Standing up to Corporate Greed: The Earth Liberation Front as Domestic Terrorist Target Number One Anthony J. Nocella, II and Matthew J. Walton
Investigating and preventing animal rights extremism and eco-terrorism is one of the FBI’s highest domestic terrorism priorities. - John E. Lewis, Deputy Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division Federal Bureau of Investigation1 We have to show the enemy that we are serious about defending what is scared. - Earth Liberation Front, Beltane 1997 The current global political climate is steeped in fear of, and rhetoric about, political violence and terrorism. Scholars and practitioners must go beyond this fear and rhetoric, and instead seek a more nuanced understanding of political groups that utilize property destruction, kidnapping, assassination, armed struggle and other militant actions for political or ideological ends. Such understanding is important in order to slow down and reverse the current trend among legislative and policy-making bodies and leaders around the world, who increasingly marginalize, demonize and exclude such groups from arenas of debate, allegedly in the name of counter-terrorism. This paper will examine the actions and philosophy of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), particularly in relation to global capitalism. We seek to explain why the ELF does what it does, and why its actions have situated it atop the FBI Domestic Terrorist list, despite the fact that ELF guidelines specifically prohibit harming any human or nonhuman animals.
Our argument is that ELF actions contain a compelling critique of
capitalism, which is much more of a threat to “American values� and to the consumerdriven U.S. way of life in general, than other potential threats that seek to harm humans.
1
Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works, May 18th, 2005.
0