How To Blow Up a Pipeline

Eco-terrorism: The Instigator or the Response?

M. D. Kwak

EVERY COUPLE OF DAYS, a new video of the latest Just Stop Oil stunt finds its way onto my social media feed. Paint sprayed onto buildings and yachts. A line of protestors blocking miles of traffic. Protestors glueing their hands onto Van Gough paintings. Exactly the kind of news I want to wake up and see first thing in the morning. And no, it’s not only my consumption of left-wing ‘greenie propaganda’ that’s behind this recent change in my algorithm. The environmental group Just Stop Oil represents a different but age-old strain of environmental activism – the sort of activism that’s controversial, disruptive and daringly illicit. And perhaps because of those reasons, what it does best is to get people talking – whether it be in castigating slurs or sympathetic solidarity.  

Eco-terrorism more broadly encapsulates acts of violence and terror committed against property or people in order to support some environmental cause. Obviously, Just Stop Oil isn’t a real eco-terrorist organisation…yet. But it’s certainly a milder version of it.

I’m personally deeply conflicted by the group’s methodologies. I can understand the media diatribe that portrays their tactics as futile, disruptive and counter-productive. It’s hard to rationalise how throwing paint on oil executives or glueing oneself onto the road can lead to tangible policy change or vast corporate reform. In more extreme cases, the violence of eco-terrorism puts innocent and vulnerable people in the crossfire. Acts of sabotage such as tree spiking can injure loggers (and let’s be honest – corporate leviathans are the ones driving environmental destruction, not individual employees working to support their families) while criminal arson and bombings can afflict human casualties and take human lives. 

If groups like Just Stop Oil ought to do anything, the least they can do is spread awareness and sympathy for the cause. Yet, if we consider what type of attention they attract, the overwhelming majority of it is negative. And it is precisely because of the inconvenience caused by their tactics that they receive such backlash. People who oppose the group aren’t individuals who hate the planet or buy into climate change denial. It’s parents whose sick child couldn’t get to the hospital in time due to congested traffic, or the cleaner whose arduous job it is to clean the mess left behind. 

Generally, I think most apolitical people are averse to more radical forms of protest, and regardless of whether it attracts awareness or not, a negative perception can be even more damaging than a slightly apathetic one. Perhaps an eco-terrorist can delay the operation of a mining company for a few hours, or even set them back a couple million dollars in property damage. But the backlash that is birthed from those crimes and the flow-on impacts to everyday individuals is likely to be far more detrimental. Ultimately, the biggest progress we’ve seen in environmental advocacy is when politicians get their act together and leverage law-making instruments in order to protect the environment and regulate the behaviour of corporations. If eco-terrorist groups taint the mainstream opinion towards the entire environmental movement, this can have devastating impacts on individual voting patterns and the political willingness to continue with legislative change.

At the same time, however, I can sympathise with the urgency and desperation of some of these activists. In the midst of a genuine crisis that has already killed millions of people in heatwaves, natural disasters and pollution, the level of inaction and stagnant apathy is brutalising and demoralising. At the point at which climate negligence becomes violence, and self-defence is all but a futile exercise, activists are condemned to a paralytic state of limbo. Whatever form of protest they choose, everything seems ineffectual and impotent. Of course, the people who perpetrate acts of civil disobedience and violence in the name of environmental justice are responsible for their actions. But the fact that they are pushed to violence, that they feel all means of non-disruptive protest have been exhausted, is more of a scathing critique on an unfeeling and unchanging world, content with letting itself burn.