How to blow up a pipeline - Andreas Malm

The
science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of
appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising
seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes
so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest?

In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of
SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the
climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological
collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to
stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying
its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.


Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred,
from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement
against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the
strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the
only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.