been around kind of forever. And oh yeah, huh. To me, one of the most interesting parts of this is being like, no, this the beginning of this large scale movement. We can trace it to an exact point in time and space.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that before. I think I also kind of had this like sense of like, oh, this is just this thing, it's just in the air, and then like it kind of goes away too. Writ it's this like grand leaderless movement that's been around forever, and it's like it kind of did a thing for about ten years. Yeah.
Well, and on a more pop cultural level, it's so funny to trace the eras of things that we could focus on as a society like the nineties were the era of save the Whales. To the extent that I feel like there's I mean, this is a weird way to track cultural relevancy, but it's what comes to mind. I think there's a compilation of Dill cartoons called Shave the Whales. You can see how well known that phrase was. I read a lot of comic book compilations as a kid.
I was not a great reader or just like not even real comic books, but because you know, newspaper funny pages. But I also I remembered because Earth First has such a ring to me in my high school brain. I wrote for an open mic night senior year of high school a song parody of phil Oakes's love Me I'm a Liberal that I called it, love me I'm a Portlander and first reference.
Love me, I'm a what. I didn't know what you said, Love me, I'm a Liberal.
I'm a Portlander.
Love me, I'm a Portlander. You don't even have to change anything I know.
Well, I guess updated it for more for modern times, although I didn't do a great job. But yeah, and for people who don't know, love me I'm a Liberal.
Is.
I think it's a wonderful, like biting satire song. Phil Oaks was a folk singer who I think said that he sang all the news that was fit to sing or something like that, and had a brief and tragic life and was very attractive, as folks singers all are in one way or another. And love me I'm a liberal is like this very catchy, jaunty folks song about having radical values at one time and then selling out
and feeling pretty happy with that. And the sort of punch line of the song is, and that's why I'm turning you in.
Yeah that that's a perfect song for this moment, And yeah that was what was in the air. And you're because you were in high school or in a lot of what we're going to be talking about. I think maybe I don't actually know.
Yeah, well, and I wonder about, you know, just looking ahead, how much what we're talking about feels present in the current moment where we're having this. It feels like unending mainstream cultural debate between should we fuc shit up? Or should we buy pasta and glass jars? And I say, why not?
Both?
I knew that, I literally knew that was what you were going to say.
I was like that.
I was like, hmm, I will not choose.
I know, I will not choose. My two big things I'm always saying is decant everything. Put all your hand soap into a prettier bottle and all your pasta into the glass jars, and funck shit up. That's the two.
I am okay with living by both of those, Sarah.
Yeah, I think that that's how we have to do it. And also, you got a carbo load. If you're gonna fuc shit.
Up, the revolution can be interior design.
That was really funny, magpie.
Yeah that was beautiful.
Put that on a fucking bumper sticker, please perfect.
No, but I like a live laugh love like cross stitch that's framed exactly.
A throw a pillow so bad at home goods. We don't need any other pillows that say grateful.
We need pillows that say pissed off. Yeah, but if people want to be grateful for hearing more of you on podcasts, where can they find you? Oh? That was so beautiful? Thanks?
I have two podcasts, can you believe it? In this dainting everyone has a podcast, so I had to have two to feel special. So I do a podcast called You Wrong About where we talk about misremembered history. I really have got to have both of you on at some point in the future. And recently we've talked about everything from The Exorcist to Billy Jean King, So there's something for everyone, and it's not all about the seventies,
despite what those two examples made it sound like. And then I Do You Are Good, which I co host with Alex Deed and which is a feelings podcast about movies, and we recently did an episode that's our our live show where we talk about Forrest Gump with Chelsea Weber Smith at SF sketch Fest and we had such a great time. And there's nothing like crying a little bit in front of people who paid to come watch you cry a little bit.
Yeah, with the microphone and zoom, you can pretend like there's not an audience.
But yeah, you're like, I'm just having a moment with the shampoo bottle I've been holding since I was five.
Yeah, Okay, Well, if people want to see more of what I do, they can look at pictures of my dog on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy and they can follow me on substack at Margaret Kiljoy and my most recent book is a tabletop role playing game called p Number City. So if you want to fuck shit up safely with your friends, you can do that. Okay, wait that how
I'm going to try and tie it together. When I was organizing Earth First in Portland in the mid odds, I was running a Dungeons and Dragons game, and wow, I don't know the legality what I'm about to say. I would give in game rewards to when my players would get arrested at Earth First events. No one was like planning. Well, actually, earth First often plans to get
people arrested. But you know, one of my players, you know, spent a night in jail and was interrogated by the FBI or whatever because it was green scare times and literally they had just hung a banner in a tree and got tackled and her for this is a complete tangent. Sophie. You got anything you want to plug?
Yeah, I'll plug. Cool Zone Media's newest podcast. It's called Better Offline. It is all about how big tech in Silicon Valley is uh infiltrating our minds in our daily lives. So check that out. It's a weekly podcast every Wednesday.
Gotta bless you cool Zone.
God bless you. Sarah Marshall.
Yeah, God bless us. Everyone thinks that's exactly what it's thinking.
Uh bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartMedia app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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