haagym.blogg.se

Now that we've gotten past that, let's get into the truly despicable crimes.

Most environmental activists don't advocate for this type of work, and in fact, some of these more militant-leaning organizations actually have disturbing connections to white supremacy. They burned down a ski resort in Vail, Colorado, kicking off a wave of copycat crimes. The Earth Liberation Front committed an act of arson in 1992 that cost $12 million in damages and effectively militarized the entire FBI against them. In 1987, ALF activists firebombed a University of California-Davis veterinary laboratory, causing damages of $3.5 million.

It appears that in terms of violent ecoterrorism, arson is the most popular choice. Let's get this out of the way: While it's relatively rare, especially in terms of climate actions, some acts of ecoterrorism really are destructive in nature (and most of them surround animal rights, not the climate movement, though of course they are connected but are not the same thing).

In fact, law enforcement poses a much larger threat to environmental activists than the other way around: While environmental activism has killed no one, 83 climate activists were killed in 2018, and nearly 200 activists were killed in 2017, with most of the deaths occurring in Brazil and the Philippines. In fact, most of them would rather be growing plants and doing the kind of stuff they'd truly love to be doing if it weren't for the fact that our planet is dying. Every movement has its radicals, and most environmental activists don't believe in violent crimes. There are a lot of problems with the term "ecoterrorism," which was mostly created to give environmentalists a bad name. Though most of the fears about ecoterrorism never materialized, and not one person was ever killed in an ecoterrorism protest, the FBI still cracked down on the cause. It is believed that the term "ecoterrorism" was first coined in 1983, in an article by Ron Arnold that defined it as "a crime committed to save nature." Around the 1990s, a group known as the Earth Liberation Front popularized eco-terrorism and became noteworthy for their aggressive crimes.