Craig Rosebraugh's War

Craig Rosebraugh is six feet three and until recently he weighed 140 pounds. He does not eat meat, and until he was diagnosed three years ago with dangerously low cholesterol, he was a practicing vegan. He did not eat any animal products whatsoever, including milk and cheese. Now, on the advice of his doctor, he eats one organic egg and a few shavings of organic cheese every week. He never eats the egg in a restaurant, for fear that even eggs advertised as organic may not be, in fact, organic.

Rosebraugh, who is 33, has a lean and weathered hawklike face, with slightly protruding front teeth and piercing blue eyes. He often wears his ginger hair in a buzz cut, and he is generally polite but also a little bit taut--combative, even. If you ask him what he thinks about the U.S. government, he will not snicker or roll his eyes comically. He will just look at you cold and say, "The same people have been in power since 1776: rich white men. And are they benefiting women? No. Latin Americans? No. The environment? No. It is time to start talking about a revolution in this country. And yes, if there is a revolution, it will be violent. Name one revolution in history that was not violent."

From 1997 to 2001, Rosebraugh was, famously, a spokesperson for the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, two still-thriving, intertwined networks of saboteurs who have inflicted $100 million worth of property damage on those they deem despoilers of nature. The more prominent ELF has claimed responsibility for setting fire to four chairlifts in Vail, Colo., and also for vandalizing dozens of Hummers sitting in the lots of SUV dealerships nationwide. Rosebraugh says he never directly participated in such destruction. Instead, he fielded messages from the saboteurs and then, sitting in his office in Portland, Oreg., sent out incendiary press releases. "If we are vandals," he once said, "so were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz."

In 1998, The New York Times Magazine called Rosebraugh the "Face of Ecoterrorism." In 2002, Congress summoned him to testify. FBI and ATF agents raided his house twice. Rosebraugh was unmoved. He went on to found the Arissa Media Group, a nonprofit with the stated purpose of pushing for a revolution in the U.S.A. Through Arissa, he then published his own book, The Logic of Political Violence, which bore on its cover a photo of the World Trade Center engulfed in orangey black flames.

What few people knew was that, as he angled to take down the Man, Rosebraugh also honed a taste for fine living. He bought an old Victorian house and furnished it with antiques. He became an accomplished vegan cook, treating his houseguests to some portobello tofu crepes, say. He disdained the prevalent view that, as he expresses it, "if you're for world change, you have to live in sloppy squalor." He saw elegance, in fact, as consistent with ELF's sabotage--as a matter of "pride and dignity and caring."

But his gourmet passions were little known. I live near Craig Rosebraugh in Portland, and until recently I always conceived of him as the consummate low-budget radical. He played drums for a garage band called the Procrastinators, and whenever I saw him out walking his dogs, he was dressed, head to toe, in penitent black.

So I was a bit shocked when, late in 2003, Rosebraugh's parents, Fred and Marilyn Rosebraugh, laid down $650,000 for a sumptuous three-story Portland Victorian so that Craig could make it the home of Calendula, then the city's only all-vegan restaurant. After an extensive refurbishment, the place bore graceful orange stained-glass windows and little crescent moons carved into the gingerbread surrounding the windows. The spindles on the railing of the large wraparound porch were painted a chromey silver.

The whole place seemed so...impeccable, and so cruelly dismissive of the scruffy radicals with whom Rosebraugh had traveled all through his twenties. And the business plan for Calendula seemed, likewise, almost overbearing in its ambition.

The restaurant would serve only organic vegan food. No pesticide residues, no genetically modified fruits or vegetables. Its entrées--which now cost roughly $12 apiece and range from shitake-seitan fajitas to tomato-coconut tempeh--would abound in local produce. Some dishes would be uncooked, in deference to a growing subset of vegans who eat "raw," meaning they won't touch any food that has been warmed to over 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Indeed, a certain moral rectitude would guide the whole Calendula project. Rosebraugh opened the restaurant explicitly to raise money to produce revolutionary media--TV programs, documentaries, and books. And now, on the walls of Calendula's dining room, there are framed photographs of famed radicals: Che Guevara, for instance, illuminated by two sanctifying headlamps.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that Calendula would be a full-bore co-op, at which even the lowliest dish scrubber has license to quote Das Kapital ad nauseam at staff meetings. But no, no, no, no, it's not like that at all because collectives are bad too. "In a collective," Rosebraugh explains, "all people do is debate trivial things. They'll spend six hours deciding whether to leave the light on or off. I believe in hierarchy, and I like the way corporations are structured. They're successful because that's what they set out to do--succeed. And I want to succeed."

Yes, Craig Rosebraugh is a tangle of contradictions. And when he first opened his restaurant, I didn't have much hunger to eat there. I was inclined, frankly, to leave Rosebraugh alone, festering on his own tiny island of piousness. But still, every time I passed by Calendula, I was galvanized by the acid battle that I imagined was frothing inside, between lynch-the-landlord anarchy and the white linen tablecloths. I was intrigued, too, by Rosebraugh's über ethical campaign, just seven blocks from my home, to build an idealistic restaurant in a world where the vast majority of consumers favor Whoppers to go. Craig Rosebraugh was making no concessions whatsoever to crass reality. He was just plain right--stubborn, convinced of himself in so many irreconcilable ways--and he was plowing forward. How long, I wondered, would the guy last?