An Nov. 3 article from the Winnipeg Free Press detailed what is already happening all over the world — eco-terrorism is being intensified by the severe weather. This weather, scientifically regarded as a result of climate change, is enabling eco-terrorists, most known cases being in the Middle East, to take advantage of now unstable of insufficient natural resources to gain power and/or enact violence on the people around them.

Unknown to many, the United States has its own eco-terrorists. There is only one major difference. The Earth Liberation Front, an extreme environmental group, fights to protect our environment from capitalistic expansion, which prioritizes profit over our environmental wellbeing. These very people fighting for our environment, to prevent detrimental climate change, are given the same label, put in the same prisons and seen as equals in the eyes of the law as those overseas who are taking advantage of capitalistic environmental negligence, by taking advantage of climate change influenced severe weather to enact acts of terror.

It is time to alter our nation’s use of the word eco-terrorism, distinguishing between those who use surrounding environments to harm people and those who fight to prevent people from harming their surrounding environments.

According to a 2005 “60 Minutes” report, ELF is considered “the country’s biggest domestic terrorist threat.” Since then, the FBI modified their classification, saying in 2008 that these eco-terrorists are “one of the most serious domestic terrorist threats in the U.S. today.”

ELF has utilized many tactics, but they are most associated with their preference for arson. To get an idea of the kind of protests they partake in, we can look back to 1998 when nine fires were simultaneously lit across the Vail Ski Resort in Colorado as a statement against capitalist expansion.

Nobody was killed in the fires, nor has anybody ever been killed in any ELF associated protest. ELF operates anonymously so as to protect the identity of its members. However, there have been a select few who have stepped forward and served as spokesmen for the group. Rod Coranado, one of these spokesmen, explained in the 2005 “60 Minutes” interview how for every arson he had been a part of, there were three or four that did not happen. Each action was painstakingly calculated, taking every consideration into account so as not to bring physical harm to anyone.

Not a single person has ever died as a result of ELF protests yet, according to a 2011 documentary “If A Tree Falls” profiling the group, those convicted are can be put in high security, intensive prisons specifically designed after 9/11 for terrorists.

The irony runs deep. On one hand, we have an environmentally focused, anti-capitalism, anti-pollution group who executes direct actions aimed at damaging systems in place harming the environment. On the other, we have real terrorists, benefiting from the very entities in which the ELF is trying to stop, who are purposefully killing people for their own religious agenda. These two things are not the same. So why do they share the same label?

These are not eco-terrorists and should not be labeled as such. In fact, they are quite the opposite. ELF members operate in secrecy, fighting an endless war against the mass destruction and terrorization of our voiceless Mother Earth.

Azor Cole is a junior public relations major and geography minor. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at azcole@syr.edu.

 

Published on November 12, 2014 at 12:01 am