Disrupting the Climate Disruptors
A film and a book that is the future.
‘There’s something compelling about seeing women fighting for Mother Earth,’ said Benedikt Erlingsson, director of the film, Woman at War.
I agree. Erlingsson’s film Woman at War is superb, and entertaining, but also radical in its message. It was tactful and smart to make the film a comedy as well. The topic is difficult. Climate disruption is real. The film doesn’t run from the issue; it just mixes music and humorous settings to push you through the flick.
Halla, our heroine, played amazingly by Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir wants to save the world and she is willing to engage the system. And be a mother as well (she is on an adopting parents list). She also directs a choir. And has a twin sister who is deeply spiritual and grounded and would hardly engage in a war against polluting corporations despite their wickedness.
Once Halla begins her violent sabotage of the instruments of pollution and climate destruction, we all know, she is a marked woman. But she is courageous, savvy, and everyone wants her to succeed. You will root for her like, we all got behind Greta Thunberg, the young teen who changed the climate disruption discourse years back.
The message of this film is clear: the climate disruption battle is going to get messy. The earth is sounding the alarm and we aren’t listening; we are just talking. Stop what we are doing. The time is now. Get involved. Make changes to your life. Talk about change. Make it happen. The evidence?
How many United Nations reports do we have to read before we know? How many warnings and/or melting glaciers do you need? The fossil fuel extractors knew this was the end game 60 years ago at least and they continue to extract it. Yet, they kept on extracting because the money is good. And everyone kept downplaying it, ignoring it.
Only the dishonest or the immoral think human fueled climate change is not real anymore. It is real.
How long before people begin to emulate Halla and begin to take action as she does in this film? Is there another way to get the attention of governments, polluters, banks, and stockholders of companies responsible for this mess created?
That question is partially answered by Andreas Malm’s book, How To Blow Up A Pipeline.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline is not a how-to book. Yet, it is a book that is a call to action.
Malm writes that the “movement” to force action on climate disruption must “spring forth with all the vigour it can muster.” He adds that “whether time has been lost or gained on balance, the struggle against climate catastrophe will be as urgent as ever. ”
Malm is writing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Everything has come to a standstill and he urges immediately aggressive action (“No More Excuses for Passivity”). His call, based on history, is militancy. Mass movements of the past such as the Civil Rights Movement, and Women’s Suffrage were movements of militancy, according to Malm. The rich, in his view, will not act without being forced to act.
Malm uses the word “sabotage” a number of times in his book and he is not mincing words. Malm asserts that “the immediate purpose of…a campaign against CO2-emitting property” is “twofold: establishing a disincentive to invest in more of it and demonstrating that it can be put out of business.”
Using examples from past political movements where sabotage was used effectively, Malm’s desires could not be more clear judging by this excerpt:
“Given this record from the past and present, the question is not whether it’s technically possible for people organised outside of the state to destroy the kind of property that destroys the planet; it evidently is, just as it’s technically possible to shift to renewable energy. The question is why these things don’t happen — or rather, why they happen for all sorts of reasons good and bad, but not for the climate. ”
Malm does not just reject inaction, he also rejects passive commitments to non-violent (no sabotage) protest movements. Bill McKibben, arguably, the leading climate movement activist and writer today, catches Malm’s heat. So do others. The book is not just a call to action but a justification for destructive action that might include blowing up pipelines.
“Climate fatalists” (Malm’s name for those who say it is hopeless anyway, so do nothing) also catch Malm’s ire as he takes them to task for their surrender to the system:
“The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities ingrained in it: not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system — what we refer to as geoengineering — than in the economic system; 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 some militant resistance.”
One need not agree with Andreas Malm or the filmmaker Benedikt Erliggson but just like Greta Thunberg, they have changed the discussion on climate disruption and many attitudes. The time to act on a personal level is now. The time to support a more aggressive movement against climate disruption is now. Malm, in the end, writes that there was once a time for “Gandhian” protest movement against climate disruption. Now, there might be time for a “Fanonian” one. This book and Erliggson’s film feel like a new more fierce movement against disruption has begun.