One Eco-Arson After Another: The Earth Liberation Front
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
April 20th, 2004. A quiet suburban development outside Seattle. Brand-new homes. Fresh lawns not yet grown in.
Then, in the middle of the night—sirens. Flames ripping through two houses.
Investigators quickly find the cause: homemade incendiary devices. And a message, left behind at another site: “urban sprawl has become a central issue in the struggle to protect the earth.” Signed, the Earth Liberation Front.
The ELF is already known to authorities: a shadowy network of environmental activists who operate in secret, striking targets they see as destroying the planet. But this attack feels different. Closer to home.
Today: one man’s journey into the Earth Liberation Front. From suburban childhood to underground cells…from protest to arson.
What draws someone into a movement like this? How does activism turn into sabotage? And when it comes to defending the Earth…how far is too far?
Special thanks to Matthew Wolfe, author of Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:04.8 | History This Week, April 20th, 2004. |
| 0:10.9 | I'm Alana Casanova Burgess. |
| 0:16.9 | Lobo Ridge is a classic U.S. suburban subdivision of the early 2000s. |
| 0:22.7 | 37 homes, upscale, the houses come with jacuzzi bathtubs. |
| 0:28.4 | It's right next to a golf course, a 45-minute drive from downtown Seattle. |
| 0:34.8 | The Lobo Ridge development is so new that the kids who've just moved in play on mounds |
| 0:40.3 | of construction dirt where their front yards should be. |
| 0:44.3 | The real estate agent for Lobo Ridge, Barry McGee, lives in one of the houses with his family. |
| 0:51.3 | The neighborhood feels safe, secluded, until two of the houses go up in flames. |
| 1:01.9 | Luckily, these houses are still empty. Barry was going to close on one of them next week, |
| 1:07.8 | but now, woken up by firefighters at two in the morning, he's watching them |
| 1:13.0 | burn. Only the concrete foundations will survive. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, |
| 1:21.2 | the ATF, takes the lead on the investigation. They find that another house across the street was |
| 1:27.4 | also supposed to burn, |
| 1:29.1 | but the device didn't go off. Six soda bottles filled with gasoline attached to paper towel rolls |
| 1:35.4 | stuffed with paper. A candle was used as a fuse. Who's responsible? 13 miles away, at another upscale subdivision, |
| 1:45.9 | investigators find a note, scrawled on a cardboard sign. |
| 1:50.1 | Among other things, it reads, |
| 1:52.4 | urban sprawl has become a central issue |
| 1:55.1 | in the struggle to protect the Earth. |
| 1:58.1 | Signed, the ELF, the Earth Liberation Front. The investigators know exactly what that is. |
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