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A new account of one of the most controversial chapters in U.S. environmental activism revisits a question that still hangs over the climate movement: What happens when people decide that polite protest is failing while the planet continues to burn?
At the center of the story is the 1998 arson attack at the Vail ski resort in Colorado, carried out by members of the Earth Liberation Front. The fire caused $12 million in damage and helped set off a yearslong FBI pursuit.
What happened?
In a review of Matthew Wolfe's new book Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage, The New Republic describes how the ELF emerged in the 1990s from increasingly militant strands of environmental activism.
In 1998, Chelsea Gerlach wrote an essay for Earth First! Journal called "Beyond Civil Disobedience," arguing that standard forms of protest were far too limited for the scale of environmental destruction. The review identifies Gerlach as the youngest member of the ELF.
The Vail attack followed soon after. Gerlach and another ELF member participated in the arson, which was aimed at stopping a resort expansion into 700 acres of old-growth forest in the White River National Forest.
Particularly after 9/11, the U.S. government came to view the ELF as a major domestic terror threat.
Wolfe writes that after the fire, the group, "once unheard of, was suddenly on the lips of every special agent in the Bureau."
The activists, however, said their targets were buildings and other property, not people.
The hunt went on for years. Most of the activists were eventually caught after founding member Jacob Ferguson started cooperating with the FBI and secretly recording his former allies.
Why does it matter?
The story is resurfacing at a time when climate anxiety is running high, and many people are increasingly angry that fossil fuel expansion and ecosystem destruction continue despite decades of warnings.
Wolfe does not romanticize the attack. The Vail fire was widely condemned, including by the Environmental Defense Fund, which called it "an outrage," and by Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, who called the activists "nitwits."
Still, the anger behind the action points to a sense that communities, forests, wildlife, and future generations are being forced to absorb mounting damage while powerful polluters face too little accountability.
Wolfe's broader question gets at the heart of that frustration: "What happens to faith in the law when the law permits cataclysm, when a system begets its own, slow destruction?"
What's being done?
The review argues that the most lasting environmental victories have come not from sabotage but from broad-based organizing. It points to the mass civil disobedience campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, which brought people to Washington, D.C., and ultimately helped force a major policy reversal.
Wolfe concludes that the ELF members were "uncomfortably prescient about our collective inability" to confront the crisis, even if their tactics failed to produce lasting change.
As William Rodgers, known as Avalon, liked to say, "Talk doesn't cook rice."
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