All damage figures below are in
United States dollars. Some well-known acts of ecotage have included:
Circa 1969–1985; ecological activist
James F. Phillips, operating covertly under the codename "The Fox", carried out a series of ecotage actions and
subvertising campaigns against corporations that were polluting the
Fox River in
Illinois.
1998 – Arson of buildings at
Vail Mountain in the
United States by the
ELF (Earth Liberation Front).
December 25, 1999 – In
Monmouth, Oregon, fire destroys the main office of the Boise Cascade logging company costing over $1 million ($1.8 million in 2023 dollars).
ELF claims responsibility.
2001 – Members of the ELF were prosecuted for setting off a firebomb that caused $7 million in damages ($13 million in 2023 dollars) at the
University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture.[3]
2003 – On August 1, a 206-unit condominium being built in
San Diego, California was burnt down causing damage in excess of $20 million ($37 million in 2023 dollars). A 12-foot banner at the scene read "If you build it, we will burn it," signed, "The E.L.F.s are mad."
2003 – On August 22, arsonists associated with the
ELF attacked several car dealerships in east suburban
Los Angeles, burning down a warehouse and vandalizing over 100 vehicles, most of them
SUVs or
Hummers (chosen for their
notoriously poor fuel efficiency) and causing over $1 million in damage ($1.7 million in 2023 dollars).
In literature and popular culture
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."
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).[5]
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 mini series Think Like a Mountain is centred about ecotage aimed to protect first growth forests in the
Pacific Northwest.
Arridge, Alexander S. "Should We Blow Up a Pipeline?: Ecotage as Other-Defense." Environmental Ethics (2023).
Bondaroff, Teale Phelps. "Throwing a Wrench Into Things: The Strategy of Radical Environmentalism." Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 10.4 (2008), emphasis on Canada.
online
Diehm, Christian. "Ecotage, ecodefense, and deep ecology." The Trumpeter 27.2 (2011): 61-80
online, a Canadian perspective.
Plows, Alexandra, Derek Wall, and Brian Doherty. "Covert repertoires: Ecotage in the UK." Social Movement Studies 3.2 (2004): 199-219.
online
Ross, Derek G. "Monkeywrenching plain language: Ecodefense, ethics, and the technical communication of ecotage." IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 58.2 (2015): 154-175
online.
Sumner, David Thomas, and Lisa M. Weidman. "Eco-terrorism or Eco-tage: An argument for the proper frame." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.4 (2013): 855-876.
online
Vanderheiden, Steve. "Eco-terrorism or justified resistance? Radical environmentalism and the 'war on terror'." Politics & society 33.3 (2005): 425-447.
online
Wagner, Travis. "Reframing ecotage as ecoterrorism: News and the discourse of fear." Environmental Communication 2.1 (2008): 25-39.
External links
The dictionary definition of
ecotage at Wiktionary