When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on a Manhattan street in December 2024, Thomas Zeitzoff’s phone started buzzing with messages from some of the environmental activists he had been interviewing for his book. They were excited. “The fact that people didn’t just straight-out condemn the violence was a lightbulb moment for many of them,” Zeitzoff writes. One veteran activist told him the shooting was “great” because it expanded the “limited range of strategies that are most psychologically amenable”. A month earlier, responding to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, another of Zeitzoff’s contacts—this one a former soldier in the United States army—told him, “now is a good time to buy a gun”.
Eighteen months on, the dark turn hinted at by these comments is yet to materialise. Political violence may be on the rise, but environmentalists aren’t the ones driving this trend. Groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are perceived as representing the environmental movement’s “radical flank”. While their actions may be disruptive, headline-grabbing and, to many, annoying, blocking roads and throwing soup at paintings is nothing like blowing up pipelines and targeting individual executives.
Environmental activism hasn’t always been so peaceful. In No Option but Sabotage, Zeitzoff, a political scientist based at the American University in Washington DC, charts the rise and fall of ecologically motivated violence in the US over the last 50 years. The story begins with two books published in 1975. The first is Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which follows a group of misfits who, distressed by the environmental damage wrought by development in the American southwest, launch a campaign of sabotage targeting bulldozers and empty trains. The book helped inspire the formation of Earth First!, an activist group that used sabotage to defend areas of wilderness. As a sign of the book’s influence, the sabotage tactics used by Earth First! (and others) came to be known as “monkeywrenching”.
The second book that shaped this movement was Animal Liberation by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer (the same Peter Singer who would later become a leading light of the effective altruism movement). Singer’s book, which called for humans to embrace veganism, avoid animal products and limit animal testing, helped inspire Ronnie Lee, a British animal rights activist, to found the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in 1976. The ALF was highly decentralised—anybody could claim an action under its banner so long as they were vegan or vegetarian—and it quickly spread across the Atlantic.
Initially, the acts of sabotage committed by Earth First! and the ALF were generally small-scale. But then, in the 1990s, instances of arson and property destruction started to become more common. This trend was largely driven by a new “leaderless group of autonomous cells”, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). As with the ALF, on which it was modelled, anybody could carry out actions in the ELF’s name so long as they adhered to its principles. Its main aim was “to cause as much economic damage as possible to a given entity that is profiting off the destruction of the natural environment and life”. The only caveat was that those acting in its name must “take all necessary precautions against harming life”.
The ecologically motivated vandalism and sabotage that spread across America in the late 1990s and early 2000s ultimately provoked a response from the state. Shortly after September 11, the FBI labelled ecoterrorism (which, according to its definition, included the use of violence against property) the number one domestic terror threat. Law enforcement agencies set out to crush this threat and, by and large, they succeeded. Dozens of activists were jailed, some with decades-long sentences due to enhancements to counterterrorism legislation. The radical social and cultural scene in the Pacific Northwest that had sustained the ELF was decimated. As a consequence, the American environmental movement’s use of arson, violence, vandalism and sabotage declined sharply after 2003. Since then, non-violent civil disobedience has been the movement’s tactic of choice.
Many of the eco-activists whom Zeitzoff interviews, particularly the older ones who were active before 2003, lament the loss of a truly radical flank willing to engage in violence and property destruction—hence the flutter of excitement generated by the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. But it’s hard to say how much of this talk is serious, and how much is nostalgia mixed with wish fulfilment. One interviewee, eager to make sure Zeitzoff knows how hardcore he is, describes Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, as “an armchair asshole”. Time will tell whether “Nathan” (all of Zeitzoff’s interviewees are given pseudonyms to protect their identities) and his fellow ELF alumni—known as “Elves”—are more than armchair generals themselves.
Zeitzoff wisely refrains from making predictions. “Escalation and radicalization” is one of four plausible scenarios he offers up in the book’s final chapter, alongside “Situation Normal: Status Quo”, “Deescalation and Demobilization” and “Pro-Democracy Fusion”. It’s the last of these that seems the most hopeful. Zeitzoff, as an academic, strives to remain neutral, but it’s clear where his heart lies. In the book’s final pages, he imagines (though little imagination is needed) the Trump administration going broader in its repression—“targeting immigrants, academics, international students, LGBT+ activists, progressives, environmentalists, voting rights advocates, and antifascists”. Faced with this onslaught, “instead of splintering, activists fuse together… Radical environmental activists join forces with other civil society actors like racial justice advocates, academics, and labor and immigrant activists in a broad-based movement against Trump. They use mass protests, targeted disruption, and occasional sabotage. They recognize that to fight for the climate, they first have to fight for democracy.”
Activist milieus don’t just fail to intersect—they seem barely conscious of the other’s existence
This, minus the sabotage, pretty much describes British campaigner Anthea Lawson’s vision for the future of progressive activism. Her new book, How Not to Save the World, gently chides her fellow activists for following a “save-the-world script” that “tells us we must be heroes and that we must make things pure… that we are good, that we know better than others, that we are okay, that others are not and so we must save them, and that it’s so urgent we cannot rest”. This script undermines the effectiveness of would-be changemakers. Its implied message of moral superiority fosters resentment, repelling rather than attracting people to join a movement for change. And when purity becomes about the overriding importance of one cause above all others, it leads to fragmentation and weakness.
The environmental movement has been particularly guilty of this. “There’s an old view,” Lawson writes, “that it’s ‘distracting’ or ‘divisive’ to address class or racial injustice as part of the urgent fight for a liveable climate.” This view is particularly prevalent among white, middle-class environmental activists—the kind of people who form the backbone of Extinction Rebellion. The trouble with the climate-only approach, Lawson argues, is that it’s politically unrealistic: “Climate politics are not separate from the politics of inequality.” Climate action pursued with insufficient “political-material awareness” will always trigger a backlash and is ultimately counterproductive. Think, for example, of the anti-Ulez pushback from tradespeople faced with forking out for an expensive new van. There will never be a political majority for “the same-old-shit but solar-powered”.
The fact that “those wanting to change the status quo… don’t all hold the same vision of what-instead” is, Lawson argues, a major stumbling block for environmentalism—and for progressive activism more broadly. This lack of consensus is nothing new: what Zeitzoff terms the “deep ecology-versus-social ecology schism” has a long history, dating at least as far back as the 1960s. Nor is it just middle-class Extinction Rebellion types who would prefer to keep environmental and social issues separate. Some of the most radical activists Zeitzoff interviews, in terms of the tactics they are willing to countenance, are also the most hostile to a “fusion approach” that connects environmentalism to other progressive causes. In this view, the reason that the worsening reality of climate change has failed, so far, to inspire significant attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure, or on the CEOs of the companies that own it, is because “the kids are busy elsewhere” (this is Nathan again). They’re busy protesting the murder of George Floyd, the rollback of abortion rights, the genocide in Gaza: the list of potential “distractions” is long.
Given these deeply entrenched divisions over both means and ends, where does the environmental movement go from here? For Lawson, “the forming of good relational culture should be at the heart of everything.” This is about more than just being nice to each other (though that would be a good start). All effective movements for change contain within them a pluralism of means—radical and moderate flanks that complement one another, even if they disapprove of one another’s tactics. The suffragists needed the suffragettes (and vice versa); ditto Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. But Lawson sees a passive, live-and-let-live pluralism as insufficient. What she refers to as “movement ecology” is about more than “leaving space for other people to do it differently without giving them a hard time over their tactics; it also requires getting together, combining our assets and skills, to become something bigger than the sum of our parts”.
First, though, the different flanks of this movement will need to learn to recognise each other as fellow travellers. What’s striking, reading these two books together, is that the activist milieus they portray don’t just fail to intersect—they seem barely conscious of the other’s existence. This isn’t just about geography (Zeitzoff focuses on the US; Lawson on the UK). Nor is it primarily about disagreement over the ends they are trying to achieve: neverending arguments between purists and fusionists are one of the things both sets of activists have in common.
What really separates them is something more primitive. It’s a matter of radically different dispositions. Zeitzoff’s interviewees are anarchic. They crave confrontation. They see violence not just as a legitimate means to an end, but a legitimate response to environmental destruction in its own right—irrespective of whether it achieves the desired outcome. They disapprove of having children, not so much for environmental reasons (though there is some of that) but because having children makes you less willing to take risks that might land you in jail. By comparison, Lawson and her interviewees are polite and peace-loving. The idea of using violence as a tactic is so unthinkable that it doesn’t even need to be explicitly rejected. Almost everyone has children.
The combined story these books tell is of a movement that is either hopelessly fragmented or brilliantly diverse. Or, quite possibly, both.
