FLAMES OF DISSENT:
The local spark that ignited an eco-sabotage boom — and bust
BY KERA ABRAHAM
Part V: The Ashes
M
ore than a decade ago, a 21-year-
old Lacey Phillabaum danced bare-
foot in a blue sundress on the
downtown Federal Building lawn. A
recent UO graduate, eco-radical writer and
defender of the old-growth trees at Warner
Creek, she jumped with other activists to
the live lyrics of Casey Neil’s “Dancing on
the Ruins of Multinational Corporations.”
Nine and a half years ago, an embold-
ened Phillabaum watched a truck roll
within arm’s length of a fellow activist
during a forest defense protest on a high-
way near Detroit, Ore. Less than a month
later, she and other Earth First! Journal
editors defiantly perched in doomed
downtown Eugene trees until police pep-
per-sprayed them down.
Seven years ago, after quitting the jour-
nal, Phillabaum joined the protests against
the WTO in Seattle. As the host of Tim
Lewis’ documentary Breaking the Spell,
she later defended the actions of the black-
clad anarchists who looted and vandalized
corporations they’d viewed as destroyers
of the Earth.
Five and a half years ago, Phillabaum
acted as the lookout during the arson of a
University of Washington horticulture
center — a crime she committed in concert
with her new boyfriend, Stan Meyerhoff,
and other activists. On the same night in
Clatskanie, Ore., eco-radicals torched the
offices and trucks of Jefferson Poplar
Farm. The coordinated arsons, executed in
the name of the Earth Liberation Front,
were intended as a statement against
genetic engineering.
But by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, a combination of mounting paranoia
and infighting had shattered Eugene’s eco-
radical scene like glass in storefront win-
dows at the Battle of Seattle. Phillabaum
and Meyerhoff moved first to Bend and
later to Charlottesville, Va., where she
wrote for an alternative newsweekly and
he studied engineering. They appeared to
be on a straight path, their criminal past
left in ashes.
Until December of last year, when the
FBI busted Meyerhoff for participating in
nearly a dozen of 20 environmentally
motivated sabotage acts across the West
between 1996 and 2001. Phillabaum
turned herself in soon after and began
working as an unnamed cooperator with
the feds. (The bust may explain why she
called off a freelance assignment for EW
on “sustainable” beef production last win-
ter. “I am having some heavy family prob-
lems,” she wrote in a Feb. 24 email, “and
I thought they were clearing up but they
are not.” As recently as Autumn 2006,
Phillabaum was listed as a copy editor for
Eugene Magazine.)
Today, Phillabaum is facing three to
five years in jail — or 25, if federal prose-
cutors can nail her as a terrorist — because
she’d slipped, even briefly, from the Earth
Day of above-ground activism into the
Earth Night of underground sabotage.
P
hillabaum is one of 12 defendants
who have pleaded guilty to a flare of
environmentally motivated arsons in
the federal sting known as Operation
Backfire. One targeted activist has pleaded
and Meyerhoff, respectively), but federal
prosecutors have said they will try to tack
20-year “terrorism enhancements” onto
each sentence.
The 10 defendants before the Oregon
courts are scheduled for sentencing in
April. Washington defendant Briana
Waters will face trial in May, and
Phillabaum and Jennifer Kolar — whose
plea deals may hinge on their testimonies
against Waters — are to be sentenced in
July.
The domino effect of the arrests and
cooperation agreements have been surreal
for local eco-radicals who knew the defen-
dants. Generally speaking, second only to
the community’s disdain for the authori-
ties is its disappointment with the cooper-
ators. Most loathed is Jake Ferguson, the
apparent ringleader of the eco-saboteurs
and the feds’ primary informant, who still
walks free; U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut
has said that prosecutors haven’t yet
decided “what to do with him.”
Nearly as resented is Meyerhoff, appar-
ently the feds’ secondary informant, fol-
lowed by Phillabaum and Kolar, who likely
began working with authorities around
spring 2006. Many local eco-radicals are
likewise upset with Chelsea Gerlach, Kevin
Tubbs, Kendall Tanksersley, Darren
Thurston and Suzanne Savoie, who had
begun cooperating by July.
out incriminating others, and Olympia res-
ident Briana Waters, who maintains her
innocence.
“What’s upsetting is how quickly peo-
ple are folding and how namby-pamby and
weak Earth First! looks when you compare
it to the Black Panthers and the American
Indian Movement, where people have held
out for decades without talking,” said for-
mer Earth First! Journal co-editor Jim
Flynn. “It just makes our movement look
weak and soft and middle-class. For peo-
ple like me, who have spent years in the
movement, it’s embarrassing. How will
we recruit new people?”
But another movement veteran, former
Earth First!er James Johnston, attacks not
the cooperators but the people who criticize
them. “It’s a bunch of dimwits who talk a
big talk about arson and anarchism and a
bunch of other crap,” he wrote by email.
“Now they don’t seem to have anything bet-
ter to do than make up bunch of lies about
the people who actually did the arsons and
ARE taking responsibility for it.”
Johnston,
an
ex-boyfriend
of
Phillabaum’s, sat next to her at the Dec. 11
sentencing hearing in Eugene. Other
activists in the courtroom avoided them
both.
E
ugene’s eco-radical era was a fire
that blazed through town for half a
decade, bringing together Earth
First!ers, anarchists, artists, feminists and
animal advocates who rejected authority
and envisioned a freer, greener world.
Their flame manifested in art projects,
housing cooperatives, forest defense cam-
paigns, anti-globalization rallies, inde-
pendent media and, notoriously, the flare
of environmentally motivated arsons.
By mid-2001 that eco-radical fire had
It may no longer be so radical, but Eugene’s environmentalist
community continues to nurture seeds sown at the peak
of the movement in the late ’90s.
not guilty, another committed suicide in
jail, and four are fugitives. One more, the
government’s first informant, lives in
Eugene and has not been indicted. The
cooperators face recommended sentences
of three to about 16 years (for Phillabaum
Most of the community insiders who
spoke with EW maintain their support for
Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Nathan
Block and Joyanna Zacher, who struck an
unusual deal with prosecutors allowing
them to confess to their own crimes with-
consumed itself, sputtering out as activists
split over dogmatic differences and per-
sonality clashes. In subsequent years fed-
eral surveillance pressed down like a fog,
nearly extinguishing the remnant embers.
How did this fire, and Operation
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