Green, Mean and Out of Control
Screaming environmentalist Tre Arrow walks the talk, but some would like him to get off his pedestal
BY Chris Arsenault
It’s not every day you meet someone on the FBI’s most-wanted list, but the day I met Tre Arrow, America’s most-wanted domestic eco-terrorist, was much like any other. He was new in Halifax and showed up at a bohemian café in March 2003 for an anti-war meeting. Short, with wide eyes, a big smile and an overbearing righteousness, he didn’t cross my mind again until I saw his picture in the Toronto Star last year.
The FBI accuses Arrow of masterminding the 2001 burning of cement trucks in Oregon. Jacob Sherman, a 21-year-old college student, and two other young radicals pleaded guilty to the arson, alleging Arrow cajoled them into it. Arrow denies any connection to the arson or political sabotage. “The only evidence they have against me is the word of these people who already pleaded guilty to this stuff,” he says.
The 31-year-old barefoot transient evaded the FBI’s multi-billion- dollar surveillance network for the better part of two years, attending demonstrations in the cities he visited, until he slipped up in March 2004, getting pinched in Victoria for stealing a set of bolt cutters. (The FBI awarded $25,000 to the Canadian Tire security guard who nabbed him.) Arrow has been at Vancouver’s North Fraser Pretrial Centre ever since, fighting extradition to the US, where he says hysteria about terrorism makes a fair trial impossible. His hearing was slated for this past June, after which time he will probably be sent south of the border—but not before making a name for himself here.
Born Michael Scarpitti to a middle-class Florida family, Arrow is the quintessential screaming environmentalist—he walked his talk and alienated a lot of people along the way. He first came to prominence in 2000, when he scaled the US Forest Services building in Portland, Oregon, sitting on a nine-inch ledge for 11 days to protest logging at Eagle Creek, for which Rolling Stone called him an “environmental rock star.”
When he showed up in Halifax, Arrow said he had an aunt living just outside the city. He came from the West Coast and didn’t talk much about his past. I got to know him as Josh Rivers, the ever-so-vegan couch surfer who defended Mother Earth, the poor and everything in between. He cooked “reclaimed” produce, sharing the dumpster’s bounty with all those around him, while chastising anti-poverty activists for using tin foil to cover the meals they brought the homeless.
He spent nights tearing around the city on a borrowed bicycle to scavenge paper from recycling bins so we wouldn’t have to print leaflets on “dead-tree bleached sheets.” His pockets were full of crumpled scrap paper with every activist phone number he could muster; some days, he would call four times to inform me about nothing at all.
In Halifax, some respected and admired him, while others found him off-the-wall if not downright offensive (he referred to every female activist as “sister,” whether or not they saw him as a brother). Before he disappeared, members of the community hosted a large outdoor vegan potluck for him. “Tre would call people on their actions and some found this intimidating,” says Ben Shannon, spokesperson for Arrow’s defense committee. Shannon left his job in Halifax and moved to Vancouver to work on the case full-time. “I’ve never seen anyone work so hard to peacefully resist and spread the message of change to others.”
I never really gelled with Arrow when he was in Halifax. He was kind and diligent, yet overzealous and a little hot-headed; passionate and contradictory. While incarcerated, he refuses cooked food, in part because of the fossil fuels used in cooking. Yet he chomps bananas shipped from Latin America at a far greater environmental (and social) cost. Lots of fury, a little short on thought.
Still, he worked exceptionally hard for social justice, taking on tasks few others would volunteer for. The last time I spoke to him, he was a little more humble than I remembered, tired and beaten down but certainly not down and out. When asked what people have done and can do to support him, he answered, “It’s really nice to get letters, but please write them on reclaimed paper with used envelopes.”
