Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage
Matthew Wolfe
What The Reviewers Say
RaveThe New Republic
Wolfe’s riveting account of the ELF’s rise and fall—based on over a hundred interviews, footage from a documentary project that was never finished, Freedom of Information Act records, and the forensic recreation of the events in question—is not a morality tale. He’s not really interested in passing judgment, and he draws sympathetic but not uncritical portraits of the activists and the law enforcement agents who pursued them ... Scanning the political horizon since Trump’s ascendance—which has dovetailed with a brutal crackdown on legal protest and an attempt to equate anti-fascism with domestic terrorism—Wolfe rightly notes that environmentalism has suffered 'the worst losses in its history' ... Looking back at the history of the ELF today, it can be easy to forget that only a decade ago, the political landscape seemed far more expansive. Sometimes it’s worth remembering—even in the face of seemingly insurmountable ecological and political crises—that victories, even if only temporary, are still possible.
It’s entertaining stuff, snappy and picturesque, even if it barely leaves the American woods ... Here, I think, is the greater significance of Fires in the Night. Activists such as the Elves sit in a long genealogy. Wolfe mentions, if too briefly, their forebears across the West, such as 'the Luddites, the populist Levellers of the English Civil War, the indigenous Zapatistas of Mexico'. All those groups, like the ELF, arose organically, comprised of ordinary people with unusual zeal. All, like the ELF, were soon repressed by authorities who, whether or not the word 'terrorist' existed, framed them as existential threats to the state ... Look at the persistence of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil in Britain, and the ever-more-draconian restrictions imposed to stop them: some have gone to prison, but many more have been radicalised. The ELF was largely broken two decades ago, but their children have reassembled the pieces and gone on.
