The Saboteurs

The sabotage did not end with Ludwig's 2012 death. There are reports of ongoing sabotage along the path of the XL pipeline and in the Alberta oil fields.

"I'd also say that sabotage in the oil patch is one of the oil and gas industry's dirty little secrets," York said. "It is widespread, and to many landowners it is a natural consequence of the industry's attitudes and behavior to those whose land they are occupying. The industry doesn't make a big fuss because they don't want to encourage the response."

But violence begets violence. And the more Ludwig blew up facilities the harsher became the intrusion of the state.

"Meeting industrial violence against livestock and families with more industrial violence against oil and gas installations is not the answer," said Nikiforuk...

"It is an act of frustration as well as a reflection of the captured state of regulators. And it submits an entire community to a reign of industry- and state-sanctioned terror. A second war broke out in the bush in the 2000s during an intense period of hydraulic fracking. Six bombings occurred at Encana well sites in northern British Columbia just 50 kilometers from Ludwig's farm. The government sent in 250 officers to investigate. They treated rural citizens like members of the Taliban. The campaign ended as mysteriously as it began and had all the earmarks of Ludwig. It did not change industry practices."

Ludwig's gravest mistake was his decision, or the decision of someone in his small community, to fire on two trucks carrying rowdy teenagers. The sons and daughters of oil and gas workers roared through the group's compound at about 4 a.m. on June 20, 1999. Karman Willis, a 16-year-old girl, was fatally shot by someone on the farm, and a second teenager survived a wound. York in his film shows Ludwig family members repeating like automatons that they thought they were under attack because the backfiring of the vehicles sounded like gunshots. No one on the farm took responsibility for the shooting, and no one was charged. The killing of the girl saw the neighboring communities cut off Ludwig and his band in revulsion. Local businesses put up signs that read: "No Service for Ludwigs."

Ludwig, before he died at age 71 after refusing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, turned away from violence. The renunciation came a year or two after his final bombing campaign. He would read, with his family, Jacques Ellul's 1969 book "Violence: Reflections From a Christian Perspective." Ellul, like Ludwig's Dutch father, had fought in the resistance against the Nazis in World War II.

"What constantly marked the life of Jesus was not nonviolence but in every situation the choice not to use power," he wrote. "This is infinitely different."

"The Christian should participate in social and political efforts in order to have an influence in the work, not with the hope of making a paradise (of the earth), but simply to make it more tolerable -- not to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wants it to have -- not to bring in the Kingdom of God, but so that the Gospel might be proclaimed in order that all men might truly hear the good news," Ellul wrote.

Ludwig said: "We feel weak in all the things we are fighting. I think the match is very unequal. But it's all right. Instead of griping about it, we might as well give ourselves to it."