Wow, here’s some news of the weird for you. There’s been an ongoing campaign against mountain top removal in West Virginia. Big Coal is playing dirty, and has been smearing opponents of their plans as “eco-terrorists.” The local press shamefully jumped on the bandwagon, calling Mike Roselle an “eco-terrorist” for civil disobedience and warning he “may put lives at stake in West Virginia.”. (Roselle is a co-founder of Earth First!, the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network, and one of the most influential activists in the history of the environmental movement–and I don’t think that’s an overstatement).

Well, that was too much to stomach, even for the guy who claims he invented the term “eco-terrorist.” Ron Arnold of the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise said:

“I’ve covered Roselle since 1995 and even devoted dozens of pages to his protest activities in my 1997 book EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature. I covered his actions to distinguish between radicals and terrorists. I say he’s a radical environmentalist, not an eco-terrorist. It’s not a crime to be a radical and Roselle has never been charged with any violent crime… Face it: what he did was civil disobedience, not terrorism. But his opponents are dredging up eco-terror accusations. That’s just hot air and it’s wrong.”

Of course, Arnold goes on to say he feels this way because the “honorable” term of “eco-terrorism” should not be “diluted” by this kind of scare-mongering, so it’s clear he still firmly stands by the use of the word. But I think it’s important to note how the usage of “eco-terrorism” has strayed beyond even what the architects of the Green Scare had intended.

The AETA 4 have been indicted as terrorists for lawful First Amendment activity, the SHAC 7 are in prison for running a website, lawmakers are threatening new legislation to target non-violent activists like Tim DeChristopher.

As Arnold says, people like Roselle “may be a terrible pain in the ass, but he’s no terrorist.”

Eco-terrorist SUV

• Using the environment to terrorize. Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist at The Washington Post, used the term to describe Saddam Hussein: “Saddam was unquestionably the greatest eco-terrorist in history. During the Gulf War, he produced the worst deliberate oil spill ever. He followed that with the worst oil-well fires ever. Then came perhaps the most astonishing ecological crime in history: deliberately draining the marshes of Southern Iraq…”
• Terrorizing the environment. That’s how the term has been used by both wildlife officials in Canada and the Earth Liberation Front Press Office, to name a few.
• Terrorizing in defense of the environment. The FBI defines “eco-terrorism” as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.”

The third use has become the accepted grammatical usage, thanks to sustained media campaigns by the FBI, corporations, corporate politicians and anti-environmentalists like Ron Arnold, who claims to have invented the term.

Yet, of those three definitions of “eco-terrorism,” the third is only one that hasn’t involved a single loss of human life.

Which definition do you think is the most appropriate?

As if they hadn’t sunk low enough already, key players in the Green Scare are now going after a children’s movie.

The teenage characters in Hoot, which opens this Friday, fight to end a development project that threatens a population of endangered owls.

Cybercast News Service put out a press release, er, article, calling the film “soft core eco-terrorism for kids.” The teens “trespass, rip up surveyors’ stakes, place alligators in portable toilets” and commit other dastardly “eco-terror” crimes.

CNS turned to Green Scare pioneer Ron Arnold, who “had not yet seen the film when interviewed” by the author:

“Hoot’s so-called harmless ‘mischief’ is training a generation to look cute while burning homes and cars and stores. Eco-terrorism is serious. Eco-terrorism is arson and pipe bombs and hate that hurts people and destroys lives,” Arnold said.

The author uncovered disturbing evidence of “eco-terrorism” seeping into the minds of unsuspecting youth:

A seven-year-old girl who identified herself as Dillon noted that “it was a fun movie” and said she learned that “it’s not good to kill animals.”

Talk about a national security threat!

I wonder if lawmakers will go after publications like The Philadelphia Inquirer that have published glowing reviews of the movie (and thus endorsed “eco-terrorism) using the Animal Enterprise Protection Act. That’s essentially what happened to the SHAC 7

Ron and CNS have a point, though. But let’s not stop with Hoot. How dare any Hollywood film encourage children to take a stand and save cute little animals? After we run Hoot out of the theatres, we should take our torches to any movie store that rents that video training guide for the Animal Liberation Front, Free Willy.

As the masterminds behind this Green Scare would surely agree, we should be teaching children about freeing markets, not freeing Willy.