Some Suggestions Concerning Strategy

After each monkeywrenching operation, ecosaboteurs should send an anonymous letter to the local newspapers explaining the reasons for the attack. Another anonymous letter should be sent to the Earth First! Journal describing the results of the attack, and the Journal should publish such letters, because reading about others' exploits will give encouragement to monkeywrenchers.

Instead of carrying out single, sporadic monkeywrenching operatings, ecosaboteurs should plan monkeywrenching campaigns. For example, a small group of monkeywrenchers might locate as many logging sites as they can in a given area, and then make a raid every week throughout a whole summer. Or they could select a particularly nasty timber company and hit its logging sites and its offices over and over again during a period of several months. Or they could first locate all the power lines leading into some small city, prepare themselves thoroughly, and then black out the city by cutting all of the power lines within a period of two or three days. Attacks that are concentrated in this way will be far more effective than randomly scattered attacks.

A monkey-wrenching attack at the site where the system is carrying on a criminal activity such as logging or mining is not necessarily the most effective way to stop the criminal activity in question. Take the Cove-Mallard operation, for instance. By concentrating its defenses (such as guards) at the logging sites, the system can prevent monkeywrenchers from doing enough damage there to stop the logging. But the system cannot place a guard at every point in the state of Idaho that might be hit by monkeywrenchers. Suppose for example that all of the Earth First!ers at Cove-Mallard were to scatter out over the state of Idaho (or even over adjacent states) and carry out a campaign of cutting power lines and telephone lines. They could virtually cripple the whole state. It is possible that the system would be willing to strike a bargain and leave the Cove-Mallard alone if EF! would lay off the telephone and power lines. More likely, though, the system would refuse to back down at Cove-Mallard because it would lose too much prestige by doing so. But the next time a conflict over a wilderness area arose, the system would hesitate to defy EF! for fear of another massively destructive sabotage campaign.

Instead of monkeywrenching only at logging or mining sites, it would be advantageous to sabotage the offices of the logging and mining companies and the homes of their executives. Office and home addresses of executives can be looked up in Dunn and Bradstreet or the Standard and Poor directory, available in any library.

At some point, radical environmentalists must come in out of the woods and attack the central structures of the industrial system. In resisting wilderness destruction and environmental damage, EF! is attacking only the symptoms of the industrial disease and not its root cause. You will never be able to save wilderness permanently unless you can bring down the industrial system itself. To do that you must attack the technology on which the system is based. EF!ers should spend as much time demonstrating or monkeywrenching at computer centers or biotech labs as they do in the wilderness. Suitable targets can be located by reading Scientific American or other science magazines.