October 2009: Former ELF Activist Launches ‘Resistance’ Magazine

Craig Rosebraugh, the former spokesman for the environmental activist Earth Liberation Front (ELF—see 1997 and 1996 and After), announces the launch of a new quarterly magazine, Resistance, Journal of the Earth Liberation Movement. Rosebraugh, a Portland, Oregon, native, operates the magazine out of Arizona, where he attends law school at Arizona State University; he co-edits the magazine with a number of other environmental and animal rights activists. The magazine calls itself “radical” and names Shell Oil Company as its “Ecoterrorist of the Season.” The magazine is nationally distributed and is available through chain bookstores. Rosebraugh tells an interviewer that he wants his readers to understand that the environment “is being destroyed because government and industry are making a lot of money off that destruction.… ‘Resistance’ was created to inform readers not only of the dangerous state of the planet, but also the urgency of action. The magazine features discussions on the strategy, theory, news, and frontline actions of a new emerging environmental movement.” The magazine advocates boycotts, sit-ins, and “economic sabotage,” which Rosebraugh describes as “nonviolent property destruction” that targets profits made by environmental exploitation. Rosebraugh says he became active in the environmental resistance movement (which some call “ecoterrorism”—see 1970s) because in 50 years of acceptable, aboveground protests and resistance, little progress has been made in reversing global warming and other environmental depredations: “It is the profit motive that is driving environmental destruction. So it only makes logical sense to work to directly remove that profit motive from these entities so they either are persuaded to stop their harmful practices or go out of business.” He says he “definitely” supports environmental activists breaking the law: “Historically, in order for any major social or political movement to make progress people in each case had to step outside social law.” Rosebraugh says he and many other ELF activists departed the ELF after a 2006 federal crackdown that saw many ELF members go to jail; since that crackdown, he says, “the more radical end of the environmental movement has really kind of dropped off.” [Oregonian, 10/19/2009; Eugene Weekly, 10/28/2009]