Searching for Ecoterrorism: The Crucial Case of the Unabomber

Abstract

A key finding of recent scholarship on political violence is that environmentalists rarely, if ever, use lethal violence. Many scholars have argued that “ecoterrorism” is a misnomer for what is more accurately termed “ecotage.” Large-n studies of environmental activism have identified only one apparent example of an environmentally motivated terrorist: the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber case is therefore a “crucial case” for evaluating the Peaceful Environmentalist Thesis—the generalization that environmentalists do not use lethal violence. Pioneering a forensic method of ideology analysis, this article uses previously unexamined archival material to assess the Unabomber’s affinities with three environmental ideologies: radical environmentalism, green anarchism, and right-wing ecologism. It shows that the Unabomber’s ideology is not environmentalist in intellectual origins or in conceptual structure, and that his motivations were anti-technological rather than pro-ecological. The Unabomber case demonstrates how ideology analysis can complement and strengthen research on political violence.