[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Eco-Terrorism: There's No Such Thing

[Bill Totten]

Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims

by Ted Rall

TedRall.com (March 11 2008)


The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in
places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are
dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of
our national housing stock - more than thirteen million homes, enough to
put roofs over the homeless three times over - are vacant year-round. So
why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless
monstrosities?

Several "model houses" at a development bearing the typically atrocious
name of "Quinn's Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities" at the edge of
Seattle's creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched
by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded
of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.

Then I laughed. I wasn't alone. Time magazine bemoaned "a notable lack
of sympathy for the fate of the homes" among residents of Washington state.

Quinn's Crossing, says its website, was "dedicated to the ethos of
putting the earth first". In this case, putting Mother Earth "first" led
the developers in "energy efficient" 4,500-square-feet McMansions. "The
houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be
occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site
sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon
spawn", reported Erica C Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The
Stranger. "The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop
an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area's Cross Valley
Water District".

4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New
Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big
it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a
nuclear family of four.

What galled the Earth Liberation Front ("ELF") was the developers'
attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as
ecologically friendly. "The builders heavily promoted the 'built green'
concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the
10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours", reported
The Los Angeles Times.

Barnett's story asked: "Were the Terrorists Right?" She noted: "An
energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large
urban apartment".

Right or wrong, they're not terrorists.

The feds say they are. They call ELF , the loose-knit "group" that took
responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the
biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs
since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly
before the famous "Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday"
memo, the FBI went so far as to list ELF as a federally designated
terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.

Terrorism - you can look it up - involves killing people. Hijacking a
plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property -
property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place - is not.

ELF's goal of "inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting
from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment" has
inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership,
Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction
threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski
project amounted to $12 million.

ELF members are vandals. They're arsonists. But they aren't terrorists.

ELF demands that its adherents "take all necessary precautions against
harming any animal - human and non-human". Although it could happen
someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating
the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society's
grotesque overemphasis on the "right" of property owners to do whatever
they want. The word "eco-terrorism" is an insult to the human victims of
real terrorism, including those of 9/11.

The closest ELF's critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that
fires send crud into the atmosphere. "This is releasing more carbon into
the air than they ever would have by building the houses", the listing
agent for one of the destroyed "rural cluster development" houses told
The New York Times. Newsweek asked: "If their cause is to save the
environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and
toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?"

Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family
living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are
builders making houses out of toxins?

Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to
twenty Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. "There's a lot
more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during
their lifetime", said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were
true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up:
in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.

"Think of all the resources those fires wasted", moaned Seattle Times
columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means - petitions,
politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings - are
the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the
environment. "The development where this latest arson took place,
situated atop the area's water supply, has been challenged by other
groups, using negotiation and the law", he says approvingly. That's
true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn's
Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.

Challenged, yes. But not successfully.

____

Ted Rall is the author of the book Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia
the New Middle East?  (Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2006), an
in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign
policy challenge.

Copyright 2008 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

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