Biography
William Courtney Rodgers, known throughout the radical ecology and animal liberation movements as Avalon, was an environmental and animal rights activist and the co-proprietor of the Catalyst Infoshop, a long-running anarchist bookstore and community space in Prescott, Arizona. He was a participant in the small Eugene-area Earth Liberation Front cell that became known to investigators as 'The Family,' which between 1996 and 2001 carried out approximately twenty arsons and acts of sabotage in five western states targeting timber operations, ski resorts, federal animal-research facilities, meat-industry sites, and the Vail ski resort expansion that the cell argued threatened lynx habitat. The action federal prosecutors charged Rodgers with personally setting was the June 1998 fire at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service / National Wildlife Research Center in Olympia, Washington — an action explicitly framed by its participants as a defense of wild animals against federal predator-control programs.
On December 7, 2005, FBI agents arrested him in Prescott as part of Operation Backfire, the multi-agency federal investigation that ultimately indicted thirteen activists in connection with the Eugene cell's actions. He was held at the Maricopa County 4th Avenue Jail in Phoenix awaiting transfer to Oregon. Two weeks after his arrest, on December 21, 2005, he was found dead in his cell. The county sheriff ruled the death a suicide by suffocation with a plastic bag.
He left a note that became one of the most widely circulated movement texts of the post-9/11 Green Scare era: 'Certain human cultures have been waging war against the Earth for millennia. I chose to fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, saguaros, cliff rose, and all things wild. I am just the most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have made a jail break — I am returning home, to the Earth, to the place of my origins.' His death is commemorated annually within the radical ecology and animal-liberation movements on December 21 as Avalon Day. William "Avalon" Cottrell Rodgers was a Prescott, Arizona bookstore owner and one of the central figures of the Eugene-based Earth Liberation Front cell known as The Family. He was arrested in December 2005 in the FBIs Operation Backfire roundup. He took his own life in the Coconino County Detention Facility in Flagstaff, Arizona on December 21, 2005 while awaiting trial — the first death of any Operation Backfire defendant. His suicide note read in part: I have chosen to leave to my own.
