From Green to Black

The lack of formal organization must make it very difficult to catch criminals associated with crimes the ELF has committed.
Extremely. The one key thing about them and one of the things that makes them very hard to catch is that they don't really exist. In fact, if I wanted to do something like burn down a tree farm, if they accepted that act as within their guidelines, then I would become a member of ELF. It's not that I'm joining the organization, it's the fact that my actions will allow them to accept me or not.

How successful has law enforcement been with tracking the ELF?
Nobody knows for sure what keeps them at bay, because they don't commit crimes in any certain pattern. If they did do the Seattle one, they might not be doing another one for another nine months to a year, and that would be a normal thing because they're all different groups doing all kinds of things across the country. There aren't just one or two people giving orders.

The ELF was much more active five years ago, with the group being linked to four incidents of arson along the West Coast in 2003 alone. Why have they suddenly re-emerged?
The ELF hasn't come out and claimed responsibility [for the fires in Maltby], but I'll throw in a guess. Right now in Tacoma, another suburb of Seattle, there's an eco-terrorist, a woman [Briana Waters] on trial for setting a fire at the University of Washington. Then, Monday was the first day of the court appearance of Tre Arrow, who the federal government just extradited from Canada for supposedly burning a bunch of logging trucks. So the fires might be a symbol of the environmental people saying, "We're not out yet," meaning, "We're still around and we're still going to do our thing. Whatever you do to that woman or Tre Arrow isn't going to stop us. We're not going to be deterred." I don't have the faintest idea if that's the case, but it seems too much of a coincidence that those things were happening when this occurred.

Would you describe this as the start of a new wave of eco-terrorism?
I don't know if it's a new wave or not, because we might have had kids who were too busy taking final exams and midterms [to be committing crimes] and that's the reason there was no activity going on, and now for some reason out of the blue—and it might be those trials—it might have been the thing to trigger one cell.

What would you say has been the ELF's biggest "success"?
They've had basically no success. They make people who might be more caring about the environment a little more upset because they commit violent acts.

What can be done to stop groups like the ELF?
What we need to do is very hard because we need to train law enforcement on both the federal and local levels to think in an entirely new way. It's the same as if you asked me about fighting Al Qaeda.

© 2008