Time for `Radical Environmentalism'

By Rebecca Burns

In These Times
July 31, 2012

http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/13602/radical_environmentalism_is_back/

If you're looking to lose a little sleep this week, check out
Bill McKibben's piece in Rolling Stone, where he outlines the
"terrifying new math" of global warning. Essentially, the
amount of carbon that fossil fuel companies are already set to
burn is five times larger than the quantity that scientists
say can be burned without causing irreparable damage. In other
words, we have what Carbon Tracker Initiative calls a "carbon
bubble:" a quantity of carbon in fossil fuel corporations'
existing oil and gas reserves that greatly exceeds the amount
of carbon that can ever be burned without wrecking the planet.
As McKibben puts it:

Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit -
equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you
might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many
drinks you could have and still stay below that limit - the
six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795
gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry
has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

Meteorological metaphors may be in bad taste in a piece about
global warming, but it should be noted that there's a silver
lining here: Just because something's ready to burn doesn't
mean we have to burn it. McKibben concludes by calling for
direct actions to stop the oil and gas extractions that will
push us over our "carbon budget."

And his article, as he well knows, is coming at a time when
the kind of civil disobedience he's urging is on the rise in
the environmental movement. This past weekend, an estimated
4,000 activists gathered in Washington, D.C. for a "stop the
frack attack" rally and scores of protesters briefly halted
operations at the Hobet strip mine in Lincoln County, West
Virginia. About 20 were arrested in what amounted to the
largest-ever direct action against mountaintop removal. These
actions followed a string of blockades of coal barges and
wastewater injection sites, as well as the first successful
shutdown of a fracking site by EarthFirst! earlier this
summer.

The thrust of McKibben's article - that lifestyle changes and
"going green" are too limited and too focused on individual
rather than collective actions - is not a new idea. The use of
tactics like tree sits and blockades to interrupt logging,
road construction and suburban development grew out of a
critique of large, professionalized environmental
organizations working primarily through institutional
channels. But the heavy criminalization of these actions - in
2005, deputy FBI director John Lewis said that what he termed
"eco-terrorism" represented the greatest domestic terrorism
threat in the U.S. - has meant that they have decreased in
frequency during the past decade, and those undertaking them
have become increasingly marginalized from the broader
movement.

Two important changes, however, are paving the way for what's
been nicknamed a "national uprising against extraction."
First, the public is no longer fooled by the substitution of
one form of dirty, unsafe energy for another. In a recent
statement on its website, the Sierra Club apologized for its
decision, revealed earlier this year, to accept more than $26
million for its Beyond Coal campaign from gas drilling company
Chesapeake Energy. After receiving harsh criticism for its
lack of action against fracking, the group now acknowledges,
"The Club's position on gas could've been tougher and
should've been tougher."

Fossil fuel lobbies have long been able to play an enormously
effective game of divide and conquer, pitting the economy
against the environment, or one form of environmentalism
against another. They've drummed up support for "bridge fuels"
such as gas to "create jobs" and slow climate change while
causing massive air and water pollution in communities
affected by fracking. However, thanks to the increasing
consensus that, as McKibben puts it, the fossil-fuel industry
as a whole is "Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our
planetary civilization," this game has become much tougher to
play, as the presence of the Sierra Club and other mainstream
groups at the Stop the Frack Attack rally indicate.

Second, more and more people are proving willing to incur the
higher costs that come with engaging in disruptive actions,
and grassroots environmental movements are building the kind
of localized networks that enable part-time activists to join
them.

The strip mine shutdown, organized by the group Radical Action
for Mountain Peoples' Survival (R.A.M.P.S.), follows from a
long tradition of mobilization against coal in the region. The
Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People staged direct
actions against surface mining throughout the 1970s, including
an occupation of a strip mine in Knott County by 20 women in
1972. Saturday's action brought in anti-fracking activists
from Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as members of Occupy Wall
Street and Occupy D.C., but organizers say that more and more
locals are taking part. (Future participation could be
compromised, however, by the harsh police response. Bail for
those arrested is reportedly set at $25,000 per person, and
police allegedly beat one 20 year-old demonstrator. In an
interview with Waging Nonviolence, R.A.M.P.S. organizer Mathew
Louis-Rosenberg said, "This is what happens when you're
effective ... They use these [scare] tactics because they can
work.")

Still on the horizon this summer is a planned blockade of the
southern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which President
Obama announced in March that he would be expediting. Sure
enough, last week, TransCanada obtained the final of three
permits from the Army Corps of Engineers to begin constructing
a 485-mile section stretching between Cushing, Oklahoma and
the Texas Gulf Coast.

The Tar Sands Blockade campaign aims to pull off a series of
interruptions along the pipeline's construction route by
connecting those willing to risk arrest with those whose land
will be crossed by the pipeline. Led by grassroots climate
justice groups like Rising Tide North Texas, the campaign is
currently conducting trainings throughout the region to grow
the numbers of those willing to participate.

Organizers say that a broad coalition has turned up for the
trainings. "You could say this is a story of unusual
bedfellows," Ron Seifert, a spokesperon for Tar Sands
Blockade, told In These Times. "We have Tea Party activists
concerned about private property rights and conservative South
Texas landowners, along with climate justice activists and
people concerned with human rights abuses at the point of [tar
sands] extraction."

Seifert notes that this has been made possible by a shift in
public perception about the stakes of climate change and the
actions necessary to stop it. The arrests of nearly 2,000
pipeline protesters in front of the White House last summer,
he says, "brought the accessibility of direct action to a more
mainstream public. I've been surprised to see in trainings
that even the more escalated tactics we've brought up haven't
scared anybody away." Several dozen people, he says, have
already committed to risk arrest.

Of course, most of these actions - three-hour shut downs of
mines, temporary delays in construction - are geared toward
building a broader movement rather than securing an immediate
victory. As McKibben acknowledges, time to do that is,
ultimately, exactly what the movement may lack. Still, Seifert
hopes that imposing enough interruptions on extractive
industries will change the economic calculus that makes
inflating the "carbon bubble" so profitable: "Every delay we
create is a victory."

[Rebecca Burns, an In These Times staff writer, holds an M.A.
from the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies, where her research focused on
global land and housing rights. A former editorial intern at
the magazine, Burns also works as a research assistant for a
project examining violence against humanitarian aid workers.]

====

For more information:

350.0rg
Bill McKibben
http://www.350.org/

The Reckoning - Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=ind1207C&L=PORTSIDE&P=R5590&1=PORTSIDE&9=A&J=on&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches&z=4

Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival (R.A.M.P.S.)
http://rampscampaign.org/

Tar Sands Blockade
http://tarsandsblockade.org/

Hands Across the Sand
On August 4, the world will join hands to end our dependence
on filthy fuels and look ahead to a clean energy future.
http://www.handsacrossthesand.com/

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