Fires In The Night by Matthew Wolfe is a non-fiction book that reads like Jim Thompson novel, if Thompson had lived to see the rise of radical environmentalism in the 1970s, 1980s and especially the 90s. The heroes are the ones breaking the law, some of whom who are flawed, while the law enforcement task force, especially of course the FBI, end up sounding like befuddled idiots. Unlike The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey—which first gave voice to people frustrated with milquetoast environmental groups like the Sierra Club—Fires In The Night isn’t an irreverent comedy. There is plenty of irreverence to authority, but this story is a tragedy.
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) took seed in the United States as an idea more than anything—frustration with the lack of effectiveness of mainstream environmental organizations had already motivated groups like Greenpeace to use nonviolent interventions to save animals and land. And when Greenpeace eventually went the way of the Sierra Club in preferring to use lawyers in Washington, more “radical” groups emerged, like Earth First! and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which had early successes, and encouraged the idea of “monkey-wrenching”—of property damage as a way to discourage industry, though that’s always been around, going at least back to the Luddites in England.
Earth First! upped the ante when there was a plan to add land on the Joshua Tree National Monument for protection. The Sierra Club proposed x amount of acres. Earth First! raised a ruckus and proposed at least double that amount. The end compromise was about halfway between the two—way more than the Sierra Club thought was possible by playing nice. Earth First! mostly faded away after some of its members were arrested, pre-ELF, though the Earth First! Journal stayed in print, and is now online.
The Sea Shepherds had more freedom since they operated ships in international waters. By ramming whaling ships and sinking them in-harbor in Iceland (illegal and risky) the Sea Shepherds effectively ended all whaling in the Atlantic. Full disclosure: I volunteered for them one season (winter of 1997) to help save baby seals in Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada, though nothing happened, mostly due to weather. And that “action” was part of a shift in tactics to documentaries featuring film stars. The Sea Shepherds are still operating, though as far I can tell they mostly stay with documentation and messaging to raise awareness.
Like Earth First!, ELF was based on a decentralized form of organization, people working in small groups, independently of, and interchanging with each other. Anyone could claim to be part of ELF in the pursuit of sabotaging industry targets. ELF raised the stakes: instead of just monkey-wrenching—spiking trees, disabling bulldozers—ELF used arson as its main weapon. Which did bring attention to the cause (or at least the effects) and caught the eye of the feds. This is 30 years ago now, but some will probably remember the burning of a new ski lodge near Vail, Colorado, which captured national headlines. As documented in Fires In The Night, this was the point where the feds really ramped up their hunt.
There are two good somewhat recent texts for comparison with the events of Fires In The Night. The first is the bestselling novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory. Powers’ novel is set around the same time, early- to late-1990s, and place, Oregon, with an amazingly similar cast of characters. And though it’s fiction, the power of a novel is to spend time with all of the characters to see how and why they came to a radical defense of the Earth. Powers is sympathetic, but also shows the disagreements people in the environmental movements had with each other about tactics and philosophies.
The second helpful text is a podcast series by independent journalist Leah Sottile called Burn Wild, which follows some of the same people featured in Fires In The Night who were involved with the early ELF action against the Cavel West wild horse abattoir in Redmond, Oregon. Sottile also did the great podcast Bundyville, about the fundamentalist Mormon occupiers of the BLM office in Burns, Oregon (two hours away from Redmond). That podcast offers a great contrast of how the federal government treated two different “radical” groups breaking the law, each with different politics: all the people involved in the BLM occupation got a jury trial and were found not guilty.
The Cavel West action—again, covered in Fires In The Night—was one of the earliest actions by the ELF group centered mostly out of Eugene, Oregon. And maybe the most successful, in the sense that the public had sympathy with ELF at that point. That is, they raised awareness that the plant was “processing” captured wild horses—sold off by the BLM, which also financed their capture—and selling the meat for profit.
The contrast between the Burn Wild podcast and Fires In The Night is also interesting because one of the main participants in the burning of the Cavel West, Joseph Dibee, comes off as fairly sympathetic in his interviews in the podcast, whereas in Fires of the Night, through more extensive interviews with other people involved (which is the strength of a book like this over a podcast) Dibee isn’t not such a nice, or rational, guy, at some points. That’s my opinion based on both texts.
All of the ELF members, or “elves, but especially the men, have their flaws. A guy who everyone only knew as Avalon, later learned to be William Rodgers, a teacher, a Prescott College at one point, was the person almost single-handedly responsible for pulling off the Vail ski resort arson. But he seems to also have used his power and influence to sleep with, or at least make passes at (“grope” according to a 14-year-old girl) younger female environmental activists, according to two people in the book. Jacob Ferguson, one of the original members of the loose-knit Eugene ELF “chapter,” at first is one of the strongest and smartest of the members, but drug addiction eventually did him in.
The exception might be one of the first core members, Kevin Tubbs, who was disciplined, smart and principled, and who nevertheless ended up betrayed by a snitch. It should be noted though that about half the people who ended up being arrested were women—women almost always took part in the actions described in Fires In The Night. Also, the one law enforcement person on the federal task force who’s seen as competent is the Forest Service LEO, Carla Jones, the one who had both the most important piece of evidence from the beginning and tracked down the real names of some of the suspects. She’s the only woman involved on the law side, and wasn’t taken seriously by the men, even when they used her ideas.
What comes across in the big picture after reading Fires In The Night is that the ELF were defeated by a lack of structure: anyone could plan and execute an “action,” so some of the not-so-careful-and competent members did. They were also defeated by messaging—because they remained anonymous, they were dependent on (badly-written) communiqués sent to a (somewhat) neutral third party, who passed them on to mainstream media, who ignored the messaging—that is, the reasons ELF gave for their actions. The corporate and industry opposition meanwhile had the time and money to do interviews and place opinion/propaganda pieces in all the major newspapers, leading eventually and especially after 9/11, to the term “ecoterrorism” being the term most would associate with ELF.
Wolfe’s style is fast-paced and engaging, though credit must be given to the people he interviews—Fires In The Night reads like an oral history except that Wolfe takes what people say in interviews and changes it to third person rather than engage with lengthy quotes. I’m not complaining, just noting that sometimes the style—humor, jokes and snide comments especially—which appear in the narrative seem to belong to the interviewees, to the point where the third-person description, ostensibly Wolfe’s own words, sometimes changes style slightly. An early example in the book “about” Ferguson:
Ferguson had found that activism gave him purpose... he discovered that he had a particular flair for monkey-wrenching, which allowed him to employ a set of street smarts he’d inherited from his criminal father. If protesters, for example, needed to “borrow” a car, Ferguson was a whiz at hot-wiring. And, while he wasn’t a big reader of theory, Ferguson had always felt an instinctual kinship to anarchism, before he’d even heard the word. He blamed the cops for the fact that his father—whose own hatred for authority had started rubbing off on Ferguson in the crib—had spent most of Jacob's adolescence in prison, and he blamed rich people for making the rules the cops had to follow. Vandalism seemed, for Ferguson, both a necessary tactic of class war and, on a more personal level, a balm—a way of feeling not quite so small and powerless. But Ferguson yearned to go big. Even as he camped out during Warner Creek (and sit-in protest), he’d sometimes find himself lying awake at night, riven with anxiety, worried that he just wasn’t doing enough.
I don’t think Ferguson ever used words like “balm” or “riven” or “instinctual kinship” or “yearned,” though this paragraph does sound like Ferguson probably sounded: I’d guess that Ferguson said at some point, “I wanted to go big.” Wolfe seems to have changed “wanted” to yearned. Can I prove this? No, but this paragraph is an good example of the sometimes-mix of common-sounding language with odd melodramatic words.
I have a few quibbles with some minor details. Wolfe at one point writes that Portland is 100 miles south of Eugene (it’s north) which I think is a typo, but which he or his editors should’ve caught. Wolfe also twice mentions “tree-spiking”—in which people nail nails into trees to protect them—as ruining the chainsaws of loggers. Which, if he’d read some of the earlier Earth First!-era books he mentions, like A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching, he’d know that the “spikes” (nails) were to damage the saws at the lumber mills (and that activists were/are then supposed to warn authorities about the spiking before, so the trees don’t even get cut). Also, later Wolfe mentions a detail about the timeline of 9/11, that President Bush was evacuated after the first plane crash, when Bush did nothing after being informed of the first crash, and kept reading a book to kids. Small details like this make me wonder if there are other small things that aren’t correct, though none of these details I mention change the overall story.
The one thing that seems like a big mistake is when Wolfe gives us some information about one of the people who escaped arrest and was never found. I’m not going to repeat the info nor the person’s name —read the book—and maybe law enforcement already knew about that info (Wolfe doesn’t say) but it just seems to go beyond journalism into doing the job of, or for, law-enforcement. I think he did it because it makes for another juicy bit of an already juicy story. But I wish he hadn’t.
As for whether ELF accomplished anything, most if not all of the interviewed members—after having gone to prison—seem to think no. For example, Stan Meyerhoff, an early younger recruit, in this third-person-ized reminiscence:
When he first got involved, he really felt like they were going to do something important. They had all this momentum—success after success after success. But then, for Myerhoff, the ELF started turning into something malicious, destruction for its own sake. He began to feel less like a warrior and more like a hit man. And then, all at once, everything just fell apart. Looking back, Meyerhoff hadn’t realized how big the world was, had been naive about the scales of money that industry was operating on, the billions industry had to fight back. And all that time, risking jail, risking death... And for what? Except for the horse abattoir at Cavel West, everything the ELF had burned down had been rebuilt. Even expansion of the Vail lodge went ahead—though so did a plan to invigorate the local lynx population, several hundred of which had been successfully reintroduced.
Would the lynx have been reintroduced without the arson? I think not, but can’t prove it. Wolfe could’ve interviewed people from that area who were involved, to see what they thought, but I admit that would have slowed down the pacing.
Wolfe mentions in passing that around the time that the Eugene core of ELF were getting arrested—circa 2005—there were “actions” taking place in other parts of the country. And, during the Covid lockdown years, someone was burning slaughterhouses around the American West, to the point where some were speculating that there wouldn’t be any place to process meat anymore. Whether those were ELF-identified/inspired actions, or Bill Gates trying to create a market for his lab-grown meat burgers I don’t know. Currently, the form of monkey-wrenching/sabotage called “DeFlocking” is happening nationwide: people cutting down or otherwise vandalizing the Flock cameras that have popped up nationwide, supposedly to capture traffic violations, but which also track our vehicles, phones, and us, everywhere, without our consent.
The Machine rolls on. But resistance continues. The rich people in power want us to think of that resistance as terrorism. Whoever controls the messaging controls what leaders will allow. And messaging has been one effective form of effecting change in the last 15 to 20 years, if not always. At least in the environmental movement that messaging has been through film. Two recent-ish movies about radical environmental activists have been, Woman At War and How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Both great movies, but barely cracked distribution in the United States.
Because I’m a writer and a reader, and though I loved Power’s The Overstory, I go back to Edward Abbey, whose The Monkey Wrench Gang was an inspiration for all levels of the environmental movement. Still is. I guarantee that everyone involved with Earth First!, the Sea Shepherds and ELF, as well as the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service, and even a lot of Forest Service employees, have read that book, about a small group of people who decide to fight back against developers ruining the American Southwest, and the federal agencies who are complicit. The novel captures the joy of fighting back Robin Hood-style against corrupt authority (and authority is always corrupt), and even though those characters too are arrested in the end (most of them—Hayduke Lives!) there’s still a feeling of satisfaction. Humor’s powerful, when it’s true. Because it’s true. Abbey channeled the power of his anger into the power of humor to get people on the side of protecting the Earth—and there’s nothing the bad guys hate more than being mocked.