‘It came out of real frustration’: the 90s activist network that set fires to save a burning planet

Matthew Wolfe’s Fires in the Night examines Earth Liberation Front, a US eco-anarchist movement, and its legacy of radical environmentalism

Are echoes of 1990s radical environmentalism returning louder or fading away? It’s a question posed by Fires in the Night, a new book on the history of the Earth Liberation Front (Elf), a loosely grouped band of US Pacific north-west activists that used economic sabotage and arson to protest environmental destruction.

The members called themselves “the Family” and were known to the outside world as Elves, owed to the acronym for the group Elf. Unlike rightwing extremists of the era, they practiced non-violence toward life, though not property. They were labelled domestic terrorists and practiced “leaderless resistance”.