The Rise & Fall of the Eco-Radical Underground

In January, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference to announce the success of Operation Backfire, a federal bust that resulted in the indictment of eleven members of the Family. It is the single biggest roundup of environmental activists in U.S. history. It is also part of a larger federal crackdown that radical environmentalists call a "green scare." In the past year alone, the government has indicted longtime animal-liberation hero Rodney Coronado for making a speech in San Diego in which he answered an audience question about how to set a jug of gasoline on fire; convicted six members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty for posting the home addresses of executives of an animal-testing company on the group's Web site; and arrested three young activists in California who had purchased ingredients at Kmart to make a plastic explosive—not realizing that their pal "Anna," a twenty-year-old anti-war protester with pink hair, long legs and an overtly stated hankering to blow shit up—was an FBI plant paid $75,000 for her troubles. One of the guys, with whom Anna sometimes shared a bed, now faces seventeen years behind bars.

Branding activists as terrorists not only makes for good headlines, it also results in longer prison sentences. In 2001, forest advocate Jeffrey "Free" Luers, perhaps today's most passionately embraced eco-martyr, was sentenced to nearly twenty-three years for setting fire to three Chevy SUVs. The Family faces far more prison time. Under a 2003 order by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, any arson set with a timer must be prosecuted under a post-Oklahoma City statute that defense lawyers call "the hammer." Under standard arson charges, the maximum sentence is five years for each building or car that is set ablaze. Under the hammer, the mandatory sentence for a single act of arson is a minimum of thirty years in prison. For two, the minimum is life—with no possibility of parole. The government wants to sentence some members of the Family to life plus 1,015 years.

Given the current environmental crisis facing the planet, even some of those responsible for putting the Family behind bars find themselves sympathizing with the group's motives. "My heart's with these people," says Kirk Engdall, the lead prosecutor in the case. "We've got to save the planet for our children and grandchildren. Where they went wrong is when they resorted to violence. They were desperate, because they felt that their cause wasn't being addressed appropriately."

Supporters in the environmental movement agree. "This is such a waste of good people," says Roselle. "I'll bet I trained some of these people in nonviolent civil disobedience, and we taught them that history shows that radical movements that are violent make people paranoid, isolated and easy for the feds to pick off." He starts to choke up. "When I think about them, it brings me to tears."

For Avalon, the impetus to wreak havoc on man-made structures began with a pure-hearted love of the wild. To him, every creature was precious, from sparrows to mountain lions to his favorite: bats. Avalon, raised in upstate New York, was a quiet, sensitive child of middle-class parents. In the early 1980s, he enrolled in an ROTC program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, but dropped out after a few months, making his way to Prescott College, an environmental school in Arizona. In the high desert of Prescott, a town of Republican retirees with a tight-knit group of radicals on its fringes, he was introduced to Deep Ecology, a vision of the world in which humans have no more divine right over the planet than any other life form. "He was amazingly connected to the Earth," says ex-girlfriend Katie Rose Nelson. "Everything in nature was like a family member with whom he had formed an intimate relationship."

By the early 1990s, Avalon was devoting most of his time to Earth First!, the unruly, zealous environmental group established in the 1980s in reaction to polite, mainstream groups like the Sierra Club, which radicals viewed as making unjustified concessions to industry. Founded by a bunch of macho cowboys with a yippie sense of humor and an adulation of cult writer Edward Abbey, Earth First! urged activists to monkey-wrench the system by employing "all the tools in the toolbox"—pulling up survey stakes, pouring sand in the gas tanks of bulldozers. The goal was to protect America's remaining swaths of "big wilderness" from any human intervention, from logging and mining to overflights by aircraft. Their slogan: "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth."

Avalon not only bought into the Earth First! worldview, he took it further. Convinced that even the most modest human habitation was too much of an imposition on the Earth, he took to living out of his silver-blue Toyota truck, a present from his parents. He even preached against domesticated pets and houseplants, explaining that humans could never fulfill the true desires of cats and ferns.

Traveling across the West in his truck, Avalon devoted months to the group's effort to save Arizona's red-squirrel habitat from a university astrophysics observatory and spent summers campaigning to stop logging in Idaho's Cove-Mallard forest, part of the largest roadless area in the lower forty-eight. Then, in 1996, he heard that a new kind of campaign was taking place in Oregon on fourteen acres of old-growth timber in the Willamette Valley. To prevent the forest from being logged, activists had transformed the area around Warner Creek into "Fort Warner," a square mile of encampments complete with a watchtower and ten-foot-deep trenches outfitted with a stream-fed shower. Avalon took his place behind the fortress walls, where activists chained their wrists to half-ton concrete barrels whenever Forest Service officers approached. The activists saw the area as part of Cascadia, a vast bioregion spanning the Pacific Northwest, and they defended the fort for eleven months.

"Warner Creek was one of the first permanent encampments, or 'free states,' as we called them," says Jim Flynn, a former editor of Earth First! Journal. "Whereas most Earth First! actions had been about 'you block the road until they kick your ass, and then you leave,' here people went up to the woods and declared that Cascadia is our land, and we're not going home, because this is our home."