Green Scared?

For years, the FBI targeted ecological activists as their #1 priority. This is one of the chief reasons environmental devastation has continued unchecked.

At the end of 2005, the FBI opened a new phase of its assault on earth and animal liberation movements—known as the Green Scare—with the arrests and indictments of a large number of activists. This offensive, which they dubbed Operation Backfire, was intended to obtain convictions for many of the unsolved Earth Liberation Front arsons of the preceding ten years—but more so, to have a chilling effect on all ecological direct action.

In this analysis, originally published in Rolling Thunder in 2008, we review everything we can learn from the Operation Backfire cases, with the intention of passing on the lessons for the next generation of environmental activists.