Environmentalist or Eco Terrorists? Violence against Industry is on the rise, and we'll talk about it on today's Hot Zone.
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All right, let's talk ecoterrorism. We're seeing more and more climate change protests happening around the globe. Many times they turn out to be just kinda whacky, like when some activists in Great Britain super-glued themselves to farm trucks earlier this year, but sometimes those protests get violent.
Last week in Germany Thousands of activists, protesting against coal-fired power trespassed the site in the municipal town of Juechen.
On Saturday, A group of activists then attempted to barge their way through a line of police, resulting in clashes with the officers and mine workers. Local media has reported two police officers suffered minor injuries from the clashes.
The mine, which they call an "opencast" but here in the states would be called a strip mine, in western Germany has become a focus of environmental protests in recent years because its operator threatened to cut down a nearby forest.
German police had mobilised hundreds of officers and a water cannon to prevent the vast, open-cast mine and adjacent power plants from being blocked by protesters. From the footage, however, it appears the cops weren't all that successful.
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."[3] The FBI credited eco-terrorists with US$200 million in property damage between 2003 and 2008.
These kinds of actions are happening on an increasing basis all over the globe as climate change zealots get more and more bold and try to shut down many of the industries that make modern life possible. A few weeks ago an organization called Extinction Rebellion released threats to shut down London Heathrow airport with drones - something that's already happened more than once - because it's members say air travel is "genocidal."
Now while A majority of states in the US have introduced laws prohibiting eco-terrorism, that's not stopping many of these whacky protests and "direct actions." I've been reporting on these groups since 2009, because some of them operate out of an area only a few miles away from our farm in West Virginia. Check this out.
[ WV Mountaintop Mining]
Let me tell you, those people don't get much of a freindly reception in southern West Virginia. When I was filming this piece, I was at that school you saw and there were some miners and their families playing baseball on the school playground. As I set up my camera to take shots of the school, all of a sudden I was surrounded by big burly coal miners who assumed I was some liberal CNN journalist and let me tell you, that's about as close as I've ever come to getting my arms ripped off doing this job. Fortunately at the last minute a policeman friend of mine drove up and told the miners I was one of the fair journalists and they could trust me. That's how I got the interview with the wife of a coal miner.
Our farm was a strip mine about thirty years ago. I get that these kids see the mines working today and think it looks like a moonscape. But you can't look at our place, thirty years later and say the mining that took place there did any lasting damage. Our farm is now almost all forest, except for the pastures that were carved out of the mountainside by the coal company which only made the property more valuable and useful. I think the lesson here is that we can easily come to believe that humans are much more powerful than we really are when it comes to harming nature. Sure, we have a responsibility to take care of the planet - it is after all the only home we have. But the antics of these self-declared "eco-warriors" does nothing to draw people to their cause, if anything it makes people hate it all the more. And the big takeaway I found while investigating this is that at least for the Earth First Movement, they employed grant writers who were able to secure funding from the Environmental Protection Agency in the form of what were called "Environmental Justice Grants." They then took those taxpayer dollars and used the money to pay for bail when their activists got arrested. Now that's just wrong. They also told me they received funding from groups like the Sierra club, who want to keep a friendly image in the press while eco terrorists like Mike Rosell do their dirty work for them.
Rosell still resides in West Virginia and still advocates for "direct action" against companies he deems to be climate sinners. And from the looks of things, his religion - that's really what it is - is gaining new converts all the time.
That's all I have for today folks. Thanks for watching and sharing this podcast. We'll be back again tomorrow right here on the Hot Zone.