From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio, Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Earth Fire, Wind, Water, Heart, Go Planet, although you're gonna make an Earth Wind and Fire reference, but then you changed course midway and I was on board again. I'm not on board with earth Fire, but I love me some Captain Planet right right. This will be familiar to many many of our fellow listeners who were based in the US. Captain Planet was an animated series about these kids, these plucky young upstarts who wanted to save the world with the help of their superpowered friend, Captain Planet, the eponymous star of the show, Uh Captain Plants gonna come up a couple of times in today's episode. The topic of our show today has been on our minds for a while because the facts are written regardless of where you live, your country has probably at some point been ground zero for a serious environmental disaster. Oils bills, hurricanes, mass extinctions, forest fires, flooding, droughts, you name it, something has happened. And right now, at the time of this recording, people across the planet have tried to propose any number of solutions to these problems, and unfortunately, very few of these initiatives have met with great success, and the world continues to degrade at an unprecedented Paceum yeah, bummer. Indeed. I mean, you know, for some people, maybe in the crowd today, this means that drastic new tactics are needed. If you can't change the system from within the system, then the system itself becomes your enemy. So certain groups have decided to conspire to act outside of the law in service of what they see as a greater environmental good. And some folks will call these people heroes. Other folks, as we'll find, will call them terrorists. Here are the facts when before we talk about the concept of so called eco terrorism, we have to lay out some some depressing information. Uh, the kind of thing that has made me actively subscribe to the philosophy of optimistic nihilism. Uh, it doesn't matter who you vote for, doesn't matter what kind of music you like, what kind of food you eat, what kind of clothes you wear. The environment is screwed, I mean for all in dens and purposes. And you don't have to be like a super activists in this space, you know, some kind of hippie living in its treehouse to agree with that point. I mean, it's pretty clear, um that there are some very very very serious and in many cases irreversible problems with the environment. Well, yeah, we we learned. We did an episode not long ago, maybe actually it was years ago now, but he was about specifically that what the oil companies new when it came to climate change and the effects that their companies were having on that whole process. I mean, it's it's pretty much an accepted fact that humans have at least pushed forward the changing climate on Earth. Yeah. Absolutely, And a lot of the arguments attempting to debunk studies about that were paid by the corporations who were at least partially responsible. They knew, they very much knew, and they just decided they're Q four profits were you know, more important than their grandchildren or the people who come after the current generation. Mammy, climate change is accepted as a fact. Uh, the conspiracy is that people tried to cover it up. So today the real debates are the real like active debates in this sphere, are the extent of the damage, like you're alluding to, Matt, Like humans did something, how much did they do? And then secondly, what is to be done about this? And when do humans need to get off their collective keysters and do something. I mean, you have you know, international agreements and climate accords and you know, um emission standards and things like that. But you're right, even stuff like that is super politicized and often you know, a little bit toothless in terms of like how much accountability the nations that are part of those agreements actually have. M And we're not you know, this is not necessarily a hit piece on the authors of those declarations or the proponents or signatories of those agreements. You're right. Well, for many, many years, the problem of environmental degradation was a politically seen as a political opportunity. It was politicized. People who are out to make money. Consequences be damned were quite successful leveraging the problems of human psychology. Right, and now, now the idea of your opinion about environmentalism is inherently wrapped up in your concept of a tribe and your membership in a tribe. But the thing is, like, okay, So people who are fighting for conservation, at least in the US were often accused of being quote far left radicals or the you know, the accusation was they were unfairly attacking people who are just trying to earn a living, put food on the dinner table, etcetera, etcetera, whatever kind of political rhetoric was in vogue at the time. Dare dare you say attacking a whole part of the country, right, like Middle America, you know, it is under attack by far left radicals because they're trying to get rid of you know, um coal mining or you know, impose all of these draconian standards on all of these stuff that people just want to earn a living. I mean, And of course at some level there's truth to that, like in terms of people needing to earn a living, but at what cost? Right? Also, economy is a religion. So I'm just gonna keep saying that until somebody proves me wrong. But you guys are absolutely right. This this shift, this politicization is very interesting if you are a student of history, because a great many conservation movements in the US and abroad had fairly patrician, politically conservative roots, you know, like the aristocracy would preserve land for their own purposes usually, or think of Teddy Roosevelt was a huge proponent of conservation and vironmentalism, but he also liked to murder you know things a lot. True, true, he did, he did, uh, And right now a lot of large institutions are making tons of profit because people are not aware of this historical context. Right the conversation has evolved. Things weren't always this way, sort of similar to how the Democrats and Republicans so called of the like eighteen hundreds were way different than the people you see calling themselves that today. You have to look deeper into things to understand them. And regardless of where you find yourself on the political spectrum, arguments that politicized climate change are usually either I'll say it, take a shot, cartoonishly ignorant, or they are made in bad faith to mislead credulous people. You if you were listening and you're human being, you need the same things as all the people that you love or hate or don't know across the planet. You know, you gotta breathe, right, that's one of the things. You want to eat food, which means you need arable land or access to someone who has that. You also need clean water. It's cool to have shelter from the elements. These are like the base, this is day one stuff. As they said at work, allics and the and the problem is just too big for any one single institution to solve it on its own. There are too many players involved. You could call them stakeholders or whatever. But we're we're not just talking about the almost eight billion people who rely on the ecosystem to survive, which is you know, that's everyone. We're also talking about the institutions that these people have formed throughout history or will form in the future. Like um okay, I I hate that we have to say this, but we have to be fair, right, We talked about this in the world without plastic, they're huge private industries that you know, move billions and trillions of dollars depending on how you slice it. And if you flip a switch and you say, you know, like no more plastic more CEO two emissions or something like that. They are going to tank and they will drive millions of innocent people with them into the ground. Too much change too soon could be as dangerous has no change in the immediate future. If does that make sense? Oh? Absolutely, And we already we alluded to that earlier in the episode, just when talking about the whole problem in general of making one massive change. And the other thing to take into account here is that every country that exists has its own kind of economy that functions based on the resources and what's available within the land and sea that they own. Right, And if you try and make a sweeping change on every one of those countries and every one of those economies, let alone the global economy, uh, you're gonna have major problems. They're the same ones you just described, Ben, where one one company goes down or an industry goes down in a certain fishing you know area, let's say on the northeast coast of the United States or you know of North America. Um, you're gonna have major issues not only in that area, but then that's gonna affect the rest of the economy and the fishing economy anyway. It's a bad example, but it's it's a major problem. Well, and not only that, you have developing countries that are maybe just now starting to become you know, um economic superpowers are working their way up to it. And they're like, what about all that time that you spent polluting, you know, and getting to get up and running, and now you're saying that we have to cut back because of all the you know, greenhouse gases you put out, like over the years, when we weren't like, that's not fair, that's a that's a point I want to spend some time on in a second, in every like we're on the same page here, we might accidentally radicalize each other in this episode, folks, which is fine. So you so we've got the companies no matter if you love them, you hate them, you think they're necessary evil. Uh, it would be bad news if they all of a sudden had to flip a switch and stop. The economic consequences would be unprecedented. Those two almost two hundred un recognized countries, they've each got their own vibes, often contradictory goals. They're not going to be super great at cooperating. And then especially now to steal a line from Fox News. Now more than ever, you have incredibly wealthy individuals, each of whom also has their own agenda, and they are capable of affecting these conversations at every single step along the way. If you are listening to today's show, odds are you can't do a thing to stop any of those three um categories of ventity. You can try to make your voice heard, but the traditional channels, it's gonna be tough. Not everybody gets to be Greta Thunberg. You know, Uh, there's a prisoner's dilemma here at play as well. No one wants to get left behind. Logically, no one wants to commit to a decision or a policy that will leave them at a disadvantage. Very basically, why would you? You know, Like I was trying to think of some examples and I just came up with some hypothetical ones. So I was trying to think of like a really big corporation, and I just pulled Uni Lever out of Scullies cranium over there. And let's say you're let's say you're Noelan Matt and you are the heads of Uni Lever, and you know that a lot of let's Let's say you make a lot of stuff that uses palm oil, and you know that the palm oil industry is very damaging to the ecosystems in which it's harvested. But you also know that if you decide to get some good pr and say, okay, we're cutting out all palm oil products and we're an international corporation, so we're gonna make a splash with this, you know what's going to happen. If you do that, You're gonna lose billions of dollars pretty quickly, and worse, your competitors are going to move into that space lickety split. So the problem is going to continue and you just won't be making money off of it. That is what will happen. Yeah, it's like like Lego, for example, they're not going to stop using plastic, but they did make a gesture and saying they're gonna phase out plastic bags in their packaging. So it's like that's sort of the middle ground of pr opportunity there. Because your Lego, it's such a hit to your supply, you can't what are you gonna make it out of? Like seashells, Like, you know, you've got to figure something out, and that's a much more long term problem to figure out a material that they can actually integrate into their supply chain to replace plastics and oil based products. So instead they're like, well, we know that this problem, but we're lego. We gotta have your legos. So let's just you know, make the bags out of paper, you know. Or I think McDonald's even is like they're happy meal toys are not made of plastic anymore. They're made of paper, but they're also gonna still have plastic straws. Right, Yeah, there's I mean, it's it's true. It really is a pickle because these the folks are in charge of these decisions are trying to mitigate damage, but they're trying to mitigate it in a way that is sustainable for their enterprise, if not sustainable for the planet and the scale of time that that is one of the biggest complicating factors here. Let's say, okay, let's say your Paul Mission controlled decond you are the ruler of Let's give Paul Transylvania. It's like, okay, also love that he's the ruler. He's just the ruler of it, you know, with a with a very tasteful iron fist mission control rules Transylvania. And as the leader of this country, he knows that his nation depends upon certain industries that are damaging to the environment. Maybe it's mining, maybe it's oil and rare earth minerals, whatever. Maybe it's a mono agriculture in just exports one thing and that's what most of the arable land is used for. So uh, dear leader Paul Decans says, Okay, I could end these industries, and if I do, then Transylvania will play a role in making the world arguably a better place decades from now. I won't be around to see it. Instead, I will be the scapegoat. I will be public enemy number one. I'll be the guy who tanked to the economy and put the population in the poorhouse and out of work. That also is the calculus that a lot of world leaders use, and they're not wrong. Is the problem. So they're still mine asbestos and parts of Russia, you know, because there's that What does that whole town asked us, I believe something like that. That that is that's literally they're they're one industry um and everyone that's they're doing that job is okay with doing that job, so they keep putting it out. What else are you gonna do? You know? Uh, these are broad kind of aside from Russia, which is a real world example, these are broad hypothetical examples, but we guarantee you they are based in fact. And so now the question becomes the same old question. Everybody knows there's a problem, everybody knows something needs to be done. Can't we all just get along and agree on a solution? Record scratch, no, actually no, we cannot. We will not. As discussed earlier, many of the countries and entities that are driving these conversations about environmentalism and preservation, they're coming from a place of immense historical privilege. Like of course, and this is not a thing on our British or European friends in the audience today, but think about it. Of course, the U K. And Western Europe can get kind of high in my about the conversation around alternative energy because they're still sitting pretty off untold trillions of dollars of historical profits from the coal power of the industrial age, to slavery to colonialism, all the other sins of the past made them a lot of money and gave them a lot of influence and they still have it. So of course, if you're an up and coming country, um, you'll sometimes hear them referred to as the brick countries. It's a little bit of a misnomer, but it's an acronym that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China countries like on that level, of course, you're gonna be frustrated if some if some grand puba from the U N comes to you and says, Okay, yeah, I'll destroy the planet. Was all fine and dandy for us, but you guys are gonna need to find a different, more expensive route to our level of success. Funny voice, take a drink. Was that a funny voice or was it my real voice? So it's it's tough, it's tough, and people here valid concerns. Big change rarely happens overnight, unless you're talking about like POMPEII or another natural disaster. So, like you were talked about earlier, Matt, things have to be phased in out pretty slowly. This takes a huge level of commitment across administrations, across governments, across continents, across generations, and it requires this is even trickier thing. It requires everybody involved to imagine a future that, for better or worse, does not yet exist. We can just see the problems on the horizon. I think I've got to I even have a note in the outline, like, folks, we are past the tipping point. We are. I was talking with UM. We have a good friend of the show, very old friend of Noel's, named Matt Riddle, and Matt Riddle and I were talking about this recently. Um, maybe the best analogy for where human civilization and climate changes now is to say this and freestyling a little. But let's say you're still, for some reason driving that horrid Peugio Honda Odyssey hybrid we made up earlier, and you have careened off the road. You were at the point in a car accident where everything seems to slow down. You see the tree that you're going to hit. You are going to hit the tree. Now, it's just a question of how much time you have to put your seatbelt on, whether you have time to have an air bag or something like that. The car crash is coming, and that's a scary thing for people to think about. We don't want to think about it. But the statistics are all there. We've mentioned the multiple times in past episodes. Uh, like parts of the world are going to be uninhabitable without around the clock technology creating a more hospitable environment. And it's just true. I mean Tool predicted it in the song Anema, you know, I mean what decades ago. California Bay, Yeah, Arizona Bay, Yeah, Arizona Bay. But basically it's that whole, you know, pretty accepted idea that parts of California are going to fall into the ocean. And again this isn't fearmongering. I mean you can find multiple, i mean innumerable resources that that that show the stats heading in that direction. It's also probably why California is like ground zero for so much concern, you know, conservation environmentalist kind of activism, because they're like really at risk. Yeah, and that that event is further off in the future where California falls away because of kind of strong tectonic movements. But the stuff we are talking about is is very real, especially the ones where places will be underwater. And uh, the drought situation and desertification of places is going to continue pretty rapidly, very very second. Yeah, and it's just gonna get worse as time goes on. It's gonna happen in your lifetime if you're listening now, But what you should be even more concerned about will be your loved ones you continue after you. Real estate is going to become a much more dicey proposition, and countries like the Maldives, for instance, are probably going to be underwater pretty soon. Climate refugees are going to continue to flee from these sorts of these sorts of large scale changes. Uh, we're talking millions of people, hundreds of thousands, millions on the way to you. If you live in a place that will still be habitable, things are going to become increasingly expensive and then they're going to become unavailable. And that's something that I would pose it was a foreign concept to many people living in the United States until COVID shortages hit, Like I don't think a lot of folks in the US are aware that in a lot of other places in the world, you will run into situations where you stuff just isn't there. The grocery store shelves are empty, even if you have money. Not to mention resource wars, you know, on a larger scale that's already a thing that happens. Like there were water wars disputes, you know between I believe Georgia and Tennessee if I'm not mistaken, um that you know, and those are real problems in terms of like potable water and like who controls the resources, you know, I mean not to get to doom and gloom, but like think about how it was in mad Max Fury Road. That's like the most extreme version of that. But I mean water is it could be the most precious commodity of them all. Yeah, and right now we're seeing legal battles, you know, a lot of those situations, at least within the United States, but those will quickly turn into more intense situations, yes, hand to hand combat m h. And if you want to if you want to look at that going to the earlier idea of science fiction often becoming fact nonfiction, do check out a great collection of short stories called Pump six. One of those stories is about is a pretty plot possible scenario about the future of water and privatization. Or check out our episode on World War three, our episode on water Wars, our YouTube videos on it. The truth is out there, the facts are in These are not these are not conspiracies. But we're getting to the conspiracy. The big thing is conventional solutions, as we've outlined, don't work. We can fill ours debating them, their pros and cons They come in all sorts of forms. You'll see the glossy pr pledges from insert company here, Lego says this. McDonald says that you'll also see those non binding resolutions from international organizations, you and committees. You'll see any number of ted talks. You'll see sweeping declarations from billionaires like Bill Gates says we need to fix this or that or whatever. And to be clear, the vast majority of those proposed solutions are made in good faith and they're made by very intelligent people, but they fall shorter their goals and they fade from the headlines. It makes sense that they fade from the headlines because, let's face it, the little conspiracy realist most people don't like to think about the end of the world, especially if they feel like they've got a pretty good right now. They're also not sexy because they are long term solutions that you know, people want instant gratification. So it's like, you know, it's a lot to ask for people to like think about ten years down the line when they can have something yesterday, especially if you're only in office for four to eight years. But yeah, seriously, I would pause it. The biggest problem we face is that the solutions to these problems are not inherently profitable. Inherentbly profitable joke, dude, because I mean, who who pays you right now to clean carbon out of the ocean. They're they're you know, groups from colleges and companies that are attempting to you that kind of work and developed technologies for that. But who's gonna pay you outside of maybe a government grant because you know, the citizens are paying more taxes so that then it can happen. And it's just it's not it's not immediately appealing to anyone other than each individual's self preservation or the need for it. I mean maybe once they figure out how to turn that ocean cleaning stuff into like the spice melons or something, you know, But other than that, it's it's pretty dire. That's where you see more like neoliberal market based approaches. That's where that's why outfits like the economists are always so twitter painted about a carbon tax, you know what I mean? And is that is that a viable solution. Some people are convinced it is, other people are convinced it's not. But but we are living in the sixth Great mass extinction. For anybody who is looking for another example of a mass extinct, and think about why we don't have dinosaurs anymore, right, like we have things that survived from dinosaurs, chickens, it's etcetera. But you're not going to see a t rex until cloning goes, you know, cloning reaches and breakthroughs, or maybe you'll see an n f T t rex. Who knows. But the issue is, and I think about this a lot, and I wish more people would mention this. We are living in what is commonly called nowadays the anthroposine, right, so you know about like the Plistine, etcetera. The anthroposine is just a dressed up word for the age of humanity. And it is overwhelmingly likely that the biggest legacy all these people who have lived and died will end up leaving is a wreck of earth. Is a mass extinction. We're in the middle of it. It is happening. It is possible that the idea of wildlife will sound like a crazy story to your grandchildren. That's again, I'm not being hyperbolic. This is happening, and this is something people knew about for more than half a century. And this frustration turned to desperation, and some folks said, we have to go beyond writing letters. Are going to protest or just recycling, you know, for five cent refunds. You know what he's doing in a glass bottle or something. And that's where we saw the rise of something called radical environmentalism in the nineties sixties. And we can dive into a little more of that ideology is the show goes on. But from radical environmentalism we see the rise of people in groups who decided, let's cut past these useless, doomed negotiations, let's skip beyond the half measures, those so called toothless proposals, let's take direct action. Today those people are known as eco terrorist, But what are they? Will pause, We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy, all right, I told you guys earlier, I figured it out. My favorite eco terrorist, Captain Planet as played by Don Cheatle. It's good sketch. I get you know, I get it. I get it. I don't know if I agree with him, but I get where he's coming from. He is he's he's an eco terrorist. Uh, eco terrorists, What does it mean? It's a portmanteau obviously, Uh, ecology plus terrorism. It's a combo. Not quite as popular as peanut butter and jelly. Uh. And at first glance, it feels like a really loaded term, like you would hear this on far right news. Right someone would say, these people want to stop an oil pipeline, they're eco terrorist, you know what I mean? And next up the war on Christmas. It feels very very biased. But I found something interesting. Uh, the the far left activists that were described as eco terrorists, they had a war with the far right to control the definition of that word, and they were saying stuff like, hey, we're not the eco terrorists. Ex on mobile is the eco terrorists. They are terrorizing Earth with what they're doing. Unfortunately, the left lost that argument, and so now when you hear eco terrorists you have to be really conscious of the source because you might just be hearing like a hit piece from a corporation disguised as news. Absolutely not, no question about it. That term has been weaponized. What would the weather underground be considered eco terrorists, know they were domestic terrorists. They seem more political specifically, but it all is kind of political since the environment has been politicized, so you're kind of fighting against policy too when you're when you're carrying out some of these acts. Yeah. Yeah, the weather underground probably has some Vin Diagram situation and some overlap in notable individuals and so on. But they are they're not they're not considered as focusing on environmental issues. They were more oriented, as you said, toward political change. Like the big proponents of communist ideology. Uh. I don't know when I hear Like when I think of conservation environmental groups, I think of like the pandal logo on the World Wildlife Fund or Federation or whatever it's called, you know, the other w WF. I think of like Sarah McGlaughlin telling you to treat puppies better, the arms of the Angels. I was just talking to my kid about that the other night. She's never had the privilege of experiencing that ad campaign with the sad puppies and the shelters and Sarah McLaughlin's Saddest song in the world, especially when paired with sad puppies. Yeah, yeah, but this is like, like, when you think of this kind of activism, you probably have a stereotype in your head. Right, there's this there's a scent of patuli wafting through the air. Someone's playing a sitar, everybody is wearing something that's somehow made out of hemp. You probably don't think of people launching RPGs at nuclear facilities, but that's part and parcel of this. Uh. Eco terrorists are defined by their tactics more so than their ideology, but ideology is part of it. Uh. These are acts. They're perpetrating acts of violence against people or property or companies with the aim of not killing folks, but disrupting actions that they feel are damaging to the environment. And the word itself is is kind of new. It's from like the nineteen sixties, you can call it. Nineteen seventies gets popularized. But the idea of using getty a tactics to fight the power is a it's like surprisingly old. A lot of people have done this. A lot of people like banded together in sort of a we must protect the wild kind of vibe. Uh. One example is in France in eighteen seven, a bunch of peasants revolted against the government's new codes regarding forestry and how to harvest resources from the forest, who could do what, etcetera. And they went into a full out war. It's called the War of the Maidens. So they didn't call it eco terrorism, but that's what it was. That's what we will call it today. The French take foraging very seriously. And then additionally, take the example of indigenous native populations in the America's when Europeans came to colonize this, and they have very different philosophies on how humans should relate to the land. Right, native populations thought to protect their philosophy, which was clearly less exploitative than the pitch that these uh colonials were coming in with. It's weird. A ton of people throughout history have fought wars over how they feel land should be used or preserved. And when we talk about eco terrorists, there are real, genuine groups that can be described as such. It's not it's important to say, it's not like one loan actor, right, It's not some quote unquote unstable person going rogue. Right. These are groups who get together for this purpose. And I was surprised to find that the FBI back in two thousand eight specifically name checked eco terrorists as quote one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats in the US today, and they backed up the reasoning too, like they had At first I thought, no, I don't know, you guys are exaggerating, but then they laid out they lay doubt the rationale, and it does make sense that they would describe them as a serious threat. Yes, And this assessment was due to the volume of crimes over two thousand known incidents from nineteen seventy nine to two thousand eight, and if you think about the economic impact of those incidents, it was over a hundred and ten million dollars. And that also includes the wide range of victims, the you know, the companies and things that were impacted by the actions and incidents. Um, the FBI saw an increasing trend towards violence. And there was also a two thousand four FBI document you can read on archives dot FBI dot gov that's from two four and it just it's the same kind of thing. It's a judiciary committee where they're talking about the extreme seriousness of eco terrorism and they they're taking it very very seriously. And then at this point of course, this is where we all have to have that gut check with ourselves and say how much do I trust the FBI? Get to that part two. Yeah, we get to that part two. But let's let's talk about some specific groups have been described as eco terrorists. There's Earth Liberation Front or ELF. I know it's the LF, but I like saying ELF. There's Stop Huntington's Animal Cruelty or SHACK or you know, Personal Favorite Animal Liberation Front ALF. I just like that itself. Is any cats? Do you think I was wondering about that too? I haven't haven't emailed them yet. It's not very eco friendly. Well eating cat, Yeah that's true. Well if you if you get rid of cats, you're saving birds. So a lot of these groups are usually going to be focused on two things. One some version or genre of radical environmentalism or two uh, some kind of animal rights initiative. And and people may try and label other groups as eco terrorists, but there's there's differences. Consider the c Shepherd group that we looked at not that long ago, the one that you know had a ship back in the sixties and seventies. I can't remember the exact timeframe of Sea Shepherds activities, but it was in the seventies where they were going around and actually running into ships that were wailing off the coast of Japan, where they're they're taking violent action. Right. The weird thing, the kind of gray area that it leads you to though, is that c Shepherd was generally I'm gonna say this, generally fighting against people that were taking illegal actions or actions that were legal in you know, to some country, to some you know group would consider it illegal even though maybe it's not illegal in one other country. Um, it's just a weird gray area that can exist there because I'm also thinking about other groups that are animal rights activists but are not animal rights they don't take part in animal rights terrorism necessarily. But it's right on the line, it feels like, because it just depends on the definition. It feels like like throwing paint on a fur coat or something like that, like is that a prank? Is that act of terrorism? Etcetera. P But it goes deeper than that to uh, with some other groups and I'm not even gonna name right now, but I don't know that that kind of thing is is a bit weird because it well, let's talk about Sea Shepherd again. I'm having such trouble saying Sea Shepherd. Um, you're nailing it. They're the ones that that are concerned with like the dolphin slaughter in Japan and things like that. Right, and they've got an amazing ship that looks like it's it means business. It looks like a warship. Yeah, it's pretty shout out by the way to all our friends in New Zealand who rope to us. Uh. In regards to that episode, that's where the event with the Sea Shepherd occur. Uh. Do check out that episode and don't let that story be forgotten. And you know it was France. France did it. France did what would be considered an act of terrorism in that case. Uh. And the name of the ship was the Rainbow Warrior. But as that's right, what a great name ship. Don't don't let the name fool you. It is not a warm, fuzzy care bear type of ship. It's built for business. Uh. Anyway, now we know that eco terrorism as a concept is it's not maybe quite what the name implies, because when you think of terrorism, you think of things like purposeful mass casualty events. You think of the Nine elevens, you think of um bombings or gassings on trains, you think of suicide bombers. The vast majority of acts described as eco terrorism are meant to disrupt at activity, And in fact, you'll hear people who are involved in these groups and people who lead these groups saying that they intentionally avoid harming humans or animals, or that they do everything in their power to make sure no one gets hurt. But when the palm oil hits the chocolate, of course, these things can resulted injuries and fatalities. And I think we especially which is something that happen. Yes, yes, exactly. Like we're not talking about your garden variety protests. We're not talking about just culture jamming, although culture jamming is a really cool thing. Shout out to all the Discordians in the crowd. Today, we are talking about things like sabotage, arson bombing. Um, most of the actions aren't that extreme, you know. Um, there's stuff like like tree spiking. Have you guys heard about tree spiking? Just just from reading the research on this episode, it's it's definitely interesting. Reminds me of like, you know, I think there's a lot of misinformation around the like the idea of lead the Luddites or whatever, like sabotaging printing presses. It's the idea of you know, sabotaging a supply chain or something that does not ideologically sit right with you. And I guess what you you put? You put things in, hammer spikes in the tree so that it would damage equipment potentially. Yeah, but it's not just equipment. It would get damaged right because there are people on the other side of those chainsaws. Is the problem, that's the flaw in the system there. So tree spiking is exactly like you described. You sneak onto a logging site or a future logging site and you hammer in some spikes in the trunk of a tree around where somebody would be attempting to cut the tree down. This is not gonna kill the tree. It's not going to do serious damage to it, just like tapping a tree from maple syrup is not going to kill the tree. So what they're doing is there Essentially, it's like if these trees were people. Imagine if there was a way you could make everybody get an ear ring or a nose ring, and it meant that they wouldn't be shot in the street. That's a weird analogy, but that's almost one to one really quickly. I know the ledites did not damage printing press. It was like cotton mills, woolen mills and cotton gins and things like that. I'm seeing if mad'll let me slide with that terrible analogy, I'm still thinking about it. All right, Well, they're not all going to be winners. Were working. But but the problem with this is, like million equipment, uh could also be affected by these tree spikes. If you have ever, if you've had munch experience logging or with a chainsaw, you know that they can be quite dangerous if something goes wrong. Right, So, in at least one case, this practice of tree biking did result in a serious injury, but not a fatality. And so far none of the tree spiking things in particular have led to fatalities. They're meant to be disruptive, yeah, and it's also not led to a major change in how the logging companies continue on. You just get more equipment ding ding, because and then you've made you you're essentially creating waste of large you know, metal filled equipment that's just gonna go into a garbage eep somewhere. Uh, that's good if you're someone trying to do good by taking this kind of action, right, and then you could say, well, well it's it's still on balance a good thing to do because I am saving some trees. Maybe the logging company will say, we don't know how many trees have been spiked. We can't check everyone, so we're gonna at least hold off unlinking. You know, we're gonna hold off on this part of our operation. But I would argue a lot of this stuff, a lot of these activities and tactics are just examples of the larger concept of sabotage, which is known as monkey wrenching. Sabotage is a cool word with great etymology. Leave you to discover it. Um they There's also another buzzword I found, which I don't like. It's very rare for me to hate a word. But echo taj Do you guys ever hear that one? You know? Is that like is that like making like like scrap booking sabotaging stuff for uh a local ecological system? You know, it occurs to me with the whole spiking thing, and like you know your point, Mad about Well, they just get new equipment. Uh not only that is get new equipment, They just make it harder for like, you know, the workers that they add more security you know to the sites and and make it more prohibitive to work there in the same way that like the t say, after nine eleven, like you know, the terrorists did not win except in making us have to you know, take our shoes off, which then causes the price of lumber to rise just slightly because the company has to charge more money to hire more people, which then makes you want to make more because it's going to be more profitable. Oh god, you see the feedback loop. Yes, and and uh so listen everyone, it's eco tag whatever. Do so on to a parody song of that. I will write the lyrics for that, and we can we can be the Beastie Boys for a second. But but this, these actions, the symphasis on sabotage is in a very large way inspired by a novel written by a guy named Edward Abbey in the name of the novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The Monkey Wrench Gang follows a Vietnam that former prisoner of war named George hay Duke who is trying to fight back against people polluting the southwestern desert where he lives, and he loves the land, so he has a campaign of sabotage. This inspires the creation of these real life eco terrorist groups such as Earth First. You have to say it that way because the exclamation marks in the name irma gird Earth First. Exactly. It sounds so nice, so does Elf and alf. It sounds although none of it looks none of it seems that nice when it's spray painted on the side of a trailer, because I've seen numerous versions of it, just like hastily scrawled. You know what else sounds like the Monkey wrench Gang sounds like a charming Disney film from the forties, like the Apple Dumpling Gang, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The The thing here is that those acts, those disruptive acts that are kind of in that gray area we've described, like what what could be called just vandalism or prank versus what what do you call terrorism? I mean, the FBI is pretty loose with their definition of terrorism, and you could say that's by necessity. You could say that there is a financial motivation because the more things that can be classified as terrorism. Uh, the more funding you can get for counter terrorism, right, that's another feedback loop. But there are things that are very serious, very dangerous crimes. One would be arson ELF in particular, the YLF became infamous throughout the nineties and early two thousands for pretty consistent decentralized arson sabotage kind of campaign. They included the arson of a ski resort and then other acts of arson were okay, I got thoughts on this with guys. Other acts of arson were things like housing developments, construction sites, auto dealerships, chain stores. I want to share an example of something that is really stuck with me, and I was thinking about this, was researching the ethical dilemmas at play in this episode. So we have a chain restaurant here in Atlanta in the US called Chick fil A. Chick fil A, I'm pretty much a cyclical basis, will get bad press in the news because they have in the past supported things that are like anti same sex marriage. Very it's it's a very conservative Christian based chicken joint. And there when this this spiked again a few years ago, and an old spike again in the future because Chick fil A is not really going to change, right, They've seen that. They don't lose a ton of money, so they're they're you know, they're not going to be compelled to change their ideology. Think of all the money they could make just staying open on Sunday. I mean, they are committed to the bit here, right, and look full disclosure, true, Cathy gave me money and tons of his books when I became an Eagle scout and I cashed the check. You know what I mean. I was a broke teenager. So I'm in a glasshouse here. Yeah, and where we live. The lines for Chick fil A's never go down. It doesn't matter what time it is. There's always a massive line and they move super quickly. Those places make bank. They got it down to a science. Man. Yeah, the logistics are yeah, no shame in that. The logistics are amazing. But here's why I'm bringing up Chick fil A and the controversy with their political funding. There was a video that went viral of this guy who goes to a Chick fil A drive through. And maybe you guys have seen this, maybe some of our fellow listeners have seen this. This guy goes to a Chick fil A drive through. He's filming on his cell phone. And there's this there's this kid. She's a teenager. She has to work the drive through at the Chick fil A, And this guy is exc gorriating this child, screaming, screaming at this kid, making her cry because of Chick fil A's conservative political ideology. And that's super unfair because this kid has nothing to do with that. This kid is just like slinging sandwiches and probably wants to get an A on her geometry quiz the next day. And that's like, that's what I think about when I when I hear about someone's like, you work at a dealership and the dealership gets bombed. What are you the one at the u N who makes decisions about carbon emissions? No? You like you mop the floor at a place that sells s U V s? Are you used to now you're now you're out of a job. What is that great or good? I don't know. I think you can lose humanity very easily in those sorts of situations. It makes me want to drill down into this. The veil Colorado Arson that we described that the Earth Liberation Front UH did that was specifically the one in Veil, Colorado happened in I believe. Um. If you if you find like the there's an independent article that was written at the time about it that goes through some of the specifics and you learn how it's actually carried out. How there you know, they were supposedly going to be timed, uh, not explosive advices, but devices that would cause a fire to start on a gas tank. And they were set up all around this this ski resort in Veil, Colorado, and it took two people to carry out the actual event where they set fire to at least three buildings and the fire spread after that point. There's an interesting moment in that article specifically that says the person that set the fires noticed there were human beings in one of the buildings where he had planned to set the fire, but chose not to set the fire in that building. Um, which kind of you know, makes speaks to the points that we've been mentioning this whole time. The attempt isn't to kill the human uh. The attempt is to stop a larger thing from happening. In this case, it was the expansion of this Veil ski resort out there in Colorado. Because they were going to take over more of the land that was, you know, at least according to this group's beliefs that land should be kept natural right, And it was one of the last places where Oh lord, I'm having a hard time we're calling the article, but I believe it was one of the last refuges for the links, the cat links. UM, I think you're correct. It's interesting too. There's another situation with ELF that really shows how the the the period you guys described where the government was really out to get these types of groups and and they were made a really big priority. Uh, no matter what it took. Um. There is a guy who is a member of ELF who is essentially, I don't know, framed I guess more or less um by an FBI informant who infiltrated the group. Um you only referred to as Anna in the in the court proceedings and all that. And apparently she acted as an agent provocateur, at least according to this guy's lawyer. I'm sorry. The guy's game, by the way, was Eric McDavid UM, and his lawyer made the argument that this Anna, who was providing them with bomb making information and materials and things like that, and like paying for them to live and you know, renting a cabin for them to like build the bombs in transportation. All this stuff was acting, you know, coercing them into making plans to bomb this damn the nimbus damn. Uh and also the U. S. Forest Service and other utilities in the area. Uh. And this guy got off. He served eight years and some change. But UM, that agent provocateur argument ultimately you know, convinced the judge to have him released. Um. And that happened in twenty seventeen, after he spent eight years and and some change of his life, you know, behind bars, and he can't get those eight years back. Also check out our earlier episode. Does the FBI manufacture terrorists? The answer is yes, unfortunately or certainly attempt to. Um. The real question is the motivations and the level of awareness they had when they were doing this. But you can you know, that's similar to the story about the mosque who reported an FBI undercover agent for trying to turn people into suicide. Oops. UH lightened up a little bit there with the yeah. And this is a great set up for for a part of our final act to day. I do want to point out something that's a little bit cynical here, Matt. You point you noted that U e l F members during the ski resort Arson, one of them did decide not to blow up a building because he was worried that he would injure or kill people. Understandable thing, and it's in line with the stated goals of these organizations. However, there is a there is a slightly less possible noble motivation for this. And this is something there's something you might not know if you're not super acquainted with the criminal world. But if you are perpetrating certain acts and you already know what crimes you are going to be committing, you want to try to h do your best to avoid more serious charges. That's why that's why sometimes in robberies, right, if you see someone get shot, you'll you'll find that some criminals will purposely shoot someone kind of like below the waist or in below the knee and the leg because then it doesn't count as attempted murder. Right is the concept. Now that your mileage may vary, please don't mug people and shoot them up least, you know, just try not to kill anybody. I feel like that's a very low bar to set try not to kill people. Um, but there I bring that up only because I'm wondering whether there was some kind of calculus like that, whether it's they said, look, if we do get caught for this, we don't want to be charged with murder, right, you just have to make space for it. Personally, I think they probably just didn't want to hurt actual people. But again, it's tough to know people's inner motivations. You know who we could ask about it is Josephine Sunshine over Acre, the one who got away, currently believed to be at large in Europe, wanted by the FBI. Josephine, if you're listening, would would love to have you on the show. We just have to find you. So which g e lf She was associated with the attacks that Matt was talking about, And there was one guy who just got arrested and he was on the run for more than a decade, but one of them did get away. Anyhow, this is still not the most extreme example. You were promised an RPG, fellow conspiracy realist, and at this point you're asking yourself, where is my RPG? Just like you know Dennis in Always Stunnying Philadelphia. Here it is actual bombing travel of France two January. Eco terrorists are super mad that there's a nuclear reactor being built, a nuclear power plant called super Phoenix, which sounds so frush right, uh so in in in the midst of these protests, these attempts to shut down construction, sam eco terrorists actually got RPGs, military grade rocket propelled grenade devices from a known arms dealer, Carlos the Jackal. That's really what he's called. There's the movie The Jackal with what's his name, Bruce Willis, Carlos the Jackal. Yeah, real dude gave gave these folks of RPGs and they fired them at a nuclear power plant it was granted still under construction. And years later somebody came out and admitted the responsibility for the attack, a guy named Kayam Neesom, who went on to become a Swiss politician. And this guy is good at politics. You could tell just from just from a quote we pulled his statement of the events. He later, you know, talked about this in a book. His statement of the events shows us a rationale that's pretty common with a lot of these direct action groups, and it's um, I don't know I'd love I'd love to hear everybody's take on it. Who wants to who's got a good, high, niesome voice. I know that it might sound odd to consider rockets as a non violent means of action. However, we took every imaginable precaution to be certain that no worker was at risk of being hit. Therefore, we committed a non violent attack. This is me with an RPG. What what I mean? In a weird way, It's true, it is a non violent attack in a way. It's true. In another way, is very very much not. That's the only non violent RPG I know about involves a twenty sided die. Right, Yeah, this So I thought that was interesting because you can see you can see the rationale. It's textbook rationale. And to Neison's credit, no one was injured by that RPG attack. But we're we're gonna pause for a moment. We know today's episode is running a little long, but we're gonna pause. We're gonna come back and talk a little bit more about what this all means. And we have returned, so to some this up, we have to talk about the importance of perspective, right, the importance of empathy, humanity and and the cliff upon which this civilization is teetering. For a lot of us in the audience today, the ethical dilemmas are clear. First, yes, Earth is in a bad way, and second, yes, humans are responsible. And without dismissing the massive, massive efforts of various institutions, we have to note that they have not been as effective as people had hoped. But on the other hand, and I think there's something we're talking about throughout the length of this show, how effective are these actions in the grand scheme of things. Eco terrorism has added more fuel to the flame of the surveillance state, and as a result, countless innocent people are targeted for surveillance. There is so much money in that industry. Yes, surveillance is an industry, But I'm just saying, being on the mailing list of a vegan co op shouldn't mean someone is automatically getting treated as the next Osama bin Laden. Like, I don't think you should be tracked for those kind of things, but it's proven that the FBI is doing that. And you know, we can say all terrorism is regardless of ideology, it's inherently conspiratorial. Right you are conspiring to do something and terrorism. Well, you know, people don't mention this as often as they should, but terrorism is also in some ways an opportunity for intelligence agencies, for people involved in the world of surveillance, because it it gives them an enemy, right, it gives them something to fight and pursue. And you could argue, then this is just there's a valid argument. I don't know what the answer is, but you could argue that through these acts, these eco terrorists, direct action groups, whatever you want to call them, may actually be empowering the growth of some of the entities they seek to fight. You know, I I think about that all the time. Like they are targeting the people who literally bankroll politicians, Right, that's a lot different from knocking over a dollar store or something, you know. Uh. And then we talked about all the time the people on the ground, what's their perspective. They're just people like anyone else. The average person on an oil drilling platform isn't some arch supervillain from Captain Planet. They're just trying to not get fired, you know what I mean. They want to go on vacation someday, they want to get home safe, and they're not dumb. In fact, most people. If they're given the opportunity and the space to really think things through, most people are incredibly intelligent. It means the people who are working on these oil rigs, they are aware of the problems posed by the oil industry. In fact, they probably know more about it than people were outside of the industry. They know what they're doing, and they're not They're not trying to ruin the planet. They're trying to stay alive. Also, this is to me, this is the big thing about a lot of these sorts of tactics. Is it not clear that most people react adversely to hostile action. Violence is very rarely gonna prompt some come to Jesus critical thinking moment on the part of the victim. You know, those folks who are whaling chips. If they get if they get slammed into by a sea shepherd vessel or whatever, if there's someone's throwing stink bombs on them, someone's trashing their equipment, they're not gonna say, oh, snap, good point, we should change our lives, you know what I mean. They're gonna be pissed, will build back twice as you know powerful, you know, come back on them twofold. That's that's the way. That's what that prompts exactly, because that is I want everyone to hear. The capital letter is here. That is how humans are, for better or worse. It's been this way for a while. It's not going to change. And then on the other side, the people that the media are calling eco terrorists, they don't think of themselves as the bad guys, and they don't all agree. They're not monolithic. Some are issues specific, save the whales, save the redwood, save the Amazon, etcetera. And some are more extreme. Some people want to return the world to a pre industrial age, which is not going to happen unless some really terrible stuff happens first. But boy keep coming back to and I think what we all keep coming back to is simply this. The numbers are in. We've mentioned the various statistics that have been confirmed multiple times by multiple reputable sources. Things are going to get worse before they get better. And conventional approaches just don't seem to be moving the needle. And that's where we get to the end of the show. The questions, their questions, the ones really managed to answer what should be done? What can be done? You know, the clock is ticking and I know the three of us didn't take any um, any really hard stance on for it or against it quote unquote eco terrorism, because like, there's a lot to unpack here. Um, I don't know. I understand the impulse. I understand the frustration that would lead to thinking that the only way forward is through extreme action. I think it's misguided oftentimes, but also like, what's the alternative? It's so hard to get things done through policy, you know, it's so hard, and it's just like a slog mind numbing. It makes you want to give up. What's the term? He has been cautiously nihilistic, optimistically nihilistic. Sorry, I'm gonna take you back to that movie. Don't look up again. That's on Netflix or I know if you want to watch it. There's a great companion podcast called The Last Movie Ever Made. It talks with the cast and crew about how they made it, but specifically it goes to the writing process of the script itself and why it was created. And the reason it was created is because Adam McKay was looking at the climate change issue and realized all the things we've talked about today, the inevitability of the consequences that there's nothing that any individual can do. It feels like no change can occur, and he just we all know that it's coming, and the people who are in charge, who could you know, possibly make changes, can't make changes because their hands are tied, or they decide not to because it's not politically a good thing for them to do. And he turned it into a movie about an asteroid heading towards Earth rather than just the you know, slow death of life on the planet. Uh. I would just recommend everybody go and listen to that, just if you really want a good downer. But it lets you. But it really speaks to the desperation we're talking about here of why somebody would throw up their hands and say, well, I'm going to set fire to some of these freaking buildings. Maybe that will change something. Yeah, I mean the other the other alternative is to try to go rage against the machine, right the g ride. I want the machines that are making them right to the difference companies that create the problems. But that is simply not possible for the majority of humanity. People can't just buy companies. It's the riot versus protest distinction, you know what I mean? Where it's like people are protesting and you know, some things get destroyed. Is that protesting or is that being cast as a riot as a political way of framing it to to make it, to spin it in a way that makes the protesters look like criminals. Yeah, I think there's shades of that in this right. That's all agreed. Yeah, And these are these are excellent points, and this is this is something that's mission critical to human civilization. It's unprecedented. People aren't sure what the right answers are, what the order of operations are, and so that's where we lean on you, fellow conspiracy realists. What do you think? Do you agree with groups that advocate direct action to disrupt damage to the environment or are these groups, with the best of intentions, ultimately giving more power to the same forces they're attempting to fight. Should law enforcement be monitoring activists and if so, to what degree? We cannot wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to find online. Hey, do you like social media? We got those. We are at conspiracy stuff on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Check out this video right now on YouTube if you want to. This whole podcast is in video format. Most of it broken up into pieces probably, but is there You can watch our faces say things like this. 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