Brooke Gladstone: This Is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone.

In the US, Vilification of Climate Activism stretches back nearly three decades in the '90s, in the early aughts, radical climate activists, and one group, in particular, was all over the news and the coverage took no prisoners

News clip: Multi-million dollar dream homes up in flames. The FBI is investigating the suspicious fires as an act of domestic environmental terrorism of the Earth Liberation Front or ELF is taking credit for the fires.

News clip: The trial continues in the case of a suspected Earth Liberation Front member accused of conspiring to destroy government property, including the Nimbus Dam in Sacramento County.

Brooke Gladstone: At the time, a smaller underground faction of the group dubbed The Family by the FBI was deemed one of the largest domestic care threats in the country. It targeted often through arson, businesses, and government facilities. It saw as harming the environment. According to the FBI, from 1995 to 2001, the group was responsible for around $45 million in damages in Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, California, and Colorado. The group was so underground that until their arrests, many of them didn't even know each other's real names.

When they discovered, the government was on their tail, a few of them fled the country. By the late 2000s, the so-called Family largely faded from the public eye, though not from the sites of the FBI and in 2018.

News clip: A man suspected of being an eco-terrorist in Oregon and Washington on the run for more than a decade, is now behind bars in Portland.

News clip: He's 50-year-old Joseph Dibee of Seattle, and he was found in Cuba and brought back to Oregon yesterday. Let's switch to--

Brooke Gladstone: Leah Sottile Sottile has long reported on extremism and is the host of the BBC Podcast Burn Wild. The podcast looks deep into these once-notorious activists and the obvious moral questions.

Leah Sottile: When the planet is burning, what are you supposed to do? Play by the rules or take direct action? If you take action, how far is too far to go?

Brooke Gladstone: Burn Wild begins by focusing on a group called the Earth Liberation Front, and then it zooms in further to an underground part of the group called The Family, which I think was a term designated by the FBI.

Leah Sottile: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: They allegedly committed something like 25 arsons between 1996 to 2001. Lots of damage, but unlike other most wanted terrorists, no one was actually hurt during these attacks, at least not physically. This was the era of the Oklahoma City bombing. Just before 9/11. With that context in mind, how did these arsons become such a priority for the FBI?

Leah Sottile: I think it's important to talk about what terrorism means. It's typically defined as ideologically motivated violence. It was right in this time, right before 9/11, when elected officials were starting to make a case that environmentalism was in essence an ideology. These criminal acts were ascribed to environmental groups. The most famous one of the Earth Liberation Front in America was the torching of the Vail Ski Resort in Colorado. When that group wrote, ELF or sent out a communique saying these arsons were the work of our group, legislators latched onto that and said, "Well, that's an ideology."

Brooke Gladstone: It was national news, and they were described as eco-terrorists in the coverage, but they weren't actually like the Manson family. I think the effort was to equate them with the Mansons, maybe by calling them The Family.

Leah Sottile: Absolutely. The Earth Liberation Front was super loosely affiliated. I can't even tell you how many people were in it. When the FBI designated this group, The Family that ranged from 12 to 20 people. What the Earth Liberation Front was doing was going after industries like logging, oil, things like the Vail Ski Resort that were clear-cutting massive areas of endangered species habitat to build commercial operations.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2006, indictments were issued for 11 members of the group that were still in the country. The ones tried at the time, faced long prison terms. The remaining two, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee and Josephine Sunshine Overaker, both fled. Dibee was captured in 2018. He's a major character in your podcast, and he said that they were made out to be a lot scarier than they were because they had an ethos of never harming a living creature.

Leah Sottile: So that is not quite squaring up in my mind with this idea of ideologically motivated violence. During the podcast, I asked the main FBI agent who is still looking for Overaker, so violence in your mind, in the eyes of the government is also burning down a building. He said, "Yes, absolutely. That arson is violence."

Brooke Gladstone: Dibee was an active environmentalist and it was an episode of clear-cutting when he was a kid that actually drew him into this fight.

Leah Sottile: Yes, a story that was kind of common. Some people forget that in the West, nature is very close by and very important to a lot of people. He was someone who grew up in Seattle in a rather privileged family. He would go hiking on the weekends and he had this specific place that was a real refuge for him.

Dibee: By happenstance, I was plowing through this horrible clear-cut and somehow they'd forgotten a little piece of it to cut. It had some second growth in it, it had some old growth in it. It had a little creek that ran through it, and it was really beautiful. If you walk quietly, like deer would jump out from behind the trees. It was this sort of refuge I went to. After a while, I got there and I was looking forward to stomping around the meadow and somehow they remembered that they'd forgotten to cut it. I think that stirred me pretty deeply.

Brooke Gladstone: Two of the things he did involved trying to put an end to misuse even the torture of animals.

Leah Sottile: Dibee specifically was very fired up over a horse meat processing plant that was in Eastern Oregon.

Brooke Gladstone: They would take wild horses, pen them up, turn them into food, and send the meat abroad.

Leah Sottile: At the point when Dibee took his actions on that facility, horse meat processing was something that Americans had very much said, "We do not want to do this." This place was one of the very last places in America that was operating that way. When Joe Dibee did commit an act of arson, essentially destroying that business, he really was taking one of the last horse meat processing plants to the ground.

Brooke Gladstone: It was a pretty torturous place from the descriptions that I've heard.

Leah Sottile: Absolutely. I mean, there were people who would talk about the noise that it made when those horses were killed. There were stories that I heard anecdotally that there would be blood outside of the facility in the streets. Even people that lived in that city did not like it.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the questions that you and your producer Georgia Catt struggled to break down in Burn Wild was at what moment does disruptive activism cross into terrorism? You came to the conclusion that in fact, this is less a moral question than a political one.

Leah Sottile: The Earth Liberation Front always operated from this standpoint that they had to hit the bottom line of corporations and extractive industries in order to make change. The government is the one who decides who is a terrorist. One thing that was really revealing to us was when we came to understand this piece of legislation that was called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which was essentially purchased by powerful corporate lobbyists in the biomedical research industry. Those are the people who want to test on animals, and that act essentially expanded the definition of what a terrorist was.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about the charge of terrorism because just as law enforcement was beginning to investigate some of these arsons, 9/11 happened. You observed that as a result, the federal departments that handled terrorism were given a lot more money and support to go after anything that was considered to be a domestic threat. Is this part of what impelled the idea that these charges against the arsonists should be enhanced, so to speak, to terrorism?

Leah Sottile: Originally, some of the people that were being charged in connection with events that the Earth Liberation Fronts touched off, they weren't being called terrorists. But I think this moment around 9/11 is so interesting for our working definition of terrorism because initially, when those planes crashed into the Twin Towers, there was a senator from Alaska who said, "I can't say it's not environmental activists that did this." There was a real fear. This is often called the Green Scare, that these environmentalists were stalking the woods.

They were in the shadows ready to just go off on the system and entire society. These wheels that were already turning, that were in motion sped up when 9/11 happened. You're right, the government had a lot more money and a lot more leeway to start charging people as terrorists.

Brooke Gladstone: Between 1995 and 2001, prosecutors say that the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front caused more than $45 million in fire damage to businesses and government buildings. None of them physically hurt anybody, but in some cases, it hurts small towns and local residents. Some of the people you spoke to believed that those acts should be classified as terrorism.

Speaker 21: There was a huge backlash and discussed about really, why would you do this to people here who are just trying to make a living.

Leah Sottile: Do you think that the Earth Liberation Front were terrorists?

News clip: Yes, I do. They were burning down other people's property. I don't care if you--

Brooke Gladstone: They said they didn't want to harm people, but they still did.

Leah Sottile: It was very interesting to talk to all of them and say, but you had to have known that you were harming someone, that there would be people, business owners, local people who would be scared. I think two a tea, each of them had some real conflicted feelings about that knowing that their actions ultimately didn't upend the system the way that they wanted to, but that they lived with this label that continues to affect the environmental movement today.

Brooke Gladstone: Joe Dibee himself has said how sorry he is for the people who faced harm from the damage he caused, and in his statements during his sentencing hearing even started to cry.

Leah Sottile: In every interview I did with Joe, hours and hours and hours, almost days of interviews with him, he said, "I'm not sure that I would've done this again." He saw very personal impacts in his life. His friends held a funeral for him because they thought he was dead. His father had dementia, and so by the time he came back, he didn't know who he was. Also, I think that what surprised every single person in this movement that I spoke to was that people really did buy what the government said about them being terrorists.

They didn't see that really everything that the Earth Liberation Front was saying in groups like Earth First was saying, these are all things that are coming to pass now with climate change.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2006, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was passed in the US. It was applied to environmental activism too. How has the 2006 Act been applied since then?

Leah Sottile: It's been applied really broadly. It's been applied, obviously, to people who do animal release, so animal rights protestors, but it's also been implied to people like Valve Turners. This has been a big thing in the environmental movement in the last few years with the Dakota Access Pipeline and these big Canadian tar sands pipelines going through the country. In some cases, people who did pretty minor acts, you know, cutting a pipeline, they ended up being sentenced with this animal enterprise terrorism enhancement and going to prison for a very long time.

In one case with a guy named Ken Ward, who used to be the head of Greenpeace and is now an environmental activist living in Oregon, he was a part of a group called the Valve Turners, who essentially fanned out across the country and made a concerted effort to turn off Canadian tar sands pipelines at the same time. Completely non-violent act. They turned the wheel, stuck some flowers in it, and waited for the police to arrive. Ken Ward, what he did was really interesting. He invoked something called the Necessity Defense.

He said, "Look at my resume. Look at my work. I have tried every single legal path available to try to change things and it hasn't worked so I had to break the law." That actually worked. The judge in court said, "You're right."

Brooke Gladstone: When Joseph Dibee was finally caught in 2018, he chose to plead guilty to the 1997 arson of Cavel West. That was the slaughterhouse in Central Oregon that butchered wild horses and sold them me to Europe. He also pleaded guilty to the 2001 arson of a Bureau of Land Management, Wild Horse Corral in Litchfield, California. The government asked for more than seven years of prison time, similar to the sentences given to other members of "The Family," but Dibee had already served a couple of years in custody, and he was ultimately sentenced just to time served. Judge Ann Aiken said this, which is read by an actor in your podcast.

Judge Ann Aiken: The work he's trying to do now to pay back to society, to work towards the common good has to be acknowledged. There can be no greater gift or rehabilitation than the giving of one's time and energy to the helping of others without expecting anything in return.

Brooke Gladstone: She is referring to the environmental work that Joe did while he was on the run, working with the Syrian government on renewable energy and with indigenous groups in Alaska.

Leah Sottile: I think what makes Joe so interesting is that he never stopped working in the environmental movement. When he was on the run, when he was in Syria, when he was in Russia, he was always working in some capacity on these issues. When he came back and he was eventually released at home detention, and even there, he was monkeying around, trying to figure out how to use kelp to capture CO2. When she sentenced him, she really was saying this is somebody who so believes in what he's doing and the world has changed.

It shouldn't invite people in the environmental movement to mimic Joe Dibee's actions. It was a nod, I think to the fact that maybe this idea of these people as terrorists is not quite right.

Brooke Gladstone: I was struck by the sobering conclusion in a New York Times magazine piece by Matthew Wolf. He noted that Dibee's two years in jail had overlapped with the summer of 2020 when "3,000 square miles of Oregon and Washington were burned by wildfires." The infernos consumed over 4,000 homes and other structures, including a cattle ranch, a gas station, a timber mill, precisely the environmental degradation that the Earth Liberation Front had targeted. Now though, there was no one to take credit, no one to hunt down, put behind bars. I mean I'm thinking similar things must have gone through your mind.

Leah Sottile: While Georgia and I were making this podcast, you know, I live in Oregon and she lives in London, and at one point, we were tracking the podcast and I said, "I have to stop because I might have to evacuate," because of wildfire that was coming close. I think that that's one thing that is often missed in this idea of the Earth Liberation Front, these shadowy balaclava-clad. People stalking the woods is that the issues that they were talking about are extremely mainstream now. Yes, I think that that New York Times magazine piece is right on the money.

It was very strange to be working on this show to be breathing in wildfire smoke and thinking, "Were they wrong in trying to get people's attention?" All of the people that we spoke to from the Earth Liberation Front started as somebody writing letters and waving signs in the street. Eventually, they just felt the issue was so pressing and dire that they had to do something extreme. That makes a lot more sense when you're breathing in wildfire smoke.

Brooke Gladstone: What's Joe doing now?

Leah Sottile: Joe is still trying to do his work with indigenous people on the Alaska coastline. He is continuing to run into hurdles because of the Earth Liberation Front case and because of this brand of terrorists. I spoke to him a few months ago and he said he was still having trouble taking plane rides up to Alaska. He would get his bags overturned that were filled with the things that he's using to measure CO2 in kelp. I think that it continues to haunt him.

One thing that I did ask Joe is if he has any interest in telling his story, so it might inspire or caution other people, and he said, "Absolutely not. I want to live a quiet life and I want to do my work on the environment because this is what I care about."

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you, Leah Sottile.

Leah Sottile: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Leah Sottile Sottile is the host of Burn Wild, which you can find on BBC Sounds. And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Leber Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Suzanne Gaber with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director, Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Adrian Lilly. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone.

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