The New Yorker Radio Hour - Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Andreas Malm, a climate activist and senior lecturer at Lund University, in Sweden, studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism. With the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow rapidly approaching—it begins on October 31st—Malm tells David Remnick that he believes environmentalists should not place too much faith in talks or treaties of this kind. Instead, he insists that the climate movement rethinks its roots in nonviolence. His book is provocatively titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” though it is not exactly an instruction manual. Malm advocates for “intelligent sabotage” of fossil-fuel infrastructure to prevent more carbon from being emitted in the atmosphere. “I am in favor of destroying machines, property—not harming people. That’s a very important distinction,” he tells Remnick. Plus: Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker’s newest staff writer, introduces David Remnick to some notable works off the syllabus of a class she is teaching. It’s called “Writing the Unspeakable,” about the literature of trauma and atrocity. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The United Nations Climate Meeting in Glasgow, which starts on October 31st, is described as the most important since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. We could see major policy announcements from the Biden administration or governments from around the world. But the summer we've just had, with its appalling wildfires and its record floods, provides ample evidence that the effects of climate change are already here, and they're catastrophic. And frankly, nothing that governments are likely to do this year will be enough to reverse those trends. Andreas Malm is a professor at Lund University in Sweden. He studies

the relationship between climate change and capitalism, and he advocates for far more drastic action that we've seen so far. His recent book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is a bit more nuanced than the title suggests, but at its core, he really does want environmental activists to rethink their commitment to nonviolence and embrace tactics of sabotage. I spoke with Andreas Maum last week. Andres, you've been a climate activist now for a long time, and in 2007, you were part of a Swedish group that started deflating the tires. on SUVs. Tell me about that. What was the impulse and how did it work? Yeah, so what we did was we went through rich neighborhoods and picked out SUVs.

This was in the early career of SUVs when they were still remarkable on streets, before they had become completely ubiquitous. And it's very easy to deflate the tires of a car. You just unscrew the valve and you insert a little gravel or a piece of a little, of stone or something like that and you know you screw the vault back on and then the air will be out of the tire in a couple of hours. So this was not proper to destruction. It didn't damage anything. It created an inconvenience for the owners of SUVs. What was the result of this action? Were they arrested? Did anybody do jail time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was eventually one arrest, but that was after thousands of SUVs had been deflated in this manner. And did that cause consciousness

about SUVs to change in Sweden? And did sales go down? Sales went down quite sharply. And we took credit for that. I mean, I don't know if you could scientifically establish that our actions were the cause of that plunge in sales that happened during that year. You know, there have been, over the past,

I guess there have been those moments when climate has been on the top of the political agenda. And this was one of those moments. There was the fourth IPCC report that received the Nobel Peace Prize. There was the movie by Al Gore. There was the run-up to Copenhagen. And in this setting, our actions probably contributed to decreasing sales of SUVs. Now, you've gone from deflating tires to writing a book now in 2021 called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

What was the moment that you realized that your next book would have to be about targeted sabotage? and why? That moment was very much the summer of 2018, which was unprecedented in northern Europe for the wildfires and the drought and the heat wave. And during that summer, I felt panic and desperation, as a lot of people did. This was the summer that led Greta Thunberg

to start her later very famous school strike movement. And that sort of changed the picture because in 2019, all the way up, to the outbreak of the pandemic, the climate movement of the global north reached its zenith of mobilization, really its peak of popular force out of the streets. So the book became a product of the moment of 2019, but it's also a core for escalation, a call for the movement to diversify its tactics and move away from an exclusive focus on polite, gentle, and perfectly peaceful civil disobedience.

What actions are you recommending for the movement? Well, I am recommending that the movement continues with mass action and civil disobedience, but also opens up for property destruction. So I'm not saying we should stop strikes or square occupations or demonstrations or demonstrations of the usual kind. I'm all in favor of that. But I do think we need to step up because so little has changed and so much, many investments are still being poured into new fossil fuel projects. So I am in favor of destroying

machines, property, not harming people. That's a very, very important distinction there. And I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways, or it can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion as when we deflated the SUVs, or in a more spectacular fashion as in potentially blowing up a pipeline that's under construction. That's something that people have done. you are recommending blowing up a pipeline. You use the phrase intelligence sabotage. What does what does intelligence sabotage look like in this context? Well let me give you a very concrete example right now total the largest single private company headquartered in France is constructing what will be the world's longest heated oil pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania and

displacing in that process about a hundred and thousand farmers all for the sake of carrying even more oil to the world market to pour fuel on the global fire. If people in that region were to attack the construction equipment, blow up the pipeline before it's completed, I would be all in favor of that. I don't see how that property damage could be considered morally illegitimate, given what we know of the consequences of such a project. Do you yourself plan to be involved in such actions? Well, if I were planning things, I wouldn't tell you or anyone else. That's part of the whole idea of this kind of things. You don't say in advance what you're going to do if you plan to do something. But I am personally, in principle, prepared to, of course, to be part of any kind of action of the sort that I advocate in the book. Anything else would be irresponsible. Andres, you argue that these are tactics that have worked in the past. One example that you point to in your book is when Nigerian activists fighting the devastating effects of oil production in the country in the early 2000s took real action.

Tell me about that and how effective it was. They blew up pipelines. They destroyed infrastructure. They went so far as to kidnap oil workers, something that I certainly wouldn't recommend. And they were successful at a particular moment. when it seemed that the major oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil were on the verge of quitting the area. Then repression kicked in, many activists were jailed,

and obviously oil production is still ongoing in the Niger Delta. So you can say that that is a case of successful termination of oil production, certainly not. I bring that up as one case among many others that show that property damage is technically feasible Another very recent example is these anonymous hackers who brought the colonial pipeline in the US, the largest pipeline in the US, to complete standstill by hacking the computers. This was about a half year ago, I believe.

And that pipeline didn't convey any gas for a week. But given the magnitude of the climate threat, the paradox here is that people have not engaged in this with reference to the climate crisis. How is it that the planet is on fire? almost literally, you know, wildfires moving from one country to the other. It's underwater with floods and storms like you saw in New York just the other week. And continuous production of new installations for fossil fuel extraction is totally normalized and it's happening all over the place and people don't rise up when they know.

At some level at least, they know that if these sources are not closed down, We will have more and more of the wildfires, will have more and more of the droughts, more and more heat waves, more and more floods until we can live no longer. And yet climate activist groups like 350.org and Extinction Rebellion have made clear that nonviolence is central to their approach. Do you think that's been a mistake or a tactical error? Yeah, so I have nothing against the tactics employed by these groups. I have very often participated in them myself. What I have a problem with is when extinction rebellion and people from 350 and elsewhere say that these are the only things that our movement can ever allow itself to engage in.

As in what we are doing is as far as we will ever go. We'll never escalate beyond this. And I think that idea, this dogmatic commitment to non-violence, is based on a faulty history writing or understanding of social. struggles over history because it's based on the idea that the only thing that has ever worked for social movements is to stay completely peaceful. And that just isn't the case. Most social movements that have struggled against overwhelming odds, against enemies that have been very powerful, have diversified and used a number of different tactics ranging into property destruction and confrontation

with the police. You saw this during the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, where there was tremendous property destruction and conquering and burning down police stations in Minneapolis and things like that. That was an integral part of an uprising that brought more millions of people into the streets of the US than any other in American history.

But, Andreas, the overwhelming, the overwhelming number of people in the demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd were non-violent. And in fact, some scholars, some activists made the argument that in fact the small minority, the instances of violence or property destruction

was a hindrance, was alienating in terms of public opinion. How do you argue with that? Well, I think that is a fault of reading of what happened because, to my understanding, what really kicked off that uprising and took it to another scale were the events three days after the murder of Floyd when the good people of Minneapolis

stormed the police. station in the third precinct where Derek Chauvin and his colleagues had been based. And as far as I can tell, that was a catalyst for the movement. And contrary to the ideas of strategic pacifism, it went hand in hand with an overwhelming majority of peaceful activities, just as you say. Of course, there was always a tension between militant groups and peaceful majorities, as it usually is the case, but I don't think that anyone could seriously argue

that the BLM movement in 2020 would have achieved more if there had been no confrontations, no windows smashed, no police stations or cars burnt. That's a fantasy scenario, in my view. You use the analogy with the civil rights movement in the United States, the tension between the broader non-violent movement of SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, and then, on the other hand, other groups. So how do you analogize those things with the climate movement?

Yeah, so the idea, and from that case is that there was a so-called radical flank effect, that the existence of a radical flank of the civil rights movement and a sort of threat of a more militant wing as in Malcolm X, the urban riots and things like that, actually work to the strategic advantage of the civil rights mainstream, because it allowed it to say to the powers that be in Washington that unless you make a deal with us, you'll end up with these people who are much more radical than we are. Here's what somebody like Bill McKibben would say, and I know you've had your debates with him, as dire as things are for the climate. It's not like the movement hasn't accomplished anything.

Pipelines have been shut down, peacefully. Legislation passed. Over six million people got involved with Greta Tunberg's climate strikes in 2019. How concerned are you that engaging with more militant tactics could backfire and damage the movement? Of course it could. I mean, if people started doing really stupid things, as in killing people, you know, I don't assassinating CEOs or something like that, then certainly the backlash would be overwhelming.

So that's why I think we need to continue to draw a very sharp line against that type of violence. And you're absolutely right that everything that the movement has accomplished so far has been on the basis of nonviolence because that's the only strategy we have used. But our victories have been very local and very partial. We in the movement certainly haven't brought fossil fuel production to a stop as we have to. Andreas, Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist wrote a piece about your book and the financial fallout from pipeline sabotage potentially. He writes this, the consequence of a wave of bombings to obliterate energy infrastructure would be to raise the price on energy immediately all across the world and the burdens would fall. heaviest on the poor. Is he wrong?

Yeah, so on the argument that there would be economic pain from property destruction. Yeah, of course, there is that risk. The problem here is, first of all, that any kind of facing out of fossil fuel production and consumption will trigger price spikes. It's very difficult to see us getting rid of fossil fuels without them becoming more expensive. So advocating a strategy that doesn't make energy more expensive is almost tantamount. Fossil energy more expensive is almost tantamount to not advocating mitigation at all. And of course, if you engage in property destruction that causes such disruption to prices, you run a risk of alienating people.

but I think that if people go about this in a careful fashion and if they time property destruction of this sort to moments when the impact of the climate crisis are being felt there would be a decent chance to also gain popular support for these kind of actions. One of the things they would mitigate against that, unfortunately, is that we live in a world of five, news. And if they were to see

if they were to see activists on the left going after private property in the name of climate change, I think you can write the script. The next thing you know, you'd have blaring headlines about eco-terrorism. So how do you avoid playing into the eco-terrorism narrative? Or can you?

Yeah. Well, I don't think that we should adapt our tactics after the enemy's script. If the protesters after the murder of George Floyd would have done so, they certainly would have stayed home. Because, of course, what Fox told the viewers was that BLM was a terrorist-Marxist movement. That's, I mean, if you challenge vested interests, you will face that kind of backlash. Whether you challenge them peacefully or you challenge them through property destruction,

you will certainly get demonization from the far right. That's all really happening. But I do think that at some point, I mean, if there's any sort of, rationality in the human species left, then people in moments when they see their habitats, their ecosystems around them disappearing and their lives becoming unbearable, if in that moment you have climate activists who strike against the sources of all this pain and suffering, then at least some segments of the population should presumably support that. If not now, then maybe when it's two degrees or three degrees hotter,

but the task for the climate movement isn't to wait until it's extremely late, which it already is, but to move ahead and to use opportunities of extreme climate disaster, which are raining upon us to drive this point home to people. We can't have more fossil fuel infrastructure and a habitable planet at the same time. We need to choose one or the other. Let's take sabotage off the table for a second. Yes. Is there a way that the movement could be smarter in the way that it engages in nonviolent protest?

Yes. I think nonviolent protest works best when it targets fossil fuel production. When you have nonviolent mass actions that close down traffic in general, squares in general in cities, it's a kind of indiscriminate targeting of urban activity, that isn't necessarily the best. I think it makes much more sense to have things like climate camps, where you have people peacefully breaking through police lines, shutting down gas pipelines or coal mines,

that's usually the case in the German climate camps, shutting this infrastructure down if only for a couple of days. That's a very effective way of getting people together in action and openly targeting the source of the problem. Finally, we are coming up on major climate talks in Glasgow

and what John Kerry has described. This is the last best hope for international action on this. Are you feeling any hope about these talks and what would be a good outcome from them? To be honest, I have no hope about those talks.

This is the 26th COP. I'm sure I'll be able to or if I live, join my kids to COP 52 down the road if things continue like this, because these COPS have produced nothing apart from complete business as usual. I do have some hope that the protests at Glasgow can reinvigorate the climate movement because it's been in something like a coma after the pandemic broke out, and it hasn't regained the momentum from 2019. Do you expect any acts of sabotage?

at Glasgow? I don't expect any, but I would certainly hope for a more militant edge at the COP 26 protests than what we've seen at any other cop protests so far. I mean, my faith in humanity would certainly be reinforced if there were real anger on the streets of Glasgow, given the state of this planet and what capital is doing to just person the situation all the time. Andreas Malm, thank you so much. Thank you, David.

Andreas Mahm is an associate professor at Lund University in Sweden. His book is called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. From the earliest days of this program, we've been covering the issue of climate change and how it's affecting our lives, our economies, and our futures. Some years ago, our reporter Carolyn Korman, went to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay

off the coast of Virginia. Tangier Island has been, losing landmass for years. And as sea levels rise, it may be one of the first places in the United States to become absolutely uninhabitable. Although when Carolyn visited, sea level rise itself was a fact that many on Tangier Island refused to accept, including the mayor. How much of your day, every day, do you think you spend considering the weather?

Probably 60% of it. Yeah. Yeah, weather is, yeah, weather is our logger. Yeah. Eskridge is showing us around his crab shanty. He's got dozens of blue crabs and tanks out here. We bring the peeler crabs in and we dump them in these tanks. That's what my father used to do and grandfather before him. He's waiting for them to molt so he can sell them as soft shell crabs, Tangier's specialty. Oh, this one's shedding right now and so's that one, right? Yeah, yep. They're called Busters. Who's this?

This is Sam Alito. He looks like a stately old gentleman. Yeah, yep. The mayor's also got cats out at the shanty. We were having a tropical system, and there was a tree stump drifting in the storm, and there was four kittens hanging onto it. I guess they came from the island, but I went out and picked them up, and they've been here ever since.

And they're a conservative group. It's Sam Alito and John Roberts, Condi Rice, and Coulter. He's been working from this spot since he graduated from high school in 1976. The building is about the size of a one-car garage, and it's perched on pilings in the harbor. He points to those pilings and says the high watermark is right where it's always been, and that's why he doesn't believe that climate change is causing the sea level to rise. We've had people coming for years about the erosion problem here. I had a lady that told me, mayor, whether you've been to be a lot of the sea level to rise.

believe in climate change and sea level rise or not go along with it because you may get funding to save your island who told you that some lady some lady told me she you know just visiting she had she was in the government that's all i'm going to say about that she said go along with it go along with it and you may get the funding you need because that's the argument of today And I did a couple interviews after that. And I would mention sea level raws and climate change in it. And I felt real dirty and so I stopped doing it. I said, I can't do it.

I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I can't do it. You can find that story and everything we've aired on the program on our podcast. Look for the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you go for podcast. We've got much more to come this hour, so stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. David Remnick.

Paral Segal is a book critic and an essayist. And very recently, she came to The New Yorker from the New York Times. She's at work now on her very first piece for us, and I called her up recently to find out what she's been reading and what she's thinking about. Parr, welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, you bet. Now, in addition to working at The New Yorker, you're also teaching a graduate class at New York University, and you're going to give us a little taste of that. the syllabus. And my understanding is that the name of the course is writing the unspeakable. What does that mean? It's writing the unspeakable because when you work with language or with narrative, invariably you become interested in where it breaks down. You know, where is it insufficient? And so these are all books that are about atrocities, some personal, some political.

But we're very interested in thinking about what forms have been developed historically, forms are being developed now to talk about them. So let's start with your first pick in this syllabus of The Unspeakable. Perhaps it's choose the work that is, in a way, the most inaccessible. It's a one-woman show that premiered in 1999. It's called 2.5-minute ride by Lisa Crone. So you can get the script, and I've assigned the script, and we listen to, you can get a recording on Audible.

And this one-woman play, a woman is going to walk to the front of the stage. And she's going to start putting on like a slideshow, like the way the old vacation slides. This is where we went. But she's going to show you two separate journeys. One is a trip she took with her father to Auschwitz, where his parents were killed. The second journey, she describes, flipping through these slides, is her father's late in life obsession. Her father had a heart condition, was a diabetic, was blind, and became obsessed with roller coasters. And so she flips through amusement parks in Auschwitz.

It just gives you whiplash, and you're laughing one minute, you're appalled. You don't know what's happening. You don't have time to assimilate it. Also, keep in mind that the slides she's showing everyone are blank. This is a picture of my dad on a roller coaster. This is a picture of my parents having dinner at the Olive Garden at the mall, which is directly across Sagina Highway from Myers. This is a picture of my dad getting an insulin shot. This is a picture of me not being able to hold his world in my head.

This is a picture of my father's funeral, which is odd because my father is still alive. And one, she's sort of describing, obviously, trauma in the everyday. And secondly, I think she's asking this really interesting question of, how can I tell this story without my father's suffering and the suffering of his parents that it's not just a trinket. It's not something easily consumed you can take home after coming to this show. Does it seem to outrage people?

I mean, there's something in people's reaction to certain kinds of literature, particularly Holocaust literature, that it's sanctified in a way. And to betray that with comedy or the perverse, no matter who the author is, often gets a terribly negative reaction. It can, but I think that so many people have had the experience I've had, listening to my own family's history of escaping partition, with some of the most inappropriate jokes known to man. And the flip side of horror and humor is very, very real.

But, yeah, I think it's also about, you know, really struggling with the idea of some trauma as being hyperrepresented, right? So what story can she tell? And she really struggles with this in the play. She stops at one point and she sort of scans the audience. And she goes, you've seen Schinders, you know this. There's nothing I'm showing you that you haven't seen. And what kind of room is left for her story, for more stories? So let's move from Lisa Crohn's, your next pick.

My next peg is Christina Sharpe's book in the wake on Blackson Being, and it's a book about its subject, but it's also so deeply a book about thinking. And it's one of those books that when you first read them, they gave you extra senses. So some of the ways I think about this book were given to me by this book. We'll start with who Christina Sharp is. Who is that, Parle? She's a scholar. Right now, I think she's at York University in Toronto. And she begins this book talking about a number of deaths that have happened in her family. some very mysterious and opens up to talk about what historians today Hartman calls the

afterlives of slavery the way that slavery's life is still inscribed in the present in incarceration impoverishment access to health care it's the sort of present-day haunting right we're not shaken of it and what Sharp wants to do in this book using the metaphors of the slave ship right the metaphor of the hold where enslaved people were kept the metaphor of the wake the water it trail behind a ship is to describe blackness and slavery in its current forms. How do we look at photographs? How do we look at the past? So let me give you an example. One of the things she does is she looks at a photograph that was, I think it was like an AP photograph of a young girl following an earthquake in Haiti. The girl is lying, I think, on the ground or on a gurney of some sort.

And she has a tape on her forehead that says ship. So she wants to look at how this news photograph, right? this photograph that was taken and disseminated, what are the premises of this photograph? Who does this photograph assume is looking at it? How can we look at this photograph and be with the subject, right? Not make her a specimen again. So she asks these questions of photographs, of news articles, about migrants, about Eric Garner, about any number of things to just sort of say, how are these stories being told? And how can we, if possible, show care as writers and as writers and as as readers for some of these events. Well, finally, we come to a writer from Belarus,

and I interviewed her for this program some time ago. It's Svetlana Alexevich, and she won the Nobel Prize, I think, in 2015. But I haven't read the book that's on your pick three list. So could you tell us about that? Right. So I'm recommending her first book, a book that I really admire because it has, you know,

big first book energy, which is sort of, you feel her. See, humor. and horror have to go together a little bit. I'm sorry. But what you experience in the book is a writer kind of exhilarated to be finding a forum to say, I think this is how I'm going to do it. This is how it's going to be done. And what's going to be done is a different way of writing history. The book is about some of the one million women who fought in the Red Army during World War II. And she wanted to tell a history from the inside, which is to sort of say, I want to tell the story, a history of emotions. Emotions are a kind of reality. And I want to tell a story of this war from the perspective

of the women. She says it has its own logic. It has its own color. It has its own smell. There's a real intimacy in this particular book. She describes growing up in Minsk and being surrounded by widows, right, and always knowing how to talk to widows, all these women who, their husbands would have been killed. And so she wanted to talk to these women again, and they were much older. And she interviews up to like 500 people for these books. And she would go to their houses and she would drink tea and they would try on clothes and she would wait for the story and then some of the stories that would come out.

They're not what you expect. I think that's also part of it, right? Like the word pretty occurs a lot in this book. The word uncissed shows up a lot. These were really young women. Some of them were 20, barely 20. And what they write about is curling their hair with pine cones in a forest and coming back at the age of 20 and feeling ancient,

they write about how difficult it is to love or be loved, to touch. She got into a lot of trouble. Censors kept saying, this is not history. I mean, and she kept saying, like, no, it's in these details. This is the story I want to tell the story of the insanity of what they lived through. It's interesting to me, Paul, that one instruction of modesty for journalists is that no matter how good you're reporting and even your insight, you're never going to get as deep as fiction can go,

into the human well of emotions and understanding. And yet the books that you've picked here are either some form of memoir or nonfiction and they go as deep as is conceivable to go. They do. They try to. And sometimes they go so deep because they also sometimes don't go all the way into the abyss. They talk about what can't be represented.

2.5 minute ride is really beautiful because she tells you, I'm going to tell you all my father's stories. But what does she really tell us? She keeps a lot of privacy for him. You know, so there's certain things that she's also asking, what can't I represent? What can't I say? The Alexevich book is notable for its ellipses, right?

And what lives in that? What lives in those three dots? You know, so I think that they do go deep, but they also are, I think, humble in the face of what they can do. Parle, I can think we are lucky readers, but your students are also lucky, too. It's wonderful to hear from you. Thank you so much, David.

Carl Segal writes on books for The New Yorker as of this month. And the recommendations she just shared are Svetlana Alexevich's book, The Unwomanly Face of War, Christina Sharps, in the wake, and Lisa Crone's One Woman Play called 2.5 Minute Ride. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us today, and I wanted to let you know that the New Yorker Festival is back, October 4th through October 10th. We'll have a mix of virtual conversations and some outdoor events that are taking place in New York City

with guests like Amy Schumer, Stanley Tucci, Jamaica Kincaid, Chimamanda Ingoza Adichie, Dave Grohl, and many more. It'll be a fantastic festival. You can find out all about it at new yorker.com slash festival. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Allison McAdam and Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.