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Thomas Zeitzoff, "No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Thomas Zaitsoff, professor in the School of Public affairs at American University. Thomas's new book, no Option but the Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis, examines various revolutionary, extremist and radical approaches to addressing a myriad of issues like overpopulation, ecological degradation, pollution, climate change, animal rights and oil drilling. Countless politicians, business leaders and average citizens worry about the threats to our environment. A fringe minority, however, have been inspired to take sometimes decisive, violent and destructive actions with the hopes of protecting the earth from resource hungry humans. While most environmental activists are peaceful, newspapers tend to highlight the most vocal and explosive actors seeking to face down the climate crisis. In no Option But Sabotage, Thomas Zaitsev explores dozens of the most important radical environmental movements and profiles over 100 former and current activists. To understand the future of global politics, we must contend with not only the very real threats to our climate, but also the psychology and tactics of the people most devoted to ending our dependency on fossil fuels. Thomas, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [01:19]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Happy to be here, Caleb.
- [01:21]
Caleb Zakrin
Really glad to have you on, in part because I feel like this topic is so timely. It becomes seemingly more timely every single day. I was recently seeing about recent policy reversals related to climate. It seems in a way like climate change is one of these issues that is more politicized than almost any other issue, where really there's on the one hand many people that see this as the, the greatest threat that we face in the 21st century. How are we going to deal with things like rising sea levels and inhospitable cities that essentially make it impossible to live without having some form of air conditioning? And this has been an issue that many people have been worrying about for a while now, really since the 70s. People have really been faced with it in, in this major way since Rachel Carson wrote Silent spring in the 60s too. But you really dig deeply into the history of the radical environmental movement and you look at contemporary activists today, various movements that have come and gone, and I think it's just really a fantastic framing, a fantastic way that people can think about how these issues are just going to continue to crop in the future and the way that it's going to shape how people think about politics. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about yourself and how you initially got interested in this topic of radical environmental politics.
- [02:56]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Thanks for the intro and kind words, Caleb. Yeah, so I'm a professor and it was actually a student question that got me interested in this. So every semester I teach about Ted Kaczynski, the unabomber, right? His 17 plus year bombing spree from 1978 to 1995 and where he killed three, wounded 20 plus. And I have my students read his manifesto, which. It's got a good hook, right? The industrial, you know, the industrial revolution has been a disaster for humanity. And then he pivots and talks about bringing down western civilization. But I had a student who asked me, you know, professor, given all the threats from climate change, you know, why don't we see more actions like, you know, Ted Kaczynski in the Unabomber? And I said, that's a good question. I don't know. And then I started doing some research and I found out that after 9 11, the radical environmental and animal rights groups, they were considered the number one domestic terrorist threats, even though they never killed anybody. And I was like, wow, you know, having done a lot of research on political violence outside the U.S. i was like, what's going on here? I wanted to know more. And that's kind of how I ended up on this three year odyssey to sort of find out what happened. And given the threat from climate change, where might we be headed?
- [04:22]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. It's interesting that you point out that how much of a concern there was around know, environmental terrorism and the way in which it's been conceived. I think like, you know, Ted Kaczynski is an interesting figure in part because he has become a sort of a, you know, a popular cult figure, especially among younger people. There's this whole trend of, you know, on TikTok of, you know, young teenagers making fan cams of him to kind of, you know, celebrate him. He was sort of like there like the Luigi Mangione of, of his day for these people. So it's interesting to see how people like him, how their, their message and how their ideas have become so influential among certain groups of people. And what I found really interesting is that, that, you know, the, the place that you, that you start this book is you start by looking at the origins of people worrying about things like overpopulation and pollution. Obviously, like at various points in time, pollution is in certain cities, has been a major issue. But can you talk about where you start the book and the first groups that you look at? Because they don't really resemble that much what we might think of as modern environmental groups.
- [05:36]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I mean, I think this is the kind of dirty secret that a lot of the environmental movement has had to reckon with over the past 15, 20 years or even a longer timeframe is that a lot of the, you know, origins of the environmental movement and the modern conservation movement are pretty racist and pretty horrible.
- [05:58]
Caleb Zakrin
Right.
- [05:58]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Madison Grant was one of the foremost conservationists in the, you know, the early 20th century. It helped found the American national parks, created the Bronx Zoo. He also wrote like one of the most racist books ever, the Passing of the Great Race, accused the west of committing suicide by, you know, allowing immigrants into their country. Hitler was a big fan of his. And so that's like, you know, most of the time we think of people who are environmentalists as leftists and liberals and they have like a, you know, a yard sign that says in this house we believe in and they drive Priuses. And I think what's kind of clear is that even into the 80s, right, there were these folks who were, you know, conservationists, but they were conservative in, you know, and they took that to heart. I mean, I talk in the book about Earth first, kind of the sort of forerunner to a lot of radical environmental activists. And it was founded by people who were, you know, disaffected conservationists, people who worked at the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth. Um, and, you know, their ethos was, you know, there was a counterculture vibe, for sure. It was founded in 1980. They like, did this big prank where they pretended to crack the Glen Canyon Dam out in American Southwest. That was seen as a, a big, you know, environmental kind of disaster to a lot of conservationists. And they took their kind of ethos was, you know, anything, you know, know, in defense of, you know, Mother Earth, no compromises. But they engaged in what they called monkey wrenching. And this was based off of Ed Abby's book, the Monkey Wrench Gang, about a ragtag group of people who, you know, pull up development stakes, put sugar and bulldozers in the American Southwest. But again, in there, there was this current. There were people like Dave Foreman, who was a rat like, ardent immigration restrictionist who called himself a redneck for wilderness. So, so the what we consider like these origins for, you know, the modern day environmental movement look very different. And I think also can tell us a little bit about our current politics.
- [08:15]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. You also look at some of the influential articles and essays of the 1960s that were dealing with some of these issues like population or thinking about the environment in ways where, know, it really is, you know, we're dealing with limited resources. And if there's too many people or too many companies or governments that are pulling on these Resources, eventually someone's going to be left without it. You know, you look at Garrett Hardin, who wrote the really famous essay Tragedy of the Commons, Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Could you talk a little about just the general mood or ethos in the 60s related to environmental issues?
- [08:56]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I mean, so I think there are, there's kind of two impulses that you sort of can pick up on. One is there's this kind of deeper concern about modernity, right? And which goes back like kind of, you know, the 19th century or even, you know, you could even go back further, right, to this view that like cities are dirty, modernity is like making us sick in a lot of ways. And like Teddy Roosevelt's like, you know, living the kind of authentic, you know, hard, you know, life which involves wilderness, right? So there is this concept and ethos that, you know, we need to conserve and wilderness is great and then wilderness has all sorts of problems that I'm happy to chat about kind of later. So that's one thing. And then, you know, the second thing is, as you point out in like the 60s, we're starting to also like question like, wow, we've done a lot. We have, you know, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, we are developing places that we hadn't before. And you know, as part of this kind of industrial, you know, like second industrial revolution in a lot of ways, right? We're poisoning lakes, right? We have, you know, the, you know, rivers catching on fire. All these sorts of things that are getting a lot of news. And then you have the kind of broader sort of new left counterculture movement of, you know, student activist protests, anti Vietnam War protests, you have civil rights movements. And within this space, right. There's you know, this kind of new, you know, sort of environmental movement that picks up. But again, these are sort of uncomfortable bedfellows, right? Because there is this very conservative, you know, in many ways kind of right leaning strain of conservation. And then there's this left wing, you know, new left activism. And part of the thing that I talk about in the book that happens is Earth first, this organization was always in tension with itself. It's one, it's a group of radical environmentalists and there's no hierarchy. So you're already going to have some tension, right? But the second thing is between some of the folks who are what we would call the deep ecologists, right, who basically believe that environmentalists and their job is all living things know, deserve equal weight. But deep ecology were about wilderness. Like if you were to sum it up in one sentence, they were focused on wilderness, whereas there's these social ecologists and they were tarred by these deep ecologists as being urban leftists, right, who cared too much about social problems. And that wasn't what Earth first was about. But the social ecologists would counter and say wilderness is a terrible topic, right? It's like this bad sort of way to wrap your, your, your, your, you know, environmental movement, bad way to frame the problem because inherently wilderness is like a social construction. And right. We can't ignore, we can't address the environmental problems if we ignore the human problems. And you know, in some ways this kind of frames the sort of modern day issues, like whether you can actually separate out the environment from other issues or whether you have to be, as you know, in the parlance of modern day activism, like whether intersectional is necessary. And this was a huge fight. And like part of this fight was, you know, the social ecologist accused the deep ecologists of being racist, fascist because a lot of them, you know, held pretty strong immigration restrictionist views. And some of, you know, Foreman was, you know, accused. And I don't even think you could say accused is that he said some really despicable things about famines in Ethiopia in the 80s or about HIV, basically saying, well, you know, it's unfortunate, but maybe this will bring nature back into balance. And so this kind of misanthropic deep ecological impulse was kind of always there in the population question. Whether you think overpopulation is like a huge issue or not, right. Is kind of this litmus test for sort of where you stood on the social ecology, deep ecology scale.
- [13:01]
Caleb Zakrin
Caring about the environment is something that I think many people feel, you know, it's important to a lot of people to protect the environment. Whether it's just, you know, know, natural landscapes or you know, to fight against pollution and the impacts that it might have, or at a more deeper level, you know, to protect the, you know, the future of human life on the earth. It's something that if you just are having a conversation with, with anyone and you're talking about the environment, you know, most people or many people, you know, will express some concern about, you know, the fate or the future of the climate. Um, but then of course, you know, there are some people, and this is really the subject of your book, who they think that, you know, just the, you know, the kind of, the typical political approach that something like the Sierra Club might make is, is simply not enough, that we have to go further, whether that's you know, taking some sort of a direct action through protest or quite literally, you know, putting bombs on pipelines and you know, making it impossible for people to go in and, and get, get oil. How do you define the radical environmental movement?
- [14:13]
Thomas Zaitsoff
So that's like the, that's a very, you know, that's a loaded question. But something that I think is, you know, I, I wrestled with in the book because it's, there's, there's not like a card, I'm a card carrying member. It's the same thing like that. People talk about it nowadays when it's like, oh, they're a member of antifa, as if there's like a card carrying member. These are, you know, for the most part especially, you know, 90s onward, the radical environmental movement is left leaning. It has a lot of anarchist influence. So it's not hierarchical, it's left wing. There's no like membership roster. But for the most part it's I think just defined by like a couple of core things. One is that people think that ecological threat is not being, is not being addressed through kind of mainstream environmental lobbying or policy. And there needs to be other actions that are taken kind of what as a political scientist that would call contentious politics. So this could be anything from like, you know, blocking a road and civil disobedience, locking down tree sits to sabotage or property destruction, which is kind of more at the upper end of what we've seen from these groups. It's like non hierarchical. And I think those are kind of like the two sort of major things, right. The first one is environmental threat needs to be addressed and people are willing to put their bodies on the line. And the radical environmental movement is not a hierarchical movement with defined leadership and card caring members. It's much more loosely and affinity based and people like, you know, part of the thing with Earth first and then later the Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front and more generally these groups is that anybody, as long as they follow like a small number of kind of rules like not harming living things and doing as much damage as possible to those causing, you know, the, the sort of bad guys causing environmental damage and harm that's like, then you can claim an action on behalf of, you know, a group or movement. So that's, that's, that's the way that I, I see things, right.
- [16:32]
Caleb Zakrin
And I, I think that's important to, to define it that way because otherwise it's going to be difficult to parse the more radical groups from just the sort of the standard, you know, political, more Politically mainstream activist groups.
- [16:49]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I think that's a great point. But I also think what's super interesting about it is this idea. Yes. There some people, like, in Sierra Club, like, loathed Earth First. Like, for sure. There were, like, people, like, in the 90s, when we'll get into talking about the Earth Liberation Front, the leaderless group, you know, that carried out arsons and bombings and did not harm anybody, but did a lot of property destruction, which led to, you know, being part of this list of the number one domestic terror threat after nine, 11. Right. Sierra Club, like, put out a reward for, like, those folks. But. And I think this is the other part, is that there was this sense of this idea that maybe, you know, maybe Sierra Club needed Earth First. Right? To kind of push the envelope, to be, you know, move the Overton window. You know, academics like myself will call this, like, a radical flank effect. Right. Is Earth First. Is out here, like, you know, spiking trees, so putting, like, metal or, like, ceramic spikes into trees that make it kind of impossible to log because the saw plate could get, you know, stuck and could really damage a timber worker. Right. Or a sawmill worker. Right. Earth versus doing these things. So then Sierra Club looks moderate by comparison. And there was this, I think, idea that particularly Earth First. And some of the folks that were more active there, like, they were, you know, doing this sabotage, but they were also doing legal fights. Right. And doing all sorts of other stuff. So I do think there is this more. You know, it's not as if the radical environmentists were over here and, you know, the mainstream environmentalists were over here, and they were kind of at loggerhead. Sometimes they were, for sure. But there was. There was sometimes this symbiotic relationship that's
- [18:38]
Caleb Zakrin
really interesting to think about. Obviously, I'm sure if you polled different members of the Sierra Club, they would have different views, especially if they were. If you were pulling them anonymously. And one of the aspects of the book that I think is really interesting, at the. At the very beginning of the book, you have a list of. Of names, and these are different activists, obviously their identities more or less hidden. But could you talk about how you went about meeting up, finding activists to interview and what that process was like? What did you learn from these interviews that you conducted?
- [19:15]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I mean, so this was one of the sort of surprising things that happened is, you know, I'd done research in Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Mexico, Ukraine with people involved with various different types of groups or movements engaged in political violence. Some, you know, that have, like, What I would consider more kind of when we say something, it's not just property destruction. They were involved in armed attacks against, you know, government or civilians. And I will say that the radical environmental movement activists that I interviewed and also the kind of radical animal rights movement folks were some of the most suspicious people. And when I first started interviewing, I was, you know, talking to my wife, and I was like, wow, you know, this is wild. The sort of levels of, you know, vetting that I had to go through. Like, I had people, like, one person, you know, asked to see my faculty ID to make sure I wasn't in law enforcement. I had somebody who does a lot of who's kind of like an activist, like, movement lawyer who I met with, who basically, you know, they were like, yeah, we'll meet up here. And I sent a Google Calendar invite. They declined it. They said, we don't use Google products. Oh, and FYI, you know, our, you know, address is actually not the address listed. That's a P.O. box. Here's our real address. And then, you know, I had other people who I wanted to interview who they would only. And they were like, you haven't talked to enough people I know yet now, right? And the. This kind of idea of, like, security culture was pretty pervasive. It's the idea that, you know, you vet people before talking to them. When you can, you talk on encrypted, you know, platforms like Signal. You don't talk about or brag about illegal actions that have taken place. You're suspicious of outsiders, and you're very careful when posting on social media. And I thought at first that this was, like, you know, paranoid. But then you get to the stories about, like, Craig Rosebrough, who was one of the spokespeople for the Earth Liberation Front. There's no, you know, he was an activist in, you know, the Portland area in the Pacific Northwest. Him and Leslie Pickering and several other folks were involved in the Earth Liberation Front press office. So they weren't actually engaging in actions, but they were kind of publicizing the communiques that happened after the Earth Liberation Front would carry out an arson or an act of sabotage. And they would kind of transmitted this to the media. And they had a, you know, a long file right, at the FBI. You know, Craig Rosebrow was able to FOIA it. But then this story came out a couple years ago that, you know, he had been approached by this, you know, agent, this literary agent for his biography. And, you know, he was writing it up and, you know, thinking about it but then he like heard like, yeah, this guy, this agent who was well known, like he had kind of done like a shady thing to a previous author. So he declined. And it turned out later that that agent was actually had been approached by the FBI as an informant and encouraged contact Rosebrow because they wanted to get information on the Earth Liberation Front. So paranoid, but maybe not so much. Maybe just, you know, kind of wise into, you know, the fact that this is what happens when you get targeted. And Tara is the number one domestic terror threat. So that was something that was, I didn't know going into this. And it really surprised me and opened my eyes. But also while interviewing activists, there were people who I interviewed were current climate activists who've been, you know, involved in, you know, different, you know, blockades, civil disobedience action. Some were involved in the Stop Cop City protest down in Atlanta against the building of a police training facility in the Atlanta Forest. And people had been arrested, some had faced indictment like after we spoke. So it was kind of to see that Right. Sort of happen in real time. While interviewing the book, it definitely kind of helped me understand better where the security culture was coming from. And then now with, you know, the way the current environment for left wing activists, and this is something I'm sure we're going to talk about, but it's definitely only heightened that feeling.
- [23:27]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. And obviously it took you a while to make contact with a lot of these activists, but then once you did,
- [23:35]
Thomas Zaitsoff
you did manage to speak with, with many of them.
- [23:39]
Caleb Zakrin
And I imagine part of that experience of speaking with these activists, you're comparing what they say to also the various, you know, literature that's been written on these groups. Were there any big surprises for you when talking with people that maybe undermined some of the previous research you had seen or just other things that helped you think about the best way to really talk about these groups and, you know, maybe the psychologies that are motivating them to join these types of groups.
- [24:10]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I would say, like, the thing that was kind of surprising to me is one, I did not set out to write about the animal rights, you know, radical animal rights scene. Like there have been books on that before. But what became clear is kind of in this late 80s through the early 2000s, you couldn't write about the radical environmental movement without writing about the animal liberation, you know, movement kind of at the same time. And you couldn't write about radical environmental activists and animal liberation folks without talking about the punk scene. And that was one of the kind of really surprising things to me. I grew up in Austin. I had friends in punk bands. I went to punk shows. I wouldn't call myself, like, hardcore straight edge, vegan, etc. But that was something that I think was surprising to me is the number of people who, during this period when, you know, probably from about, like the late, you know, mid to late 90s to the early 2000s, when the Earth Liberation Front was super active, the Animal Liberation Front was. Was very active as well. Then the Pacific Northwest was like this burgeoning scene. And it was, you know, as somebody point like, said, like, specifically the city of Eugene in Oregon, where the University of Oregon is, is you had this confluence of animal liberation anarchists, punk, you know, anarchist folks. You had tree sitters and radical environmental activists. And they all sort of mixed in this scene and punk in, you know, this idea of punk and anarchism kind of became this underlying guiding ideology for a lot of folks is that, you know, we want to do it ourselves, right? We're, you know, anarchist punks. We're going to organize and we want to sort of liberate, you know, animals, the environment and people. But I think kind of at a deeper level, what it meant is that, you know, now when you talk to somebody who's from the climate movement or the climate justice movement, they're like, oh, I got active, you know, with Fridays for the Future doing youth climate strike when I was in high school or maybe in college even later, right? It's a very different entry point for activism versus I came in through the punk scene. And at these punk shows, there were these zines that published, like, you know, lists of targets they would publish, you know, animal rights. Like, they would publish, you know, sabotage that the Animal Liberation Front had carried off, like, animal liberation actions. They published, you know, graffiti, vandalism. They'd support the Earth Liberation Front. One of the people I remember who's telling me is that, you know, this animal liberation, this animal liberation activist who got into the scene told me I was throwing rocks through windows. And then I just, you know, I went to a punk show and then I figured out, oh, these are the windows where I need to throw it. And it suggests something that these subcultures, the kind of people they attract, how they nurture people, the ethos they put them with is actually more important than I think a lot of other sort of books have given maybe credence to. And something that surprised me.
- [27:12]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I. I think that makes. That makes a lot of sense on a number of levels. I think also from you know, I. I think I similarly had an experience of being involved when I was, you know, very young, like 14, 15, going to a lot of punk shows and, you know, seeing these types of zines or these sorts of people that. Where, you know, it was the same sort of topics. It was no, you know, don't do drugs or drink. You know, don't eat animals and protect the environment.
- [27:39]
Thomas Zaitsoff
These.
- [27:40]
Caleb Zakrin
These topics came together, and it makes sense on some level why people relate these. But I do think you also show that, you know, in previous eras, these wouldn't necessarily have all gone. Gone together in the exact same way, or at least they wouldn't have gone under the same punk packaging. And it is really interesting to see how much the punk subculture, you know, lends itself to. To this sort of environmental activist route or path. Obviously, there's. There's many different ways that people go through punk. You know, there's a whole, you know, there's a lot of people that started as punk rockers and then become, you know, conservative. Conservative economists. But. But this. This is one interesting path that you. That you chart The.
- [28:24]
Thomas Zaitsoff
The sort of.
- [28:25]
Caleb Zakrin
The two kind of earlyish movements that you look at, you know, from the Earth First Era than to the Earth Liberation Front era. Could you talk about how these two approaches and two groups kind of compare with each other?
- [28:38]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I mean, so I think there's. There's debate as to. I mean, there's a link for sure, right? We know that several of the people that later became involved in the Earth Liberation Front were involved in, like, Earth first actions. You know, there's a big, amazing documentary called Pickaxe about kind of the. What activists call the Battle of Warner Creek, where. And you can watch it on YouTube or you can even see there's a documentary of a Tree Falls, the story of the Earth Liberation Front, where a lot of these folks, and in my conversations with many, some of them too, right, they had been involved in forest defense campaigns, mean, you know, the early 90s. And they were kind of maybe fed up a little bit with the pace and maybe that it was seen as too much, you know, civil disobedience and not enough sabotage or property destruction. And that's kind of been the line, right? Like, I mean, it's my book, you know, the title is no Option but Sabotage. And it's a rhetorical question, but I think to people in the Earth Liberation Front, right? So you had these people, many of whom were around the Eugene area, who. Who were involved in, you know, Earth First. Different kind of Forest campaigns and forest defenses were like, no, this is not, you know, we're not doing enough. Now we want to escalate. And they basically start carrying out actions in this kind of leaderless group, right? And you know, there's the bombings of the Oak Ridge, you know, ranger stations that happen and these communiques get released. And, and I think what's important to like situate and why it's situated in Eugene is because the Earth Liberation Front was happening, you know, in the Pacific Northwest. It was happening in other places too, for sure. Not just there, but in the Pacific Northwest. And at this time there's also this kind of anti globalization movement that's happening as well. And the Earth Liberation Front is like one piece of this. And we see this kind of peak in the 1999 battle in Seattle, right, as activists call it. But is the World Trade Organization protests where anarchists, you know, labor groups, all sorts of left wing folks descend upon Seattle. And then there's some pretty intense confrontations with police and pretty crazy scenes outside the World Trade Organization protests. So it's part of this kind of broader sort of transition. And I think the difference, right, is you know, the, some of the older guard of the Earth Liberation Front, their view, a lot of them was entirely negative of, you know, the old guard of Earth First. Their view of the Earth Liberation Front was entirely like very negative. They were like these, you know, some. One of the founders of Earth first who I spoke to said, he goes, you know, they, they were just red and black, right? And that they were anarchists and that's what they wanted to do. They wanted to just, you know, do their smash stuff and they didn't care about building campaigns and they had, you know, they were urban, right? They, in the sense that they cared about like city stuff and they weren't really hooked into the environmental angle as much and that they had kind of lost the plot, in their view. And so there was this tension that had happened. But it's. I think the Earth Liberation Front was sort of the, this kind of radical offshoot of folks, right, that has this Earth first kind of forest defense. But it also had this broader energy from the punk and anarchist scene that was going on in Eugene, in the
- [32:18]
Caleb Zakrin
broader Pacific Northwest after 9 11. There's obviously, you know, the initiation of the war on terror campaign and there's quite a lot of focus and attention on terrorism beyond the United, the borders of the United States and the risk of, of terrorist penetration within the United States too. But you also talk about the Green Scare You've already alluded to this quite a bit that, you know, the real fear from law enforcement of the threat of domestic terrorism was from environmentalists. Could you evaluate the green scare? The, you know, how. What was the analysis that they took to this and what impact did this have on environmental activism?
- [33:01]
Thomas Zaitsoff
The term itself is contested by activists. Right. Like, I think it's just a, it's a useful term in the sense of sort of cataloging a period like which the centerpiece was Operation Backfire, which was this multi agency task force, you know, led by the FBI and you know, in particular like police in Oregon and Washington, both at the state and local level, to take down the Earth Liberation Front and particularly this cell. There are group of folks that they dubbed the Family, right? That's always like a scary thing, the Family. And you know, activists were like, you know, it was like either the Manson family or a mafia crime family, which to them was ridiculous. But it definitely was this targeted period of, of repression. And I think there's kind of two things that I take from, from that. The first is that initially the government didn't really have a lot of good information as to what was happening because for the most part, the year, you know, this is before cell phone tracking, there weren't as many cameras. And the folks in these Earth Liberation Front cells, they were, you know, they had, they were aware of, you know, they were some of the earliest adopters of encryption. Right. They were aware of some of these shortfalls. And so they would not talk about actions. They didn't leave behind DNA like or you know, fingerprints. They were pretty careful. And the FBI didn't, in law enforcement didn't really have clues as to what was happening. And as I talk about in the book, that changed when there was an informant, Jacob Ferguson, who had gotten picked up on some other things and they knew was kind of in this general sort of milieu of this scene of activists and he turns informant. And that's how things kind of change pretty quickly. I do think one of the things that activists do claim, and I think it is true is, you know, when they like for instance, burning down the Vale ski lodge in Colorado, right. When you're targeting entrenched business interests, you're going to get a pretty strong response. Those, you know, the timber industry has a lot, you know, money, right? All these, all these kinds of industries that they targeted had sway. And I think that's there already happened with radical animal rights activists that had target, you know, animal testing laboratories and other things that were, you know, for Biosciences and, you know, the fur industry. Right. Again, these are industries that have lobbyists, that have friends, that have political power. And that means that, you know, something that if it hadn't targeted these concentrated industries, might have been treated maybe at a slightly lower threat, gets elevated. But I do think on the flip side is that, you know, there were between like 300 to 500, you know, bombings, arsons, incendiary devices over like a eight, nine year period. And many of them were unsolved. That's a pretty, pretty big track record. Again, nobody had been killed, but there was quite a bit of property damage. And I think, I think that especially after 9, 11, the idea that this was sort of a campaign of terrorism and needed to be stopped sort of along with the fact that they're attacking industry, it. It kind of turbocharged the, this investigation, this period of repression that activists call the greed scare. Right.
- [36:25]
Caleb Zakrin
And after this period where you see sabotage and direct action, you actually have this couple really great charts that show the number of environmental actions taken, the kind of the rise and fall and the decline in direct actions taken in this period. And then of course, we see the rise of this kind of climate justice movement, various new figures emerging to talk about the threat of climate change. I feel like this was an era in which a lot of people, you know, were beginning to wrap their heads around this being an issue that could really no longer wait. Presidents were saying this, political leaders were saying, were saying these sorts of things. Business leaders were getting into the mix. Whether or not you want to, you know, even. Even oil, even the CEOs of certain oil companies were acknowledging that at some point in the future they might not be in the business of oil. Things have changed a lot, you know, in the past couple years even. But how do you frame the climate justice movement in the context of these earlier movements? Is it, is it more. Even if there are certain actions taken, like protesting the Dakota Access pipeline or, you know, throwing soup cans at paintings or, you know, the, you know, kind of the high profile actions taken by Greta Thunberg involving, you know, sailing across the ocean instead of taking a plane. How do you fit these sort of more recent trends in climate activism in the earlier context?
- [37:58]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I think there, it's a really good question, right, is because there's definitely like a lineage, right? There's a lineage of like some of these tactics of civil disobedience. Like when we see people lock down or, you know, try to stop, you know, whether it be pipelines or other things being built, it's directly the lineage of, you know, Ed Abbey, monkey wrenching Earth first kinds of actions. What I do think is different, you know, the pipeline fights are some, you know, maybe share slightly more because they're place based campaigns, but a lot of the Earth first and even the Earth Liberation Front stuff to some degree, right? These were like campaigns that were place based. It was about defending a particular spot, keeping wilderness here, right? Whereas the, you know, even with the fact that some people are trying to avoid a pipeline being built, it's not like we're trying to stop it from being built just particularly here. It's we're trying to stop all pipelines from being built, stop all fossil fuels, stop all carbon. And that's a much harder bar to clear and much trickier to organize around because people are willing to save the forest, right? Save this particular parcel of land. But the idea of stopping carbon and keeping it below 350 particles per million, which is like Bill McKibben350.org, what they found it. People get climate change and the effects, but it's a harder problem and it's a global problem. It's trickier for people to organize. And I think that's been part of the thing that activists have had to figure out is like, how do we make this tangible? How do we make this so that people can figure out these are the things that we want to stop, right? And there's, you know, are we de growthers or are we, you know, green new dealers, right? These are like kind of schisms within the movement. But I think the other big legacy, right, there's this decoupling of the punk scene, right? Not saying punk would have lasted forever, but it's a different kind of person that's coming into the movement now than before. And there's a different climate. Justice is intersectional, right? It cares about climate racism, it cares about climate justice, it cares about, you know, capitalism, all these things, right? It's not to say that activists before didn't do that. They did, but it wasn't as explicit. And I also think the laws, right, the laws for blocking critical infrastructure, all these things have gotten like strengthened in, in the last, you know, last four years. We've seen that, you know, at the state level. Now we're seeing it at the federal level that, you know, the kinds of civil disobedience and other kinds of activism that previous generations did. Now you can get slapped with terrorism enhancements or there's a real, there's the real threat. So there's all these things that are kind of swimming against and maybe preventing this kind of activism from reemerging. But on the flip side, climate change, the effects are only getting bigger, right? Or not, not bigger, but like there, it's, it's, it's, it's increasing, right? You don't even have to say it's accelerating because that's a debate among climate scientists. But even with linear right. Extrapolations, we are not entering a good period. Right. I remember, like writing my book is that it was like, oh, 2023 was the hottest on record. Oh, 2024 was right. We're having these things. And part of what made me want to write the book too was, you know, during writing the book in D.C. in July 2023, and it looks like Apocalypse now outside our window because of wildfire smoke from Canada. Now that's, that's something we have yearly, right? And I think the question that activists are asking themselves, and again, there is not a good answer yet, is how far are people willing to go to stop this from happening and what should they do? Right. Yeah.
- [41:39]
Caleb Zakrin
Well, one person who you mentioned in the book, but I feel like is one of the principal figures that I sort of became familiar with with this more, you know, sabotage oriented direct action approach to environment is the scholar Andreas Malm. And what has his influence been? Because it seems to me that he has had just an enormous influence on a lot of people in more recent years that have gotten interested in radical environmental action.
- [42:08]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah. So I can tell you the Malm in his book how to Blow Up a Pipeline, which like, I think it was kind of wild to a lot
- [42:16]
Caleb Zakrin
of
- [42:19]
Thomas Zaitsoff
activists, but also even like academics who study the radical environmental movement. It was made into like a kind of indie thriller, which is, it's a pretty good movie. The irony too was that the movie itself was also put on one of these, like, Department of Homeland Security, they have these fusion alerts. And so when the movie came out, right, there was an alert that went out that said, you know, left wing, you know, activist movie encouraging sabotage and eco terrorism. You know, be on the lookout. Right. Which is like kind of wild, you know, malms title, you know, notwithstanding how to, you know, how to blow up a pipeline suggests one thing. But in his book he's talking about sort of more massive, you know, civil disobedience and other things. And older activists, you know, associated with the Earth Liberation Front because he criticizes them pretty heavily in his book. They have a lot to say. They called him an armchair asshole. They said he's, you know, a Maoist. Right. All sorts of things. I think, you know, the idea of whether there can be sort of this mass campaign of civil disobedience is like an open question mark. But I think the biggest. The big debate. Right. So I think there's this idea from some people who are, like, you know, property destruction is immoral. And I think even among people, like, who are in the sunrise movement or in mainstream movements, I do not think that's the case. And in fact, I was surprised at, you know, something that I would say, you know, 15, 20 years ago would be considered kind of radical. The idea. Is it moral or not to engage in property destruction? For younger climate activists, I think most of them would say it's, you know, it's okay. The difference, though, is whether they think it's, like, a wise strategy, and this is where there's, like, a ton of debate is, you know, is blocking roads the way to do it or people on, like, their way to work and pissing off drivers? Right. Is, you know, spraying, like, dissolvable paint all over Stonehenge. Right. Is that the way, Like. Like, do these climate stunts do anything that they want? And, like, are we going to. Is. Is it building a mass movement or taking a more vanguard approach like earlier groups did? These are, like the big, big, big debates. And I think that this idea of, you know, tactics is kind of intimately tied into what is your theory of change. Right. Do you think that. Right. We can, you know, we can follow other movements that maybe had a radical flank, like some people argue about the civil rights movement, or do, you know, does this ethos of, no property destruction, et cetera, we need to stay disciplined and have a mass movement. These are, like, big questions, I would say, you know, these are questions that people are asking right now. I mean, you talked about what's happening with current environmental policy. I mean, the front page of the New York Times today is how Trump has basically completely gutted any kind of climate policy at the federal level. They've opened up public lands for drilling. They've stalled or killed as many renewable energy, you know, renewable energy plans, you know, and. And even subsidies for those things as they can. And. And so I think it's wild because these, you know, many of these things opening up public lands to drilling and development, that was the reason Earth first. Was created in the first place. So there's a big, you know, this is a big question mark kind of hanging out in the air right now.
- [45:55]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. And, you know, obviously, you know, looking at 50 years of various types of action, from peaceful protest to, you know, writing your member of Congress, to more direct actions like, you know, sending bombs or. Or, you know, blocking trees. Do you have any sense of all. At all or. Obviously, it's very challenging to, like, come up with any concrete conclusion, but just a, you know, a kind of a preliminary conclusion as to the effectiveness of this type of political violence. Obviously, you know, maybe bracketing political violence directed towards humans versus political versus property destruction. But, um, you know, what was your sense about whether or not this was effective? And I'm also curious, too, you know, in your conversations with former activists, whether or not they had any sort of sense about whether or not it was all worth it? You know, would they. If they had gone back and done it over again, would they have tried an approach, maybe more in line with something like the Sierra Club or something. Something different entirely?
- [47:02]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah. So this is a really. These are our big questions is like, what, you know, one. What's effective? So one of the things, the irony that I found myself was that I obviously, I became, you know, friendly and considered good friends. Some of the people who I met through this, who are activists, and they were asked me for, you know, can you send me one of the latest articles from the literature on, you know, social movements and protest tactics? Remember, one direct action organizer even said, here, can you send me this? It shows that, like, it's okay to do, you know, kind of civil disobedience stuff, because my NGO thinks it's terrible. Could, like, send me this. I can use it as a citation. So I think there's a little bit of that that they're also trying to figure out, right, is that there's this constant kind of experimentation. I think one of the most surprising things that, you know, quotes that happen is I did interview some people who were involved in law enforcement, who were involved in the Operation Backfire. And one person who was a detective at a, you know, at a local police department, who was involved in the Operation Backfire investigation, what he said is, he said, you know, I never thought I would say this, but, you know, the people, you know, he goes, I will never excuse property destruction and the firebombings, right? They deserved every, you know, punishment they got for that. But the people who did this kind of Warner Creek blockade where they blocked this forest road to protect old growth forest in, you know, in. In right outside of Eugene is like, they're the reason we have old growth forests in Oregon. And I. Not now, I wouldn't have said it at the Time. But my kind of hats off to them that they were able to block and hold and prevent the logging from happening. And I think that that's something that I was like, very surprised at now the question as to, you know, what, you know, and then one other thing, that one other sort of interesting divergence was speaking to, you know, people who are in this, you know, circle of. Involved with the Earth Liberation Front, like their press office. So one person who I talk about in the book, Jesse, was like, everything we did was, you know, I don't regret anything, right? In the sense that we challenged, like capitalism in the biggest industries and we imposed a cost on them and the movement is still alive. And when you see Antifa, when you see, you know, stop Cop City, when you see all these other things, right, it's still there. It's this part of the same broader sort of left wing movement. Whereas, you know, Blake, in the book, who, you know, is maybe like when we kind of started doing, you know, these vanguard kind of movement actions, I wish maybe in hindsight a mass movement might have been more effective in some ways. So there's debate among. Among activists for sure. I will say one of the ironic things is I had Robert, who I talk about in the book, who is a Animal Liberation Front, you know, he spent some time in prison. He has a very direct way of speaking, which I actually had. I had him zoom into my class and I remember one of my students asked him, do you regret, you know, anything, you know, what you did? And he said, yes, I definitely have some regrets. I wish I had done more. I wished I had realized prison wasn't as hard or was it wasn't that hard. And if you do something, you know, bike to a target, wear all black, and leave your cell phone in a Faraday bag so it can be tracked. I was like, whoa, wait, okay, we're not endorsing it, but so I think that kind of runs the spectrum a bit now. I think one of the things that's interesting is that a lot of the people, like the big question mark is what are activists going to do Now? This is something I'm bringing up at the end. And I think this is a big question, you know, question for what is, you know, given the threats that we're facing towards our democracy, the repression that activists are facing, what is the role of a radical environmental movement in this kind of autocratic, threatening moment? And Tim, who I, again, I consider a friend, and he's a direct action organizer activist, was saying, like they were having these meetings and like, do we focus on climate stuff or do we focus on democracy stuff? And they basically said, well, you can't really have a climate movement in an autocracy, so we've got to do democracy and we'll do both. And that's something that is interesting is that a lot of the activists that I interviewed, the current activists, they have transitioned to, you know, protesting against, you know, immigration actions, been involved in sort of the pro democracy protests. So I think that's something that's been revealing to.
- [51:45]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I think that, you know, as, as it seems to be that the environmental movement seems to constantly be in flux. You know, various kind of high, high points where there is a lot of action and then, you know, moments where there's a bit of an adir and people not exact, you know, not, not as involved with certain, certain things or, or people shifting between them or mainstream approach and a more radical approach. I definitely think that it'll be interesting to see how activists think about the best, most effective ways to respond. You know, I just think a lot about the fact that, you know, what's the effectiveness of, you know, changing people's minds then? And also too, it'll be interesting to see how people look towards other countries and other models and other approaches that have been spearheaded to promote more green sources of energy. So I think that this will be a topic that there'll be no shortage of things to write about. So I'm sure that this is just kind of the beginning, the tip of the iceberg for you in terms of writing about environmental movements and seeing how these groups respond, what they fight about. And it's interesting too, you know, the, the various leaders, one of the leaders that popped up in your book who is now, you know, a leading figure in the Trump administration, you know, RFK Jr. It's interesting to see how he's kind of, in a way, even though of course I wonder what he thinks about the, you know, that, that recent headline in the New York Times that you're pointing to. But he's also carved out his own sort of conservative right wing environmental approach in the form of Maha in the Republican Party. So it'll be interesting to see how that movement develops as well and whether or not there will be, you know, further changes and shifts to, to how people approach these topics.
- [53:46]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Yeah, I, I mean I talk about like, I didn't, you know, when I wrote the book, I was like, I'm not gonna, there probably won't be a chapter, you know, on. I, I didn't expect to Do a chapter on the Make America Healthy Again movement. I mean, I thought, oh, you know, it'll be something on kind of some of the eco fascist impulses like that were in the far right, that we need to lock down the borders, that overpopulation, particularly of non white population is a big problem. So like that through line of, you know, Madison Grant, you know, from the early 20th century, that, you know, white population is in decline is like there's a direct through line to the great replacement theory. And there have been people, even Tucker Carlson, who have talked about how immigrants are polluting our country. And I wouldn't be surprised in the future if when climate change becomes harder to grapple with that it becomes adopted on the right. But it's still this idea that climate change and global warming are a hoax is still pretty ingrained among right wing activists. But what did emerge, and it's kind of out of this weird soup of, you know, activists, like, opposed to the COVID lockdown, this sort of fitness wellness area, is this, you know, raw milk movement, which is essentially kind of, again, part of the broader Make America healthy again. And many of the folks who I talk to who are part of this movement in different ways, right, their view is that, you know, like many left wing activists, right, they're worried about pesticides, big agriculture, they want to eat healthy, they're worried about pollutions, contaminants, but it manifests itself slightly differently. Right. They're kind of enthusiasts for raw milk, which they see as this miracle energy drink. Even though there's a ton of science that suggests consuming raw milk is actually, can be very dangerous. There's an, for instance, there's an. I think there was an E. Coli outbreak at the popular Instagram influencer ballerina farm, her raw milk enterprise. So it's something that, you know, scientists who, people who study food safety are kind of aghast at. But this idea that, you know, they are poisoning us with the vaccine, with vaccines and with their food and other things, it appeals to, I think people like this idea of kind of purity and avoiding contamination. And many of these folks are all, you know, they're big RFK Jr. Supporters. And I think what's interesting is, you know, talking to somebody who, you know, frequents these spaces, said, you know, yeah, I sell to the left wing, you know, Birkenstock moms, but also the militia crafts too. And it's a weird sort of horseshoe in some sense of, you know, both, you know, left wing and right wing skeptics of, you know, experts in government have kind of found their home with Trump and RFK Jr. And this make America Healthy Again coalition. But again, the irony is they're worried about contaminants, they're worried about pollution, but again, they do not believe in climate change and they believe it is a globalist hoax. And that was something that came across quite strongly in most of the interviews.
- [56:53]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. And that's why I think it's important, you know what the, the, the chapters that, where you have, where you kind of look at the other issues that are important to environmental activists, how they align and how they've shifted over time. I think is really interesting to kind of think about how people's views change or augmented by other beliefs or by other groups of people or other communities that they're spending time with. Even for someone who might not necessarily be directly studying the radical environmental movement, but it's just interested in general and how people's political views develop, especially radical political views develop. I think it's actually quite valuable to see how people can take these really interesting, unexpected routes towards a particular political view. There's unfortunately so much that we haven't really had a chance to talk about in the book, but there's still so much more in here about different. You really go granular on these different movements and the various issues that they faced and the various leaders. We really were only able to do a high level gloss. So I really recommend if anyone is interested in, in this topic and understanding the radical environmental movement's past, but also its future, you should definitely go and read no Option but Sabotage. So Thomas, thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network.
- [58:08]
Thomas Zaitsoff
Thank you, Caleb. My pleasure.