In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior.
Across the world, informally organized groups claimed anonymous actions in the names of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts.
International networks grew out of these movements. Struggles emerged against superhighways, gold mines, luxury ski resorts, old-growth logging, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and animal testing facilities on several continents.
At the turn of the 21st century, U.S. federal authorities intensified repression against the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts and many other less militant environmental organizations. Their goal is to protect business interests against all those who would stop them from despoiling the environment, no matter the cost to life on earth…
This makes it more urgent than ever to defend what wildness remains, impose consequences for the most environmentally destructive activity, and defend those who take risks to make the world hospitable for both human and nonhuman life.
If we do not want to spend the next century locked in ethno-nationalist, religious, and racial warfare, we have to foster new struggles against climate change and ecological destruction, we have to build mutual aid networks capable of surviving in disaster zones, and we have to resolutely defend everyone who fights for a world without cages.
Excerpted and summarized from “We Don’t Forget: Support Joseph Dibee, Environmentalist Accused of Sabotage” a statement from Crimethlnc., It’s Going Down, and a network of anti-fascist groups published in August 2018. crimethinc.com.