This media shyness is something new. In the past, Clausen has courted anyone with a byline. But last year, The Wall Street Journal ran an article that questioned his anti-ecoterrorism crusade; he calls it "the hit piece." It takes a full day of negotiations before he'll submit to an on-the-record interview. When we finally talk, he brings his own tape recorder and reveals the reason for his earlier dietary queries.

"Basically [the Journal reporter] was a vegan," he says. "That's why I asked if you drank beer and ate meat. I stood there while he checked into this $150-a-night bed-and-breakfast and the lady asked him if he wanted bacon or sausage with breakfast. He said, 'No, I don't eat meat.'" Clausen gives me a look that says, Tell me there ain't something fishy about that. (For the record, the Journal reporter, Bob Ortega, is not a vegan. He confesses to being "what you might call a fishetarian"—doesn't eat pork, but loves fish and eggs. He also says his eating habits don't affect his reportage.)

Clausen still doesn't trust me, an admitted liberal, but warms to the chance to present The World According to Barry. "Look, I'm not antienvironmentalist," he insists. "I'm antiextremist. I have never given a speech where I haven't told people we need environmentalism. We're all environmentalists. We all want to help the environment. I don't support clear-cuts, I'm no fan of Weyerhauser, and I think Plum Creek Timber is the worst company of them all. But when you start breaking the law, when you go after these small- and medium-size companies, you're only helping the big multinationals."

Clausen sees himself as a decent fellow out to catch the bad guys who is thwarted and misunderstood at every turn by coke smugglers, rural sheriffs, FBI agents, enviros, and picky-eater journalists. When he talks about the radical activists he's after, his tone is surprisingly benevolent, as if he's a cop doing his damnedest to keep the neighborhood ex-cons on the straight path. It hasn't gone unnoticed out on his beat. "I've been involved in Earth First! for 15 years and I've seen people who really hate us," says Andy Caffrey. "Barry's not like that. He's generally polite, quiet, even mousy. That vitriol isn't in him. He's just a little scam guy."

And yet, for a man on a mission, he is curiously ambivalent about his motivation. Every time I ask him why he does what he does, he gives a different answer. One time he says it's about the importance of standing up to bullies, another time it's about the sanctity of freedom and liberty, then it's about saving kids from Earth First!'s siren song of green anarchism. In the end, Clausen seems to simply enjoy the game. "I like to be able to be right," he tells me. But there's a catch—he can't prove he's right until law enforcement officials listen to him and his data, and catch the bad guys. So he keeps playing. "If I can do all this from a little dinky office with no funding," he exclaims, "imagine what the FBI could do!"

So what's your role in "all this"? I ask him. "My role? I don't have a role," he protests. But there I think he's wrong. In the environmental drama, Clausen's part is small but memorable. He's the informational agitator. If he was a little more on the ball, he'd put up a Web site and turn himself into the Wise Use version of Matt Drudge. (It couldn't hurt. Clausen supports himself by doing construction work and cashing the occasional check from donors who hear him on cranky talk-radio shows.) In the Wise Use demimonde, small pond-drops like Clausen can cause huge ripples.

"What I find most disturbing about him," says Tarso Ramos of the Western States Center in Portland, "is the way he's pushed, along with Ron Arnold, to bring this word 'ecoterror' into the language." It's an old truism: Whosoever defines the language controls the issue. This is what's at stake in the war between "monkeywrenching" and "ecoterrorism." Ecoterrorism didn't appear until 1983, when Ron Arnold used the term in the Libertarian magazine Reason. Arnold, Clausen, and other Wise Use leaders have championed it ever since. Its power to shape the debate is considerable. Even a lukewarm environmentalist will smile on monkeywrenching, which carries the sound of a morally righteous prank. But only a zealot supports terrorism.

Of course, the terror visited upon environmental activists is disturbing enough on its own. Entire books have been written about the backlash, most notably David Helvarg's The War Against the Greens, which documents harassment ranging from verbal abuse to the bombing of Judi Bari. The attacks haven't abated. Two years ago, Earth First! activist David Chain was killed while protesting in northern California when a tree cut by a Pacific Lumber Company logger landed on him. In late 1998, a member of Julia "Butterfly" Hill's ground crew watched in horror as a gang of local vigilantes demolished her car and rolled it over a cliff. In March 1999, police in Santa Fe, New Mexico, disarmed a ten-inch pipe bomb left in the Forest Guardians' mailbox.

Compared to such violent acts, is ecoterrorism really terrorism? ELF/ALF activists often defend their practices by scrambling to the high ground of "property, not people." So far, no one has ever died as a result of their actions. "If [ELF/ALF] claims a crime, you know we're going to abide by certain rules of engagement," says ALF activist Rod Coronado. "You're dealing with someone who's targeting property and isn't going to try to shoot you." But according to the FBI's definition of terrorism—"the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social goals"—Arnold and Clausen aren't far off the mark. When the ELF and ALF warn, "Leave the forests alone, and no one gets hurt" and follow up with firebombs, it's hard to dismiss it as monkeywrenching. Radical environmentalists sidestep the question by declaring the despoilers of wilderness the "real terrorists." To liberal activists, this should be a chillingly familiar argument—it's the same one used by those who shoot abortion doctors.

Sometime in the last two years ecoterrorism graduated from contested term to established noun, and it wasn't all Barry Clausen's doing. The crimes simply caught up with the word. Less than a year after declaring ecoterrorism "off the radar screen," FBI director Louis Freeh reversed himself before a Senate committee in early 1999 and declared it one of the nation's primary domestic threats. "The most recognizable single-issue terrorists at the present time," Freeh said, "are those involved in the violent animal rights, anti-abortion, and environmental protection movements." A few months later the Portland Oregonian published a landmark series by reporters Bryan Denson and James Long, who spent ten months evaluating hundreds of so-called ecoterrorism incidents. "The crimes," they concluded, "are acts of domestic terrorism." In 11 Western states alone, Denson and Long substantiated 33 incidents that caused more than $28 million in damage from 1995 through 1999. And as if all that wasn't enough proof, even the Oxford English Dictionary recently added the word "eco-terrorist."

What caused the shift? In a word, Vail.

In terms of media exposure, it was brilliant: The October 19, 1998, predawn arson attack on Vail's luxurious new Two Elk Lodge and adjacent buildings and ski lifts led the news from coast to coast. When ELF claimed responsibility five days later—it was "an act of love," said the fax relayed by Craig Rosebraugh—millions of people were confronted with the plight of the Canadian lynx and the violent potential of ELF. But the $12 million blaze was also a wake-up call to law enforcement and may, in the long run, turn a somewhat sympathetic public against the radical activists. "I've seen a massive shift in [law enforcement] resources" in the past year, says Teresa Platt, executive director of the pro-industry Fur Commission USA. "They've prioritized it. We didn't do it. The criminal actions just kept escalating. The Vail fire was shocking."

David Schwendiman, an assistant U.S. attorney in Salt Lake City who successfully prosecuted two ALF activists last year for bombing a mink food co-op in Sandy, Utah, believes both his case and the Vail fire galvanized law enforcement agencies across the country. "Before these cases," Schwendiman says, "it had been hard to get any law enforcement to take this seriously. But you put five pipe bombs out there and people start to realize this isn't just cow tipping."