Ecotage

Ecotage (/ˈikəˌtɑːʒ/ EE-kə-TAHZH), also called eco-sabotage or monkeywrenching, is sabotage carried out for environmental reasons. The term covers a wide range of direct-action tactics, including tree spiking, the disabling of construction or logging equipment, arson of buildings associated with environmentally damaging industries, deflation of tyres on sport utility vehicles, and the closing of valves on oil pipelines. Practitioners typically target property rather than people and have framed their actions as a form of defensive resistance against ecological destruction.

The word was popularised by Sam Love and David Obst in their 1972 anthology Ecotage!, which combined "ecology" and "sabotage". Although clandestine sabotage for environmental ends predates the term, ecotage entered the wider environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s through the writings of Edward Abbey, whose 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired the founding of the radical group Earth First! and the publication of Dave Foreman's 1985 field guide Ecodefense. From the 1990s onwards, ecotage in the United States was associated with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF), whose campaigns of arson became the focus of the Operation Backfire investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The classification of ecotage is contested. Governments and industry groups in the United States have frequently described it as a form of eco-terrorism, and convictions of ecotage participants have, in several cases, carried a terrorism enhancement at sentencing. Activists, academics and a number of legal scholars dispute this framing, arguing that property destruction without intent to harm people falls outside conventional definitions of terrorism. In the 2020s, the debate has been renewed by Andreas Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) and a corresponding wave of climate-related sabotage in Europe and North America.

Cases

"Stop Urban Sprawl" was spray-painted on this multimillion-dollar house to protest the development. Mansions in the United States are a frequent target by the ELF.

All damage figures below are in United States dollars. Some well-known acts of ecotage have included:

In their 1972 environmental-action book Ecotage!, Sam Love and David Obst claimed to have coined the word "ecotage" by combining "ecology" and "sabotage" to describe a "branch of tactical biology".

In fiction, the practice of ecotage was popularized in Edward Abbey's 1975 anarchistic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and its sequel Hayduke Lives! (1990). It has also been treated in other novels including Carl Hiaasen's Tourist Season (1986) and Sick Puppy (2000), Neal Stephenson's Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988), T. Coraghessan Boyle's A Friend of the Earth (2000), Dave Foreman's The Lobo Outback Funeral Home (2000), and Richard Melo's Jokerman 8 (2004). Radical depictions of environmental protection also inform major Native American novels including N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), James Welch's Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977).

Several books written specifically for children and young adults have also explored radical responses to environmental endangerment including Carl Hiaasen's Hoot! (2002), Flush (2005), and Scat (2009), Claire Dean's Girlwood (2008), S. Terrell French's Operation Redwood (2011), and Silas House and Neela Vaswani's Same Sun Here (2012).

Ecotage is mentioned in the Mars trilogy of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson as a means of protest shown by the Red political party. Typically, the "Reds" would destroy terraforming ventures in an effort to slow the terraforming of Mars.

The Concrete miniseries Think Like a Mountain is centred about ecotage aimed to protect first growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

Ecotage also informs movies such as Choke Canyon (1986) and On Deadly Ground (1994).

Academic literature

In a 2024 article in the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Dylan Manson tries to develop a just war inspired theory that could justify defensive activism and hence ecotage: "The conscientious defensive activist can only engage in permissible eco-sabotage when she acts with just cause as constrained by necessity, with proportionality, with a reasonable chance of success, and without putting life at excessive risk." Manson makes then a distinction between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric eco-tage and questions whether the real cases he brings meet or not the aforementioned moral criteria.

Thomas Young argued, in an article titled 'The Morality of Ecosabotage' published in the journal Environmental Values, that some arguments against ecosabotage cannot prove it always wrong and that there is some ground for a utilitarian justification of ecotage.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words". Dictionary.com. Retrieved March 6, 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 Vanderheiden, Steve (2005). "Eco-terrorism or Justified Resistance? Radical Environmentalism and the "War on Terror"". Politics & Society. 33 (3): 425–447. doi:10.1177/0032329205278462.
  3. ↑ Wagner, Travis (2008). "Reframing Ecotage as Ecoterrorism: News and the Discourse of Fear". Environmental Communication. 2 (1): 25–39. doi:10.1080/17524030801945617.
  4. ↑ Love, Sam; Obst, David (1972). Ecotage!. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 978-0671785727.
  5. ↑ Zakin, Susan (1993). Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement. Viking. ISBN 978-0670838172.
  6. ↑ Manes, Christopher (1990). Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization. Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0316545327.
  7. 1 2 Potter, Will (2011). Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege. City Lights Books. ISBN 978-0872865389.
  8. ↑ Sumner, David Thomas; Weidman, Lisa M. (2013). "Eco-terrorism or Eco-tage: An Argument for the Proper Frame". Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 20 (4): 855–876. doi:10.1093/isle/ist086.
  9. ↑ Malm, Andreas (2021). How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1839760259.
  10. ↑ Wild Greens Attack GE Potatoes, Genetic Engineering Network, March 11th 1999.
  11. ↑ Bernton, Hal (October 5, 2006). "Local News | Earth Liberation Front members plead guilty in 2001 firebombing | Seattle Times Newspaper". Seattletimes.nwsource.com. Retrieved 2010-09-01.
  12. 1 2 3 Manson, Dylan (2024-09-01). "Eco-sabotage as Defensive Activism". Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 27 (4): 505–522. doi:10.1007/s10677-024-10449-w. ISSN 1572-8447.
  13. ↑ "Southern District of Iowa | Arizona Woman Sentenced to Six Years in Prison for Conspiracy to Damage the Dakota Access Pipeline | United States Department of Justice". www.justice.gov. 2022-09-23. Retrieved 2025-06-05.
  14. ↑ Gayle, Damien (2023-08-07). "Activists drill holes in tyres of more than 60 SUVs at Exeter car dealership". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2025-05-22.
  15. ↑ Gayle, Damien. "As Europe criminalizes environmental protest, some activists turn to sabotage". Mother Jones. Retrieved 2025-05-22.
  16. ↑ Aitchison, David (2013-07-25). "Revolution as technē: place, space, and ecotage in the American radical novel". TRANS-. Revue de littérature générale et comparée (in French). 16 (16). doi:10.4000/trans.851. ISSN 1778-3887.
  17. ↑ Aitchison, David (2015-05-15). "Little Saboteurs, Puerile Politics: The Child, the Childlike, and the Principled Life in Carl Hiaasen's Ecotage Novels for Young Adults". Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 40 (2): 141–160. doi:10.1353/chq.2015.0018. ISSN 1553-1201. S2CID 142407527.
  18. ↑ Young, Thomas (2001). "The Morality of Ecosabotage". Environmental Values. 10 (3): 385–393. doi:10.3197/096327101129340886. ISSN 0963-2719.

Further reading