Eco-terrorism, aimed at environmentally harmful constructions that modern economies and governments have inflicted upon us, has been one past imaginative way of responding.
Having just watched the eco-terrorist thriller “How to Blow Up A Pipeline” (now available on Hulu), I’ve decided that such a violent action to fight climate change is not a good idea. That’s despite the plea that ends the film with one of the detonators (Xochitl is her name) saying (on a video), “If you're seeing this, then I've just blown up a section of JDIA [a fictional oil company] oil pipeline. Destroying this property was a last resort. If we want to survive, we must damage and dismantle CO2-emitting devices, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let those who profit from mass death know their properties will be trashed. They will defame us and claim this was violence or vandalism, but this was justified. This was an act of self-defense.” (All film quotes are taken from the film script, which adheres almost exactly to the spoken words.)
My opposition to such an act was also despite a sympathetic review of the film (by Peter Bradshaw) in the leftist-leaning British newspaper The Guardian, which states, “Here, the pipeline destroyers are the good guys.” (Bradshaw gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, and wrote that it was a “fiercely watchable thriller which had me biting my nails down to the wrists.”) Moreover, I realize that many of our non-violent efforts to battle climate change have been ineffective. Resistance to measures that would reduce profits and fossil fuel emissions like CO2 have often been too great. As has public ignorance, confusion, and indifference.
I realize that many of our non-violent efforts to battle climate change have been ineffective. Resistance to measures that would reduce profits and fossil fuel emissions like CO2 have often been too great.
Eco-terrorism, aimed at environmentally harmful constructions that modern economies and governments have inflicted upon us, has been one past imaginative way of responding. We see this already in 1975’s Edward Abbey’s classic, Monkey Wrench Gang. But back then the effects of climate change were not perceived as the greatest environmental threat—and it was the Glen Canyon Dam, on the the Colorado River, that was the gang’s main target. Today, however, almost 50 years later, there is little doubt that climate change is our greatest environmental danger, and, some would argue, a danger so great that eco-terrorism has to be seriously considered as one possible reaction.
A more recent book that imagines various responses to our present (and future) climate threat is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future: A Novel (2020). And eco-terrorism is one of the many means resorted to by some of those in the book. Here is just one brief example:
Later it was shown that clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the planes involved, fouling their engines. [As NASA reported, “Long-haul flights (flight distances > 2485 statute miles) create a disproportionately large amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.”] Quite a few terrorist groups took credit for the action. . . . One message was fairly obvious: stop flying. And indeed many people stopped. Before that day, there had been half a million people in the air at any given moment. Afterward that number plummeted. Especially after a second round of crashes occurred a month later, this time bringing down twenty planes. After that commercial flights often flew empty, then were cancelled. Private jets had stopped flying. Military planes and helicopters had also been attacked, so they too curtailed their activities, and flew only if needed, as if in a war. As indeed they were.
Films have been another medium for depicting eco-terrorism. Woman at War (2018), set in Iceland, is one such example. The heroine of the story knocks out electrical pylons, causing power outages. She does so because she wants to discourage multinational corporations from aiding construction that will accelerate global warming. She also sends out a manifesto: “I urge everyone to rise up and use their ingenuity to cause damage to these enterprises. That’s the only thing those psychopaths, those global multinationals, can understand. That’s how they operate, with threats and sabotage against nature and society...The sabotage against our nature causing atmospheric warming is a crime against humanity and all life on earth. The globalized industry is the force behind this suicidal charge that not even democracy can stop.”
In my review of this film I cite an article, “Questions for the Movement: Property Damage as a Tactic in Nonviolent Actions,” in a 2004 issue of the journal Quaker Theology. It contrasts the Gandhi-Martin Luther King approach with that of those who would justify violence to property. It quotes Gandhi as writing, “The destruction of bridges, etc., by means of explosives does not touch this evil but only provokes a worse evil in the place of the one it seeks to end...Sabotage is a form of violence. People have realized the futility of physical violence but some people apparently think that it may be successfully practiced in its modified form as sabotage.” But in my review I contrast his view with that of Nelson Mandela, who started out hoping to employ Gandhian nonviolence but eventually concluded that the racist apartheid system in South Africa left his political group “no alternative to armed and violent resistance.” (Nevertheless, he consistently attempted to avoid or minimize the taking of human lives.)
The Quaker Theology article concludes, “Nonviolence as it has traditionally been practiced is becoming decreasingly effective...Is property damage the answer? Sometimes yes and sometimes no....What is important is that organizers keep moving forward in pushing the movement forward to new ways of being.”
This conclusion has merit. Climate change has become increasingly threatening in so many ways. According to the World Health Organization, we can expect some 250,000 additional deaths each year between 2030 and 2050 just from malaria, malnutrition, and heat stress. We can also anticipate more flooding (including of cities like Miami, New Orleans, New York, and several in both China and India), heatwaves, drought, raging fires, and intensified hurricanes.
Our climate crisis is so serious—a ticking “time-bomb” in the words of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres—that we need not only more will power, but also more creativity and imagination to continue meaningful, sustainable life on our planet. In such a predicament, I would not condemn all possible violence directed at property. But I would be extremely cautious about ever approving of it. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has put together a list of U. S. “eco-terror incidents from 1984-2002”—none of which have killed anyone.)
The four main reasons for my extreme caution are:
- Non-violent means are generally preferable to violent ones;
- as with defending warfare, where various criteria should first be met, so too with eco-property-violence;
- such violence might cause a backlash that would eventually create more harm than good; and
- just as wars often have unintended consequences, so too might eco-property-damage, for example people being unintentionally killed.
In the case of “How to Blow Up A Pipeline,” the young blow-it-uppers do not evidence sufficient thought or caution before joining together to carry out their plan. I do not agree with Xochitl’s claim (see first paragraph) that “destroying this property was a last resort.”
In Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review of the film he notes, “It is inspired partly by Andreas Malm’s radical eco-activist manifesto of the same title, and partly...by the heist [Tarantino film] classic Reservoir Dogs.” The link above provided in Bradshaw’s review is to a November 2021 essay by the Swedish activist and scholar (at Lund University) Malm, but he’s also written a two-hundred-page book (January 2021) in which he outlines his views.
Here is a brief summary of what he writes in his essay. After criticizing various countries and their leaders (including both Presidents Trump and Biden) for worsening our climate crisis Malm states, “If someone has planted a time bomb in your home, you are entitled to dismantle it. More to the point, if someone has placed an incendiary device inside the high-rise building where you live, and if the foundations are already on fire and people are dying in the cellars, then many would believe that you have an obligation to put the device out of action.” He adds, “This is the moral case which, I would argue, justifies destroying fossil fuel property.” But note he distinguishes that destruction from that of “harming human bodies, for which there is no moral case.”
He does not think “activists can accomplish the abolition of fossil fuels–only states have that potential–but . . . their role is to ratchet up the pressure for it.” Yet, even though he thinks there is “an unassailable ethical imperative” for “destroying fossil fuel property,” he does not think that this imperative “necessarily translate[s] into efficacious action.” And he cites a case in England where “drivers dragged climate protesters out of the road and threatened to run them over.”
It’s this admission by Malm and the actions taken in the Hulu film that primarily lead me to question the wisdom of destroying pipelines. In a decade-old LA Progressive essay, I made the distinction between an ethics of principle and one of consequences, and indicated that in the political realm I thought the consequences of one’s actions had to be considered.
In the United States, I’m afraid that the actions of the film pipeline destroyers would have detrimental consequences, lead to the strengthening of Trump supporters rather than help solve our climate crisis. Without revealing any spoiler information, I’ll simply note that those involved in the destruction of the pipeline were just the kind of people that Trumpsters like to reject (or furnish you own verb)—young, unconventional, racially mixed (including one Native American and a few African Americans), and even a lesbian couple.
In Germany in January 1933 Hitler became chancellor within the provisions of the democratic Weimar Republic. His Nazi party had only garnered 37 percent of the Reichstag seats in the last previous parliamentary election, but he was the head of the largest party within that body. (The German Communist party came in third) Then, about a month after being named chancellor a fire broke out in the Reichstag, and Hitler (without sufficient proof) blamed it on the communists. Nevertheless, enough Germans believed him or at least suspected communist guilt that by the middle of July he was able to have all other political parties, except the Nazis, outlawed.
Thus, a property-crime act in which the communists were only the suspected culprits seems to have created a backlash, helped the Right, and played a major role in assisting Hitler to become a dictator. Why might not Left-wing property violence have a similar effect in the USA?
