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<h2><b>The green
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<a href="http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=5783" eudora="autourl">
http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=5783<br><br>
</a>The story of Rod Coronado and how new laws are equating
environmentalists with Al Qaeda<br><br>
<i>by Dean Kuipers <br><br>
</i>It's only appropriate, perhaps, that the future of the First
Amendment takes shape in a hippie law office in San Francisco's North
Beach district, surrounded by strippers. A light April rain falls on
furtive patrons of the Lusty Lady and the Roaring 20s on the street below
as legendary radical environmentalist Rodney Coronado sits in a
conference room in the Pier 5 Law Offices, strategizing with some of this
country's finest civil-rights attorneys. <br><br>
Coronado's no stranger to this scenario, having emerged only days before
from his second stretch in federal prison, this time for eight months. He
listens attentively, his dark Yaqui Indian heritage shining through as he
munches on a veggie burrito. The glow on his fiancée Chrysta's face says
everything you'd need to know about how good it is to be out. But the joy
may be short-lived. Now Coronado is caught up in a prosecution he never
could have foreseen and which has the environmentalist community, in
particular, digging in for a long fight with the federal government.
<br><br>
That's because his alleged crime doesn't involve something he actually
did. Rather, it only involves something he said. <br><br>
In 2003, Coronado gave a public speech about animal rights in Hillcrest
attended by about 100 people and hosted by a vegetarian group. It was, he
says, his "standard" speech at the time, talking about his own
extreme efforts to protect wildlife, including a 1991-92 arson campaign
against fur farms as an agent of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), for
which he served 57 months in prison. During a Q&A period after the
speech, someone asked him how he once made his incendiary devices. Having
long retired from that kind of action, and having paid for it with prison
time, he answered the question. <br><br>
U.S. attorneys now say Coronado's brief responsethe actual words
themselvesis a federal crime. Not only that, it's terrorism. <br><br>
And that word"terrorism"is new to the environmental movement
when it comes to punishment for crimes. The word
"eco-terrorist" was coined in 1982 by Ron Arnold, a prime mover
in the anti-environmentalist "Wise Use Movement," but only
recent laws make ecologically motivated speech a terrorist crime. The
attorneys aren't even totally certain how it works. I ask the question,
cognizant that Coronado and his fiancée are in the room, and opinions
fly. Ben Rosenfeld, from the offices of famed attorney Dennis Cunningham,
says the government's plea offer, which they turned down, was 21 months.
Tony Serra, the silver-haired lion who is a resident of these offices and
who has successfully championed everyone from Black Panther Huey Newton
to the Hells Angels to Earth First!er Judi Bari, says he always figures
the judge could go twice the offer, so 42 months. <br><br>
But Jerry Singleton, the attorney who is defending Coronado's case in
federal district court in San Diego, shakes his head. <br><br>
"The government is holding out that there's this bogeyman,"
says Singleton, who is based in San Diego. "They're saying that the
guidelines, which would put him at, I think, 18 years, would be the ones
that apply. Those were post-9/11." That stuns the room for a minute.
<br><br>
"I don't think those sentencing guidelines are applicable in this
case, not the way it's been charged," opines another Pier 5
attorney, Omar Figueroa. <br><br>
"Well, there's an argument that they are," says Singleton,
shooting a look at Coronado. "They're trying to use them."
<br><br>
Eighteen years would be a shocking sentence for a speech, even if
Coronado were the only one facing time like this, but he's got company.
Since 2005, the government has brought more than 20 cases against
environmentalists that have not only redefined free speech, but also
redefined environmentally motivated property destructionlike torching
Hummers or tree-felling equipmentas being on a par with the murderous
assaults of Al Qaeda. <br><br>
On May 21, a federal judge in Oregon announced she was sentencing 10
animal activists there as "terrorists" for burning SUVs, among
other crimes, under post-9/11 revisions of the federal sentencing
guidelines that can add as much as 20 years to a sentence if the crime
was meant to coerce or influence the government. Singleton says he's not
sure how this will apply to Coronado's case, since the Oregon defendants
sentenced thus far have pleaded guilty to actual arsonnot just talking
about arson. But Lauren Regan, an attorney representing the defendants in
the Oregon cases, says this landmark ruling has redefined terrorism,
saying: "The unintended consequences of this judge's ruling is that
anyone who damages property opens themselves up to a terrorism
prosecution. They burned SUVs on a private car lot, never physically
injuring anybody; to think that's equal to killing 168 people in Oklahoma
City is a stretch." <br><br>
Twenty eco-radicals on trial might not sound like a lot, but it's almost
as many as had been arrested for major crimes in the 18 years previous,
while 1,200 known attacks by ALF or its younger twin, the Earth
Liberation Front, caused as much as $200 million in damages. It is
important to note that no persons have ever been injured or killed in
these attacks, but industry lobbying groups have forced the government to
make prosecuting them a top priority. <br><br>
Environmentalists are calling it the "green scare," in
reference to the "red scare" that characterized the hunt for
communists during the McCarthy era. The wave of prosecutions have sent a
shock through the part of the movement that engages in direct action,
like activists bicycle-locking themselves to bulldozers. <br><br>
In another case in New Jersey, six activists were given sentences as long
as six years for running a website that posted information about
vandalism attackswithout connecting them to the vandalism in any way. In
the meantime, even the Democratic-controlled Congress keeps ratcheting up
the laws, passing in November the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which
makes attacks against the profits of animal-based industries, once again,
terrorism. <br><br>
"You have to look at Rod's case in conjunction with the whole spate
of vindictive cases that the government has been bringing against radical
environmentalists, who the government carelessly lumps in with
terrorists, and members of ELF or ALF and sometimes just
anarchists," says Rosenfeld. "The government has been on record
as admitting it's made a domestic priority out of going after this
movement writ large." <br><br>
True enough, the U.S. Department of Justice has said in congressional
testimony since at least 1999 that it considered ALF and ELF to be
"top priorities" in the fight against domestic terrorism. But
that has never included people who make animal-rights websites. Or widely
published activist leaders like Coronado who make speeches. Until now.
Rosenfeld says he's started to field concerned calls from other
environmental groups. <br><br>
"It is having a huge chilling impact on people," he adds.
"The government has shown its willingness to go after people based
purely on speech and ideology. People don't know anymore what they can
safely even say, let alone what they can safely do. This is at complete
variance with what most people believe is protected activity."
<br><br>
<b>Boom! Just like that</b> <br><br>
The facts of what Rodney Coronado did and said in San Diego are not in
dispute. On Aug. 1, 2003, he rose in the pre-dawn darkness at the offices
of the Earth First! Journal in Tucson, where he was crashing, and boarded
an early plane to San Diego. He was only 36 years old but could have been
considered, even then, an elder spokesman of the radical movement, having
been involved with groups like Earth First!, the Sea Shepherds and ALF
since he was 18. He was met at the airport by David Agranoff, his host,
then 29, who had invited him to speak that evening as one of a series of
events Agranoff's vegan advocacy group was calling "Revolution
Summer." <br><br>
Despite the name, Agranoff and his cohorts were hardly the stuff of
violent overthrow. Agranoff is a laughing, easygoing horror fiction
writer and a teacher of kids with autism, and the four or five people in
the group, including his wife, called themselves Compassion for Farm
Animals. "Mostly what we did was pass out dairy-free ice cream in
Balboa Park, maintain our website and do community potluck dinners. That
was our terrorism," Agranoff chuckles. <br><br>
And Coronado himself was, as he insists, retired from felony action.
After finishing a long stint in prison in 1999, and having a son who
needed his daddy, he was no longer available for fur-shop smashups or
arson or other major offenses. He was, he says, satisfied with being a
spokesman for the movement and maybe participating in marches or civil
disobediencenothing more. <br><br>
Someone else in town, however, was using more hardcore tactics. Before
Coronado's plane arrived in San Diego that morning, a huge blaze began at
an unfinished, but controversial, 206-unit La Jolla condominium complex
that caused $50 million in damages. Four hundred people had to be
evacuated from nearby homes. A banner hung at the site read: "If you
build it, we will burn it. The E.L.F.s are mad." <br><br>
Agranoff and Coronado claim they never heard about the fire until around
6 p.m., when they went to The Center, a gay and lesbian community complex
in Hillcrest, for the planned talk and were met there by reporters who
filled them in. Coronado says he had "no goddamn idea" who
started the fire but gave them some remarks about arson as a tactic. To
one reporter, he said, "I would rather see an apartment complex burn
to the ground than developers making money off the environment." The
feds have never charged him with involvement in the fire. <br><br>
"Anybody who did that arson knew that the last thing they should be
doing was hanging out where I was," says Coronado. "Because
they knew that the feds were going to be all over my shit."
<br><br>
Coronado assumes that agents regularly attended his talks, and it seems
they did; agents later subpoenaed and questioned people who attended that
lecture after allegedly recording their license plate numbers outside.
But he made a practice of never toning down his lectures. <br><br>
"I'm not going to sanitize my speeches for fear of throwing them a
bone," he says. "Let them listen. I was pretty known for a
standard lecture about animal and earth liberation, Deep Ecology, and
then contexting it within my own personal experiences, with my own Native
American heritage." <br><br>
Coronado had delivered this talk scores of times, all over the world. In
it, he recounted selected bits of his own history as examples of what he
considered non-violent action in defense of threatened wildlife. He grew
up as a middle-class kid in San Jose, hunting and fishing and learning
about his Yaqui ancestry. But his monkey-wrenching became legendary in
1986, when he and another sailor from oceangoing radicals the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society sank two unmanned Icelandic whaling vessels
in Reykjavik Harbor. Later, in 1989, he began a video investigation of
fur farming with a partner, Jonathan Paul, the footage from which was
used in a 60 Minutes segment. In 1990, he helped launch "Operation
Bite Back," a sweeping campaign that torched fur farms and research
laboratories in Oregon, Washington, Michigan and Utah, causing millions
in damages. Eventually, after two years underground in mountain cabins
and Indian reservations, Coronado was caught living on a Yaqui
reservation outside Tucson and sentenced in 1995 to 57 months in prison
for burning a Michigan State University animal-research lab. <br><br>
This was the apex of Coronado's life as an arsonist. Living on the lam
and in prison, Coronado says, led him through a series of spiritual and
strategic epiphanies. Over the years, his cast of personal heroes had
expanded to include not only Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,
but also the Apache warrior Geronimo, but he knew armed resistance was
not his destiny. He vowed, though, to always speak out in defense of
wilderness and wildlife. <br><br>
Agranoff says about 100 people were at the San Diego talk, and he was
thrilled. "Usually, we'd get about 15 people. We'd publicized the
hell out of this." It was a public event, and he didn't know most of
the attendees. Finally, someone asked a question: How did you build the
incendiary device you used in Michigan? <br><br>
Coronado never missed a beat. He'd answered this before. Trying to recall
his wording, he says now: "I was like, ‘Oh, well, I did this: I made
a crude incendiary device'and I walked over to a table where we had the
food set up, grabbed an apple-juice jug, saying, "a device like
this," and then I turned around, there was a chalkboard behind me,
and I made a really brief line drawing of how an electronic circuit
works: here's the battery, here's the timer, here's the igniter. And then
you create a circuit, and that ignites underneath this [the jug, which
would have been full of a mix of gasoline and motor oil] andboom! Just
like that." <br><br>
Boom. Got that? No, evidently nobody else did, either, because no known
person ever made a bomb from the instructions Coronado gave that night.
The feds waited two and a half years to make sure and then arrested him
anyway, in February 2006. Agranoff remembers the description as being
even less detailed, saying Coronado never drew it on any chalkboard.
"No, he didn't draw a diagram. He just kinda quickly answered the
question and moved on," he says. <br><br>
That night, Coronado hopped on a bus to Los Angeles to give another
version of his standard speech at a big annual animal-rights conference.
In San Diego, however, his words were lingering. <br><br>
<b>Criminalizing speech</b> <br><br>
Under 18 USC § 842(p)(2)(A), which was introduced by Sen. Dianne
Feinstein and co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph Biden, "It shall be
unlawful for any person to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an
explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction, or to
distribute by any means information pertaining to, in whole or in part,
the manufacture or use of an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of
mass destruction, with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or
information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that
constitutes a federal crime of violence." <br><br>
That's the whole law under which Coronado is charged. It was meant to get
bomb-making instructions off of the Internet, where they are widely
available. The troubling word, here, though, is "intent." Ben
Rosenfeld can't see how the government can claim Coronado intended anyone
in San Diego to commit a federal crime. Commenting on Coronado's case in
a widely distributed 2006 legal essay, he writes: "Make no mistake.
This is a pure free speech case. Measured against any historic test of
free speech, Coronado's behaviorthat is to say, his speechwas
alarmingly innocuous and uncriminal [his emphasis]." <br><br>
Two days after the speech, Agranoff and his pals returned from a planned
non-violent demonstration at a Norco dairy farm to find their van was
gone and their house had been ransacked by the feds. Eventually, Agranoff
and many others were dragged in front of a grand jury, which was convened
to investigate the fire but which ended up mostly asking questions about
Rod Coronado. Agranoff's house was raided again, this time when he was
present, as was the home of another activist, Michael Cardenas, and the
only things taken were videotapes of Coronado's speech. Neither tape,
however, showed the question-and-answer period. <br><br>
Agranoff and fellow activists Danae Kelly and Nicole Fink refused to
speak to the grand jury and were jailed for about 80 days each on
contempt charges. <br><br>
"I'm perfectly willing to testify," says Agranoff,
"because there's nothing I can say that would hurt Rod. But I'm not
going to do it in a secret proceeding. They have to do this in open
court." <br><br>
San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lamwho was later fired by Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, which hasn't affected the caseannounced Coronado's
indictment on Feb. 22, 2006, in a press release that seemed to purposely
conflate Coronado's speech and the fire he didn't commit. <br><br>
"Teaching people how to build explosives in order to commit violent
crimes is unacceptable in civilized society," she is quoted. This is
followed by a quote from agent John Torres of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), who says, "When
organizations such as ELF/ALF engage in these senseless acts of violence,
it threatens us all. ATF will continue to aggressively pursue these types
of cases and bring this type of criminal activity to a halt."
<br><br>
"What strikes me as being so wrong about this statute is that
there's no requirement that there be any kind of agreement between the
person furnishing the information and the listeners, either explicit or
implicit," says Singleton. As such, he sees it as protected speech.
In his view, it fails the historic test for incitement, which requires
intent and/or imminent action. <br><br>
There are only three exceptions to free speech, as carved out by the
Supreme Court: <br><br>
• "Fighting words"the direct incitement to violence <br><br>
• Obscenity <br><br>
• The exception for "clear and present danger." <br><br>
Ben Rosenfeld, in his essay on Coronado's case, feels none of these
applies to this speech. In the case of "clear and present
danger," for instance, he notes that Supreme Court Judge William
Brandeis wrote: "If there be time to expose through discussion the
falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education,
the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." In
other words, if someone has time to think about the crime, the speech
describing it does not represent a clear and present danger. <br><br>
"[This is] really asking the court to outlaw a type of speech that
has never been outlawed before," says Singleton. He filed a motion
to throw out the Feinstein law as unconstitutional, but the judge
declined earlier this year. "All the case law talks about is an
individual having criminal liability for aiding and abetting in the
commission of another substantive crime. Or if you are inciting violence
to such a degreecrying ‘fire' in a crowded theaterthat harm is
imminent. That's the Brandenburg test," Singleton adds. <br><br>
If this statute stands, however, the government is saying the standards
established by the 1969 Supreme Court case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, are
outflanked; no imminent crime is needed anymore. In fact, as in
Coronado's case, no substantive crime need ever occur. It is, literally,
a speech crime. <br><br>
U.S. attorneys prosecuting Coronado's case are unable to comment on the
question of intent, but the FBI's San Diego spokesperson, April Langwell,
says via e-mail: "By definition, Domestic Terrorism is the unlawful
use, or threatened use [emphasis hers], of violence by a group or
individuals…. Mr. Coronado has the right to establish and organize an
advocacy group…. He does not have the right to teach others how to
instill fear and destroy property in our community." <br><br>
Actually, he does. Or, at least, he used to. <br><br>
"Certainly, the law has not changed since the Brandenburg case those
many years ago," says James Wheaton, senior counsel with the First
Amendment Project in Oakland. Although he cautions that free-speech cases
are extremely detailed and one shouldn't generalize, he adds, "Mr.
Coronado, if I understand it, made a speech in a public place and
responded to a question. I think it will be difficult for them to
establish that he, at the time he made that speech, intended that
somebody act upon it immediately. And they will have to establish
that." <br><br>
<b>The new terrorism</b> <br><br>
Coronado is finding out right now exactly how far the government is
willing to go to make this case. <br><br>
The sprawling Oregon case includes 65 different counts of arson and
conspiracy related to 18 different incidents of environmentally motivated
sabotage in the Northwest, and charged to 13 defendants, plus two other
related defendants charged in Washington state. All but one of the
incidents were attacks on private property or companies, not government
facilities. Jonathan Paul, for instance, is charged with being the
lookout at a fire that burned a horse slaughterhouse in 1997. Another
activist, Suzanne "India" Savoie, allegedly served as a lookout
for a 2001 fire that gutted the offices of a lumber mill. <br><br>
"This is the first time in the history of the United States that the
federal government is seeking this enhancement for property crimes that
did not result in injury or death to humansto equate property
destruction with terrorism," says Lauren Regan. <br><br>
The sentencing enhancements, Regan explains, were never intended for this
purpose. Add-ons of up to 20 years were available in cases of
international terrorism but then extended to domestic acts after the
Oklahoma City bombing by the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act. Still, the added time pertained to acts that caused bodily
injury or death to humans, or threatened federal infrastructure like the
power grid or waterways. That all changed with the 2001 USA Patriot Act.
Under that law, a judge may add decades if "the offense was
calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government" or
"was calculated to intimidate or coerce a civilian population."
<br><br>
If these enhancements apply to acts of private-property destructionor,
in the case of Coronado, merely talking about how property is
destroyedwhat, then, are the limits of "influence"? Protests,
another form of talking, are meant to "influence" the
government. So is democratic debate. What if Oprah goes on a campaign for
cruelty-free cosmetics? <br><br>
"When everyone is a terrorist, no one is," says Regan.
"The further we broaden the language of what a true terrorist is,
the less security we really do have. If a monkey-wrencher is the same as
Osama bin Laden, where is the distinction drawn?" <br><br>
Jerry Singleton and other attorneys agree with her but worry about the
political climate. These Oregon cases, as well as Coronado's, have been
orchestrated by a Bush administration starved for political victories.
The prevailing thought is that at least one of these cases will go to the
Supreme Court, where its reception is wholly uncertain. <br><br>
The first cases to get that far might be the New Jersey cases, which
involved six activists who called themselves Stop Huntingdon Animal
Cruelty, or SHAC, and who openly sought to put the major animal-testing
corporation, Huntingdon Life Sciences, out of business. Their crime
consisted of putting the time and location of legal protests and personal
information about company employees on a website. Several of the
employees were victims of irritating vandalism, including having their
windows smashed and even cars overturnedbut none of these acts were
connected to the SHAC defendants themselves. They were committed by
persons unknown. <br><br>
SHAC's attorney, Andrew Erba, was stunned last September, when the
activists were given sentences of up to six years in federal prison under
the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act. <br><br>
"The truth is, if you carry this forward, this logic, almost any
group that does activist activities, particularly using the Internet, is
in terrible shape," says Erba. "The government took the
position that the various postings on the website… incited people to take
action. But, absent the proof of imminent action, you really can't just
prosecute ideas. It's unconstitutional." <br><br>
"Now, they've just criminalized running an above-ground
campaign," says Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon and spokesman with
the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, who does exactly what
Coronado has done for years: talk to the press. "All this is going
to do is drive people underground. And chances are [they] won't get
caught for that." <br><br>
<b>Test case: Sherman Austin</b> <br><br>
Sherman Austin is the only person who has been jailed under the statute
being used against Coronado. On Jan. 24, 2002, when he was 18 years old,
he was napping at the Sherman Oaks home he shared with his single mom,
his twin sister and his brother, when FBI and Secret Service agents with
assault rifles drawn swarmed the house. They were looking for the
computers that held Austin's website, Raisethefist.com. <br><br>
Austin is a bright, dreadlocked African-American kid who was politicized
by meeting lots of anti-corporate anarchists protesting L.A.'s Democratic
National Convention in 2000. Austin says he's neither a "green"
nor a "red" anarchist, and it's just as correct to call him a
socialist or "libertarian socialist." One look at his website
would reveal that his image of the anarchist is one engaged in liberation
struggles like those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas; plus there is lots of
info on L.A. area police-brutality cases like the videotaped beating of
16-year-old African American Donovan Chavez in Inglewood. The imagery on
the site is pretty sensationalisticit looks a lot like Fox News. He also
used to offer free hosting for other activists. One of them posted a
document called the Reclaim Guide. <br><br>
The guide was an amateurish manual prepared for a protest against the
International Monetary Fund that never happened because of 9/11. The
entirety of its "smoke bomb" recipe, for example, reads:
"Mix 4 parts sugar with 6 parts salt peter. Heat this over a low
flame until it melts, stirring well. Pour into a container. When pouring
place a few wooden matches into it for a fuse. About a pound of this will
smoke up an entire block." <br><br>
"I looked at the Reclaim Guide but never thought much of it,"
says Austin. "It didn't seem like it was that big of a deal. You
could get this kind of information at any number of white supremacist and
neo-Nazi websites." <br><br>
Instead of warning Austin to remove the material, the FBI had him and his
family under surveillance for months. Then, in August 2002, federal
prosecutors began offering him a plea deal on 18 USC § 842(p)(2)(A).
Austin's mother, Jennifer Martin Ruggiero, was astonished at the
government's attempt to turn her son into a terrorist. <br><br>
"I don't care about anarchism. He can be an anarchist," Martin
says. "I care about violence. And I know Sherman is non-violent.
That's part of his politics." <br><br>
Weeks before any plea negotiations began, the FBI interviewed the kid who
actually wrote and posted the Reclaim Guide, a white teenager from Orange
County. In his FBI interviews, he admitted the work was his. But the feds
called Austin the "author" anyway. <br><br>
"I told the FBI at least seven different times when they questioned
me at my house, if I'd authored this information, and I told them
no," says Austin. <br><br>
A federal probation officer preparing pre-sentencing reports on Austin's
case assured his public defender that the federal terrorism sentencing
guidelines would not apply, so Austin opted for a trial. After months of
haggling, however, the government seemed to get peeved. The probation
officer did a new pre-sentencing report and announced that the terror
guidelines would, indeed, apply and could add 15 to 20 years to his
sentence. Austin signed the plea. The judge then broke the plea agreement
and gave him a year in prison, where he had to be isolated after
receiving persistent death threats from the Aryan Brotherhood. <br><br>
"That's what it's all aboutfree speech," says Austin.
"Because if it was just about explosives, they'd have plenty of
other websites to go after. I mean, Raisethefist.com wasn't a website
you'd go to if you wanted to know how to build a bomb." <br><br>
No. For that, you'd probably go to The Anarchist Cookbook, which is
available every day on that radical website, Amazon.com. <br><br>
<b>Get a new spokesman</b> <br><br>
Hours after meeting the lawyers, Coronado sits in a late-night Berkeley
coffee shop, wishing Chrysta hadn't heard that bit about getting more
years in prison. <br><br>
"Part of me didn't want Chrysta to hear it," he says. "To
have me back now, after eight hard months in prison, and to be hearing
another possible three or four yearsor moreand only a few months from
now. That's hard to hear." <br><br>
The case against him is "a stretch," he says. "But at the
same time," he adds, "I've already been convicted of two past,
quote, ‘ecoterrorism'-related offenses. The last thing I want to do is be
talking to the jury about how I didn't do this third thing."
<br><br>
His second felony offense was something of a fluke, but it has put the
fear into Coronado. In keeping with his plan to only do
civil-disobedience-like actions, Coronado has been keeping a low profile
in Tucson and not even acting as a spokesman anymore. In 2003, he was
helping to organize a chapter of Earth First! in Tucson when he
participated in the dismantling of a mountain lion trap in popular Sabino
Canyon park, believing this was a misdemeanor offense. Because the
federal government considers him a serious threat, however, they
re-jiggered the prosecution into a felony and sent him away for eight
months. At his trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Wallace Kleindienst argued
that Coronado "is a danger to the community…. I know he wasn't tried
here for being a violent anarchist. This trial wasn't about Rod Coronado
being a terrorist, but he is one." <br><br>
He got out of prison again just in time to take his 5-year-old son to the
ritual deer dances on the Pascua Yaqui reservation south of Tucson. His
priority now, he says, is to take care of that boy and Chrysta's
4-year-old daughter, and while he knows the younger hotheads in the
movement might dismiss him as a sellout, he's hoping they'll offer him
one final gesture of respect and find a new spokesman. <br><br>
"I don't want to do that role anymore," he says of
eco-radicalism. "I would like to see that people understand that the
struggle for me is about simpler things. The greatest goal of my
revolution now is simply to have a family! Ha-ha! If I can't make real,
in my own life, my principles and beliefs, then what chance is there of
them ever expanding outward to the greater world?" <br><br>
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