Note: It appears that the second wave of the Green Scare is upon us. The recent re-incarceration of former eco-defender Daniel McGowan, and this news of the FBI’s harassment (or investigation) of the co-founder of the Earth Liberation Front communications office, provide concrete evidence that state and federal authorities – in the pockets of the 1% – are still bent on destroying radical ecological movements.
On a related note, Global Justice Ecology Project Executive Director Anne Petermann will be speaking on the dangers of genetically engineered trees at Burning Books, on Earth Day (April 22) at 8 pm. 420 Connecticut St., Buffalo, NY. Leslie James Pickering is co-owner of Burning Books.
-The GJEP Team
By Geoff Kelly, April 4, 2013. Source: ArtVoice
Last August, Leslie James Pickering received unsettling news from an old acquaintance he’d known in Portland, Oregon, where both had lived in the 1990s. Pickering’s friend, now living in the Southwest, had received a phone call from two men who identified themselves as agents in the FBI’s Buffalo field office.
The agents asked Pickering’s friend about his character—what she thought of him as a person. Was he capable of influencing or even manipulating people? They asked her about Pickering’s activities in Portland, where Pickering and a partner, Craig Rosebraugh, were founders of the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office. NAELFPO received and disseminated to the media anonymously delivered communiques from Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, a radical environmentalist group that was, at the time, waging a campaign of property destruction against corporations they considered to be exploiting and destroying the planet’s ecosystems. Though he was never a member of ELF, Pickering was a sympathizer and had been a participant in demonstrations against the same kind of activities and institutions that ELF targeted.
The FBI agents asked Pickering’s friend if he might have been involved in purported ELF activities in Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By that time, Pickering had resigned from NAELFPO and returned to Western New York, where he was raised.
The agents asked her to steer them toward others who knew Pickering and maybe didn’t like him very much. Is he a loner? An extremist? It seemed, she told Pickering, as if they were creating a personality profile, and trying to figure out what he might be up to today.
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Christy Rodgers
Global Justice Ecology Project
hallieb
Jeff Conant
