Setting fire to buildings, the blaze causing $12 million worth of damage. Threatening to contaminate water supplies, or sending out anthrax. Placing spikes in trees, so anyone who touched them would get injured. These may seem like entirely unrelated incidents, but they all fall under the category of ecoterrorism, or acts of violence carried out in order to further environmentalist goals. 

Ecoterrorism is a contentious issue, including whether it should even be called terrorism. Terrorism can be defined as acts of violence and intimidation with the goal of furthering political goals. These types of actions are easily defined when the acts of terrorism include things like killing civilians, but the line becomes blurrier when the illegal acts don’t directly hurt anyone. 

In my interview with Professor Allen Boyd from the University of Maryland, it was made clear that there is no black or white answer to the question of what distinguishes terrorism and civil disobedience. He stated, “There are many definitions of terrorism and ecoterrorism… It is much more useful, in my opinion, to categorize these activities based on legal/illegal and licit/illicit. For example, it is legal and licit to write to your legislators and argue for a policy shift, it is illegal and illicit to blow up a pipeline, it is illicit (but not necessarily illegal) to deflate someone’s tires or graffiti a wall.”

According to Professor Boyd, civil disobedience is a nuisance that raises awareness, causes people to think about their actions, and is easy to resolve. Something like deflating tires is inconvenient but not dangerous, and is clearly tied to the message of cars devastating the planet. That is the flaw with protests like those done by Just Stop Oil, which engage in behaviors like throwing soup on famous paintings. While these actions do draw attention to the groups, they do not draw attention to the bigger issue of climate change as they are unrelated to the issue the protest was meant to address. 

Professor Boyd also brought up ‘The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia, and the United States,’ a book by Carola Dietze, which follows the origins of terrorism. According to Dietze’s work, effective acts of terrorism entail acts of violence that raises public awareness on an issue. 

Terrorism often has a negative connotation, and while this connotation is largely justified, there are rare exceptions. According to Dietze, acts of violence such as those committed by staunch abolitionist John Brown are justified due to the complete lack of other options. There were no political institutions at the time protecting Black people in America, and following the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, Black people weren’t even considered human in America. 

It can be argued that John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and his death sentence that followed successfully strengthened anti-slavery sentiment in the North. As the Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” This means that John Brown and others like him in this time period were justified in their attempts to alter the government in the only way possible at the time. 

There are many famous examples of acts of civil disobedience that border on terrorism. The Boston Tea Party can be deemed an act of domestic terrorism. Similar to blowing up a pipeline, there were no direct victims of this act of terrorism, but both devastated the local economy due to the destruction of a valuable resource.  

In contrast to the abolition movement, there are alternatives to ecoterrorism. You can choose to attempt to solve global warming by voting for politicians who will support your cause in government. Many engage in protests, such as Fridays for Future, wherein students would skip school on Fridays to protest climate change. There are even extreme examples of civil disobedience, such as when members of the Extinction Rebellion glued themselves to the floor in Parliament to draw attention to the U.K.’s destruction of the environment. 

When asked about modern day ecoterrorism, Professor Boyd said, “It has been decades since we last saw serious ecoterrorism in the United States, most infamous being the Earth Liberation Front. I do think that for the time being we are unlikely to see any sort of uptick in ecoterrorism. The Left has largely disavowed illegal behavior and there is virtually no appetite amongst left-wing environmentalist groups to cause harm to humans and very few believe that it is acceptable to harm property (even when there is no harm to humans).”

A subset of ecoterrorism is ecofascism, the belief that our planet is overpopulated and depleting our resources. According to eco fascists, the next step in the fight against climate change is mass killing. 

The origins of ecofascism can be traced back to former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his book “The Population Bomb.” Elrich was the first person to connect English economist Thomas Malthus’s fears about overpopulation with concerns about the environment. In the book, Elrich attempts to paint himself as an environmentalist concerned with the well-being of our world, citing that hundreds of millions of people would die in the following decades if actions to control the population were not taken. Instead, food production has outpaced population growth since 1960, our population growth has naturally declined as countries have developed around the world, and Elrich’s fear-mongering led to the forced or coerced sterilization of women all throughout Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and also the one-child policy in China. 

There are many problems with this ideology. There is no evidence that we are lacking the resources to support our current population. In fact, we have 1.5% more food than we need for everyone to be fed properly, the food just isn’t being distributed evenly. Any famines in recent decades have been entirely political, not a result of lack of food. 

Ecofascism is also entirely dependent on the idea that overpopulation is one of the leading causes of climate change. Much of the blame for severe air pollution and the destruction of our environment has been pinned on the Global South due to the rapidly growing population in that region. However, there is no evidence to support this idea; in fact, the poorest 50% of our world’s population only emits 7% of our greenhouse gases. The largest producers of our greenhouse gas emissions are at the top 10% of our population economically. It has been proven that the largest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions is the U.S. military. 

Engaging in ecofascism through encouraging forced sterilization or even murder in the hopes of preventing population growth in the Global South is not only immoral and reinforces white supremacist ideas, but will also fail to solve climate change. People experiencing poverty throughout the world, who were the ones Elrich focused on sterilizing, make insignificant contributions to our carbon emissions. 

Ecofascists and ecoterrorists will argue that the rapid destruction of our environment requires dramatic solutions, but revolution doesn’t have to be violent to be effective, as seen in the lunch counter protests. 

There are fears that change is not happening quickly enough. As Professor Boyd said, “Change does happen slowly and progress is definitely being made. It will not happen quickly enough to save everyone and everything that deserves to be saved, but we have to trust the process.” 

There are ways you can help. Voting, joining protests, or even joining environment-centered organizations like Bronx Science’s Green Team are all non-violent ways to expedite the process of creating change. It can be frustrating and even horrifying to see the destruction caused by major corporations to our environment. But calling for things that will harm the quality of life of others, such as the forced sterilization of women in Latin American, Asian, and African countries is not any more ethical than destroying the environment. If we want a better planet, we need to focus on hope for the future.

“Climate change will be solved by scientists of all stripes,” said Professor Boyd. “There are scientific careers that will lead to very comfortable lives, but if you want to be remembered and do good for humanity, go into agricultural science and figure out new climate resistant crops, materials science and figure out more efficient solar or light/stronger blades for wind, get us towards a viable commercial fusion reactor. These are the things I hope to see in the coming decades. Things are going to continue to get worse before they get better, but if we’re active and we engage ourselves towards specific things, we can make it less terrible and measurably save lives.”

“Climate change will be solved by scientists of all stripes,” said Professor Boyd. “There are scientific careers that will lead to very comfortable lives, but if you want to be remembered and do good for humanity, go into agricultural science and figure out new climate resistant crops, materials science and figure out more efficient solar or light/stronger blades for wind, get us towards a viable commercial fusion reactor. These are the things I hope to see in the coming decades. Things are going to continue to get worse before they get better, but if we’re active and we engage ourselves towards specific things, we can make it less terrible and measurably save lives.”