The left, eco-centric and anarchist internet is reporting that anarchist trans environmentalist prisoner Marius Mason has been released from American gaol.

In an explanatory press release, anarchist newswires reported that Marius Mason is an anarchist, environmental, animal rights activist as well as a loving parent, artist, poet, and musician, currently serving nearly 22 years in federal prison for acts of property damage carried out in defense of the planet. 

He has fought tirelessly during his incarceration for trans prisoner rights. 

Marius’ 2008 arrest was part of what has been subsequently termed the Green Scare, a series of environmental activist arrests based on snitching and FBI harassment of activists that set a precedent for charging non-violent activists with “terrorism.”

The Green Scare was a major crackdown on environmental and animal rights organizing across the US. Following the 9/11 attacks, the US government mobilized public anxieties towards an Islamophobic panic, justifying indiscriminate harassment and prosecution of members of mosques and Muslim organizations with no relationship to Al-Qaeda. In the years after 2001, this repressive momentum extended to alleged “eco-terrorists,” drawing on a related panic and using similar tactics of harassment, surveillance, infiltration/provocation, and escalated criminal sentencing. 

In 2005, this repression exploded in the Green Scare’s most famous case, Operation Backfire, in which the FBI rounded up many well-known environmental activists and charged them as terrorists for actions claimed by the Earth Liberation Front in the American West. Manipulation, scare tactics, and the threat of decades-long sentences in the wake of the Patriot Act led some of the indicted activists to snitch on their comrades. This snitching extended the Green Scare by spreading fear, trauma and distrust widely, but did not actually lead to substantially shorter sentences for those who had betrayed their former friends.