The Eco-Sabotage Group That Went Up In Smoke

The Earth Liberation Front grew impatient with legal forms of protest. Then they turned on each other.

In early 2021, during the depths of the pandemic, a slim, provocatively titled book became a surprising hit. How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Swedish scholar Andreas Malm made the case for a more radical form of environmental activism that, he argued, matched the severity of the crisis we face. If rising temperatures and biodiversity loss pose an existential threat to the planet, why aren’t more people putting their bodies on the line?

Though the book was not a how-to manual—there is in fact nothing in it about blowing up pipelines—the message was clear. The contemporary environmental movement, despite some notable successes, such as stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and building a formidable divestment campaign (modeled on the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s), had not come anywhere near to achieving its goal of curbing climate change or holding those most responsible, i.e., fossil fuel companies and the banks that fund them, accountable. Malm’s logic was relatively straightforward; if these tactics have failed and the window to make a difference really is closing, it’s time to try something new.

The book was widely reviewed (the Financial Times named it one of the best books of the year, and Malm was interviewed on the New Yorker radio hour), and, if nothing else, Malm punctured the polite discourse surrounding the acceptable limits of political action. A film that took the book’s title literally—it follows the story of a group of activists who blow up a pipeline in West Texas—was released two years later. But though it often went unmentioned, Malm was drawing on a much longer tradition, one that has periodically attempted to redefine the trajectory of environmental politics.

In 1998, an essay similar in spirit to Malm’s appeared in the Earth First! Journal. Titled “Beyond Civil Disobedience,” it opened with a thought experiment, in which the author—writing under the pseudonym “Snap Dragon”—asked readers how they’d respond to an intruder breaking into their home to kill their family. The options were: Make a banner and call the media, call a lawyer and file for a restraining order, or chain yourself to the front door. (And the answer was that none was sufficient.)    

The piece was written by Chelsea Gerlach, the youngest member of the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, a highly secretive group of eco-saboteurs who engaged in a series of spectacular acts of property destruction between 1996 and 2001. Relying mostly on primitive incendiary devices, the activists set fire to government buildings on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land, released wild horses from captivity, toppled transmission towers, and, in their most audacious and consequential act, incinerated the Two Elk ski lodge at Vail resort, which was planning to expand into the White River National Forest—including 700 acres of old-growth forest.

The Vail arson—which was carried out in October 1998 by two of the group’s members, including Gerlach, and caused $12 million in damage—put the ELF on the map. But, as Matthew Wolfe points out in Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage, not always in the way they had hoped. The Vail attack was widely condemned on nightly newscasts and across the nation’s op-ed pages (The Wall Street Journal called it a hate crime). But the group also drew the ire of much of the environmental community, with the Environmental Defense Fund castigating the action as “an outrage” and Earth........

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