Our Biggest Enviro Threat? 77 ALEC Bills in 2013 Advance a Big Oil, Big Ag Agenda

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ALEC's "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" was the ideological ancestor for "ag-gag" laws, introduced in nine states in 2013 to quash the First Amendment rights of reporters, investigators and videographers by making it harder for them to document issues with food safety and animal cruelty. The bills take many forms, but generally make it a crime to shoot video of a farm or slaughterhouse, or to apply for employment at these facilities under "false pretenses."

Modern-day Upton Sinclairs have been using similar techniques as  The Jungle's author to document food safety issues -- Sinclair  got a job at a Chicago slaughterhouse under false pretenses so he could write his book -- but are using 21st Century tools. 

In 2007, for example, an undercover video investigation by the Humane Society showed sick “downer” cows -- which are banned from human consumption because they were implicated in the spread of mad cow disease -- being pushed towards slaughter with forklifts and cattle prods, leading to the largest meat recall in U.S. history.

The ALEC-influenced "ag-gag" bills seek to criminalize this type of investigation. 

In March of this year, ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling defended the laws,  telling the Associated Press, "at the end of the day it's about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy."

Utah passed an ag-gag law in 2012, which led to  charges against a young woman named Amy Meyer, who did nothing else besides film the outside of a slaughterhouse from public land. Meyer regularly passed the slaughterhouse on her way to volunteer at an animal sanctuary, and began filming when she witnessed what appeared to be animal cruelty with possible public health repurcussions: a sick (but still living) cow being carried away from the building on a tractor. The slaughterhouse owner asserted that she had trespassed, despite there being no damage to the barbed wire fence surrounding his property.

"This was the first time anyone has been charged under the ag-gag law," Meyer told CMD. "But as long as these ag-gag laws are around, this won't be the last prosecution, unfortunately."

Less than 24 hours after journalist Will Potter publicized her story -- but months after she was first charged -- the prosecution dropped its case against Meyer.

"The only purpose [of ag-gag laws] is to punish investigators who expose animal cruelty and journalists who report on the ag industry," she said. "These laws are intended to keep consumers in dark and shield factory farms from scrutiny."

As written, the ALEC model bill could also criminalize environmental civil disobedience, such as when activists "obstruct" the business operations of a logging or mining facility through tree-sits or road blockades. A bill reflecting these provisions  was introduced in Oregon this year to outlaw most civil disobedience against logging operations.

Polluters Stand With ALEC

Over the past year-and-a-half,  at least 49 global corporations have dropped their ALEC membership -- including companies like Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Amazon -- but oil and energy companies have stood by ALEC.

"Despite its terrible reputation, ALEC is still valued by polluting companies like ExxonMobil, Duke Energy and Koch Industries, which finance and help craft ALEC's state policies to smother competition from clean energy industries and offer handouts to fossil fuel companies at every turn," says Greenpeace's Gibson.

"ALEC's guise of 'free market environmentalism' is just a code word for its real mission in our states' legislatures: to allow dirty energy companies to pollute as much as they want, to attack incentives for clean energy competitors and to secure government handouts to oil, gas and coal interests," Gibson says. "That's not a free market."