"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.
Naturally, their antithetical enemy is the Ecocidal Antagonist, a type of villain who aims to destroy nature for their own selfish goals, and the primary target of this type of character.
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, and Ecocidal Antagonist, who wants to do as much harm to the environment as possible. See also Overpopulation Crisis, which the Evil Malthusian is deeply concerned with preventing.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Twinkle Maria Murdock and her family of Space Warriors from the Cowboy Bebop episode "Gateway Shuffle". With delusions of grandeur, she converts 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.
- The motive of Power of Hope ~PreCure Full Bloom~'s Big Bad turns out to be based on the fact that humanity kept littering and polluting, and, as such, she decides to destroy them all by using the very things that caused her Bad Future to happen in the first place.
- Mobile Fighter G Gundam: The reason for Master Asia's Face–Heel Turn. Although full-scale wars have been replaced with the mano-a-mano Gundam Fights (which are explicitly not to the death), the colonies designated Earth as the battlefield. After winning the previous tournament, Master Asia looked back and saw the scale of destruction from decades of fifty-foot mecha duking it out in cities and wilderness alike. He decided to use the Devil Gundam to accomplish this end by wiping out humanity. Domon counters in their final battle by pointing out that humans are also the result of natural processes, not a separate entity from Earth, and making them extinct is yet another form of ecological harm.
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.
Blogs
- How to Hero mentions eco-terrorists as one of the many types of bad guys superheroes might have to fight.
Comic Books
- 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 per se as much as 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 his 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 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.
- Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: In the 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.
- In The Ultimates (2024), Ultimate Hawkeye was a Native American teenager by the name of Charli Ramsey who claimed Clint Barton's gear after the latter's Refusal of the Call. They then immediately use it to run a solo terror campaign against the Evil, Inc. Roxxon for polluting their people's land, but was careful to avoid harming the civilian workers. Iron Lad is skeptical about letting them join The Team, but Captain America decided to vouch for them with Charli then becoming his sidekick.
- X-Men had Nature Girl, one of Xavier's former students who had The Beastmaster & Green Thumb powers. During X-Men: The Krakoan Age she snapped after seeing a sea turtle get tangled in a plastic bag, murdering the owner of the store it came from. After getting arrested by Wolverine she quickly escaped and formed a mutant eco-terrorist group called the "X-Men Green". Ironically, her Face–Heel Turn eventually led to her being disowned by Mother Nature herself, Gaea, before being recruited by Apocalypse.
Fan Works
- The Bat (Siltrics) reimagines Aquaman as this due to a combination of years of disrespect, people contaminating the seas, and a disaster befalling Atlantis.
- Shadowchasers Series: 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 succumbed 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. Ironically, this ends up giving her an eventual Heel–Face Turn (after she recovers from catatonia), as it turns out her connection to The Green was flawed and made her mental issues even worse. She ends up forming a bond with the dryad Duanthe.
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.
- Batman & Robin: Poison Ivy views humanity as a plague on the Earth and, if she can't force it to live in a more restricted way, then killing off large portions of the species is also fine. One of her confrontations with Batman revolves around her demanding that Wayne Enterprises abandon the use of diesel fuel and coolants, which would be feasible in itself — but her demands that it cease all of it immediately would cause the deaths of millions of people due to cold and hunger, and when Batman points this out she states that those deaths would be "acceptable losses".
- Cleaner (2025): Earth Revolution are radical environmentalists willing to use kidnapping and threaten their hostages with death so they can expose corrupt, environmentally damaging actions by an oil company. However, the original leader Marcus won't kill. Noah, however, is not only willing to but believes all humans should die to save the Earth. He takes over by murdering Marcus and the terrorists loyal to him.
- 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.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Alan Jonah 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.
- Kingsman: The Secret Service: The Big Bad, Richmond Valentine, is a Bourgeois Bohemian and Misanthrope Supreme who sought to kill off the vast majority of the human race to protect the environment and rebuild the world In Their Own Image.
- 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.
- 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
- All the Wrong Questions: The Inhumane Society is a terrorist organisation devoted to protecting the planet and willing to go to extreme lengths to do so, including kidnapping and plotting on killing an entire town full of children.
- Ark Angel: The terrorist organization Force Three. 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.
- CHERUB Series: The Help Earth! group, which first appears in The Recruit, in which they plan to make an attack on a conference between several major oil executives. They return in Divine Madness, in which they destroy natural gas facilities for 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.
- Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021): Seymour becomes increasingly distraught by the possibilities of climate change and falls in with Bishop, a mysterious online personality who insists that violence is the only way to stop it and recruits people to this end. It's how he's convinced to blow up the library, though after Seymour's arrest the truth about the group is never revealed.
- 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.
- The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers: In 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.
- Heavy Object: Bad Garage is an international group which believes that 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.
- Humanx Commonwealth: 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 is 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, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Mortal Engines: The Anti-Traction League 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.
- The Ministry For The Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, 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.
- Oath of Fealty: The American Ecology Army, an offshoot of the FROMATEs (FRiends Of Man And The Earth). They totally oppose the arcology Todos Santos and commit kidnapping, (fake) attempted arson, rape, and murder in their campaign to destroy it.
- The Oregon Files: In 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.
- Prince Roger 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.
- Saints At The River: The antagonist 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.
- Tom Clancy's EndWar: The novelized version 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!
- 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.
- 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 titular 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.
- At the start of the Bull 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 has 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.
- The 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.
- FBI: Most Wanted: In "White Buffalo", after going on the run, Trevor and Emma hijack a CO2 tanker and release the gas at an amusement park when cornered. After escaping again, the two dream up a new act of public defiance, identifying the pipeline’s transfer station as their new target.Discovered, the duo abandons attacking the transfer station. Instead, they collect a hostage and move on to the pipeline’s injection site. This is a site where CO2 gas instead of a slurry of water, sand, and chemicals is used for fracking. This practice, illegal and dangerous, stokes Trevor’s anger. The hostage warns that if they set fire to the injection site, they will die. Ignoring the warning, Trevor starts the fire.
- 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 who the NJP defends in "Lovers" were convicted of murder and terrorism for a bombing which killed a waiter aimed at gas-guzzling cars. It turns out that a man they knew did this however, not them.
- NCIS:
- In "Sub-Rosa", a save-the-whales extremist tries to destroy a submarine since he believes that naval sonar and other signaling is disrupting whales' migration and breeding. The episode also makes it clear that he's in no way connected to the protesters who are 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. 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.
- Siren (2018): Maddie, Ben, Xander, Calvin, Helen and Ryn's tribe sabotage the oil rig's drilling that will destroy the merpeople's habitat otherwise through a coordinated effort.
- 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 Star Trek: The Original Series 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.
- "Allegiance" and "Twenty Squad" in Season 7 sees the team face off with a group named Green Rebellion, a much less sympathetic example. They are well armed and frequently kidnap relatives of oil executives trying to extort them into shutting down harmful operations, killing their hostages when refused. After most are taken down, the one survivor comes back with members of a far left terrorist cell he co-founded to get vengeance, intent on blowing up LA through triggering a jet fuel pipeline which runs under the city.
- 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.
- The 3rd Edition supplement Loose Alliances features 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.
- The Garou in Werewolf: The Apocalypse can come off this way, which is a bit awkward since they're the Player Characters.
Video Games
- Baldur's Gate has the Shadow Druids, a secret society of corrupt druids who value the lives of plants and animals over people. In the original duology, the party can stumble upon their leader, Faldorn, and she can become a potential companion in the first game. In Baldur's Gate III, they're revealed to be the ones manipulating Kagha into antagonizing the tiefling refugees in Act 1, and it takes a bit of digging to learn the truth.
- 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.
- Dave the Diver has Sea Blue, an organization fronted by ex-Navy Seal John Watson that, supposedly, fights to prevent the exploitation and destruction of the sea and its resources. Dave's friend Cobra, though, notes that Sea Blue are unusually aggressive in their actions, and they only ever target small or independent fishers like Dave rather than targeting the MegaCorp fisheries that do the real damage to the environment. Watson himself shows a callous disregard for the environment during his boss fights with Dave, attacking Dave with grenades and missiles and blaming Dave when his missed shots blow up the reef or nearby wildlife. Midway through the game, Sea Blue is revealed to be a front for a massive dolphin slaughter facility that is operating in the area, and Watson's antagonism was meant as a means of driving out a perceived competitor so he could exploit the giant blue hole for all it's worth.
- 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's the fact that 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.
- In Evil Genius 2, DLC character Polar is an ice-themed Supervillain whose goal is to save the world from being destroyed by humanity... by plunging it into another Ice Age.
- 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.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Unless Sol goes out of their way to befriend him, Dys will turn against the colony, detonating a bomb against the walls during the yearly Glow attack. Catching him in the act of setting the bomb reveals that Noctilucent offered him a place in the Gardener Array if he betrayed Humanity. Even if Sol successfully talks Dys out of bombing the colony, he'll snap and do it anyway if he finds out about Tang's virus project, since it means she would be wiping out all of Vertumnan wildlife with it.
- The Long Dark: The Forest Talkers are an activist group against resource exploitation of Great Bear Island, particularly mining and illegal logging of old growth forests. Jeremiah says that some see them positively as activists, while others, particularly the Breyerhouse company, regard them as terrorists. They have supply caches around the island containing weapons and bomb materials, suggesting that at least some of their methods involve violence or property destruction.
- 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 up to generation 7, 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.
- Subverted in the Video Game Remake. Team Aqua retains their previous characterization, while Team Magma by contrast become Ecocidal Antagonists who want to shrink the oceans for the sake of industrialization with Pokémon being an afterthought.
- 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
- Big Bad of Pokémon X and Y, 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 (i.e. anyone who can afford the $50,000 USD membership fee) 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. In the sequel Pokémon Legends: Z-A he's revealed to have survived his Disney Villain Death and become The Atoner, working as an assistant to the Nature Spirit Zygarde.
- 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 obssession 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Warframe: Pazuul the Ram is one of the four Archons, Sentient Beasts created as a sort of living memorial to animals that have long gone extinct on Earth. After the Sentients terraformed the Tau System to be habitable for their creators, the Orokin Empire, they turned on them after realizing that the Orokin would just ruin Tau just as they had done to the Sol/Origin System, starting the Great Offscreen War that would become known as the "Old War". Pazuul represents the most extreme aspects of this ideology, being an Ax-Crazy lunatic with a deep-seated hatred for all of humanity, which he outright calls "filth-born" and "children of abomination". It's for this reason that that he took command of The Remnant of Narmer, the empire that the Sentients created after conquering the Origin System in "The New War", seeking to enslave humanity once more in reverence to the perfection of Tau and the restoration of the Origin System's ecosystems.
- You play as one in the Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names. How violent you want to be is up to you, but every good character will be one, given the nature of the setting.
Webcomics
- In Chapter Two of Skyvein, a news anchor attributes the release of a skysquid to a couple of eco-terrorists.
- Nature Girl from 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.
Websites
- 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 Wanderer's Library: 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.
- SCP-804
Web Videos
- History of Power Rangers has its host accusing Animus of being this as, during the middle of the show, he decides to take away the Wild Zords (and with it, the power to transform into the Power Rangers) because he believed the Rangers aren't doing enough to protect the enviroment and, ironically, doom the planet in the process.
Western Animation
- An episode of American Dad! has 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. He ends up as one of the minor and one-shot characters killed in the Great Bus Crash in "100. A.D".
- 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.
- Batman:
- Poison Ivy is portrayed as this in various animated series, such as Batman: The Animated Series, The Batman (2004), and Harley Quinn (2019).
- Professor Pyg and Mister Toad are 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.
- 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.
- Time Squad: Edward Teach, AKA Blackbeard is one when Time Squad meets him, abandoning pillaging in favor of attacking whaling ships and similar 18th century eco-terrorism. While Time Squad seemingly sets him straight (they convinced him to donate 10% of his plunder to eco-friendly causes), he's relapsed in his second episode, and when Time Squad are forced to take him along on their next job to deal with Socrates (who's started a fitness club instead of a philosophy school), he manages to escape and goes on a rampage through ancient Greece, attacking loggers, freeing test animals and destroying dams.
- 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.
