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.