Hella Nation - Evan Wright [38]
“It’s beautiful to be free at your age,” says the man with frizzy hair.
“It sucks, dude,” counters the homeless thirteen-year-old.
Across the street a police cruiser crawls past at walking speed. Wingnut eyes it grimly. He is no stranger to run-ins with the local cops. “Some are rednecks,” he says. “Some are ex-LAPD. Most are just boneheads who got the ball taken away from them when they were a kid.”
His concerns right now revolve around federal law enforcement. Wingnut believes that because of the publicity surrounding the WTO riots, the FBI has begun watching him and his fellow anarchists from Eugene. He has decided to leave town with two other anarchists, a girl who goes by the name of “Siren” and a young man who calls himself “Panic.” All of the anarchists choose noms de révolution, in part because they sound cool, but also because it makes it more difficult for authorities to track them. Wingnut says he has gone by a variety of names: “Critter,” “Pine Cone,” “Swamp,” “Scrotum.” Not even his friends know his real name. He and Siren and Panic will share a car down to Los Angeles. Wingnut hopes to hook up with some animal rights activists down there and disappear with them into the desert. “After the new year, there will be no more Wingnut,” he says. “You can’t fight a revolution from jail.”
IN SEPTEMBER 1999, the Portland Oregonian published a series of articles on ecoterrorism that identified one hundred significant acts of destruction in the West since 1980 that were linked to environmental saboteurs. One-third of these occurred in the past four years, notably the pipe bombing of a Utah fur-breeder-supply company in 1997; the Vail, Colorado, lodge burnings in 1998 tied to the Earth Liberation Front; and the partial destruction of an Orange County, California, animal-testing lab in 1999 by the Animal Liberation Front. While not all activists connected to the radical wing of the eco movement identify themselves as anarchists, their methodologies are comparable, in particular the lack of hierarchy and use of autonomous cells to conduct direct action. “Anarchists have created a leaderless resistance movement,” says Bryan Denson, a coauthor of the Oregonian series. “It’s not a unified movement in the traditional sense. It’s a polka-dot thing that’s not easily tied together.”
“Anarchism among those resisting the dominant paradigms in American society has been on the uptick in the last decade,” says University of Oregon sociology professor Michael Dreiling. Anarchism, which was associated with the radical fringe of the American labor movement in the nineteenth century, largely faded by the time of World War II. But according to Dreiling, in the past fifteen years the theory of anarchism—both as a means and an end—has grown in popularity among forest activists in the West, anti-racism movements in the Northeast and Midwest, and in labor movements increasingly disenfranchised by the waning power of unions.
The current movement is loosely organized in a series of co-op houses in a dozen cities in the country. Anarchists are active in antihunger programs like Food Not Bombs. They have lent support to labor strikes. “They avoid traditional employment,” says Dreiling. “They avoid using money. It’s a movement that’s difficult to categorize or quantify. Anarchist tactics are based on direct action—the destruction of property—carried out by small