Burn Wild

An update on Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, who on November 1st 2022 was sentenced.

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The mother of Josephine Sunshine Overaker - the remaining fugitive environmentalist - tells her story.

And a change of plea from Joseph Dibee means he’s able to talk in a way he hasn’t before, including about a night he said he'd never speak of.

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Jane Quimby was one of the FBI agents on Operation Backfire, the investigation that busted the Earth Liberation Front and so-called Family. One of those she put behind bars was Chelsea Gerlach – sentenced to nine years and now living with the weight of that word ‘terrorist’.

Now, they’re ready to talk in a way they couldn’t before.

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Burn Wild is a BBC Audio Documentaries Production for BBC Sounds and Radio 5 Live

As they visit the site of an ELF arson twenty-five years ago, Leah and Georgia meet inhabitants of a town that two years ago was lost to forest fire.

The Earth Liberation Front had a clear line they wouldn’t cross: they would never cause any physical harm. And they never did.

As climate change bears down they ask - where is the line now? A time when the stakes have gotten higher, the consequences sharper.

Leah and Georgia hear from those who spent years behind bars as a result of their actions in the name of the ELF, and environmental activists today - including the founders of mass civil disobedience movement Extinction Rebellion.

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Presenter: Leah Sottile

During a visit to Eugene, Oregon - a city that brought key people and ideas in this story together - Leah and Georgia find something unexpected.

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In 2005 Joe Dibee fled America – leaving everything behind.

Speaking in Summer 2021, as he awaits what he hopes will be a trial date, Joe tells Leah and Georgia about life out of reach of the FBI, and his eventual capture in Cuba.

As they faced - or face - years behind bars, Leah Sottile explores what that word, terrorist, meant for the environmentalists who had become a ‘domestic terror priority’.

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More than fifteen years ago a woman, authorities call an eco-terrorist, slipped through the fingers of the FBI and vanished. Leah Sottile meets the agent she evaded, who’s made it his mission to see her caught before he retires.

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Featuring footage from the FBI

Burn Wild is a BBC Audio Documentaries Production for BBC Sounds and Radio 5 Live.

For over a decade, Joseph Dibee’s mugshot stared out from the FBI’s Most Wanted Domestic Terrorists list.

And since that year, Joseph Dibee has been a fugitive.

Now, he’s been caught.

For the first time in what would be more than eighteen months of recording, journalist Leah Sottile and producer Georgia Catt get to talk to him.

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An underground group of radical environmentalists become a domestic terror priority. Then two go on the run. And this series goes in an unexpected direction.

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For over a decade, a pair of mugshots have lived side by side on the FBI’s website, on its list of America’s Most Wanted Domestic Terrorists.

And now one of them has been caught.

For the past eighteen months journalist Leah Sottile and producer Georgia Catt have been recording with him across a case that ventures into some of the thorniest questions of our time:

What is the most effective way to bring about change?

Burn Wild. An eight-part podcast series. Starting September 6th.