How to Blow Up a Pipeline

 

A review of How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm (London: Verso Books, 2021)

Apparently, this little tract from Andreas Malm (an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University) was originally intended to ask why there was so little climate activism. However, in the wake of Greta Thunberg and the rise of Extinction Rebellion it became a critique of the pacifism of the environmental movement. He sets out his case for a more aggressive environmentalism in three brief chapters.

The first chapter, ‘Learning from Past Struggles’, is an overview of environmental activism since the 1990s. Malm is struck by how little has been achieved by green activists in the past thirty years. In looking for a reason, he picks on the pacifism of the movement. Extinction Rebellion, in particular, has made what it calls strategic pacifism a central pillar of its approach. In response, Malm explores the historical models used by Extinction Rebellion to justify their pacifism, specifically the movement for universal suffrage, the movement for Indian independence, and the civil rights movement in the USA. He concludes that in all three cases, members of those movements turned to violence when nonviolence failed.

By creating a violent fringe that the mainstream leaders of the movement could disavow, this forced the powers that be to enter into dialogue with the mainstream of movement.

Having established that violence may succeed where pacifism fails, he moves on in Chapter 2, ‘Breaking the Spell’, to argue that capitalism is too committed to the carbon economy to make the effort required to transition to a green economy. Assuming that politicians and business leaders are unlikely to be moved by the nonviolent antics of Extinction Rebellion, he advocates for the strategic use of sabotage. For practical examples, he turns to the global South and cites cases of activists blowing up pipelines in Nigeria and South Africa. By way of contrast, he remarks on the striking lack of examples in developed economies (apparently forgetting that in the ‘developed’ world, greater regulation and surveillance makes the acquisition of explosives much more difficult). Having commended the blowing up of pipelines, he is careful to disavow any action that affects ordinary workers. But this makes the pipeline a bad example, since loss of fuel would affect the poorest most quickly.

Finally in Chapter 3, ‘Fighting Despair’, he attacks the fatalist critics of climate action, specifically Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen. However, he fails to see that he too is a kind of fatalist. He offers no practical alternative to capitalism, merely the hope that by breaking the present system something better will come to pass. He has, in fact, bought in to the myth of redemptive violence that pervades the society he wants to change.

This little tract has the strengths and weaknesses of a book written in the white heat of righteous anger. His passion makes it a compelling read, but it leads him to overlook nuances. This results in a confused and simplistic account of pacifism and a rose-tinted view of the role of violence in political change. Strangely, for someone who advocates for violent environmentalism, the most aggressive action he admits to is letting down the tyres of SUVs. In conclusion, this is a disappointing and hopefully ephemeral work, which I have now deleted from my Kindle.