TESTIMONY OF RON ARNOLD

Before the U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee, Crime Subcommittee

ECOTERRORISM IN AMERICA

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Ron Arnold. I am testifying as the
executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a nonprofit citizen
organization based in Bellevue, Washington. The Center has approximately 10,000 members
nationwide, most of them in rural natural resource industries.

Mr. Chairman, the Center does not accept government grants and is in full compliance with
House Rule XI, clause 2(g).

Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you on behalf of our members for holding this hearing
today. It is long overdue. For the past five years our members have routinely contacted our
headquarters to report crimes committed against them of a type we have come to call
ecoterrorism, that is, a crime committed to save nature. These crimes generally take the form of
equipment vandalism, but may include package bombs, blockades using physical force to
obstruct workers from going where they have a right to go, and invasions of private or
government offices to commit the crime of civil disobedience. So you can see, Mr. Chairman,
the range of ecoterror crimes ranges from the most violent felonies of attempted murder to
misdemeanor offenses such as criminal trespass. But they are all crimes. I am not here to
discuss noncriminal actions that do not result in arrests and convictions.

My organization\’s membership is nationwide. There is no region of the United States where I
have not received complaints from members about being victimized by ecoterrorists. It is a
broad and pervasive crime that is seriously under-reported because the victims are terrorized and
fear reprisals, copycat crimes, or in the case of corporations, loss of customer confidence and
resulting drops in share prices.

I am the author of a book on the subject of this hearing, titled, EcoTerror. In this book I have
reported the tactics of organized vandalism called by environmentalists \”monkeywrenching,\”
which means sabotage against goods producers and their equipment in order to save nature.
Ecoterrorism has been studied by social scientists with illuminating results. In particular, the
tactics of the group known as Earth First! have been described in the Academy of Management
Journal in a study titled Acquired Organizational Legitimacy Through Illegitimate Actions. I
request that pages 699, 715, 716, and 717 of this study be made a part of the record. I
interviewed the lead author of this study to verify its contents. Kimberly Elsbach told me that
the data were gathered directly from Earth Firsters who allowed her to witness criminal acts on
condition that she destroy her notes as soon as her scholarship no longer needed them. One of
the most pertinent tactics she discovered was called \”decoupling,\” which is a set of techniques
denying the crime while deploring the conditions that caused the perpetrators to become so
frustrated they committed the crime. Thus decoupling throws blame for the crime on the victim
while it denies guilt. However, law enforcement officers have concluded that in fact Earth
Firsters were the perpetrators, a conclusion drawn as a result of several arrests and convictions in
which the defendant admitted connection to Earth First.

As Earth First in recent years has tried to mainstream itself, ecoterror crimes have become more
destructive to their wishes for a good public image. Therefore, Judi Bari, an Earth First leader,
wrote an article in the Earth First Journal recommending that a decoupling group call itself Earth
Liberation Front in order to create deniability for Earth Firsters crimes. I document this in my
book EcoTerror on page 270, which I respectfully request be made part of the record. In fact,
the Earth Liberation Front has subsequently become a well-known entity to law enforcement.

Furthermore, Mr. Chairman, the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front signed
a joint communique stating their solidarity and blending. I have been able to determine that
certain criminal Earth Firsters, Earth Liberation Front members and the Animal Liberation Front
members are the same people. Examples are David Barbarash and Darren Thurston, convicted
felons now under indictment in Canada for attempted murder by pipe bombs, were at one time
Earth Firsters. I am stating that there is no difference between ecoterrorism and animal rights
terrorism. The perpetrators are in large part the same, and the solidarity of action is openly
declared.

These crimes to save nature are difficult to solve for law enforcement. The solution is to extend
federal protection to loggers, miners, fishermen, farmers and ranchers, and others who are the
most frequent targets of ecoterrorist attack. A simple way to accomplish that would be to add
those classes of people to the list of persons protected by the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of
1993. That law federalized crimes of property damage over $10,000 or that resulted in
dismemberment or death to a human being as a result of attacks on animal enterprises.

A simple amendment would create the Resource Enterprise Protection Amendment of 1998 by
adding to the list of protected persons loggers, miners, fishermen, farmers, trappers, ranchers,
food outlets and processors and all resource enterprises subject to ecoterror crimes. This law
also needs a citizen attorneys general clause to allow harmed parties to seek relief in federal
court, and it needs a periodic report to Congress. The existing Animal Enterprise Protection Act
also needs to be reviewed because its enforcement has proven to be lax and virtually ineffectual.
Congressional oversight of its enforcement is badly needed.

I feel that this modest proposal would meet with congressional approval and would go far to
protecting the interests of all natural resource producers in America.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing.