Will the environmental protest movement turn violent?

Climate chaos is unfolding all around us and leaders won’t act to prevent it. Yet the environmental protest movement remains mostly peaceful. A personal take on whether this is changing.

Extinction Rebellion stage ceremony of mourning for the COP process after repeated failure.

The account is shocking to read even if the protest was routine.

Activists blocked the traffic and performed street theatre. They carried placards saying ‘Blah Blah Blah’. They tried to prevent the conference delegates from leaving by locking themselves to the gates with chains.

This could have described countless environmental protests over decades. The shocking detail was this happened in 1995 at COP1, the very first UN climate conference. Even then, the science was settled. Everyone knew. The protesters, the delegates, the leaders. Everyone including Shell and their scientists who had known long before then but buried the truth for profit and corrupted media and politics to ensure it stayed buried.

Emissions have risen year on year so much that by COP26 in 2021, 25 meetings later, Extinction Rebellion declared the COP process a Crime against Humanity for its abject failure, its greenwashing and the alarming tendency for fossil fuel lobbyists to infiltrate as delegates. Not content with that, the fossil fuel industry has now simply taken over. COP28 will be hosted by the UAE, one of the largest oil producers in the world, and the President is an oil baron.

The charge sheet for humanity defecating on its own future is clear, present and ongoing. Climate change will make pandemics more likely and fossil fuels kill more people than Covid. Millions of tons of plastic are pouring into our oceans. Microplastics are now being found in the placentas of unborn babies, in every corner of earth and at every level of the food chain. Yet the production of plastic is relentlessly growing.

Plastic chemicals are shrinking penises, causing sperm counts to plummet and decimating fertility. Not exactly reassuring when you think about the causes of the dystopian nightmare of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. Forever chemicals are infiltrating nature and ecosystems are on the verge of collapse. Millions of people are being displaced and food systems are being disrupted.

One person is likely dying of hunger every 48 seconds in drought-ravaged Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia exacerbated by climate change. Think this is just happening in poor countries? Last year, 3 million were displaced in the US by extreme weather. 3,271 excess deaths have been recorded during heat-periods in 2022 in England and Wales.

Current estimates suggest we are now at 1.2C and we are heading for 2.4C and that’s only if promises made are kept. Even Scotland, which likes to think of itself as a progressive climate leader, is falling behind. If this is bad at 1.2C, imagine what will happen at 2.4C.

That the leaders around the world are failing to act on our behalf to stop an unfolding disaster is an understatement. You could call this madness. Humanity’s suicide note. Stupidity. This makes sense because apparently climate change is reducing our ability to think and make decisions as well as degrading our sources of omega-3.

Should we blow-up oil pipelines?

Climate activists have, for decades, tried everything. Yes, they have shifted the dial, can claim some notable victories, force disinvestment, moved things along but essentially all the marches, the protests, the strikes, the Cassandra-like desperation, the petitions, endless clarion calls for the science, the civil disobedience, the arrests have not altered the trajectory of an unfolding disaster.

Despite this, the modern-day environmental movement continues to follow peace and non-violence. Considering its size, diversity and what is up against, it has been remarkably disciplined and instinctively unified in this. It is surprising how little rioting, waves of destruction and blowing-up of pipelines there has been when you consider what is at stake. The British novelist John Lanchester observed in 2007 that it’s “strange and striking that climate activists have not committed any act of terrorism.” It pretty much still stands today.

In his 2020 manifesto, How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argues that peaceful protest has reached its limit, that every trick in the book has been tried and every tactic has been played.

“Do we say that we’ve done what we could,” asks Malm, “tried the means at our disposal and failed? Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die — a position already propounded by some — and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming? Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?”

Malm criticises Extinction Rebellion’s use of the theory of non-violence where civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it’s the most powerful way of shaping world politics. This theory is based on research that concluded nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns.

Some argue that this research is limited and flawed. For example, it overlooks how violence has often been a helpful midwife for the birth of freedom in ways we would rather forget. Violence contributed to the abolition of slavery, the Suffragette movement, American civil rights, apartheid and independence anti-colonial movements from India to Algeria. The Bengalis tell you that their resistance fighters scared off the British army as much as Gandhi did.

One historical tactic of the violent resistance, especially in the Global South, has, ironically, been sabotage of the fossil fuel infrastructure, often with effective results. Malm must be delighted to see the current protests in Ecuador by Indigenous people, merging protests and targeting of oil facilities over a number of social and land issues.

Malm argues that things are so dire it’s time to escalate to strategic property violence by “steady loving hands”, in the words of two catholic activists, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, who received eight year prison sentences for sabotaging the controversial Dakota Access pipeline in America. Intelligent tactics would target the lifestyles of the super rich. For example, a concerted targeting of SUVs, a source of carbon emissions bigger than most countries, would destroy its business model. No-one would buy an SUV if they knew it would be targeted and damaged.

Malm’s own treatise has itself been criticised (the fascinating debates on ethics and violence are way too complicated to cover here). His calls for escalation rely on activists who would bear a heavy price for taking on states, even liberal ones like the UK and USA, who are increasingly authoritarian in cracking down on peaceful protest, let alone those who commit violence on property. He also overlooks the history of eco-sabotage activities of groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, tree spiking tactics in America to prevent tree logging or the sabotage tactics of Earth First!

A very peaceful march of pilgrims, faith groups, samba bands and a 30 metre serpent walk through Glasgow during COP26. The writer is in the pink hi-vis.

Is violence increasing?

Extinction Rebellion is regarded as the radical flank of the environmental movement, although this is increasingly now the territory of Just Stop Oil (JSO) and Insulate Britain. In reality, the key demands of XR and JSO are hardly extreme positions and are based on mainstream consensual science.

Furthermore, their current protests seem tame when compared with methods embraced by other, now lauded, movements from history. (You could argue that their so called ‘extreme’ disruption tactics are nothing compared to the disruption caused by the climate crisis.) The culture wars confects outrage when protestors sit in the road or throw soup on a painting. But compare these actions with the suffragette who slashed a Velázquez painting with a knife or the suffragette’s arson and bombing campaigns.

In the last few years, tactics have shifted to property damage. JSO has vandalised petrol pumps whilst Extinction Rebellion has broken windows, especially of banks funding fossil fuels, in a deliberate echo of the suffragettes. These are staged, with protestors taking responsibility by waiting to be arrested. More hit and run tactics are employed by groups such as Tyre Extinguisher, a group which deflates the tyres on sport utility vehicles.

But is the mood darkening as the stakes increase? At Luetzerath, in Germany, protest turned to clashes between heavy-handed police and activists determined to stop an expansion of a coal mine. In France, Italy and Switzerland, snow-making machines have been sabotaged, stopping ski resorts from restoring their pistes as a freak heatwave turns them to mud. Last December in France, hundreds of activists invaded a cement plant, where they cut cables, smashed windows, graffitied walls and sabotaged the incinerator.

A step too far on the violence spectrum for many? But here’s the thing. If we are talking about violence on property, what about poisoning and polluting someone’s land or water supplies? Or destroying a forest belonging to a community?

Violence on environmental activists

For the moment, it continues to be environmental protestors who have far more to fear from violence, than are likely to commit it themselves.

First, it starts with the violence of words. Exposing a truth and asking for change triggers a wave of violent fantasy online. These aren’t even the trolls mainlining 55 Tufton Street climate denial propaganda. Seemingly reasonable people, hardly hiding behind a troll persona, want to run you over with their cars, hose you down, send you to China. They yearn for the police to beat you up.

Then there’s the violence of bystanders who can get frustrated by the inconvenience caused by direct action. In some ways, this is more understandable. People stressed and under pressure, with lives to get on with will react accordingly. There’s also the violence of police and state responses to protests.

Violence directed at environmental protesters can also move in more sinister, political ways. When activists from Ende Gelande, a German protest group, temporarily shut down Schwarze Pumpe, an eastern German power plant, they were violently assaulted by climate-denying fascists. This is likely to increase when efforts to target emissions start biting into people’s livelihoods and ways of life, and a toxic paranoid culture war increases the heat of the debate.

Then it ends in murder. More than 1,700 environmental and land rights activists have been killed in the past decade, particularly in Latin America.

Future climate violence: a sci-fi vision

What happens if and when things fall apart? What if political violence has a role to play in actually saving the future? What if people decide you can’t beat them playing by their rules in the institutions they infiltrate and control?

The danger still might not come from environmental protesters. It might come from the victims of a disaster.

In Ministry for the Future, the novel’s harrowing opening chapter depicts a brutal wet-bulb heat wave in India that kills 20,000,000 people in a single week. Out of the pain and trauma emerges a terrorist network called the Children of Kali.

Organisations set up black ops divisions to do whatever it takes: hacking to sabotage coal plants, bombings, shadowy terrorist outrages.

Clouds of drones bring down 60 passenger jets across the world in a matter of hours. Everyone stops flying. Container ships using diesel began to sink when passing close to land, affecting world trade and causing depression. Fossil fuel executives are hunted down and assassinated. Cattle are infected with mad cow disease so everyone stops eating meat. Power plants are attacked by drones.

No-one knows who really is doing this. Kali is nowhere and Kali is everywhere.

Most environmental protesters I’ve come across are the most caring and gentle souls who abhor violence yet are battling an unfolding disaster. Imagine taking on a fight where there’s no simple victory, no finishing line and no single solution. Imagine a fight where the enemy is us: our demons, our spoilt inner child, our willfulness, our demands to continue living in our dream worlds.

The stakes are rising and the pressure of multiple crisises such as mass migration (increasingly caused by climate change), populism or covid, can bring out the best in us but also the worst. We are in a race, not just to limit the worst of the climate crisis, but also to limit the violence caused by it. We can win it with solidarity, persistence, vision, patience and hope.

The alternative is unthinkable.

The environmental protest movement is a very, broad church. Even groups like Extinction Rebellion have plenty of differing views and debates within their circles. This writing represents my personal thoughts only .

And I’m not about to go out and blow-up an oil pipeline!