GREEN RAGE
by Matt Rasmussen
from Orion Magazine – January/Feb 2007

Radical environmentalists are caught between their love of the Earth, trespass of the law and the U.S. government’s war on terror

PEOPLE LIKE TO THINK of the courtroom as a crucible of justice, but to me it’s always seemed a diluter of passions. The atmosphere is restrained, so respectful and genteel it’s easy to forget that people’s lives hang in the balance. The system has a way of straining out emotion. It is designed to objectify, to control the soaring passions that created the need for the courtroom in the first place. The perpetrators and the victims pour their passions into the settling ponds of the attorneys, and the attorneys, in turn, pour the diluted stuff into the deep vessel of the judge, and, by extension, into the even deeper water of The System.

If you sat in the gallery of a federal courtroom in my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, last summer and watched as six young men and women entered guilty pleas in a string of environmentally motivated arsons—crimes that the federal government describes as the most egregious environmental terrorism in the nation’s history—you might have wondered where the passion had gone. One by one, in a windowless chamber, the defendants answered perfunctory questions posed by Judge Ann Aiken, who sat Oz-like in the highest chair. One by one, they listened to descriptions of the crimes they were accused of committing. One by one, they accepted the government’s offer of plea bargains, and one by one, they said the word.

“Guilty.”