It is difficult to assess Matthew Wolfe’s Fires in the Night in part because I went into it expecting something a little bit different. If one looks at this book as a true crime, narrative nonfiction text about a specific legal case of an affinity group, it’s mostly fine. I have some disagreements here and there, but overall it is well researched and executed in a way that draws the reader in.
FITN has the sort of appeal that a lot of similar media has where it takes real life events and presents them to the reader in the form of a thriller, for better or worse ethically. However, for someone who lived through the time these events took place, who was also active in organizing, and who felt the harrowing and chilling effects of the green scare, this book falls a bit short. This book also comes out at a time when history is repeating itself as we watch leftist groups fighting fascism again being broadly labeled as terrorists, so the feelings are even more raw. Recent sentences handed down in the Prairieland case are some of the most devastating and politically motivated in movement history. Minneapolis defendants are also facing frightening prospects.
This may not entirely be the fault of the author. I know much of the time they don’t have much choice in the title or the marketing of a book. This book is not about “The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a secret history of eco-sabotage.” FITN is specifically about a single affinity group plus a couple of acquaintances and the legal consequences that befell them.
The problem with characterizing this book as being about the ELF at large, something that is not limited to the title, reduces what was a worldwide movement into a fraction of a story about a few individuals. The author regularly refers to the group as if they are the entirety of the ELF. However, much like the misunderstood entity of antifa today, the ALF and ELF we’re never centralized groups, but more a label placed on a type of action that met a certain group of criteria- mainly direct action against animal/earth exploitation enterprises without causing injury or death to humans and other animals. This is something the author does know and mention, but then goes on to basically characterize the movement as a small USA Pacific Northwest affinity group. People took actions across the world, using a massive variety of tactics, some more effective than others, with all sorts of different outcomes in regards to legal aspects. People are still doing so today.
Furthermore, due to the absolute mess that was this particular case, focusing solely on it makes it seem like the movement was mostly an ineffective and misguided set of mistakes. If someone knew nothing about this history, they might think that the only reason the government got involved was due to arson combined with post 9/11 patriot act emboldened FBI. However, anyone with an understanding of this history and that of any other movement knows that the crackdown came because the movement was effective. Not just those taking on the label of the ELF, but organizers all over the country were taking action and having real effects against corporations that were destroying the planet and torturing animals. Another thing that is remarked upon on the book, but not focused on nearly enough, is that the vast majority of these actions not only didn’t injure anyone, but weren’t even dangerous like arsons described in the book. Yet, the crackdown by the feds meant having the FBI showing up at vegan potlucks and surveilling/disrupting your entirely legal above ground actions. It had them infiltrating animal rescue groups, seducing and entrapping activists, coercing some of them into taking actions they never would have taken otherwise, having long-term relationships with them (and even children,) and bullying their friends and family into turning on them. Rape kits sat untested due to “lack of resources” for years while money was used to test DNA on the bandanas of activists that legally protested on sidewalks. Entire laws- like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act- were created that criminalized any sort of vague disruption in the profits of corporations who exploited animals and the environment as terrorism, creating broad and sweeping devastation in the lives of people daring to take even legal 1st amendment actions like filming animal abuse at a slaughterhouse from the side of the road. These laws are still in place.
I’m not saying that the author never touches on any of this. He talks about how property destruction prior to 9/11 had never been labeled terrorism and how animal and eco activists were placed above white supremacists on the FBI’s terror watch list despite the latter being who was actually mass murdering people. My issue is that he doesn’t touch on it enough. It is a side note rather than the main story.
These effects on these movements occurred on a dying planet, the latter of which is captured well at times by the book in terms of the ways that the organizers were thinking about things. I felt that the author did well to truly understand why these particular activists in this particular affinity group took the actions they took. I am limited somewhat in the fact that I was reading an ARC, but the sources and process I do have access to in the review copy show that the author was often using specific sources for every sentence. Narrative nonfiction is a risk. In order to create something that reads almost like a novel, there’s a certain creative flourish. I do think this pays off in how it engages the reader. There were a couple times that I felt he relied on some industry propaganda, particularly when discussing animal liberation. But overall, I think the reader can get a good grasp of the desperation and passion that the characters of this book were feeling.
That said, in his notes, Wolfe discusses his construction of stories as the “most logical” sequence of events based on the sources he used. The book as a result tells stories that may or may not be true, but bills itself as a factual account. There were times that I was left wondering about certain very specific details. There is one section in the end where he speculates about Josephine Overaker that I found irresponsible. I am still unsure about the things that I had not heard about before reading this and the level of accuracy of each one. This is not really something that is unique to this book though. I would say pretty much any deep dive like this is not going to be perfect and I do think an admirable amount of research went into this book.
I had followed this case quite closely at the time. I read frequently about the green scare, I wrote to political prisoners, and I was admittedly generally paranoid both in personality and because I was paying attention to how the left was being treated in a post 9/11 world. This book still taught me some things that I didn’t know. I never realized how massively diverse the backgrounds were of these activists. Despite how this book ends, it can serve as inspiration in a way about how people from all kinds of backgrounds can come together and make something big happen. I also didn’t know about Avalon being a predatory manarchist/macktivist. An important lesson can be learned there about movement idols with the most social capital.
There are also details that, strangely enough, serve as instruction on what to do right if you want to carry out an effective action of their choosing without getting caught. If they had stuck to a more careful methodology and if it weren’t for the FBI’s infiltration and adept ability to get so many people to turn on one another, they might have gotten away with all of it. Though given the time period and government in place, the outcomes may have been the same. Organizers were convicted in other cases on much less.
As the story progresses, it gets more and more devastating. If there ever was a fable that could be told to teach a lesson about how the state is not your friend and how cooperation will not save you, it’s this one. One thing to note is how the feds were scrambling to go after everyone before the statute of limitations was up. Everyone in the case had long since moved on for years and was no longer a “threat” in terms of the state’s fake-ass claims of protecting the nation from “domestic terrorism.” The resolution was about punishment, quota, and furthering a precedent that would cause anybody to think twice before they got involved in any sort of movement. It’s strange, I don’t recall if I knew just how many people snitched in this case. It was well known far and wide that Jacob Ferguson became the most nightmarish betrayer of everyone he knew and everything he claimed to believe in. His story, along with that of “Anna” and other agents who entrapped people left many organizers having nightmares that their partner or friend might not be who they say they are. I knew that Daniel McGowan, Joyanna Zacher, Nathan Block, and Jonathan Paul held out and refused to cooperate no matter what. But, I forgot or didn’t realize just how many others decided to inform on each other. I think that Wolfe did a decent job capturing why each of the defendants folded. He definitely captured how their betrayals did nothing but make everyone’s lives worse including their own.
If a tepid political yard sign and a live laugh love mug gave birth to a human being who was then given the power of a federal judge, it would be the painfully neoliberal Clinton appointed Judge Aiken. The sentences she reigned down on the defendants were matched only by her stupidly patronizing advice that they should read memoirs or perform random acts of kindness to stop apocalyptic ecological devastation, all while claiming that she, too, (just like Al Gore!) totally cares. Even though she showed that maybe she has learned a thing or two when she decided in later years to let one defendant off with community service, she exemplifies just how right wing the Democrat party was at the burgeoning time of tough on crime politics. It is difficult to describe the sickening feeling of seeing someone who chose to betray everyone they knew and everything they believed in be sentenced to more years in prison than those they informed on. The vindictive part of me feels like they deserve it. Another part of me thinks of what it must be like facing massive prison time, being called a terrorist, with a shoddy public defender and federal agents telling you that all of your former comrades already informed on you. I wouldn’t have made the same decision, but I see how they ended up doing so. I hope it serves as a lesson to others who may find the feds holding their hand telling them they just want to help them… if only they’ll rat on their friends. Even Jacob Ferguson, who got off on probation despite arguably being the most chaotic and dangerous in his methods, still lost all of his social support, was immortalized in media as a snitch of the worst calibre, then fell back into addiction and ended up in prison again anyway. As all who cooperated learned, being a informant in prison adds another layer of punishment and risk.
The way that Wolfe chose to wrap up the book in the epilogue was crafty. I wish he would have taken it much further though. He chose to briefly focus on what has happened since then. How we’ve lost 70% of the animals on Earth in a 50-year time period. How ecological destruction has only accelerated, but along with it has come an ever increasing bravery among organizers to take a variety of actions, including property destruction and sabotage, to fight back. The most poetic part of the epilogue is his focus on wildfires. I wish he would have written more about this. When you juxtapose the absolute devastation of massive areas of the planet blanketed by uncontrollable fires caused by climate change and other ecological destruction, it puts into perspective how absolutely ridiculous it is to characterize controlled arsons against buildings as the top threat. Regardless of how you feel about varying tactics that organizers use, one cannot deny that when you push someone to desperation and render an legal avenues ineffective (or worse, punish them as terrorism) that more extreme actions are inevitable. As we watch things continue to collapse around us, we will have to ask time and again what we are supposed to do, what we should have done, and what hope there is left to preserve the little that remains. There will never be perfectly correct answers to these questions.
My advice to the reader is to go into this book as a legal/political thriller style narrative that will tell you a tiny part of a massive story. It may scratch that itch of entertainment one can get from this sort of thing while also teaching you something about the time period and movements therein. However, if this history is new to you, you need to look much further than this book if you want to understand the history of these movements, the FBI’s role, and the secret history of eco-sabotage.
This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.
_____
Edit: I keep thinking about it so bumping up to 4 stars for the amount of labor and research alone.
Since someone asked, I should have mentioned that I highly recommend Will Potter’s work for more info about the green scare and some of the organizing taking place. A lot of other knowledge is hard to obtain due to government surveillance, so much of it is scattered across zines, prisoner support websites, online articles, etc. That is why I’m willing to give Wolfe some grace given the sources available.