FIRES IN THE NIGHT

A searching history of a group of saboteurs whom the FBI once deemed “the country’s foremost domestic terrorism threat.”

Call it premature apocalypticism, if you like: In the 1990s, a group calling itself the Earth Liberation Front, with little apparent hierarchy or leadership, began to set fires to things like ski resorts and auto dealerships, implicating these businesses and their consumers in climate change, dying forests, and other signs of environmental woe. The group, writes journalist Wolfe, was born in a “a bustling salmagundi of hardcore activists, mutinous students, moth-eaten hippies, utopian techno-futurists, guerrilla gardeners…vagabonds, and almost every stripe and shade of political leftist.” Its ideology, such as it was, reflected that topsy-turvy milieu—save for one point, which was the notion that anyone who polluted Earth should be, to quote one missive, visited by “the most destructive eco-sabotage and criminal damage ever seen.” ELF wasn’t as choosy as it might have been in targeting victims; it burned down, for instance, a Forest Service station, which drew down the FBI and proved, as Wolfe writes, to be “the costliest attack on federal property in the United States since the militia bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building the year before.” Still, it took the FBI years to track down the perpetrators, who in the meantime had evolved into making explosive and incendiary devices that would make a Weatherman envious. “Catching members of the ELF was like trying to grab smoke,” writes the author, channeling a frustrated agent. But in the end, even disciplined terrorists get sloppy, and ELF’s undisciplined excesses—bouncing checks, shoplifting, using needle drugs—began to turn the public mood against them. It was a recipe for dissolution helped along by informants, plea deals, and imprisonment, even as, Wolfe notes ironically, the planet was busily burning, with “more orange skies in the offing.”

A solid work of investigative journalism that shows how quixotic intentions can quickly become evil.