Fires in the Night Traces ELF's Radical Climate Legacy
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- Earth Liberation Front conducted arsons and economic sabotage across the Pacific Northwest from 1995 to 2001, targeting fur breeders, timber warehouses, meatpacking plants, a Bureau of Land Management horse corral, SUV dealerships and electric power transmission towers.
- ELF's most famous attack was a 1998 arson at a Vail, Colorado ski resort causing more than $12 million in damage, carried out on behalf of the endangered lynx, per the new book 'Fires in the Night' by Matthew Wolfe.
- The group caused $45 million in total damages according to the government and was the subject of 190 investigations across 34 FBI field offices, according to 2004 testimony from FBI deputy director John Lewis.
- ELF styled itself as 'the Family' and practiced 'leaderless resistance,' with members known externally as 'Elves' — a label derived from the group's acronym — and used non-violence toward life but not property.
- The group emerged from Eugene, Oregon as a radical outgrowth of eco-anarchist movement Earth First!, which had been founded a decade earlier in response to mainstream environmental groups' compromises.
- ELF member Stanislas Meyerhoff, co-author of an incendiary bomb-making guide, was sentenced to 13 years for a string of arsons including the Vail fire and later said he 'acted from a faulty and narrow vision as an ordinary bigot.'
- At least one ELF member, Josephine Overaker, is still at large, while Joseph Dibee was captured in Cuba in 2018 on an Interpol red notice and claimed ELF 'hadn't really existed' — a claim Wolfe draws parallel to current debates about 'antifa' that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist organization.
Why it matters: Wolfe's argument reframes a $45 million property-damage campaign as a failed early warning: the Elves' small fires didn't catalyze broader climate action, and as Wolfe notes, 'the result of their small fires failing was that much larger fires were in the offing.' The legacy question lands now as modern climate movements from Just Stop Oil to Tesla-dealership protesters still wrestle with the tactical lines Wolfe's book draws.
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