Steady Loving Hands

November 5 of 8: How to Blow Up a Pipeline - Andreas Malm - Verso Books 2021

This is a book about the role of violence in movements for social and structural change but mainly about the absence of violence in the ecological movement and its fight to slow climate change. Malm has been involved in direct action of some form in the climate movement for around thirty years, and he observes that the groups fighting against the destruction and mass exploitation of our natural resources are also the most staunchly nonviolent in the history of political movements. He argues that this is probably the single most important reason they haven’t made any progress.

The US government has understood, since the 50s, the eventual impact of releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, but our investment in the extraction of oil and gas has only ever risen in the last six decades. Even since the COP summits started in the 90s, gathering some of the world’s most oil-crazy countries to discuss steps toward reducing fossil fuel use, oil extraction and consumption has increased. To get at this resource, we’ve fought wars, displaced people from their land, destroyed animal and plant species. The ultimate legacy of our era’s love affair with the energy produced by fossil fuels is rising water levels, waves of mass migration, an increasingly unstable climate leading to more frequent and severe natural disasters and diseases as well as unreliable harvests, meaning food shortages, meaning famine and conflict.

So the stakes are super high, Malm says, probably higher than any other issue in history. And it’s one of the few issues that does or will or can have a direct impact on everyone, everywhere. On top of that, the forces causing the issue are extremely centralized: unlike an issue where the causes are ultimately ideological — where the battleground is in the hearts and minds of people all over the globe and progress has to be made in often hard-to-quantify ways, sometimes through concrete policy and direct action, sometimes through education and conversation where change is slow, incremental — unlike that kind of issue, if you want to do damage to the structures responsible for climate change, the targets are very specific and visible, and the value of those targets is pretty quantifiable (it’s all machinery and infrastructure).

So if the stakes are high, and the forces at fault present visible and concrete targets, and all the nonviolent strategies have been ineffective over the course of decades, the obvious question to Malm is: Why haven’t we seen more violence around this issue? Where are the climate terrorists and militias?

To start answer this question, Malm explains how nonviolence has often been a central tenet of climate activists, and he begins to deconstruct that ethic. On one hand, he argues that lots of disparate strategies are often conflated under the term “violence,” and that conflation helps those in power make these kinds of strategies seem “extreme” to the general public. Things like sabotage and vandalism and property destruction, for example, are often called “violent” actions even when those actions do little or no harm to people. But if the public thinks of the action as “violent,” the activist loses public support and sympathy.

On the other hand, many climate activists are against violence for utilitarian reasons, saying that nonviolence has proven itself more effect throughout history, and Malm tears down this idea as well. He does a survey of many of the most recognizable fights for social justice in the last 150 years — slavery, suffrage, apartheid, civil rights, even the fight for independence in Gandhi’s India — and shows how in each of these cases, violent resistance, property destruction, and sabotage played a huge part in the victory (alongside other, “nonviolent” strategies).

Another big failing of the climate movement at large is how little they’ve integrated class consciousness into their struggle. It’s an especially glaring blindspot, given that the consequences of climate change (like the consequences of most widespread crises) are borne first and most severely by populations that don’t have the resources to insulate themselves. But I think a lot of people view the climate movement as an activism of privilege, because that’s how it has often manifested (which is not to say there aren’t significant working class arms of the movement — there are). The struggle against climate change is often expressed in ways that heap judgement or scorn on people who can’t afford to reduce their “carbon footprint,” instead of targeting the folks whose massive investments in fossil fuel continue to make it one of the most profitable industries. The movement’s stance of nonviolence is an expression of that privilege — it’s easier to maintain a “respectable” composure when you’re not in any immediate danger. Malm brings up the class element of the movement a couple of times, but I thought a larger portion of the book could have been spent discussing that aspect — how can climate activism remove barriers to entry? How can activists make this fight accessible and attractive to the average citizen?

Overall, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is both a remarkably well-reasoned book about the WHY of climate activism, as well a practical book on the HOW of climate activism, and it includes a wealth of inspiring examples. My favorite is the story of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, members of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Movement, who on the night Donald Trump was elected president in 2016,

“trespassed onto a site for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa. They brought coffee canisters filled with rags and motor oil, placed them on the seats of six pieces of heavy machinery and lit matches; five of the six were burnt out in the attack” (97).

Throughout the next spring, they attacked the pipeline at various sections where security was weak (a pipeline is long and therefore hard to keep under surveillance), using welding torches to burn holes in the pipeline in eleven different places. They delayed construction for months, just the two of them. Eventually they turned themselves in, feeling that by speaking publicly about what they’d done and why, they could encourage and inspire others to take action. They got eight and six years in prison and were fined $3 million dollars.

Malm quotes an interview statement from Reznicek:

“The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it — this is violent. We’re acting in an effort to save human life, to save our planet, to save our resources. And nothing was ever done by Ruby or me outside of peaceful, deliberate and steady loving hands” (100).

Steady loving hands! This story was an important reminder to me that if making war on our world’s most oppressive forces is an act of violence, it’s a loving, caring violence. How far am I willing to go for the love of my world?

Click here to read November 6 of 8: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage