Ecoterror

This book scrutinizes the growth of the ‘eco-terrorism’ movement operating on a global scale, focusing on the main groups and their more radical offshoots, both historically and those currently active. These include Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. It critically examines how these groups form and how they have evolved, their key personnel, their strategies and tactics, principles, motivating philosophies and attitudes to violence. Specifically, the book seeks to understand whether such groups inevitably evolve from activists to militants to terrorists, as the literature suggests. Lastly, it considers the future of such groups, asking whether they will become more prominent as more people become ecologically aware and as global environmental conditions deteriorate, or whether such groups have peaked as a force for environmental change.

Provides an overview of the issue of ecoterrorism, including history, terminology, biographical information on important figures in this field, and a complete annotated bibliography.

In recent years, the concept of environmental security has been adapted to include preparedness for acts of ecoterrorism. This latter term has now become synonymous with environmental terrorism where the perpetrator uses the environment as a weapon to harm an opponent. The intended outcome is usually large-scale deaths, severe damage to the environment, and instilling fear in the general population. This book explores various facets of ecoterrorism including the role of the state in pursuing and maintaining environmental security, a review of the concept of ecoterrorism, food security challenges and weaknesses, technological countermeasures to enable rapid detection or response, and existing pollution sources and hazards that may serve as targets for terrorist acts. In sum, this volume provides a useful overview for both the layperson and experienced researchers.

Conviction records of radical environmentalists! Detailed lists of sabotage against people and property! Names of the guilty groups-no punches pulled! EcoTerror author Ron Arnold has long challenged the assumptions and rhetoric of organized evironmentalism. In this extensively documented book he now exposes and entire underground movement of violence to save nature. The Unabomer used radical environmental publications to target his last two victims, Thomas Mosser and Gil Murray. The vicious Animal Liberation Front maintains a World Wide Web site that brags over 600 crimes committed in the name of 'animal rights'. Earth Firsters use a tactic called 'decoupling' to hide their involvement in 'monkeywrenching'- sabotage against essential production. Protest demonstrations against logging in the Pacific Northwest cost the taxpayer over $1million a year in emergency law enforcement. The overwhelming majority of the victims attacked by ecoterrorists are small family companies, not big corporations. Big-money foundations give millions to smear anyone who stands up to expose ecoterrorists and the moral bankruptcy of big eco-groups. Mainstream environmentalists incite underground violence to save nature by promoting hate against industrialized civilization rather than offering respect for its benefits and practical solutions for its problems.

Informed by both critical animal studies and critical terrorism studies, John Sorenson analyzes ecoterrorism as a social construction. He examines how corporations that profit from animal exploitation fund and produce propaganda to portray the compassionate goals and nonviolent practices of animal activists as outlandish, anti-human campaigns that operate by violent means not only to destroy Western civilization but also to create actual genocide. The idea of concern for others is itself a dangerous one, and capitalism works by keeping people focused on individual interests and discouraging compassion and commitment to others.

Ecohorror represents human fears about the natural world—killer plants and animals, catastrophic weather events, and disquieting encounters with the nonhuman. Its portrayals of animals, the environment, and even scientists build on popular conceptions of zoology, ecology, and the scientific process. As such, ecohorror is a genre uniquely situated to address life, art, and the dangers of scientific knowledge in the Anthropocene. Featuring new readings of the genre, Fear and Nature brings ecohorror texts and theories into conversation with other critical discourses. The chapters cover a variety of media forms, from literature and short fiction to manga, poetry, television, and film. The chronological range is equally varied, beginning in the nineteenth century with the work of Edgar Allan Poe and finishing in the twenty-first with Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro. This range highlights the significance of ecohorror as a mode. In their analyses, the contributors make explicit connections across chapters, question the limits of the genre, and address the ways in which our fears about nature intersect with those we hold about the racial, animal, and bodily “other.” A foundational text, this volume will appeal to specialists in horror studies, Gothic studies, the environmental humanities, and ecocriticism. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Kristen Angierski, Bridgitte Barclay, Marisol Cortez, Chelsea Davis, Joseph K. Heumann, Dawn Keetley, Ashley Kniss, Robin L. Murray, Brittany R. Roberts, Sharon Sharp, and Keri Stevenson.

When a murder suspect's body is found frozen in the ice of a remote mountain creek, the subsequent investigation poses unsettling questions about how a promising young woman from a loving family could engage in acts of killing and ecoterrorism. Reprint.