Cockburn, Alexander
The Nation, v262, n18, p9(2)
May 6, 1996
ABSTRACT: 'ABC World News Tonight' reported that alleged Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski was associated with violent environmental group Earth First! The footage shown with the news story did not mention that group members, who appeared to be violent, were actually trying to prevent injury to a biologist.
Within forty-eight hours of Theodore Kaczynski's arrest in his Montana cabin near Lincoln, ABC World News Tonight ran a lead story on Kaczynski's "connection to a radical environmental group." So said Peter Jennings's introduction. Then Brian Ross, described by Jennings as "our chief investigative reporter," tied the knot: "ABC News has learned that Kaczynski's name appeared in F.B.I. files in November of 1994, in connection with an F.B.I. investigation of a radical environmental group called Earth First!, which is active in Montana. Over the years, Earth First! has been best known as a violent group, spiking trees and blowing up logging equipment."
Behind Ross's voiceover, the images showed a struggle between environmental demonstrators and loggers, inferentially the Earth First! commandos attacking a peaceable troupe of tree fellers out for a walk with their chain saws. The footage was actually eight years old and featured a far more typical scene, namely the loggers dragging a biologist called Peter Galvin along by his hair. The Earth First!ers had intervened in an effort to save Galvin from serious injury.
This informative background was unstated. His voice portentous with investigative triumph, Ross conveyed the news that "authorities" believed that Kaczynski had been at a November 1994 meeting at the University of Montana at Missoula, "attended by top Earth First! members." The conclave had supposedly been plotting strategy against "multinationals." One month later, Ross said, the Unabomber sent the package that killed Thomas Mosser, formerly an executive with Burson-Marsteller, "which does work for large multinational companies."
Ross's ABC segment next introduced Barry Clausen, identified as "a private investigator who infiltrated Earth First! for the timber industry." According to Ross's summary of Clausen, "the bomb last year that killed (Gil Murray) the head of the California Forestry Association clearly can be traced back to a hit list published in one radical environmental journal." The F.B.I., Ross concluded, is very interested in the Earth First! connection.
Two days later, on This Week With David Brinkley, Ross had burnished his conspiracy model. By now he was charging that Burson-Marsteller had been a specific topic of discussion at the 1994 Missoula meeting. Ross left the heavy implication that Mosser's death a month later had been plotted at the session: "Much as Timothy McVeigh may have been inspired and inflamed by the militia, it's possible, perhaps, that Kaczynski was inspired and guided by the radical environmental groups."
Thus it was that within four days of Kaczynski's arrest, Earth First! was being accused by a TV network of fomenting murder.
The four-day November 1994 gathering in Missoula, invoked by Ross and Clausen as prelude to murder, was an open conference of some 500 people including the late Oklahoma Representative Mike Synar. There were people from the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and timber giants such as Weyerhaeuser and Louisiana Pacific. Gathered under the title "The Second International Temperate Forest Conference," the hundred or so sessions dealt with topics like "consumption in the 1990s," "industrial versus ecological forestry" and "moving the multinationals from the forest to the farm." According to participants and a detailed program for the events that we've studied, there was no session on Burson-Marsteller or any other P.R. firm.
Clausen, a self-confessed drug-runner, first showed up in Montana in the late 1980s, trying to infiltrate the Alliance for the Wild Rockies on behalf of the timber industry. After several failed attempts he headed to Washington State to do more "infiltrating," which actually meant showing up at Earth First! meetings, which were well-advertised and generally festive events. At the end of these inspections, Clausen produced an unintentionally comic narrative of his adventures, which contained no revelations of any sort.
In the wake of Ross's first ABC segment, there were endless stories that a list of Missoula conferees, now supposedly in the hands of the F.B.I., included the name "T. Casinski." This was being put about by Clausen, who refused to show reporters the document in question. Tom Fullum and Jake Kreilick, who organized the conference, tell us they've been over the attendance rosters several times and have found no name even remotely resembling Kaczynski or Casinski.
One of the most sensational elements of Ross's story, seized upon by The New York Times's Neil MacFarquhar, was of the "hit list" put out by what Ross described as another "radical environmental journal," a phrase on the Earth First! Journal's masthead. "An Eco-Fuckers Hit List" of a hundred trade associations was indeed published, but in 1992 in the anarchist zine Live Wild or Die. The list's purpose was scarcely homicidal encouragement. It advocated boycotts of Weyerhaeuser products, parodies of Exxon ads and so forth. The organizations on it were clearly taken from a list of co-sponsors of a Wise Use conference held in Reno in 1989.
Ron Arnold's Revenge
Just as Clausen saw Kaczynski's arrest as a marvelous opportunity to stir the pot, publicize himself and settle scores with Earth First!, so too did his comrade in arms Ron Arnold, Saint-Just of the Wise Use movement. Arnold had been hungering for revenge ever since the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995, in whose wake environmental groups and their publicists, such as David Fenton and David Helvarg, had rushed forth with Clausen-type headline-grabbers about the ties between the suspected bombers, the militias and the Wise Use movement. The supposed links between Wise Use and McVeigh were easily as specious as those suggested by Clausen and Ross between Kaczynski and Earth First! On April 10, a column by Linda Chavez appeared in USA Today, ramming home the message that "the Unabomber may well have taken his inspiration from the writings of Earth First!'s radical fringe.... the group was 'willing to protect (the) wilderness by any means necessary,' including illegal and potentially violent tactics."
Next up as a Wise Use dumpster was Cal Thomas. In his syndicated column, showing up in West Coast newspapers on April 11, the former publicist for Jerry Falwell retailed some vintage Arnold reflections: "Where are the warnings about Earth-Firsters who see the planet as something sacred and those they claim violate it as infidels worthy of death?" Thomas recycled all the claptrap about a supposed Earth First! hit list and deplored the fact that whereas after the Oklahoma bombing, Clinton and Gore had denounced right-wing talk-radio hosts like G. Gordon Liddy and Rush Limbaugh for "nurturing" McVeigh and friends, the Unabomber was not being adequately pinned on liberalism, Harvard and Berkeley.
Even more insidious and disingenuous than the ABC News pieces was a report on NPR's All Things Considered for April 10. Howard Berkes faithfully recycled Clausen's mythmaking, with some genteel liberal eco-baiting about the "angry, sometimes violent, language" of the greens that perhaps could have set the Unabomber off. It remained for an incoherent Joe Klein in News-week to miss the entire affray, alleging that the right hadn't made the Unabomber/left connection.
The Blood Lust of Dave Foreman
One of Linda Chavez's more chilling quotations from the Earth First! archive given her by the Wise Use crowd was this: "The blood of timber executives is my natural drink, and the wail of dying forest supervisors is music to my ears." She was accurately quoting Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, who left the organization in 1990 when he scented creeping humanism and felt it was retreating from the biocentric protocols of his own vision of Wild Nature.
In fairness to Foreman, the quote about the dying supervisors and the bleeding timber execs is taken from a burlesque he used to give on road shows. But there are plenty of quotes by Foreman just as unappetizing and said in all seriousness, such as: "We aren't an environmental group. Environmental groups worry about environmental health hazards to human beings, they worry about clean air and water for the benefit of people and ask us why we're so wrapped up in something as irrelevant and tangential and elitist as wilderness."
Foreman made this point in a speech in 1987. At around the same time in Earth First! Journal he was issuing his notorious hope that famine would wipe out what he regarded as surplus humans in Ethiopia.
It's a sad irony that today's Earth First! should have to carry the can for Foreman's disgusting views. Foreman was always a Barry Goldwater environmentalist and, like the Unabomber, hated the left. His Malthusianism is under the same big tent as the Nazi philosophy of nature.
Foreman and the Unabomber eschew politics. Both have nourished the infantile romanticism of lone-wolf intervention, whether by bomb or tree spike. There's a chasm between the "nightwork" of industrial sabotage advocated by Foreman in the 1980s until he was busted in Arizona by the F.B.I., and the collective, public acts of nonviolent civil disobedience used by today's Earth First!ers in their brave struggles in Oregon, Idaho and Alabama (to take three particular zones of their current activities). Violence is visited on them.
Meanwhile, Foreman has cashed in, sitting on the board of the Sierra Club, denouncing the club's reform faction. Today, Foreman says, "I get quite frustrated with true believers who hold on to some idealistic notion of No Compromise." This from the man who bankrolled his decade with Earth First! on the sale of T-shirts and bumper stickers bearing the slogan, "No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth."
The F.B.I. in Missoula
What no one asked was why the F.B.I. was compiling lists of environmentalists attending public meetings at the University of Montana. The bureau has an environmental crimes task force. This force doesn't spend its time investigating timber theft by Weyerhaeuser, as recently reported by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and published by the Los Angeles Times for March 25. Nor does it strike when international mining companies flush cyanide into the salmon streams of the West. The F.B.I. did not investigate the 1993 murder in New Mexico of the Navajo environmentalist Leroy Jackson. It hasn't followed up on other such cases. What the bureau's enviro squad does get up to is typified by its efforts to harass and smear environmentalists in Missoula over most of the past decade.
After incidents of tree spiking in the Clearwater National Forest just west of Missoula, the G-men hauled in Professor Ron Erickson of the University of Montana's environmental studies program, interrogated him and six of his students, took hair samples, made them write "stumps suck" a hundred times, leaked to the press the fact that they were suspects, damaged their careers and created enough hubbub to prompt the Montana state legislature to try to cut a million dollars out of the program's budget.
The F.B.I. maintained a presence in Missoula during the Cove-Mallard actions by Earth First! from 1993 through 1995. Among the casualties of their surveillance were Karyn and Par Sandstrom. Both were grad students at the University of Montana. An F.B.I. man snooping through a window saw Forest Service maps tacked to a wall inside their house. The bureau seized on the maps as an excuse to bust in and interrogate the couple. The maps were being used by Par, a wildlife biologist.
The tree spiking case was finally resolved when a relative turned in the two men responsible. Neither had anything to do with Ron Erickson or indeed with the university. Recently ABC News called Erickson--not to get his account of F.B.I. harassment but to inquire whether Theodore Kaczynski had been one of his students.
Copyright © 1996 The Nation Company Inc.