Green Is the New Red by Will Potter

Author:Will Potter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2011-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Loyalty Oaths

May 15, 2007 The Northwest is a story of extremes. The Cascade mountain range extends down from British Columbia through Washington, and on its way to California it creates two Oregons. The Cascades trap cool, moist air from the Pacific Ocean, creating a maritime rain forest in the western third of the state that is wet and green, dripping with life. It can be gray and it always rains, but the land is lush and alive. The western slopes of these mountains can shed two hundred inches of a snow a year, but cross the summit and the clouds drop only a fraction of that moisture. Travel down the slopes of the Three Sisters or Mount Hood, head down into Redmond and deeper down into the playa, and life withers. The land is rough and bitten. Rocky mountain ash, black cottonwood, sagebrush, chokecherry: the trees are short and the bushes gruff, their needles sharp like devil tongues.

Oregon is Portland, the bicycling capital of the country, and Eugene, the “anarchist capital of the United States,” according to former Mayor Jim Torrey. It is organic produce, vegan restaurants, compost and biodiesel. Interstate 5 is a lefty-liberal corridor established by “Californicators” and hippies, and a road frequently traveled by the most active cells of the Earth Liberation Front as they sabotaged property across the state.

There is another Oregon. Veer off the road and the attitude is less commune and more frontier. The Ku Klux Klan is strong here and so are militias. In 2001, after an extreme drought, the federal government cut off the irrigation water flowing to farmers in the Klamath Basin Irrigation Project. Scarce resources were redirected to Upper Klamath Lake to protect the endangered suckerfish. Militia leaders declared, “We are at war,” and used the Internet to organize convoys of antigovernment protesters from Montana, Nevada, Idaho and beyond. Militia members siphoned water and sabotaged the headgates. When the government repaired them, they were sabotaged again with chain saws and blowtorches. Some militia members threatened bombings and assassinations of federal officials.

This Oregon is not the subject of today’s hearing, though. Militia members who have used ELF-style tactics, and gone even further with threats of physical violence, are not a government priority. Today is about a group of environmentalists who have been labeled “terrorists” from day one. Since their arrest for a string of property crimes in the name of defending the environment, the Operation Backfire defendants have been relentlessly branded eco-terrorists and domestic terrorists in government press conferences, Congressional hearings and the media. Up to this point, use of the word has been for political posturing and public relations purposes. Today in Eugene, though, a federal court will hear arguments about whether the label will follow the defendants into their sentencing hearings and throughout the prison system.

The court’s decisions will have grave implications for the defendants. If the government successfully argues for the application of the “terrorism enhancement” to their crimes, it could add up to twenty years to their sentences, in some cases quadrupling prison time.

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