As the impacts of climate change worsen globally environmental activists have found themselves increasingly targeted by repressive measures. A great deal of recent environmental activism in the U.S. focuses on resisting oil pipelines: activists have closed valves on pipelines, maintained encampments in frigid temperatures, and suspended themselves in tree-sits for months in order to protest existing pipelines and block new pipeline construction. For their efforts, many have been labeled “terrorists” by lawmakers, law enforcement, and private corporations.
In 2016, in response to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe launched the #NoDAPL campaign to stop the construction of a pipeline that would violate Indigenous land sovereignty and potentially contaminate the tribe’s drinking water. Now complete, the DAPL spans 1,172 miles across the Dakotas, Iowa, and Illinois, potentially posing a major threat to the Standing Rock Sioux’s drinking water. Thousands of Indigenous people and allies gathered at protest camps in North Dakota to block DAPL construction, where they were met with violence and surveillance—much of it focusing on Indigenous activists—at the hands of law enforcement and the private security firm TigerSwan, which DAPL owner Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) hired to suppress the protests. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force also monitored #NoDAPL participants, as first reported by the Guardian.
In 2017, ETP filed a lawsuit against Earth First!, Greenpeace, and the NGO BankTrack, accusing them of being “rogue eco-terrorist groups” by supporting #NoDAPL.
David Naguib Pellow, director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained in an email how the “eco-terrorist” label targets “ordinary citizens who seek to make peaceful nonviolent social change and to instill fear and paralysis in them so that powerful economic and political interests are protected.”
Additional anti-pipeline activists have also been singled out and branded as terrorists since #NoDAPL. In 2018, the ACLU obtained via FOIA request documents pertaining to pipeline protest repression in Montana in 2018. The documents revealed that the state’s U.S. Attorney’s Office hosted an “anti-terrorism training” in Montana that year, raising fears that Indigenous-led protests against the Keystone XL in Montana may be targeted in the same ways that #NoDAPL was. A Guardian report from this year reveals that Oregon and federal authorities may be monitoring protests against the proposed Jordan Cove Project, which includes a 232-mile natural gas pipeline and pipeline terminal in Coos County via a “domestic terrorism working group.”
In the Virginias, activists organizing against the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) have attempted to halt construction for around four years, using tactics including tree-sits. But in 2018, participating tree-sitters found themselves surveilled by the Virginia Fusion Center, an anti-terrorism unit that has coordinated with local sheriffs and EQM Midstream Partners, a major stakeholder in the MVP. In 2019, three MVP protesters using civil disobedience tactics have been charged with terrorism crimes.
Since late 2017, conservative state lawmakers around the country have taken up model legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that ostensibly protects “critical infrastructure”—in this case, pipelines—from direct action and civil disobedience. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law’s U.S. Protest Law Tracker, six states have passed new “critical infrastructure” legislation in the last three years.
But the trend towards singling out environmental protesters is not a new phenomenon. There is a history of repression against both eco-activists and animal rights activists, culminating in a period in the late 1990s and mid-’00s known as the Green Scare, when lawmakers introduced legislation to crack down on animal rights and environmental activists, and repeatedly invoked rhetoric about “terrorism” to describe environmentalists. Tactics from this era are apparent today as well.
“This particular moment is one where we’re seeing both continued repression and the amplification of repression through the use of surveillance technologies and infrastructures (such as the rise of fusion centers) that builds on state-based neutralization practices rampant during the Green Scare,” Pellow told me. “But we’re also seeing the tried and true, age-old methods of surveillance.”
Conservative legislators contend that eco-terrorism has existed for decades since some members of Greenpeace left that group in 1977 to organize on more radical terms. People affiliated with Earth First! were among the first to experience the crackdown on eco-terrorism. The FBI infiltrated and surveilled Earth First! in the 1980s using tactics such as spying and leading smear campaigns that some critics have called “classic COINTELPRO” (referring to the secretive and often illegal FBI program that was officially active between 1956 and 1971). Five Earth Firsters were charged and sentenced for crimes relating to vandalism in the late 1980s, with some sentenced to prison.
A vast array of environmental activists, including Earth Firsters, Greenpeace representatives, and Indigenous environmental activists, were also subjected to abuse by proponents of the “Wise Use” movement, a right-wing anti-environmental movement that advocates against environmentally-friendly policies by pushing for expanded private property rights. “Wise Use” has been heavily promoted by the corporate interest think-tank the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
David Helvarg, founder and director of the ocean activism organization Blue Frontier and author of The War Against the Greens: The “Wise-Use” Movement, the New Right, and the Browning of America, says that the wise use movement pioneered the use of astroturfing to create the appearance of popular dissent to environmental policies and activists. The wise use movement was obsessed with eco-terrorism and inspired a great deal of violence against eco-activists including alleged rape and assault, and even what some allege was the murder of an Indigenous activist, according to The War Against the Greens.
During George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” the crackdown on activists intensified. The USA PATRIOT ACT, signed into law following the attacks of September 11, 2001, vastly expanded the federal government’s power to surveil and imprison people considered to be suspected or accused of committing “domestic terrorism.” The law has primarily been used to restrict the freedoms of Muslims and U.S. prisoners from MENA countries, but it impacted environmental activists as well.
Daniel McGowan, a former member of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) who pleaded guilty to two acts of arson carried out in 2001, was sentenced in 2007 using the “terrorism enhancement” sentencing tool, which enables judges to increase prison sentences for already illegal activities. McGowan served some of his seven-year sentence in two ultra-restrictive federal facilities called “Communication Management Units,” created during the George W. Bush administration to incarcerate terrorists and other “high-risk inmates.”
Helvarg says that there is a flagrant “double standard” around the treatment of environmentalists versus far-right activists who commit acts of violence that actually harm other people. “The sort of activists on the margins, whether Earth First! or ELF, were perceived as a domestic terror threat whereas [right-wing] militias were not,” Helvarg told me.
In fact, members of the right-wing including activists, politicians, and law enforcement regularly assert that eco-activists are a major terrorist threat, sometimes arguing that eco-activists jeopardize public wellbeing more than militias and White nationalists.
The year after the PATRIOT ACT passed, James F. Jarboe, then-Domestic Terrorism Section Chief for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, testified before Congress that, “During the past several years, special interest extremism, as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), has emerged as a serious terrorist threat.” In a 2005 hearing on “eco-terrorism,” Republican senator from Oklahoma, Jim Inhofe, called ELF and ALF the “number one domestic terror concern over the likes of White supremacists, militias, and anti-abortion groups.”
Between 2001 and 2006, the FBI also spied on Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and anti-war activists in a manner that the Inspector General of the Justice Department later described as “unreasonable and inconsistent with FBI policy.” Authorities placed some of the investigated individuals on domestic terrorism watchlists for years.
ALEC was influential in anti-environmentalist legislation during this period as well. In 2004, ALEC drafted model legislation called the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act (AETA). Just two years later, President Bush signed an amendment to the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA) that replaced the AEPA with the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, expanding prohibited activities for animal rights activists. The broad nature of the law means that almost any activity could potentially be considered “terrorism” if it is done in the name of animal rights. The Act states that it is illegal to carry out, attempt to carry out, or conspire to carry out actions that “intentionally damages or causes the loss of any real or personal property (including animals or records) used by an animal enterprise,” or “intentionally places a person in reasonable fear of the death of, or serious bodily injury to that person, a member of the immediate family of that person, or a spouse or intimate partner of that person by a course of conduct involving threats, acts of vandalism, property damage, criminal trespass, harassment, or intimidation.” According to Pellow’s Total Liberation, both AEPA and AETA have been enforced against animal rights activists, including members of ALF who were prosecuted under AEPA in 1998.
Since coming to office, Trump has further emboldened right-wing policymakers and influencers to quash dissent of all kinds, invigorating their attacks on environmental activists. Calls to treat environmental defenders like terrorists enable more surveillance and violence, putting activists at risk while protecting those profiting from ecological destruction.