Eco-Terrorism: Re-examining and Re-presenting the Issue in Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

Abstract

In an era dominated by several terrorist organizations, global terrorism has become one of the biggest international challenges. With the increasing number of terrorist attacks all over the world, the word “terrorism” has extended its meaning and new forms of terrorism, such as narco-terrorism, argo-terrorism, bio-terrorism and eco-terrorism have emerged. The focus of this paper will be on “eco-terrorism”. This paper deals with two documentary films___ Peter Jay Brown’s Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist and Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman’s If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front___ related to the issue of “eco-terrorism”. The paper is composed of two parts. The first part examines what “eco-terrorism” is and how it is different from other forms of terrorism. Theorizing briefly both “environmental terrorism” and “eco-terrorism”, this section has tried to highlight the differences between the two, thereby eradicating further scopes of confusion, which sometimes tend to arise in general discussions. In the second part, the representational strategies employed by the filmmakers in the two afore-mentioned documentaries are analysed, and thereby, the validity of the term “eco-terrorism” is re-examined.

Keywords

• eco-terrorism
• environmental radicalism
• representational strategy
• environmental superhero