The philosophy of eco-terrorism.

From 1996 to 2001 a shadowy group of eco-terrorists variously calling itself the Earth Liberation Front or the Animal Liberation Front attacked targets in the western United States, destroying properties that the group claimed threatened the environment. The attacks culminated with a spectacular and devastating blaze, set by arsonists, at a Vail, Colorado, ski resort. After a lengthy federal investigation, the perpetrators were apprehended and tried for their crimes, giving occasion for journalist Matt Rasmussen to investigate the motivations of the ELF terrorists. His lengthy and somewhat sympathetic report appears in the January/February issue of Orion Magazine, a left-leaning environmentalist journal.

One of the revelations to come out of Rasmussen's report is that some of the intellectual lineage of the eco-terror movement can be traced back to radical academic John Zerzan, a one-time confidant of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. According to Rasmussen, "In the '60s [Zerzan] was a Marxist and a Maoist and a Vietnam protester.... He now believes that Paleolithic humans and the few remaining primitive cultures provide the best models for how humans should subsist"

The eco-terrorists believed that vision could and should be brought to reality by violently attacking the properties of those they saw as enemies. One of the ringleaders of the attacks was Bill Rodgers, who committed suicide after being arrested for his role in the crimes. "Certain human cultures have been waging war against the Earth for millennia," Rodgers said in a letter he wrote before suffocating himself with a plastic bag. "I chose to fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, saguaros, cliff rose and all things wild. I am just the most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have made a jail break--I am returning home, to the Earth, to the place of my origins."

Rasmussen concludes by wondering if the ELF radicals will someday be remembered as symbols of "courage and righteousness." But that is incomprehensible since they seek nothing less than the destruction of civilization, a la Zerzan. To some that may sound like a lofty ideal, but it means nothing less than the end of modern farming, the end of modern sanitation, the end of modern power generation, the end of modern transport--and the deaths of billions of people.