"Listen to the words of these people." "They're speaking to you." "They're speaking to the spirit of this land." "Asking that you consider some of the things that have been done." "I know there are no accidents here, there are only signs that happen to people because they're not following some of your first laws that were put here to govern your people." "To make them good." "We were all well at one time." "Now look at us." "We're pitiful." "I ask that you give us another chance so we can make things right again." "Testify!" "Eco Defense and the Politics of Violence" "From years of study, I submit the following claim:" "The state of the earth's environment is worse than most of you know it is." "The pace of decline is faster than most of you realize." "The world's scientists sound the alarm in their journals, but it is a sound that has not reached policymakers yet." "Richard Leakey described what we're in right now as the sixth major extinction in the world's history." "We will lose between the years 1980 and 2045, in a 65 year period, we will lose more species of plants and animals than have been lost in the last 65 million years." "We see a spiritual crisis as our distance from the natural world widens." "We no longer respect or love the natural world around us." "Our material desires and our efforts toward prosperity broke our connection to the richness of life and the beauty of nature." "We must integrate respect and love of nature back into our spiritual traditions." "This is a very pivotal generation." "We're involved in a third world war." "The war to save the planet itself." "Years from now, I would not be surprised if we look back as a society and say,..." ""Why did we not do more or sooner?"" ""Why did we not go and burn those corporations down sooner?"" ""Why did we not hold those CEOs accountable, for killing our children, for destroying our future generations, sooner?"" "What are we doing to ourselves?" "The revolution will not be terrorized." " The movie ran through me" " The glamour subdue me" " The tabloid untie me" " Im empty please fill me" " Mister anchor assure me" " That baghdad is burning" " Your voice it is so soothing" " That cunning mantra of killing" " I need you my witness" " To dress this up so bloodless" " To numb me and purge me now Of thoughts of blaming you" " Yes the car is our wheelchair" " My witness your coughing" " Oily silence mocks the legless" " Boys who travel now in coffins" " On the corner " " The jury's sleepless " " We found your weakness " " And its right outside your door" " Now testify" ""Why Monkeywrench?" "Thats Why. "" ""We are watching" ELF" "The philosophy and tactics of direct action environmentalists are timely." "Both modern society and the world's few remaining indigenous communities are becoming totally ensnared by technological imperatives." "Integrate into the world capitalist economy or be eradicated." "Be transformed from something natural into something productive, or perish." "Grow technological, or die." "The activists represent in this video are just a few among thousands of others who have risked their lives and liberties resisting the commandments of global capitalism." "From blockades and treesits to the use of explosive and incendiary devices, revolutionary environmental groups, including the ELF, ALF, Earth First!" ", and Sea Shepherd, act to defend life against profit." "Critics condemn the alleged violence of revolutionary environmentalists, but consider forest clearcuts, widespread extinctions, massive pollution, the destruction of habitats and indigenous homelands, the introduction of synthetic chemicals into the environment, and the torture, death, and dismemberment of more than 25 billion factory farmed animals worldwide each year." "The emerging global consumerist lifestyle is saturated by violence." "Consider the violent effects on human beings, especially on young children and elders, as air, land, water and food is polluted." "Then consider violent reprisals against groups and individuals courageous enough to resist attacks on people and on the Earth." "Think of the violence that murders David Chain, defender of Northern California's redwoods." "That executes Ken Saro-Wiwa, defender of the Ogoni homeland in the Niger Delta." "That kills Chico Mendez and Dorothy Stang, defenders of the lands and first nations in the Amazon Basin." "That bombs Earth First!" "activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney and that kills Karen Silkwood for trying to tell the truth about the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Oklahoma." "This is the violence that incarcerates dozens of Earth liberation activists, like Jeffrey "Free" Luers, who, in June 2001, was sentenced to 23 years for burning three SUVs on a Eugene, Oregon car lot." "Unlike their counterparts in the corporate state matrix, actions by revolutionary environmentalists, even by the state's admission, have resulted in no physical harm to any human or nonhuman animal." "The monkeywrenching tactics of these groups are aimed at tools of actual violence, employed for the purpose of corporate profit." "Henry David Thoreau, in his famous pamphlet, Civil Disobedience, urged readers to live by principle." "And if circumstances require us to be agents of injustice, then, Thoreau said, break the law." "Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine." "Western technological culture, and it's unfolding through the capitalist world economy, is a systematic assault on the earth." "In defense of life, revolutionary environmentalists counter the assault, on the ground, at the points of destruction." "This is their story." "How long?" "How long have these nonprofit organizations been raking in our tax-deductible donations?" "Getting these photographs flashed in front of us, reading off statistics, how long has that been going on?" "And when we get upset about these issues they're raising; they have the solution: hold a sign." "Hold our sign." "Make a donation, it's tax-deductible." "Goddamn." "This movement doesn't need any more sign posts." "I'm not a human sign post." "This movement doesn't need any more donations." "Not at the expense of the people signing that check feeling like they did their part for the struggle, for the year." "That's a joke." "What this movement needs is a little blood, sweat, and tears." "What this movement needs is a little dedication, a little sincerity, a little heart and soul." "Things that aren't for sale." "Things that you can't buy." "See that's the whole concept." "That's the big lie that even the overall environmental movement is selling to us through their nonprofit businesses." "That you can buy these types of things." "Revolutionary change is not for sale." "You can't buy revolution." "It's not for sale." "You have to make it." "You show up at the Sierra Club and you say I want to help and they say, great, go door to door and try to raise money for us." "People don't feel like they're saving the forest." "But when you come up to a blockade and you stand in between the forest you want to protect and the people who want to cut it and you say, no, enough, you're not cutting past us today." "That person feels like they did something, and they did do something to save the forest." "It's more empowering." "And still you don't stop the destruction, there's a point where you put your body between the forest and those who are trying to destroy it, and what it is you want to have saved." "The environmental movement is not about groups or organizations, it's about ideas." "And these ideas will evolve and change." "I personally have no use for large institutionalized environmental organizations." "I think they're more of a problem than a help." "They're just eco-bureaucracies." "Many of them-and I won't name any, because I don't like to badmouth organizations, except for one, which I feel that I can, and that's Greenpeace." "The reason I can criticize Greenpeace is because I'm a co-creator of Greenpeace and therefore I feel like Dr. Frankenstein sometimes." "And I feel that since I helped create the thing I can certainly criticize it." "And I think that Greenpeace has become the world's biggest feel-good organization." "People join it to feel good, to feel "I'm part of the solution, I'm not part of the problem"." "Greenpeace brings in close to 300 million dollars a year, and what do they do with that money?" "Generate more money." "People at the top of the totem pole now are not environmentalists." "They're fund raisers, they're accountants, they're lawyers, they're business people." "It's not strange to me when people tell me that the former president of Greenpeace now works for the logging industry of Canada." "The former president of Greenpeace Australia now works for the mining industry." "The former president of Greenpeace Norway works for the whaling industry." "See, it's just one corporate job to the next." "You no longer have the passion." "The passion that is needed in the environmental movement..." "Well, I started writing letters and signing petitions and sending money to Sea Shepherd when I was 12 years old." "As soon as I graduated from high school when I was 17, I joined Sea Shepherd." "When I was 19, I carried out my first independent action against the Icelandic whaling fleet we sunk two of their ships and disabled their whaling station." "People have always responded with surprise at how young I was coming into this, but being an indigenous person and knowing my history, it's not uncommon." "This is the role of young people." "Warriors are the young men, young women of our society." "It is their job because they do not have dependents, they do not have their own children or their own family." "It's their job to protect their larger family." "If I knew I had a fatal disease, I would definitely do something like strap dynamite on myself and take out Glen Canyon Dam." "Or maybe the Maxxam building in Los Angeles, after it's closed up for the night." "Maxxam is the name of the company cutting down most of the old Redwoods in Northern California, like this one, which was over 1000 years old." "The point of these statements, Earth First!" "ers say, is to make people wake up to the crisis." "We want people to have the jitters, people ought to have the jitters!" "The planet is being killed by corporations right now, and if people don't get the jitters, then something is seriously wrong with the human species." "Being a warrior means taking personal risks." "Being a warrior can mean for some in Earth First!" "breaking the law." "It can mean committing acts of sabotage to protect the earth." "And even taking pictures of themselves doing it." "One of their techniques is to wreck logging machinery by pouring sand or dirt into the engine." "They call this monkeywrenching;" "Sticking a monkeywrench into the gears of the industrial machine to make it stop." "Monkeywrenching in many ways is using the tools of the devil against the devil." "Another Earth First!" "tactic is to hammer long nails into trees logging companies plan to harvest." "Because workers can't safely cut those trees without a metal detector." "I've done all kinds of monkeywrenching." "Such as?" "I've munched roads, I've spiked trees, I've siltated equipment." "So we thought that using the tactics that had been used by those before us, we thought we could bring some sanity to this area where they're actually destroying an ecosystem that's tens of thousands of years old for mega profits for corporations." "They're destroying communities, destroying worker's lives, and we thought that by making this a national movement and bringing the eyes of the nation on it, that we could stop the insanity." "I think the energy is phenomenal;" "Every attempt they've made to stop it has only made us bigger." "They call us the terra-hydra, every time they try to stomp out Earth First!" ", it grows three more heads." " Now some say the romans killed jesus, and some say that it was the jews. " " And some say it was pour judas, and some say it was me and you. " " But when I think of that cross he was nailed to,...   ... and the tree that was logged for the wood,...   ..." "I realized that the loggers killed jesus,...   ... and it's time we got them back good. " "It is said that in Brighton, England in 1992 a group of individuals broke away from a chapter of Earth First!" ", realizing that to be..." " So spike a tree for jesus,... ... then jesus will love you you know. - ...succesful in the struggle to protect the Earth more extreme tactics must be utilized." "Thus, the Earth Liberation Front was born..." " Spike a tree for jesus,... and some day to heaven you'll go. " "In November of 1997 I received a communication, much like the ones I had before from the ALF, but this one was different." "It was claiming responsibility for an act of arson targeting a Bureau of Land Management horse corral just outside of Hines, Oregon, a very rural area of Oregon." "The individuals had released all the wild horses from the facility and then burned the place down." "The actual group claiming responsibility was the Earth Liberation Front." "You may have heard of the Earth Liberation Front." "The Attorney General himself says it's a domestic terrorist organization." "The FBI says it's one of the most dangerous organizations in the country." "But what is the ELF?" "Who is the ELF?" "The Earth Liberation Front is an international underground organization that uses direct action in the form of economic sabotage to try and directly stop the destruction of the natural environment." "The organization is an environmental group, but also one that realizes the true cost of murder and destruction of life." "They don't feel it's enough to work on individual single issues, but in addition the capitalist state itself and its symbols of propaganda must also be targeted." "It may then be more realistic to refer to the organization as one which is working to protect all life on this planet." "The ELF is organized into autonomous cells which operate anonymously and independently from one another and the general public." "The group contains no hierarchy or central leadership, but instead operates under an idealogy." "If an individual believes in the ideology and they follow a certain set of widely published guidelines, he or she can perform actions and become a part of the Earth Liberation Front." "The Earth Liberation Front guidelines are as follows... 1." "To cause maximum economic damage to a given entity that is profiting off the destruction of the natural environment." "2." "To educate the public on the atrocities committed against the envirnoment and life 3." "To take all necessary precautions against harming life." "And again, a lot of times when these acts have gone on, ad hoc names will be used." "One of my favorites is the anarchist golfing association, that was one of the ones I heard from some anti-golf course action." "It was amusing." "So I didn't know if the Earth Liberation Front was going to be an organization that was going to continue to be around or if it would be a one-time shot." "I did not know that the Earth Liberation Front would grow to be the most pressing domestic terrorism threat in the US at this current time." "I did not know that between 1997 and the current time the group would inflict over 45 million dollars in damages against entities profiting off the destruction of the natural environment." "I did not know that in that time period, the Earth Liberation Front would be highly successful in getting away with targeting dozens and dozens and dozens of places, of individuals, of corporations, of government entities that continue to not give a damn about our clean air, clean water, clean soil that we all need to survive." "The PATRIOT Act defines terrorism as the unlawful use of force and violence against people or property to intimidate or coerce government or civilian populations in furtherance of a political or social objective." "The department of justice, the department of homeland security agree that eco-terrorism is a severe problem, naming the most serious domestic terrorism threat in the USA today as the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, which by all accounts is a converging movement with similar ideologies and common personnel." "ELF and ALF are terrorists by definition." "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." "This is a noble tradition of resistance and a sacred duty and I am forever grateful." "Even when I was in prison for four years, I woke up every day feeling good about myself, because I knew what I was there for." "I wasn't like the other people there who woke up regretting what they had done that brought them there." "I knew that I was being kept in a cage by the United States government because I had represented the earth and animals against them." "And that to me has given me the greatest happiness that I could ever experience in life." "To have it be known by my opponents and enemies that I stand with earth, not with the people who would exploit and destroy her." "And in that way, I am grateful that I've had this honor of being called by my opposition an enemy of the united states and a terrorist." "Because if the people who are destroying this world see me as an enemy, then that's gotta be a good thing." "I think that violence can be applied to the natural environment because we rely upon it for our survival." "But inanimate objects, especially those that are man-made, and are used to destroy life, I don't think you can be violent to." "I think a lot of times it's more violent to allow them to exist." "And the other thing about violence and property, and the destruction of violent property, is that, if somebody walked in here right now and went up to my buddy Rick and put a gun to his head, and I jumped up and tackled him and took the gun away, I would be a hero in that sense, because I prevented an act of violence from happening to an innocent person." "In the same way, that is what the actions of the ALF and the ELF are about." "Our actions, though they may be aggressive, are not violent." "They are actions to prevent violence, not to create violence." "I think that non violence is the only way we can achieve our goals." "I think that we can only answer violence with non violence." "The unspeakable horrors that have been done to us are not in our hearts." "The people who can destroy forests, we're not that kind of people,... .. and we can't do that." "And I think that the only way we can succeed if we answer their violence with our non violence." "The fact is that we have never injured anybody." "We have no intention of injuring anybody and I think that we can control the situation to ensure that we don't injure anybody." "After that they can say whatever they like, frankly we don't give a damn." "In the past we sustained quite a bit of damage when we've been rammed on the side, so we put out this device here we call the mother of can openers and it keeps vessels from coming up alongside." "If they do then we pierce their hull and cause them more damage than they cause us." "This is a water pump we got from the royal navy - surplus." "And what we do is use it to power a water cannon, which will repel anybody trying to come on board, or to keep vessels away from us." "We can focus it on the smokestacks and threaten to cause damage to their engine." "It's one of our non-violent defense systems." "Well in the past, we've been able to secure barrels of pie filling from the U.S. department of agriculture, they're surplus barrels, and we can get an attachment from a water cannon and drop that into the barrel, so it can suck up all 45 gallons in a few seconds, and send it out the barrel of the water cannon, using the water pressure as the vacuum pump." "With this we can fire a shot of lemon marangue or boston cream pie at anybody trying to board us." "It usually serves to be an effective deterrent." "The conservation movement is a movement of conservatives." "It is conservative in its values and conservative in its tactics." "There has not been a single human being killed or injured by a conservationist anywhere in this country, anywhere in the world." "Yet conservationists are dying in the forests of California for trying to conserve our forests." "For trying to maintain the status quo." "I for one am proud of this record of nonviolence towards humans." "Have I destroyed property?" "Yes I have." "My philosophy in this matter is guided by none other than Martin Luther King who stated very firmly that violence can only be committed against a living sentient being." "There are some radical fundamentalists who scream that this forum is a gathering of eco-terrorists." "Is it?" "I personally have not seen any executives from Exxon, Shell, or Union-Carbide here." "These are the only eco-terrorists I know of, for by its very definition an eco-terrorist is a person who terrorizes the environment." "I guess you could say that what they mean are eco-activists who practice terrorism." "But where are these people?" "Am I one?" "Some media have reported I am." "Yet here I am addressing this forum." "If I were a terrorist in the present climate, I would be in jail right now, or on the run." "Underground, anywhere, but not here." "If I were a terrorist I would not be traveling freely under my own name with my own passport." "If I were a terrorist I would not be the director of an established and legal charitable organization whose storefront office is in the radical city of Malibu." "If I were a terrorist my ships would not be allowed to enter into the USA." "This name calling is infantile." "We must begin to understand the politics of violence, especially the pseudo-violence, the fictitious violence constructed within the minds of people as politicians and the corporate media lie over and over again, claiming that eco-defense activists are violent, indeed, terrorists." "Actual violence against nature, animals, and people is disguised." "Attention is diverted from real, everyday violence to the ersatz violence of the eco-terrorists." "It is true that monkeywrenching, sabotage, arson, animal liberation, lockdowns, and blockades are destructive." "Buildings, equipment, information, and profit is destroyed." "But are these methods actually violent?" "The truth is that these groups and individuals are guided by philosophical principles that are antithetical to violence." "Animal rights, which assumes that all animals have inviolate bodily integrity." "Biocentrism, which recognizes that intact ecosystems must be preserved so that all life, including human life, may prosper." "And deep ecology, which holds that, in moments of heightened spiritual awareness, human animals can experience a profound sense of identity with nonhuman animals and with the earth." "The activists featured here are not violent." "They actually resist the violence that most of us refuse to acknowledge." "My stepfather is a clown in the Shrine circus." "When I was about 23 he invited me backstage." "Now mind you at that time, I had no idea what went on behind the scenes at the circus." "So he said, "Hey Gary, come on backstage, come see the elephants,..." "You want to see the elephants, right?"" "I'll never forget that day." "Michigan state fairground, 8 mile and woodward." "I'm standing in the warehouse area, face to face with an 8,000 pound elephant." "Her front left foot in chains." "Back right foot in chains." "She was swaying back and forth neurotically." "Which I later found out was the neurotic behavior that elephants always get in the circus from being immobilized and confined all the time when they're not on stage." "At that time, I also did not know about the training techniques, which are vicious and brutal." "You must beat down an elephant to make them submit and acquiesce to the trainer." "Carson and Barnes Circus" " Elephant training" "So if I say rip his head off, rip his fucking foot off, what does that mean?" "It's very important to do that, right?" "When he starts squirming too fucking much, both fucking hands-BOOM-right under that chin!" "Sit, and he better back up." "When he fucks around too much, you fucking sink that hook and give him everything you've got." "And he's gonna start screaming." "Sink that hook into him sometimes." "When you hear that screaming, you know you got their attention a little." "Right here in the barn." "You cant do it on the road." "I'm not gonna touch her in front of a thousand people." "She's gonna fucking do what I want and that's just fucking the way it is." "I am the boss, I will kick your fucking ass." "I had an epiphany at that spot." "Commonsense took over from there." "I looked into her eyes and I saw nothing but sadness, hopelessness and fear." "I looked to the left and I saw lions and tigers pacing in their cages." "I looked to the right I saw monkeys screaming in their cages, holding on to the bars." "I walked out in a daze, baffled, for the rest of the show." "And the bears came out wearing yellow tu-tus and riding tricycles." "At which point I stood up and left." "From that moment on I wanted to know what else happened to animals." "Animals I thought I cared about, because I had a dog." "Because I loved my dog Bourbon and my dog Brandy." "All of a sudden that meant I loved and cared for all animals?" "Nonsense." "I later found out what happened at slaughterhouses." "Where my food came from." "And I wanted to know." "Where did my food come from?" "Where did my clothes come from?" "Was animal research really necessary?" "I knew it was unethical, I later found out it was unscientific." "What else happened at the circus, at the rodeo?" "And I investigated, I investigated like crazy." "I didn't believe PETA or any other animal rights person when they sent me information and told me foxes were being anally electrocuted on fur farms, or that, you know, 50% of all animals in slaughterhouses are dismembered while they're fully conscious." "I was as skeptical as anybody, I'm like no way, there are laws out there,... .. there is no way animals are being treated like this." "Well, I later broke into fur farms, broke into research labs, went behind the scenes at every circus that ever came through Michigan." "I saw slavery firsthand, I heard their screams, and it was worse than what PETA told me, it was worse than what was on the videos." "I did 6 weeks of research, 6 weeks, at the Thorne Apple Valley pig slaughterhouse on eastern market Detroit, MI." "I went there every day for 2-6 hours, just to sit there and watch, and listen." "Listen to the pigs scream one by one as they were being killed." "I was no further than 50 feet away from the killing floors." "And I would just sit there and listen to them scream." "I was not a vegetarian at the time, I was not a vegan, I was not animal rights." "But I was learning, and my mind was open." "The old adage that minds only work when they're open, like parachutes." "My mind was wide open, and there were always 6 or 7 pig trucks on the road waiting, waiting to be called in, and I would walk up and down that street, and I'd stand face to face with those pigs, and I would look at them, and they'd look back at me and it was like they were saying to me,..." ""Why are you doing this?"" "And you know what?" "I never had an answer." "I said, I don't know why we do this to you." "I later found out there was a bishop from Britain, William Inge, who in an 18th century sermon once said that if animals ever formed and organized religion, the devil would be depicted in human form." "I can't argue with that either." "We must be the devil to animals." "What we now know is that all people in the human community have fundamental rights." "So the next step in the development of this moral and legal evolution is to say wait a minute, if we're going to say that people of color have rights just as well as white people have rights, and that women have rights just as well as men have rights, it really makes no difference to say that nonhuman animals don't have rights and that humans have rights." "That that is a contradiction, that's a hypocrisy." "That animals have these rights just as we have these rights." "So therefore first of all, a right guarantees you basic freedoms and liberties." "And so for a nonhuman animal it's going to be their right to bodily freedom." "That means we don't experiment on them." "That means we don't confine them in cages." "That means we don't hunt them." "That means we can't slaughter them for food just because it suits our palette preferences." "So to have that right is an important guarantee for animals." "Now a lot of people want to raise the question, well, nonhuman animals and human animals are very different." "Animals don't design spaceships." "Animals don't write algebra textbooks." "Animals don't compose sonatas." "Animals don't think about the world on an ethical level like we do." "And they want to point out all these differences between human and nonhuman animals." "Well they're missing the point." "The point is not what is different among us and them, the point is what is similiar between all of us." "We are all animals." "We have all evolved from a long continuum of natural evolution, that it's a continuum of consciousness and subjectivity and of a community of life." "And so what is really at issue is what unites us, not what separates us." "And what we share with the animal world is that we're sentient animals, that we can feel pain, that we know the difference between pleasure and pain, that we can make choices, we have preferences, we have a life that is precious to us, and we have young family members that are precious to us, and that we have wishes and plans and we are subjects of a life." "All living animals share this in common." "And when you get right down to it, why human beings have rights is because they can feel pain and they have these preferences." "And the animals live in the same kind of world as we do at that level." "And that's all that is needed for any living being to have rights." "If you can feel pain and you have preferences then no one ought to ever take those preferences away from you, and inflict pain on you for any reason." "If you have a right you have a right to your own integrity of your body." "What you mean when you say that animals have rights is simply that you are not to take their life, invade or injure their bodies, or deny them their freedom because you think you're going to benefit, or you think we're going to benefit." "Rights, the rights of an individual, trump the interests that others have, the benefits that other are going to have." "So the notion of an inalienable right, that is a right that can't be taken away or traded off, It can't be taken from me." "Yeah, animals certainly have inalienable rights." "What's the relationship between animal rights and animal liberation?" "Animal liberation is a very practical step taken in the philosophy of animal rights." "A lot of people talk about animal rights, but they don't do animal liberation." "Animal liberation is the practical implication of animal rights." "That means we don't just talk about whether animals have rights or not, we know they have rights, because it is well established scientifically and philosophically what kinds of beings they are, and why they should have rights." "Now that we know they have rights, now we're going to start liberating them, because they're being kept in cages unjustly." "They're being denied their rights." "And now our duties are to protect those rights." "And one of the key principles of ethics in general, is that to be a good moral person, it's not enough to just not to harm, you have to actively do good." "So what people from the Animal Liberation Front are assuming is that it is our duty to actively do good." "It's not enough for them to not do harm by being vegan, say try not to do harm to other living animals, they are out to do good, to do right, and that means getting every animal out of every cage that they possibly can." "How would you answer the charges, and there's a lot of them, that this constitutes terrorism?" "I would say this is the most Orwellian perversion that I've ever heard." "Because the real terrorists are people who out there killing animals." "The real terrorists are people out there raping the earth." "And the people who are saving the animals from the real terrorists, who are compassionate people, who are ethical people, who are willing to sacrifice their freedom for the life of another being, that is not terrorism." "That is noble, that is dignified, that is the ethical life at its purest." "Moreover, what kind of a terrorist is it that never harms another living being?" "Because the ALF does not harm other human beings in their actions to save nonhuman animals." "They're informed by a nonviolent philosophy and adhere to that very scrupulously." "And what kind of a terrorist is it that does not have an explicit political agenda to wreak havoc on a society, but rather to raise the moral consciousness of its culture?" "They are not terrorists, they are fighting the real terrorists, the real terrorists are people in corporations and people running this government." "When you look at the big picture, it's so much more easier to understand what it is we're fighting." "And it's so much easier to understand that there is still this huge rift between these opposing worldviews;" "...that worldview held by indigenous people, and that is now held by people who of their own choosing, choose to live harmoniously with animals and nature, and then there's that worldview that has always sought to destroy it, which sees animals as property and the environment as a natural resource." "The worldview that sees even people as a target and as a commodity to be exploited." "And I think that to me, that's what being a liberationist is about." "It's not just about fighting for the liberation of animals, it's about fighting for the liberation of oneself, too." "One of the native American groups I work with up north is always accusing us white people of being aliens, because we're always trying to alienate ourselves from the earth." "Put concrete between us and the soil, put buildings between us and the trees, and separate ourselves from it." "And it's time for that to change, to understand that we are one with the earth, and when it goes, when the atmosphere melts down, when our water is too polluted for us to drink, and there's no forest left and there's not room for the wolves and the grizzly, there's also not gonna be room for us, we're gonna go with those systems." "We are part of it." "A conservative that is a true conservative is a biocentrist." "This means that he or she understands their place in the natural universe." "We understand we are equal citizens among other equal citizens on the planet." "If you think you're a better earthling than a worm, a bacteria or a dung beetle, think again." "The planet could get along quite nicely without the conceded naked apes that look upon ourselves as divine legends in our own minds." "The planet and we would have a very hard time of it if the worms disappeared." "And if only a few bacterium species were to be eradicated we would follow them into extinction." "And this is one of the most serious problems of all, one that is not talked about by the media." "Our poisoning of soil, water and air could actually eradicate many species of bacteria, and so doing eradicate ourselves." "Human beings exist on this planet on a matrix like beam called anthropocentrism." "We think for our pleasure because, well, we're human." "You know, we're trying to convey something that has very little to do with linear thinking." "The earth, her people, the life force of this planet that is older than all of us, and we're trying to fit it into academic terms, trying to cram it into this philosophical or ideological box so that us academics or students or members of the first world can understand that." "Well that's denying the whole concept of what we're here for in the first place." "We're here to represent beings in their own terms, not in terms that will be palatable to you, or the media, or anybody, and definitely not in terms that will satisfy people who are destroying them." "During the 1974 first Greenpeace whale campaign, we encountered the Russian whaling fleet off the coast of California." "And our idea to save the whales was to put ourselves between the whales bodily and the whalers." "And at that time, while we pursuing a pod of eight sperm whales, a whaler fired over our head and struck a female in a pod of sperm whales." "And suddenly the bull came full out of the water and dove." "And we'd been told the whales would attack us." "And we were waiting with a lot of anxiety for the whale to do just that." "When I turned because the ocean erupted behind me, the sperm whale had thrown himself out of the water straight at the harpooner on the bow of the Russian vessel." "And they fired a harpoon that was not attached, and it exploded and the whale fell back and died." "As it was screaming and rolling in the water, blood everywhere,..." "I looked up past these six inch teeth, into an eye the size of my fist, and what I saw there was understanding, that the whale understood what we were trying to do." "Because he could've very easily come forward and crushed us or seized us in his jaws and killed us." "Instead what he did was slowly slide back in the water, eye to eye contact all the way, and went beneath the waves and died." "What I also saw in that eye was pity." "Pity not for himself or his kind, but pity for us that we would be capable of committing such an abominable act against nature." "Direct Action:" "Spiritual Dimensions" "Given that you have a wealth of experience with individual encounters with people in ecological resistance, would you describe them as people of faith?" "There was a theologian, Schubert Augden, who once wrote that all ethics is grounded in the affective faith experience of a value of people and the environment." "In that sense, I would say yes." "I think that if you look at both radical and mainstream environmental movements, and when you get past the surface with people, generally speaking, if not always, I'm still looking to find some examples where this is not true, but generally speaking, people have a deep sense of being bound to, connected with, and belonging to the biosphere, or nature, however they understand that." "And if we look back at the roots of the word religion, it has to do with being bound to or connected with that which is greater than oneself." "Now we have people who are taking narratives that didn't used to exist, namely scientific narratives, of the big bang, cosmological evolution, biological evolution on this planet as a substory within the broader cosmological story." "And they're saying, these are also sacred stories." "And these stories lead to the miracle of life on this planet, with all its incredible diversity, both genetic and species variety." "And that that process, and that diversity, is sacred." "So what I increasingly find is that people who come to reverence that kind of a story, and this is not uncommon in the environmental movement, when they stand before those sorts of realities, or they think about their experiences, they fall back on metaphors of the sacred, to describe that which is most meaningful to them, that has been most transformative to them." "So for me I try to keep it simple, when it comes to these sort of definitional things." "To me that's religion." "When people draw on metaphors of the sacred, or talk about environmental degradation as a desecration, as environmentalists have done for generations here in the united states for example, it seems common sensical to understand that as in some sense spiritual or religious, whichever word we think makes most sense I guess." "I have long been interested in both radical religion and environmental ethics so I soon left for the woods to learn more about these groups." "A few years later I interviewed two individuals, Peg Millet and Mark Davis, both of whom served several years in prison for an effort to sabotage powerlines coming from a nuclear power plant, which they viewed as a desecrating act." "Millet described how, when the FBI tried to capture her in the desert that night, she had a mystical experience that helped her to escape." "As she fled, her consciousness was transformed into that of a ringtail cat, her totem animal." ""The ringtail consciousness was in me that night," she recalled." ""I ran through cactus gardens without getting stuck, I could feel the ringtail like it was surrounding me, protecting me." "I felt its presence."" "Sticking with redwood examples, I spoke with three direct action activists about the ritual and spiritual dimensions of their activism." "They all agreed that direct action forest ritualizing both keep them connected with the spirit, the consciousness of the forest." "One of them explained,..." ""What we know about redwoods is that they sprout, they hold on to each other." "Today's redwoods are part of this continuous living sprouting being, or consciousness, that once covered millions of acres." "And all of this knowledge has been chewed up and chased into small pockets."" "He then described an experience during a meditative circle in a redwood forest cathedral." ""I don't recall what kind of ritual we were engaged in at the time, but suddenly this cold icy breeze came through the camp, washed over our knees, and we heard a long rolling moan." "Everyone stopped talking, until afterward we said,..." "'Did you hear that?" "That was no breeze!" "'" "We didn't try to give it a name." "There are a lot of old energies, old pain in there, lots of the spirits have dwelled there a long time, and they have a lot to say."" "And it was only through the sacrifices that I was willing to make to the animal people that I was blessed with their sister and brotherhood, and the awareness that came along with it." "The awareness that the legends and myths and stories that you hear out of indigenous cultures about the animals as people, as creators, as gods and goddesses, that all of those stories are real." "And that they are the remnant of a society and a civilization and culture that lived in harmony with their environment." "That recognized the value and strength of the earth and spiritual world." "And that to me has given me so much appreciation, and such a feeling of honor that I am allowed to represent these most ancient of people, these nations of others we call animals." "And that is the task before the generation before us." "They stand to either do the most to reverse the destruction of the earth and the animal nations, or they can do the least, and just allow things to continue as business as usual." "And if that's the case, then they have to realize, as do all people in society, that it is your fault for what has happened." "It is you who will have to answer to your children 50, 75 years from now when they ask what you did during the eco-wars." "And in that sense, I think each one of us has to live the life today, this very moment, doing the things that we would be proud to tell our ancestors about." "And in the morning when you wake up, be thankful to be alive." "And pray for those who cannot pray." "For the animals that walk on the earth, for the creatures that swim in the water, and for the fowl that fly in the air." "And you can pray that we walk upon the earth that swirls within this universe." "Thank you." "Well, while we got you singing, we'll do a song about the elves." "The elves in the forests." "I've never met one." "please support earth and animal liberation prisoners:" "Civil disobedience has many permutations. You can block the streets in front of the united nations. You can lay down on the tracks, keep the nuke trains out of town. Or you can pour gas on the condo and you can burn it down." "So here's a toast to the night, three cheers and a grunt; hey, hey, hey!" "Uh!" "" "Very good, very good, you got it." "Next time we'll all get it." "To the Earth Liberation Front!" "The Earth Liberation Front!" "" "You can go to senate hearings, wait until they call your name." "My hat is off to anyone with the will to play that game. But if you wanna know the truth, what warms my aching heart, is to see the masked avengers come to tear the road apart." "So here's a toast to the night,- -three cheers and a grunt: hey, hey hey, uh!" " -To the Earth Liberation Front!" "The Earth Liberation Front!" "Well they'll tell you that it's violence to destroy a logging truck. -These are the very people who'd kill the planet for a buck. They'll tell you to talk and be reasonable they'll say." "Maybe we can talk tomorrow, but we can pull the GM crops today!" "So here's a toast to the night, three cheers and a grunt:" "hey, hey hey, uh!" " -To the earth liberation front!" "The Earth Liberation Front!" "Now there are so many things of beauty in this world to see. A wild running river, or an old growth redwood tree. But in such an ugly situation, so sinister and dire," "there's nothing quite so lovely as a Wal-Mart on fire!" "So here's a toast to the night, three cheers and a grunt:" "hey, hey hey, uh!" " -To the earth Liberation Front!" "The Earth Liberation Front!" "Here's a toast to the night, three cheers and a grunt:" "hey, hey hey, uh!" " -To the Earth Liberation Front!" "The Earth Liberation Front!" ""