The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

The popularly acclaimed two segments today,

we'll hear from Christopher Ketchum,

author of a profile of an eco-terrorist in Harper's magazine, and

Nieve Gordon, law professor and human rights activist, about what it is in Israeli

society that produces monstrosities like the war in Gaza.

As we stare down climate disaster and see a political and business class with little

interest in doing much serious about it, it's tempting to give in to the impulse to do

something, anything, to avert catastrophe.

For some people like those in Extinction Rebellion, it means gluing yourself to a Picasso.

For others, it means blowing things up.

That was the approach taken by the subject of a profile by my first guest, Christopher Ketchum, published in the November issue of Harper's magazine.

His subject, Stephen McRae, was a high-end carpenter in Texas whose business was destroyed in the 2008 financial crisis.

McRae ended up living in this truck in the wilderness to the American West. He grew more and more concerned

about ecological devastation and in 2016 decided to do something

about it, fire a single rifle shot into an electrical transformer.

He got caught and spent six years in federal prison, were it not for a plea deal he could have done a lot more.

What leads someone to a deed like that?

Here with some answers is the author of that profile, Christopher Ketchum.

Ketchum is a freelance magazine writer who's had over a dozen pieces in

Harpers and others in the New Republic Rolling Stone Mother Jones and Hustler.

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