Earth Day

To coincide with the celebration of the 39th annual Earth Day, the FBI has just named an environmental activist to it's most wanted list. Daniel Andreas San Diego, the only American on the list of the world's most hunted criminals, stands "accused in two bombings of San Francisco Bay area biotechnology companies targeted for their association with a British-based company that performed laboratory testing on animals." The bombings resulted in no human casualties, and currently remains on par with Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in the eyes of the US Govenment.

Not sure how I feel about "eco-terrorism." Seems like an effective means of "sticking it to the man" but explosives cause environmental damage, which seems a little counter-active.

One really great article about a more infamous "eco-terrorist" named Tre Arrow ran in Rolling Stone a few years ago.
"Tre became the most visible figure in a largely underground movement that was spreading far beyond the forests of the Pacific Northwest to challenge assumptions about nearly every aspect of humankind's relationship with the natural world. These mostly young crusaders saw themselves as the only real opposition left to the forces of corporate greed, and they became increasingly convinced that radical, aggressive, even violent protests were the only way to achieve their ends.Today, at age twenty-eight, Tre is a fugitive from the federal government. Indicted on the basis of an investigation conducted by the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force, he faces as many as eighty years in prison. Known to family and friends as a pacifist so extreme that he wouldn't step on ants, Tre may now be an armed soldier in the "revolutionary force" of the Earth Liberation Front, an organization that in September announced its members would "no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice." (excerpt)

Arrow was sentenced to 78 months in a US prison in August 2008 as a result of a plea bargain, after spending four years in jail in Canada.


Earth Day is often associated with "hippies" or stoned, non-violent, non-active types, but environmentalism also connotes protests, anger and what the "mainstream media" likes to call "extremism," and label "eco-terrorism" without bothering to acknowledge the more subtle acts of terror that large corporations earn lots of money from committing. Biotechnology, for instance, the endeavor of the corporation San Diego supposedly bombed, could cause unknown damage to the natural world by interfering with natural species interaction, requires increased use of herbicide, interfering with organic farmers' crops, and unveiling a mass of problems we can't even predict as mere transient humans in the face of something infinitely greater, older and more powerful.

We all know that "Green Consuming" is a (brilliant) capitalist ruse aimed at profiting off of upper-middle-class-white-guilt, and it seems that the eco-terrorists and those like them have been pushed underground, or to Central America.

But since 2002, when Tre hit the road running, our environmental woes have not been eradicated. So, where's the activism? It seems that Tre's actions and the actions of all "eco-terrorists" are born out of a love for the natural world and the acknowledgment that it's something that can't necessarily defend itself against rampant human abuse. However, the actions of eco-terrorists don't actually achieve anything except garnering media attention, which in turn casts them and their actions as demonic and insane. But do San Diego or Arrow deserve to be hunted by the FBI, just because the government is invested in the exact opposite cause of these environmentalists, and they happen to he holding all the power to destroy the planet and incarcerate those who believe it's wrong?

"There exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits and invalidates [the discourse of change] and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network." --Foucault

If the earth is an oppressed entity (that is, exploited and unable to make claims as such), it seems the best way to honor the earth today and everyday is to exercise a little (or a lot of) rebellion against those doing the oppressing. Use their system of power to gain some for yourself, and use it to do the earth a favor.

Read more about Radical Ecology here: radicallygreen.org