Today, Explained - Should you blow up a pipeline?

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Climate activists have tried marching and lobbying. Now, a growing flank of movement radicals want to take more extreme action. Author Dana Fisher tells us who they are, and sociologist Matthew Wolfe traces the history of radical environmentalism in the US. Today's episode was produced by Avishay Artsy with an assist from Siona Peterous. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and fact-checked by Jon Ehrens. Our engineer is Patrick Boyd. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a movie that was released last year, a group of climate activists get together to blow up a pipeline in Texas. They're going to call us terrorists. No, they're going to call us revolutionaries or game changers. No, they're going to call us terrorists because we're doing terror. Who cares what they call us? We ain't hurting nobody. The movie is fictional. The book that it's based on is non-fiction. The author Andreas Malm argues that

sabotage and property damage are valid tactics to confront fossil fuel use. It was a zeitgeisty movie, but is anyone blowing up pipelines? Things got physical outside Citigroup's headquarters in Tribeca today, with activists blocking the entrances. Climate change activists have climbed into Rome's Trevi Fountain and cast diluted charcoal into the water, turning it black. Not yet, but they're doing lots of other stuff. Coming up on Today Explained, we're going to look at the past, present, and future of environmental radicalism. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one

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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Dana R. Fisher is a professor at American University. She studies climate policymaking and climate activism, meaning she spends a lot of time with activists. Dana, I think that there's a sense that climate activism is becoming more radical over time. Is that true? Well, certainly, Noelle, since the Biden administration took office, we've seen a growing what we call a radical flank, which is those people who are engaging in more confrontational and radical tactics around climate change emerging. These are folks who are doing something that's against social norms, like, for example, throwing

food on the covering of a work of art. Another day, another Van Gogh artwork attacked by climate activists. We've seen people using crazy glue in all sorts of crazy ways. Protesters upset about fossil fuels interrupted the U.S. Open semifinals, and one of them actually, get this, glued his bare feet to the concrete in the Arthur Ashe Stadium stands in Queens last night. That had to hurt, right? As well as activists who glued their hands to the lectern in Switzerland. The activists briefly interrupted a debate and sparked anger in the crowd. No, sir, you won't glue yourself to the desk.

Seriously? Other types of radical tactics include blocking traffic. The morning commute is never fun, right? But today, demonstrators are making things even worse. We've been following this for you all morning here. An environmental group has blocked traffic in several areas around Boston. But these are all, you know, radical in that they're outside the norm of the ways that the environmental movement and the climate movement has worked in recent years, which tends to be much more institutional and much more focused on working through the political system rather than outside of it. I saw a video recently. It was some climate activists who were, they were in Washington,

D.C., where I live, and they were blocking traffic. People were walking up to them and saying, I need to get to work. I mean, these people are really upset. Do these kinds of actions help or hurt the cause of climate activists? The people who are actually doing this type of confrontational activism, which I'm calling in my new book, Activism to Shock, these shockers are actually trying to shock the general public into paying attention to the climate crisis. Now, is it going to piss people off? Absolutely. And there's lots of evidence of that. But one of the things that we know from the research is that while specific actions and specific groups that engage in these more radical tactics tend to turn off people. Research shows that it does shine

light on the climate crisis and actually draws attention to and support for more moderate forms of activism. So in the broader movement, it may be quite effective. But for these specific activists and the tactics they're using and the groups that they're working with, it's completely unpopular. Well, what would they say if you ask them, was that successful when you guys blocked traffic? Is the answer, we got media attention? They'll basically say, you know, we tried going to a legally permitted march. We tried carrying signs. We tried going to our elected officials' offices. And, you know, I can tell you from data I've collected that they do do all of those things. And what they'll say

is it doesn't work. It's not gotten the attention. It hasn't helped change the conversation. I'm an activist. I've been trying for decades to get attention to these issues, and we've been being ignored. But sitting on the street or gluing myself to the tarmac, when the media starts to talk about it, it helps us to start to have these conversations about what's needed to address the climate crisis. You spend a lot of time with these folks. Who is a typical climate activist? Generally, the climate movement is very similar to left-leaning movements that we've observed over the past five, seven years here in the United States, and that is they tend to be highly educated, predominantly white, and majority female.

My name is Rose Abramoff. I'm an earth scientist, and I'm also a member of the Scientist Rebellion. I was arrested for chaining myself to a drill on the Mountain Valley Pipeline. We shut down work on the Mountain Valley Pipeline for about half a day. And direct actions that are happening all along that pipeline have led to that project being delayed for over six years and being millions of dollars over budget. So to me, like that's one line of evidence that activism works, direct action works. Is there a type of person who becomes radical or becomes radicalized? We don't have a lot of data on the people who are engaging in the radical flank or participating in the radical flank. There's anecdotal evidence. And a lot of the anecdotal

evidence is people who have been engaged for quite some time and then became really frustrated with the lack of progress and so started thinking we need to be more, you know, engaged and more confrontational to get more attention. My first act of civil disobedience was in April of 2022. Before that, I was very law-abiding. You know, I went to City Hall, like I wrote policy reports. I sort of did everything by the book in the hopes that, you know, if I did everything right, policymakers would listen to the scientific community and take action. And of course, as that has continued to not happen

over decades, I sort of felt like I needed to try increasingly different tactics in order to make our voices heard. Other movements have started out less radical and then radicalized over time, right? Well, in my new book, I actually talk specifically about the civil rights period and the civil rights movement, which was also this broad-based movement. In the civil rights movement, what we saw was that the movement started out as working through much more kind of traditional institutional channels with the efforts and the hope to end Jim Crow and also to give Black Americans the vote. And younger activists or younger members of the movement got extremely frustrated with that and basically decided they needed to do more, and they decided to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. So we saw sit-ins, and they basically would just go places and sit in

and occupy and refuse to leave, which is nonviolent activism. It's kind of similar to blocking the street. In response to that, there were counter-movements that mobilized. We call them white supremacists today. men came in and they started pulling and beating primarily the young women, putting lighted cigarettes down their backs and their hair and really beating people. And it was that process that led to both more radicalization of more activists because they saw predominantly, you know, Black young people being beaten up on national television. The brutal crackdown was widely televised and images of

the event were seen around the world. But in addition to that, it also mobilized and motivated sympathizers to get involved in supporting the movement. And that is, you know, what a lot of scholars who study the civil rights movement say is the reason why the civil rights movement was both successful, but also why we saw this big shift in policymaking in the United States. I think that we could see something very similar happen around the climate crisis, but we're going to see a lot more civil disobedience before that happens, for sure. You know, Martin Luther King was arrested 29 times over the course of his life. And those are the tactics that we're using now. In the decades to come, like, it will be obvious that we are on the right side of history. On violence, let me ask you about how to blow up a pipeline.

So this is a book released in 2021 by the writer Andreas Malm climate crisis and the degree to which incremental change that has been all that has been possible through policymakers, through business efforts thus far, is absolutely insufficient to solve the climate crisis. Didn't you used to try? You're just a coward. Like everybody else. I am not a coward. You want me to sit here and count seeds? Our conservancy-

I don't care about the conservancy, okay? I don't care. It doesn't do anything. What does it do? It makes white people feel better. It makes you feel better. It does nothing. And then we go down this road of these young people who are going to try to literally try to blow up a pipeline, right? And why they're doing it. Right.

So this is what I'm really curious about is the book has the most provocative title in the world. It's like the anarchist cookbook. And it's a beautiful orange cover. I'm looking at it right now. Then it becomes a movie. And so, like, from where I sit as somebody who is not a researcher but a journalist, it's like, oh, that has made it into the zeitgeist. And so the thing I'm curious about is, when that book comes out, does anyone proceed to then blow up a pipeline? I mean, is anything moving in that direction? I mean, are there people out there in the United

States and around the world who are thinking about how they need to form these, you know, eco-terrorist cells because the climate crisis is real and nothing's being done about it? Probably. But I don't think that they read Mom's work and they said, oh, an orange book, now I'm going to radicalize. I think they were already there, and they were already thinking, we are nowhere near where we need to be. Because this crisis will keep getting worse and worse, I believe that this movement is also going to escalate because of that. The more frustration we see people having with businesses and the state and the government,

because it is insufficiently addressing the problem, we're going to see more people who get fed up to the point where they mobilize. And the more people who are mobilizing, the more that radical flank is just necessarily going to expand. That's Dana R. Fisher from American University. Her forthcoming book is called Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Coming up on Today Explained, I think I've seen this film before, The History of Environmental Radicalism. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family.

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My name is Matthew Wolfe. I'm currently a national fellow at New America, and I just received a Ph.D. in sociology from NYU. Matthew's writing a book about the Earth Liberation Front. They're a radical environmental activist group. I asked him, where did the modern environmental movement probably begins in the end of the 1950s, when the United States was discovering what might be thought of as the dark side of post-war affluence. We have created an environment which satisfies the basic material needs of man better than any other in history. But with each year that passes, we threaten more ominously our natural environment of air, land, and water. There were all these alarming studies that were coming out that were showing both the rapid disappearance of the natural world and the lethality of a lot of man-made pollutants. Dump the gunk into the river. Cut down the trees. Poison the land and the air.

And it was this kind of golden age of environmentalism. And so you had, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, a bunch of really important environmental laws. The environmental agenda now before the Congress includes laws to deal with water pollution, pesticide hazards, ocean dumping. And everybody was on board with this. I mean, Republicans and Democrats. Like even Ronald Reagan, when he was governor of California, looking at smoggy Los Angeles past a really strict emissions law in California. The state of California decided that we needed to take action

to combat the smog that was choking the beautiful cities of my home state. Out of that concern was born the first serious program to require manufacturers to build cleaner cars and help control air pollution. The only group that was pushing back against this and ended up pushing back very hard against it were people in industry, which started in the 1970s,

this huge backlash to the environmental movement. in the 1970s, this huge backlash to the environmental movement. Throughout the 1970s, you have a bunch of dark money that's being dumped into lawsuits, policy papers, ad campaigns, think tanks, all of which decry environmentalism as an attack on free markets, on individual liberty, and on economic prosperity. Mindless economic growth cannot continue. But to bring the economy to a crashing halt is to eliminate support for anything we want to undertake, including environmental restoration. You actually see the shift in Reagan himself. After passing some strict environmental laws in California, by the time he's running for

president in 1980, he starts using his stump speech to ridicule environmentalists as doom criers. The present day doom criers notwithstanding, we can all feel pretty good about what has been accomplished here in the United States at both the private and government level. In fact, we may be troubled now and then by protective overkill. Some of the environmental groups are getting really big. Like you've got Greenpeace, you've got the Sierra Club, who suddenly have budgets in the millions and are headquartered in Washington, D.C., and are trying to make change within the system. Every man, woman, and child can help make a difference, and that includes you.

The Sierra Club can show you how. Find out today, your kids, their kids are counting on you. And after they do that very successfully for a number of years, facing this backlash, they begin to have to kind of compromise and the gains become much more incremental and they're not making as much progress. So for a lot of activists, this was really frustrating. So this was where you saw the origins of radical environmentalism, a more militant, less compromising wing of the environmental movement. After 10 years of modest environmental progress, the powers of industrialism and militarism have become alarmed. The empire is striking back.

So we must continue to strike back at the empire by whatever means available to us. More militant, less compromising. What does that mean in real life? So the foremost radical environmental group was Earth First, whose slogan was no compromise in defense of Mother Earth. Earth First emerged in the spring of 1980. The people who started Earth First decided that there was a need for a radical wing of the environmental movement, a wing that would make the Sierra Club look moderate. Earth First founder Dave Foreman believes the laws of nature are higher than the laws of man. Human beings have no right, no God-given right, to totally pave, to totally destroy, to totally use, to totally manipulate every square inch of this planet.

So it was a difference in terms of philosophical outlook, but then it was also a difference in terms of tactics. Certain kinds of low-level sabotage and vandalism were kind of built into its DNA. Earth First says its acts of civil disobedience are necessary because discussion and negotiation have failed. Mainstream environmentalists say Earth First is giving the entire movement a bad name. And they actually announced themselves to the world by hanging a 300-foot polyethylene banner painted to look like a massive crack on the front of the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, which was considered this big environmentally destructive dam. Let's all focus our attention on the crack on the dam. And at the count of three, I'll yell, free the Colorado as loud as we can.

And maybe the spirits will be with us and we'll really put a crack in it. One, two, three. Free the Colorado! They announced themselves as both philosophically radical, but they also were given to this kind of spectacle. And to trying to get attention for the cause in ways that mainstream environmental groups might not really do that. When does the Earth Liberation Front, you've studied them for a long time, when do they emerge? The Earth Liberation Front was initially started in the United Kingdom, where a number of activists

decided that they wanted to adopt sabotage, aggressive sabotage, as a number of activists decided that they wanted to adopt sabotage, aggressive sabotage, as a way of making environmental change. And there were a number of ELF cells that sprouted up in the mid-90s, including one in the Pacific Northwest centered around Eugene, Oregon. The Earth Liberation Front committed a number of arsons throughout the Pacific Northwest. The FBI is looking for those who torched these $30,000 SUVs Friday. It's the second arson in less than a year at this Eugene Carr dealership. Among the potential suspects, the Earth Liberation Front. They targeted their arsons against polluting industries and entities that were seen as harming the natural world.

Timber mills, an SUV dealership, housing developments, and a ski resort. ELF operatives carried out dozens of attacks over the years, but have only destroyed property. They took steps to make sure they never injured or killed people. The ELF became a really high priority for the FBI. After September 11th, when terrorism became a new priority for the FBI. After September 11th, when terrorism became a new priority for the FBI, they ended up naming the ELF and radical environmentalists as their number one domestic terrorism threat. Terrorist acts under the definition of the law can vary all over the board.

There's no requirement for purposes of terrorism that you physically endanger another person's life. I mean, you don't have to be Bonnie and Clyde to be a bank robber, and you don't have to be al-Qaeda to be a terrorist. So they sort of supercharged the investigation, and they eventually were able to apprehend 17 members of the ELF who were active in this cell in Eugene, Oregon. And they were arrested and most of them were sent to prison. A suspected eco-terrorist accused of firebombings in Oregon

is now behind bars. After the ELF arrest in 2005 and 2006, a lot of the activity in the Pacific Northwest began to quiet down a bunch. The movement went, you know, not quite dormant, but pretty close. These days, we don't hear a lot. And based on what you've just said, it makes sense. We don't hear a lot about activists, you know, blowing up bulldozers. We hear about different kinds of sabotage, like activists throwing soup on paintings, right, or blocking the road on the way to Burning Man. Do you see today's climate radicalism? If we can call it radicalism, and maybe we can't, but do you think it's a continuation of what has come before it? rediscovering some of the same tactics that the radical environmentalists did in a different context. I'm not sure the degree to which today's contemporary climate activists have read up on Earth First or on the ELF, but I think that they are facing the same dilemma that the radical environmentalists faced in the 1970s and 80s about how do you make change

when it doesn't look like you're able to make change within the system. And that requires trying out new tactics and seeing if they work. I think the ELF was prescient about the threats we were facing, but the response they adopted didn't work. Using arson didn't allow them to make the kind of change that they wanted to make. I don't think repeating exactly what the ELF did again is going to produce different results. At the same time, I think it's worth looking back at the ELF as a lesson carrying forward for activists confronting the same kind of dilemmas that radical

environmentalists dealt with 40 years ago. Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy with an assist from Siona Petros. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and our engineer is Patrick Boyd. John Aaron's fact-checked today's episode. Last week, Sean did a really great episode about climate denialism. And I'll tell you this, I learned a lot and I am very mad about different things after hearing that episode. You should check it out. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.