- Again, the forum is sponsored by the Bloomington Proactive Committee. My name is Don Pratt. I was asked
- to moderate tonight, and I said, sure, we'll do this. I've had some people tell me since then, hey,
- you better watch it out there. There's going to be problems out there. I said, I'd like to think that
- the folks in Bloomington can get together, and even if they disagree about a few things, have a civil
- conversation about a matter that
- again, that some of us don't agree on. And I was telling Joyce, I don't see anybody out here going to
- cause trouble tonight. I don't see too many troublemakers out there. So I think we'll be all right.
- Again, the purpose is to consider the question of which forms of protest are acceptable, effective,
- and responsible. And the format tonight, each of our panelists is going to speak for 10 to 12 minutes.
- And then we are going to open things up for your comments and questions. And the panelists were asked
- to be here because they bring different backgrounds and perspectives to the topic. And as was indicated
- at the microphones here, and if you keep your three minutes, we'll keep the comments to three minutes
- to make sure we get everybody
- through and have a chance to speak. And as was mentioned earlier too, once everybody speaks, if you
- want to get back in line and talk some more, you're certainly welcome to do that as well. So again,
- welcome to the forum. I will introduce the panelists now. Speaking first and in the middle position,
- Professor Jim Hartz.
- Religious Studies Department at Indiana University teaches the philosophy of religion. The second speaker
- tonight will be Tim Pitchford, a retired FBI agent. That's to Professor Hart's right. Tim Pitchford
- was the Indiana terrorism coordinator. And the third speaker tonight will be Craig Rosebraugh,
- the spokesperson for the North American Earth Liberation Front. So we'll start things off here with
- Professor Hart.
- My comments are first of all, first of all I want to thank people, Elisa in particular for inviting me and
- and also for arranging this meeting. I think this is terribly important. I think it shows both the vitality
- of Bloomington and the generosity of all of us to hear perspectives and work through things together.
- I take it as an adumbration of a better future. My comments are, first of all, interpretive. I'd say
- I don't really know
- And I take it that Craig doesn't really know either what ELF's fundamental diagnosis of our common problems
- are and what our goals are. In other words, I'm interpreting their diagnosis and I'm interpreting the
- ends of ELF's activity. And further, I want to also, and this is going to be somewhat appreciative,
- by the way,
- I also want to express appreciation of their implied distinction and all of this is an implication or
- rather an inference because I really don't know what ELF is up to except by way of inference. I want
- to express appreciation of the implied distinction between the violence to property, the violence to
- the ecosystem and its non-human inhabitants and violence to people. I'm going to be making distinctions,
- I think distinctions
- are essential. The world turns on distinctions. Finally, however, I want to raise some questions about
- the means that ELF uses because I find it difficult, at least I don't want to easily separate means
- from ends. I'm not going to talk in detail right now about violence. It's an extremely tangled topic.
- I want to distinguish violence where I've given an opportunity
- in terms of physical violence and mental violence. I'd also want to distinguish between personal violence
- and impersonal violence or structural violence. I think all those forms of violence have to be reflected
- on and introduced here. I also would further want to think about violence in terms of the Latin root
- of to violate. I would also want to distinguish it from mere harm and so forth and so on.
- So here's my guess at the diagnosis and the goals of ELF. The reaction to ELF's actions by most politicians
- and the HT have been to label ELF as terrorists and to urge general condemnation of them and dissociation
- from them. I don't think these reactions have appreciated the urgency of the problem to which ELF is
- calling our attention.
- That problem need not be rehearsed here in detail, I think especially among most of you, but let me
- put it in a feeble symbolic way by the following consideration. Most of us believe that it is necessary
- to buy bottled water, and we pay more for our bottled water than we do for gasoline. And this is an
- incredible state of affairs for someone who has lived as long as I have. More likely than not,
- Our children will be paying for very poor water, water that is poorer than what we now purchase. They
- will be paying what we now pay for a good bottle of bourbon. The quality of water reflects the political
- public choices on what the good life is. In our case, it reflects the preference of a liquid space for
- high-tech recreation over a basic health need.
- The quality of water reflects the quality of the air. The quality of water reflects the quality of the
- watershed, the quality of life of the non-human forms of sentiency, and the ecosystems that surround
- and inhabit this water space. I believe ELF's presumed main goal should be our goals. Stop most forms
- of development. Why most forms? Because they're indiscriminate regarding basic issues of the quality
- of life and ecology.
- How do we determine, however, what is discriminated and appropriate? This is a most difficult question.
- All of us live in dwellings that were once the result of development. All development is in someone's
- backyard and is a destruction of some wild space. All of us use money and therefore make use of development
- of products and put money back into circulation, which as profit is used for further development. Most
- of us who support ELF's goals
- as I have interpreted them, have no clear answer to these questions except we believe that there is
- a moral imperative to live more simply and unhook our lives as much as possible from what I like to
- call the mega machine. Finger pointing today usually involves that the finger makes a U-turn and points
- back at the accuser. Purity of heart and hands is almost impossible with something like a village based
- on blooming dollars economy.
- This would also go a long way toward establishing a bottom-up democracy where a representation would
- be at a minimum and participation at a maximum. But striving for a nonviolent participatory democracy
- free of hierarchy in the MEG machine is an infinite task and may know completion only in our dreams.
- In the meantime, the MEG machine goes relentlessly on with the general support of the politicians as
- the laws, destroying much of life and the bases of life around us.
- This relentless progress of ecological devastation is an undeclared state of war on the environment.
- There seems to be a will to eliminate all wild spaces from our midst. Parks, residences, or pavement
- must be put in place of all natural undomesticated spaces. How are those non-human and human creatures
- who have no voice at the city councils, state legislatures, Congress, chambers of commerce, the stock
- markets, the IMF,
- the brokerage houses, the union management bargaining tables, and so forth and so on. How are these
- to be spoken for when the bulldozers have already been mobilized, when the land has already been sold,
- when the various forms of positive progressive development have written them out of existence? This
- seems to me a basic question that ELF asks, and it answers it with the destruction of private property
- of certain developers and certain developments. It assumes
- that normal democratic procedures are not possible, that rather a kind of war has been declared and
- an appropriate warlike answer is called for. Now I want to talk briefly about the destruction of property.
- Private property is an enormous topic. I believe its bounds and nature are inseparable from what used
- to be called the common good, which itself is inseparable
- from the good of individual persons, the good of what I call self-actualization. I see nothing indicating
- that Elf is against all forms of property. Thus, we may assume that would agree that property is a necessary
- extension of the self, of the necessary extension of the self in the world for its own realization of
- itself, for its own good. Let me say something briefly. I'm sorry I'm a philosopher. I have to do this
- briefly here.
- We are through our havings. And what I mean by that is an obvious sense that we need things in order
- to be. Now, the most basic sense of saying I, the first person reference here, is tied up with
- our possibilities, our experienced possibilities. And our body is an experienced possibility. I am through
- by being able to be
- possible to be able. I have an I, but I have an I can. And my I can is inseparable from me, from what
- I refer to when I say I. And that can, that being able, is inseparable from some sense of having. I
- have my powers. For example, a simple sense of having your powers is that you have to learn the language.
- You have the power to learn the language, and only you
- can learn the language. And when you become a speaker of a certain language, it's because you've had
- the power. But you've had to actualize the power. I think there's an extension not only of these internal
- powers, which we call our raw capacities, but also our way of being in the world. As being embodied,
- we have bodies that need to be nurtured. And we have to have the possibility of nurturing our bodies
- by using our bodies.
- as capacities which enable us to be nurtured. But to eat is a way we actualize our bodies. So I have
- to have my body, have to have ownership, but I also have to have a way of transforming the earth in
- order for me to be.
- I have to have some stewardship or disposition of the earth. I have to have something in order to be,
- let's say, in order to eat, because in order to be, I have to eat. This is a long story. It's several
- courses long. I'm not going to get into it. But I want to say property is essential to being in some
- level. OK. This elemental sense of property is joined to the common good, to one's bodiliness,
- to ones I can, is a far cry from most understandings of private property as a right to do with as one
- wills so long as one has paid for it. Yet there is a certain sacredness to property rights in the present
- context, which is a contingent, non-necessary context that needs to be upheld. As long as people do
- not live in village-based subsistence communities, and as long as the state
- is an entity which has its power from above to kill its members if it regards this as unnecessary for
- reasons of state, then private property is a refuge from the always present menace of the state. It
- seems thus to have a kind of sacred inviolability. Yet we can all think of instances when we would be
- disposed to destroy private property in favor of a higher good. War by definition does this. But think
- also of a baby in a crib
- upon whom there is descending a heavy object. For example, an heirloom piece of pottery. Anyone standing
- there might well attempt to divert the pot by a kick or a blow with a stick, even though this involves
- the destruction of a pot which was priceless and irreplaceable. Private property, thus, is not absolutely
- sacred in a way a Gandhian would say that a person is. Private property
- is not an absolute right. It's only a contingent, a condition, a relative right. Furthermore, think
- of the example that the Berrigan brothers gave at their trials when they were accused of destroying
- government property, namely the heads of nuclear missiles. Aside from the questionable chasm which was
- set up between the government and the people, the Berrigans argued, how can something which by its nature
- is aimed at killing millions of people be called private property?
- What is private or personal about something which by its nature, its end, its design, its function,
- can only be considered as belonging to the generality of people? That which is designed to kill all
- of us is not able to be considered private property in the sense is up to a part of the whole to decide
- what to do with it. To do with it meaning the whole, the people, all of the people.
- This would seem to be a part of the reasoning of Elf. A bulldozer in a wetlands cannot be thought of
- as private property of a construction company. Countless lives, non-human at least, are at stake in
- the destruction of a wetlands. And as awful as it sounds, a modern house with all its conveniences not
- only requires a bulldozer, but its very existence functions like a bulldozer what it is in a wild space. Finally,
- question of means. ELF has not harmed anyone directly, as far as I know. It has not directly inflicted
- bodily harm. In that respect, its guerrilla-like campaign is one of nonviolence. ELF, perhaps, is making
- a distinction between harm to people and harm to property. Of course, there is an extended violence
- to people when their property is violated, and that must be acknowledged.
- By using our example of legitimate defense through violence, if you want, through property, in the case
- of the pot falling on the child, we may perhaps say that Elf does not wish to harm the owners of the
- property because it wishes to defend the earth. Its destruction of the property is only an indirect
- willing of harm to the individual owners of property. Thus one might say that the child's nightmares,
- I'm referring now to the
- family whose house was burned down, that the child's nightmares, the anxiety of the parents, et cetera,
- were willed only indirectly as an offshoot of the directly willed violence to the property. But when
- Alf refers to the people whose property is damaged as rich scum, it seems that they're asking that their
- actions be taken as directly willing the harm of the people. This, I think, is unacceptable.
- First of all, it's an odd metaphor for a deep ecologist to use scum as something, a way of heaping a
- probrium on somebody. But more important, it shows a fundamental contempt of the other person. This
- what it is joined with the anonymity of guerrilla tactics becomes hard to distinguish from the methods
- of the mega machine which I, for one, want to oppose. The modern mega machine of the government
- politics, business, entertainment, transportation, communications, capitalist economics, and so forth,
- is founded on the elimination of the centrality of face-to-face relations. It is founded on the irrelevance
- of first-person experiences as the center court of authority for deciding life's issues. Elf's demonization
- of the other is rich scum, and its anonymity are precisely basic dynamisms of the mega machine that
- most of us want to overcome.
- A final word about militant nonviolence, which I do not want to be regarded as peripheral, but as central
- to what I have to say. I think Gandhi would applaud the concern and goals of Elf. He saw the problem
- of the mega machine very clearly. It was embodied for him in the British Raj, the government of Britain,
- and the emergence of the Congress party,
- as the Indian version of the same what we have in India today. Today he would be at the forefront of
- militant echo activism. But I do not think he would approve of the way Elf hides out. No one merits
- contempt, neither the serial killer nor the serial developer. The means we use to reach our goal must
- be of the same nature as the goal. We cannot hope for a democratic echo community
- inspect that we ourselves will look different than our opponents at the end if along the way we turn
- ourselves into our opponents in terms of a justification of ends by means and creating an anonymous
- interaction which is a hair's breadth away from contempt. For example, chaining ourselves to trees or
- sitting in front of bulldozers are ways in which we own up to our civil disobedience. Look our opponents
- in the face and say to them,
- That is to say that the developers, we do not agree with you. Of course, this is just our opinion. We
- do not have privy to a divine revelation on these matters. We respect you and believe you are acting
- according to your lights. And we want eventually to live in harmony with you. But we cannot live with
- you if you persist in acting the way you do.
- We're willing to pay for our actions, our civil disobedience, but your development is not going to go
- on without our interference and without our resistance. But this is an extraordinary ideal and costs
- much. An anonymity is doubtless an easier route and costs less. Elf's way is doubtless much more courageous
- than what most of us are doing, myself certainly included, yet it still hints
- of a lack of courage and resembles too much the opponent. And ultimately, I believe, it cannot win over
- the backing of the great numbers which will be necessary to stop development and inaugurate a new kind
- of style of living. In the end, Elf seems to believe that war solves things. I'm not convinced of that.
- But they're right about this. Development is a form of war.
- Our next speaker is retired FBI agent Tim Pitchford. Mr. Pitchford. While driving here from Indianapolis,
- I started to see how gas prices were $1.49 just as I left $4.65, and they all went up to I think $1.69
- as I got close here, and slowly my gas tank was getting very, very low. A little button was saying,
- 24 more miles before your tank is dry. I was running late.
- And thanks to the terrorism, the Department of Transportation, everywhere I went there was backups and
- cones by forged throughs. So now my tank is about one more mile, and I think I'm going to make it to
- the marathon just before we get out of here and try to get a little bit of that echo energy. You know,
- I retired from the FBI two years ago, and with that, I never even heard of ELF, E-L-F.
- So I did a little background over the last few weeks to find out what it was so I have at least some
- idea what I'm going to do here today. But I thought I'd just kind of bring up a little bit on what Indiana
- is in relation to terrorism and how the history of Indiana reflects to terrorism. You know, the definition
- of terrorism runs, according to the FBI, unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property
- to intimidate or coerce a government or citizen population in furtherance of political or social objectives.
- Now, the FBI, in order to look into those kinds of things, we don't investigate terrorism per se. We
- look into the elements of the crime. And the crimes that usually associate those kinds of things are
- arsons, bombings, kidnappings, extortions, phone threats.
- And I'm not a great philosopher, although I did go to a Benedictine college where we studied Machiavelli
- and learned that the end does not justify the means. I'm somewhat of a follower of that Lieutenant Zipowicz
- on NYPD Blue who said, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. And yet I see people out there
- somewhat trying to fight the bulldozers and the animal eaters at Hardee's.
- by doing tens of thousand dollars worth of damage to a hamburger stand. And I go, okay. But then you
- look at Indiana history. Who comes from Indiana? Reverend Jim Jones, who set himself up as somewhat
- of a religious leader, probably somewhat of a messiah, pretty much became somewhat of a terrorist in
- his own right. Also, who do we have?
- The man's son, son of God. Who was that? Charles Manson. He's from Bloomington, I understand. May have
- done a couple years here. The Harrises. John and Emily Harris came from Bloomington. John was a high
- school teacher up in Carmel. These are the founders of the Symbionese Liberation Army, kidnapped Patty
- Hearst. I think they wanted to feed the hungry by kidnapping Patty Hearst and robbing banks.
- Indiana is rich in history in the Ku Klux Klan, and we all know the demise of the Klan in terms of its
- financial coffers and influence is pretty much disintegrated, but it's being picked up by groups like
- the Skinheads. A lot of other right-wing groups come out of that group, the Aryan nations. These right-wing
- groups all are anti-tax type people.
- or anti-government for some reason, whatever the government is. Lincoln said that a government of the
- people, by the people, and for the people may not be able to survive with the wars that we have, the
- civil wars that we have in the Gettysburg Address. I think this is what he envisioned. Then you've got
- your left-wing Marxist types of groups. The United Freedom Front,
- People that were putting bombs in Washington, D.C. years ago. You're H. Rap Brown. One day I was in
- Indianapolis and a fellow came to me and he says, do you know who's in town? I said, no. Amil Jamil.
- I said, well, I don't know. I haven't missed Amil, but I've never heard of Amil Jamil. Well, that's
- the Islamic name of H. Rap Brown. And I says, well, I know him by a different name. And he said, well,
- what is that?
- I said, we know H. Rat Brown, he was arrested for carrying a bomb in his car in Washington, D.C.,
- subsequently became a fugitive. And I was working in New York City in the early 70s when he was a fugitive
- and in fact involved in a robbery of a social club where he made all the individuals in the club stripped
- down. And one of the individuals had to strip down was a police officer in this particular club and
- he particularly was not too crazy about
- showing his gun. So he drew a gunfight and sued. H. Rapp Brown went to the roof, exchanged more gunfire,
- and he lost a right testicle in which he now has been known among law enforcement as One Ball Brown.
- He is now involved in a fight for his life because he assumed his religious leadership down in Atlanta.
- He is involved in a shooting of a police officer.
- He may get the death penalty. Here is a classic terrorist. Years ago, he had his own envision of the
- way the world should be. Now he sits in a jail cell facing a death sentence for killing a police officer
- who pulled him over for some minor traffic infraction. He also went through Indiana. That was my point.
- Indianapolis and Indiana has a way of, I don't know if it's being a magnet, but at least it has an awful
- lot of terrorist activity.
- The El Rookins up in Chicago used to travel through Indiana on 65. We stopped a car one time that was
- carrying law rockets. Who knows what they were going to do to save the world with their law rockets.
- We put them in jail. The IRA over in Ireland, they were blowing up bandstands with, I guess,
- English people, you know, and them.
- People were getting killed. Horses were getting killed for the animal rights people. Who knows how many
- trees they knocked down in the park with their bombs. But the devices came from Indiana. The devices.
- The timing devices came from Indiana. So we were able to trace some of that and maybe put some leads
- on to who the bomb makers were. And that's what the FBI tries to do. Find out who's doing the crime.
- Let the chips fall where they made.
- We're not involved in the ideology of any of these groups. Some of them may have noble causes. The noble
- causes are something that may be something that's going to be a benefit to somebody somewhere down the
- line. The media is here tonight, apparently, and that's one thing terrorists want. They want media exposure.
- But another thing they want is anonymity. They want to hide. They're cowards. They don't come out and
- let you know their beliefs and debate them face to face.
- They want to go and they want to hit targets that are easy targets, like hamburger stands, or someone
- who has a meat market in Indiana trying to make a living, raise kids, put them in college, and is going
- out of business because some juveniles who belong to the ALF, Animal Liberation Front, are causing him
- damage at 2 o'clock to 4 o'clock in the morning where he can't run his business.
- And you start finding out who are these people. Well, there are people that read a magazine that's published
- out of Toronto, Canada, that publishes these little incidents. And they think that they're making big
- news. They think they're important. And we can only prosecute them on juvenile-type offenses. But they're
- terrorists. The people that publish the magazine in Toronto are helping to create this terrorist atmosphere.
- Terrorism is basically fear. If the community lives in fear, you become less governable. You become
- less civilized.
- And therefore, you're going to have people who are going to react to whatever noble cause in a very
- in noble way. With that, I just kind of want to just briefly touch on the fact that there are consequences
- to terrorism. There's the high cost of security. Whenever you go to an airport, you know that you're
- delayed almost an hour now before you get on the plane. Your luggage is pretty much searched. You better
- have a photo ID. These are all because of this
- societal element of fear. Now, people say, well, why doesn't the FBI solve some of these crimes? Well,
- we're not living in a police state, and thank God we're not. So consequently, we don't have surveillance
- cameras everywhere, and we're not putting people in rooms and interrogating them for three days. They'll
- do that in certain communist, Mayo, or Marxist-type countries, where they don't have a whole lot of
- terrorism.
- So consequently, we're not looking for a police state. We don't have a police state, and hopefully we
- never will. But we're paying a high cost for security, thanks to the people that think they have to
- go out and commit certain acts to damage property, create $12 million worth of damage out in Vail, Colorado,
- deprive people of a living who would be working there. They've got a more noble cause. OK, well, let's
- hear it. Put it out on the front street, debate it,
- Tell your congressman, get laws passed, do the right thing. In conclusion, I'd just like to say the
- only way we're ever going to get a handle on law enforcement, or on law enforcement, terrorism. Nobody's
- ever had a handle on me, not even the FBI. They're shrigging in their shoes right now, probably. Why
- did you go down there?
- But the only way you're going to get a handle on terrorism is to have cooperation between law enforcement
- agencies so that you know who the juvenile delinquents are, so you know who the money people are, supplying
- the funds, supplying the wherewithal, supplying the meeting places, even though you might have a noble
- cause. You may love animals. You might belong to, what, cheetah, concerned Hoosiers for the ethical
- treatment of animals. If you have a meeting of cheetah,
- or PETA. And in that group, you've got ELF people who are putting written material, citing targets,
- and what kind of damage can be done to those targets. Members of CHITA can be arrested as co-conspirators.
- They can be charged. And under federal guidelines, if they can show a connection in funding or providing
- any kind of help, they will be charged with extortion, whatever the crime was, arson,
- So I would just say if anyone feels that they are somehow encouraging violence by having meetings and
- thereby using those meetings as a base, and they knowingly do this, they will be subject to the same
- punishments as the guy who sets the torch. So we need cooperation between law enforcement officers to
- identify those instances and that, but most of all we need cooperation among the people.
- people who belong to those organizations that see among their midst a Timothy McVeigh type, someone
- who's going to go to the horrendous next step. There's one who wants to be more important than anybody
- else and show everybody that he is, you know, a great bomber, killer of mankind, whatever he is.
- In any event, that's all I got to say. I'm ready for questions or ready for the next speaker.
- The next speaker is North American Earth Liberation Front spokesperson Craig Rosebra. Good evening.
- When one tugs at one single thing in nature, she finds it connected to the rest of the world. It's an
- interesting notion and the relevance of the notion is applied directly to every single time we use
- abuse, exploit and destroy our natural resources and our natural environment because what we are doing
- is destroying something more. We're destroying our chances of sustainability as a planet. We're destroying
- our ability as people to live on this planet for future generations. We're destroying the ability for
- animal nations as well as our natural environment to function as a mere planet.
- or destroying the possibility of life. There are individuals within a growing movement that are very
- concerned about this realization and are doing things about it. That's why I'm here tonight and I'll
- be talking about a group called the Earth Liberation Front, talking about what that group is as well
- as what the ideology is and the message behind the organization itself.
- The Earth Liberation Front is an international underground organization using direct action to stop
- the systematic destruction and exploitation of our natural environment. Pure and simple. The ELF is
- anonymous. We heard just a little while ago the ELF being called cowards. They don't want to come out
- and take responsibility for their actions. Well, taking responsibility for their action ensues that
- these people have some sort of at least
- minor belief in our non, I would argue, non-democratic society. What these people want to do is to be
- free to continue conducting their actions each and every day. And if they come out and claim responsibility
- for their actions, they run, as we just heard, very serious chances of being incarcerated for a number
- of years. What they want to do is continue their work, which they feel is necessary to further
- the environmental movement so all of us
- and the planet has a possibility of going on. The ELF is anonymous not only to myself but to the general
- public. People have a hard time believing that. People think that I know all the members of the ELF.
- They're anonymous. That's the way it works. The ELF operates in what are called cells. They
- have a non-hierarchical structure. Each cell is independent of one another. Each cell is anonymous to
- one another. The ELF follows
- Rather than having a physical leader in each cell where you're having some triangle type structure that
- you would have in a business, a corporation, or a government, classic government, DELF merely follows
- an ideology. And so as long as individuals follow that certain ideology and the guidelines set within
- that ideology, they are able to claim their action as that, a part of the earth aberration front. The
- guidelines are as follows.
- Number one is to inflict economic damage to those who profit from the destruction of the natural environment.
- That's obvious. We've seen that here in your local community. We've seen that in my community and in
- various communities around the country. Number two, to reveal and educate the public on the atrocities
- committed against the environment and all the species that cohabitate in it. I am not going to argue
- that the Earth aberration front
- is concerned with direct public opinion about their tactics, because obviously, if you look at a widespread
- cross-section of mainstream America, people are not going to identify and agree with fire or arson,
- as you may put it. We're taught to believe something different, that that's not the way you go about
- social change. Number three, as far as the guidelines go, to take all necessary precautions against
- harming any animal, human or non-human.
- These are the three guidelines. They're very broad, but also very specific in what they cover. And I
- think the most important guideline that the Earth Liberation Front has is that which covers their strict
- code of nonviolence as it adheres to protecting human and non-human life. And their history, both in
- the United States and abroad in Europe, speaks for itself. Not one individual has been harmed directly,
- physically, by their actions. There's a growing number of people in the United States
- that are recognizing that the ideological structure in this society is causing the majority of injustice.
- This structure places profit before the natural environment and all life including humans that cohabitates
- in it. The profit motive is ultimately responsible for our air, our water, and our soil being more polluted
- now than ever before. It is responsible for more forests being gone currently than ever before.
- The profit motive is being responsible for more animals being exploited and killed than ever before.
- And I believe it is a true cause of arguably more human exploitation, sickness, and death than ever
- before. We have a sick drive for money in this capitalistic culture, and it is ruining not only our
- lives, I feel, but the lives of what it takes to really live our air and our water and our soil, our
- natural life on this planet.
- There's also a growing realization among a lot of people in this country that state sanctioned campaigns
- and protests are not accomplishing real social change. People are looking back at 20 to 30 years of
- the environmental movement and asking, what are we really doing? If we are really having overall success,
- why in the world would our air, our water, and our soil, the necessities for life, why would they be
- more contaminated and polluted now than ever before?
- A lot of work has been done, a lot of time has been spent, but are we being successful? A lot of people
- are saying not as much as we should be. People are recognizing that there's a difference between what
- the state wants you to do and what the state does not want you to do and the reasons behind the difference.
- What the state wants you to do is to follow a certain set of state sanctioned protest guidelines
- such as promote legislation, collect signatures on petitions, hold peaceful rallies, hold marches and
- parades only if you get the proper permits, coordinate media stunts like civil disobedience, but only
- with the police, stay on the sidewalk, et cetera. The state sanctioned means of social change is taught
- to us throughout our lives as the only valid means of social change. We learn this from our schooling
- systems. We learn this from popular culture, from mass media. This is the way we conduct social change.
- Well, the problem with that is, what if sticking to those tactics does not produce the end results that
- is needed to protect life on this planet? What does the state not want you to do? Realize who and what
- is really causing injustice in society? Use any means necessary to stop that injustice?
- cause ongoing severe economic damage to entities profiting off the exploitation and destruction of the
- earth and all life on it. Why does the state not want you to do that? Purely because it threatens their
- power and the power that this capitalistic society holds over the American people. And now that we have
- branched out our culture, I would say most of the world at this point. People then come to the question, well,
- Is direct action successful? Is the work of groups like the ELF, its sister organization, the Animal
- Liberation Front, are those actions successful? I would say yes. Working hand in hand with above ground,
- more traditionally legitimate tactics such as legislation, talking to people, holding panels, educational
- panels like we are here tonight, gathering signatures on petitions, civil disobedience.
- across the board. Hand in hand, direct action working in accordance with these other tactics is successful.
- Why? Because the capitalistic drive towards profit has been shown to answer to only one factor, the
- profit and loss margin. You cause these entities enough economic damage and they will stop their unjust
- acts, their businesses. Proof of that can be found
- in an incident that happened in 1997, early in my work as a spokesperson. It was an action that occurred
- against a place called the Cable West Horse Rendering Plant. This was a horse slaughterhouse that shipped
- horse meat overseas for human consumption. This corporation was burned to the ground by the Animal Liberation
- Front, which has a similar set of guidelines to the ELF. And in that process,
- Not only did they burn that company to the ground, but they put it completely out of business. It was
- an instant success. The company was never able to rebuild. No, it didn't stop the entire industry of
- raising horses for slaughter for human consumption overseas. But it did, number one, put that one business
- out of business, so to speak. And number two, it did send a message to industries internationally, entities
- internationally. It says, if you continue to exploit and destroy our environment, our animal nations,
- even our humans,
- There's going to be groups out there like the ELF and the ALF that will try and stop you. In England
- in 1997, consort kennels, a breeder of beagles, was shut down after a direct action campaign by protesters.
- This is all recent examples. In 1999, Hillgrove, a cat breeding farm, was also forced to close by direct
- action tactics. From 1997 through the present, the Earth Liberation Fund has claimed credit for some 14 now
- including the recent tree-spiking incident in the area here that was just claimed by the Earth Liberation
- Front. They have claimed credit for some 14 actions around the country that have inflicted well over
- $30 million in damages to entities destroying the Earth merely for profit. Profit and greed. I consider
- direct action the people's movement in this country.
- Realistically, I think we could put an end to most of the injustices in the world today if we wanted
- to, if we realize the necessity for direct action, working in accordance with various other tactics,
- more legitimate tactics as we've been taught. If we really put our minds to it, if we really used and
- determined what is it going to take to cause that injustice or stop that injustice? What is it going
- to take to convince these companies or these entities that there are some things more important to life
- than just making the almighty dollar. I'll finish with a quote that kind of sums up, I think, a lot
- about what the group is about and what the group believes. It goes something like this. The author is
- unknown. If we are trespassing, so are the soldiers who broke down the gates of Hitler's death camps.
- If we are thieves,
- So were the members of the Underground Railroad who freed the slaves of the South. And if we are vandals,
- so were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Oswich. Take questions before
- I end. If people have more interest in the history of the Earth Aberration Front, we did bring detailed
- magazine called Resistance in the Back on the right there, which details the United States history and
- the North American history of the Earth Aberration Front. Thank you.
- questions and comments, we ask that you come to either of the microphones. And you can direct a question
- or comment to one or all of the panelists. If the question or comment is directed at one panelist, the
- other panelists have the option to respond as well. And again, we respectfully request that you limit
- your questions and comments to three minutes. And we'll start at the microphone here, please.
- I direct this to Jim Hart and to the ELF representative. I don't know the family whose house was burned,
- but I got to own a house my first time a while back, and it was an incredible thing for me. I've worked
- long and hard to make it my home, my piece of the earth, my corner of the earth. I've called myself
- an environmentalist. I am compromised, as are we all.
- I've made mistakes, and I've driven vehicles, and I profit from these things. But I believe a family's
- home is its castle. That's a famous saying in a different form. And if someone attacks my home, they
- attack me, and they're provoking violence. They're provoking violence in the heart and physical violence,
- and they could get themselves killed. They could get themselves harmed.
- But I think a person has a right, which is pretty well established in this country, to protect your
- home. You have done great violence to this family. You have destroyed the wood and the work and the
- time that people have put into this. I think you're too young to have done enough building to know what
- it takes to build a home, to build a family, to buy a lot in a place of beauty and natural
- you know, in nature and environment. I mean, someone wouldn't have built that home if they didn't love
- nature and love Bloomington. You folks aren't from Bloomington. I doubt many of the people that are
- causing this harm grew up in Bloomington or have built a home or have bought that property and have
- made a home and a family and, you know,
- You talk about destroying lives. Okay, there's been at least a million dollars worth of damage done
- between forest working equipment, road equipment, which we badly need a road to Ellitsville, and this
- home on Lake Monroe. I started out with, I'd like to hear the response to what I have to say about destroying
- this home and these things, and I have a final formula to give you.
- When you destroy a million dollars worth of things here, you've destroyed at least four lives because
- it takes the man hours that it takes to do all that work that you have in few moments destroyed with
- a match or some sand or whatever you use in the middle of the night. That's destroyed the time that
- these workers have put and it adds up to four lives.
- Can I agree that there is something sacred about the home and private property? My point was that there
- are circumstances in which the absolute claim one makes on one's private property is conditioned. You
- can well imagine, I'm sure you would be one of the first, if there was a disaster. Where are you? I
- can't see you. You would offer your home.
- as a place of hospitality for people who were in need of refuge. And you could understand that it could
- be, perhaps by a local community, it could be proposed as a place of refuge. So I think that you would
- condition the right of private property. Those claims, though, the way you're making them, I don't think
- are nuanced enough. And I'm going to be quick on this, because I know there's a lot of people. I just
- want to say, there are many points you raised.
- One more point I'll make here. I don't think it's fair to say of a million dollar house that four lifetimes
- are being wasted or negated or nullified. In many cases, a million dollar home is built by someone who
- has a million dollars, and that doesn't necessarily represent four lifetimes of labor. How a particular
- person in the American economic system gets a million dollars is a good question. And it's not always
- by living four lifetimes.
- I'm not talking about $1 million home. I'm talking about all these incidences have added up to $1 million.
- It's taken so many man hours to produce those machines to render down that ore and so forth. Just briefly,
- I am a property owner. I'm a business owner. I have lived quite, I think, an experienced life. I'm 28
- years old. I am young. I'm not from the Bloomington area. That's obvious. I do think, however,
- that your remark regarding the man hours cannot be applied to this because in the eyes of the Earth's
- aberration front, again, no violence was caused directly. And they consider violence, this is what they
- consider, regardless of what each other person considers in here. This is their definition. Their definition
- is violence as it pertains to harming human and non-human life directly.
- Obviously, I'm not saying that the Scott family did not suffer, did not suffer psychological hardship.
- What I think the group intends to do is to at least allow or hopefully allow the Scott family at least
- in some time period to reflect on what happened and hopefully realize that although they will never,
- I imagine, understand, they can at least slowly take in what the motives behind the group's actions
- were, pure and simple.
- did conduct the damage, ought to turn themselves in, go before a grand jury. Let the grand jury decide
- whether or not they've got a just cause or a just war and then let the judge decide. My name is Bill
- Breeden. I don't think I have to prove to anybody that I'm a radical. At the same time, my first response
- when I picked up the paper and saw this house burning in Monroe County. My first recollection was a
- picture on CBS News of an American soldier torching a hut in Vietnam and saying, we have to destroy
- this village in order to save it. Same thing. My feeling is doing violence to children's mind is violence.
- when those children have to consider the fact that if they move into that house, are these people going
- to come back and burn it again with us in it? They don't have the sophistication to figure this out.
- They have the nightmares. That's violence. And I think the Earth Liberation Front has to answer for
- that. Furthermore, I know a lot of people here in Bloomington. I've been around here now almost 20 years.
- I've worked for change in Bloomington.
- We've changed a lot in Bloomington. We just elected two city council members on radical environmental
- issues of stopping I-69. It's never been done before. We just stopped a multi-million dollar golf course
- from destroying our Griffey Woods over here. And on the night that we all were celebrating and all feeling
- wonderful because of the unity that that community we found in this community, all of a sudden it was
- destroyed.
- And I would say to you, I know a lot of good people here live a lot of good lives, but who among us
- is so pure and who lives such sacred lives as to declare themselves both jury and judge? The question
- is not who is right and who is wrong. The question is, how are we going to live together? We've got
- to build community in order to save the earth. That's what we've got to do. This action destroyed community.
- It has been clear. Please, please.
- Please, please. I don't want to take time for applause, please. Save it. Save it. Well, I think we have
- three minutes. OK. What I want to say is, Jim Hart, I respect you greatly. We're friends for life. You
- have identified it well. They are at war. It's time to declare peace.
- It's the war destroys the tender grasses and the smoke of violence raised out of that house down there,
- poisoning the air, poisoning the environment, and poisoning a wonderful spirit in this community. And
- we took that violent smoke into our lungs and our minds turned it into mistrust and fear and it destroyed
- something beautiful. The Earth Liberation Front, the experts are not just fit to respond to that. Thank you.
- A common notion of the Earth Liberation Front is that they're always outsiders. They're always misfit
- youth, uneducated, have nothing better to do with their lives, and go and cause trouble in society.
- That's pretty easy, isn't it? That's pretty easy to assume because that gives us... Would you like to
- get up and ask a question? It leaves
- a lack of responsibility on all of us to really think about the issues that what if these people are
- actually educated? What if they do have an intelligence that gives meaning to their issues,
- to their actions? Don't we have a right to understand that? The only thing I see as destroying any work
- done by the environmental movement, which I would even argue about as success to this point,
- The only thing as I see destroying that are groups and individuals who come out publicly and condemn
- the actions that they don't agree with, because that's not what they were taught. Pure and simple. I
- don't have a question. I came to understand there were comments that were. Greetings fellow humans,
- natives and non-natives. Non-natives.
- Welcome to Indian-uh. We're here to discuss protests tonight and its relation to direct action and violence.
- Vince Scott, your house has been burned. I'm an electrician. I'll help you build a new one. But not
- on the Lake Monroe watershed. I don't want that lake polluted any worse than it is, and I don't like
- what's happened to it so far.
- But I will commit to wiring your house for you someplace else where it doesn't hurt the environment.
- It's impossible to speak of violence here without understanding the history of this place, this land,
- and the violent destruction and poisoning that the authorities here have supported. Welcome to Indian.
- My grandfather's bones are here in Indian, in the earth. My grandmother's bones are here.
- in India and in the earth. My mother's bones are here. My father's bones are here. These bones are still
- walking. These bones are still walking on top of the earth. My bones still walk above the ground like
- those of my fellow elders here. But we are the new Native Americans, and we're being buried alive. When
- my grandfather walked here, Lake Monroe was Salt Creek valleys, the broadest, most fertile farming land
- in the county.
- where food for Bloomington was grown. When my father walked here, poor man could hunt this land to feed
- his family, even during the great hunger of the 1930s. Since I've walked here, that area has been turned
- into the largest lake in Indiana, 192 miles of shoreline. There are roads and towns still under that
- water and dumps of PCBs, too. But all air thunder and all air lightning are gone forever down in Elandtown.
- The lake wasn't the idea of the poor, the hunters, the farmers who lived there. It was the idea of the
- rich and powerful speculators of Bloomington. And all of those poor, those farmers lost their land,
- their homes, their livings, their communities were seized through imminent domain. And with chainsaws
- and bulldozers, their forests and homes were leveled, were demolished so that motorboats could defecate
- in our drinking water and the rich could develop the watershed. With the lake as a
- Speculation boom. Property taxes became too high to profitably farm the area surrounding the
- lake. Surrounding land has fallen into the hands of developers who no longer need actual weapon of eminent
- domain and police force to take and destroy the land. Development is eminent domain for the rich. But
- we're the new Native Americans and we're being buried alive. I know my time's up. Will anyone tolerate
- what I have to say?
- I'm not done. I'm not anywhere near done. And what I'm not down talking about is how the government
- hadn't listened to us so far. Please remove this person like my wife was removed. I know you'll get
- in the back of the line again and come up and make another statement when you're time to speak. We'll
- let everybody talk. Thanks. Good evening, my name is John Blair. I'm from Evansville. I'm the president
- of a group called Valley Watch Incorporated, whose purpose is to protect the public health and environment
- of lower Ohio Valley.
- In the 23 years that I've been involved in doing environmental work, I've seen Indiana go to this state.
- We're number one in the release of particulate matter. We're number one in the release of sulfur dioxide.
- We're number one in the release of nitrogen oxides. 100% of our streams and lakes have fish consumption
- advisories warning women and children not to eat more than one meal a month of the fish from Indiana
- waters. We put out two and a half times the amount of carcinogens in the air as does the state of California.
- It's a pretty dismal situation we've created for ourselves. So I understand a lot of what's going on.
- I have been a big advocate of civil disobedience over the years. And like you suggested, Mr. Hart, I
- have been very outspoken. I've been in the front of it. I've been arrested. That's not the issue. The
- issue is when we talk about violence, violence is trespass.
- in my lungs, in my children's lungs, in their bloodstream and that has got to stop. Another thing I
- would note is that every successful political movement that's ever been encountered in the United States
- and probably throughout the world has incorporated some form of civil disobedience and much of that
- has been repugnant to a group of people. Now it hasn't been supported widely but ultimately in order
- to get the attention that's necessary sometimes you have to resort to tactics that
- a lot of people don't like. Now I have personally preferred nonviolent, goes without question in the
- way I've done things, symbolic and active instead of passive. I think that if we look at those three
- things for our civil protest that I think that we might gain a lot more, a lot quicker, but the unfortunate
- problem is that those things
- only work well if there's numbers of people doing them. And unfortunately in Indiana, we've let ourselves
- be shot down to the point that we are very isolated, marginalized whenever we try to make any kind of
- action. Okay, I just want to make one more point. When it comes to freedom, there are three things that
- strike me about freedom. One of them is that freedom is something you seize. It's not something that's
- given to you.
- It's also something that's like pregnancy. It's a little absolute. You're either free or you're not.
- And then also and last is that freedom is like a muscle. If you don't use it, it atrophies. And most
- of us are guilty of not using our muscle called freedom. Let's start doing it. My name is Terry Caulk.
- I am an elder in the Elflor Family Incorporated ELF. My wife was thrown out of here for delivering a
- paper to you, suing you from the Elflor Family Incorporated because the media cannot and you cannot
- call yourself what you are.
- You keep calling yourself ELF. We've been working here for 17 years. We run a 109-acre nature sanctuary.
- My house runs on solar electrics. We work on closed ecological life support systems, constructed wetlands
- waste treatment. We've been educating people in this area for years on how to do things correctly, how
- to solve the problems. We are working with sustainable solutions. I challenge all of you to come and
- talk to me about solar electrics, wind generation, anything you need, what you have done.
- and your group has done is a measurable damage to our educational efforts in this area, teaching people
- how to fix things. Instead, you brought violence to it all. I find that you feel that the laws do not
- apply to you. Then if the laws do not apply to you, but you're a property owner, there's no reason why
- you shouldn't come and take your glasses right now. Well, excuse me, not your glasses, just glasses
- or anything else.
- There's many of us who are warriors. We do not want to go to war. We've chosen peaceful paths. We could
- have gone to war years ago. We chose not to. We chose to fix the problem. My wife was the person that
- headed up against the program to stop the subdivision in which the house was burnt. We won. It went
- from 400 and some units down to 100 units. We got them to do it under proper laws, proper way of dealing
- with nature.
- So I'd just like to say from the Elflor family and the 500 members thereof, you are cast out of the
- circle of elves. You are not elves. You are orcs. Please call yourself what you are. Thank you. Good
- luck to you. If the panelists, if you folks want to comment, please jump in at any time. Next question, please.
- I'm from Evansville and I'm a board member of an environmental group down there called Save Our Land
- and Environment. And from what I can gather, it sounds like that most of the actions that ELF has taken
- have been against what could be construed the low-hanging fruit. I think that the perpetrators that
- do the most violence to our lungs and to our public health in terms of air quality and water quality
- or for the most part multinational corporations that have huge fences, security systems, and in some
- instances media operations in this day and time that insulate them from virtually any complaints or
- redress of grievances that the public may have in this country. And we have
- people in our government who do little more than kowtow to these people. I just attended some Title
- V air quality training on the Title V permits in Indianapolis last week, and the EPA told us first thing
- off of the bat on Thursday that they only review annually about 10 percent of the air quality permit
- applications that they get for toxic chemicals, for NOx, for
- carcinogens, for all of these other kinds of things that cause our kids to get sick, that give us record
- numbers of children enrolled in asthma camps every summer, and off-the-chart breast cancer incidents
- and other public health crises, really, that I contend are being inflicted upon the American public
- by corporate America.
- Until this is raised as an issue that everybody in this country begins to recognize and begins to realize
- that we are all less a people as a result of the freedom and the years of freedom that we are being
- deprived because of corporate pollution, I don't see things getting much better. And I don't see ELF taking on
- the con agras of this world, or the general electrics of this world, or the utility companies of this
- world, I see them attacking the low-hanging fruit. And I think that in that respect, many of their attacks
- are somewhat misguided. And I think it becomes incumbent upon all of us to start talking about these
- things among the people that do have
- potential to have some impact, starting with the governor, our elected officials, and the heads of some
- of these corporations that I've mentioned. As far as your comment with multinational corporations being
- at, I think, the forefront of a lot of these issues and problems we're discussing here tonight, I would
- say that the Earth's aberration front
- as far as I have seen, chooses their target at random for a specific reason. They want to present an
- atmosphere that leads no individual or entity free in the sense that if anybody, no matter how big you
- are, whether you're General Electric all the way down to someone building a $750,000 to $1.5 million
- home on a watershed, nothing should leave you free to continue your destruction of the Earth.
- So that's why they do that. I think the corporations are big because we all are hooked. I'd like to
- challenge some of the factual basis of things that you said. I didn't put them all down, but I think
- I got two or three clear examples. I've spent
- I spent most of my career dealing with environmental issues, so I have some standing in the matter.
- One, there is more woodland in the U.S. now than there was 100 years ago. Two, lifespans are getting
- longer. Three, the environment is cleaner than it was
- in the late 1960s, at least in the developed countries, and those, in fact, who have followed
- the profit-mongering capitalist system. It's not true in those who have sought other means or who never
- had this available to them. So not only do I think many of your facts are wrong, but the premises on
- which you base those statements are also wrong. No existing society can tolerate someone who moves outside
- of the law to change the law. Such is violent revolution,
- And although revolution may at times be justified, we have to recognize it for what it is and either
- join it or adamantly oppose it. Then the question. Many people are concerned about what they regard
- as the destruction of human life. They call themselves the right to life movement.
- Since you are a person of principle and without hypocrisy, I assume you would applaud the tactic of
- fringe elements of these groups burning down abortion clinics so long as they are sure that the buildings
- are vacant. Am I right? Are you asking that to me or the other panelists? I'm here tonight
- as a representative of the North American Earth liberation front, a common thing that media likes to
- do, a common thing that people like to do to try and poke holes in my arguments.
- is to change the subject onto a different issue to try and lessen my credibility. I'm not going to discuss
- another issue. I'm here today to talk about the environmental movement. I think vigilantism is an issue.
- I think vigilantism is an issue.
- think there are times when laws must be broken. And in good conscience, one can break laws, or sometimes
- one must break laws. And the great societies we admire are all founded on those acts of breaking laws.
- So although I agree basically with your claim about obedience to laws, laws are a dictate, quoting St.
- Thomas Aquinas, a dictate of practical reason by the appropriate authority,
- for the legislation, for the perpetuation of the common good. Sometimes laws don't meet those canons,
- and sometimes only the courageous stand up to break the laws. And I think that in many cases we tend
- to be complacent in regard to the face of laws. However, I think what has to be debated, and what we
- are debating tonight, is whether the tactics of ELF
- are appropriate forms of civil disobedience. I don't think St. Thomas Aquinas ever committed an arson.
- I think if you go 57 miles an hour in a 55 zone, I think we're all guilty of breaking certain laws.
- I think an individual who is given some sense of support that he can break a law, all of a sudden finds
- out that he has an addiction. Most criminals I have ever
- had occasion to interview in depth, never committed just one offense. They committed multiple offenses.
- It's like a bank robber. Gets away with the first one, gets away with the second one. Ultimately, he's
- going to get caught. Individuals who start small work the way big. You live by the sword, you die by
- the sword. H. Rapp Brown is a perfect example. That's all I got to say.
- My name is Daniel Logan, and I live here in Bloomington. And I just have a few brief readings I would
- like to share with my fellow citizens here in Bloomington. And this is what I hope is an opportunity
- to educate our minds as well as inform our hearts. First reading is just the five, Gandhi's five general
- rules for nonviolent opposition
- Nonviolent opposition implies non-violence and guilt. It includes total refusal to cooperate or participate
- in activities of the unjust group, even being accused when it comes from them. Nonviolent opposition
- is no veil for those without living faith in the God of love and the love of all humankind. The person
- practicing nonviolent opposition must be ready to sacrifice everything
- accept their honor. A nonviolent opposition must pervade everything and not be applied merely by isolated
- acts. Second reading is from a Buddhist nun from the Tibetan tradition by the name of Tenzin Palmo.
- And she writes, if we act out of the root of anger, we will experience more anger in return.
- The Buddha himself said, hatred doesn't cease by hatred. Hatred can only cease by love or by no hatred.
- All anger, no matter how justified, how righteous, how holy it is, comes from the same source, which
- is antipathy, aversion, or hatred. Whether it expresses itself in violence or nonviolence, it's still
- anger. And so, however it justified, it will never bring about circumstances leading to peace
- love, and reconciliation. How can it? Thank you. Good evening, Mr. Pitchford. Welcome to Bloomington.
- Glad to have you here. It's very interesting to hear from you. In your list of Indiana terrorists, I
- think you omitted a few people. And it's significant the pattern
- I think that in the number of names that you mentioned, the pattern was established. I'd like to mention
- a few homegrown terrorists here. One of the worst was Admiral Poindexter. So I don't think they were
- from here, but, you know, Oliver North and General Singlaub go along with this.
- They were considerably more serious a threat to this country than any of the people you mentioned. So
- I don't know if you take an oath in the FBI to defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign
- and domestic. I did when I was okay. We got to watch out for some of those domestic enemies. We're talking
- criminal activity where we go right before grand jury.
- Well, Bill Breeden was here tonight and he took the street sign that there was questionable legality
- of its placing in Odin, Indiana, which is both his hometown and Admiral Poindexter's hometown. So he
- took a street sign valued at $30 down because he was afraid that it might send the wrong message to
- the youth of the community.
- And they had a manhunt for him over this $30 sign. I guess they had 150 state troopers and helicopters
- in the air out looking for him. Now, what I'd like to say to you, if you have any connections within
- the agency or within the government, is would you please try to get that type of law enforcement against
- corporate polluter criminals?
- I don't know why you would think we don't go after corporate, you know, people. When they break the
- law, and there's a complaint made, it's investigated, and it goes before a grand jury, and they are
- convicted. What generally happens when you complain about an environmental crime, and I've,
- this guy is right. Right. Well, why don't you put that in the paper?
- We've been doing it. We've been doing it for years. If citizens file a complaint, it generally goes
- to a civil matter, and the guys in the suits sit down with the guys in the suits, and sometimes they're
- even settled on the golf course. So let's start talking about a little equal justice of the United States.
- I don't like Mr. Rosenbrough. I don't like Elf. I don't like this. OK, one bit.
- And, you know, but it's like the law enforcement agencies in our government is letting us down and,
- you know, take that oath seriously, protect us from both enemies, foreign and domestic, and protect
- us from the organized enemies as well as the anarchistic ones. I'd just like to make a comment.
- You know, a lot of people think that there's FBI agents everywhere to enforce every violation of every
- law. There's 8,000, well, maybe 10,000 now agents in the FBI. That's not very many agents to cover a
- whole country like this. We need support from the people. You're not getting, the FBI doesn't get that
- much support. That's why you have these arsons and the like, because people are too afraid to come forward.
- They don't want to testify. They don't want to be on jury duty.
- There's a lot of things that are just falling apart with people not being responsive to the problems
- in the community. The fact that you're showing up tonight is great, but you've got to take it the extra
- step. If you've got problems by any particular group, environmental, industrial group or whatever, you've
- got to find out what criminal violations there are involved and report them. Report them.
- I want to talk a little bit about the sorrow over the home that these people had. I know that it must
- have been a terrible thing to have happened that their home was burned. But I want to talk about a larger
- home that we all share. And this home has only been discussed really for a very short time
- recently it was discussed, maybe it was discussed and held in sacredness a long time ago. But just recently
- we've just decided that there's only one home for the human race in our planetary system. And that one
- home, that one home that has us all living here, that can take care of us all, animals, plants and humans
- is the earth. And that home has been violated. And that's what I'd like to say. I'd like to say we need
- to think about our home
- our home where we cannot go anyplace else. We can't go to Mars. Mars is not ready for us. It has no
- air to breathe. It has no water. It has no land. We can't go to Mars. So when our water is unfit to
- drink, when our land can't grow our food, when our air is unfit to breathe, we can't go anywhere but
- here. We have to start thinking about the violence that we are causing ourselves. I'm going to leave
- the animals and the other nations out right now, because to tell you the truth,
- We don't consider them. If we considered them, we would not be doing what we're doing. There is heavy
- extinctions going on right now. This is called a cataclysm, a cataclysm of extinctions. So we are causing
- great extinctions of animal species and plant species. They are not concerned to us, obviously. But
- we are concerned to ourselves. And the pollutants that we are putting into the air every day and into
- the soil and water every day are causing birth defects, causing sexual
- It's a deviancy. It's actual harm to the sexuality of the child. Breast cancers test
- testicular cancers, all kinds of horrible things are happening underneath our noses. You can't tell
- me that we are living longer lives. This whole thing has only started for 50 years. Maybe we are living
- longer lives in the short run, but we have to look seven generations into the future. We are not going
- to be living longer lives in the future if we continue on the path that we have undertaken. We are not
- stopping the pollutants. We are not stopping the chemicals. There are thousands of chemicals being added
- to our air, water, and soil daily.
- There are pollutants being added to our bodies daily. There are pollutants being added to our children's
- bodies. Our children are suffering from this. If we can't think about our children, why should we think
- about animals or plants? It's ridiculous. We need to think about the violence to our home. This is the
- only planet that is safe and comfortable for human beings. If we don't think about our planet,
- we will expire. If that's what we want to do,
- then we continue on the path that we are. I don't want to talk about Elf and their violence to a machine
- or to their violence to a home. I'm sorry for the people who have found a problem with that. Really,
- my heart does go out to them. But I'm concerned with the violence to our home, our mutual home, our
- home for all the creatures, the animals, the humans, the people, the children, the women, the men, everybody.
- We have to think about that, and we're not.
- My name is Sherry Sammis. I have been a lifelong resident of Bloomington. Hello, Mr. Pitchford. Have
- we been through it? You could look up our history for the last 30 years. We have been fighting Westinghouse
- and PCBs and golf courses and everything for decades. Anyway, we are not responsive. You were talking
- about how we are not responsive. We are not responsive because
- the government is not responsive to us, and many of us have felt like giving up. So I just wanted to
- make that point. The other thing I wanted to say is we all performed a great act of civil disobedience
- tonight by coming here. That's a great start. John Fernandez, our special ET, environmental terrorist,
- of the county,
- is not here tonight, did not want us to appear tonight. And I suggest we take this meeting from here
- on in and decide what we are going to do to change things. We are all here right now. We have some great
- minds. We have people who have put effort into this for 30 years. We're here. We're ready. Let's do it.
- I don't know anybody here, except a few people, and I don't care. I'm not afraid of speaking to all
- you. What I have to say is this. When we destroy something that was built by humans, then we're destroying
- nature because it's human's nature to build things. And it's also human's nature to destroy things.
- Destruction is the counterweight that levels out life. And you know, destruction is important.
- construction is important but whatever we do it's part of nature because what goes on in this earth
- that's nature and maybe somebody's watching us maybe it's God or maybe it's nobody at all but in any
- case you know whatever we do you know it's just gonna happen because that's nature we can't control
- what animals do we can't control what we do we're just doing it
- I just want to say, if indeed you are correct in your assumptions, I think we're a sorry state.
- Thank you. Well, I think the comments that were just made are well taken, because oft times people are
- told, get with the system, as Tim said, or get out of it. And there is no outside the system. This is
- a planet. We're all on it. And there is a truth.
- to the fact that what people do is part of human nature. And the kinds of responses, whether you agree
- with them or not, that ELF is making are natural responses to the type of aggressions that are being
- made against our very lives and against the things that are necessary for our children and our grandchildren
- to survive. And that's always been in the realm of what's considered self-defense.
- If a person defends their children or the right of their grandchildren to live, and somebody comes up
- and says, that's illegal. Oh, I think you broke a law protecting your child. Well, this country, so-called
- country, was founded on acts of breaking the law. Private property. Tea was dumped in the harbor. Ships
- were scuttled. The king's law
- was broken, broken, broken, broken, broken. And there were agencies at that time, just like the FBI,
- just like the police. These are good people staffing these agencies. They're trying to make a living.
- They're trying to feed their families. They don't really want to hurt anybody. They want to do good
- things. They find themselves caught. What do I do? We're trying to maintain order. We try to enforce
- the law. We try to protect people. Well, that's exactly what the people from ELF
- are also trying to do. Now, there's a big disagreement between the two over whether those means are
- appropriate. But I think we have reached a point of crisis. I don't like to see a child have nightmares,
- but I sure as hell would rather my child had a nightmare than to not have air or to not have water or
- to not have any other species surviving on the planet.
- something they're accustomed to. I think nature has to be protected. This is a basic urge and instinct.
- And there is such a thing as natural law, as well as the laws made by our God-forsaken legislators up
- in Indianapolis or in Washington, D.C. And I'd like to make one other point. This is addressed to all
- three of you.
- You know, when our country was founded, like I said, there were people like Patrick Henry. There were
- people like Thomas Jefferson that said we needed a revolution every 10 years, probably to keep the state
- from becoming too oppressive. If Lincoln, you mentioned Lincoln, Tim, were alive today, his children
- would all be taken away from him because if he didn't have electricity or if he raised them in a one-room
- house. So I appreciate that people ought to be upfront and they ought to take credit for what they do
- And if they did, and enough of us did that, that would have the most effect. But it's hard to blame
- people for not walking into the meat grinder. Yeah, and my question is, how do you recommend that people
- address the very issue of survivability of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren?
- By just saying, well, whatever the law is made, we protect it.
- These people that are breaking the law, we have to look farther than that, I think, don't we? And ask,
- are they doing something good or are they doing something bad? I'll make a comment. You know, I study
- government through political science and philosophy. And I understand there's a lot of philosophical
- points of view and noble
- issues brought to bear here. But, you know, when this country was formed and put together, they took
- into consideration the tyranny of kings and the tyranny of government. And we made this a government
- of the people, by the people, and for the people. And if you have a problem with your legislature not
- passing the right laws, you know, you've got to start telling people that you want so-and-so to vote
- a certain way or throw them out.
- And if you think there's a judge that's not ruling in behalf of a particular issue, you need to write
- him a letter. You need to have meetings like this and point out. If you think your postmaster is doing
- something, not delivering your mail properly or taking your little birthday cards that are in there
- and doing something, do a petition in your neighborhood to the postmaster. Have that post, that letter
- carrier removed. If you think your public servants are not doing their job to your satisfaction,
- You've got to do something to it. You don't go out and burn down a house and then... There's a lot of
- things you can do. I mean, there's a lot of things you can do. And I'm not saying, you know, breaking
- the law is what you ought to do. I'm just saying you ought to consider all the options before you burn
- down a house. I would just add to that. Well, what if all the other options are exhausted and have been
- exhausted for years?
- I mean, who's saying that? I am. Well, then people in Marion County Jail have the same perception. They're
- all criminals. I mean, they all did something that took them beyond the brink, too. So was Rosa Parks,
- Martin Luther King, the four students at Greensboro, North Carolina, were they all criminals, too, then?
- Oh, give me a break. I'd like to go back to the suggestion that we have been fairly
- complacent as a unit. I see a lot of energy here tonight, and I think that we are capable of real forms
- of civil action, civil agency that we perhaps have neglected, and that it would be I think we probably
- could get more done if we were willing not as, Mike, none of us want to walk into the meat grinder,
- walk under the bulldozer, walk into
- an arrest that was just going to lock us up for five years or something like that. But I think many
- of us here are willing, are going to be much more willing, going to be much more motivated if we can
- do things together. Those of us who have been arrested find it an enormously empowering event if you
- have a lot of friends there and if you believe in the cause and you've been well trained
- in the discipline of civil disobedience, the Gandhian form, much can be done. I don't think we have
- exhausted the means, but I do admire the courage that the kind of guerrilla activity that Elf undertakes.
- I don't think these clandestine acts are without courage. I don't think that's mere cowardice, but I
- think another kind of courage, another
- more creative kind of courage another more democratic kind of courage is still possible and i i i think
- uh... tonight's a good night and i wish we would also have some sort of way of getting lots of names
- together for future uh... uh... demonstrations when we have an issue and i think the fernandez administration
- is a good uh... uh... uh... uh... nodal point we'd appreciate it
- you'd let folks that haven't spoken yet come through first. We would appreciate it, just a courtesy.
- Well, no, I'm not looking for problems. We established we'd let everybody speak at least once before
- we started repeats. All I can do is ask.
- All I can do is ask if you'd be kind enough to wait until the other folks have spoken. All I can do
- is ask if you insist on talking.
- I would like everyone to be able to get back in line and speak as much as they want. What I have to
- say is that as I look around me, I don't see any black faces in this audience. That's not a coincidence.
- Jason, I lied. My friend Jason is here, and he's way in the back, and he's black as he can be. But just
- let me say, beautiful to me.
- When I began school here, now we're talking about violence that the state does to people and the context
- that we are living in and continue to live in. From the bottom to the top, our authorities have a history
- of forgetting the violence they participated in. When I began school, the blacks here were forced to
- attend Banneker Segregated School. The police force was used to keep them in
- Bucktown at night, black students were not allowed to live on campus, and blacks could only drink alcohol
- on election day when the politicians brought them whiskey. Now, all the time that this has been going
- on, and we're talking, our only law enforcement official here tonight is federal, all this time the
- feds have been busy. They've been implicated in the Kennedy murders. They've been implicated in the
- murder of Dr. King.
- His family thinks the FBI had something to do with the death of these people, the murder of Malcolm
- X, the men who would have been our president, the killing at Kent State, Jackson State, the Black Panthers,
- George Jackson gunned down in prison. There's a lot of murders that the state has committed, violence
- against people. Meanwhile, here at home, we're the new Native Americans,
- and we're being buried alive. Our most powerful citizen, Bobby Knight, can strangle local citizens who
- call him on racist speech and never face a public hearing over the matter because our local prosecutor
- won't do his job. And that same prosecutor can assault and pull a gun on an unarmed woman motorist in
- February, and that's not allowed in court either. So when we try to deal with problems about violence
- in our community, our courts are closed to us.
- And we may think that it's a victory that we've prevented a PCB-burning incinerator from being built
- here. But really, we've only been defeated halfway, because the cleanup's never begun, really, not for
- the citizens and not for the investigation of where things have been dumped. And if we think that Highway
- 69 is a victory, it's not. We staved off a defeat for a certain amount of time. We haven't been victorious here.
- We've had our ass kicked here for 30 years, and the politicians haven't listened to us a bit. And people
- that have tried to open up the election laws and make them more democratic, like Mike Andrews over here,
- ended up spending time in prison for it. So I've had my piece now. Thank you for listening.
- My name is Marty Crouch and I would like to get back to a few more practical, not that I don't have
- deep philosophical thoughts, but back to some practical implications of ELF type actions.
- what Mark was just saying about some of the previous actions that have been attributed to the FBI and
- some of the other activist movements, the AIM movement and the Judy Berry bombing and all those sorts
- of things. You know, when people live together after 20 or 30 years, they often start to look alike.
- And what I'm concerned about is that with the ELF style of tactics that
- the dance between the FBI and the ELF becomes such a close tango that the ELF starts to look too much
- like the FBI and also that it is too easily co-opted. And to be very specific, the tree spiking recently
- that I just heard was claimed by ELF
- was done on the morning of the roadless area hearings in Martinsville. And my first thought was that
- timing is too perfect. That had to be a saboteur. It couldn't have been an environmentalist. They aren't
- that stupid. And so the actions, the anonymous actions that are based on the arson and the tree spiking
- and so forth,
- and done in anonymous cells where you don't know who's doing it are so easily co-opted. Anybody who
- wants to give a bad name in the community or to disrupt, say, the credibility of the environmentalists
- at the roadless area hearing or to take the sense of unanimity from the golf course struggle and bust
- it apart into factions
- or get everybody mistrusting each other and wondering, well, is there an FBI plant in my group? And,
- you know, are they tapping my phone and all that kind of stuff? It's so easy to co-opt. How do you do
- those kinds of tactics and not become a look-alike with the FBI and also co-opted by the forces that
- you would not like to be co-opted by?
- start by saying the federal government of the United States of America murders people in cold blood
- every single day of the year. We're still bombing Iraq. The ELF, the Earth Liberation Front, does not
- cause violence towards people. I've already stated that. Second of all, he brought up a good point.
- How do I know? How do spokespeople know who is involved in the ELF or if there isn't even an ELF at all?
- It could be an company burning down their own structure for insurance reasons. It could be some agent
- provocateur who wants to sabotage a movement. And the truth of the matter is, it could be. They're anonymous.
- I don't know who they are. You folks don't know who they are. At least I don't know if you know who
- they are. What we can do as a society, what we can do as a movement, if you include yourself in the
- environmental movement,
- is to realize these actions are going to happen whether or not we like them, whether or not we agree
- with them or not. They're going to happen. What we can do as a movement is to realize they're going
- to happen and to think that now is our chance, now is our opportunity, now is our responsibility to
- deal with the aftermath of actions that have already happened. And I think the only way we can strengthen
- our movement is to not come out and publicly condemn these actions, thereby splitting a large line through
- the environmental movement
- which is usually what the work of the FBI is for, what is the true strengthening of our movement is
- to come out and embrace all different sorts of tactics because it's been a historical example that all
- different sorts of tactics are what makes social movement successful. By simply saying something does
- not make it true, the FBI
- is not involved in spiking trees. The FBI is involved in investigating people that burn down arsons,
- or burn down homes, commit arsons, and sabotage bulldozers, that bomb buildings, that kidnap people,
- that assassinate people, whether they be presidents, or whether they be Martin Luther King, or whether
- they be you or I. What about what?
- COINTELPRO was an intelligence program in the 60s. What about it? Well, we're here talking about another
- matter. You almost have to explain the 60s to talk about that. I'm not saying everything in COINTELPRO.
- I don't even know everything about COINTELPRO, but it was a program. It was a counterintelligence program
- that I know that certain letters were written to certain activists who were
- advocating violence. And I mean, I know about as much as probably you know, but I can't say that everything
- the FBI has done has been clinically perfect. But the FBI does not go out and commit arsons and murders.
- And if you say it, it doesn't make it so. And people are saying things like that. And all you're doing
- is sort of distancing yourself from any perception of legitimate
- government because you're saying the state. I mean that's what Marxists do. They talk about the state
- and that's because over there it is the state. You've got communist dictators running countries and
- so it is the state. Here it's the government of the people. You get to vote. It's capitalistic.
- So what else? What's the alternative?
- I just wanted to make, I think Craig has put his finger on, and Marty too, on a key issue that we all
- have to think seriously about. That is, how do we justify our ethical agency? And Craig, on behalf of
- ELF, is espousing what philosophers call a consequentialism, that somehow the fruits or the end does
- justify the activity. This is a tough issue.
- My own position is that even if the consequentialism, sorry, even if it were true that ELF activity
- were successful, I don't think success would be the ultimate ethical criterion. That's a very difficult
- issue. Sorry.
- I'd like to speak from my heart to Craig. I sort of wish we were doing it over a beer, but we won't
- get to. I'm a pacifist.
- I was a conscientious objector during Vietnam. I'm morally, ethically, and religiously a pacifist. I'm
- a member of this church. And I recommend pacifism highly. But aside from the moral issues, I think there's
- a strategic issue. And that is, we will never outviolence the establishment.
- We'll never out-violence the FBI, the US Army, the CIA, and all of these forces. When we seek and turn
- to violence, even if it's only directed against property, it certainly meets my definition of violence,
- even though it's directed only against property. We'll never beat them with violence. The great force
- of the 20th century
- The great invention was nonviolence, nonviolence in which the person from Thoreau through Gandhi and
- King and through today stands up and accepts responsibility for their conduct as a moral act, even alone,
- hopefully in the hundreds and thousands. That is, I believe, in this millennium, going to be the great lesson
- of the 20th century. I implore you, I implore you and those people you don't know, but who communicate
- with you to consider that a large bulk of what I, my perception of the activist community, of the ecological
- community does not want violence.
- as a part of what we do. And when you say, when we condemn you, we are causing the splinter, I think
- you may be the splinter that is keeping us from doing the kind of united actions that have
- the I think almost the only hope certainly infinitely more hope than any form of violence of reforming
- our culture to one that does not over consume and continuously destroy and overpopulate this planet
- I implore you to consider leading those who have advocated non and violence not against humans to abandon it
- Thank you so much. Thank you for your comments and I respect your position as a pacifist. I'll address
- your points in two different parts. The first of which, I've never advocated a direct action on its
- own by itself as a sole
- entity or tactic will change the world or change the way our injustices are in the world. What I do
- advocate is it being used as one tactic among many when a social movement has come to the point where
- it has exhausted other forms of peaceful social change. I also think that discussing pacifism, I too
- have been schooled
- I believe in what I consider the Gandhi and the Thoreau School of Pacifism. I studied that for a long
- time, put on workshops around the country on that philosophy. And I, for the most part, agree with it.
- The thing I don't agree with is the overall assumption that every single social movement out there that
- has gained success has done so through nonviolence on its own without the help of direct action as a
- use and a necessity. What we learn going up in our educational systems a lot of times are
- Once in a while we have had to break laws in this country to further social change. It hardly ever happens
- anymore, of course, but years ago we had a lot of things that went on and when it came time to conduct
- civil disobedience in the manner that you have spoke of and I just talked about briefly, then that was
- accepted and we're taught that that was a good thing. What we're not taught about in our schooling system,
- what we're not taught
- about on our mass media and our culture for the most part is the role direct action has had in social
- movements throughout history and is still going on in different parts of the world. So I respect your
- position. I do consider myself a nonviolent activist. Obviously I have a different definition of nonviolence
- than you do as it pertains to property. But that's the route I choose and that's why I'm a spokesperson
- for this organization.
- My name is Jeff Isaac. I do a lot of things around Bloomington. One of them is I teach political science
- at IU. This is a very complicated subject. I want to applaud Jim Hart for the nuance of his presentation.
- I want to make three points and I'll try to make them really quickly and be concise. The first point
- has to do with speaking for the earth.
- in Dr. Seuss's well-known book, The Lorax. The Lorax says he speaks for the trees. The question is,
- who is privileged to speak for the trees or to speak for the earth? I would submit no one is privileged
- to speak for the trees or for the earth. And I would simply submit that there is an extraordinary arrogance
- behind some of the rhetoric of the earth liberation front. Second point, the earth cannot be liberated.
- The earth can be properly used or it can be misused. The earth is currently being misused. It is being
- abused. But this statement, that the earth is being abused, is a human claim, a fallible claim, based
- on criteria that are not self-evident. Only we can redeem such a claim through discourse and through politics.
- We humans must attend to the abuses of the Earth by making serious arguments about ecology and public
- policy, by making political choices based on public opinions, by trying to organize people. What is
- striking about the rhetoric of the Earth Liberation Front, and I think it's evidenced in this presentation,
- is it is really anti-political. There's no serious effort to convince anybody of anything. You have
- a true believer, or maybe a small group of anonymous true believers, who claim they know what is right,
- And they say to you, they don't really care what public opinion thinks. Either you're with them or,
- or else you don't really matter. That is a profoundly anti-political stance. Third point, how should
- we make political choices and do politics? There is no method superior to democracy. We do not live
- in a fully democratic society. We live in a profoundly, profoundly constrained and imperfect and flawed society.
- But we do possess a broad array of civil and political rights. These rights are the hard-won results
- of serious mass movements for social change. The people who participated in these movements would not
- disparage these rights in the way that they've been implicitly disparaged in Craig Rozebrah's presentation.
- As citizens, we must exercise these rights to engage, to organize, and to mobilize others. We must work
- politically to convince others
- of the injustice of current arrangements and to effect change through the law, perhaps sometimes by
- breaking the law, but always in a self-limiting, serious, and civil disobedient way. What Bill Breeden
- said is true. There's serious politics going on here. It's politics that has confronted obstacles, that
- has experienced failures, and also successes.
- Lorax says they can speak for the trees. Well, if that's not OK, and we say that no one can speak for
- the trees, why is it that we have multinational corporations doing just that? They're speaking for the
- trees. They're speaking for the trees saying, our trees are of no value. We can cut them down simply
- to make a number of dollars for our back pocket. They're speaking for the trees in a negative way. Why
- is it so wrong for us to stand up for the trees in a positive way? Next point.
- Am I talking now? Second of all, the earth can be liberated. It can be liberated from human over exploitation
- and destruction, pure and simple. Third point, you say that these people and myself do not want to engage
- in the political process. Well, a lot of us are disillusioned with the political process because a lot
- of times in this pseudo-democracy, it does not work.
- and there are countless people in here who would agree with me. We've already testified to that. I came,
- I traveled all the way from Portland, Oregon to do just that, participate in a public forum which is
- a political process to try and educate people in this community along with a panel here on these issues
- that affect your community. I didn't come here to boast my own career. I don't get paid a cent for this.
- I came here because these issues are important and political, pure and simple.
- I just want to briefly come back to one point that I think keeps recurring, and it has to do in some
- ways with the tangled relationship of ethics and politics. And I think that the commitment to the political
- process, commitment to democracy in the present is necessary for bringing about an ideal form or a much
- ameliorated form of democracy in the future.
- But I also want to say that our agency, when we feel that the present laws are working against us, that
- our agency still has to be an ethical agency. And I don't think the basis of ethical agency can be belief
- in what succeeds. I think many forms of ethical agency would be regarded as unethical if they were foolhardy.
- if they were stupid and so forth and so on. But if it were true, if Craig is right, that violence or
- certain forms of guerrilla violence or certain forms of destruction of property
- or ELF's version of nonviolence were successful, I still think we can raise the issue of whether it's
- appropriate ethically. And I think that that's the issue we really haven't addressed. My voice is soft.
- I want to be sure I'm speaking so that I can be heard. Okay. I'll try. Can you hear at this volume?
- Okay. I'm reading because I am disabled by a chemical injury and I have some cognitive dysfunction.
- And so I put my words on paper to help me keep my thoughts straight for you. And I'm here. I'm here
- to ask the people of Bloomington to contact local government officials to stop raw sewage leaching into
- Cascades Park Creek.
- In this document, when I refer to a resident and a tenant, I'm speaking of myself. I wrote it in third
- person to help me keep my focus. A faulty septic sewer system has been leaching sewage into the ground
- for months on property owned by DGTL, Incorporated. Just yards away from a creek in Cascades Park, states
- a local resident. On June 12th,
- representatives of the Monroe County health department and Bloomington's office of housing and development,
- neighborhood development, the hand office responding to the residents complaint, inspected the site
- on June 13th, sewer trucks extracted waste from the septic holding tanks. This reduced the sewage stench
- on the property, but did not address the basic soundness of the septic system.
- For the next two weeks, the resident, who rents an apartment on the property, sought information and
- assistance in solving the sewage problem from the Monroe County Building Department, the Monroe County
- Health Department, Hand, City of Bloomington Utilities, the City Engineer, and the Mayor's office. These
- offices were unable to provide public records on the planning, permits, and inspections on the privately
- owned septic system, which consists of three holding tanks and two pumps.
- Waste from two apartment buildings is collected in two tanks and is pumped across a small creek to the
- third tank, where the second pump forces the waste uphill and across Clubhouse Road to join the city
- sewers. City Utility's computer map of the city sewer system shows a simpler system with one tank and
- one pump that flows straight from the apartments to a manhole on the south end of the property.
- On June 25th, two ground floor apartments on the property were flooded by liquid sewage, which soaked
- the carpets and filled the bathtubs, creating health hazard for the tenants. Two days later, the installation
- of a new clean-out access allowed the liquid sewage to drain from the tenants' tubs. This was never
- right, one of the owners was heard to remark. This person's name appears as a DGTL Inc. representative
- on the rental property registration form on file in the Hand Office,
- hand file number 6369. No rental occupancy permits are present in that file. I can only read as fast
- as I can. I won't be long. On June 26, the disabled resident who initiated the complaint to Monroe County
- Public Health
- submitted a detailed letter to the city engineer requesting access to public records regarding the septic
- sewer system and requesting that the premises be inspected as unsafe under Bloomington City Code 17.16.
- Since this flood of sewage, the tenant has given the letter to Mayor John Fernandez requesting his office's
- action. Whether or not the system was installed with proper permits and inspections, which public records
- will show when they are found, the smell of this place tells me
- that raw sewage has been leaking into the soil and groundwater since last October. The Boca Plumbing
- Code, which enforcement authorities are obligated to uphold, states in Section P120.1, all plumbing
- installations, regardless of type, which are unsanitary or which constitute a hazard to human life,
- health, or welfare, are hereby declared illegal and shall be abated by repair and rehabilitation or
- removal. This citizen asks the residents to help abate this public health risk
- and environmental contamination by contacting public officials and insisting that they act immediately.
- Thank you. This is for Craig, and it actually touches on a couple recent comments. Earlier you were
- talking about how the most effective way to be in the environmental movement is to combine the above
- ground legitimate forces with the guerrilla tactics.
- And my question is, since the golf course, which was a very unified effort, there has been a schism,
- I think, in the local environmental community among those who maybe agree with your tactics, some who
- don't agree, and some who are, quite frankly, struggling and muddling through the middle of it. So how
- do you concretely combine those forces to do that? And also, how do you form solidarity with people
- that you cannot identify, meaning
- for those environmentalists who are above ground and maybe do embrace your tactics, but if they can't
- identify you, how do they form a solidarity? That's a good question. This is not just an issue affecting
- the Bloomington area. This is affecting communities all around the country. There was a lot of what
- I would consider fallout after the Vale resorts incorporated were burned in Colorado in 1998.
- Instantly, you had groups that came out and publicly condemned the actions all the way from the national
- level down to the grassroots level. And in addition to that, you had smaller groups and some larger
- groups that also supported it and then a number of groups that just kind of were neutral on it.
- Instantly, and again, what the big groups and the small groups did that came out against it, they condemned
- it publicly. And again, as I stated before, that put a dividing line between the movement. And so in
- a lot of communities and the environmental movement itself as one big community, we stand divided a
- lot of time over the issue of tactics. What I think is the answer, because I acknowledge these tactics
- of direct action, they're going to go on regardless of how we feel about them.
- They're going to go on. Other people are going to commit them. Or maybe people in this room are going
- to commit them. We never know. But since they're going to go on, all we can do as a community is to
- realize that and to respond appropriately by realizing that if we don't come out and condemn, not that
- we have to condone the actions, but if we don't come out and publicly condemn, but merely state, I can
- understand why people would go to those lengths because the environmental movement is an environmental
- exploitation and destruction is at the state it is right now. People are going to those lengths to try
- and stop it. What that did was to say, well, my group never said it supported or didn't support it.
- What we said was people are upset and they did that action. That's what needs to happen from a public
- spokesperson stance, from PR firms, inside organizations. That's what needs to come out in communities.
- Just realizing that these incidents, these actions are going to go on and that we as a community can't
- let these actions
- divide our movement. This is one movement. It's going to be made up of a healthy variety of tactics.
- And we have to realize that and build upon it. I'd just say any criminal activity like arson is going
- to divide the community. You're talking about bringing together people who are of one mind in terms
- of the environment. You're assuming there's a lot of people who are just neutral in the community would not
- come to your side. I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but there is a larger community
- here in Bloomington, and that community does not want to live in fear. They don't want to have their
- neighbors exposed to vandalism at night, people coming around, starting fires. That kind of tactic divides
- communities, creates fear and suspicion. And when you have that and you condone it, you're just doomed
- as a community.
- Good evening. I have two brief questions for Professor Hart and Mr. Rosebraugh. The first is John Locke,
- English political philosopher of the 18th century, on whom many American political writings and ideas
- were founded, said that people were created with certain inalienable rights among them, life, liberty,
- and the right to own property. And I'm wondering if you accept that and if you do,
- how do you reconcile someone that's right then or supposed right to destroy my right to own property?
- And my second question is, I can see a clear historical chain or context for nonviolence from Dr. King
- all the way back to Thoreau, in many cases very clear quoting each other saying, I got this idea from,
- save Dr. King from Mahatma Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi from Leo Tolstoy, et cetera.
- Can you, for me, please put into context a little bit of the modern, I'm not even quite sure what to
- call you, because terrorist is, you know, probably offensive. But if you could do that for me, I would
- really appreciate it. Thanks. First of all, the issue of life, liberty, and excuse me. Yeah.
- the locking approach, the issue of property, to bear with him getting kind of tired. It's gone a long
- time. I obviously feel that people in this day and age, you know, they have a right to property. I have
- owned property. I have had severe economic damage done to my property. I know what it's like. I also
- feel that we have a responsibility, if we're going to be property owners, to not be greedy about it,
- not be selfish about it,
- and to do whatever it's going to take to ensure that our property is used sustainably in the sense that
- we're not destroying what everybody needs because just because we own a certain set of property, that
- doesn't mean that that property is not used by everybody. Trees in someone's property are virtually
- used by people all over the world. Waterways that may run through someone's property are used by people all over.
- You know, so just because we own a piece of property does not mean that we have the right to do whatever
- we want to with it. And naturally I applaud the people that are going to call those individuals on their
- actions that are unjust and polluting and destroying the lives of others, you know, and by others I
- naturally mean the natural environment, animals and humans that are involved in it. And as far as the
- second point to the question, if I understand it right, you want a timeline or some sort of traceable way to,
- to find the history of direct action. Is that what you're referring to? Direct action has been used
- for a long time. It continues to be used on various levels. There's violent direct action and nonviolent
- direct action. You still see more violent direct action in the form of uprising, such as the situation
- in Chiapas. It's armed self-defense or armed struggle. You still, going back years ago,
- We were taught a lot about Susan B. Anthony and the Suffragette Movement. What we weren't taught too
- much about were individuals like Alice Paul in the early 1900s that used severe civil disobedience and
- her colleagues that also used direct action to help gain further rights for women. Not only in the United
- States, but abroad in England. That went on to the Civil Rights Movement. There were not only people
- doing the famous lunch counter sit-ins and doing the famous sitting in the back of the bus or the front
- of the bus or everywhere they wanted to sit on the bus. There were actually people doing economic damage
- behind the scenes to different companies at the time, different individuals and entities that were engaged
- in what I consider the more modern slave practice that's going on at that time and to some extent still
- goes on to this date. You had in the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era,
- a lot of stuff going on then. You had groups that came out of there such as the Weather Underground
- that used more forms of direct action to try and bring down the capitalist state that, as I stated before,
- I feel is the main disease causing all these symptoms. This is not something new. The ELF did not start
- in the United States. It started abroad in England, and the ELF
- Basically, tactics were formed from looking at its sister organization, the Animal Liberation Front,
- which also started in England in the 1970s. The groups have been very successful. They've withstood
- years of pressure from authorities, and they are succeeding. In England, they are far ahead of us within,
- as far as I would argue, with a lot of these movements because of their use of direct action and because
- they started before us in using that direct action.
- say about rights, but it's late and it's been property assault. I'd say the ALF has been a failure.
- All they did was go out and attack a few hamburger stands. They had one woman had a good gift shop in
- Broad Ripple. The name of the gift shop was the Bear Gift Shop. She had her place totally terrorized.
- She had death threats at night. She had physical damage done to her property. She finally folded up
- and left town.
- Hurray for the ALF. I just think that it's a lot of people who get involved in those organizations that
- think they're doing heroic acts that create a lot of dysfunction in society. They create Ted Kaczynski's
- bombers, basically one-man vigilantes. So I totally disagree with the ALF and the ELF earth liberation
- philosophy.
- First of all, I'd just like to thank you all for coming tonight to have this discussion with us Some
- of you came further than others Craig. Thank you very much for coming I've enjoyed hearing your your
- views There's a lot of things I want to talk about I mean why we've worked very hard in this community
- for a number of things and for someone to tell us, you know to go through the normal channels and
- of the process, you know, to petition your government and to all that. You know, we've seen and I'm
- sure that our community is not unique in this way. I know it's not. We've seen constantly that the people
- speak and then the government does the opposite or does what, you know, we don't want them to do. It
- happens with the PCBs. They tried to make it happen with the golf course. We actually amazingly won
- that one so far. We'll see what happens with that.
- But with the I-69, they want to build a highway through our community. All the people continuously speak
- about it. They say, we don't want this. We don't want it. We don't want it. And then the mayor comes
- out and says, I'm in favor of it. So what are we supposed to do? I can definitely sympathize with the
- people who are doing these actions, because I have felt very frustrated myself. I have been working
- within the system for 10, no, eight years now.
- And I've been active, political. I've been doing forest activism. I've done other things. And you try
- your hardest. You organize with people. And you write letters. And you talk to your congresspeople.
- And you do everything. And you just see that it just does not work. And so I got fed up with the system.
- And I dropped out of college. And I moved to Oregon, where you're from, or where you're living anyways,
- and got involved with the Warner Creek blockade. And we actually stopped logging this pristine
- habitat area for the spotted owl for a year, and we were successful. And it was not because we continuously
- told the government to do something about it, but they did not. And we just maintained a constant presence
- there and forced them to reconsider what they were going to do. And so direct action does work. This
- forum is set up so that we can discuss different forms of direct action. Maybe not everyone agrees with
- what the ELF is doing, but
- at least they are bringing it to the public. I mean, it's, this would not be happening if someone hadn't
- burned the house down and screwed up the logging equipment. We wouldn't be having this discussion. We
- need to have these discussions in public. We need to be, people need to get active, you know, and it
- doesn't take, you don't have to do a million different things, but we need everyone to do a little bit
- at least. And there's so many people in our society that sit back, watch TV,
- watch the sports, and that's all they keep up with is what the batting average is of their favorite
- player. We need to seriously take into effect what we're thinking about in our lives. Do we want to
- build community? Do we want to have friends and people that we can feel safe in our community? Or do
- we want to be afraid of what some radical people are doing because they're so fed up with the system?
- And so thank you all for coming.
- People who are in line now will be the last people to speak. Thank you. Yes, sir. I had a couple of
- comments and a couple of questions, mostly for Craig. I am one of the 14 victims in the last couple
- of years. That was my logging equipment. I'm Perry Cruz down here in Morgan Monroe State Forestry. So
- a couple of things. It does be good to be able to see somebody, because I didn't see anybody. And I
- just want to make a couple of points.
- You might want to start some training classes. They cut the free online and let it all out into the
- atmosphere, dumped quite a bit of fuel on the ground around the place. And I don't think you got a whole
- lot to worry about with the FBI and the local police force, because we had fingerprints and shoe prints
- and a lot of that good stuff, and they didn't want any of that. So maybe you are on the same team,
- you know? Okay. And another thing you might want to rethink
- I had inland marine policies on all of it. And the insurance companies come down, they belly-ache, paid
- out $30,000, $40,000, fixed it all up. If you was around, you see me back out there a few days later,
- going at it again. And there's about 700 trees. Now, I don't want to be facetious, but they probably
- used a couple of those trees to make the paper we used here tonight. Okay? So that is one question for
- you. What about, do you use wood and paper?
- this organization, these people, you said you own a business, you have a house, that's one question.
- Do you use wood and paper? Do I use wood and paper? Yes, sir. The wood I try and use on paper, I try
- and use either recycled or made from sustainable resources such as hemp. Okay, so I've never seen a
- purist that didn't use wood and paper. We log, my family logs. It does me good that everybody that's
- protesting's holding a paper, okay? Come from a tree.
- It's a God-given natural resource. It is. Look around us at the wood. Beautiful, huh? We all have our
- own perspectives. Another question. Why did you come and get me? I would have thought maybe you'd went
- over there and got the State Force headquarters or something. They sold it to me. They did it. They
- took my money. And you come and got me. I'm the little guy. Well, number one, I think
- And again, I take issue with the point that people point their finger at me and say, why did you do
- this? I understand that. I understand. It's clear that I'm a spokesperson. All right. The first one
- I've seen. And I understand your concerns, and I applaud you for being here tonight. But I also look
- at your presence here tonight as a positive thing in the sense that you may not have been here tonight
- if you hadn't been targeted.
- and hopefully there's issues going on within your head, whether or not you're going to even think about
- the motives behind the actions or not. This brought you here tonight into this community forum. You're
- a member of this community, and you have things at stake in this community just like everybody else.
- You're using things in this community that other people need to survive. And I think you, along with
- everybody else, need to work together to try and figure out the best way possible to walk as lightly
- on the earth and ensure that we have a sustainable
- Earth for future generations. Okay. Maybe just one word about the fact that it is almost all this damage
- is usually passed on. We all paid. My insurance went up. All your insurance went up. A lot of times
- it is passed on to the consumer. Any comment on that? Then I will get down here. Any comment on your
- insurance costs? No. The fact that it is passed right on to all of us. We all pay it. I suffered $50,000
- worth of damage.
- It's all passed right on down to the consumer. Did your insurance rates go up at all after you suffered
- a $50,000 loss? Yes, they did. That's all my point. Thank you. I just mentioned the fact that he is
- one victim, and again he mentioned we're all victims because we have to pay the prices of higher security.
- He's got to pay the prices of higher security. He's got to be a little more careful now where he parts
- his equipment.
- Again, it's not a victimless crime. It is a crime that needs to be prosecuted. And if you've got a complaint
- with law enforcement for not being there to take the footprints and the fingerprints, they're in the
- phone book. You call your chief of police. You call your FBI. And you make a complaint. Or do you find
- the Earth Liberation in their phone book and call them? If you want them to respond, have them turn
- themselves in.
- Go to grand jury and let's get it hashed out to find out whether or not they are responsible enough
- to own up to these acts. I just have three questions and a brief comment. It seems ironic to me that
- some of the strongest supporters for treading on the earth lightly
- are the Apollo astronauts that went and circled the moon and landed on the moon, that looked from the
- moon back at the earth and saw how small and blue and precious that it was sitting in space. That's
- my comment. And the question, I have a question for each of you.
- Mr. Pitchford, my question to you is you have been telling us all evening that we should contact our
- congressman, our mayor, the authorities to basically, if we have a complaint or something, in order
- to get that taken care of, that, well, I'll just put it in these terms.
- if we're going to get the laws changed, say, through the Congress, do you have any idea how long that
- process takes? And my question to you, Mr. Hart, philosophically speaking, do you think that the American
- Revolution was a good idea? And my question to you, Mr. Rosenbrah, was do you see in the future
- a world political party along the lines of the Green Party, perhaps on a more radical, in more radical
- terms, since the Green Party seems to be losing steam in a lot of countries, or perhaps a reinvigorated
- Green Party worldwide since
- Capitalism seems to be spreading its fingers throughout the world. Do you see that happening? Thank
- you very much. You asked how long it might take to have hypothetical legislation change. My answer is
- somewhat of a question. Do you know the representative that you have in this district that sits up in
- Indianapolis?
- Do you know his phone number? Have you ever called him? It may only take five minutes to give him a
- call and for him to bring it up on the floor of the house. Have you ever called him? Well, in that case,
- maybe whatever change or suggestion you had is not something that he agrees with. I mean, could it be
- that maybe, you know,
- just because you think something should be changed, it shouldn't. I mean, there is government by the
- people. And, you know, what we see here is a certain percentage of people, but this isn't all the people.
- And when someone says the mayor doesn't agree with some particular thing, the mayor has to be elected
- by a lot of people. If one or two people don't particularly like what the mayor's doing, that doesn't
- mean, you know, that that's the right way to go. For crying out loud, the rest of the people have a say, too.
- It's getting late. The American Revolution, in one sense, hasn't happened yet. And it happened in a
- very limited way. The perspective of the Indians, women, indentured servants, so forth and
- so on, ecologically. That wasn't given in the American Revolution. That wasn't revolution for them.
- We all know that. Maybe we can talk about that later.
- The question of do I see a Green Party being successful in the coming future at all, is that correct?
- Not without a major change in our government and at least at minimum a change to actually making this
- country into an actual democracy where you have a government by the people and for the people, which
- is not what we have now.
- I'd just like to make a couple of points. One of them is that as far as changing the law, the Indiana
- legislature's response to 234,000 fish being killed in the White River this year was to pass a law which
- allowed the Clean Water Act to be, a community to be exempt from the Clean Water Act if it rained a
- tenth of an inch to be able to dump raw sewage out through combination sewer overflows.
- You know, it's no wonder your comments, Mr. Pitchford, ring hollow here because the Indiana legislature
- at least and the problems I described in Indiana when I first spoke are so total and they're so pervasive
- throughout the whole political institution. Secondly, on a little lighter note, I grew up in Bedford
- and went to school in Bloomington and of course my aunt disowned me because I became such a radical
- at that point. Bloomington does that to people.
- I wish you were all in Evansville because, you know, this is an amazing thing that happened here tonight
- in my eyes. Nothing like this could ever happen in the community of Evansville because you're supposed
- to have a monolithic opinion in Evansville. And if you go outside that monolith, you get ridiculed and
- bastardized at the media and privately and your economic destruction, personal economic destruction
- comes with that. And last, I'd like to say that
- You know, there's, yes, a lot of people have said that the ELF is not courageous action because it is
- anonymous. Well, Mr. Rosebra, you have inspired me with your courage to come and be open and address
- these issues. I am twice your age. I understand you're 27.
- I'm 53 and I have such total admiration for your courage and willingness to stand up for what you believe
- in and to become the conduit for a philosophy that is surely not going to be wildly popular. You have
- not only my admiration but my thanks.
- Mr. Pitchford, I wonder whether you or the people from your viewpoint believe that there is or could
- be such a thing as an Earth ethic. That would be something different from an ethic or some kind of view of
- a thing like private property. I became an environmentalist, really, when I read a Sand County Almanac
- by Aldo Leopold. And his point was that we have not come to an Earth ethic. And I don't believe we're
- still there.
- One reason I don't believe it is that even after people like, what's the woman who wrote about the ocean,
- or Silent Spring, Rachel. Rachel Carson was pilloried and attacked by corporations. And it seems to
- me that legislatively, everything that environmentalists have tried to do in this country has gradually
- or sometimes subtly and sometimes sneakily, been countermanded and cut off by the people in our Senate.
- And one more thing about talking to your own congressperson. If you knew my congressman person's
- environmental record, you wouldn't say that to me. His name is Dan Burton.
- Pardon? He's not mine. I don't know about him. Mine's bad enough. I want to ask one more question.
- I'm sorry. I want to ask about private property. Is it an ultimate legal reality, or is there a higher
- law? In other words, is there not just human law, but is there natural law?
- And my third question is, I'm not going to say why the American people don't vote, because they'll just
- say we're all lazy slobs. But why don't they give us discussion, even in this political situation right
- now, of questions about what everybody is talking about, sustainability on this earth. I don't hear
- it being brought up, and I think it's all our fault. Thanks for listening, unless you want to say something.
- I personally believe that there's a higher law, that's moral law, then there's natural law, then there's
- man-made law, and there is a duty of certain people who are tasked to uphold the law to enforce laws.
- To say that they are doing it without concern for ethics is not correct. Oftentimes there are
- cases where criminals are apprehended, they're given their rights, they're given all the benefits, they're
- taken before a grand jury, a jury, and they're given the benefit of defense. So just because these people
- are not, you know,
- let go and let free and let go on to commit arsons does not mean that there's a certain unethical aspect
- in law enforcement. I'm not sure if that's answering your question. You're assuming that there's a certain
- unethical aspect in law enforcement? Is that what you're trying to ask me? Sometimes private property
- rights, like say my personal freedom, doesn't mean I can do whatever I want with it.
- Any more than my freedom means I can do whatever I darn well. Please, that is not, there are responsibilities
- that go with these things. And if people take, well, I think there's such a thing as the commonwealth,
- the commonweal, which supersedes the private property of your being. Well, there are checks and balances
- within law enforcement, within the jurists, you know, the legislature, that you've got judges. So you've
- got checks and balances to make sure that there are
- ethical and proper methods of enforcing the law and adjudicating the law and rewriting the law in some
- cases. And yes, I fully agree that there has to be that process. I would just like to say I agree basically
- with the drift of your remarks. I think that the law books
- have been written with a little awareness. I was just reading a more medieval manual where the issue
- of the environment was for the most part hidden to the author. I also would like to say that in the
- issue that the law books also in terms of economics does not take account of what's called externalities.
- that there's nothing there about the real costs, the environmental costs. It's all based on the manifest
- profit and loss. And environmental issues are not really in the law books in terms of profit and loss.
- And economics has always been an enormous abstraction. But now with the intensified environmental
- consciousness, it looks utterly stupid when you start thinking of what the real costs are to the environment
- in terms of what counts as legal profit, a legitimate pursuit of economic rights, and so forth. It's
- a horrible abstraction.
- Many economists have been working on trying to get into the economic mindset, as well as into the legislative
- bodies, these other considerations. But it's been an extraordinary uphill battle. Well, good. I guess
- someone has to be last. And I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but I have not been inspired
- by Mr. Rose-Braw.
- And I've lived in San Francisco and Berkeley, so I have some understanding of political dissent, but
- I'm a little surprised at how everyone is against representative government. That's sort of the government
- we live under. And actually what you seem to be applauding is anarchy, because that's what this gentleman
- represents. If you don't like having elected officials who make decisions for you,
- which I can understand. I certainly vote against people. And by the way, I vote every time. If everyone
- here voted every time, you could elect people. It's true. This room probably exceeded the ballot count
- at the last primary. But if you don't like representative government making decisions for you, I don't
- know how you can like an anarchist.
- How can you possibly like a guy in a black shirt with matches in the dark burning down a house? Do you
- like that as a planning decision? That's stupid. That's not planning. That's anarchy. And the constant
- reference to civil disobedience and Mahatma Gandhi and the revolution totally forgets who these people
- were about. They stood up in front of their people and accepted punishment if it had to be doled out.
- You people hide in the dark. I don't think that's very proud or brave. Okay, I certainly don't think
- so. And even once, Mr. Rosebrough, you said that you were like the liberators of the Nazi prison camps.
- You said that. That says that my government is similar to Nazi Germany. I don't like that. I'm offended by that.
- And to carry your logic to the absurdity, what if one of your colleagues somewhere out there in the
- dark is offended by this very building? He's mad because whatever many years ago was built, he didn't
- want it developed. And tomorrow night, he burns this whole place down. That's the logic of your anarchy,
- one guy out there making a decision. I think that's absurd.
- Just a word on anarchism and anarchy. I think the word is, again, a term of opprobrium. I think democracy
- is inseparable from communitarian anarchism. I don't think you can have democracy unless it's a bottom-up
- movement. I think there are times when representation are necessary, but we must remember that if they are the
- modus vivendi of a government, we are basically forfeiting our own agency and our own hearts and minds
- and wills. When we establish a government that gives carte blanche to people to think and act on our behalf
- We have already given up democracy. Representative democracy is always a deficient form of democracy.
- It's an ad hoc solution to certain problems. That's why democracy requires smallness. That's why democracy
- requires what Gandhi called village anarchism. And that's the direction, I think the only direction
- we can move in if in fact we are going to be able to get outside the mega machine.
- We are not getting outside the mega machine when we leave these doors, these hallowed doors, and go
- on with our lifestyle as usual. We support the corporations in every aspect of our lives. In every aspect
- of our lives. That's why the corporations are so, so strong. We make them strong. And if we're going
- to get outside of it, we have to get together. We have to not trust in God as the dollar says. We have
- to trust as the blooming dollar says in each other.
- to make any final comments before we leave this evening. My only last comment that's directed towards
- the last individual was, the more we rely on popular media, mass media, to inform our own opinions for
- us, the less we are of a people. How does the opinion come to this individual that the people out conducting
- these actions are wearing black and anarchists?
- How does the individual come to the conclusion that myself sitting up here is an anarchist? Did I say
- that? Did I leave any sort of notion towards that? I don't think so. These are media stereotypes created
- by mass media and art society to place a negative stigma upon these actions and this organization, and
- I detest that. We are individuals, we have our own minds, and we can think.
- I just want to thank everybody for coming. I admire the longevity, endurance of your ends. I think that,
- but that's a necessary condition. I think of democracy that we have to wear our bottoms thin because
- there's no way of being democratic unless talking together. I'm sorry that it had to be set up in terms
- of a panel. I think that, but next time perhaps, and I hope there is a next time, we have a more distributed
- and a less centralized kind of discussion.
- If anybody has any information regarding who would be responsible for the crimes that were committed,
- either arsons or destruction to bulldozers and the like, please call your local police and the FBI and
- show that you are a concerned citizen. I want to check and see if Lisa Spector has anything she'd like
- to say here as we conclude.
- And I wanted to thank everybody for coming out and engaging in a respectful dialogue. This needs to
- continue. I'm pleased that neither the mayor
- tree spikes nor fire has separated our community so much that we can't still talk. And it's up to us
- to stay unified as a community. Nothing can separate us but ourselves. So we need to stay together.
- We need to keep working to protect our home in whatever ways we're comfortable with. Thank you so much
- for your bravery and speaking up and coming here to help our community come together. Thanks, Craig.