Earth Liberation Front

In 1998, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an extremist environmentalist group, perpetrated one of the costliest and most sophisticated acts of “ecotage”—economic sabotage in the name of the environment—in U.S. history, thereby becoming a primary focus of the FBI.

ELF was formed in Brighton, England, in 1992, when a few members of Earth First! became frustrated with that group's unwillingness to break the law to achieve its goals. Modeled after Britain's Animal Liberation Front (ALF), ELF is composed of autonomous, anonymous cells that engage in direct actions to cause economic hardship to businesses and institutions that they believe are destroying the environment. Like members of ALF, the members of ELF—who call themselves “elves”—take precautions against harming animals and humans during their actions. To date, they have not physically harmed anyone.

In November 1997, a communiqué announced the presence of ELF in North America, after an attack on the Bureau of Land Management wild horse corrals in Burns, Oregon, which ELF conducted in conjunction with ALF. Most of the group's early actions, however, were against logging activities, using “monkey wrenching” techniques, such as disabling heavy machinery used by loggers, borrowed from Earth First! The aim was to make cutting down trees unprofitable for lumber companies and, in later actions, targeted suburban sprawl, [Page 113]to make building luxury homes less lucrative for construction companies.

On October 18, 1998, in Vail, Colorado, ELF carried out its largest ever action, setting fire to five buildings and four ski lifts at a resort, causing more than $12 million in damage. The act of arson was committed against Vail Resorts, a large development company planning to expand operations into 2,000 acres of Rocky Mountain wilderness. This area is the habitat of the North American lynx, a threatened species. Mainstream environmentalists had protested the expansion since 1993, but, by 1998, clear-cutting had begun.

Craig Rosebraugh, the ELF spokesperson, later delivered an ELF statement that read, “This action is just a warning. We will be back if this greedy corporation continues to trespass into wild and unroaded areas.” He later stated that the Vail arson was not an act of terrorism but “an act of love.”

After Vail, some environmentalists claimed that the arson was actually a government attempt to discredit the environmental movement, especially as no members of ELF were ever arrested. Most ELF members had successfully evaded authorities, claiming the FBI “can't see them because they don't believe in elves.”

In January 2001, however, Frank Ambrose, an ELF member, was arrested in Indiana for timber-spiking more than 100 trees. In February, three New York teenagers associated with ELF pleaded guilty to setting a series of fires at home construction sites that encroached on farmland in Long Island. While the federal crackdown on all forms of ecoterrorism, beginning in the late 1990s, has affected ELF, individual cells remain active, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, perpetrating more than 50 major actions, usually including arson and significant property damage, each year.