Ecotage

Ecotage ( ), also called eco-sabotage or monkeywrenching, is sabotage carried out for environmental reasons. The term covers a wide range of direct-action tactics, including tree spiking, the disabling of construction or logging equipment, arson of buildings associated with environmentally damaging industries, deflation of tyres on sport utility vehicles, and the closing of valves on oil pipelines. Practitioners typically target property rather than people and have framed their actions as a form of defensive resistance against ecological destruction.

The word was popularised by Sam Love and David Obst in their 1972 anthology Ecotage!, which combined "ecology" and "sabotage". Although clandestine sabotage for environmental ends predates the term, ecotage entered the wider environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s through the writings of Edward Abbey, whose 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired the founding of the radical group Earth First! and the publication of Dave Foreman's 1985 field guide Ecodefense. From the 1990s onwards, ecotage in the United States was associated with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF), whose campaigns of arson became the focus of the Operation Backfire investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The classification of ecotage is contested. Governments and industry groups in the United States have frequently described it as a form of eco-terrorism, and convictions of ecotage participants have, in several cases, carried a terrorism enhancement at sentencing. Activists, academics and a number of legal scholars dispute this framing, arguing that property destruction without intent to harm people falls outside conventional definitions of terrorism. In the 2020s, the debate has been renewed by Andreas Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) and a corresponding wave of climate-related sabotage in Europe and North America.