M ay 6, 1996
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
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The Nation.
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Earth First!, the Press and the Unabomber
This column was written with Jeffrey St. C lair
ative Mike Synar. There were people from the Forest Service, the
ithin forty-eight hours ofTheodore Kaczynski’s arrest in his
Fish and Wildlife Service and timber giants such as Weyerhaeuser
Montana cabin near Lincoln, ABC World News Tonight ran
and Louisiana Pacific. Gathered under the title “The Second Inter­
a lead story on Kaczynski’s “connection to a radical environ­
national Temperate Forest Conference,” the hundred or so sessions
mental group.” So said Peter Jennings’s introduction. Then
dealt with topics like “consumption in the 1990s,” “industrial ver­
Brian Ross, described by Jennings as “our chief investigative
reporter,” tied the knot: “ABC News has learned that Kaczynski’ssus ecological forestry” and “moving the multinationals from the
forest to the farm.” According to participants and a detailed pro­
name appeared in F.B.I. files in November of 1994, in connec­
gram for the events that we’ve studied, there was no session on
tion with an F.B.I. investigation of a radical environmental group
Burson-Marsteller or any other PR. firm..
called Earth First!, which is active in Montana. Over the years.
Clausen, a self-confessed drug-runner, first showed up in
Earth First! has been best known as a violent group, spiking trees
Montana in the late 1980s, trying to infiltrate the Alliance for the
and blowing up logging equipment."
Wild Rockies on behalf of the timber industry. After several
Behind Ross’s voiceover, the images showed a struggle be­
failed attempts he headed to Washington State to do more “infil­
tween environmental demonstrators and loggers, inferentially
trating,” which actually meant showing up at Earth First! meet­
the Earth First! commandos attacking a peaceable troupe of tree
ings, which were well-advertised and generally festive events. At
fellers out for a walk with their chain saws. The footage was ac­
the end of these inspections, Clausen produced an unintentional­
tually eight years old and featured a far more typical scene, name­
ly comic narrative of his adventures, which contained no revela­
ly the loggers dragging a biologist called Peter Galvin along by
his hair. The Earth First! ers had intervened in an effort to save
tions of any sort.
In the wake of Ross’s first ABC segment, there were endless
Galvin from serious injury.
stories that a list of Missoula conferees, now supposedly in the
This informative background was unstated. His voice porten­
hands of the F.B.I., included the name “T. Casinski.” This was
tous with investigative triumph, Ross conveyed the news that “au­
being put about by Clausen, who refused to show reporters the
thorities” believed that Kaczynski had been at a November 1994
document in question. Tom Fullum and Jake Kreilick, who or­
meeting at the University of Montana at Missoula, “attended by
ganized the conference, tell us they’ve been over the attendance
top Earth First! members.” The conclave had supposedly been
rosters several times and have found no name even remotely re­
plotting strategy against “multinationals.” One month later, Ross
sembling Kaczynski or Casinski.
said, the Unabomber sent the package that killed Thomas Mosser,
formerly an executive with Burson-Marsteller, “which does work
One of the most sensational elements of Ross’s story, seized
for large multinational companies.”
upon by The New York Times’
s Neil MacFarquhar, was of the “hit
Ross’s ABC segment next introduced Barry Clausen, identi­
list” pul out by what Ross described as another “radical envi­
fied as “a private investigator who infiltrated Earth First! for
ronmental journal,” a phrase on the Earth first! Journal's mast­
the timber industry.” According to Ross’s summary o f Clausen,
head. “An Eco-Fuckers Hit List” o f a hundred trade associations
“the bomb last year that killed [Gil Murray] the head of the Cal­
was indeed published, but in 1992 in the anarchist zine Live Wild
ifornia Forestry Association clearly can be traced back to a hit
o r Die. The list’s purpose was scarcely homicidal encourage­
list published in one radical environmental journal.” The F.B.I.,
ment. It advocated boycotts of Weyerhaeuser products, parodies
Ross concluded, is very interested in the Earth First! connection.
of Exxon ads and so forth. The organizations on it were clearly
Two days later, on This Week With D avid Brinkley, Ross had
taken from a list of co-sponsors of a Wise Use conference held
burnished his conspiracy model. By now he was charging that
in Reno in 1989.
Burson-Marsteller had been a specific, topic of discussion at die
1994 Missoula meeting. Ross left the heavy implication that
Ron A rn old’
s Revenge
M osser’s death a month later had been plotted at the session:
“Much as Timothy McVeigh may have been inspired and inflamed
ust as Clausen saw Kaczynski’s arrest as a marvelous oppor­
by the militia, it’s possible, perhaps, that Kaczynski was inspired
tunity to stir the pot, publicize himself and settle scores with
and guided by the radical environmental groups.”
Earth First!, so too did his comrade in arms Ron Arnold,
Thus it was that within four days of Kaczynski’s arrest, Earth
Saint-Just of the Wise Use movement. Arnold had been hun­
First! was being accused by a TV network of fomenting murder.
gering for revenge ever since the Oklahoma City bombing of
The four-day November 1994 gathering in Missoula, invoked
April 1995, in whose wake environmental groups and their pub­
by Ross and Clausen as prelude to murder, was an open confer­
licists, such as David Fenton and David Helvarg, had rushed
ence o f some 500 people including the late Oklahoma Representforth with Clausen-type headline-grabbers about the ties be-
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May 6,1996’
The Nation.
tween tlie suspected bombers, the militias and the Wise Use
movement. The supposed links between Wise Use and McVeigh
were easily as specious as those suggested by Clausen and Ross
between Kaczynski and Earth First! On April 10, a column by
Linda Chavez appeared in USA Today, ramming home the mes­
sage that “the Unabomber may well have taken his inspiration
from the writings o f Earth Firstl’s radical fringe.... the group
was ‘willing to protect [the] wilderness by any means necessary,’
including illegal and potentially violent tactics."
Next up as a Wise Use dumpster was Cal Thomas. In his
syndicated column, showing up in West Coast newspapers on
April 11, the former publicist for Jerry Falwell retailed some
vintage Arnold reflections: “Where are the warnings about EarthFirsters who see the planet as something sacred and those they
claim violate it as infidels worthy o f death?” Thomas recycled
all the claptrap about a supposed Earth First! hit list and deplored
the fact that whereas after the Oklahoma bombing, Clinton and
Gore had denounced right-wing talk-radio hosts like G. Gordon
Liddy and Rush Limbaugh for “nurturing” McVeigh and friends,
the Unabomber was not being adequately pinned on liberalism,
Harvard and Berkeley.
Even more insidious and disingenuous than the ABC News
pieces was a report on NPR’s Ail Things Considered for April 10.
Howard Berkes faithfully recycled Clausen’s mythmaking, with
some genteel liberal eco-baiting about the “angry, sometimes
violent, language” of the greens that perhaps could have set the
Unabomber off. It remained for an incoherent Joe Klein in News­
week to miss the entire affray, alleging that the right hadn't made
the Unabomber/left connection.
The B lo o d Lust o f Dave Foreman
nc of Linda Chavez’s more chilling quotations from the
Earth First! archive given her by the Wise Use crowd was
this: “The blood o f timber executives is my natural drink,
and the wail o f dying forest supervisors is music to my ears.”
She was accurately quoting Dave Foreman, founder of Earth
First!, who left the organization in 1990 when he scented creep­
ing humanism and felt it was retreating from the biocentric proto­
cols o f his own vision of Wild Nature.
In fairness to Foreman, the quote about the dying supervisors
and the bleeding timber execs is taken from a burlesque he used
to give on road shows. But there are plenty of quotes by Fore­
man just as unappetizing and said in all seriousness, such as
“We aren’t an environmental group. Environmental groups worry
about environmental health hazards to human beings, they worry
about clean air and water for the beneft of people and ask us why
we’re so wrapped up in something as irrelevant and tangential
and elitist as wilderness.”
Foreman made this point in a speech in 1987. At around the
same time in Earth First! Journal he was issuing his notorious
hope that famine would wipe out what he regarded as surplus
humans in Ethiopia.
I t’s a sad irony that today’s Earth First! should have to carry
the can for Foreman’s disgusting views. Foreman was always a
Barry Goldwater environmentalist and, like the Unabomber, hat­
ed the left. His Malthusianism is under the same big tent as the
Nazi philosophy o f nature.
Foreman and the Unabomber eschew politics. Both have
nourished the infantile romanticism o f lone-wolf intervention,
whether by bomb or tree spike. There’s a chasm between the
“nightwork” of industrial sabotage advocated by Foreman in the
1980s until he was busted in Arizona by tire F.B.I., and the collec­
tive, public acts of nonviolent civil disobedience used by today’s
Earth Firstlers in their brave struggles in Oregon, Idaho and Ala­
bama (to lake three particular zones of their current activities).
Violence is visited on them.
Meanwhile, Foreman has cashed in, sitting on the board of
the Sierra Glub, denouncing the club’s reform faction. Today,
Foreman says, “I get quite frustrated with true believers who hold
on to some idealistic notion of No Compromise.” This from the
man who bankrolled his decade with Earth First! on the sale of
T-shirts and bumper stickers bearing the slogan, “No Compro­
mise in the Defense o f Mother Earth.”
The F.B.I. in M issoula
W
hat no one asked was why the F.B.I. was compiling lists of
environmentalists attending public meetings at the Univer­
sity of Montana. The bureau has an environmental crimes
task force. This force doesn't spend its time investigating
timber theft by Weyerhaeuser, as recently reported by the
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and pub­
lished by the Los Angeles Times for March 25. Nor does it strike
when international mining companies flush cyanide into the sal­
mon streams of the West. The F.B.I. did not investigate the 1993
murder in New Mexico of the Navajo environmentalist Leroy
Jackson. It hasn’t followed up on other such
cases. What the bureau’s enviro squad does get
up to is typified by its efforts to harass and
smear environmentalists in Missoula over
most o f the past decade.
After incidents of tree spiking in the Clear­
water National Forest just west o f Missoula,
the G-men hauled in Professor Ron Erickson
of the University of Montana’s environmental
studies program, interrogated him and six of his students, took
hair samples, made them write “stumps suck” a hundred times,
leaked to the press the fact that they were suspects, damaged
their careers and created enough hubbub to prompt the Montana
state legislature to try to cut a million dollars out of the pro­
gram’s budget.
The F.B.I. maintained a presence in Missoula during the CoveMallard actions by Earth First! from 1993 through 1995. Among
the casualties of their surveillance wereKaryn and Par Sandstrom.
Both were grad students at the University of Montana. An F.B.I.
man snooping through a window saw Forest Service maps tacked
to a wall inside their house. The bureau seized on the maps as an
excuse to bust in and interrogate the couple. The maps were being
used by Par, a wildlife biologist.
The tree spiking case was finally resolved when a relative
nimed in the two men responsible. Neither had anything to do
with Ron Erickson or indeed with the university. Recently ABC
News called Erickson—not to get his account o f F.B.I. harass­
ment but to inquire whether Theodore Kaczynski had been one
o f his students.
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FAX TO:
W ALTON JONES FOUNDATION
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FAX NO, 8042951648
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FROM:
Barry Clausen
DATE:
March 17, 1998
Dear Mr.
I just attended to the “
Eleventh Annual British Columbia Forest Industry
Conference”in Vancouver, BC, During the conference Price Waterhouse announced the
timber industry in BC will lose ONE BILLION dollars in 1998.
I found it ironic that:
1. Price Waterhouse hosted the conference for the timber industry,
2, That according to your financial records, Price Waterhouse, Atlanta is your
accountant.
2. That Price Waterhouse executives Robbie Pound and Sandy Rose from Price
Waterhouse, Atlanta attended the conference.
3. That in May, 1997 you funded the Earth First Ruckus Society to go to
Vancouver, BC to train Canadian youth how to commit illegal acts. That those
acts were designed to help destroy the Canadian economy by shutting down the
timber industry.
I have been ofibred funding by Canadian businessmen to travel BC and speak to
organizations throughout BC, The Canadian press has already contacted me for a story
about actions In Canada as a result o f your money. If I accept speaking engagments it will
Obviously include at least a portion o f the above,
1thought you might like to respond. Apparently Canadian businessmen think
Canadian citizens will find my information interesiing.
Turns out I was right, Thoedorc KaczynsW* the confessed Unabomber, did use
unaccurate radical literature horn Earth First, Missoula, Montana (who you fund) to select
his last two victims. Article following-
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