Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Gasland, was arrested by Capitol Hill police today as he and his crew of journalists attempted to film a public hearing on a controversial natural gas issue.

House Republican leadership directed Capitol Hill police to detain the film crew. Approximately 16 officers entered the room. Apparently there were objections to Fox and the crew not having proper credentials (which, if given the opportunity, could have been easily obtained).

Zach Carter at Huffington Post has a detailed account, which he has been updating. (Politico also has decent coverage.)

I have received dozens of tweets and emails about this (and the Huffington Post article in particular) and I would like to caution readers against attributing these events to any conspiratorial efforts at keeping the hearing secret. Fracking is a nasty practice that involves nasty corporate interests, and Homeland Security has been spying on screenings of Gasland, but I don’t think that’s why this happened. I don’t suspect this is about being pro-fracking or anti-environmentalist.

I think the reality is far less sexy: politicians like to think they have a monopoly on power, and don’t like that power challenged.

In other words, they behaved irrationally because they are bullies and thugs. I don’t mean that as mere name calling. Events like this need to be understood in the context of the bigger assault on journalists. (Something I had personal experiences with recently).

There’s a reason that the United States fell 27 places to #47 in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index.

I doubt this will deter Fox and his crew. But maybe it will bump up sales of the Gasland DVD?

UPDATE: Mat McDermott at Treehugger raises similar points in his great post.

When I was in Portland, Oregon, I sat down with the nice folks at Because We Must to film a video interview about my work, and some of the lessons learned from the corporate-led war on dissent as “terrorism.”

We filmed it in this beautiful park, and our discussion of a pretty dark topic was interrupted at one point by bald eagles cutting lines through the sky. The three of us all looked at each other after being hit with the same reminder: this is all worth fighting for.

I think this video turned out really well (and I love the Godspeed in the background — that album was on repeat many late nights writing the book). It’s really an honor to me that folks spend their time and energy producing things like this. I don’t think I say this nearly enough, but thank you all for listening to what I have to say.

Interview with Will Potter from Because We Must on Vimeo:

We are are excited to post our interview with our good friend Will Potter. Will runs the very informative blog Green is The New Red and is also the author of the recent book ‘Green Is the New Red: An Insiders Account Of A Social Movement Under Siege’. Will focuses on how the animal rights, and earth liberation movements have been targeted by the Government and labeled as ‘eco-terrorists’ and how dangerous this is for all social justice movements, present and future. After watching the interview, we would love it if you shared it with comrades, friends and family!

Every activist should know sht the FBI says.

I tried to resist. I really did. But when I jokingly posted on the GreenIsTheNewRed Facebook page that I wanted to make a “Sh*t the FBI Says” video, ya’ll went nuts about the idea.

Like the videos that started the trend, it’s pretty goofy. But sadly, it’s all based on statements the FBI has made in court, in the press, or to activists themselves (I’ve heard quite a few of these myself).

So on a serious note…

After you watch the video, please check out this great Know Your Rights booklet.

Thanks to Chris, Greg, Michael, Shannon, Brad and everyone else who helped out in the f-f-freezing cold. Please like this on YouTube or Facebook if you think they should wear the fake mustaches every day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some of the articles that inspired this video:

* “FBI Looking for Informants to Infiltrate Vegan Potlucks”

* “Eric McDavid Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison as a Terrorist”

* “FBI: “Eco-terrorists” Are Bigger Threat Than Osama bin Laden, Hate Crimes, and Attempts to Assassinate Obama”

* Jordan Halliday prohibited with associating with the “Vegan Straight Edge”

* “Activist Secretly Videotapes FBI Visit”

* “IRS Suicide Pilot Is Not a ‘Terrorist,’ But Environmental Activists Are?”

* “FBI Harasses Sociology Professor Who Has Spoken Against Labeling His Student a ‘Terrorist’”

* “Discussion of Government Surveillance of Activists with Will Potter, Former FBI Agent, ACLU and More”

In 2011, we saw two clear, sweeping trends regarding protest movements, and the corporate backlash against them. Before we get to that, though, take a look at the 10 most popular stories of 2011:

10) Tim DeChristopher Sentenced — What’s Next for the Environmental Movement?

9) New Lawsuit Challenges the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act as Unconstitutional

8) Supreme Court Will Not Hear SHAC 7 Case

7) 5 Reasons Why Environmentalists and Animal Activists Should Occupy Wall Street

6) If Sarah Palin Were an Animal Rights Activist, She’d Have Already Been Convicted of “Terrorism”

5) Breaking: 12 Activists Arrested in Spain, Being Charged With “Eco-Terrorism”

4) Minnesota Bill Targets Anyone Who Exposes an “Image or Sound” of Animal Suffering at Factory Farms, Puppy Mills

3) Richmond Cops Mistakenly Hand Over Anti-Protest Guides to Anarchist

2) Senate Approves NDAA Bill that Allows Military to Imprison U.S. Citizens, Without Charge, As “Terrorists”

1) FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorist

I created this list according to the number of views each article on this website received. I think some of the stories are more significant than others, but the order really isn’t important.

More important are the trends they reflect.

The first trend is an increasingly aggressive campaign led by corporations against those who effectively threaten profits. I have been writing this blog since 2006, when the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was being debated. If you had told me then that there would be a campaign in multiple states to criminalize undercover investigations, or that environmentalist Tim DeChristopher would receive two years in prison for civil disobedience, I wouldn’t have believed you. On top of that, the hubris of corporations and politicians is also being codified into law in new ways, such as the National Defense Authorization Act, and these tactics are spreading to other countries.

When you stack things up that way, it’s pretty grim.

But that’s only half of the story.

As Tim DeChristopher was being sentenced to prison for non-violent civil disobedience, activists around the country didn’t cower in fear. Thousands protested the creation of the Keystone XL pipeline, and hundreds were arrested saying, “now it’s our turn.” And as new FBI documents reveal that the government has considered terrorism prosecutions against non-violent undercover investigators, activists have hit back with a lawsuit calling the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act unconstitutional.

In other words, the second trend is that resistance is growing.

What’s in store for 2012? The Occupy Wall Street movement has gone from a few dozen tents to a national movement in about 100 days. As more and more people recognize that they are part of the “99 percent,” and act accordingly, Occupy will undoubtedly attract a proportionate backlash from same “one percent” who have targeted animal rights and environmental activists for decades.

There are significant challenges ahead for all of us. It’s hard to know what is the best way to take action, or how we should proceed. But I think Woody Guthrie was on to something with his New Year’s resolution list from 1942.

Two of the items on his list for the new year: “Make up your mind… Wake up and fight.”

Did you miss some of these stories this year? Be sure to sign up for the free email newsletter. You can also follow Green Is the New Red on Facebook and Twitter.

The Rumpus is one of my favorite websites on all of the Internetz. It’s a smart, sharp, literary site, and it was a treat to speak with Caroline Paul about my new book.

Here’s an intro from Caroline:

In 2007, I was put on Homeland Security’s Watch List. True, my brother had just been arrested. He had been a member of the underground Animal Liberation Front, freeing wild mustangs, mink, and lab animals for nigh on twenty years. But the Watch List? Me? Isn’t that for terrorists? It didn’t fully make sense until I picked up Will Potter’s book.

I was eager to speak to Potter, whose Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege shows how the US government is colluding with corporate America to suppress animal and environmental activism of all stripes.

Please head over to The Rumpus and check out the full interview, then pass it on if you like it. Thanks!

City by city, it’s growing. If you have been watching the rise of Occupy Wall Street from the sidelines, maybe it’s because you’re not sure if you’re part of the “99 percent” or maybe it’s because you just have other things to do. Here’s the thing: This is bigger than one person, one issue, or one movement.

Here are five reasons why environmental activists and animal rights activists should Occupy Wall Street:

1) Corporations are destroying the planet. And, as Bill McKibben wrote, “For too long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our government, and the cloakrooms of our legislatures.” The first official Declaration of the Occupation of New York City articulated some of the many facets of this movement, including environmental and animal rights concerns. Here are a few highlights:

“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies..

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices…

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil…

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit…”

2) Corporations are attacking you. Since the 1980s, corporations have campaigned to label activists as “eco-terrorists.” They have pushed for outrageous prison sentences of activists like Tim DeChristopher. They have lobbied for federal legislation like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and state legislation to label civil disobedience as “eco-terrorism.” They are doing everything in their power to marginalize and disrupt the environmental and animal rights movements. (In other words, as this clever Greenpeace video depicts, they’re afraid of you.) Rather than protesting bill by bill, arrest by arrest, this is an opportunity to challenge the true problem: unchecked corporate power.

3) You have experiences to share about tactics. Occupy Wall Street has locked arms to blockade the banks, and marched to the mansions of millionaires. Sound familiar? More than 800 1,200 environmentalists were arrested in a massive civil disobedience against the XL Pipeline. And the SHAC campaign brought a multinational corporation near bankruptcy through a diversity of tactics including home demonstrations. This obviously isn’t to say that environmentalists and animal rights activists created tactics like civil disobedience or home demonstrations, but they have, more than any other contemporary social movement, put them to unique and effective use targeting corporations. There are lessons to be shared– good, bad, and ugly– that will benefit everyone.

4) You have experiences to share about dealing with corporate and government repression. Occupy Wall Street has already seen some of the overt tactics used to target social movements, such as the police beating and pepper-spraying activists. As this movement grows, however, so will the proportionate backlash. You have experiences with informants, infiltrators, and corporate espionage. You have resisted grand jury witch hunts and fought back against restraining orders and injunctions. You have defeated draconian state legislation and organized effective prisoner support campaigns. To be clear, ya’ll aren’t alone! Other social movements have dealt with, are dealing with, this as well. But the backlash against the animal rights and environmental movements, the “Green Scare,” is a case study in all the post 9/11 tools available to corporations and those who represent them. I’ve sounded like a broken record on this website, but I’ll say it again. There’s nothing inevitable about any of this. By coming together and sharing experiences, we can coordinate and fight back.

5) This is bigger than all of us. By “this” I don’t mean Occupy Wall Street (although that’s part of it). I mean the task at hand. We all, out of necessity, focus on the issues that are most dear to us. We have limited time, limited money, limited resources. That’s why, for instance, I have carved out the field of work that I have. But listen: there are times for carving out our niches, and times for doing the hard work, the messy and uncomfortable and frustrating work, of trying to connect all of the pieces. Animal rights activists and environmentalists are often pegged by the broader, capital-L “Left” as “single issue,” but I have never found that to be true. This is an opportunity for all of us to share, as the Zapatista saying goes, “One no, many yeses.”

Slavoj Zizek captured this sentiment beautifully in an address to Occupy Wall Street:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.” And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—’war on terror,’ “democracy and freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ etc—are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.

You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.

Want to take action? Start at the Occupy Wall Street main website. What are you planning in your city?

The history of the animal rights and environmental movements has been poorly documented by the mainstream press. The stories of these movements have overwhelmingly been ignored, and when they’ve been reported by newspapers or television networks, it has been through the lens of corporate and government officials. The best, and sometimes only, documentation of these movements has come from activists themselves.

Zines, leaflets and newspapers are fragile by nature, though, and activist turnover (combined with FBI raids) has made them increasingly rare. Josh Harper and the crew of ConflictGypsy.com have set out to create an online archive of these publications, preserving the history of protest movements for animal rights and environmentalism.

I was thrilled to be asked to write a guest blog post about a classic publication, Ecotage. It was published in 1971, when many of the tactics now considered “eco-terrorism” were merely considered pranks or “ecotage.” In this post I discuss how corporations orchestrated a change in government policy by wielding the power of language. However:

Ecotage should serve as a reminder that there is nothing inevitable about this. The FBI labels “eco-terrorism” the “number one domestic terrorism threat,” but public support is not, and has never been, with the corporations destroying the environment; it’s with those trying to stop them.

Head over to ConflictGypsy and read the full post, then check out the rest of the archives. As a warning, though, the massive amount of cool stuff on that site will suck you in before you know it.

Tim DeChristopher has been transferred to the prison where he is expected to do his time. How about writing him a letter of support?

Tim DeChristopher
#16156-081
FCI Herlong Federal Correctional Institution
PO Box 800
Herlong, CA 96113
USA

Here’s some information from Peaceful Uprising about writing him.

Sometimes folks tell me they’re nervous writing prisoners, because they don’t know them personally and don’t know what to say. Don’t be! Tell a joke, describe something interesting you read recently, ask a question, draw a picture… anything you think might take their mind off their surroundings, if even for a moment. Now go write!

One month ago, environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for non-violent disobedience. The sentence was harsher than those handed down to people who burned churches and threatened black leaders. It was a sentence intended — like so many disproportionate sentences against activists — to send a message. But what message?

Environmental activists could have responded to this case in the way that corporations and politicians (who called DeChristopher an “eco-terrorist”) had intended. They could have scaled back their organizing to only milquetoast tactics that are 100% “safe”; they could have responded with fear.

Instead, we’re seeing something quite different as attention has shifted to the creation of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would draw oil from that tar sands of Canada to East Texas (this NPR story has a good overview). Already, more than 800 people been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience in Washington, D.C. Some of the arrests that have made headlines have included a top NASA climate scientist, Jim Hansen.

What has been even more inspirational is the response of young people who have been radicalized by both the sentencing of Tim DeChristopher and the Obama administration’s deference to corporate interests. A letter from student groups and youth leaders at the Tar Sands Action said in part:

Big corporations are using their financial influence to corrupt our democracy and deepen their pockets at the expense of Americans. And it’s not just related to energy and the environment; they are threatening the very foundations of our democracy, working to disenfranchise voters, attack workers’ rights and the middle class…The Keystone XL decision is a significant test of President Obama’s commitment to our generation, but it’s not the only one.

The letter astutely taps into what is so significant about the mass civil disobedience taking place in Washington right now. It has drawn national attention to a dangerous, misguided plan that President Obama should shut down. More broadly, though, I think these 800+ arrests  represent something bigger than this particular campaign. As Tim DeChristopher recently wrote from prison: “By its very nature, civil disobedience is an act whose message is that the government and its laws are not the sole voice of moral authority. It is a statement that we the citizens recognize a higher moral code to which the law is no longer aligned, and we invite our fellow citizens to recognize the difference.”

I would go even further: the government is not the sole voice of moral authority, and it is not any voice of moral authority. I don’t think most Americans would even consider that a radical statement at this point. Do you? We’ve watched bankers get bailouts while the environmental crisis worsens and unemployment increases. I think we need to remind ourselves that this is a sentiment that environmentalists in D.C. understand just as viscerally as pissed off Texans.

For more information and to get involved, visit Tar Sands Action and  Rising Tide North America.

When I was in Los Angeles on book tour, I had the pleasure of visiting the KPFK studio and speaking with Sonali Kolhatkar. It was an interesting discussion about the power of language, and how corporations are re-writing the law. Thanks to Sonali, Martina and everyone at KPFK for the opportunity! Video below…