Sabotage, Booby-Traps and Direct Action

Among activists and protestors are those who use direct action and sabotage to advance their cause.

From the 1993, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching to the more current Earth First Direct Action Manual 3rd Edition there are guides readily available on-line that teach users how to sabotage machinery, damage vehicles, and disrupt commercial operations such a logging, mining, and hunting, as we see in the Earth First Wolf Hunt Sabotage Manual. The March 2017 web-site Earth First! Mechanic's Guild offers updates to Ecodefense.

Awareness of these tactics is important for those who work in these commercial industries, for conservation law enforcement / game wardens working in wilderness areas, and as we see in the Earth-First "Death Manual" for ‘off-roaders’ who ride in wilderness areas. (Note: that the off-road community titled this the "Death Manual", not Earth First.

You don’t have to work in a wilderness area however to be a target of sabotage and direct action, as we can see from the Animal Liberation Front Guide to Direct Action (2010).

Targets of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front can be seen in this table from the May 2013 report An Overview of Bombing and Arson Attacks by Environmental and Animal Rights Extremists in the United States, 1995-2010. 

Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook is a 625 page manual discussing a wide range of topics of interest to activists and those interested in direct action.  A Step-by-Step Guide to Direct Action provides additional information. In February 2018, I listed other related resources in a blog post Anarchists, Activists, and Saboteurs.

ALF / ELF activists are not the only ones that may pose a safety concern. Marijuana growers frequently set booby-traps to protect their outdoor grow sites.  These traps may be fairly simple, like punji pits and cartridge traps, or they may be more complex.

 

By studying these tactics and techniques we can be safer during any encounter with them.