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| possums rule and monkeywrenching is good |
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not an instruction manual. It is, instead, a philosophical reflection on the utility of violence (re: property destruction). It was a challenging read for this anabaptish, Quaker-lite, grad-school-ethics-class-psuedo-pacifist but I'm glad I did. A recent study of 20,000 people across 27 countries found that a fifth of all those under the age of 35 think it's too late to fix climate change. Here, Malm decries climate fatalism and urges imaginative action.
"Climate fatalism is a performative contradiction. It does not passively reflect a certain distribution of probabilities but actively affirms it. Or, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: that which is repeatedly asserted to impossible can thereby become impossible. The more people who tell us that a radical reorientation is scarcely imaginable, the less imaginable it will be.
Imagination is a pivotal faculty here. The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities: not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider militant resistance. Climate fatalism does all in its power to confirm these paralyzing absurdities." -- Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)
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