It wasn’t until the 1940’s that what we think of as the “commando” or special forces units were standardized by the British Army. With the goal of disrupting German forces in western France and later in the Mediterranean and North Africa, the first commando units were modeled on small groups of Arab fighters who had great success pinning down much larger British Army units during the uprisings in Palestine in the 1930’s.
These units proved to be very effective during World War II and have since become a staple of modern warfare. Today, the U.S. empire largely projects military force through targeted special forces operations and bombing campaigns, rather than outright warfare and traditional military maneuvers.
The Case for Ecological Commandos
Our planet is on the verge of total ecological collapse. Nothing is getting better. Governments and corporations continue business as usual while every day, carbon dioxide levels rise, forests are cut down, and 200 species are driven extinct. Forty percent of all human deaths can be attributed to pollution. Ocean fish may not exist by 2050.
Even in ecological preserves, life is suffering; there has been an 85% decline in mammals in West Africa’s parks. Major dams continue to be built. Environmentalists being are murdered around the world. African lions are in precipitous decline, as are tigers, leopards, elephants, polar bears, rhino, and countless other species. Most of the species who are driven extinct haven’t even ever been described by western science; they slip into extinction with barely a ripple.
Our few, hard-won victories are temporary. Protections can be (and are) revoked. Ground can be lost. Despite all we have done, life on this planet is slipping away.
Small forces of ecological commandos could reverse this trend by targeting the fundamental sources of power that are destroying the planet. We have seen examples of this. In Nigeria, commando forces have been fighting a guerrilla war of sabotage against Shell Oil Corporation for decades. At times, they have reduced oil output by more than 60%.
No environmental group has ever had that level of success. Not even close.
In the U.S., clandestine ecological resistance has been relatively minimal. However, isolated incidents have taken place. A 2013 attack on an electrical station in central California inflicted millions of dollars in damage to difficult-to-replace components used simple hunting rifles. The action took a total of 19 minutes, displaying the sort of discipline, speed, and tactical acumen required for special forces operations.
Characteristics of Special Forces Units
Physical Fitness
Mobility and secrecy are critical to the success of special forces. Therefore, physical fitness, as well as the use of appropriate aids, such as helicopters, bicycles, or pack animals, is essential. Commandos must be prepared to climb barriers, crawl, swim, carry heavy objects, endure long distance travel, maintain stillness, and so on.
Training in Infantry Weapons
Competency in firearms, knives, explosives, unarmed combat, and other handheld weapons are essential to these types of missions.
Focused on Stealth
Commandos must be capable of evading superior forces. This means they must have the ability to move silently and swiftly, and to hide in a variety of terrain. They should also be capable of killing or capturing opponents quickly and silently. However, stealth—the ability to avoid enemies—is more important than combat; fighting should only occur as a last resort. According to the book Deep Green Resistance, thus far the definitive resource on environmental sabotage, ecological commandos should seek to avoid causing casualties to avoid alienating the public further.
Comfortable Operating in Darkness and All Weather Conditions
Darkness is the element of choice for special forces units. Adverse weather can provide additional cover and opportunity. Therefore, units should train to operate in such conditions.
Capable of Operating on Water
Objectives often will be more accessible via water.
Flexible and Self-Directed
Communications during operations may be impossible, and comms equipment is always subject to failure. Special forces must be prepared with a plan. However, they should have a good understanding of mission objectives and be prepared to improvise.
Small Units
Unlike traditional military forces, commando units typically form small squads of 2-12 individuals. Multiple squads may come together for some operations, but small unit size allows faster reaction time and greater operational flexibility—critical in asymmetrical conflict. Special forces engaged in sabotage often split into two forces: one focused on demolitions, the second on covering the demolition force. Units in the field are supported by medical teams, researchers, supply officers, and other support staff at secure positions.
Proper Target Selection
Traditional military units operate by seizing and holding territory. Since special forces rely on tactical rather than strategic advantages, a different approach is needed. Commandos generally focus on high-value targets like supply lines, fuel depots, communications hubs, important propaganda targets, unprepared foes, and so on. Attacking such targets can destroy the enemy’s ability to fight. Clandestine units are always focused on attack, and not defense.
Intelligence Driven
The success of special forces operations depends largely on good intelligence. Gathering information about target locations, defenses, surveillance, cover, enemy reinforcements, escape routes, transportation options, weather, and so on is essential.
Doing What it Takes to Halt Empire
Our situation is desperate. Things continue to get worse. False solutions, greenwashing, corporate co-optation, and rollbacks of previous victories are relentless. Resistance communities are fractured, isolated, and disempowered. However, the centralized, industrialized, and computerized nature of global empire means that the system is vulnerable. Power is mostly concentrated and projected via a few systems that are vulnerable.
Even powerful empires can be defeated. But those victories won’t happen if we engage on their terms. Ecological special forces provide a method and means for decisive operations that deal significant damage to the functioning of global capitalism and industrialism. With enough coordination, these sorts of attacks could deal death blows to entire industrial economies, and perhaps (with the help of aboveground movements, ecological limits, and so on) to industrialism as a whole.
Implementation of this strategy will require highly motivated, dedicated, and skilled individuals. Serious consideration of security, anonymity, and tactics will be required. But this system was built by human beings; we can take it apart as well.
Good luck.
Originally published as Ecological Special Forces on the DGR blog.
Editor’s note: large sections of this article are inspired by Without Rubber, the Machines Stop by Stop Fossil Fuels. Deep Green Resistance does not endorse their organization or their analysis but it’s worth reading.
by Liam Campbell
It’s easy to take rubber for granted. Without it, most of the world’s vehicles would literally grind to a halt, airplanes would eventually be grounded, and most of the world’s industrial factories would cease to be profitable. When someone mentions rubber people think of tires, but open up a car and you’ll find a staggering number of components require the substance: seals, hoses, shock absorbers, wiring, and interiors. If you swim farther down the supply chain you’ll discover that the manufacturing factories that create vehicles also need vast quantities of rubber to operate their own machinery; the same is true of the processing plants that refine raw materials for the factories, and so on all the way down the supply chain.
About half of all rubber comes from trees, and over 90% of natural rubber comes from Asia. The three largest producers are Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia; these few countries account for nearly 75% of all natural rubber production. The Americas used to be the world’s largest producer of rubber, until a highly resilient fungus called Microcyclus ulei annihilated the entire American industry.
In Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, Rob Dunn explains:
“Leaf blight will arrive in Asia at some point. How will it come? The spores of the fungus are thin and so don’t do well on extended travel, such as on boats, but they’d do fine on a plane. […] As a 2012 study4 notes, ‘The pathogen can be easily isolated from infected rubber trees…and transported undetected across borders,’ which is to say that the intentional destruction of the majority of the world’s rubber supply would be easy […] It would be easy because the trees are planted densely; because most of the plantations are relatively close together; because the trees are genetically very similar to each other. It would be easy because the trees in Malaysia have not been selected for resistance; they have been selected for productivity. Planters chose trees with lots of latex, favoring short-term benefit over long-term security.
Scholars express concern about whether terrorists might have the technology necessary to spread leaf blight to Asia. Do they have the specialized knowledge necessary to transport and propagate fungal spores, the specialized knowledge necessary to destroy the world’s supply of rubber? Of course they do, because all it would really take is a pocket full of infected leaves.5″
In other words, a single person could severely cripple industrial civilization by simply booking a few flights, carrying a few infected leaves, and going for a walk in among the trees. Soon after, Asia’s rubber plantations would suffer the same fate as their counterparts in the Americas, the cost of rubber would skyrocket, and industrial civilization would be dealt a crippling blow.
The other half of global rubber is derived from petroleum, but synthetic rubber remains significantly inferior to natural rubber. The increased cost and reduced availability would seriously interfere with industrial activities making personal vehicles much more expensive, hindering airlines, and likely reducing global fossil fuel use. More critically, aircraft tires and heavy industrial vehicle tires require almost 100% natural rubber, meaning those vehicles would become extremely difficult to maintain if Microcyclus ulei found its way to Asia.
We are indoctrinated to believe that individuals are powerless, and that industrialized civilization is an invincible Goliath. None of that is true. When systems become large and complex, they also become fragile due to having so many interdependent systems; this makes them susceptible to cascading failures. The stunning reality is that a determined 80-year-old grandmother could take down vast amounts of industrialized civilization by simply booking a holiday that included stops in the Americas and Asia, and collecting a few leaves along the way.
The yellow vests movement has been struggling for six month now. Half a year. This is a record-breaking movement in France by its length. Commentators no longer refer to the May 1968 movement, but go back to several democratic protests that occurred during the 19th century. This movement is interesting for the ecological resistance, first because it gives an insight of what future social instability or chaos might look, like in phase 3 of the decisive ecological warfare (DEW), due to the grow of inequalities and ecological disruptions. It is also very interesting in a tactical point of view, because that kind of future mass movement could constitute strong levers (as only few people are part of the radical movement) to help the resistance, in an opportunistic way, to harry and destabilize civilization, with the unintentional help from people who are little concerned by ecological issues. The simplistic and anthropocentric yellow vests saying “end of the world, end of the month, same struggle” designed in order to reply to the unfair pseudo-ecological taxes, could, not for the reason they primarily think, have unexpected ecological benefits by disrupting the techno-industrial system. Then, the question to us is how can we support and strengthen these movements whenever they spontaneously emerge in order to achieve these benefits.
The yellow vests movement started in October 2017 on social networks with a great fed up against the president Emmanuel Macron’s policies. His policies are mainly in favor of the riches and the big companies, doing them one fiscal gifts after another, while the country middle class is becoming poorer and poorer. The movement was specifically triggered by the increase of the fuel tax, the hardening of mandatory vehicle safety inspections (with the unsaid goal, behind security and ecological arguments, to stimulate the growth of the cars sales) and the reduction of the speed limit from 90 to 80 km/h. The increase of this tax was part of a pack of so-called ecological measures of the “extreme centrist” and liberal government of Emmanuel Macron. The minister of ecology Nicolas Hulot, known for being anything but a radical ecologist, resigned a few weeks earlier in August 2018, denouncing his own powerlessness in this government and the impossibility for him to implement the ecological measures he aimed at. This man, quite popular in France, was only a store front for the government. Actually, the current trend in liberal politics is to make poor classes bear the weight of the pseudo-ecological transition, via guilt, individual change and taxes rather than global systemic changes, industry restriction and fair laws, that would, for instance, tax the airplanes fuel, which is « duty free » for the airlines, at the same level than people pay for everyday fuel.
In October-November 2018, people started to put a yellow vest on their car dashboard (a few years ago, it became mandatory to keep one in every car for security reasons), in order to show their disagreement with Macron. This was a huge success, with a majority of cars on the road displaying it. Then, it took the form, since the 17th November 2018, of huge protests every Saturday, not only in Paris but also all across the country. Other actions are also conducted during the week, including the permanent occupation of hundreds of traffic circles. It managed to cause millions of losses to businesses like supermarkets, multinationals, and, among others, luxury shops on the Champs Elysées.
The movement was first watched suspiciously by a part of the left-wing for several reasons, but mainly because they believed the mainstream media’s speech. First, it looked anti-ecological and formed of “rednecks”, many said. Cars, as everyone acknowledge now, are part of the ecological problem, and the movement started as a popular protest against the fuel tax (coined pejoratively by some as a « Jaquerie », a term that refer in France to Middle Age protests against taxes). Also, as a popular mass movement, very diverse political tendencies were represented. Nationalism and sovereignty, as cross-political tendencies (from left- and right-wing both), are quite common in the movement. The national flag, seldom used by the left (except by Jean-Luc Mélenchon who tried to bring it back into fashion to prevent from the extreme-right monopolizing it), is often present in the occupied places or during the protests. This made many think that the movement was led by extreme right-wing people, but later this turned out to be wrong. Along the same lines, the presence of racists and anti-Semitics have been over-emphasized since the beginning by the media in order to discredit the movement.
Actually, mostly, those taking part to the demonstrations were new to politics and militancy, and never formerly campaigned. Like vomiting, it was natural to them, everywhere in the country, to reject as a whole the current political system, all parties included, that was cooking them on a low heat. It was visceral. This led them to banish all party banners or distinctions. Many of these people are anarchists without even knowing it. All actions, blockading, occupations and protests are self-organized, principle deeply rooted into the movement.
Consistently, no official authorization requests, with some official leader that would be responsible for the protest, were sent to the administration, which is decreed by law in France. This is a natural consequence of the fact that the movement was spontaneously born on social networks, rejects the government rules of the game and is almost totally horizontal. People are very mistrustful to any representative, who could negotiate and betray his fellows by compromising with the authorities. Some people in the movement have more influence than other, but either they refuse to become representative of the others, because they don’t feel legitimate, either when they try to, they are immediately rejected by the majority of the others.
The movement also came quickly, due to police clampdown, to a high level of violence, with bloody police confrontations and devastated urban areas. The violence levels culminated the Saturday 6th of December 2018, when the people came in front of the Elysée, with a helicopter ready to extract Macron if by chance they succeeded to enter the palace (at this time a lot of people were burning or guillotining life-size Macron dolls across the country), and more recently the Saturday 23th March and the May Day 2019 with new hardcore clashes in Paris. A funny Saturday was, at the beginning of January, when people used a pallet truck to smash open the front door of the ministry of the government spokesperson Benjamin Grivaux.
Since the beginning, the only political answers to the movement are denial and frightening post-truth answers, which challenge the understanding of anyone with a minimum of intellectual honesty. The police clampdown worsens every week. Now, the yellow vests not only risk to loose a hand or an eye because of riot guns and grenades (with thousands of injured people, some of which victims of war wounds say the hospital staffs), but also risk suffocation. By their unheard amount, concentration and composition, the chemical weapons the police now use can no longer by called “tear gazes”. The gazes that are being used since the 13th of April cause suffocation, burns, non-stop vomiting, consciousness loss. Many kids or elders passing by are also hit.
All these things are quite new to French leftists, and far from the usual, almost traditional, protests the militants are used to, like trade-union-like ones or Occupy-Indignados-like ones. It is uneasy to protest side-by-side with persons that are sometimes politically or socially far from us. For these different reasons, unsurprisingly, the trade unions are very reluctant and, until very recently, seldom called to protest with the yellow vests or, at least, to a supporting strike.
Moreover, except the black bloc, this level of violence is completely unusual to most pacifist leftists and syndicalists, whose order service usually get along with police forces to supervise the protests (and, as I saw in December 2018, sometime block the tail of the procession to let free rein to the police for repressing the yellow vests that are at the front!). The trade-unions called to protest for May Day, but Philippe Martinez, the president of the CGT, had to sneak out because he was scared by the violence of the police clampdown!
Since the beginning of the movement, I finally observe the idea that pacific protests are ineffective gradually spreading in circles that I knew to be pacifists, with a higher violence level tolerance than before. The yellow vest sum it up in the saying: “no breakers, no 20h” (20h refers to the evening news in France). This shift is perceptible in a growing part of the population, despite the unanimous condemnation of violence in the media by the whole Paris intelligentsia (which is very annoyed by the Saturday chaos in its streets), main-stream personalities, journalists, and politics.
Happily, the few extreme right-wing people who took part to the first demonstrations either gradually stopped to mobilize or gradually tempered their opinions by an osmosis phenomenon that, fortunately, occurred in the company of people from other political sides. Very unlikely, according to the caricature the media tried to picture them, within a few weeks, the movement resulted in people to unite in favor of social justice, whatever their political background was, and for the introduction of direct democracy measures in the constitution like the unanimously claimed Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (RIC). Their first 42 claims of the beginning of December were enlightening. Weeks passing, as the goals of the movement got more clearly defined, left-wing militant started to join the popular movement. Interestingly, even if most of their claims are social justice ones, they still often refuse to be politically labeled as left-wing, in order to exclude nobody. The no banner principle is still strictly applied (except for the yellow ones, and the anarchist ones maybe).
The time many leftists and ecologists took to enter in motion (for those that did it) is at the same time wise, and an error. Of course, waiting and observing, when we face an uncertain situation, is wise. But this is also a strategic error, because timing is strategic. And I am the first to recognize my error. Opportunities do not necessarily occur twice. The repression arsenal of the power grows weekly bigger and bigger. Drones, new authoritarian laws, semi-lethal weapons, more powerful chemical weapons (forbidden by the Geneva convention, and used against our own population, what a joke!), urban tanks, chemical marking of the demonstrators with synthetic DNA in the water canon, automatic face recognition with AI, psychological techniques for terror, censorship and targeted arrests in collaboration with Facebook…
This is also an error because we let the others do the toughest job, in the darkest of the winter. And finally because when you miss the departure, it is difficult to catch-up the train. It would be a shame that the French left miss the revolution they have been expecting for ages, isn’t it?
I noticed something of interest for us, that was little commented (but fact-checked) among the huge feed of daily news. Among all the arbitrary arrests, the government targeted and sued ordinary people (who sometime got months of jail) who, in Facebook comments, naively encouraged or called to block refineries and (for a retired man) to blow them up if the government didn’t give in the people’s claims. This means the government is very afraid of that kind of blockage, which can paralyze the country within a few day. It can be quite fast, as we have only a few refineries in France.
About this, the government did a master stroke in Novembre 2018 just after the first protest. They postpone their new tax on heavy trucks to avoid the truck drivers to join the yellow vests. Indeed, the drivers know how much the country depends on them, and know how to block easily all the country’s large retailers and fuel supplies. Their protests are usually very efficient and listened to by the power.
Radical ecologist could strengthen movements like the yellow vests and use them as levers. If they do not directly serve the ecological movement, on one hand they serve social justice, with is always desirable, and on the other hand, they also destabilize the techno-industrial system by blocking supermarkets, breaking multinationals front stores, cutting roads and borders, or blocking oil refineries. In December 2018, the French power was surprised and destabilized by the breadth and the strength of this movement, and this is the kind of weakness we are looking for to generalize in the future.
While gentle ecologists pacifically parade in useless climate walks, at the same time, yellow vests are having violent assaults with the police in other areas of the city, breaking bones, loosing eyes, hands, and for some of them, dying. As radicalists, given the choice, we should know were the battle takes place and not to be late.
This is of course a brief and incomplete account of the yellow vest movement, whose forms are very diverse and shape-shifting.
The woman places an arrow on her bow, draws to her cheek, and fires.
The arrow arcs over a high-voltage electrical transmission line, carrying a non-conductive rope. She jogs to her arrow, and begins to reel in the rope. As she pulls it over the lines, a conductive cable is revealed to be attached to its end. As the cable bridges the three-phase power lines, a short-circuit ripples down the lines. Miles away, an aluminum smelter grinds to a halt.
This is the opening of the new film Woman at War from director Benedikt Erlingsson. The film follows a one-woman ecosabotage campaign against the Icelandic aluminum industry.
Whenever I watch a film, especially a film grappling with the ecological crisis, I expect it to disappoint me. Ethan Hawke’s First Reformed, for example, started with a promising premise and then veered into self-flagellation and misogyny.
Woman at War, however, did not disappoint. Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir gives a masterful performance as Halla, a happy middle-aged woman who appears content with her life as a choir director in an Icelandic city. She moves about her life with grace and serenity, riding her bicycle through the streets, swimming in the ocean, and talking with her sister and other friends.
But Halla leads a double life. Her apparently tranquil existence hides her true mission, a campaign against heavy industry that is destroying Iceland. A portrait of Nelson Mandela hangs on her wall at home, a constant reminder that yesterday’s terrorists may become the freedom fighters of history. This is, no doubt, a reference to the ANC sabotage campaigns that Mandela helped to lead in Apartheid South Africa beginning in 1961.
In his testimony when he was sentenced, Mandela describes his reasoning: “I do not deny that I planned sabotage,” he said. “I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.”
The same reasoning is true for eco-saboteurs today. In the era of climate chaos and government inaction, “extreme” acts like ecosabotage are not extreme at all. They are, in fact, some of the most reasonable responses imaginable.
The argument for sabotage in Woman at War is as undeniably real as the industry it tackles. Iceland’s abundant geothermal energy and hydropower extraction give it very low electricity prices, and has made it a global hot spot for aluminum smelting. The three aluminum smelters in Iceland use a full 73 percent of all electricity generated in the country.
Their power is supplied by geothermal energy harvesting facilities as well as a highly controversial hydroelectric dam that was opposed by environmental and community groups in the courts, via protest, and with direct action and ecosabotage. The smelters themselves are major polluters linked to birth defects, cancer, and bone deformations in nearby communities.
In the film, Halla’s attacks are not spontaneous. Like Mandela, she has obviously conducted a rigorous assessment of the situation. Her actions are meticulously planned. She receives intelligence from a friend high in the Icelandic government. She operates carefully, intelligently, implementing reasonable security precautions while avoiding wholesale paranoia.
At one point, Halla evades her face being recorded by a drone by wearing a Nelson Mandela mask, in an echo of Mandela’s words in his book Long Walk to Freedom: “Living underground requires a seismic psychological shift,” Mandela wrote. “One has to plan every action, however small and seemingly insignificant. Nothing is innocent. Everything is questioned. You cannot be yourself; you must fully inhabit whatever role you have assumed… The key to being underground is to be invisible.”
Like any effective underground figure, she follows the maxim that “Clandestine operational activity must be compartment[aliz]ed, it must be planned, it must be short in duration, and it must be rehearsed (or at least, composed of habitual actions).”
Rebecca Solnit, who has written some wonderful things, critiquesWoman at War, writing that “our largest problems won’t be solved by heroes.” But Solnit then lauds Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an organization which (like the entire American environmental movement) has failed to stop even the growth of fossil fuel burning. McKibben’s entire approach hinges on a transition to green technology that, as I explain in my forthcoming book Bright Green Lies, has thus far failed to reduce emissions even by a fraction.
In contrast, eco-sabotage groups like MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) have reduced oil output in Nigeria, Africa’s largest producer, by up to 40 percent on a sustained basis.
So which approach is really effective? Show me a country in which mass action has significantly reduced carbon emissions, and perhaps Solnit’s argument would hold more weight. Just two people conducting eco-sabotage against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) were nearly as effective in slowing the construction as tens of thousands were at Standing Rock. Imagine if a few more people had joined them. And a few more. And more.
As director Benedikt Erlingsson said of Halla in a recent interview, “She’s not a terrorist, she’s not creating terror, she’s not harming people. She’s only sabotaging structures. But she is doing what all fighters have been doing: for non-violent protest to work, it always needs to have an economic fist.”
Petitioning those in power to change things simply isn’t working. To have a chance of planetary survival, we need the most direct of direct actions.
Practically, there are a few lessons to be learned from Woman at War. For example, the film showcases perhaps the high end of effectiveness for a single saboteur. By acting in coordinated groups or securely linked cells, a larger number of people could be more effective. Additionally, the film shows the importance of building a culture of resistance. Halla is saved early on by a nearby farmer who detests the transmission lines and police crisscrossing the land his family has lived on for a thousand years. This element shows the importance of building a support network that can house, feed, transport, and otherwise support underground resistance—and won’t ask too many questions.
There is much to love about this film. Aesthetically, it is beautifully done. The music is superb. The Icelandic tundra, glaciers, rivers, hot springs, and stones are a presence all their own, and Halla inhabits this landscape throughout, repeatedly pressing her face into the thick moss as if into the embrace of a dear friend. She also demonstrates quite clearly that, in an asymmetric struggle, bushcrafts, physical fitness, and wilderness travel skills are a serious advantage for clandestine eco-resistance.
Woman at War bypasses American sexualization, casting a strong female lead acting on her own terms, without a hint of objectification. It even tackles prison well, showing that (to quote Mandela once again) “The challenge for every prisoner, particularly every political prisoner, is how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs.”
Ending a movie like this is hard. In reality, revolutionary work is likely to end with prison time, death, or international exile. But Woman at War closes deftly, in the same way it tackles tricky topics like morality, jobs, and family. Halla visits Ukraine to adopt a young girl, and on her return to the airport, is forced to carry her through a slowly-rising flood that has blocked the road. It is tranquil but daunting slow-moving emergency submerging the entire world. A fitting metaphor, then, for the theme of the entire film.
As I finish writing this review, spring is in full bloom. The birds are singing outside my small cabin in the Oregon woods. But I know that the slow-moving floods of climate change, species extinction, toxification, overpopulation, habitat destruction, and refugees are rising. Year by year, we are slipping into a nightmare. Woman at War is not exactly a template, but it is a great beginning point for a movement that could save us from the worst of what is coming, if only we are ready to listen.
—
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is the author of two books.
Editor’s note: this is an anonymous communiqué previously published on Philly Anti-Capitalist. The featured image is unrelated to this action.
Early last week, we made the two tractors that Energy Transfer Partners was using to construct the Mariner East 2 pipeline near Exton, PA inoperative by cutting their hoses and electrical wires, cutting off valve stems to deflate the tires, introducing sand into their systems, putting potatoes in the exhaust pipes, using contact cement to close off the machines’ panels and fuel tanks, and a variety of other mischievous improvised sabotage techniques.
We feel called to fight for the natural world and would be lazy to submit to the demise of the earth, animal and self by not fighting against its destruction by machines and corporations who seek to kill it for capitalist growth. It was surprisingly easy and brought us so much joy. We’ve read since that ETP has had to acknowledge the damage, which they are usually careful to cover up, and see that this wreck of a project could be seriously compromised by the proliferation of more actions like these.
For those restless, angry warriors out there, we hope you find similar happiness in destroying little by little the tools of this capitalist settler-colonial nation. Death to colonization and capitalism… Shout out to everyone out there still attacking in spite of repression and grief.
Have you heard the incredible news about Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, two activists who sabotaged the Dakota Access Pipeline? In early August, the two women admitted to committing multiple acts of eco-sabotage against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). They made their statement on video in front of the Iowa Utilities Board, talking about what they had done, reading their press release, and then started to tear down the sign of the Utilities Board.
The two women were arrested for that action, then released on bail. Their home has since been raided by the FBI and materials have been confiscated in an ongoing investigation. I highly recommend you read their press release. It’s fascinating.
These two are likely to be charged with serious crimes, and we urge you to follow their case for ways that you can support them.
One of the things that’s most important about their press release is in reference to a specific act of sabotage the two women carried in May 2017. This action was hidden from the public. At the time of the event, Energy Transfer Partners described it as an accident. They covered up the fact that the delay was due to sabotage.
There are certain situations in which it’s in a corporation’s or government’s best interest to disclose that there has been sabotage to drum up public opposition and outrage, invoke terrorism or whatever the latest political specter is in order to make people afraid, boost budgets, and allow the further curtailment of civil liberties.
However, there are other situations in which it’s in their best interest to hide what is going on—to not tell people about these attacks. Obviously, this was one of those circumstances. The thought process of managers at Energy Transfer Partners must have been something like this: “We don’t want people doing copycat actions, we don’t want people understanding that these tactics can be effective, that sabotage can be effective at stopping this pipeline.”
Two people alone made a huge difference using these tactics. They delayed the pipeline for months. That’s something that tens of thousands of people involved in the public Standing Rock protests were barely able to match. While nobody was ultimately able to stop the pipeline, the fact that two women with no training and almost no money were able to seriously damage and delay the pipeline is a testament to how effective sabotage can be.
The reason Jessica and Ruby came forward is that they wanted the truth to be known. To me, that’s very important. It’s inspiring. It points to the fact that there are likely many more of these actions happening than we know about. It’s not in the corporations’ best interest to tell us, because these stories of resistance are inspiring and they know that. This is a dangerous thing, and they know that.
Small forces of ecological commandos could reverse this trend by targeting the fundamental sources of power that are destroying the planet. We have seen examples of this. In Nigeria, commando forces have been fighting a guerrilla war of sabotage against Shell Oil Corporation for decades. At times, they have reduced oil output by more than 60%.
