Blockadia

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein  · 15 Sep 2014  · 829pp  · 229,566 words

. No Messiahs: The Green Billionaires Won’t Save Us 8. Dimming the Sun: The Solution to Pollution Is . . . Pollution? PART THREE STARTING ANYWAY 9. Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors 10. Love Will Save This Place: Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far 11. You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and

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entire world to fight these companies, to fight these challenges.” —Luis Yanza, cofounder, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front), 20102 9 * * * BLOCKADIA The New Climate Warriors “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason

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dotted with waterfalls. So what’s up with all the riot police? The barbed wire? The surveillance cameras strapped to tree branches? Welcome to Blockadia What’s up is that this area is no longer a Greek vacationland, though the tourists still crowd the white-washed resorts and oceanfront tavernas

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, with their blue-checked tablecloths and floors sticky with ouzo. This is an outpost of a territory some have taken to calling “Blockadia.” Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever

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of the industrial activities in question have neither been adequately tested nor regulated, yet have already shown themselves to be extraordinarily accident-prone. What unites Blockadia too is the fact the people at the forefront—packing local council meetings, marching in capital cities, being hauled off in police vans, even

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7 And of course the checkpoints, which are staggered along all the roads where heavy construction equipment has moved in. But in this outpost of Blockadia, the police aren’t the only ones with checkpoints: In Ierissos, local residents set up checkpoints at each entrance to their village after over

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more reminiscent of civil war than political protest, are unfolding in countless other pieces of contested land around the world, all of which make up Blockadia’s multiplying front lines. About eight hundred kilometers to the north of the Greek standoff, the farming village of Pungesti, Romania, was gearing up

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livelihoods. “We live on agriculture here,” one local reasoned. “We need clear water. What will our cattle drink if the water gets spoiled?”10 Blockadia also stretches into multiple resource hot spots in Canada, my home country. For instance, in October 2013—the same time that Pungesti was in the

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forty-nine countries but pressure from numerous heads of state and eleven Nobel Peace Prize winners (not to mention Paul McCartney). The spirit of Blockadia can be seen even in the most repressive parts of China, where herders in Inner Mongolia have rebelled against plans to turn their fossil fuel

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mining that China imports increasing amounts of coal from abroad. But many of the places where its coal comes from are in the throes of Blockadia-style uprisings of their own. For instance, in New South Wales, Australia, opposition to new coal mining operations grows more serious and sustained by

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already under severe stress from ocean acidification and various forms of pollution runoff.17 This is only the barest of sketches of the contours of Blockadia—but no picture would be complete without the astonishing rise of resistance against virtually any piece of infrastructure connected to the Alberta tar sands,

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is murder with cattle farmers whose homes are decorated with deer heads). In fact the direct-action group Tar Sands Blockade first coined the term “Blockadia” in August 2012, while planning what turned into an eighty-six-day tree blockade challenging Keystone’s construction in East Texas. This coalition has

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of the rubberstamp TransCanada was expecting, the project sparked a movement so large it revived (and reinvented) U.S. environmentalism.21 Spend enough time in Blockadia and you start to notice patterns. The slogans on the signs: “Water is life,” “You can’t eat money,” “Draw the line.” A shared

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Obama’s energy policy is “all of the above”—which effectively means full steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the margins—Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be described as “None of the below.” It is based on the simple principle that it’

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International, which has been at the forefront of the global movement to “leave the oil in the soil” and whose influence can be felt throughout Blockadia. * * * As the experiences in Nigeria and Ecuador make clear, anti-extraction activism is not a new phenomenon. Communities with strong ties to the land

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time and has succeeded in protecting some of the planet’s most biologically diverse lands and waters. Many of the specific tactics being used by Blockadia activists today—tree-sits and equipment lockdowns in particular—were developed by Earth First! in the 1980s, when the group fought “wars in the

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a matter of scale, which is itself a reflection of the dizzying ambitions of the extractive project at this point in history. The rise of Blockadia is, in many ways, simply the flip side of the carbon boom. Thanks to a combination of high commodity prices, new technologies, and depleted

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you are—red, black, white or yellow—we’re all in this together.”64 * * * This kind of alliance building among the various outposts of Blockadia has proven the movement’s critics wrong time and time again. When the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline began to gather momentum, several high

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measures are recipes for flammable water in your faucet, an oil slick in your backyard, or a train explosion down the street. Indeed, many Blockadia activists cite the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as either their political awakening, or the moment they realized they absolutely had to

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the risk such action would pose to GDPs, as if economic growth still has a meaning on a planet convulsing in serial disasters. But in Blockadia, risk assessment has been abandoned on the barricaded roadside, replaced by a resurgence of the precautionary principle—which holds that when human health and

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of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia’s defining feature. I saw it shine brightly in Halkidiki, Greece, in the struggle against the gold mine. There, a young mother named Melachrini

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that place. Is not the hatred of the coal companies, or anger, but love will save that place.”11 This is also what makes Blockadia conflicts so intensely polarized. Because the culture of fossil fuel extraction is—by both necessity and design—one of extreme rootlessness. The workforce of big

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like colleges, faith organizations, and municipal governments to sell whatever financial holdings they have in fossil companies. The divestment movement emerged organically out of various Blockadia-style attempts to block carbon extraction at its source—specifically, out of the movement against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, which was looking for

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court cases, and more militant direct action should real progress fail to materialize. And that is a very significant shift indeed. Already, the rise of Blockadia and the fossil fuel divestment movement is having a huge impact on the mainstream environmental community, particularly the Big Green groups that had entered into

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in the state of New York.”59 * * * Local ordinances are not the only—or even the most powerful—unconventional legal tools that may help Blockadia to extend its early victories. This became apparent when the panel reviewing Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline announced its recommendations. The news that it had

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the broader multicultural mosaic, not as something they needed to actively defend. However, in perhaps the most politically significant development of the rise of Blockadia-style resistance, this dynamic is changing rapidly—and an army of sorts is beginning to coalesce around the fight to turn Indigenous land rights into

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colonial formation of Nigeria. In short, Indigenous land and treaty rights have proved a major barrier for the extractive industries in many of the key Blockadia struggles. And through these victories, a great many non-Natives are beginning to understand that these rights represent some of the most robust tools

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torn apart over whether to accept industry deals or to uphold traditional teachings. And as the offers from industry become richer (itself a sign of Blockadia’s growing power), those who are trying to hold the line too often feel they have nothing to offer their people but continued impoverishment.

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coal development, told me, “I can’t keep asking my people to suffer with me.”38 These circumstances raise troubling moral questions for the rising Blockadia movement, which is increasingly relying on Indigenous people to be the legal barrier to new, high-carbon projects. It’s fine and well to

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frontline land defenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their communities. All of this points to something else that sets Blockadia apart from many previous social movements of its kind. In the past, people committed to social change often believed they had to choose between

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France, describes resistance and alternatives as “the twin strands of the DNA of social change. One without the other is useless.”26 The denizens of Blockadia live and know this. Which is why theirs is neither a movement of negation (no to the miners/drillers/pipe layers/heavy haulers), nor

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going to allow drilling to begin.37 Local supporters of the plan, however, have not given up and Correa’s backsliding has opened a new Blockadia front: protestors opposing drilling have already faced arrests and rubber bullets and, in the absence of a political solution, Indigenous groups are likely to

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working closely together “has reawakened a worldview in a lot of people.”40 The deep sense of interdependence with the natural world that animates rural Blockadia struggles from Greece to coastal British Columbia is, of course, far less obvious in the densely populated cities where so many of us live

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road, and simultaneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything. * * * The movements explored in these pages—Blockadia’s fast multiplying local outposts, the fossil fuel divestment/reinvestment movement, the local laws barring high-risk extraction, the bold court challenges by Indigenous groups

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we act, and with all the urgency this dire situation demands.”20 Most of all, those clarion voices are coming from the front lines of Blockadia, from those lives most directly impacted by both high-risk fossil fuel extraction and early climate destabilization. Suddenly, Everyone Recent years have been filled

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Watch. Gerald Amos, Greg Brown, and Twyla Roscovich, “Coastal First Nations from BC Travel to Witness the Gulf Oil Spill” (video), 2010. CHAPTER 9: BLOCKADIA 1. “United Nations Conference on Environment and Development: Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,” International Legal Materials 31 (1992): 879, http://www.un.org. 2

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British Columbians,” Sierra Club BC, press release, December 19, 2013. CHAPTER 11: YOU AND WHAT ARMY? 1. Melanie Jae Martin and Jesse Fruhwirth, “Welcome to Blockadia!” YES!, January 11, 2013. 2. Mary Harris Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones (Mineola, NY: Dover [1925], 2004), 144. 3. Gurston Dacks, “British Columbia After

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(King), 449 Beyond Zero Emissions, 102 BG Group, 145 Bhopal Action Resource Group, 206 BHP Billiton, 196 Big Green, 20, 85, 87–88, 124 Blockadia and, 355–58, 403 carbon trading and, 218–25 climate change debate and, 198–201 climate debt seen as politically toxic by, 414 energy investments

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, 428, 429–30, 439 bitumen, see tar sands Black Mesa Water Coalition, 398–99, 402 Black Sea, 349 Blake, William, 157 Blazevic, Sara, 355 Blockadia, 293–336, 450–51 abolition and civil rights movements compared to, 450, 453, 455–57 Big Green and, 355–58, 403 as constructive movement, 405

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–87, 464 and need for viable economic alternatives to extraction industries, 349, 398, 399, 400–401, 403, 413–18 origins of, 73–75 see also Blockadia climate science, 46, 59, 127, 152, 158 climate treaty negotiations, 11, 77–80, 411 see also emission reduction Clinton, Bill, 83–85, 213, 231

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selective, 93–95 for wealthy nations, 88, 89 Delaware River Basin, 346 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 371 Delingpole, James, 42 Delucchi, Mark A., 101 democracy: Blockadia and, 361, 380 climate change as crisis in, 363–64 corporations vs., 7 free trade agreements as threat to, 358–60 Democratic party, 35, 83

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: acceptable risk and, 335 astronaut’s-eye view adopted by, 286–87, 296 command and control, 204 grassroots, 305–10; see also Big Green; Blockadia Keystone pipeline and revival of, 303 top-down, failures of, 295 “environmentalism of the poor,” 202 environmental justice, 92, 155 see also climate debt environmental

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and, 281–84 government collusion with, 297–99, 303, 306–7, 308, 360, 361–66, 378–80 grassroots opposition to, 305–10; see also Blockadia; climate movement growth as measure of, 129–30 high risk in, 324–25, 331 Indigenous land rights and, see Indigenous peoples, land rights of infrastructures

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North, 49, 314 see also developed world; postindustrialized nations Global Risks report, World Economic Forum, 112 Global South, 53, 77, 181, 309, 314, 412 Blockadia movements in, 412 environmentalism in, 202 see also developing world global warming, see climate change Globe and Mail, 325, 333 God’s Last Offer (Ayres

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65 Indian Affairs Bureau, U.S., 396 Indigenous Environmental Network, 318, 332 Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade, 367 Indigenous peoples, 67, 181, 200 in Blockadia movement, 139, 177, 373–74, 380–84, 443–45 carbon cowboys’ preying on, 220–21 children of, in church-run schools, 339, 379 climate

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300 Losing Ground (Dowie), 84, 203 Louisiana, 330, 431 Love Canal Homeowners Association, 206 Lovell, Evan, 239, 240 Lovelock, James, 231 love of place, in Blockadia movement, 337–66 low-carbon economy, 16, 21, 91, 93 for developing world, 76 infrastructure in, 72, 124 low-consumption activities, 93–94 Lower Elwah

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, 68–70, 71, 99, 126 renewable energy sector in, 66–69 Oomittuk, Steve, 375 Operation Climate Change, 307–8 opposition movements, 9–10 see also Blockadia; climate movement Oregon, 319, 320, 349 Oreskes, Naomi, 42 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 114–15 Orwell, George, 96 Osuoka, Isaac,

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public value of renewable energy projects vs., 400 see also specific pipeline projects Pittsburgh, Pa., rights of nature ordinance in, 444 place, love of, in Blockadia movement, 337–66 planetary exodus, 288–89 planned obsolescence, 91 planning, long-range, see long-range planning Point Carbon, 225 Point Hope, Alaska, 375

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells  · 19 Feb 2019  · 343pp  · 101,563 words

than hope, and when I read Naomi Klein rhapsodizing about a community of political resistance growing out of the local sites of protests she calls “Blockadia.” I believe, as Purdy does, that the degradation of the planet and the end of natural abundance demand a new progressivism animated by a renewed