A Cure for What Jails Ya: An interview with jailed "eco-terrorist" Jeffrey Luers

http://grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/04/dicum

A Cure for What Jails Ya
An interview with jailed "eco-terrorist" Jeffrey Luers
By Gregory Dicum
04 May 2006

In 2000, 21-year-old Jeff Luers and an accomplice set fire to three pickup trucks at
a dealership in Eugene, Ore., to bring attention to gas-guzzlers' contribution to
global warming. They were promptly arrested. Luers, who refused to plea bargain, was
sentenced to 22 years, eight months in prison. It is the longest term ever handed
down for environmentally motivated sabotage in America -- and far longer than
sentences given to arsonists in Oregon who have destroyed more property and
endangered peoples' lives.

But Luers' sentence may be surpassed if any of the upcoming trials of 11 people
arrested in January for eco-motivated arson and vandalism yield convictions. Though
Luers' crime was minor by comparison, his case serves as a precedent: the fact that
one of those arrested, Daniel McGowan, used to run a website for Luers was raised in
an attempt to deny McGowan bail.

Because Luers is already in prison and knows he is under total surveillance, he is
willing to speak his mind on eco-sabotage as few others are. He regularly issues
communiqu?s from prison through a website maintained by outside supporters, and
co-published Heartcheck in 2005, a prison zine that sounds a call for unflinchingly
hands-on eco-revolution.

But Luers' ability to communicate more widely with the outside world has been
hampered by the authorities. He has been classified as a member of a "security
threat group" -- a measure designed to disrupt gangs, but applied in Luers' case to
his anarchist and environmental affiliations. Restrictions on his communications
have frustrated many reporters, but Grist was able to interview Luers over the phone
from Oregon State Penitentiary -- the first interview he's given in nearly a year.

How do the latest arrests change the landscape for radical action?

This is pretty much the make-or-break point for the radical ecological movement in
this country. A lot of people are scared and intimidated right now. They're either
going to fall apart, or they're going to come together and show that, no matter how
many arrests are made or how hard the government tries to crack down on dissent, the
people aren't going to be quiet. That's what people need to do: whether or not they
support radical action, they can't be intimidated into silence.

Did your conviction serve as the deterrent it was apparently intended to be?

Unfortunately, yeah, I think it has -- particularly in the local community that I
got arrested out of. There's been a noticeable decline in underground activities,
and part of that is the harsh sentence I received. But I think part of that is also
the fact that we had a lot of people who put their hopes into easy solutions. It
looked like it was going to work for a while: there was a huge galvanization of the
public after [the WTO protests] in Seattle in '99. But the actions stopped. There
was a lot of pressure from the police forces on separating unions and radical
activists, and everything just kind of collapsed.

Coming out of that period, "eco-terrorism" was identified by the federal government
as one of the biggest threats to the nation, right alongside things like al Qaeda.
Did you consider yourself engaged in terrorism when you burned those trucks?

If someone believes I'm a terrorist, I don't think there's anything I'm going to say
that's going to change their mind. When you look at the use of the word today,
"terrorism" is basically a way to define armed struggles you disagree with.

What is it that you are struggling for?

The biggest thing I'm trying to achieve is a change in social conscience. Our
society operates under an extreme capitalist system that is completely
unsustainable. You can't take a limited amount of resources and exploit it
infinitely and expect it to continue to yield the same results year after year.

I think we're finally starting to realize that: we've got climate change, our oil's
starting to run out, our forests are disappearing. But the thing that bothers me is
that technologies exist to create a greener lifestyle and they're not being
implemented. In part it's because big companies don't see a profit in them, but it's
also because consumers don't demand it.

When I think about the people who are out there sitting in their SUVs and sitting in
front of their TVs and just consuming, consuming, consuming, it seems to me that
most of them aren't doing it because they are evil and trying to consciously destroy
the earth. It's just that they're not thinking about how they're living.

Though they may share some of your goals, a lot of environmentalists are committed
to nonviolent change, and would certainly disagree with your tactics. What do you
think of their tactics?

We need groups like the Sierra Club; we need people who believe in support and
reform. But at the same time, I think that we need people like me who are willing
and able to get our hands dirty.

Any individual that cares enough to act knows whether or not they can take that
extra step. Everyone has a level of commitment they can make, whether that's taking
more mass transit, or riding your bike one day a week, or not using a vehicle at
all. You can organize a boycott of the biggest local polluter. If you're already an
activist, you can up the scale of what you're doing and get more involved in civil
disobedience. Or you can go with other, extralegal activities.

And that, of course, is the route that landed you in prison.

That is the route that landed me in prison. So I advise people to use caution.

Was the truck-burning action you were convicted for the most extreme thing you'd done?

Yeah, I'd say it was. I was trying to move into the realm of more radical actions.
This was one that I felt was not only symbolic in nature but allowed me to take that
baby step. I was working toward being more of an underground guerilla activist.

Did you consider yourself a member of the Earth Liberation Front?

No. It might just be my political ideology, but I have a hard time identifying with
any organization. While I strongly support what the ELF does, and I definitely can
identify with their tactics and reasons why they use them, any person in the United
States who claims ELF in any action automatically opens themselves up to
investigation by the FBI.

As we've seen recently, the bar isn't even that high: people are being investigated
based on what they eat or drive, for example. Because a lot of mainstream
environmentalists share overarching goals with people like you, isn't there a danger
that these acts of eco-sabotage are just giving mainstream environmentalism a bad
name?

No. When you've got groups like ELF out there burning things down, it makes
aboveground activism look tame. Because of that, the general public knows it's
asinine when Greenpeace gets charged with piracy for boarding a ship and hanging a
banner.

In Heartcheck, you write things like, "Smash it. Break it. Block it. Lock it down. I
don't care why you do it or how you do it but stop it. Get out there and stop it."
It sounds like you're not repentant.

I'm not. Social change is never a strictly peaceful thing. I simply don't think that
you're going to see any type of true social change in this country without a show of
force from the people, whether that comes in the form of millions of people marching
in the streets or in the form of a few thousand out there committing acts of
sabotage.

Political direct action today is following in the footsteps of the noble acts of
social rebellion for human liberation that have always occurred in this country:
things like the Boston Tea Party, the Underground Railroad, the Suffragettes, and
the civil-rights movement.

You write that many activists are "stuck in a stagnant cycle," and can't get
"outside the box of activism." What are you referring to?

In this country, protest is basically a relief valve for public stress. Great
examples of that now are the designated protest zones miles away from the actual
thing that people are protesting. It's built into the social equation now that if
you give people an outlet, they won't take things further and actually threaten the
status quo. So when I say, "thinking outside the box," I mean exactly that: if
you're doing something that the group you're protesting is actually allowing you to
do, then it's probably not very effective.

In the same zine, you also wrote "it's a beautiful thing to see the financial
district of a major city smashed to pieces." Of course we saw that in New York --
was that a beautiful thing?

That's a tough one. From a militant standpoint it's sad, but I'm not going to say
that it was entirely wrong. I have friends who witnessed 9/11 and I have friends
that lost family. I hate to see loss of life, period. And yet, I can understand how
the World Trade Center is a legitimate target in this country. The U.S. economy is a
trade economy, and when you're striking out and trying to cripple a country, you go
after what it is that makes that country operate.

Some eco-tage actions have been pretty major, and could conceivably kill people who
happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In your view, would that be
justifiable collateral damage?

If you're looking at actions like burning cars, then no, injuring someone is not
justifiable collateral damage. People are taking a lot of caution. We've seen
relatively few injuries in any of these types of actions, and those that have
occurred are generally the people committing the actions themselves. I don't think
that it's just a matter of time before a bystander is injured through property
destruction -- those groups have a track record of nearly four decades of
underground illegal direct action that's involved all kinds of sabotage, and we
haven't seen a single injury.

But then again, I wouldn't be opposed to physical violence against a human being if
it was necessary.

You're advocating violent social change, but your ultimate goal is to have a
peaceful, sustainable society. How can a violent path lead to peace?

It's hard. You know, I ain't gonna deny that. But I don't think that an entirely
passive resistance in this country could be successful. I don't think the government
would allow it, frankly -- it would be quashed through force of arms.

But if people are too dispirited to even keep doing the level of actions that you
mentioned in Eugene, how are they going to do something like band together and rise
up in armed struggle?

I don't know. That's why I write about it. If I had solutions, believe me, I would
have them all over the place whether people wanted to hear them or not. I don't. All
I know is that things are very, very wrong and I'm willing to work in a myriad of
ways to try to fix them.

My greatest success is in simply trying to inspire people. Out of all the people
that have read anything I've written or heard any interview I've done, maybe .001
percent have actually gotten involved in illegal direct action. But I've gotten a
lot of people to start recycling, or to write their representatives. And to me
that's huge. If I can get just a handful of people that never cared about anything
to suddenly care and want to do something no matter how small, then maybe they'll
get a handful of people to do the same thing. It has to start somewhere.

But couldn't you have accomplished just as much above ground instead of going to
jail? Do you think you would have had the same impact?

I don't really know, to be honest. I'm a militant, flat out. When I was 16, I
aspired to be a militant, as strange as that sounds. I enjoyed being a militant. I
enjoyed the civil disobedience that I did, probably in much the same way that people
who become soldiers enjoy what they do. I obviously didn't fill that niche very well
because I ended up in prison doing it, so perhaps there were better alternatives for
me.

When I did this I was a young kid, just turned 21. I went out, did a pretty small
little action and got hammered with 22 years. But I have continued to be passionate
about why I did what I did, and I think that resonates with people. People want to
root for the underdog, and I'm the underdog: the things that I'm struggling for are
so utopian they seem almost ridiculous. Yet people want a fraction of that idealism
in their lives.

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Gregory Dicum is the author of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air. He
writes a biweekly column for SFGate, the online edition of the San Francisco
Chronicle, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Mother Jones,
and others.
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