The Green Scare

The Green Scare was a major crackdown on environmental and animal rights organizing across the US.  Following the 9/11 attacks, the US government mobilized public anxieties towards an Islamophobic panic, justifying indiscriminate harassment and prosecution of members of mosques and Muslim organizations with no relationship to Al-Qaeda.  In the years after 2001, this repressive momentum extended to alleged “eco-terrorists,” drawing on a related panic and using similar tactics of harassment, surveillance, infiltration/provocation, and escalated criminal sentencing. 

In 2005, this repression exploded in the Green Scare’s most famous case, Operation Backfire, in which the FBI rounded up many well-known environmental activists and charged them as terrorists for actions claimed by the Earth Liberation Front in the American West. Manipulation, scare tactics, and the threat of decades-long sentences in the wake of the Patriot Act led some of the indicted activists to snitch on their comrades. This snitching extended the Green Scare by spreading fear, trauma and distrust widely, but did not actually lead to substantially shorter sentences for those who had betrayed their former friends.

Over the next years, the Green Scare spread through the extension of investigations to other parts of the country where ELF groups had carried out actions and a pattern of provocation aimed at young people who had not broken the law.  This latter tactic was borrowed from an FBI campaign already targeting isolated and vulnerable young Muslims, in which a provocateur would offer resources and friendship while encouraging a young person to express interest in carrying out a terrorist attack.  In the context of the environmental and anarchist movements, the FBI carried out at least three of these provocations, leading to extended prison sentences for young people bullied into planning destructive actions by federal agents posing as friends and peers.  

Lastly, the Green Scare extended into government harassment of mainstream environmental and animal rights organizations with a focus on breaking links of solidarity or political communication with activists facing repression.  In this way, the Green Scare can unfortunately be thought of as a full successor to its namesake, the Red Scare of the 1950s directed against Communist Party members as well as civil rights and labor organizers – in both cases, moral panic and state repression targeted long-time activists as criminals while also working to disorganize and suppress broader movements for social change.