Revenge of the Saguaro. Tom Miller
a gang of four in Tucson, Arizona, enjoyed a two-year run. Their target was real estate developments, and their aim was to slow down housing construction that leapfrogged through the valley and up the mountainsides. They had neither political theory nor context and saw neither historical precedent nor overarching principles. They sought no greater goal than acting as flame retardant to the firestorm of development burning the desert. The initial group had been friends at Canyon Del Oro High School, and most went on to the University of Arizona. They called themselves the Eco-Raiders, and they did their homework.
The Eco-Raiders denounced developers who chopped down cactus willy-nilly on the periphery of town, who built in floodplains, and, as in that old cliché, raped the land. They fought home builders with sabotage. They targeted suburban growth that debilitated the delicate balance plants needed to flourish and animals required to propagate. Their moonlight forays became the desert’s rape-crisis center. At the time neither Tucson nor Pima County had a comprehensive growth plan. The Eco-Raiders became the anti-growth plan.
To decelerate housing development meant attacking it at the point of sale. The Eco-Raiders initially went after new-home advertising on billboards, then escalated to assaulting model homes and earth-moving equipment. Almost always they left a note explaining their exploits. Their calling card was a big spray-painted STOP URBAN SPRAWL left at their attack sites, followed by their name. They skipped construction sites that abided by their four-point program: cluster housing, natural plant-life preservation, open spaces for playgrounds, and homes built outside floodplains.
The Eco-Raiders usually went out around ten at night in an anonymous pickup. Three of them, wearing bandannas to shield their identities and gloves to keep their fingerprints to themselves, would hop out with a two-man saw and spray paint. They’d saw down a land-promoter’s billboard in the desert, usually one advertising a new development. If there was a convenient flat surface nearby, they’d leave their calling card. The driver would swing by a designated pickup point once every 20 minutes. The raids took place frequently, at least a couple of times a week.
The Eco-Raiders enjoyed warm press relations; whenever they left a note explaining their attitude, the town’s dailies would dutifully report it. They wrote local officials in block printing on lined paper:
BEING APPALLED BY THE UNCHECKED SPREAD OF URBAN SPRAWL, WE ARE PROMPTED TO CONTACT YOU AGAIN AND REQUEST THAT YOU TAKE ACTION. PLEASE STOP PROTECTING DEVELOPERS WHO ARE DESTROYING THE EARTH FOR PROFIT. IT IS TIME TO OFFER TAX INCENTIVES OR DEMAND BY LAW THAT BETTER USE BE MADE OF THE LAND. . . FOR THE PAST SEVERAL WEEKS WE HAVE DESTROYED AN AVERAGE OF AT LEAST ONE REALTOR OR LAND DEVELOPMENT SIGN A DAY. WITH THE HELP OF MORE CONCERNED CITIZENS WE SHALL RAISE THAT TO TWO A DAY. STOP URBAN SPRAWL BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!
—ECO-RAIDERS
Not only did they have a commendable cause, they were polite and familiar with the law—and they knew how to use the apostrophe.
Initially, home builders and sellers were befuddled. No one had ever publicly challenged them; rezoning hearings had always been pro forma. Suddenly they became defensive, unsure how to counteract such bold and multipronged attacks. After the Eco-Raiders escalated to smashing windows on model homes, pouring sand down fuel tanks of earth-moving equipment, and ripping the wires out of homes under construction, the housing industry got really pissed. Their free handout to prospective home buyers addressed the issue head-on: “These ecology-minded bands wear black robes and mumble chants while they do their ‘good deeds’ to save society from itself.” The head of the Home Builders Association reduced their position to an orthographic formula. “They want N-O growth, and we want K-N-O-W growth. That’s the difference.”
The Eco-Raiders became minor folk heroes. People talked about them at cocktail parties and keggers, at water coolers and in barrooms. If the public’s attitude was not 100 percent supportive, at least it brought attention to the subject. Copycat groups sprang up and used the same name. The war against Vietnam was in full throttle, and the growing Watergate scandal further diluted respect for government. Most agreed with the Eco-Raiders’ objectives but wavered on their technique. (One fellow I met told me he approved of their methods but not their goals.) The Eco-Raiders posed the philosophical question, What is the sound of one billboard falling?
Myself, I rather admired their spunk and hoped to ride with them one night. I placed a classified ad in the alternative weekly New Times asking the Eco-Raiders to get in touch. Using techniques gleaned from B movies, I arranged for callers to the newspaper to be given the number of a phone booth where a friend would refer them to me at yet another phone booth—somewhat like a three-corner billiard shot. Most callers thought I was recruiting, not seeking. Among them was a female detective whose ploy was pitifully obvious. In my notes I scribbled, “und-covr—cn’t they d/bettr thn ths?”
Deciphering who among the callers was the real McCoy was surprisingly simple, and in short order the Eco-Raiders trusted me enough to invite me along for a raid. If you have confidence in me, I told them, you’ll have to trust my photographer too; they did. On the appointed night they sent us to a gas station, whose pay phone Yellow Pages hid our instructions—a very neatly drawn map directing us to what was then the northeastern edge of the city. At a specific point we were to make a U-turn and park by a 45-mph sign near a power substation. “Be careful,” an arrowed note on the map cautioned, “there is an identical sign here.” We were to turn off our engine and roll down the right front window. We were given an “Out of Gas” sign to put on my car.
We parked at the wrong sign, my photographer and I, and almost missed the rendezvous. After 25 minutes, two members of a band of Eco-Raiders came hiking up to us, somewhat short of breath and not at all pleased with our mistake. We all slithered out of sight into an area where homes were under construction.
We had a lovely saguaro’s-eye view of the city’s twinkling lights, a view that would attract any home buyer. The group’s spokesman, whom I guessed to be five-ten and 165 pounds, wore a knit hat, a stocking over his face, an army-surplus jacket, black gloves, and heavy boots. We sat as he answered my interview questions on tape for 20 minutes. Suddenly the group rose as one and went over to a previously stacked pile of rocks. They each took a softball-size rock and heaved them at the windows of two half-built homes. The windows were thick and the rocks weren’t entirely effective, so the gang pulled a couple of crowbars from their clothing and finished the glass off with a few well-aimed whacks. The spokesman slipped inside the house and sprayed STOP URBAN SPRAWL—ECO-RAIDERS on the walls, then we filed back to the pickup point.
Frankly, I would have preferred your basic billboard chop-chop. Nonetheless, their vandalism was exhilarating, and I found myself hyperventilating. Mr. Spray Paint was as calm as a Tarahumara Indian running under a quarter moon. The Eco-Raiders bid us good night, and the photographer and I headed to a bar to sort out what we had just seen.
This sort of raid went on with continued impunity, and eventually the county sheriff’s department took a hard look at the goings-on. In six weeks’ time they fingered a likely suspect—who, with a promise of immunity, told all. As it happened, he had not accompanied us that night—the Eco-Raiders raided in shifts—but he sure knew enough to get the others arrested.
The main Eco-Raiders were sentenced to six months’ county-jail time and fined less than a thousand dollars, each on misdemeanor vandalism charges. They also had to donate 300 hours’ labor to the Pima County Environmental Health Department. The fellow behind the stocking mask that night—the one who had done most of the group’s research and whose broadsides articulated their intents—was John Walker. A few years, later I bumped into John while shopping. He was making a living drawing nicely rendered line sketches of Southwest characters and selling them on the shopping-mall circuit. We reminisced about the Eco-Raiders, and he gave me a framed sketch of two Indians relaxing.
The other day I took out the map to the raid site for the first time in years and drove up to the construction spot in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains where I’d met up with John and his buddies. It is now a gated community called Casa Sunrise. I tried to imagine what the land would look like if the Eco-Raiders had had their way.