ELF Targets Omaha Courses

Not content to target research facilities and businesses it capriciously deems detrimental to the planet’s health, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) has launched a series of vandalism attacks on golf courses. Most recently, the cowardly, secretive group harmed several courses in the Omaha area.

The raids came over the past year at four Omaha-area golf courses. In July 2001, three youths, each 19-year-old college students, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of fourth-class felony charges of criminal mischief. Among the courses hit were Pines Country Club in Valley, Indian Creek in Elkhorn, and Knolls and the Champions Club in Omaha. At these facilities the vandals spray-painted buildings and walkways, dug up fairways and greens, and painted the word “ELF” on buildings. The suspects apparently learned of ELF’s anti-golf sentiments through the Internet.

The Omaha incidents are the latest in ELF’s attacks on golf- and turf-related industries. In January 2001, zealots poured turpentine on a green at a British Columbia layout, saying the golf course was a destruction of green space meant for animals and people. In late May ’01, the group claimed responsibility for a fire that destroyed the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington in Seattle. The arsonists ruined years of research conducted by scientists seeking more drought-resistant plants. The UW fire was set simultaneously with another fire at the Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, Oregon; damage from the two blazes totaled $3 million.

Since 1997, ELF has caused more than $40 million in damage to projects and facilities it alleges threaten the environment. The most destructive act of ecoterrorism in U.S. history came in 1999 when ELF set a fire that did $12 million damage to an expansion project at a Vail, Colorado, ski resort.

Besides using arson to bring attention to their vaguely nefarious causes, ELF and other wannabe ecoterrorists employ tree-spiking and bombing to injure people and destroy buildings and research projects.

One of the most ironic and misinformed acts of ecoterrorism ever involved the golf industry in June 2000. A group called the Anarchist Golfing Association caused $500,000 in damage to an Oregon grass-seed research facility. In that attack thugs stomped experimental grass plots and destroyed seed beds. The grass specimens ruined at Pure-Seed Testing Inc. were grown using ancient techniques of plant breeding, not genetic engineering, the supposed impetus for the vandalism.

The damage caused by the Anarchist Golfing Association undid years of research Pure-Seed had conducted on the development of turf hybrids which are more resistant to pesticides and herbicides, the very chemicals that groups like ELF claim are destroying the earth. You’d think ELF would applaud such efforts.

In directing its heinous acts on golf, ELF is targeting an industry that has a proven track record for the intelligent use of chemicals and biodegradable materials. The self-regulations imposed on the golf industry, especially by the Golf Course Superintendents Association and the USGA, are unheard of in other American businesses where “environmentally-sensitive” practices are commonplace. When groups like ELF wreak havoc on golf and its massive green spaces, they’re ignoring the millions of American homeowners who use much more powerful chemicals on their lawns in much less controlled dosages.

Thoughtless acts by radical groups like ELF fly in the face of pure science. Independent studies have concluded that – outside of pristine rain forests – turfgrasses used on golf courses are nature’s very best biofilters. In other words, the water that lands on courses, whether from irrigation or naturally occurring precipitation, is exceptionally clean when it enters the earth after being filtered by golf turf.

ELF’s members should visit a few golf courses and take a gander at all the wonderful plants and animals that use these open, green spaces as habitat. They might grasp the important environmental and recreational roles that golf courses play on planet Earth. Perhaps these mysterious “elves” might be more reluctant to poison impressionable college students with misinformation like they did with those kids in Omaha.