Two radical environmentalists have been sentenced for their roles in a July 2000 attack against a U.S. Forest Service research facility in Wisconsin.

Government-owned vehicles were vandalized and approximately 500 trees were destroyed during the attack against the Hugo Sauer Nursery in Rhinelander on July 20, 2000. The act was carried out on behalf of Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the most active environmental extremist movement in the United States.

Bryan Lefay, formerly Bryan Rivera, 27, of Olympia, Washington, was sentenced to three years in prison on February 25 after pleading guilty to willful injury to government property on November 14, 2008.

Katherine Christianson, 27, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, received a two-year sentence on February 19 after pleading guilty on December 4, 2008.

The two were ordered to pay a total of $424,361 in restitution.

Lefay, Christianson, and three others targeted the facility because they mistakenly believed that scientists there were genetically engineering trees, according to court materials. The vehicles defaced featured multiple references to ELF, including “ELF is watching the U.S. Forest Service.”

ELF claimed responsibility for the incident in a communiqué released shortly afterwards; the statement described the attack as a response to bioengineering and read, “We are everywhere and nowhere and we are watching. For wildness and an end to industrial society.”

The other individuals implicated in the case have pleaded guilty or been convicted on charges relating to the Rhinelander or other environmental acts: 

• Aaron Ellringer, 35, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the group’s driver, was sentenced to four days in jail on misdemeanor charges on December 30, 2008. Ellringer was indicted in the case in July 2008, along with Lefay and Christianson.

• Ian Wallace, 27, originally of Eau Claire, is awaiting sentencing for his role in the 2001 attempted firebombing of a U.S. Forest Service facility at Michigan Tech University.

• Daniel McGowan, 34, of New York, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2007 for his role in an ecoterror campaign that targeted five western states between 1996 and 2001. McGowan was among the 11 individuals, known as “The Family,” indicted in 2006 on charges related to 17 acts of domestic terrorism committed on behalf of ELF and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).