Eco-Terrorist

"Owen Ayers, former officer in the Navy... This guy's a war hero. Medical discharge in 2011 after participating in Operation Tomodachi. The U.S.military relief effort at Fukushima. Flew into an unscheduled emergency venting of radioactive gas. He and several members of his crew got radiation poisoning. He was the victim of a nuclear meltdown, so now he wants to cause one."

— FBI profile on Owen Ayers aka Gaia, The Blacklist

A person who uses violence and terror to try to save the planet from ecological catastrophe, the Eco-Terrorist is generally a Mad Scientist (especially the Evilutionary Biologist), a Well-Intentioned Extremist (with an emphasis on extreme) or a Knight Templar. The milder versions, being well-intentioned, may try to avoid harming people, and will confine themselves to actions like blowing up polluting factories in the middle of the night, and things like that. More extreme ones will have no hesitation to kill those they deem responsible — directly or indirectly — for harming the planet. And the most extreme of all will see humans as a blight on the planet, and think the only way forward is to eliminate the species.

Most Eco-terrorists will view themselves as a sort of human incarnation of Gaia's Vengeance. In works with Grey-and-Gray Morality, they will often be fighting Toxic, Inc., who may even try to frame them with a False Flag Operation.

An eco-terrorist may be a lone wolf or part of a larger organization. (In real life, the former is more common.) Clandestine eco-terrorists may hide behind more legitimate environmental organizations — which, in some cases, can lead to unfortunate consequences for the more legitimate groups, if the connection is discovered.

Larger organizations may have a more international scope than most other flavors of terrorist — an eco-terrorist group might well have both Western and Far-East Asian Terrorists and other Evilutionary Biologists working side-by-side.

Very closely related to the Animal Wrongs Group, but with a much broader scope of interest, which includes not just animals, but also plants, habitats, and, well, the entire ecosystem. May overlap with Evil Luddite if they believe that technology is the biggest threat to the environment. Contrast with Greenwashed Villainy, when a villain pretends to be eco-friendly to cover up their polluting actions. See also Overpopulation Crisis, which egregiously extreme eco-terrorists are frequently deeply concerned with preventing.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Twinkle Maria Murdock and her family of Space Warriors from the Cowboy Bebop episode "Gateway Shuffle". With delusions of grandeur, she coverts the non-violent protest group into a terrorist organization and habitually targets restaurants that serve a species of sea rat and guns everyone down, before planning to wipe out the entire human population on their native planet.
  Twinkle Maria Murdock: Please do not associate us with common terrorists.
• Bad Garage in Heavy Object is an international group which believes the use of Objects is going to cause ecological and geological disasters, a theory which is being suppressed by the supernations. They have a knack for radicalizing military units within the supernations and making them work on behalf of Bad Garage. In Volume 19 they attempt to destroy Rome to warn the world and succeed when the combined weight of Baby Magnum and Rush destabilizes the crust, causing Rome to be consumed by a volcanic eruption.

Audio Plays

• The Big Finish Doctor Who episode "Hothouse" has Alex Marlowe, a former rockstar who heads up an eco-terrorist group who are trying to create Human/Krynoid hybrids at a secret laboratory deep in the jungle, in the hopes that this will help the jungle fight back against humanity.

Comic Book

• Anderson: Psi-Division has a storyline about an eco-terrorist who tries to unleash a form of Mutagenic Goo which makes plants attack people.
• Batman:
  • Some writers' versions of Poison Ivy paint her as an eco-terrorist who uses extreme violence trying to save plants from the evils of humanity. Depending on the story in question, she may selectively attack polluters, companies and profiteers or launch broad, indiscriminate attacks against urban society. In other stories she's less so interested in ecological terrorism as such as she is in leading plants in revolt against the rule of animals in general and humans in particular.
  • Ra's Al Ghul is an immortal dismayed at the human population boom and the way nature has suffered as a result. He plans to kill off most of humanity to forcibly restore the balance between humanity and the world. It varies from writer to writer if Raz's goals are genuine, or if he just wants to kill enough of humanity that the survivors can be forced into worshipping him as the leader of a primitivist utopia. His daughter Talia al Ghul also shares his environmentalist vision, but it's usually far less genocidal than he is.
• Judge Dredd: The "Father Earth" storyline has the Plant Person leader of Cursed Earth mutants lead an attack on Mega-City One. He's taken out after he and his followers accidentally release a hypnotic carnivorous alien plant and willingly let themselves be eaten.
• In Kingdom Come, former hero Hawkman has essentially become a mild version of this, who has no hesitation about using violence against loggers and others who threaten his precious Pacific Northwest.
• Polish superhero parody comic book series Likwidator intentionally embraces this trope and takes it to its logical extreme. The storyline consists mostly of the main hero wandering around killing evil people who mistreat nature — eg. cut trees, work in environment-polluting factories, hunt, buy meat in the store, keep their dog on a leash... Most readers get gravely offended, which is probably the point.
• In the Mickey Mouse Italian comic Topolino e la formula numero 13 ("Mickey and Formula Number 13"), Goofy's neighbor McPolish is a devout and agressive ecologist who laments pollution caused by cars. He discovers a chemical formula that turns solid metal into rust powder. He then customizes a street sweeper to insert the chemical inside the exhaust pipes of cars, turning their motors into rust, causing the number of cars to decrease.
• Superman: The post-Crisis version of Terra-Man was a businessman who grew a conscience about the damage he was causing to the Earth's environment. He decided to save Earth and attacked enterprises that were dangerous to the environment. His weapons focused mainly on turning the environment against his opponents.

Fan Works

• In Shadowchasers Series continuity, Red Feather (back when she called herself White Feather) had only good intentions for the environment in mind. In fact, to this day, she is repulsed by groups who take it too far. But back then, she was naïve to the ways of humans, and too reluctant to use technology to research new members thoroughly. This resulted in two eco-terrorists joining her group by mistake, and a disaster that she had to take responsibility for. In the present day, having been released on parole, she renamed herself Red Feather (as the purity her old name represented had been tarnished) and joined the title organization to defend nature with a more hands-on approach.
• With This Ring takes a very unsympathetic viewpoint of Poison Ivy, denouncing her as essentially a psychotic murderer who uses plants as her excuse to kill and torment people and who has succumed to delusions of godhood. It does this by having Swamp Thing show up after her final scheme is foiled, denounce her as a petty self-important fool whom the Green doesn't support, and finally permanently stripping away her chlorokinetic powers, the same powers she argued made her Gaia's Vengeance in the first place.

Films — Live-Action

• 12 Monkeys pulls a bait-and-switch with this. In the near future, a plague has nearly wiped out humanity, forcing the survivors to live underground. Evidence points to The Army of the 12 Monkeys being responsible for the plague, but they're just the Red Herring. The actual creator of the plague was Dr. Peters, an assistant at a virology lab — who had spoken before about the "lunacy" of mankind's environmental destruction.
• Aquaman (2018) has King Orm, who takes the Atlantean ecological resentment for the humans on the surface (they pollute the seas and through Global Warming cause the acidification of the oceans) one step further. As his first act before he forms an army to subdue mankind, he sends massive waves that both flood coastal cities and fill them with sunken warships and trash thrown in the oceans.
• Thanos is revealed to be the Overpopulation Crisis-fearing variant of eco-terrorist in Avengers: Infinity War. In his backstory, his homeworld, Titan, faced an overpopulation crisis, with the leaders desperately seeking a solution. Thanos proposed that half of the planet's population be killed off, with who lived and who died being determined strictly by random chance. Understandably, the leaders of Titan were aghast with Thanos's solution and adamantly refused to implement it; however, no effective alternative was found, and the crisis continued to grow in severity, which probably wasn't helped by Titan's axial tilt somehow being thrown out of whack, resulting in devastation and ecological disaster far beyond the scope of merely growing population. This tragedy fuels Thanos's relentless desire to "balance the universe" by killing half of all lifeforms on all worlds — no more, no less, selected randomly — allegedly in order to spare the universe as a whole from suffering the apocalyptic fate his home faced and succumbed to, and he seeks the Infinity Stones simply because they are the most efficient means of accomplishing his goal.
  • However, according to Word of God he was more concerned with proving himself right than actually helping the universe, which is why he doesn't just take the simpler solution of doubling the resources and goes ballistic when the Avengers try to undo it. In fact, his plan affected plant and animal life too, effectively halving the resources he claimed he was trying to preserve and causing massive ecological damage. He's called the Mad Titan for a reason.
• The East: An operative for an elite private intelligence firm finds her priorities changing dramatically after she is tasked with infiltrating an anarchist group known for executing covert attacks upon major corporations.
• Alan Jonah from Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) became one after years of witnessing the worst of humanity in his service to the Crown turned him into a Misanthrope Supreme. His actions directly lead to the uncorking of King Ghidorah's can, which in turn results in countless deaths and the destruction of numerous major population centers across the globe.
• How To Blow Up A Pipeline: The group plan to blow up a pipeline, hoping it will crash the whole oil industry and spark change which can save the environment from further degradation plus stop its pollution from poisoning people. Some of them openly accept the term "terrorist" for themselves, and know they'll be called this regardless.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Nick Van Owen sabotages the InGen expedition to Isla Sorna by releasing all the dinosaurs they captured, causing a stampede that destroys most of their equipment. Later, he removes the bullets from Roland Tembo's hunting rifle, causing the deaths of almost the entire expedition when a T. rex attacks the camp and the rest flee into a Velociraptor-infested area.
• Night Moves (2013): All three of the protagonists are eco terrorists who plot and then bomb a dam.
• While Forrest Taft in On Deadly Ground is depicted as a nature-protecting hero, in reality he's this. How else would you call a person that tries to save an environment by blowing up an oil rig with adjacent refinery and presumably killing countless Punch Clock Villains, including a secretary whose only fault was working for the Big Bad?
• The villains of the 2019 spy film The Rookies are an eco-terrorist group who intends to cleanse the earth of overpopulation. Getting their hands on a green virus which can transform humans into plants, the Big Bad intends to unleash the virus on major cities worldwide to replace human life with plants, and in fact managed to release a sample of the virus in New York.
• In Tenet, the instigators of the attack from the future are supposed to have initiated their plan because of the ravaged state previous generations have left the world in by their time. Somehow, they don't seem to fear their own destruction by their plans coming to fruition.

Literature

• The terrorist organisation Force Three in the Alex Rider novel Ark Angel. They turn out to be a subversion, as they're being bankrolled by Nikolei Drevin, and their environmentalist goals are just a Red Herring to stop anyone drawing a connection between the two.
• All the Wrong Questions: The inhumane society are a terrorist organisation devoted to protecting the planet, and are willing to go to extreme lengths to do so, including kidnapping and plotting on killing an entire town full of children.
• The CHERUB Series has the Help Earth! group which first appears in The Recruit, where they plan to make an attack on a conference between several major oil executives. They return in Divine Madness, where they destroy Natural Gas facilities for Church of Happyology The Survivors.
• Chocoholic Mysteries: In Mouse Trap, when tracking the virus aimed at the computers of the people who were a part of Julie Singletree's mailing list, it's identified as being the same one used by one of these, who claimed to support ecology, but did so by sending viruses to companies he thought didn't use ecological principles he approved of. The same person turns out to be the killer, who murders his own cousin when she unintentionally copies his death threat to someone into a message she sent out on her mailing list.
• The Divide (2005): The prologue reveals that Abbie is branded as an environmental terrorist, although the truth is more complicated. She starts out as an environmental activist sticking to pickets until she meets Rolf, a mysterious European who convinces her to help him commit several acts of arson. They go on to burn down the cabin of a mining magnate who destroyed her ex-boyfriend Ty's family ranch, killing the businessman's son in the process. The head of Abbie's former protest group speculates that Rolf was previously involved with sending letter bombs to government employees to protest logging.
• In The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers novel Blown Away, the person behind the attempted bombing of the Billington Resort is a member of the terrorist group Ecology First, which resorts to extreme methods in order to preserve the environment.
• The Humanx Commonwealth novel Flinx in Flux features as its primary antagonists a fanatical ecoterrorist group who believe in destroying all forms of "exploitation" of the natural order by humans. Their current target: a small genetic engineering firm working on the planet Longtunnel, which is renowned for the plasticity of its native lifeforms. Flinx gets involved when he accidentally rescues one of the company's researchers, the lovely and talented Clarity Held, who was kidnapped, interrogated, beaten, and left for dead on Alaspin. The group later mounts a full-scale armed assault on the Longtunnel facilities, and eventually tries to capture Flinx himself, once they learn what he is. In this final battle, they pull a Nice Job Fixing It, Villain by accidentally breaking the mechanism keeping Flinx and Pip asleep.
• Joe Pickett:
  • Savage Run begins with the murder of two radical environmental activists who are spending their honeymoon spiking trees in the forest.
  • Robert in Below Zero. His final act after a string of murders is to attempt to blow up a coal-fired power station.
• Killer Species: Series villain Dr. Catalyst starts as a Well-Intentioned Extremist (albeit a highly egotistical one), creating hybrid super-predators for the purpose of hunting and destroying invasive species in Florida. However, when people react to his actions by trying to eliminate his creations and the government publicly labels him a terrorist, he winds up focusing more on eliminating those who oppose him, with his hybrids in books 3 and 4 being specifically created to go after humans.
• L: change the WorLd features the most extreme version, with a group called Blue Ship who want to kill off most of humanity with a supervirus in order to save the environment.
• In Legacy of the Aldenata, "Greens" conspire to sabotage the war effort and let most of humanity get killed by a Horde of Alien Locusts that eat anything organic on invaded planets, and then swarm to others once the biosphere collapses, fueled by a mixture of antipathy towards civilization and ignorance of Posleen behavior.
• In Lullaby, the boyfriend of the very odd realtor, Helen Hoover Boyle, turns out to be an eco-terrorist who ends up becoming the Token Evil Teammate.
• In Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World, Karen is kidnapped by four members of the Animal Rights Militia, who hate her because her company's cruelty-free tuna sells for so much money that it's increased the price of all bluefin tuna, which they fear will drive the species to extinction. The terrorists threaten to blow up her plane if she doesn't shut down all the fisheries in six months, then release her. Karen reports the kidnapping to Interpol, who fail to find the kidnappers, but assure her that although ARM has no qualms about destruction of property and psychological torture, they draw the line at physical violence. A few years later, the same terrorists blow up all seven of True Blue Tuna's fisheries. Karen is actually grateful, because she was already planning to shut down the fisheries and turn the artificial breeding grounds into a tuna preserve.
• The Anti-Tractionist League in Mortal Engines, who attempt to end the environmentally destructive policy of Municipal Darwinism through acts of sabotage and the occasional assassination of prominent Tractionist leaders. In the later books, they are deposed by the considerably more militant Green Storm, who wage all-out war against the Tractionist cities and deploy Cyborgs and Suicide Attacks as part of their war effort. The Storm's leader, Stalker Fang, eventually hatches a plot to fire a Kill Sat to trigger a chain of dormant volcanoes, hoping that humanity will die off but life itself will survive and return the planet to its natural state.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel The Ministry For The Future prominently features the India-based group called "The Children of Kali", which comes about after a fatal Global Warming-exacerbated heatwave kills up to 20 million people in the country. Their methods involve using drones to down airplanes to scare people into not flying, assassinating fossil fuel company CEOs, and infecting cows with Mad-Cow Disease.
• The FROMATES (FRiends Of Man And The Earth) terrorist group in Oath Of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. They totally oppose the arcology Todos Santos and commit kidnapping, attempted arson, murder and attempted mass murder in their campaign to destroy it (and everyone living in it).
• In The Oregon Files novel Skeleton Coast, the crew of the Oregon uncovers a plot to create a deliberate toxic spill in order to enlighten people about the damage such things can cause.
• The Overstory: The main characters are an example on the milder side, eventually resorting to setting fire to a construction site to stop deforestation, though trying to set it up so nobody is hurt and the fire is sustainable. It doesn't all go according to plans, though...
• Pictures At 11 by Norman Spinrad is about a group of international eco-terrorists who take over a Los Angeles television station with guns and bombs in order to get their message out.
• The Prince Roger series features these as the villains opposed to the Empire of Man. They're an interstellar empire of environmentalist extremists who are a Strawman Political nation for the authors. It's also noted that they are, ironically, far more polluting than the Empire simply because the Empire's greater embrace of technology lets them use much more efficient manufacturing processes.
• Rainbow Six features the world-threatening version of this trope: utilizing a Batman Gambit in setting off attacks to gain attention, then getting their own soldiers as security to unleash a virus to wipe out the human race, then spreading said virus masked as a vaccine after the initial outbreak.
• The antagonist in Saints At The River is Luke Miller, a pissed-off environmentalist that believes that building a temporary dam to recover the body of a drowned child (and thus alter the river flow) would set a precedent that would enable further damage to the environment. Maggie, the journalist who is the protagonist in the story, returns to her hometown to chronicle the dispute between the townsfolk who want to recover the body by building the dam and the environmentalists, led by Luke, who try to thwart the plan. Luke is depicted as a misanthropic Cloudcuckoolander who believes that nature, particularly the titular river, is the only thing in the world that's pure.
• State of Fear is about hippie eco-terrorists with an elaborate plan to flood the US in order to convince people that global warming is real.
• The group "Mother Earth" in Ben Elton's novel This Other Eden is an example. It turns out they are actually a sort of anti-PR wing for an oil giant.
• The novelized version of Tom Clancy's EndWar has a terrorist group led by a guy named Green Vox. They're an environmental group and during the Soviet invasion of Canada decide to blow up the oil fields with NUCLEAR WEAPONS... because oil is polluting the environment!
• In Underdogs, Nicholas Grant takes over the United Kingdom with his army of clones and herds most of the population into miserable, cramped prison slums in order to reduce their population with fighting and disease. He hopes to take the world's population from nine million to three million, which he thinks will be enough to fight global warming.
• Wearing the Cape: One of the recurring enemies is the "Greenman," an absurdly powerful Green Thumb villain who can both reanimate corpses by filling them with plant matter and also hyperaccelerate normal plant growth, creating a forest that grows fast enough to kill anyone who doesn't run fast enough. Since all supers are examples of Traumatic Superpower Awakening, mental instability is common, but people grumble that nearly everyone with plant powers of any reasonable strength is insane, using their powers to try to kill off the human race instead of actually fixing the environment. The Greenman turns out to be the (female) hero Cybil, who was secretly far more radical than she had ever demonstrated in public.
• Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River is, as the title might suggest, about tracking down an eco-terrorist who wants to destroy a dam on the Colorado river to restore the habitat.
• In Zodiac (1988), the protagonist, Sangamon Taylor, is accused of being this by his opponents. His willingness to resort to illegal methods to fight polluters lends some weight to the accusation.

Live-Action TV

• In the Adam-12 episode "The Ferret," the title vandal attacks companies that damage the environment, doing a Janitor Impersonation Infiltration to get inside. He has enough fans that Reed becomes the subject of an unflattering newspaper article for trying to arrest him. He finally gets caught dumping a bucket of toxic sludge in an office, and gives a speech about pollution as he's being led away.
• In Bull, at the start of the episode "Dirty Little Secret", a bombing takes place that was said to be done by eco-terrorists. At the end, it's revealed that an international consortium is trying to frame them.
• An episode of Criminal Minds had an arsonist who began murdering men involved with corporations accused of being heavy polluters, as well as their families. It turns out he was acting alone, and was nothing more than a sadistic psychopath (he used a suit that allowed him to watch his victims burn up close). His actions disgusted the local environmental group whose website he was using to find his "justifiable" victims, especially the leader, who kills him in an instance of Taking You with Me.
• The villains of the Doctor Who story "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" are a group of eco-fanatics who are plotting to abuse a time machine to Ret-Gone the entire human race apart from themselves so that they can create a new green civilisation. Only the leaders are aware of this, as their minions are being deliberately deceived into thinking that they're going to colonise an alien planet.
• Elementary, episode "The Long Fuse", features an eco-terrorist named Edgar Knowles, who becomes a suspect in a bombing when his distinctive pattern of speech is matched to some threatening emails. Holmes rules him out because the bomb used a chemical fuel, and Knowles always used natural fuels in his bombs. It eventually turns out the bomb was made by someone else who was trying to frame Knowles.
• The I-Land: It turns out that Moses was once one. He planted a bomb in an oil pipeline when there was supposedly no one around, but an engineering team showed up unexpectedly to visit. So instead it killed eight people, landing him in prison.
• In Justice (2006): A couple in one case were convicted of murder and terrorism for a bombing which killed a waiter aimed at gas-guzzling cars. It turns out that another member of their group actually did this however, not them.
• NCIS:
  • In "Sub-Rosa", a save-the-whales extremist tried to destroy a submarine on since he believes that naval sonar and other signaling was disrupting whales' migration and breeding. The episode also makes it clear that he's in no way connected to the protesters who were seen protesting the naval sonar affecting the whales at the beginning of the episode.
  • In "Oil & Water", an environmental group are the initial suspects of planting a bomb on an oil drilling platform because of the leader possessing blueprints for the rig. However, when questioned, she says that she only had the blueprints because her group was planning to sneak onto the oil rig to do a civil disobedience sit-in protest before the bombing closed it down. She also correctly points out that the bombing could have resulted in a massive environmental disaster on par with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which is the opposite of what everybody in the environmental group wants. And the culprit turns out to not have been connected to any environmental group. He's one of the lawyers who represents the oil company that owns the rig and planted the bomb as part of a fraud scheme.
  Leader: I have no problem going to prison for what I believe in, but that (Gestures towards the crime scene photos of the bombing) is against everything that I stand for.
• NUMB3RS: In "Scorched", the team is investigating a series of arson cases, which have the name "ELM" being found at the scene. The group insists that they are not involved with the arson and accuse the FBI of trying to frame them for the fires. It later turns out to be a fire investigator setting the fires, with him using a friend of one of the activists, who is a prodigy who wants to fit in.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Déjà Vu", Julie Alger sabotages the teleportation experiment as she believes that it is against nature.
• In Smallville, Aquaman first appears as an eco-terrorist trying to stop a sonic weapon created by Lex Luthor from going into production.
• A Spooks season 8 episode has a group of eco-terrorists who kidnap what they consider to be a group of Corrupt Corporate Executives for an on-line trial by Internet viewers, with lives on the line.
• Star Trek:
  • The character of Phillip Green was described in the Star Trek: Enterprise as the leader of a faction of eco-terrorists whose actions led to the deaths of about 37 million people. So extreme were his actions, that the Excalibans featured in the TOS episode "The Savage Curtain" recreated Green in order to study the concepts of good and evil.
  • Siblings Rabal and Sevora of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Force of Nature" arguably fit the bill, especially Sevora when the siblings take to disabling various starships passing through a region of space called the Hekaras Corridor. Even though the Enterprise crew hears them out and Picard promises to fully endorse a proposed study of the effects of warp drive on the fabric of space Sevora says she will have no part of it and commits a Suicide Attack by causing the warp drive of her ship to explode, creating the rift she was warning others of well before it otherwise would have formed and decades before anyone was ready to deal with such rifts.
• S.W.A.T. (2017): "Cry Foul" involves extreme activists having blown up oil derricks and then targeting a corrupt CEO who'd refused to fix safety issues, despite his own derrick endangering residents nearby. Though the protagonists take them down of course, they also express disgust at their targets' misdeeds, agreeing with their motive if not the method.
• In Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, Gary's co-worker Ted is revealed to have been a mail-bombing eco-terrorist back when he was alive.

Music

• The Rise Against song "The Eco-Terrorist in Me" is an homage to the concept, suggesting that "burning factories" is acceptable because businessmen are the "true criminals."

Tabletop Games

• Aberrant: Greenwar is the result of answering the question "what happens if you let one of these groups have access to super-powered agents?". One of their most notorious signature "tricks" is using a telepathic member to Mind Rape a target of their ire by imprinting the mind of a tortured/dying animal over their own. Whether this leads to the victim undergoing a change of heart or a homicidal mental breakdown is no concern to them. That said, they're perfectly okay with just straight-up murdering "oppressors".
• Blood Bowl: In the background, the dryad Star Player Willow Rosebark has been implicated in the vandalism of a number of stadiums constructed from wood taken from sacred groves, as well as the assault of woodsmen and craftsmen working on such stadia. She will also offer her services to teams playing opponents known to cause damage to arboreal environments.
• Damnation Decade: Man Last are a militantly anti-human civilization. They want to push humanity off the top of the food chain and are planning to use an extraterrestrial virus to wipe out the majority of the human race once they vaccinate themselves against it.
• Hunter: The Vigil: The Keepers devote nearly as much energy to fighting environmentally-harmful corporations as they do hunting witches, both on general green principles and because deforestation and landscape alterations will destroy Source pools, which they believe to essentially be the Earth Mother's organs. Their tactics range from organized protests to spiking trees and sabotaging heavy equipment.
• Magic: The Gathering: The Gruul Clans of Ravnica are a loose coalition of Barbarian Tribes who's original purpose, as defined by the Guildpact, was to preserve the wildernesses around the city and keep civilisation in check. As the city has expanded and the wild places have vanished, many have ended up squatting in the city's rubble-belts and abandoned buildings, and many of them feel the best way to fulfil their purpose now is to tear down the city so that nature can reclaim what was lost.
• Monsterpocalypse: The "Terrasaur" faction (Godzilla-like giant dinosaurs) are backed by an eco-terrorist group known as Green Fury. (A shout-out to Godzilla's origins as a warning of the dangers of nuclear testing.)
• Shadowrun
  • In the backstory of the game, an eco-terrorist group, TerraFirst!, is used as an excuse to give big corporations more rights to hire and use mercenary troops.
  • 3rd Edition supplement Loose Alliances. There are a number of other ecoterrorist organizations in the Shadowrun universe.
    • The Green Cells are the European version of the TerraFirst! group. They are organized in a cell structure without a central command. They carry out hit-and-run physical attacks, magical sabotage, and Matrix strikes on anti-environment targets.
    • GreenWar is an ultra-extreme group that carries out vicious attacks such as dumping acid in water supplies, bombing corporate offices, causing toxic oil spills and using biological warfare (weaponized diseases).
  • Some shamans (magic-users) are corrupted by toxic waste and pollution and become toxic shamans. Avengers will ruthlessly attack and destroy anything that harms the environment, while Poisoners actively spread environmental destruction in service of their toxic totems.

Video Games

• In Civilization: Call to Power II, late-game civilizations running the Ecotopia government can recruit units actually called Eco-terrorists. Their deadliest weapon, the Nanite Cleanser, removes all signs of human habitation in its radius — mines, farms, cities.
• One of the main themes of Elemental Gimmick Gear is in fact criticizing eco-terrorism. The Big Bad is a mad AI called Psycho Mother who wants to heal the earth after World War III, but her methods are arbitrarily cruel and cause huge amounts of innocent humans to die. Then there is fact her own attempts at “restoring” the earth only create mutated life forms who threaten the earth far more than humanity ever could.
• Empire Earth 2 has a mission where eco-terrorists are preventing a player-allied tribe from fishing, forcing you to keep sending them food until the terrorists are defeated. This is far easier said than done, as the terrorists also have access to battleships and submarines.
• Final Fantasy VII: AVALANCHE believe that Shinra Corporation's Mako reactors are harvesting the very soul of the planet to generate electricity. Their solution: launch violent raids on reactor sites, slaughter Shinra's guards, and bomb the reactors. But in their defense, they were completely right.
• The Gaians in Freelancer fit this mold, staging murderous attacks on terraforming companies, polluting industries, their allies, and anyone else they deem an environmental threat. Even though terraformed planets were just lifeless iceballs before humans showed up, and most pollution is tossed into the nearest sun.
• Caleb Goldman, the primary villain of The House of the Dead^note Greater-Scope Villain of 1, 3, and Overkill and Big Bad of 2 and 4 (despite being dead in 3 and 4 — it's rather complicated), is a classic example of this; motivated by disgust at the destruction humanity has caused to the global ecosystem, he funds Dr. Curien's research into life and death and deliberately uses the results to unleash a Zombie Apocalypse and cripple humanity. ^note Fridge Logic kicks in when one considers the ecological ramifications of converting a huge chunk of the human population into mindless beings who seek only to devour all living things they can sink their teeth into.
• In Mega Man ZX Advent, Thetis is one of the villains, and his motivation for terrorizing the people (and feeding their souls to his Model W Fragment) is that people have been ruining his beloved seas.
• The Neverwinter Nights 2 fan module The Maimed God's Saga presents Malar, the Chaotic Evil god of nature's savagery, as one of these. Decrying mankind's destruction and exploitation of nature, he starts corrupting priests of Tyr, Lawful Good god of justice, hoping to make civilization self-destruct.
• The Pokémon franchise has quite a few examples of this kind of character; naturally, they tend to be in the villainous teams. In fact, of all the antagonistic groups from the core games, only Team Rocket, the original villainous team of the franchise, and Team Galactic, would-be usurpers of creation, don't fit the mold of eco-terrorism in some form (and Team Galactic could be argued to be spiritual eco-terrorists).
  • Team Magma and Team Aqua, the villain teams of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, are two directly opposed groups of ecoterrorists. Both want to expand the available living space of certain Pokémon, but their goals are zero-sum with respect to each other; Team Magma wants to expand the world's landmasses (and shrink the world's oceans) to create new habitats for humans and terrestrial Pokémon, while Team Aqua wants to expand the world's oceans (and shrink the world's landmasses) to extend the domain of aquatic and marine Pokémon. To achieve their goals, they respectively seek to awaken Groudon and Kyogre, a pair of legendary Pokémon who rule over land and sea, respectively, and possess the power to summon sweltering sunlight or torrential downpours to expand their realms. In the climax, depending on the version of the game you're playing, either Team Magma or Team Aqua (or both) manage to awaken their desired legendary Pokémon, and quickly end up realizing that doing so was a terrible idea — in Ruby, Groudon awakens and begins evaporating the oceans entirely without Kyogre to keep it in check; in Sapphire, Kyogre awakens and begins flooding the entire world without Groudon to hold it back; and in Emerald, both Pokémon awaken and begin fighting for dominance over each other, causing extremely chaotic and destructive weather to ensue. Thankfully, the player manages to defeat or catch the out-of-control legendary Pokémon (or, in Pokémon Emerald, alert Rayquaza, the ruler of the sky and mediator between Groudon and Kyogre, to the catastrophic squabble between the two titans, resulting in it swooping down to Sootopolis City to break up their fight and calm them down); either way, the balance between land and sea is restored, and Maxie and Archie, the leaders of Team Magma and Team Aqua, repent their misdeeds.
  • Team Plasma, the villain team of Pokémon Black and White, is an Animal Wrongs Group, with its leader, N, believing that people and Pokémon need to be separated for everybody's sake. A more thorough description of Team Plasma's actions and their leadership can be found on the Animal Wrongs Group page. ^note It should be noted that the true leader of Team Plasma, Ghetsis, is just using the ostensibly noble goals of Team Plasma as a smokescreen to advance his true agenda of claiming absolute power over the people of Unova. This, in addition to the player character challenging N's beliefs and driving him to adjust his worldview to a less extreme state where humans and Pokémon can live side by side, results in Team Plasma splintering into a genuinely benevolent faction of Pokémon rights advocates led by N and an unapologetically malevolent faction of conquerors led by Ghetsis in the sequel.
  • Team Flare, the villain team of Pokémon X and Y, initially appear to not be an ecologically-driven organization; their activities for most of the game are illicit money-making endeavors at the expense of innocent people and Pokémon in the vein of Team Rocket. However, making as much money as possible is not their true goal; their leader, Lysandre, turns out to be a bitter, insane misanthropist who firmly believes that there is a finite amount of happiness in the world, that the world’s population is too large for happiness to be available to everyone, and that the vast majority of people and Pokémon are simple-minded, selfish beings whose very existence is a blight on the world. Team Flare is his attempt to gather together as many of the few people whose existence he deems worthwhile as he can before he harnesses the power of the legendary Pokémon Xerneas or Yveltal (depending on the game version) with AZ's ultimate weapon to kill off the rest of the population. Naturally, the player has to capture Xerneas or Yveltal to put a stop to Lysandre's plans.
  • Team Skull, the villain team of Pokémon Sun and Moon, are not an example of an eco-terrorist organization, being a group of hoodlums with no grand ambitions beyond making a living by any means necessary and lashing out at a world that they believe has rejected them. Team Skull wouldn't even be worth mentioning on this page if not for the fact that they are secretly backed by the Aether Foundation, an organization that exists to protect wild Pokémon populations and the habitats that they live in. However, the Aether Foundation isn't an example of eco-terrorism either, as their ecological preservation goals have nothing to do with their criminal activities; they only do bad things because their leader, Lusamine, is a psychotic nutcase with an obession with Ultra Beasts and a very warped, egocentric view of the concept of love. Team Skull and its boss, Guzma, directly assist Lusamine in her endeavors to reclaim Cosmog from her runaway daughter, Lillie, and use it to open a gateway to Ultra Space, and the climax of the game begins with their successful abduction of Lillie and Cosmog, forcing the player, Hau, and Gladion to storm the Aether Foundation's headquarters to rescue them. ^note Lusamine isn't even fully at fault for her villainous deeds, as she's under the influence of Nihilego, a parasitic Ultra Beast that drives its victims insane with inhibition-ruining neurotoxins, causing her obsession with entering Ultra Space (and the rank-and-file members follow Lusamine's erratic commands because they're also affected by Nihilego's neurotoxins; Wicke and Faba appear to be the only members of the Aether Foundation who aren't being driven crazy by Nihilego). However, the way Nihilego's toxins work (they don’t directly modify the victim’s behavior, but instead amplify their deepest desires and disable their inhibitions) mean that Lusamine can't be fully absolved from responsibility for what she does under Nihilego's influence. Once Lusamine is defeated and restored to her senses, the Aether Foundation returns to being a benevolent, legitimate ecological preservation organization, and Guzma, like Maxie, Archie, and N before him, also resolves to change his ways and be a friendlier Pokémon trainer.
• Eco-terrorist hippies occasionally spawn during the "FUZZ" activity in Saints Row 2.
• The Cult of Planet in Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire is kind of like this, except they are defending an environment that is more than capable of defending itself, and believe in their cause so strongly that they would gladly let humanity go extinct to preserve Planet. (They can convince Planet not to kill them by doing this, and in fact lend them aid in the form of slightly more docile — to them — wildlife.)
• One of the plots in Telling Lies involves an activist organization who the FBI believes are eco-terrorists.

Web Comics

• In Chapter Two of Skyvein, a news anchor attributes the release of a skysquid to a couple of eco-terrorists.
• In the role plays of White Dark Life, Malthus and his organization, the Light Demons, fit this trope to a T, as they seek to kill off most of the sapient population in order to halt sapient-induced ecological damage (and, as their leader’s name would imply, they also believe that they are acting as a bulwark against an otherwise-inevitable Malthusian Catastrophe). However, in practice, they spend much of their time trying to kill off the Heroes' League, particularly Legault Dawn, Arthur Calibur, and their girlfriends/wives, siblings, parents, and cousins, due to Legault and Arthur having humiliated him and crippled the Light Demons several years ago; Malthus continues to hold a fierce grudge and is determined to utterly ruin their lives in addition to killing them. Malthus is also notable for himself and his direct subordinates, the Chi Trinity — Persephone, Lamarck, and Teresa — being among the only evil characters in the setting with Holy Hand Grenade abilities (though in their case, they channel Mako rather than holy power); as a result, they are an extreme threat to Lily Natchralli, Legault's Love Interest.
• Nature Girl in X-Men Unlimited (2021) is a mutant with Green Thumb and The Beastmaster powers. After finding a beached sea turtle that choked to death on a supermarket plastic bag, she murders the shopkeeper who provided it and, when confronted with a vision of him afterwards, says she'd do it again. After getting captured by Wolverine, she escapes and founds a terrorist organization called X-Men Green.

Web Original

• How to Hero mentions eco-terrorists as one of the many types of bad guys superheroes might have to fight.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-804 was an anomalous modern art piece called "A World Without Man" that caused the decomposition of all man-made material, as well as human flesh, within a 100-meter radius. What the Foundation researchers found especially horrifying was that there was no Mind Manipulation involved in its activation.
    Dr. Johannes Sorts: A cure for the virus known as humanity. So why did a group of activists throw themselves and their neighbors into the deadly workings of a machine that they thought was going to wipe all human life off of Mother Earth? They simply wanted to do it.
  • The Serpent's Hand is a "para-environmental terrorist organization" that seeks to end The Masquerade, viewing the paranormal and supernatural as part of nature. For this reason, they're hostile towards the Global Occult Coalition (which shoots anything it doesn't understand on sight), as well as the Foundation to a lesser extent.

Western Animation

• An episode of American Dad! had Hayley falling in with an environmentalist group whose leader insists that he's a "tree born in a man's body" and "wears" nothing but a potted plant. He also tries to blow up the new mall, but only succeeds in destroying Francine's muffin kiosk and Klaus' human body from the main plot. When he does this, Haley rejects him, shoving him over and breaking his pot, causing him to desperately heap dirt around his body while acting like he's suffocating.
• The Archer episode "Pipeline Fever" has Joshua "Gandolph" Gray, an eco-terrorist who wants to blow up oil pipelines in the Louisiana bayou. Archer and Lana are dispatched to stop him.
• The heroes of Captain Planet and the Planeteers can shade over into mild examples of this in some cases, using violence and magic to destroy the enterprises of the greedy polluters who serve as the show's villains. However, they are very heroic examples, who never hurt people badly (even if they will destroy millions of dollars' worth of equipment with few qualms). The show is also deliberately vague about whether the villains' plots, and thus the Planeteers' actions against them, are legal in the first place with some of them like Dr. Blight being outright Omnicidal Maniacs.
• DC Comics:
  • Poison Ivy is portrayed as this in various animated series, such as Batman: The Animated Series, The Batman, and Harley Quinn (2019).
  • Professor Pyg and Mister Toad, two lesser-known members of Batman's Rogues Gallery, were portrayed this way in Beware the Batman. The two would hunt people down for what they perceived to be crimes against the animal kingdom, after which Pyg would surgically alter their victims into Half-Human Hybrids. (As horrific as that sounds, it's much tamer than Pyg's usual modus operandi.)
• Rick and Morty: In season 5, Morty begins dating Planetina, a Captain Ersatz of Captain Planet, after he frees her by killing the teens who used to summon her, now cynical, greedy, middle-aged dirtbags who were about to outright sell her into slavery. However, being in existence all the time quickly turns Planetina into this trope, since she can apparently hear all the damage being done to Earth (though it's never confirmed if this is literal or not), and she begins an all-out crusade against all polluters. Escalating from slashing people's tires to force them to walk and setting fire to the home of a congressman to finally burning a group of coal miners to death. Not the people who own the mines or the coal companies, the actual, blue-collar workers!
• Spoofed in a Robot Chicken skit that sees the Planeteers decide their efforts are futile so long as Red China exists and attempt to take over America to trigger World War III after killing Captain Planet for standing in their way. However, they're Killed Offscreen by a security guard within seconds of storming the Capitol, with a newsman announcing that their families are having their bodies made into mulch.
• What's New, Scooby-Doo?: This turns out to be the villain's motive in "She Sees Sea Monsters By the Sea Shore". Crunchy dressed up a minisub to look like Motoshondu and sank the tourists' boats to preserve the turtles' territory. Professor Ravenmane, the researcher from Aqualand, decries it as dangerous and irresponsible behavior that no member of the conservation community would support.
• In the Superfriends 1973-74 episode "Dr. Pelagian's War", Dr. Pelagian is an eco-terrorist out to stop three polluting businessmen.
• The SWAT Kats pursue and shoot down an eco-terrorist named Morbulus, who likes to blow up refineries, even though that's where he'd get his jet fuel from. Morbulus escapes capture, only to cross paths with Doctor Viper, who transmutes him into a four-eyed blob monster.
• Blackbeard from Time Squad is essentially this, especially in his second appearance.

Real Life

• There have been several organizations labeled as this by the United States government, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Earth Liberation Front (ELF), The Coalition to Save the Preserves, and the Hardesty Avengers.
  • The 1992 federal Animal Enterprise Protection Act criminalized tampering with animal-related enterprises more heavily and was enacted in response to the actions of ALF member Rodney Coronado, who firebombed fur industry research labs and farms throughout the early 1990s after previously sabotaging Iceland's whaling industry. Coronado was imprisoned twice in the US (with PETA contributing $70,000 to his legal defense) before denouncing violence and starting a peaceful wolf conservation non-profit.
• Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is often thought of as this, though his motives were far more complex and rooted primarily in concern for the effects that he felt industrial civilization had on human beings, regarding a cleaner natural environment as just one of many positive effects of freedom from "technological slavery". His ideology bore many similarities to anarcho-primitivism, which he later rejected on the grounds that industrialization made returning to nature impossible, and that anarcho-primitivism's idealization of the Noble Savage was rooted in precisely the sort of industrial-era pathologies that it purported to rebel against. In response to increased development in the area around his Montana cabin, especially the construction of a road through one of his favorite spots in the wilderness, he snapped and spearheaded an 18-year bombing campaign targeting academics and technologists (killing three and injuring dozens) before publishing his manifesto decrying industrialization & left-wing politics, which led to his eventual arrest after his brother recognized the themes in his writing. Notably, he always included bits of tree bark within his bombs.
  • Kaczynski's writings were a direct inspiration to the radical militant group known as the Deep Green Resistance, which have yet to perform any actual attacks but advocate the use of violence in defense of the environment, and one of its founders Derrick Jensen is said to have corresponded with Kaczynski himself after his arrest. However, Kaczynski is not directly tied to the group, having denounced the leftist views of Deep Green Resistance and other radical environmentalists.

---