LAST EDITED ON Sep-30-07 AT 07:04PM (MST)[p]LAST EDITED ON Sep-30-07 AT 07:04?PM (MST)
This is a list of Earth First organizations and contacts. Reading the list I thought some of the MM members would like to know how wide spread Earth First's tentacles are. These people a deranged and should be stopped.
Ransom
The Earth First! Octopus
There are several hundred Earth First! organizations in America, and at least 50 in other nations. Most of them use the words "Earth First" in their title, but a cheat-sheet might be helpful for those Earth First! entities that go by other names. Bear in mind that many Earth First! organizations rapidly form around a cause, and then disappear. As a result, a complete list of Earth First! organizations is impossible to compile. However, when you see the following names, think Earth First!
Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project
Cascadia Forest Defenders
Coastwatch
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers
Cove Mallard Coalition
Daily Planet Publishing, Inc.
Direct Action Fund
Earth Defense Education Project
End Corporate Dominance
Environmentally Sound Promotions
Friends of the Wolf
League of Wilderness Defenders
Redwood Action Team
Warrior Poets Society
Zero Xtract from Public Lands
The Earth First! Journal includes a section called "EF! Campaigns and Projects." The following organizations have graced that list in recent years:
Bioengineering Action Network
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers Video Project
Earth Liberation Prisoners
EF! Action Update
North American ALF Press Office
ELF Press Office
Earth Liberation Front
North American Earth Liberation Support Network
The Earth First! Journal has listed the following groups as "contacts":
Arizona Wildlands Museum
Autonomous Zone
Biodiversity Liberation Front
Blue Mtns. Biodiversity Project
Boxcar Books and Community Center
The Brokedowns/Elgin Food Not Bombs
Cascadia Forest Alliance
Cascadia Forest Defenders
Church of Deep Ecology
Confluence/St. Louis IMC
Direct Action Network
Environmental Resource Center
Fairfax Action Team
Flagstaff Activist Network
Foghorn
Forest Ecosystems Action Group
Green Vigilance
Lawrence Grassroots Initiative
Liberated Zone Infoshop
Lost Cause Collective
Mass Direct Action
Mountain Eco-Collective
New Mexico Direct Action
Oceandream Media Foundation
Pink Planarians
Popular Power
Project Harmony
Rustic Revolt
Shuksan Direct Action
Slingshot
Solidarity Books
Stone Soup Collective
Tornado Alley Resistance
Unci Maka Uonihanpo (Honor Mother Earth)
Wild Wasatch Front
Wilderness Defense
The following EF!-named groups have been listed by the Earth First! Journal as contacts:
Alachua EF!
Allegheny EF!
Bay Area EF!
Big Bend EF!
Boundary Waters EF!
Buffalo Trace EF!
Croatan EF!
Dallas EF!
East Texas EF!
EF! Austin
French Broad EF!
Gainesville/Ichetucknee EF!
Houston EF!
Kalmiopsis EF!
Kat?ah EF!/River Faction
Kat?ah EF!/Tennessee Valley Faction
Kat?ah Foothills EF!
Kekionga EF!
Lake Erie EF!
Lake Worthless EF!
Loon Antics EF!
Love Canal EF!
Madison EF!
Maine EF!
OFF!
Olympia EF!/Cascadia Defense Network
Peninsular Ranges EF!
Phoenix EF!
Red Gate EF!
San Juan EF!
Santa Cruz EF!/EF! Radio
Seattle EF!
Shawnee EF!
Sonoma County EF!
Teewinot EF!
Tucson EF!
Two Rivers EF!
Uwharrie Earth First!
Wild Rockies EF!/Wild Rockies Review
Yellowstone EF!
Bomb-throwers have a funny way of making even the most radical spokespersons seem reasonable, and one of Earth First!'s main goals is to make green groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth appear mainstream by comparison. Mission accomplished.
EF! also claims some success at its other practical goal: inflicting economic damage on the industries that it opposes. In Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman brags that "ecotage [economic sabotage] in the National Forests alone in the United States is costing industry and government $20-25 million annually." Putting companies out of business through sabotage, Earth First!ers believe, will ultimately protect the earth from human beings.
Which is really the point. Earth First!ers seek to destroy industrial civilization, if not humanity itself. Writing in the May 1987 issue of the Earth First! Journal under the pseudonym "Miss Ann Thropy," Earth First! theorist Christopher Manes suggested that "if radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS."
The author of an article in the November-December 2001 Earth First! Journal proclaimed that he was jealous of Osama bin Laden, and that the al Queda mastermind "is riding an unstoppable current of history." A speaker at Earth First!'s annual "Rendezvous" meeting once said that the "optimal human population" is zero.
Dave Foreman describes the philosophy that motivates Earth First! in Confessions of an Eco-Warrior:
"An individual human life has no more intrinsic value than does an individual Grizzly Bear life. Human suffering resulting from drought and famine in Ethiopia is tragic, yes, but the destruction there of other creatures and habitat is even more tragic."
"Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as 'disease' (e.g., malaria) and 'pests' (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere."
"An antipathy to 'progress' and 'technology.' We can accept the pejoratives of 'Luddite' and 'Neanderthal' with pride."
"There is no hope for reform of industrial empire."
"We humans have become a disease -- the Humanpox."
These are not just Foreman's own idiosyncratic views, but the first principles of the EF! movement. The National Chamber of Commerce quotes John Davis, then editor of the Earth First! Journal, summing it up: "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." And Earth First!ers reportedly sit around a camp fire, chanting, trancelike, for hours: "Billions are living that should be dead. Billions are living that should be dead. Billions are living that should be dead."
The Washington Post describes the Earth First! approach to earth worship:
In another clearing, a different group sat in a circle seeking other forms of magic. It was an exercise called a Council of All Beings, originated by Australian activist John Seed. At a Council of All Beings, you choose a nonhuman form of life and meditate upon that form -- mouse or tree or stem of grass -- until you seem to be that stem or mouse and then you tell the others in the circle about lawn mowers or traps and how it feels to be oppressed by humans.
The Council of All Beings reminded me of a form of religious worship that had taken place at the [Earth First!] Montana rendezvous I had also visited. There, the worshipers had evoked the presence of Gaia, a name for Earth as a being or a goddess, which is taken from the more scientific theory known as the Gaia hypothesis, in which Earth is described as an organism. The ceremony had been self-consciously pagan. "If you're going to talk about Christianity," a Montana worshiper had said, "please leave."
When I asked Dave Foreman, still in vest and camouflage hat, what the Council of All Beings and Gaia-worship role was in Earth First!, he grinned. "That's the woo-woo stuff," he said. "It's beyond me. But the diversity's good."
Earth First!ers, like their hero Dave Foreman, generally believe that "Mother Earth" is in some sense spiritual, and that monkey-wrenching is (in his words) "very much a sacrament."
Theodore "the Unabomber" Kaczynski is the radical environmental movement's biggest black eye. Conventional wisdom dictates that Kaczynski was merely an intellectual serial-killer, but his connection to Earth First! and the broader eco-terror movement is undeniable.
When FBI agents raided Kaczynski's Montana cabin in April 1996, they found copies of the Earth First! Journal, as well as an Earth First! affiliated publication called Live Wild or Die. This broadsheet, funded by Mike Roselle, included a now-famous "Eco-F*cker Hit List."
At the top of the Hit List was the California Forestry Association. In the middle was a prominent cartoon about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Kaczynski sent dozens of mail bombs; three were fatal. He killed an employee of the California Forestry Association, and a Burson-Marsteller PR executive named Thomas Mosser. Kaczynski (mistakenly) believed that Burson-Marsteller was responsible for rehabilitating Exxon's public image after the 1989 Valdez oil spill.
The source of that mistake? An essay in the Earth First! Journal, which the FBI says was one of Kaczynski's "favorite" periodicals. A letter found in Kaczynski's cabin -- titled "Suggestion for Earth First!ers from FC" ["FC" was the Unabomber's pseudonym] -- read in part: "As for the Mosser bombing, our attention was called to Burston-Marsteller [sic] by an article that appeared in the Earth First! Litha." The reference to "Litha" is in keeping with the Journal's habit of naming its issues after (pagan) lunar-calendar months.
According to ABC News and other media outlets, the FBI also believes that Kaczynski attended an Earth First! gathering just one month before murdering Mosser.
Ted Kaczynski did little more than follow what Earth First! openly advocates. The September 1989 Journal included an article instructing:
While Eco defenders are quick to point out that life is sacred and is not a target of Eco-Defense, many doubt that multinational takeover artists who liquidate old growth forests to pay off junk bonds qualify as Life-forms. Such Robotoids, they aver, should be classed with damns, dozers and drillers. A "Hit List" is available upon discreet inquiry.
For Earth First!, this kind of advice is (sadly) not a one-time thing. A cartoon in the 20th Anniversary issue of the Journal noted: "Trees are for hanging. Kill a developer." And the Unabomber could easily have read Dave Foreman's words: "The blood of timber executives is my natural drink, and the wail of dying forest supervisors is music to my ears."
This is a list of Earth First organizations and contacts. Reading the list I thought some of the MM members would like to know how wide spread Earth First's tentacles are. These people a deranged and should be stopped.
Ransom
The Earth First! Octopus
There are several hundred Earth First! organizations in America, and at least 50 in other nations. Most of them use the words "Earth First" in their title, but a cheat-sheet might be helpful for those Earth First! entities that go by other names. Bear in mind that many Earth First! organizations rapidly form around a cause, and then disappear. As a result, a complete list of Earth First! organizations is impossible to compile. However, when you see the following names, think Earth First!
Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project
Cascadia Forest Defenders
Coastwatch
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers
Cove Mallard Coalition
Daily Planet Publishing, Inc.
Direct Action Fund
Earth Defense Education Project
End Corporate Dominance
Environmentally Sound Promotions
Friends of the Wolf
League of Wilderness Defenders
Redwood Action Team
Warrior Poets Society
Zero Xtract from Public Lands
The Earth First! Journal includes a section called "EF! Campaigns and Projects." The following organizations have graced that list in recent years:
Bioengineering Action Network
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers Video Project
Earth Liberation Prisoners
EF! Action Update
North American ALF Press Office
ELF Press Office
Earth Liberation Front
North American Earth Liberation Support Network
The Earth First! Journal has listed the following groups as "contacts":
Arizona Wildlands Museum
Autonomous Zone
Biodiversity Liberation Front
Blue Mtns. Biodiversity Project
Boxcar Books and Community Center
The Brokedowns/Elgin Food Not Bombs
Cascadia Forest Alliance
Cascadia Forest Defenders
Church of Deep Ecology
Confluence/St. Louis IMC
Direct Action Network
Environmental Resource Center
Fairfax Action Team
Flagstaff Activist Network
Foghorn
Forest Ecosystems Action Group
Green Vigilance
Lawrence Grassroots Initiative
Liberated Zone Infoshop
Lost Cause Collective
Mass Direct Action
Mountain Eco-Collective
New Mexico Direct Action
Oceandream Media Foundation
Pink Planarians
Popular Power
Project Harmony
Rustic Revolt
Shuksan Direct Action
Slingshot
Solidarity Books
Stone Soup Collective
Tornado Alley Resistance
Unci Maka Uonihanpo (Honor Mother Earth)
Wild Wasatch Front
Wilderness Defense
The following EF!-named groups have been listed by the Earth First! Journal as contacts:
Alachua EF!
Allegheny EF!
Bay Area EF!
Big Bend EF!
Boundary Waters EF!
Buffalo Trace EF!
Croatan EF!
Dallas EF!
East Texas EF!
EF! Austin
French Broad EF!
Gainesville/Ichetucknee EF!
Houston EF!
Kalmiopsis EF!
Kat?ah EF!/River Faction
Kat?ah EF!/Tennessee Valley Faction
Kat?ah Foothills EF!
Kekionga EF!
Lake Erie EF!
Lake Worthless EF!
Loon Antics EF!
Love Canal EF!
Madison EF!
Maine EF!
OFF!
Olympia EF!/Cascadia Defense Network
Peninsular Ranges EF!
Phoenix EF!
Red Gate EF!
San Juan EF!
Santa Cruz EF!/EF! Radio
Seattle EF!
Shawnee EF!
Sonoma County EF!
Teewinot EF!
Tucson EF!
Two Rivers EF!
Uwharrie Earth First!
Wild Rockies EF!/Wild Rockies Review
Yellowstone EF!
Bomb-throwers have a funny way of making even the most radical spokespersons seem reasonable, and one of Earth First!'s main goals is to make green groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth appear mainstream by comparison. Mission accomplished.
EF! also claims some success at its other practical goal: inflicting economic damage on the industries that it opposes. In Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman brags that "ecotage [economic sabotage] in the National Forests alone in the United States is costing industry and government $20-25 million annually." Putting companies out of business through sabotage, Earth First!ers believe, will ultimately protect the earth from human beings.
Which is really the point. Earth First!ers seek to destroy industrial civilization, if not humanity itself. Writing in the May 1987 issue of the Earth First! Journal under the pseudonym "Miss Ann Thropy," Earth First! theorist Christopher Manes suggested that "if radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS."
The author of an article in the November-December 2001 Earth First! Journal proclaimed that he was jealous of Osama bin Laden, and that the al Queda mastermind "is riding an unstoppable current of history." A speaker at Earth First!'s annual "Rendezvous" meeting once said that the "optimal human population" is zero.
Dave Foreman describes the philosophy that motivates Earth First! in Confessions of an Eco-Warrior:
"An individual human life has no more intrinsic value than does an individual Grizzly Bear life. Human suffering resulting from drought and famine in Ethiopia is tragic, yes, but the destruction there of other creatures and habitat is even more tragic."
"Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as 'disease' (e.g., malaria) and 'pests' (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere."
"An antipathy to 'progress' and 'technology.' We can accept the pejoratives of 'Luddite' and 'Neanderthal' with pride."
"There is no hope for reform of industrial empire."
"We humans have become a disease -- the Humanpox."
These are not just Foreman's own idiosyncratic views, but the first principles of the EF! movement. The National Chamber of Commerce quotes John Davis, then editor of the Earth First! Journal, summing it up: "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." And Earth First!ers reportedly sit around a camp fire, chanting, trancelike, for hours: "Billions are living that should be dead. Billions are living that should be dead. Billions are living that should be dead."
The Washington Post describes the Earth First! approach to earth worship:
In another clearing, a different group sat in a circle seeking other forms of magic. It was an exercise called a Council of All Beings, originated by Australian activist John Seed. At a Council of All Beings, you choose a nonhuman form of life and meditate upon that form -- mouse or tree or stem of grass -- until you seem to be that stem or mouse and then you tell the others in the circle about lawn mowers or traps and how it feels to be oppressed by humans.
The Council of All Beings reminded me of a form of religious worship that had taken place at the [Earth First!] Montana rendezvous I had also visited. There, the worshipers had evoked the presence of Gaia, a name for Earth as a being or a goddess, which is taken from the more scientific theory known as the Gaia hypothesis, in which Earth is described as an organism. The ceremony had been self-consciously pagan. "If you're going to talk about Christianity," a Montana worshiper had said, "please leave."
When I asked Dave Foreman, still in vest and camouflage hat, what the Council of All Beings and Gaia-worship role was in Earth First!, he grinned. "That's the woo-woo stuff," he said. "It's beyond me. But the diversity's good."
Earth First!ers, like their hero Dave Foreman, generally believe that "Mother Earth" is in some sense spiritual, and that monkey-wrenching is (in his words) "very much a sacrament."
Theodore "the Unabomber" Kaczynski is the radical environmental movement's biggest black eye. Conventional wisdom dictates that Kaczynski was merely an intellectual serial-killer, but his connection to Earth First! and the broader eco-terror movement is undeniable.
When FBI agents raided Kaczynski's Montana cabin in April 1996, they found copies of the Earth First! Journal, as well as an Earth First! affiliated publication called Live Wild or Die. This broadsheet, funded by Mike Roselle, included a now-famous "Eco-F*cker Hit List."
At the top of the Hit List was the California Forestry Association. In the middle was a prominent cartoon about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Kaczynski sent dozens of mail bombs; three were fatal. He killed an employee of the California Forestry Association, and a Burson-Marsteller PR executive named Thomas Mosser. Kaczynski (mistakenly) believed that Burson-Marsteller was responsible for rehabilitating Exxon's public image after the 1989 Valdez oil spill.
The source of that mistake? An essay in the Earth First! Journal, which the FBI says was one of Kaczynski's "favorite" periodicals. A letter found in Kaczynski's cabin -- titled "Suggestion for Earth First!ers from FC" ["FC" was the Unabomber's pseudonym] -- read in part: "As for the Mosser bombing, our attention was called to Burston-Marsteller [sic] by an article that appeared in the Earth First! Litha." The reference to "Litha" is in keeping with the Journal's habit of naming its issues after (pagan) lunar-calendar months.
According to ABC News and other media outlets, the FBI also believes that Kaczynski attended an Earth First! gathering just one month before murdering Mosser.
Ted Kaczynski did little more than follow what Earth First! openly advocates. The September 1989 Journal included an article instructing:
While Eco defenders are quick to point out that life is sacred and is not a target of Eco-Defense, many doubt that multinational takeover artists who liquidate old growth forests to pay off junk bonds qualify as Life-forms. Such Robotoids, they aver, should be classed with damns, dozers and drillers. A "Hit List" is available upon discreet inquiry.
For Earth First!, this kind of advice is (sadly) not a one-time thing. A cartoon in the 20th Anniversary issue of the Journal noted: "Trees are for hanging. Kill a developer." And the Unabomber could easily have read Dave Foreman's words: "The blood of timber executives is my natural drink, and the wail of dying forest supervisors is music to my ears."
