Builder say cities aren't the only context for green design.

With an estimated 80,000 visitors, Seattle’s Street of Dreams is regarded as one of the highest- attended single site luxury home and garden tours in the United States. Its president, John Heller, told CNN after the blaze that he understood the fire to be “an act of terror.” Although no group or person has claimed responsibility for the act, investigators began exploring links between the Street of Dreams incident and a 2006Camano Island house arson under investigation as a possible Earth Liberation Front (ELF) attack.

The theme for the Seattle Street of Dreams 2007 summer event was focused on green homebuilding, showcasing how aspects of new home construction, design, landscaping and furnishing can be more environmentally responsible. One of the torched homes reportedly earned the first Five-Star Built Green ratings ever awarded in Snohomish County, and all of the homes in the development are required to meet or exceed Built Green’s Three-Star rating, according to the Yarrow Bay Development Co.

This was not the first time the “green” homes at Quinn’s Crossing were the subject of opposition, however. A statement on the Street of Dreams Web site says the development was the subject of protests by “an environmental activist group,” but notes a settlement had been reached in that dispute. According to local news reports, neighbors of the development located near the headwaters of Bear Creek voiced concerns that the homes’ septic systems could damage wetlands needed to protect an aquifer used by as many as 20,000 people in the area and could harm streams used for breeding by Chinook salmon.

Immediately following the blaze, Built Green Executive Director Aaron Adelstein issued a statement on the organization’s Web site denouncing the arson. “The senseless destruction of property serves only to polarize the environmental debate and push the dialogue back to the fringe,” he wrote. “Built Green along with our members and communities have made great strides over recent years to bring green building from that fringe where it had comfortably but ineffectively resided for decades, into the realm of mainstream public awareness.”

Adelstein said he thinks the arsonists were taking issue with regional growth and land- planning issues. Built Green does not take site selection for the homes it certifies into account, though it does offer points toward higher ratings if homes are developed in locations close to amenities such as public transit or urban cores. “Once a building is allowed, we advocate for it to be built in the most sustainable way,” he said. “If we were to ignore those types of housing we would be making no change in those types of markets.”

The early March incident brought the issue of so-called “ecoterrorism” back into the public limelight following an aggressive public clampdown on such activity in recent years. In 2007, 10 people, including self-proclaimed members of ELF, were convicted for a string of arson fires that totaled more than $40million in damage, according to the U.S. Justice Department. And in 2005, six individuals were arrested for Pacific Northwest ecoterrorist acts dating back to 1998, including the millennium-eve destruction of a transmission tower owned by the Bonneville Power Administration.

ELF claims to have no visionary leaders, no hierarchy and no organizational structure. Its targets have included mink ranches, timber industry offices, McDonald’s restaurants, primate research facilities, U.S. Forest Service operations, meat packing plants, luxury homes, Republican committee offices, suburban developments and sport utility vehicles. The group claims no living beings have ever been hurt in an ELF action.

However, ELF arsons often result in an increase in the environmental impacts its backers claim to abhor. For instance, Boise Corp.’s regional headquarters in Monmouth, Ore., were burned to the ground on a chilly Christmas morning in 1999, a time of year when wildfires couldn’t serve as an alibi. The torching of Boise’s headquarters was instead attributed to the monkey-wrenching of ELF. As a result of the arson, Boise chose to rebuild using non-renewable materials such as concrete, steel and aluminum, according to written testimony from a Boise logging manager.

A statement from Street of Dreams says a $100,000 reward is being offered by the Building Industry Association of Washington for information leading to arrests in the arson. The Northwest Insurance Council and the Arson Alarm Foundation are also offering a $10,000 reward. Federal investigators have appeared to be winning the war against what they dub the United States’ great domestic terror threat. Just days after the Street of Dreams fire, a federal jury in Tacoma found ELF arsonist Briana Waters, a 32-year-old violin teacher from Oakland, Calif., guilty of two charges in relation to the firebombing of a University of Washington genetics research laboratory in 2001.

After 9/11, when the world watched two pillars of capitalism collapse and crumble with thousands of innocent victims inside, actions by ecoterrorists monkey-wrenching under the guise of ELF seemed to flare in intensity, with high-profile incidents including arson attacks on a federal wild horse facility in California and a biomedical lab in Alamogordo, N.M.

Behind the pillars of Capitol Hill, the Bush administration launched a global effort to “rid the world of evildoers.” The U.S. Senate passed an ambitious piece of legislation aimed at tackling terrorism abroad—as well as at home. Easing through the U.S. Senate Oct. 26, 2001 on a 98-1 vote, the Patriot Act expanded the definition of terrorism and offered authorities greater money and muscle to investigate a new dawning of alleged threats, which included saboteurs fighting for what they claim are environmental causes. In addition, a number of less-visible local laws were passed in the Pacific Northwest to increase the punishments for vandalism and economic sabotage.

Conservative think tanks, such as the Bellevue, Wash.-based Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, mainly known for its efforts to combat global warming policies, also lined up to launch anti-ecoterrorism efforts. In some cases, anti-environmentalists seized the opportunity to paint the entire environmental movement with a radicalist hue. For instance, at an October 2001 annual Society of Environmental Journalists convention at Portland State University, in a break-out session entitled “Rising Civil Disobedience in the Environmental Movement,” Bill Pickell of the Washington Contract Loggers Association quipped that his environmental counterparts on the panel might as well be armed with box-cutters. He then went on to condemn Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” as misguided, mercury contamination as a false scare, and the environmental movement as radical and unjust.

“You know, my daddy told me when I was a boy — I used to trap skunks — he said when you mess with skunks, if it smells like a skunk, it probably is a skunk, and then you get that spray on you,” Pickell said. “I don’t see any difference between the Sierra Club and these other groups. They both want the same goals.”

Another ecoterrorism commentary at the time, this one an essay by Robert Locke in FrontPageMagazine.com, compared ELF saboteurs to terrorists who “might even take out a few skyscrapers” and then launched into an all-out anti-environmental manifesto that blamed the entire environmental cause for “the millions who have died in the Third World due to environmentalists, campaigns against DDT, asbestos cement, methyl bromide, and chlorine…” “Even if we don’t see freaks from Seattle crashing airplanes into the Space Needle, the philosophy alone is a potent threat,” he wrote. Pickell’s and Locke’s comments illustrated a growing concern among environmentalists, many pursuing modest goals with widely accepted tactics, that they were being tarred with an ever-expanding extremist brush. Even forms of direct- action nonviolent protest have been billed as manifestations of ELF actions.

But such commentary typically comes from the extreme, just as arson attacks come from the furthest extreme. In the middle are moms and dads who want their kids breathing fresh air, grandparents who want their grandchildren to explore ancient forests, and businesses that want to capitalize on environmental innovation.

According to former Tidepool editor Ed Hunt, who in June 2001 wrote “The trouble with terror,” a highly regarded litany against ecoterrorism, ELF activity undermines popular support for environmental causes because it reinforces tired stereotypes about environmentalists as uncompromising absolutists who are not worth reasoning with or listening to. “If you find yourself on the same side of an issue with bombers and arsonists,” he wrote, “it can’t help but make your position seem unreasonable.”

In this case, Adelstein says the early reaction to the arsons he’s heard from developers includes commitments to keep using green building techniques. “In the big picture, it’s going to have no impact on the green building industry,” he said. Builders have told him they’re “not going to be told to change anything by illegal acts and threats of violence.”