Blockadia

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Moreover this particular road is in Halkidiki, a world-renowned tourist destination that attracts many thousands of visitors every year, drawn to the peninsula’s stunning combination of sandy beaches, turquoise waters, olive groves, and old-growth forests filled with four-hundred-year-old beech and oak trees and 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, 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 extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.

…

What unites these increasingly interconnected pockets of resistance is the sheer ambition of the mining and fossil fuel companies: the fact that in their quest for high-priced commodities and higher-risk “unconventional” fuels, they are pushing relentlessly into countless new territories, regardless of the impact on the local ecology (in particular, local water systems), as well as the fact that many 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 putting their bodies between the earth-movers and earth—do not look much like your typical activist, nor do the people in one Blockadia site resemble those in another. Rather, they each look like the places where they live, and they look like everyone: the local shop owners, the university professors, the high school students, the grandmothers.

…

Moreover, direct action against reckless resource extraction has been a part of the environmental movement for a very long 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 woods” against clear-cut logging. What has changed in recent years is largely 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 conventional reserves, the industry is going further on every front.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

From a certain vantage, this may just look like conventional politics, of the kind that Kingsnorth derides as impossibly naive. They are also my politics, for what it’s worth—I nod my head in recognition when I read Kate Marvel calling for courage rather 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 egalitarian energy; and I believe, as Al Gore does, that we should push technology to chase every last glimmer of hope for averting disastrous climate change—including unleashing, or indulging, market forces to help do so when we can.