Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your
Speaker 2: weekly reminder that sometimes people try to do things to
Speaker 2: stop the bad things. I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy, and
Speaker 2: with me today is a guest who's named Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 3: Hi Sarah, that's true. Hi Margaret, I'm so happy to
Speaker 3: be here. Yay, as you do a cool thing.
Speaker 2: Sarah is the host of You're Wrong about Did you
Speaker 2: ever go through a period where it was going to
Speaker 2: end with dot dot dot in the title.
Speaker 3: I feel like there's like an implied dot dot dot
Speaker 3: and I've seen it rendered that way. It's like the
Speaker 3: question mark and who's the boss?
Speaker 2: Do you think that? Every now and then they accidentally
Speaker 2: wrote it as who is the boss?
Speaker 3: Or like who's who se the boss? Like who's the boss?
Speaker 2: Is this? It's gotta be someone's. Is it yours? CAF?
Speaker 2: I wonder, I don't. It might have been a different
Speaker 2: It was one of these things, one of these very
Speaker 2: very simple the way that english and contractions work. Where
Speaker 2: I was working on this activist zine during occupy or whatever,
Speaker 2: and we were like put out a new zine every
Speaker 2: week with news, and my co editor was like, who
Speaker 2: wrote this fucking article and looked at me and was
Speaker 2: like it couldn't have been you. They used like, who's wrong,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I wrote that one. We have
Speaker 2: not had much.
Speaker 3: Sleep really, as we can see, my faculties are deteriorating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is twenty eleven and occupy has destroyed all
Speaker 2: of our brains. But what hasn't destroyed our brains is
Speaker 2: our producer. Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi.
Speaker 1: I just wonder Sarah. Question for Sarah. How many times
Speaker 1: are you having a conversation with somebody and do they
Speaker 1: go that could be something that people are wrong about
Speaker 1: maybe maybe you should do as a topic for your show.
Speaker 1: How often does that happen?
Speaker 3: You know, I hardly socialize, so not that much, but
Speaker 3: like probably on average three times a month. And my
Speaker 3: my favorite is when it's on something that like, if
Speaker 3: you've listened to the show, it really like has nothing
Speaker 3: to do with anything we've ever talked about, but.
Speaker 2: It's but it's a thing to you know what.
Speaker 3: I'm sure people say this to you both where people
Speaker 3: are like, I'm sure there are too many podcasts already.
Speaker 3: I use you know, I'm sure you would you don't
Speaker 3: think people should start podcasts and I'm like, no, start
Speaker 3: your own podcasts and then you won't try and get
Speaker 3: me to do it for you.
Speaker 2: That yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, I think you do socialize more than that that
Speaker 1: you think, because I saw you this week and I'm
Speaker 1: seeing you again.
Speaker 2: That's true. Well that's the Sophie exception.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm like, three times a month, honey.
Speaker 2: Honey, how many Sophie, how many like hard introverts do
Speaker 2: you have in your life?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: How many of us are you? Our primary socialization?
Speaker 1: Well that's because that's because we all find each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fair enough, we all find each other. We're like, do
Speaker 1: you want to.
Speaker 3: Hear like the center of the wagon wheel?
Speaker 1: We're like, do you want to do something that's not
Speaker 1: overstimulating with me? Great, low stakes, let's go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one other over stimulant note. Our audio engineer is Danel.
Speaker 1: It is Daniel Hi, Danel.
Speaker 2: I love you, Hi, Danel Hi Danel. Our theme music
Speaker 2: is written for us by unwoman Sarah. Have you ever
Speaker 2: ever heard of the environment? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm in Portland, so we heard of the environment
Speaker 3: two years before everyone else.
Speaker 2: That actually is oddly the theme of this whoops kind
Speaker 2: of because the next question I had written in my scripts.
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard of the Pacific Northwest? I have?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know of it, and it's works. I'm a fan.
Speaker 2: How about the Earth Liberation Front?
Speaker 3: I don't know, because I feel like when I was
Speaker 3: growing up, they were all kinds of environmentalist groups, but
Speaker 3: they all kind of blurred together in my little brain.
Speaker 3: So I honestly can't tell you fair enough. I don't
Speaker 3: know how how much you tell the public.
Speaker 2: Did where did you grow up? You don't have to
Speaker 2: answer this. Oh, yeah, well I grew up outside Portland, Okay,
Speaker 2: so in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the Northwest, in the Portland I definitely call
Speaker 3: the Portland area home and Oregon in general. And then
Speaker 3: of course if you're in Portland, then like we claim
Speaker 3: southern Washington as kind of ours. Sorry Washington, but you
Speaker 3: get to come over here to avoid sales tax, so
Speaker 3: it's nice. And so, you know, to me, an iconic
Speaker 3: Northwesterner is famous for doing something that was dangerous to themselves.
Speaker 3: And so my favorite is Harry Truman, the old man
Speaker 3: who refused to evacuate because of Mount Saint Helen's blowing up,
Speaker 3: and you know, apparently died in the blast like he wanted.
Speaker 1: It was his choice.
Speaker 2: M M. Well, that's sort of related to what we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about. It's definitely about people in the
Speaker 2: Pacific Northwest deciding to make some decisions that in some
Speaker 2: ways didn't go well for them and in some ways.
Speaker 2: But did we say they were going to yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: They didn't really make the claim that they were getting
Speaker 2: out of it unscathed Magpie.
Speaker 1: Am I right that maybe Sarah might know them better
Speaker 1: by their nickname the Elves.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's like familiar, but in the sense of like
Speaker 3: I feel like, you know, if you go to the
Speaker 3: country Fair a few times, then like you overlap with
Speaker 3: people who have more serious thoughts, then let's eat mushrooms
Speaker 3: in the woods.
Speaker 2: There is a non zero chance, this is a very
Speaker 2: high chance that many of the convicted terrorists were going
Speaker 2: to talk about today we're at the country Oregon Country
Speaker 2: Fair at some point or another. Amazing because today we
Speaker 2: are going to talk about a bunch of ecoanarchis, punks
Speaker 2: and hippies who in the nineties and into the early
Speaker 2: aughts caused millions of dollars in damages to earth destroying
Speaker 2: machinery all without killing or injuring anyone. They were branded
Speaker 2: as terrorists. They were hunted for years. One of them
Speaker 2: is still being hunted today. Their movement, or at least
Speaker 2: the you know, the specifically late named Earth Liberation Front,
Speaker 2: fizzled out and their tactics remain divisive. I have no
Speaker 2: doubt that there, if there are people around to write
Speaker 2: history books one hundred years from now, they'll be seen
Speaker 2: pretty clearly as heroes, not as like the John Brown
Speaker 2: of the environment, because they didn't actually spark anything. That's
Speaker 2: not sure. They sparked some very specific things, quite a
Speaker 2: lot of things, but.
Speaker 1: I see what you did there.
Speaker 2: Yeahs fire, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They are real flawed heroes. Their actions may or may
Speaker 2: not have been strategic. A bunch of them regret the
Speaker 2: choices that they made. However, a lot of what we
Speaker 2: have about them regretting the choices they made are them
Speaker 2: talking to judges who are deciding how many years they
Speaker 2: should send in prison. And I have a feeling people
Speaker 2: are more sorry for their crimes when someone is holding
Speaker 2: a gun to their head. Sure, but they showed that
Speaker 2: some people are willing to go pretty fucking far in
Speaker 2: order to save the world from boiling, and we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about them. I'm excited, and don't worry. We're
Speaker 2: going to start with the French Revolution. Why not? Why not?
Speaker 3: I'm always saying that, honey, can we have the French Revolution.
Speaker 2: Let's just stop. It's on the way home. We have
Speaker 2: a French Revolution at home, and then the French Revolution
Speaker 2: at home is just the teen earrings that some hipster
Speaker 2: is wearing. So not because the French Revolution was so great.
Speaker 2: Does so many things start with the French Revolution, But
Speaker 2: because Europe colonize the world, so all of their random
Speaker 2: ideas have outsized impacts. But we're going to start with
Speaker 2: a mathematician who served on the revolutionary committee in his
Speaker 2: neighborhood during the revolution and faced the same thing that
Speaker 2: many of the revolutionaries did, which was that he immediately
Speaker 2: almost got guillotined himself. His name was Jean Baptiste Joseph Free.
Speaker 2: He is not super important to this story, but I
Speaker 2: like drawing red yarn across a conspiracy board. That's basically
Speaker 2: my job. And he ties into the French Revolution, which
Speaker 2: means after helping bring democratic ideals, so the West de
Speaker 2: you know, was arrested twice by the revolution was going
Speaker 2: to get guillotined, but he didn't. He said he did
Speaker 2: a lot of science, Like he writes papers with names
Speaker 2: like on the propagation of heat and solid bodies, And
Speaker 2: this is not the name of art porn to my knowledge.
Speaker 2: If someone makes it, it's still available. Yeah, he does
Speaker 2: something really important to our story. In eighteen twenty four,
Speaker 2: he was like, hey, everyone, I did an awful lot
Speaker 2: of math, and the Earth should be way colder than
Speaker 2: it is based on how far away it is from
Speaker 2: the sun. Something is insulating us. Wow. Yeah, So he's
Speaker 2: a nineteenth century scientist, so he gets obsessed with blankets
Speaker 2: and insulation and he wraps himself in a blanket all
Speaker 2: the time for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3: That's what I want to do. For different reasons.
Speaker 2: Well, here's the reason to be careful with cozy core.
Speaker 2: He tripped on his blanket, fell down the stairs, and died.
Speaker 3: Oh oh boy, you gotta take the blanket off sometimes.
Speaker 3: But I appreciate the dedication. Yeah, there is a literal
Speaker 3: and metaphorical lesson here.
Speaker 1: Wait, I knew there was a thing I don't.
Speaker 2: Like that, which is why we should destroy stairs. No
Speaker 2: other lesson could be learned from this No before he died,
Speaker 2: I just like going into the personal lives of these men,
Speaker 2: because it's never what people talk about. Ever married. He
Speaker 2: wrote a detailed description of how handsome and in love
Speaker 2: he was with a certain male doctor. So of course
Speaker 2: the internet is like, well, he was never married, and
Speaker 2: he made friends a lot of women, so he was
Speaker 2: a womanizer.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmm, because straight men loved to hang out with women.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's the rare ones that do. And then half
Speaker 2: of us come out as trans So the next scientist
Speaker 2: in this chain of oh shit, global warming is actually happening,
Speaker 2: which we all figured out in the nineteenth century, and
Speaker 2: it took till the twenty first century before even people
Speaker 2: would admit it anyway, was a woman named Eunice Newton Foot,
Speaker 2: and no one listened to her because her last name
Speaker 2: was Foot. No, just kidding this. Because she was a woman,
Speaker 2: she was also politically involved. Global warming has always been
Speaker 2: a woke conspiracy. In this case, she was American, and
Speaker 2: she was in the nineteenth century, and she was a
Speaker 2: white woman, so she was involved in all the US
Speaker 2: stuff at the style. At the time, she was a
Speaker 2: fierce abolitionist. She was into getting women some basic rights,
Speaker 2: and while we're at it, no one should be allowed
Speaker 2: to drink alcohol anymore. Two out of three, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll take a partialll win.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'll probably never directly cover the temperance movement on this
Speaker 2: podcast because it is not cool. People did cool stuff,
Speaker 2: but it ties into it all, Like there's all this
Speaker 2: stuff that around the turn of the century, like eugenics
Speaker 2: and temperance, that were like not the right wing issues
Speaker 2: that you would picture them as today. Anyway, she married
Speaker 2: a feminist man, and since she was a woman and
Speaker 2: her science was like amateur right, because she was a woman,
Speaker 2: everything she patented she had to patent under her husband's name,
Speaker 2: because women didn't have enough legal rights to sue of
Speaker 2: her patents. She discovered the insulating properties of CO two,
Speaker 2: not in nineteen fifty six that she is not a
Speaker 2: liitch or a vampire to my knowledge. In eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 2: despite what More wrote in her script. In eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 2: she presented her theory that quote an atmosphere of gas
Speaker 2: would give to our earth a high temperature, and if,
Speaker 2: as some suppose, at one period in its history, the
Speaker 2: air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present,
Speaker 2: an increased temperature from its own action as well as
Speaker 2: from increased weight must necessarily have resulted, So we've definitely
Speaker 2: had time to prepare. Yeah, embarrassing, this is. I mean,
Speaker 2: they knew that CO two warmed the atmosphere before we
Speaker 2: started putting CO two into the atmosphere at scale with
Speaker 2: the industrial society.
Speaker 3: Well may you put it that way? And to quote
Speaker 3: Jack Nicholson and The Shining, you've had your whole fucking
Speaker 3: life to think things over. What gets a few more
Speaker 3: minutes going to do you?
Speaker 2: Now? Oh god, that's that is what's going to happen.
Speaker 2: So she had this theory and she went to go
Speaker 2: present this theory. But I'm just kidding. She didn't present
Speaker 2: her theory. She had to have a male friend present
Speaker 2: her theory because women did not present such things.
Speaker 3: She had to put a bunch of docsins in a
Speaker 3: three piece suit and hope for the best.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the man who did present it started off
Speaker 2: by saying science was of no country and no sex.
Speaker 2: So the men in her life aren't like capitalizing off
Speaker 2: of her. They're actually supporting her, and they're really fucking
Speaker 2: annoyed about all this. Too good for them, Yeah, However,
Speaker 2: they're hanging out in friends of a woman, so clearly,
Speaker 2: well one of them's married to her, so I guess
Speaker 2: he's he's probably womanizing her.
Speaker 3: Isn't woman eyes like say, woman is? It sounds like
Speaker 3: a term like martinize or simonize, like, you know, just
Speaker 3: a quick and easy process for turning someone into a woman.
Speaker 2: That would be ideal. Let's push for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, one hour womanizing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the woman the Womanizer store or you know, it's
Speaker 2: all these horrible misogynists. Men go there thinking that something
Speaker 2: different is going to happen than what does.
Speaker 3: Now there's an eighties comedy. Okay, so this is like
Speaker 3: one of those pieces of news where you're like, wow,
Speaker 3: humans are capable of both so much and so little.
Speaker 3: Like we discovered CO two would be a problem before
Speaker 3: we started doing the problem.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Next up is Vante Ernius, who is a Swedish chemist.
Speaker 2: He was an early birth control advocate, tying into that
Speaker 2: other problematic movement, eugenics. But in eighteen ninety six he
Speaker 2: was the first person to actually calculate global warming based
Speaker 2: on human cause CO two emissions. This is, you know,
Speaker 2: a couple decades into the CO two emissions and he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: let's math this out, and I put it together. He
Speaker 2: was as kind of a dick. He married one of
Speaker 2: his former pupils, which is essentially never a good look.
Speaker 2: And then he wound up on the Nobel Prize committee
Speaker 2: and he just like played favorites and he got all
Speaker 2: of his friends Nobel Prizes and all of his enemies.
Speaker 2: I didn't get them. But he calculated global warming flawed.
Speaker 2: People do real interesting things. That should actually be the
Speaker 2: title of this show that can be your spinoff TV series. Yes,
Speaker 2: please give me the TV series. By the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 2: you now get a Canadian this time. So we've got
Speaker 2: four different countries represented in this particular quick overview of
Speaker 2: people who called this a long time ago. And his
Speaker 2: name is Gilbert Plas and he started making a name.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, totally. Also, okay, now to picture this man.
Speaker 2: This man is the ultimate like fifties stereotype man. He
Speaker 2: is a stamp collector, He has a classical music DJ
Speaker 2: and he worked on the Manhattan Project. What wow.
Speaker 3: So this guy is like played by David Stratheron in
Speaker 3: the biopic.
Speaker 2: I don't know who that is.
Speaker 3: I hope he's mister goodnight and good luck God. I
Speaker 3: really sound like my mom these days, where he's like,
Speaker 3: instead of the person's name, you guess group for like
Speaker 3: the name of the thing you can first think of
Speaker 3: them being in.
Speaker 2: So instead of Helen, time about you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Magpie usually doesn't get most references.
Speaker 3: Nice I'm thinking of like David Strath Aaron I hope
Speaker 3: people agree with me, is like the archetypal, handsome, long suffering,
Speaker 3: thin lipped mid sanctuary man. He also played mister Lowenstein
Speaker 3: in A League of their Own. Oh yeah, that's relevant.
Speaker 2: Okay, but I've seen the League of their Own and
Speaker 2: I've now looked him up. Yes, this man did play him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we did at the Academy. We've had We've had
Speaker 3: a good year.
Speaker 1: We've done it.
Speaker 3: Portland is a second rate city in many ways, but
Speaker 3: we're a first rate, second run movie city.
Speaker 2: I'll have you all know. I did see a lot
Speaker 2: of good movies at the cheap theaters there.
Speaker 3: But okay, so we have we have a serious man,
Speaker 3: if you will.
Speaker 2: He starts making predictions about climate change that are more
Speaker 2: or less accurate now seventy years ago, there is someone
Speaker 2: doing the math that more or less lines up. So
Speaker 2: We've known about human caused climate change for a long
Speaker 2: long time. Yeah. Next, we're going to talk about the
Speaker 2: first ELF. People talk about the ELF, and they're usually
Speaker 2: talking about the main ELF, the Earth Liberation Front. But
Speaker 2: there was a different group of gorilla eco radical people,
Speaker 2: probably just one guy, but had a group name. This
Speaker 2: ELF was called the Environmental Life Force. This is probably
Speaker 2: one man who did a few actions in nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: seven in California and Oregon. His name is John Hannah.
Speaker 2: He was a I don't know if he's still alive,
Speaker 2: but he was alive as of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: It was the last interview I read with him. He
Speaker 2: was an anti war vet in the sixties. He'd gotten
Speaker 2: out of the military before the Vietnam War and then
Speaker 2: he went off to school to study marine biology to
Speaker 2: environmental stuff, but then he got caught up in the
Speaker 2: anti war movement, dropped out of school. He was in
Speaker 2: students for Democratic Society, but it wasn't radical enough for him.
Speaker 2: So he had this whole elaborate plan where he was
Speaker 2: going to go to Thailand to hijack a B fifty
Speaker 2: two bomber and then like protest the war by blowing
Speaker 2: it up, not with people in it, but like landing
Speaker 2: it and then blowing it up. Cool. And then he
Speaker 2: didn't do it because he went to Thailand and was
Speaker 2: like starting to figure it out, and then he was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm I can't do this by myself and he went home. Later.
Speaker 2: Our second tie into the Manhattan Project opposite side of it,
Speaker 2: he was a civilian deckhand on a ship that brought
Speaker 2: medical survey teams out to the Marshall Islands, which is
Speaker 2: where all the atomic bombs were get it had been
Speaker 2: tested right, and for decades afterwards they would go and
Speaker 2: use humans as guinea pigs to see what had happened
Speaker 2: to the people who had been exposed to all this
Speaker 2: horrible fucking mass death that the US had done.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about the Marshall Islands
Speaker 1: and just going to plug Jim's stouted series on it
Speaker 1: could happen here that he did on the Marshall Islands,
Speaker 1: check that out.
Speaker 2: It is real good and it's where everything I know
Speaker 2: about the Marshall Islands comes from. Yeah, So he goes
Speaker 2: out there and he sees firsthand how everyone has been
Speaker 2: treated like human guinea pigs, and he's like, man, this
Speaker 2: is not increasing my theory about the US government and
Speaker 2: capitalism and it being good. In nineteen seventy seven, he's
Speaker 2: living in an agricultural area in California. I think he's
Speaker 2: living like later he's in Santa Cruz, but I think
Speaker 2: he's rural at this point. And his girlfriend is disabled.
Speaker 2: She'd been exposed to pesticide while working at a cannery.
Speaker 2: One day, he's driving home and his crop duster plane
Speaker 2: flies over her head and he just gets a face
Speaker 2: full of pesticides before he can roll up the window.
Speaker 2: And he's recently been reading Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring
Speaker 2: and another book from a local professor about pesticides. He
Speaker 2: writes up a report of the incident for the agricultural commissioner,
Speaker 2: and nothing came of it, so he's like, all right,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna do something about this. In nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 2: he took the first action as the elf. This one
Speaker 2: has nothing whatever. I just he used an airgun to
Speaker 2: shoot out the windows of a vacation home of a
Speaker 2: county supervisor. And he did this because quote the action
Speaker 2: was in retaliation for the jailhouse death of Larry Williams,
Speaker 2: a young black inmate, he went into a diabetic shock
Speaker 2: and died for lack of an insolent shot. The county
Speaker 2: supervisor whose windows he shot out the vacation home of
Speaker 2: later went on to be known a little bit more
Speaker 2: as Dianne Feinstein, who was mayor of Sanecisco. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: then US Senator and paved the way for the antediluvian
Speaker 2: rule of the country. Well, great timing.
Speaker 1: I don't usually expect to get a Feinstein drop in
Speaker 1: this podcast.
Speaker 2: Einstein, you can tell because I didn't even know how
Speaker 2: to pronounce her name. But what I also don't know
Speaker 2: how to pronounce are the names of all of our advertisers,
Speaker 2: because they're randomly generated, and if you have them is
Speaker 2: because capitalism is a nightmare machine that we're all trapped
Speaker 2: inside of and the machine is bleeding to death. Help me.
Speaker 4: Here's some ads, and we're back.
Speaker 2: And so the ELF, the Environmental Life Force, took credit
Speaker 2: for that attack on Feinstein's Feinstein Feinstein, Einstein, she's dead,
Speaker 2: yeah whatever. Then on May first, he tried to set
Speaker 2: fire to seven crop dusters at a local airport, which
Speaker 2: makes sense. They'd just been dousing him with poison. He's
Speaker 2: real careful to make sure that no one's hurt. He
Speaker 2: sets the timers to go off at two am. The
Speaker 2: napalm is constructed carefully and not to spread the fire.
Speaker 2: And I will not be talking about how he did that.
Speaker 2: Thank you. That's going to come up a couple times.
Speaker 2: How I am not talking about some of this shit.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about why because people get arrested for talking
Speaker 2: about it, which is fucked up anyway. And then he
Speaker 2: waits around the crime scene, ready to intercept anyone who
Speaker 2: might show up who could accidentally get hurt. It's like
Speaker 2: an airport in the middle of nowhere, but he's like
Speaker 2: not taking any chances. He's like, I will go down
Speaker 2: before anyone gets hurt from my actions. Huh. I love that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He also didn't make the fire bombs right. The blasting
Speaker 2: caps go off, but not the napalm, and he pretty
Speaker 2: much just scuffed the paint on the planes. He writes
Speaker 2: this communica. Sorry, the elf writes this communica. He again
Speaker 2: almost certainly just him. But people want to have their
Speaker 2: things that they say. He wants to say that there's
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of them, so that's great. And he
Speaker 2: in the communicy is like listing off alternatives to pesticides.
Speaker 2: Then he drove up to Oregon and bombed a paper
Speaker 2: company office in Oregon City fair enough on August first.
Speaker 2: And the reason he did this they owned a tree
Speaker 2: farm that sprayed herbicides and that herbicides were leaching into
Speaker 2: streams and killing salmon and shit. So locals had chained
Speaker 2: themselves to trees to try and stop the paper company. Right,
Speaker 2: so a helicopter sprayed all the activists with herbicide Jesus
Speaker 2: So John Hannah drove up there instead a small pipe
Speaker 2: bomb at their offices. He was really unexcited about people
Speaker 2: being sprayed with chemicals. Again, no one is hurt in
Speaker 2: this case. He actually writes about how he was like
Speaker 2: he wasn't even like the later elf is trying to
Speaker 2: maximize economic damage. He's just trying to get attention, like
Speaker 2: draw attention of things. So it's like a small pipe
Speaker 2: bom that like blows out a window. Then on November
Speaker 2: twenty second, nineteen seventy seven, the ATF and local SWAT
Speaker 2: arrested him in his house in Santa Cruz because they
Speaker 2: traced the copy machine that the communicats had been copied on,
Speaker 2: and basically, oh yeah, like there's a ways that copy
Speaker 2: machines like and printers actually leave specific like traceable information,
Speaker 2: and so they figured out where they were being printed
Speaker 2: off at went to the place and was like, hey,
Speaker 2: then your employees have a problem with the environment and
Speaker 2: how it's been treated, and like his girlfriend worked there.
Speaker 2: Ah shit, Yeah. So he told them he'd acted alone,
Speaker 2: and then he says in interviews like as late as
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight, he's like, look, there's no statute
Speaker 2: of limitations on terrorism, so I'm going to continue to
Speaker 2: tell you that I acted alone, which is his like
Speaker 2: wink wink, nudge, nudge. Maybe I didn't act alone. I
Speaker 2: think he worked alone. Again whatever, not a problem, but
Speaker 2: he got sentenced to five years in prison. After a
Speaker 2: bit he was out on probation. He genuinely sees what
Speaker 2: he did as counterproductive. This isn't a like I told
Speaker 2: the judge, Hey, Bud, I'm sorry, wish I hadn't done it.
Speaker 2: If I could go only I could take back, take
Speaker 2: it back, turn back time that song you know anyway,
Speaker 2: m hmm. And one of the reasons he changed his
Speaker 2: mind is because he talked with one of the activists
Speaker 2: who've been sprayed with herbicide up in Oregon, and that
Speaker 2: person told him that after the bombing, the activist lost
Speaker 2: all credibility and the campaign fell apart. He became a
Speaker 2: strong believer in strict nonviolence. He also, and I think
Speaker 2: this strains credulity, he claims that he knew the founder
Speaker 2: of the next incarnation of the ELF over in the UK,
Speaker 2: and that he tried to talk the person out of it.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that next incarnation about fifteen years later.
Speaker 2: Is the main one we're going to discuss this week.
Speaker 2: The actual ELF, the one with more than one person
Speaker 2: in it, may or may not have gotten inspiration from
Speaker 2: the environmental life Force, but I can point to two
Speaker 2: very specific places it absolutely did come from. First First.
Speaker 2: You ever heard Earth First?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do. That's the group that I remember most
Speaker 3: being active or kind of knowing about tangjanctually in the
Speaker 3: mid two thousands when I was growing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did Earth First organizing in Portland in the
Speaker 2: mid twenty twere you were growing up, Yeah, yep. Earth First,
Speaker 2: which I've whatever. I'm pretty public about that. They're an
Speaker 2: above ground organization. I talked about them a bunch. If
Speaker 2: people want to hear me talk more about Earth First.
Speaker 2: I talked about them in my episode about Judy Berry,
Speaker 2: who was an anarchist organizer who was bombed probably by
Speaker 2: the FEDS in the year nineteen ninety. I'm going to
Speaker 2: rudely split Earth First into two parts of its history,
Speaker 2: the original and then what it's been for most of
Speaker 2: its existence since the first version. The early years of
Speaker 2: Earth First had the unofficial slogan Rednecks for Wilderness. They
Speaker 2: were one organization in which its members did both non
Speaker 2: violent civil disobedience and also a whole bunch of sabotage.
Speaker 2: They called it monkey wrenching, and this is named after
Speaker 2: a book by Sabbey Problematic Fave. Yeah, probably will do
Speaker 2: an episode about the monkey Wrenchers. At some point, two
Speaker 2: tensions started cropping up within Earth First First. There was
Speaker 2: this tension between the quote tofu eating anarchists who were
Speaker 2: also mostly actually rural and rednecks, but they were like
Speaker 2: more feminist, anti authoritarian, and lessened to the American flag
Speaker 2: and some of the some of but not all of
Speaker 2: the founders who are like the American flag is our symbol.
Speaker 2: We are rednecks, just like Edward Abbey. We think it's
Speaker 2: cool to throw beer cans out the window while we're
Speaker 2: fighting for the environment, you know whatever. I have very
Speaker 2: low opinions of Edward Abbey. Someone I feel very bad.
Speaker 2: One of my friends like, you were gonna do an
Speaker 2: episode at Edward Abbey, and I'm like, I am not.
Speaker 2: He was a xenophobe who believed in close borders and
Speaker 2: very nim be whatever.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Yeah, the libertarian river that runs through all this
Speaker 3: is you know, there are many rapids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, totally. So in the end, the Tofu Eating
Speaker 2: Anarchists one and the American flag Waivers left. This is
Speaker 2: many of the founders made this transition to this new
Speaker 2: version of the group or were always the Tofu Eating anarchists.
Speaker 2: And when I've talked with people who are from that period,
Speaker 2: they say that there's these divisions are like kind of
Speaker 2: overblown and like really like one of the main histories
Speaker 2: of Earth First was written a while ago, and as
Speaker 2: written by a journalist who very very much was on
Speaker 2: the side of one of the original like redneck for
Speaker 2: wilderness guys and so like, it colors a lot of
Speaker 2: the Median narrative where people are looking for a split
Speaker 2: that wasn't whatever anyway, there's less bad blood than people say.
Speaker 2: But there's another tension that could not last in an organization,
Speaker 2: the tension of having an above ground organization like Earth First.
Speaker 2: They don't have a membership roster and is decentralized, but
Speaker 2: they have meetings and they have gatherings, and they like
Speaker 2: do things in public, and they chained themselves to things
Speaker 2: and shit. Right, if you're doing that, you can't be
Speaker 2: the same group that burns things at night. So you
Speaker 2: have this tension between above ground illegalism like tree sitting
Speaker 2: in roadblockades and underground illegalism like tree spiking and arson
Speaker 2: and you know, destroying bulldozers and stuff. The new earth
Speaker 2: First didn't condemn the underground stuff. They just didn't do it.
Speaker 2: It was separate. Lots of imprisoned Arsenists came out of
Speaker 2: Earth First ranks, and Earth First and related organizations ran
Speaker 2: and run legal support campaigns for these prisoners, but it
Speaker 2: was distinct from Earth First itself. And this isn't like
Speaker 2: wink wink nudge nudge handwavings. It's true. I was involved
Speaker 2: in Earth First fair amount, and I never knew whenever
Speaker 2: people would get caught for felony stuff, I'd be like
Speaker 2: Holy shit, really, you know, mm hmm, because it was
Speaker 2: separate Earth versus still around. Its slogan is no compromise
Speaker 2: in defense of the Earth. I like them that has
Speaker 2: probably come across. And then there's one another origin point
Speaker 2: where the Earth Libration Front gets its name, which is
Speaker 2: not I don't know why, I'm like picking a fight
Speaker 2: with this old guy who's probably whatever. They didn't get
Speaker 2: their name from the Whatever, the old one. They got
Speaker 2: it from the Animal Liberation Front. Mm. Ever, the Animal Liberation.
Speaker 3: Front, yes, but weirdly only through a TC Boile story,
Speaker 3: which is an embarrassing way to learn about the world
Speaker 3: because it's about I feel like so many of his stories,
Speaker 3: we're just like I met a hot woman who was
Speaker 3: doing something strange and it's about like dating an alf activist.
Speaker 2: Cool. Wait, if you think of the story, will you
Speaker 2: let me know what it is? I really like tracing
Speaker 2: representation of this type of group in fiction.
Speaker 3: It's a short story called Carnal Knowledge.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, that perfect sounds dirty old man, but you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, carnal Knowledge. It does. It does.
Speaker 3: Also the name of the movie where Jack Nicholson played
Speaker 3: a college student when he was like thirty nine years old.
Speaker 3: But that's a separate.
Speaker 2: Issue of God. Yeah, so the Animal Liberation Front. My
Speaker 2: disclaimer here, I have been vegan for long enough that
Speaker 2: my veganism is old enough to drink at bars. I
Speaker 2: am overall supportive of the Animal Liberation Front and a
Speaker 2: lot of it's things, but my support is not without
Speaker 2: caveats in this and specifically, I have a lot of
Speaker 2: issues with the way that vegan activism is done. I
Speaker 2: don't believe eating animals is inherently morally wrong, and I
Speaker 2: don't have an issue with people who hunt for food,
Speaker 2: and I support indigenous fishing and hunting rights in particular.
Speaker 2: I think that a lot of animal rights activism is
Speaker 2: too black and white, and I have issues with a
Speaker 2: lot of it. That said, when people rescue animals and
Speaker 2: give them new homes and care for them, I am happy.
Speaker 2: At the core of it. That is what the Animal
Speaker 2: Liberation Front does. At the core of it is, you know,
Speaker 2: they go into places where they believe animals are being mistreated,
Speaker 2: and they take those animals out and they find them sanctuary.
Speaker 2: I will probably not do an alf episode. Maybe one day,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm going to speed run them really
Speaker 2: quick in the nineteenth century in England. Eh, speed run,
Speaker 2: I'm going back to ninth century. You had all of
Speaker 2: these teach kids to be nice to animals, organizations called
Speaker 2: Bands of Mercy, which is a cool name. They stuck
Speaker 2: around for a while and then they petered out. Then
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty three of the Hunt Saboteurs Association that
Speaker 2: in England they would go around and like fuck up
Speaker 2: staghound hunting events, which is not where people hunt staghounds,
Speaker 2: is when they use staghounds to hunt stags. I have
Speaker 2: no idea that that was the thing people did. It
Speaker 2: does seem like less cartoonishly scary and British than fox hunting.
Speaker 2: But yeah, wow, yeah, it was like, you know, you're
Speaker 2: always rooting for whatever king to get gord. When this happens,
Speaker 2: it happened so rarely, so volunteers would start showing up
Speaker 2: in the sixties and blow hunting horns and put down
Speaker 2: false sents and shit to disrupt the hunts. Some of
Speaker 2: the hunt Saboteurs took up the name Band of Mercy
Speaker 2: and started slashing hunters tires and breaking windows and again
Speaker 2: whatever we're not talking about like the deer hunter in Kentucky,
Speaker 2: we are talking about a class based thing. In England.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy three, they burned down a pharmaceutical research
Speaker 2: laboratory the Band of Mercy. In nineteen seventy four they
Speaker 2: burned down some boats that were seal hunting. Then they
Speaker 2: liberated six guinea pigs, the first direct animal liberation of
Speaker 2: the movement. Wow. And then something that happened that I
Speaker 2: think is really important, which gets at the core of
Speaker 2: the strategic complexity of this kind of action, happened. The
Speaker 2: hunt saboteurs were like, hey, these guys, ain't us about
Speaker 2: Band of Mercy. We blow horns and stuff. We don't
Speaker 2: slash tires. That's a step too far, don't I mean whatever.
Speaker 2: They went from slashing tires to burning things down, But
Speaker 2: they also offered a reward to anyone who rated out
Speaker 2: the Band of Mercy, which is a classic. We agree
Speaker 2: with your morals, but not your tactics. Combined with the
Speaker 2: classic and we'll sell you out to the system we
Speaker 2: claim to hate in order to curry favor from that system.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy six, some arrested Band of Mercy folks
Speaker 2: got out of prison and changed the name to the
Speaker 2: Animal Liberation Front. Which is certainly more hardcore. But Band
Speaker 2: of Mercy is a pretty good name, just saying it's
Speaker 2: fucking fantastic.
Speaker 3: And with the animal liberation front, I really am stuck
Speaker 3: on the fact that they only needed two more words
Speaker 3: and then they could have been Alfie.
Speaker 2: But now they're an alien that eats cats. Yeah that's
Speaker 2: good too. Wait alf must have come after this Alf's eighties, right, right,
Speaker 2: So it was alf named after that, I certainly hope.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm just gonna say yes, absolutely, it's head cannon. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a complicated show, you know. Yeah, guy watched it
Speaker 2: as a kid and have not thought about it since.
Speaker 2: But I had an alf skateboard when I was in
Speaker 2: middle school. Nice and it was a he was skateboarding
Speaker 2: on the skateboard. Oh so asive skateboard. Yeah, I always
Speaker 2: liked it.
Speaker 3: When I'll say, you would have, as a kid, like
Speaker 3: a Spider Man costume and then there would be a
Speaker 3: graphic of Spider Man on the chest, And as a kid,
Speaker 3: I was like, this completely takes me out of it.
Speaker 3: What kind of a superhero would wear a smaller image
Speaker 3: of themselves on their own.
Speaker 2: Clothes and yet here you are wearing a sweater with
Speaker 2: your face on it?
Speaker 1: Does that sweater have your face on it?
Speaker 3: No, but it has a whale with a neutral expression.
Speaker 3: This for the White Whale bookstore in Pittsburgh, and their
Speaker 3: mascot is a little whale who's just happy to be here.
Speaker 2: I like to think. For the record, I did not
Speaker 2: know what was on the shirt before I said the
Speaker 2: joke that I made.
Speaker 3: But I mean, like I on my best days, I
Speaker 3: feel like I'm just a whale, just you know, swimming
Speaker 3: around sifting out tons of krill with my Baileen.
Speaker 2: Well, now I feel bad because actually one of the
Speaker 2: actions that didn't get claimed by the ALF, but was
Speaker 2: a very ALF, the action in the first one that
Speaker 2: happened in the US, I think, was a group of
Speaker 2: people who freed some whales in all kind of way. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, the nineties in the Northwest were also a big
Speaker 3: time for whales. What with h Yeah, Cako, I.
Speaker 1: Would say, in a way, Sarah, do you not blow
Speaker 1: us all out of the water.
Speaker 2: Honey, honey. So the ALF, when they form, they laid
Speaker 2: out a structure that went on to define what the
Speaker 2: sort of leaderless resistance looks like. There's no central registry,
Speaker 2: there's no leadership. Anyone who adheres the basic guidelines can
Speaker 2: call themselves ALF. One of those central tenets is you
Speaker 2: have to adhere to that all precautions must be in
Speaker 2: place to protect human and non human animal life. Above
Speaker 2: Ground groups started to form to support underground activists, like
Speaker 2: they had a press office and magazines and websites and
Speaker 2: legal support funds and all that shit. And they set
Speaker 2: about gluing locks, freeing animals, burning shit, slashing tires, spray painting,
Speaker 2: running targeted and focused activist campaigns to shut down vivisectors.
Speaker 2: And within a few years ago at the US and
Speaker 2: so the ALF came out of the ALF, and it
Speaker 2: came out of Earth first, and I got one more
Speaker 2: foundation to describe that is as much of a bed
Speaker 2: rock as these ads are, the bedrock of being able
Speaker 2: to pay people a living wage to read history books
Speaker 2: about arsonists. Here's ads, and we're back. And we spent
Speaker 2: our ad time talking about the hot blacksmith in the
Speaker 2: classic film A Night's Tale.
Speaker 3: We've used our time really well.
Speaker 2: I think when we look back on the heyday of
Speaker 2: the Earth Liberation Front, it's easy to see it in
Speaker 2: the context of global warming, and they and the you know,
Speaker 2: that's how I started the episode. I clearly am framing
Speaker 2: it that way, and the participants did see it as
Speaker 2: related to global warming, but at the time time people
Speaker 2: were something talking about something more localized, the destruction of
Speaker 2: old growth forests and intact ecosystems. Before I moved out
Speaker 2: west and fell in with the forest defenders, I'd never
Speaker 2: really seen a clearcut. You live out west, I'm you know,
Speaker 2: you've gone out and seen the clearcuts all around. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they look like shaved patches on the mountains. You know,
Speaker 2: they look like a bad punk haircut. Less than four
Speaker 2: percent of the original forest the United States is left everywhere.
Speaker 2: Colonizers have gone. They have left this like absolute nightmare
Speaker 2: and it's wake. I grew up on the East Coast.
Speaker 2: I imagine that logging was done sustainably because that's what
Speaker 2: I was told. I was told two trees are planted
Speaker 2: for every tree cut down. And actually on one of
Speaker 2: the documentaries that I watch were on this, I think
Speaker 2: is if a tree falls. I think that was the one.
Speaker 2: As a timber executive who's like six trees are planted
Speaker 2: for every tree we cut down.
Speaker 1: We all used to get that commercial.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't even how would you imagine that that
Speaker 2: would work? Then there'd be too many trees in the area, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're like carrots. Yeah, I mean that's what they do,
Speaker 2: is that they replant monocultures and.
Speaker 1: Then everyone would have the same lovely infrastructure we have
Speaker 1: in Portland.
Speaker 2: Yeah by that, do you mean none? Sophie.
Speaker 3: It's great because because now you know what's nice about
Speaker 3: Portland is it despite the fact that we're decimating the
Speaker 3: forest all around us, there's still enough old trees to
Speaker 3: crush people's houses all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, it's something. It's nice
Speaker 2: that global warming can use the few remaining trees to
Speaker 2: crush people's houses in killing people. Yeah, actually did anything?
Speaker 2: Was that one? The phone on the cop car?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a good one.
Speaker 2: That When I was a kid, I imagine that loggers
Speaker 2: went into forest and cut like wine tree out of
Speaker 2: fifty so that the forest stayed intact. That they were like, oh,
Speaker 2: we want there to be a forest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too. Yeah.
Speaker 3: They go timber and they look really hot while they
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 2: They do, and they have those heels on the boots.
Speaker 3: They sleep all day, they work all night. They hang
Speaker 3: around in bars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so then they just actually clearcut acre after acre,
Speaker 2: and sometimes they say we're not clear cutting, it's selective cuts.
Speaker 2: After they would ban clear cutting in certain areas. And
Speaker 2: if you go out to these selective cuts, it is
Speaker 2: exactly the same as going out to a clear cut,
Speaker 2: only there's two trees per acre or something like that,
Speaker 2: and those trees, if you spend enough time out in
Speaker 2: the woods, those trees blow over because those trees grew
Speaker 2: up in a forest with trees around to block the wind.
Speaker 2: So speaking of trees falling in people's houses, the National
Speaker 2: Forest Service is not in the business of protecting forests.
Speaker 2: That is not its job. I'm not even trying to
Speaker 2: slander it here. It is in the Department of Agriculture.
Speaker 2: It is the National Forest Service with because of the
Speaker 2: timber sell program, is largely a big tree farm sold
Speaker 2: off to various timber companies, often at a loss to
Speaker 2: the taxpayers, because you can actually get a lot more
Speaker 2: money out of in tech forests through recreation and things
Speaker 2: like that, and very little of our timber needs come
Speaker 2: from the nation whatever. Anyway, It's like I was in
Speaker 2: earth first for a while. Has it come across so
Speaker 2: the wilam At National Forest is one of the most
Speaker 2: beautiful places in the world. In nineteen ninety one, some arsonists,
Speaker 2: not the good kind, started a nine thousand acre forest
Speaker 2: fire in the cord Patch Roadless area in the forest,
Speaker 2: which was a habitat reserve for the northern spotted owl. Basically,
Speaker 2: there was this culture war thing happening in the early
Speaker 2: late eighties early nineties about the spotted owl, where people
Speaker 2: were like, we want to cut down everything, and people
Speaker 2: were like, we'd rather didn't, and they were like, give
Speaker 2: us a good reason, and we were like, spotted owl
Speaker 2: nest there, and then the courts were like okay, and
Speaker 2: then the culture war was like, well then we hate
Speaker 2: the spot owl. Fuck the spotted owl.
Speaker 3: It's what I like, vaguely remember that from like my
Speaker 3: earliest flickerings of consciousness. So like, conservatives loved to make
Speaker 3: weird jokes about the spotted owl, and I was like,
Speaker 3: I don't get it. Yeah, they've never changed. So as
Speaker 3: soon as this place, this in the Cornpatch Roadless area
Speaker 3: was declared a spotted owl sanctuary, someone burned it.
Speaker 5: M h.
Speaker 2: The Forest Service was like, sweet, the trees burned, we
Speaker 2: can sell them now in what's called a salvage timber sale,
Speaker 2: which is based on this entirely incorrect assumption that a
Speaker 2: burned forest is not a healthy forest, and uh can
Speaker 2: it's good to then take all the biomass out of it.
Speaker 3: That's very depressing. But I also want to make my
Speaker 3: joke that they had a fire sail.
Speaker 2: They did have a fire sale. Sorry, it's okay. I
Speaker 2: would bet a decent sum of money that the fire
Speaker 2: was started for the purpose of turning in savage sale.
Speaker 2: Light it and log it was the slogan attributed to
Speaker 2: the timber companies. One of the things that happens a
Speaker 2: lot in logging is that the fines for like, for example,
Speaker 2: one timber sale that I worked on, when they accidentally
Speaker 2: quote unquote cut an old growth tree outside of the
Speaker 2: area that they're supposed to cut, they would get fined
Speaker 2: a couple thousand dollars on a tree that they sold
Speaker 2: for tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah, so God, there's
Speaker 2: no and there's no criminal punishment, right, so they just
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 3: Well, it's like when you see those signs that are
Speaker 3: like fine for striking and killing a highway worker seventy
Speaker 3: five hundred dollars and there have to be people who
Speaker 3: see that and are like, all.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, totally. So the arsonists who started that nine
Speaker 2: thousand acre fire was never caught. I am not sure
Speaker 2: the fire was ever really investigated seriously. Later in this
Speaker 2: story you're going to see like a teenager go to
Speaker 2: prison for eight years for doing five thousand dollars worth
Speaker 2: of damage to a McDonald's. Three hundred FBI agents working
Speaker 2: on a case to bring down one cell of the
Speaker 2: Earth Liberation Front. I'm sure they had nothing better to do,
Speaker 2: but nine thousand acres of public land, all growth forests,
Speaker 2: totally I replate. Now, who cares whatever? So this timber sale,
Speaker 2: the salvage timber sale is set off huge protests. There
Speaker 2: was a five year campaign from ninety one to ninety five,
Speaker 2: which isn't five years, it's four years. But whatever. A
Speaker 2: burn forest is still a valuable ecosystem, and in the
Speaker 2: West in particular, forests are often fire ecologies designed to
Speaker 2: survive and often thrive from burns. You know, I worked
Speaker 2: one salvage timber sale that we were trying to stop
Speaker 2: where the pine cones don't open unless there's a fire.
Speaker 2: You know, the new seeds like literally can't be planted
Speaker 2: until the fire goes through. That said, the kinds of
Speaker 2: fires that these are a different, different deal. But if
Speaker 2: you don't clear cut a burned forest and remove all
Speaker 2: the biomass and all the habitat, these forests can recover.
Speaker 2: An activists knew that, and they started leading hikes through
Speaker 2: the burn area to talk about fire ecology. In early
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety five, they won in court saying that it
Speaker 2: shouldn't be logged. But then a Republican Congress passed the
Speaker 2: Salvage Logging Rider in nineteen ninety five, and this basically
Speaker 2: like it literally had to go through Congress to say no,
Speaker 2: we just want to cut everything we can in this
Speaker 2: one particular area. Basically, basically this rider to a different
Speaker 2: bill said for the next year, any burn forest can
Speaker 2: be cut without any environmental review because but normally if
Speaker 2: you want to cut public lands, you have to at
Speaker 2: least go through environmental review process, which is where activists
Speaker 2: the glamorous stuff is the tree sitting in the road blockades,
Speaker 2: but the thing that actually saves the forest or the
Speaker 2: lawyers fighting that while the blockaders prevent it from being cut,
Speaker 2: while the court is figuring it out. Whatever. The reason
Speaker 2: this was a rider this bill was because it was
Speaker 2: attached to a different bill. In this case, these fucking
Speaker 2: ghouls attached it to a bill giving money to Oklahoma
Speaker 2: City bombing victims. Oh my god.
Speaker 3: See, every time we're nostalgic for the nineties, it's.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, nothing changes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the fashions just you know, waiver slightly, but that's
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we're back. We're back to it again already, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Actually I think we've already moved on eight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, god knows. I think we're doing two thousand and
Speaker 3: three now.
Speaker 2: Which is if I dress like two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: no one would come near me.
Speaker 3: I got to get a newsboy cap if we're going
Speaker 3: to do my personal two thousand and three, which Sophie
Speaker 3: is already gravitating towards, so we can Sophie, we're going
Speaker 3: to be Newsy's this year.
Speaker 2: Okay, that is a good style. I am all about the.
Speaker 3: Nobody was saying it twenty years ago, but maybe it's
Speaker 3: finally time.
Speaker 1: No, we should I was. I was saying to my
Speaker 1: sister in law the other day. I was like, I
Speaker 1: feel no emotional attachment to my wardrobe, and like it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like me anymore. So maybe it's because it's
Speaker 1: not Newsy's enough.
Speaker 2: Maybe you're Newsy's era.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I I identify so deeply with the episode
Speaker 3: of Seinfeld where Curie and a later at a funeral
Speaker 3: and Elaine's like, I hate all my clothes. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: like sometimes when you're at a funeral, that's the saddest
Speaker 3: thing you can think about.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, all right, we're all going to get newsboy caps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then go out and do reacted. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: we reacted. The timber companies are like, let's fucking go.
Speaker 2: Who cares we kill the planet. We'll be able to
Speaker 2: buy new trucks. And this massive protest movement, it doesn't
Speaker 2: go away just because Congress told them that the law
Speaker 2: wasn't going to work with them anymore. It moved to
Speaker 2: a more sort of desperate direct action movement. Over six
Speaker 2: hundred people got arrested defending various forests in the area
Speaker 2: that summer, just massive protests were everywhere. One of the
Speaker 2: main groups involved was a new group called Cascadia Forest Defenders.
Speaker 2: And it's not Earth First, but it's not not Earth first.
Speaker 2: The direct action environmental movement is like that where you'll
Speaker 2: just you know, Portland had the Cascadia Forest Alliance, Eugene
Speaker 2: had the Cascady and Forest Defenders whatever. And because of
Speaker 2: all of this, the Forest Service only managed to sell
Speaker 2: a fifth of the billion board feet of timber that
Speaker 2: they'd hoped out of the salvage Rider because lawsuits and
Speaker 2: activists kept tangling everything up. And there was this particular
Speaker 2: fourteen acres sail Warner Creek and it's suddenly opened for logging.
Speaker 2: So a couple activists grab their toothbrushes and sleeping bags
Speaker 2: and run up the hill and they just stay there.
Speaker 2: And then they keep staying there for almost a year,
Speaker 2: three hundred and forty three days on all through the winter,
Speaker 2: under eight feet of snow, and along the way, hundreds
Speaker 2: of people total, five hundred to one thousand people come
Speaker 2: to this encampment. They rip up the road with pick axes,
Speaker 2: which is, they build fifteen foot deep, ten foot wide
Speaker 2: trenches in the road. They built a palisade wall like
Speaker 2: an Wild West town with a drawbridge and an observation tower,
Speaker 2: and they buried anchor points in the road to lock
Speaker 2: themselves too. These are called sleeping dragons, you know, because
Speaker 2: you can. You just grab a chain with a carabiner
Speaker 2: around your wrist and then you like run to a
Speaker 2: hidden point in the road, stick your arm into it
Speaker 2: and you can clip into this point and then they
Speaker 2: can't take you out. They called it the Cascadia Free State,
Speaker 2: and they made a documentary about it called pick Axe.
Speaker 2: That's worth watching. It was made by the participants and
Speaker 2: it's all nineties camp quarter. It's kind of wild. It
Speaker 2: looked like shit what I saw it, And then now
Speaker 2: it probably looks cool and old and people do it
Speaker 2: on purpose. Yeah, that's an artifact. Yeah. Two activists went
Speaker 2: to the federal building in Eugene and went on a
Speaker 2: hunger strike, all to protect this fourteen acre timber sale,
Speaker 2: or rather to make a bigger point and draw attention
Speaker 2: and build a community around this movement. The following summer,
Speaker 2: on August sixteenth, the Forest Service came in with heavy
Speaker 2: equipment and arrested seven people and tore the whole thing down.
Speaker 2: One of the kind of wild things about these encampments
Speaker 2: is that they rely on like all this could anything
Speaker 2: you can do with a pickaxe over the course of
Speaker 2: months or a year can be destroyed in a few
Speaker 2: hours with heavy equipment, you know. But the timber sale
Speaker 2: was canceled, as were a ton of other salvage sales
Speaker 2: because everyone in the area, from the hippies to the
Speaker 2: little old ladies, were fucking mad about it. People kept
Speaker 2: like storming offices. When some folks were arrested, their arrayment
Speaker 2: was held in secret, and so the activists outside were like, nah,
Speaker 2: it's not going to happen. Protesters forced their way into
Speaker 2: the jail and rioted in Eugene. This particular movement based
Speaker 2: in Eugene, Oregon is going to have a worldwide impact.
Speaker 2: It basically brings hippie anti capitalism into the modern era.
Speaker 2: It rebirths the US direct Action, anarchist movement, which later
Speaker 2: goes on to influence a ton of stuff through the
Speaker 2: anti globalization movement and up through occupy and onward.
Speaker 3: Well, well a lot has come out of Eugene.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and protesters spent a lot of time in these
Speaker 2: makeshift shelters in the snow, holding off the federal government,
Speaker 2: and they got to talking. You know. There's like only
Speaker 2: a couple of them that stick around all winter, and
Speaker 2: they're like, Hey, what is necessary and what is ethical
Speaker 2: and what is strategic? How do we stop not just
Speaker 2: this timber sale, but the death machine of global capitalism.
Speaker 2: So a ton of people from this group formed the
Speaker 2: most prolific so of the Earth Libration Front, and they
Speaker 2: met each other there and they grew close on a
Speaker 2: road in the middle of nowhere, buried under snow. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: after a decade of ecotage, Earth First formally splits from
Speaker 2: the underground action. This is now we're we're playing fast
Speaker 2: and loose with time here. Now we're back to nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two in Brighton, England, where a lot of punk
Speaker 2: stuff comes from. And they were like, all right, if
Speaker 2: you're doing above ground shit, you're Earth First. If you're
Speaker 2: doing ecotage, which is their like cool word for sabotage
Speaker 2: in the name of the Earth, then you're the Earth
Speaker 2: Liberation Front and good luck to you. But you're not us.
Speaker 2: The Animal Libration Front had gotten its legs in England,
Speaker 2: so it makes sense enough that the E Left died two.
Speaker 2: In April nineteen ninety two, the Earth Libration Front made
Speaker 2: its first attack, or at least the first one with
Speaker 2: a communicae. They attacked a peat company called Fizzins that
Speaker 2: was destroying peat bogs, which are a non renewable resource,
Speaker 2: something that is only just now coming to mainstream like attention.
Speaker 2: Like you know, people used to always like use peat, muscle,
Speaker 2: lot and gardening, right, and people are moving to alternatives
Speaker 2: because they're like, oh, Pete Moss doesn't come back. I
Speaker 2: had no idea, Yeah, Pete Moss doesn't come back. Don't
Speaker 2: use it. Coconut something the thing no one can sayar
Speaker 2: qar koar. It's like Creed Brett and trying to remember
Speaker 2: his job title quabbity quall. Yeah, I have no idea
Speaker 2: what word you're trying to say?
Speaker 5: Cook?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 2: Like is the coconut right? Yeah? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I've probably never said it aloud. I've just like, I know,
Speaker 2: I mean, I've been free to gardening articles. Yeah. And
Speaker 2: I think this is actually an example of the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that the Earth Liberation Front is doing, is
Speaker 2: being about thirty years ahead of its time and confronting
Speaker 2: issues that at the time were like what who cares?
Speaker 2: And now people are like, oh, we care, because we're
Speaker 2: all about to boil h This magazine called Green Anarchist,
Speaker 2: not to be confused with the US magazine Green Anarchy,
Speaker 2: put out this first communicate, all our peat bogs must
Speaker 2: be preserved in their entirety for the sake of the plants,
Speaker 2: the animals in our national heritage. Cynically donating small amounts
Speaker 2: will do no good. The water table will drop and
Speaker 2: the bogs will dry out and die unless it is
Speaker 2: preserved fully. And so the ELF spreads across Europe and
Speaker 2: the rest of the world. Most of the narratives around
Speaker 2: the Earth Libration Front collapse the whole movement down to
Speaker 2: a few people, especially this cell that we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about called which gets called the family, which is sketchy.
Speaker 2: If you're ever naming your own group, don't name it
Speaker 2: the family. Yeah, And we're going to collapse the narrative
Speaker 2: down to them a little bit too, for three reasons.
Speaker 2: One it is narratively convenient. Two we know the most
Speaker 2: about it. And three well, because not everyone involved in
Speaker 2: all these actions has been caught, and there's no statute
Speaker 2: of limitations on terrorism charges, so I really to dig
Speaker 2: into some of these things, you know. But fittingly enough,
Speaker 2: the first recorded ELF action in the US was on
Speaker 2: Columbus Day, and it was some graffiti about colonization five
Speaker 2: hundred and four years of Genocide was spray painted in
Speaker 2: one place, elf was spray painted another place in Eugene, Oregon,
Speaker 2: naturally perfect. And then, because they hadn't really nailed their
Speaker 2: security culture yet, for a few days later, all along
Speaker 2: the I five corridor, just in a single direction, gas
Speaker 2: stations and McDonald's had their glues locked with five hundred
Speaker 2: and four years of genocide and Earth Liberation Front and
Speaker 2: fuck corporations and all that jazz. Then a week or
Speaker 2: so later, the first fire that they're famous four happened
Speaker 2: was nineteen ninety six. It's in the forest outside Detroit, Oregon,
Speaker 2: the other Detroit as it's often, Yeah, this one has
Speaker 2: a lake.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's like people were like, which Portland, And you're like,
Speaker 2: unless you live in Maine, no one's going to ask
Speaker 2: which Portland? You mean, truly, come on, you guys, like,
Speaker 2: but it's a capital, and you're like, yeah. Anyway, in
Speaker 2: the forest outside Detroit, Oregon, a US Forest Service pickup
Speaker 2: truck was burned down and incendiary device was found on
Speaker 2: the roof of the ranger station, but it never ignited,
Speaker 2: and just like that, the US Earth Liberation Front kicked off.
Speaker 2: As for how that went, we'll talk about it on
Speaker 2: Wednesday and just like that, honey, Hi, you know like
Speaker 2: my Cliffhanger. No, it's an you didn't get it. There's
Speaker 2: the Sex of the City remake is called it's called it.
Speaker 1: Just like that.
Speaker 2: I get really excited when I do know pop culture reverence.
Speaker 1: You did not need to know this pop culture reference,
Speaker 1: but when you said it, it was meant to be.
Speaker 3: My first thought hearing all this is that these are
Speaker 3: movements that, because they felt fully by the time I
Speaker 3: was a teenager, I just assumed had been around kind
Speaker 3: of forever. And oh yeah, huh. To me, one of
Speaker 3: the most interesting parts of this is being like, no,
Speaker 3: this the beginning of this large scale movement. We can
Speaker 3: trace it to an exact point in time and space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that before. I think I
Speaker 2: also kind of had this like sense of like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is just this thing, it's just in the air,
Speaker 2: and then like it kind of goes away too. Writ
Speaker 2: it's this like grand leaderless movement that's been around forever,
Speaker 2: and it's like it kind of did a thing for
Speaker 2: about ten years. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and on a more pop cultural level, it's so
Speaker 3: funny to trace the eras of things that we could
Speaker 3: focus on as a society like the nineties were the
Speaker 3: era of save the Whales. To the extent that I
Speaker 3: feel like there's I mean, this is a weird way
Speaker 3: to track cultural relevancy, but it's what comes to mind.
Speaker 3: I think there's a compilation of Dill cartoons called Shave
Speaker 3: the Whales. You can see how well known that phrase was.
Speaker 3: I read a lot of comic book compilations as a kid.
Speaker 3: I was not a great reader or just like not
Speaker 3: even real comic books, but because you know, newspaper funny pages.
Speaker 3: But I also I remembered because Earth First has such
Speaker 3: a ring to me in my high school brain. I
Speaker 3: wrote for an open mic night senior year of high
Speaker 3: school a song parody of phil Oakes's love Me I'm
Speaker 3: a Liberal that I called it, love me I'm a
Speaker 3: Portlander and first reference.
Speaker 2: Love me, I'm a what. I didn't know what you said,
Speaker 2: Love me, I'm a Liberal.
Speaker 1: I'm a Portlander.
Speaker 2: Love me, I'm a Portlander. You don't even have to
Speaker 2: change anything I know.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess updated it for more for modern times,
Speaker 3: although I didn't do a great job. But yeah, and
Speaker 3: for people who don't know, love me I'm a Liberal.
Speaker 5: Is.
Speaker 3: I think it's a wonderful, like biting satire song. Phil
Speaker 3: Oaks was a folk singer who I think said that
Speaker 3: he sang all the news that was fit to sing
Speaker 3: or something like that, and had a brief and tragic
Speaker 3: life and was very attractive, as folks singers all are
Speaker 3: in one way or another. And love me I'm a
Speaker 3: liberal is like this very catchy, jaunty folks song about
Speaker 3: having radical values at one time and then selling out
Speaker 3: and feeling pretty happy with that. And the sort of
Speaker 3: punch line of the song is, and that's why I'm
Speaker 3: turning you in.
Speaker 2: Yeah that that's a perfect song for this moment, And
Speaker 2: yeah that was what was in the air. And you're
Speaker 2: because you were in high school or in a lot
Speaker 2: of what we're going to be talking about. I think
Speaker 2: maybe I don't actually know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and I wonder about, you know, just looking ahead,
Speaker 3: how much what we're talking about feels present in the
Speaker 3: current moment where we're having this. It feels like unending
Speaker 3: mainstream cultural debate between should we fuc shit up? Or
Speaker 3: should we buy pasta and glass jars? And I say,
Speaker 3: why not?
Speaker 2: Both?
Speaker 1: I knew that, I literally knew that was what you
Speaker 1: were going to say.
Speaker 5: I was like that.
Speaker 1: I was like, hmm, I will not choose.
Speaker 2: I know, I will not choose. My two big things
Speaker 2: I'm always saying is decant everything. Put all your hand
Speaker 2: soap into a prettier bottle and all your pasta into
Speaker 2: the glass jars, and funck shit up. That's the two.
Speaker 1: I am okay with living by both of those, Sarah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that that's how we have to do it.
Speaker 3: And also, you got a carbo load. If you're gonna
Speaker 3: fuc shit.
Speaker 2: Up, the revolution can be interior design.
Speaker 1: That was really funny, magpie.
Speaker 2: Yeah that was beautiful.
Speaker 1: Put that on a fucking bumper sticker, please perfect.
Speaker 2: No, but I like a live laugh love like cross
Speaker 2: stitch that's framed exactly.
Speaker 1: A throw a pillow so bad at home goods. We
Speaker 1: don't need any other pillows that say grateful.
Speaker 2: We need pillows that say pissed off. Yeah, but if
Speaker 2: people want to be grateful for hearing more of you
Speaker 2: on podcasts, where can they find you? Oh? That was
Speaker 2: so beautiful? Thanks?
Speaker 3: I have two podcasts, can you believe it? In this
Speaker 3: dainting everyone has a podcast, so I had to have
Speaker 3: two to feel special. So I do a podcast called
Speaker 3: You Wrong About where we talk about misremembered history. I
Speaker 3: really have got to have both of you on at
Speaker 3: some point in the future. And recently we've talked about
Speaker 3: everything from The Exorcist to Billy Jean King, So there's
Speaker 3: something for everyone, and it's not all about the seventies,
Speaker 3: despite what those two examples made it sound like. And
Speaker 3: then I Do You Are Good, which I co host
Speaker 3: with Alex Deed and which is a feelings podcast about movies,
Speaker 3: and we recently did an episode that's our our live
Speaker 3: show where we talk about Forrest Gump with Chelsea Weber
Speaker 3: Smith at SF sketch Fest and we had such a
Speaker 3: great time. And there's nothing like crying a little bit
Speaker 3: in front of people who paid to come watch you
Speaker 3: cry a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, with the microphone and zoom, you can pretend like
Speaker 2: there's not an audience.
Speaker 3: But yeah, you're like, I'm just having a moment with
Speaker 3: the shampoo bottle I've been holding since I was five.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Okay, Well, if people want to see more of
Speaker 2: what I do, they can look at pictures of my
Speaker 2: dog on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy and they can follow
Speaker 2: me on substack at Margaret Kiljoy and my most recent
Speaker 2: book is a tabletop role playing game called p Number City.
Speaker 2: So if you want to fuck shit up safely with
Speaker 2: your friends, you can do that. Okay, wait that how
Speaker 2: I'm going to try and tie it together. When I
Speaker 2: was organizing Earth First in Portland in the mid odds,
Speaker 2: I was running a Dungeons and Dragons game, and wow,
Speaker 2: I don't know the legality what I'm about to say.
Speaker 2: I would give in game rewards to when my players
Speaker 2: would get arrested at Earth First events. No one was
Speaker 2: like planning. Well, actually, earth First often plans to get
Speaker 2: people arrested. But you know, one of my players, you know,
Speaker 2: spent a night in jail and was interrogated by the
Speaker 2: FBI or whatever because it was green scare times and
Speaker 2: literally they had just hung a banner in a tree
Speaker 2: and got tackled and her for this is a complete tangent. Sophie.
Speaker 2: You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll plug. Cool Zone Media's newest podcast. It's called
Speaker 1: Better Offline. It is all about how big tech in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley is uh infiltrating our minds in our daily lives.
Speaker 1: So check that out. It's a weekly podcast every Wednesday.
Speaker 2: Gotta bless you cool Zone.
Speaker 1: God bless you. Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God bless us. Everyone thinks that's exactly what it's thinking.
Speaker 4: Uh bye.
Speaker 5: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 5: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 5: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 5: on the iHeartMedia app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 5: your podcasts.
Speaker 2: You're an