America’s Eco-Arsonists_ Inside the Earth Liberation Front _ HISTORY This Week

History This Week, April 20, 2004. I'm Alana Casanova Burgess. Lobo Ridge is a classic U.S. suburban subdivision of the early 2000s. 37 homes, upscale, the houses come with jacuzzi bathtubs. It's right next to a golf course. A 45-minute drive from downtown Seattle. The Lobo Ridge development is so new that the kids who've just moved in play on mounds of construction dirt where their front yards should be. The real estate agent for Lobo Ridge, Barry McGee, lives in one of the houses with his family. The neighborhood feels safe, secluded, until two of the houses go up in flames. Luckily, these houses are still empty. Barry was going to close on one of them next week. But now, woken up by firefighters at two in the morning, he's watching them burn. Only the concrete foundations will survive. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF, takes the lead on the investigation. They find that another house across the street was also supposed to burn, but the device didn't go off. Six soda bottles filled with gasoline attached to paper towel rolls stuffed with paper. A candle was used as a fuse. Who's responsible? Thirteen miles away, at another upscale subdivision, investigators find a note scrawled on a cardboard sign. Among other things, it reads, Urban sprawl has become a central issue in the struggle to protect the earth. Signed, the ELF. The Earth Liberation Front. The investigators know exactly what that is. The ELF has already been designated a domestic terrorist group, although they consider themselves environmental activists. Arson isn't new for them, although they usually target industrial facilities away from where people live. This arson in Lobo Ridge is something new. One newspaper writes, the ELF is, quote, moving out of the forests and into the streets. As far as the public record goes, nobody is ever caught for this crime. The ELF is notoriously difficult to pin down. Even if one of their members is arrested, they don't know anything about the activities of other cells or neighboring groups. They work anonymously, linked merely by mission, to target those who profit from what they see as environmental destruction and hit them where it hurts. Today, one man's journey into the Earth Liberation Front. What is it like to be an underground eco-activist, or according to some, eco-terrorist? And at a time when environmental stakes are at an all-time high, when it comes to protest, how far is too far? If you've seen the movie One Battle After Another, you'll remember that the main character is Pat Calhoun, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He's scrappy, crunchy, and he's part of this secret activist group called the French 75. They have code words and burner phones, they blow up buildings, and they're committing violence in the name of progressive activism. This story is a lot like that film, but instead of Pat Calhoun, we have someone named Kevin Tubbs. He grew up in a middle-class conservative family in the suburbs outside of Omaha, Nebraska in the 1970s. Kevin Tubbs is the main character of Matthew Wolfe's book, Fires in the Night. Dad was in the military, and he was one of those kids who was into punk music, and he was also into his high school ROTC. It was this funny mix of discipline and rebellion. Kevin was also a real animal lover. He grew up in a one-story yellow house full of stray dogs. They were treated like family members, and as a teenager, his neighbor owns a Siberian husky. Kevin notices that the neighbor treats the dog in a way that he really doesn't like. The husky was kept in this tiny little cage, and Kevin would see this dog just, you know, barking and miserable in this tiny little paddock. The dog was kept in a tiny 20-foot square pen behind the neighbor's trailer, and so Kevin takes action. One night, after everybody had gone to bed, he crept outside, crept over to the dog's cage, and let it out, and walked it across town to a friend's house, dropped the dog off, then walked home and got back in bed. Kevin didn't think much of what he'd done, but it planted a seed of sorts. He thought of it as just a simple moral instinct. The dog was upset, so Kevin freed him. Simple as that. As he gets older, Kevin starts reading underground animal rights journals. He learns about rats being butchered alive and monkeys screaming with electrodes implanted in their abdomens, all in the name of science. I thought, you know, why do we all agree that it's not okay to hurt a dog, but you can hurt these other kinds of animals? And, you know, why is it okay to hurt any animal? Why is it okay to eat animals? So he began to read more about animal rights and got fully into the movement. And by the time he was 18, he was a pretty hardcore activist. In college, he signs up for animal rights groups, and he participates in some of his first demonstrations. He got arrested a bunch. One time he got arrested for dressing up in a cow costume and running through the Iowan Cattlemen's Association, where they're having their annual convention. And he conscripted a friend to chase him in the cow costume with a meat cleaver. After college, Kevin gets an internship with PETA in Washington, D.C. He spends his time trying to flag down people on the National Mall to try and get them interested in various campaigns. He hands out pamphlets to tourists about how General Motors was using live pigs in crash tests. But this kind of activism is less than satisfying. After a while, he begins to feel like his efforts are kind of futile, like he's mostly ignored, he's not making a lot of traction. He later calls what he's doing theatrical resistance. And so he decides to go West, he packs up his things, gets into his car, along with his then-girlfriend and his Beagle Pit Bull mix Pujo, and heads to Eugene, Oregon. Why Eugene? In the 80s and 90s, it's the epicenter of the radical environmental movement in the United States, a lumber town where loggers are accused of going too far, deforesting land with trees hundreds of years old. When Kevin arrives in the early 90s, the city is a radical hotbed of hippies, activists, guerrilla gardeners, a panoply of the far left. Once settled, he starts as editor of Earth First, a radical environmental newsletter. They publish dispatches about activism and op-eds about environmental atrocities. And one day, Kevin, in between shifts at Earth First, decides to bring some food to a local soup kitchen. And his eye is drawn to this interesting-looking guy, a volunteer standing at the door. Jacob Ferguson looks like this kind of strange post-apocalyptic pirate. Jacob Ferguson. He's got dreadlocks. He's got a bunch of tattoos. He's got a pentagram tattooed on the crown of his head. Kevin is this, you know, sort of, for all his protesting, is still a kind of straight-laced, you know, sort of temperamentally conservative guy from the Midwest. And Jacob is this gutter punk. But they both really care deeply about environmentalism. And they become friends very quickly. They may look very different, but Kevin and Jacob become fast friends. They begin protesting together. And one of their first is at Warner Creek. In 1991, there's a mysterious fire in Willamette National Forest, just outside Eugene. It burns for two full weeks. 9,000 acres are destroyed. Some suspicion fell on the logging industry because there was this loophole in federal law that basically if there were chunks of forest that had been burned, it gave the logging industry the rights to cut down trees around it. There was a loophole to get access to some trees that would normally be off-limits. A five-year legal battle ensues for the rights to those trees. And in 1995, the environmentalists lose. Activists were totally incensed by this. So in order to physically defend the wilderness from logging, they basically set up a blockade on a logging road and prevented logging trucks from being able to enter the forest. They build the structure, an actual fort near Warner Creek, in the same area where that fire happened. Like it was like a fort with like a drawbridge and like turrets, and they came to stay. The Warner Creek occupation lasts almost a year. It gets cold out there. Like it was, there was snow and there was rain, but they stayed in this thing. And eventually, the government changes its stance. Warner Creek is saved. It worked. But as Kevin saw it, it just wasn't enough. It felt like even though the battle had been won, the war was being lost. A few months after the Warner Creek victory, Kevin gets a letter at the Earth First office. It's from an activist organization somewhere in the UK. A group calling itself the Earth Liberation Front, or the ELF. Kevin Tubbs is intrigued. This clearly isn't a typical protest group. This letter feels like a call to arms. He reads it again, and again, and again. What is the ELF? Kevin Tubbs had never heard of the Earth Liberation Front, but their letter is a jolt to the system. It outlines their entire strategy. ELF was formed with sabotage as like its main tactic. Sabotage was supposed to act as like kind of attacks on environmental destructors. They needed to pay a price for destroying the Earth, and that price would come in the form of having equipment and buildings destroyed. The ELF organizes itself in cells, anonymous even to each other, working under one loose banner. And, it appears, they want to spread to the United States. The letter compels Earth First readers to rise up, destroy anything that contributes to Earth's ruin. Start your own ELF cell. You too can participate in eco-sabotage and make polluters pay. For the most part, Kevin's activism had remained peaceful. So what he previously might not have felt comfortable doing, physically destroying property, now he feels like he has permission. He's frustrated enough that suddenly breaking the law maybe was the only thing that made sense. It's Christmas Eve, 1995, near a dairy plant in Eugene called Dutch Girl. This is a rough time for Kevin. His girlfriend had broken up with him and taken up with a folk singer. He was bicycling past this dairy, which he was, you know, ideologically against because Kevin was vegan. Dairies necessitate keeping cows in captivity. And as Kevin's been biking by the last few days, stewing about his breakup, an idea starts to take hold. On the night before Christmas, he comes back on his bicycle with two milk jugs packed with gas-soaked sponges. He went out and he made two very simple incendiary devices, but basically just designed to like make flames. He spray paints milk is murder on a nearby wall, stuffs the jugs into the wheel wells of two milk trucks, lights his fuses, gets back on his bike and rides away. He burns up the two milk trucks and never gets caught. I think it taught him a few things. I think it taught him that, you know, fire is a pretty good weapon of the week. Like it doesn't cost very much. And at the end of the day, the dairy industry had two less trucks than it did before. These tactics start to become a bit of a habit for Kevin, like the next year in 1996. This time Kevin's now best friend, Jacob Ferguson, shows up at Kevin's place, knocks on his door around 10 at night. Hey, can you give us a ride out to a ranger station out in Oak Ridge? Ranger stations host auctions for logging companies. So Kevin and Jacob and other activists would normally go to these spots to protest. So Kevin just said, all right, I'll drive. I'll leave it to them to do what they want to do. But I'm not going to ask any questions. They head to Willamette National Forest. Kevin serves as lookout, while Jacob and Jacob's girlfriend race towards the ranger station. They plant the same kind of incendiary devices Kevin had used to burn up those dairy trucks. As they run back to the car, Jacob sprinkles nails across the parking lot, hoping they would flatten the tires of any police vehicles that might come after them. It was all over the news. It was a federal building. So it was a big crime to burn it down. Kevin is a little shaken. This is by far the most extreme act he's ever been a part of. But when it comes down to it, arson works. It gets attention. And so he sort of doubles down on being a part of the ELF. He adopts a new identity. And code names are just one of the ELF's many tactics. They'd use code words, like they'd call incendiary devices burgers. They'd call arsons barbecues. They'd usually talk outside to avoid listening devices. They began to use what are called dead drop emails, where when group members would communicate with each other, instead of sending an email, which could theoretically be intercepted, they'd all just log into a common email account and read messages that had been left in the drafts folder. They used pay phones. They really tried to not talk to each other. They didn't want a record of calls between each other. Once he really commits to this new way of living, Kevin stops going to protests altogether. He stops working at Earth First. He has his dog, Pujo, sniffing out buildings to make sure no one's inside before they strike. Pujo would go around and do these recons all over the Pacific Northwest to try and figure out where the ELF cell might target next. Kevin learns about a local slaughterhouse, Caval West. It's a facility that processes horses. A federal program that was designed to save wild horses actually led to thousands being killed, then sent to Japan and Europe as meat. Their hides are used for clothing. It's a very violent, very bloody process. They would actually back up the pipes in the local town. It would be like blood would bubble out of people's bathtubs. Locals protest, but no dice. So Kevin sees his next target. He and Jacob make a plan. They scheme to recruit a bigger team than they usually work with. Caval West is a huge target. It's so huge, their usual devices won't work. They have to make something special, a mixture of gasoline and diesel. And cutting it with soap. They're very careful about selecting only vegan soap, not soap made from animal tallow. The soap allows the fuel to burn longer. It creates this kind of like chunky paste that kind of looks a little bit like soggy Lucky Charms, and they call it vegan jello. The team picks a night where no horses are actually at the facility. Kevin is, again, the driver. He drops off the ELF team, communicating over radio. He drives over to a local McDonald's to hide. Out in the field, the ELF saboteurs pour their vegan jello into the walls of the slaughterhouse. They set incendiary timers for 60 minutes. Except one goes off. The fire ignites. Panicking, the team yells abort and radios Kevin for a taxi pickup. As they speed away, a massive pillar of black smoke and flames rises behind them. It takes 40 firefighters and two million gallons of water to put it out. The Cavil West arson makes national news. But Kevin wants credit where credit is due. He pens a press release, the first for any ELF cell in North America. He wants to tell people why they did what they did and let the owners of the slaughterhouse know why they're being punished. It's important to let people know about what bad things people are doing and what's being done to fight it and hopefully inspire other people to form their own ELF cells. After Cavil West, Kevin and Jacob go on a spree. They try to free minks in Utah. They had this idea that they could go into this mink farm where all these poor minks were being killed and used to make like mink coats. They thought they could go in and they just opened the cages and the minks would, you know, run away. But they found that actually when they opened the cages, a lot of the minks needed some coaxing to try and get out of their cages. They were kind of comfortable there. Jacob, you know, would reach in, try and get these minks out. One of them bit him pretty hard. So it was a little bit of a thankless liberation there. Kevin and Jacob then try to free some horses from a corral in Burns, Oregon. But as the millennium draws near, Kevin starts to get concerned. And he's right to be. The FBI is carrying out a full-blown investigation of the ELF. They're starting to feel the heat. And yet, Kevin carries on. In the summer of 1999, Kevin and Jacob go down to Southern California. There are all these beagles being fitted with pacemakers at a medical lab. So they rescue the beagles, but one of them gets loose and goes running around and alarm goes off and they have to hightail it out of there. Kevin begins to wonder if he maybe isn't kind of living on borrowed time. Kevin again starts to wonder, are his days of freedom numbered? Is his luck about to run out? Is it time to leave the ELF? It's the early 2000s and a few years have passed since Kevin Tubbs' last ELF operation. He decided it was time to retire. He's still living in Eugene, but no longer has anything to do with the organization. After 9-11, the government really cracks down on anything that could be defined as terrorism, including ELF activities. Although they're still active. Those arsonists strike Lobo Ridge in April, 2004. But Kevin's life looks a lot different. He works as a manager at an adult store. He donates to NPR. He settles into a quieter lifestyle. But in the back of Kevin's mind, the worry of being caught for what he's done never goes away. He has this weird creeping suspicion that maybe the police are onto him, are still interested in him. Like he hears some, sometimes he'll hear late at night something that sounds like kind of like a radio squelch. And he checks his house for listening devices and he doesn't find anything. He just has this sense. It's nagging at him. And then someone walks into his adult store who he hasn't seen in years. Jacob Ferguson. Kevin was really happy to see him. Like he and Jacob had been super close. And so he was a little wary, but he was generally really happy to see his old friend who he really cared for. So they rekindle their friendship, their long lost brother energy. They hang out, smoke weed, watch the Chappelle show. As far as what they talk about, there's a rule in the ELF. You don't talk about anything you did, even to your closest comrade. But Jacob really wants to chat. I kept thinking about it as being a little bit like a soldier's story. When you have this really intense bonding experience with other people, like soldiers talk about getting very close with their comrades. And it's the same thing in the ELF. These two have so much history. Every so often he'd use some of the old code words that he and Jacob would use, like burgers or barbecues, to talk about some of these actions. As happy as he is about reconnecting with his old friend, Kevin still can't shake the feeling that he's being watched. So he decides to conduct an experiment. He remembered reading in an activist zine that if you get arrested for a crime, the court has to reveal all the investigations that are currently pending against you. So Kevin thought, huh, maybe I can figure out whether I'm actually being followed if I get arrested for shoplifting. So Kevin goes to a local Target. This is 2005, and Kevin goes to his local Target and picks out a Kanye West album and just kind of walks through the door and sets off the security alarm. But because Kevin's kind of a clean-cut white guy, the security guard just kind of waves him through. So Kevin goes back and picks up a whole case of Pepsi. And then walks through the door again. Same thing happens. Security alarm goes off, but the security guard just kind of waves him through. Kevin goes back a third time. And gets a whole vacuum cleaner and just walks through the door. And this time the security guard's like, wait, what the hell? And arrests him. He was, of course, completely wrong that the government has to tell you about any investigations. But even so, the charges are dropped. Around the same time, the winter of 2004, Kevin and Jacob exchange Christmas cards. Kevin, being security conscious as he is, doesn't even actually write in the Christmas card. He writes on a little post-it note that gets stuck inside the Christmas card. Basically says, like, you know, we love you. You're a member of our family. The idea that Jacob can read it and then can, you know, when he's done, he can throw out the post-it note. So there's nothing to link the two of them together. But instead... Jacob just turns over the card to the FBI. Jacob works out a deal where, effectively, in exchange for immunity from the crimes that he'd committed, he agrees to cooperate with the FBI. And the FBI, for more than a year, flies Jacob all around the country and arranges him to run into his former colleagues and say like, hey, you remember when we used to commit fire crimes? And get them talking about their time in the ELF as a way of implicating them. The rekindled friendship was a ruse. The whole time he and Kevin had been hanging out, chatting about the old days, Jacob was wearing a wire. And it was the FBI who got Kevin's target shoplifting charges dropped. On December 7th, 2005, FBI agents arrest Kevin while he's doing inventory at the adult store. They lead him back to a black SUV and hand him a leather book. Inside, photos of him and his associates, their whole ELF cell. The agents take Kevin back to his house to execute a search warrant. He pets Pujo's face one more time. It's his last day of freedom. He's sentenced to nearly 13 years in federal prison. Kevin never sees Jacob again. And it's really frustrating for Kevin, both because his dear friend, you know, betrayed him. And as Kevin tells it, like it's one thing to have somebody betray you. It's one thing. It's another thing to have them betray you and they never have to look you in the face again. After Kevin Tubbs serves his sentence, he goes back to his hometown, Omaha. His halfway house offers him two jobs. He can work at a chicken processing plant or at a slaughterhouse. Kevin talks his way out of that and spends his days driving an airport shuttle at a Marriott. Customers love Kevin. They ask him where in town they can get the best steak. He winces and suggests a place his dad used to love. In the parking lot of the Marriott, he meets a pack of stray cats living on a hillside. Kevin feeds them, names them, and they start to run up to his car when he parks near their little clan to visit. When Kevin Tubbs was indicted, along with 10 other ELF members in January 2006, the FBI holds a press conference. FBI Director Robert Mueller. Terrorism is terrorism, no matter what the motive. The FBI is committed to protecting Americans from crime and terrorism, including acts of domestic terrorism in the name of animal rights or the environment. Labeling the ELF as a terrorist organization had the effect of seemingly bringing an end to their kinds of tactics. You don't hear about people burning down slaughterhouses and ranger stations and suburban construction sites. It's harder to get away with crimes now. The federal government is in a mood to punish illegal protest. And as the ELF shows, doing this can cost you a lot. The climate crisis is only getting worse, and environmental activism does continue. But in recent years, state legislatures have gone out of their way to prevent any protest near what's deemed as critical infrastructure. Some states are making just trespassing on these sites a felony. In 2023, protesters attempted to block the construction of a police training center built in a cleared forest near Atlanta. Prosecutors filed domestic terrorism charges against many of these activists, who are now facing 35 years in prison if convicted. So, Matthew Wolfe says, he's not sure if we'll see an organization like the ELF or their tactics rise up again anytime soon. It's an open question for me about what resistance will look like over the next decade and what things people will try as things get scarier and more desperate. Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with The History Channel. To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweekathistory.com. Special thanks to our guest, Matthew Wolfe, author of Fires in the Night, The Earth Liberation Front, The FBI, and A Secret History of Eco-Sabotage. This episode was produced by Amy Padula and Ben Dickstein. It was sound designed by Tyler Morissette and hosted by me, Alana Casanova Burgess. For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein. From The History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lair and Liv Fidler. Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week.