Unironically the FBI violently dismantled environmentalist organizations in the 90s because of this. Not because anyone was going to arm the trees, but because the environmentalists were factually and morally correct and that made them a threat that needed to be neutralized before they got wide spread traction. "environmental terrorists" were the FBI's number one priority for most of the 90s. They used the burning of a couple of car lots in California by unrelated people to spin up a wild conspiracy theory about organized eco-terrorists that were going to do eco terror stuff. They never really explained how vandalizing mink farms was terrorism, and it didn't matter that no one was ever actually harmed by tree spiking, but they still used their made up stories to arrest and intimidate a ton of people, effectively shitcanning a lot of the then existing environmentalist movements in the US.
Unironically the FBI violently dismantled environmentalist organizations in the 90s because of this. Not because anyone was going to arm the trees, but because the environmentalists were factually and morally correct and that made them a threat that needed to be neutralized before they got wide spread traction. "environmental terrorists" were the FBI's number one priority for most of the 90s. They used the burning of a couple of car lots in California by unrelated people to spin up a wild conspiracy theory about organized eco-terrorists that were going to do eco terror stuff. They never really explained how vandalizing mink farms was terrorism, and it didn't matter that no one was ever actually harmed by tree spiking, but they still used their made up stories to arrest and intimidate a ton of people, effectively shitcanning a lot of the then existing environmentalist movements in the US.
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