On June 16, 2000, 22-year-old Jeff Luers torched three shiny new pickup trucks at a Chevrolet dealership in Eugene, Oregon. He was protesting Americans' excessive consumption of oil. For this and a botched attempt to burn an empty gasoline truck, Luers, a first-time offender, was sentenced to 23 years, although nobody was injured in the incidents.

Luers had the misfortune of going to trial not long after Oregon passed the nation's toughest statutes against ecoterrorism. According to the new laws, a person who "interferes" with logging operations could receive up to 20 years in jail and a $300,000 fine. Someone who uproots genetically modified crops from research plots could receive five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. By comparison, an Oregon Forest Service worker who in 1998 set 30 forest fires to earn overtime fighting the blazes received a three-year jail sentence -- although her actions endangered the lives of more than 120 firefighters.

Over the past three years more than 20 states, including California and Florida, have passed laws that increase penalties for those engaged in ecoterrorism, a legislative trend that troubles Michael Ratner, president of the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights. Laws against vandalism, arson, and trespassing already exist, Ratner says, so additional ones aren't necessary. "Calling people terrorists who protest GM crops by ripping them out or damaging a lab puts them on the same level as the World Trade Center attackers," he says. "That's ridiculous."

No, it's not, says Rep. George Nethercutt Jr.

(R-Wash). At a congressional hearing on ecoterrorism, Nethercutt called the environmental group Earth Liberation Front (ELF) a "homegrown brand of Al Qaeda," and he has cosponsored a federal ecoterrorism bill (which never reached the floor for a vote). "National environmental groups need to know," he proclaimed, "you are either with us or against us."

That ELF has committed criminal acts isn't in question. Since 1996 it has destroyed more than $43 million worth of property, including a condominium development in Vail, Colorado. But are its members terrorists? The FBI thinks so: It counts the group among the nation's top terrorist organizations.

But Bron Taylor, a University of Florida professor who has studied radical environmental groups for two decades, says that these acts don't meet "a common-sense definition of terrorism," which typically involves attempts to kill or maim people, not destroy property, to bring about change. It may be that lawmakers, says Ratner, are simply "using terrorism as a broad brush to discredit a movement."
-- Karen Charman

One day John Horning, director of the Forest Guardians, surveyed what was once a lush 162-acre stretch of state-owned land along Arizona's Babocomari River and saw, instead, a virtual "moonscape." Over time a herd of cows had "just grazed it to the bone," Horning says. The Babocomari is one of the few rivers snaking through the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, and Horning is of the mind that cattle, which trample the banks, eat the plants, and foul the water, don't belong anywhere near it. After six years of battling the Arizona State Land Department in court, Horning has finally gotten his way. Last May the Forest Guardians won the right to lease this ailing little patch, and when the group takes full control, it will give the cows the boot.

Compared to the 59,115 state-controlled acres being grazed in Santa Cruz County, 162 acres is admittedly a speck, but Horning's court victory is nonetheless a landmark event. Since 1915 Arizona's land agency has awarded leases almost exclusively to one group: ranchers. When the Forest Guardians bid on a parcel in 1997, the agency refused even to consider the offer. That policy, argues Horning, was not only ruining desert lands but violating Arizona's constitution, which requires state leases to generate maximum revenue for the state education fund. In 2001 Arizona's Supreme Court agreed and ruled in favor of the group, which promptly offered $2,000 a year for the Babocomari parcel, almost twice the amount bid by a local rancher.

Just as it has done on New Mexico lands, the Forest Guardians will rebuild banks, replant cottonwoods, and open the area to educational tours -- all to publicize "backward state policies" that favor cattle grazing at the expense of healthy ecosystems says Horning.

Arizona House Speaker Franklin "Jake" Flake, a fourth-generation rancher, is not happy about this turn of events. Flake complains that environmentalists will simply "cherry-pick the best parts of the land" -- a claim Horning doesn't deny. "We're focused on getting the biggest biological gain for our buck," he says of his "unranching" strategy. That usually means trying to buy riparian areas containing wetlands -- which constitute less than one percent of the Southwest's lands but support 75 to 80 percent of the region's fish and wildlife.
-- Tim Vanderpool