Matthew Wolfe wrote his first book while a fellow at New York University. But he first caught wind of its subject years before, as a teenager in Marin County, Calif. “When you’re a teenage boy,” he tells WW, “the idea of a number of righteous vigilantes setting fires at night in furtherance of a righteous cause seems pretty cool.” Unlike recycling or turning out the lights when you leave the room, property destruction was an act that felt commensurate with the threat of planetary destruction. “I have more complex views about it now,” Wolfe says, after more than six years researching the underground arsonists of the Earth Liberation Front, who in the 1990s mixed “vegan Jell-O” in milk bottles and used it to ignite empty buildings as revenge for forests and woodland creatures. Weeks before the publication date of Fires in the Night, Wolfe talked about why ELF found fertile soil in Oregon, which elves unexpectedly talked about their crimes, and why futile and stupid gestures have eternal appeal. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
WW: Was there something about Eugene in the 1990s that made it especially ripe for this kind of activity?
Matthew Wolfe: Totally. It was this unique place where a long tradition of radicalism, centered around the University of Oregon, came crashing into capitalism—which is Eugene’s history as a logging town. You had a lot of people for whom their livelihood was based on cutting down trees and a lot of people for whom trees were sacred. And that created a lot of fights. It was also where the Earth First! Journal, the organ of the radical environmentalist movement, was being published at that time. So it was a real tinderbox for environmental conflict, and a place where a lot of people were coming, as one activist put it, to really get into the shit…