Hunting America's Most Wanted Eco-Terrorist

But the next morning, when the FBI showed up at that woman's front door, Tre was gone, having disappeared while it was still dark out. His parents have not heard from him since.

A week later, FBI agents showed up at the Scarpittis' house to interview Jim and Mel. "We were floored," Jim says. "We both find it very difficult to accept that he would be involved in anything beyond peaceful civil disobedience." They told the agents they would urge their son "to get back to Portland and turn himself in," Jim says, "because I'm convinced that would be what's best for him."

What the FBI didn't tell the Scarpittis, though, was that the Joint Terrorist Task Force suspected their son of participation in a far more aggressive arson attack in Pennsylvania on August 11th, two days before his indictment in Portland. The blaze at the U.S. Forest Service's Northeast Research Station in Irvine, Pennsylvania -- not far from Pittsburgh, where Tre had been staying -- caused more than $700,000 in damage and destroyed years of research. The Earth Liberation Front issued a press release in which it claimed responsibility for the blaze: "This facility was strategically targeted, and if rebuilt, will be targeted again for complete destruction. Furthermore, all other U.S. Forest Service administration and research facilities nationwide should now be considered likely targets."

PART VI: THE REVOLUTIONARIES

Since its formation in 1997, the Earth Liberation Front has taken credit for the majority of significant "eco-terror" incidents in the United States. Many other acts of sabotage against "those involved in exploitation or destruction of the environment," as ELF puts it, have been committed by individuals who may or may not be directly associated with the group, since 1980, when the federal government began keeping count. While the total number of incidents is in the hundreds, and the combined property damage exceeds $50 million, the overall impact of "underground direct action," as environmental activists describe it, has been much greater than these figures suggest. Because of eco-terrorism, companies ranging from sawmills to movie studios have changed the way they do business.

Before ELF existed, eco-terror was generally carried out by ad-hoc groups of between two and six people who chose targets in their communities and kept what they had done to themselves. ELF essentially formalized what already existed into the system of "anonymous cells" by which the movement operates. In the process, it has done spectacularly well at avoiding detection. To this day, no one in law enforcement has penetrated ELF, and no reporter has obtained an interview with an avowed ELF member.

"The history of social change shows that it takes stepping outside societal laws to make change happen," says Craig Rosebraugh, who for the last four years has been the public face of ELF. Rosebraugh is a skinny, shaven-headed young man who wears wire-rimmed glasses and black combat boots. In 1998, he announced that he had received an e-mail from ELF claiming responsibility for the arson that caused more than $12 million in damage to a ski resort in Vail, Colorado, the largest eco-terror attack ever. Rosebraugh insisted that he did not know who had sent him the e-mail and said he was not an ELF member -- though he did agree with the group's aims.

Rosebraugh has made no public statements that would connect him with any of the crimes the government suspects Tre Arrow of committing. But in an unpublished interview he gave to ROLLING STONE shortly after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., he said he had become convinced that revolutions took place only when pacifists committed to aboveground civil disobedience were backed by militants who accomplished underground acts of violence. "Liberals," he said, "are the kind of people who support armed struggle among the Indians of southern Mexico but not here in America." At the time, he was enrolled at Vermont's Godard College, writing a master's thesis "arguing the validity of armed struggle."

It is impossible not to hear Rosebraugh's remarks from back then echoing in the press release sent to the media to announce ELF's responsibility for the laboratory fire set in Pennsylvania eleven months later. ELF's members are "no longer limiting their revolutionary potential by adhering to a flawed, inconsistent 'nonviolent' ideology," the press release said. "While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake, where it is necessary we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice and provide the needed protection for our planet that decades of legal battles, pleading, protest and economic sabotage have failed so drastically to achieve. The diverse efforts of this revolutionary force cannot be contained, and will only continue to intensify as we are brought face to face with the oppressor in inevitable, violent confrontation."

PART VII: OUT THERE

If Tre Arrow has, as the government suspects, joined this revolutionary force, his former associates at the Cascadia Forest Alliance will find themselves in the painfully awkward position of simultaneously applauding and deploring the young man who became their poster boy. What his fellow forest activists actually knew about the Schoppert fire, they weren't willing to discuss; each of the Cascadians called before the federal grand jury that returned the indictment against Tre refused to answer questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment, as has been the group's policy for several years. And when Tre was identified as a suspect in the Pennsylvania laboratory fire, his friends in Portland stopped talking about him to anyone in the media.

Then, on October 18th, the criminal charges against Tre doubled when he and Jacob Sherman were indicted on four counts involving the April 15th, 2001, firebombing of three cement trucks at Portland's Ross Island Sand & Gravel. Unlike the later Schoppert arson attack, a claim of responsibility for this firebombing was made -- in a communiqué issued by the Earth Liberation Front through its press office in Portland; it accused the sand-and-gravel company of "stealing soil" and "mishandling toxic wastes" at its location on the Willamette River. Federal agents said that the indictment had been based in part on similarities between the incendiary devices used in both the Schoppert and Ross Island firebombings.

When U.S. Attorney Mike Mosman decried ELF for "seeking to influence public policy through violence," activists retorted that ELF is not violent and that "economic sabotage" would be a fairer description of the group's activities than the government-imposed term eco-terrorism.

ELF and its allies have made the avoidance of injury to others a primary tenet of their actions, and no one has been killed or injured as a result of an ELF action, despite the fact that the U.S. government describes ecoterrorism as America's "most dangerous domestic threat." Still, almost every activist over the age of thirty recognizes the dangers of direct action. "'Armed struggle' will achieve nothing but disaster," says Rodney Coronado, the Yacqui Indian who became a mythical figure within the underground environmental movement in the late 1980s.