Modern society — industrial civilization — is built on violence.
This violence goes largely unnoticed. When it is noticed, it’s often seen a series of isolated incidents, rather than a fundamental part of the dominant culture.
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Here is an average morning inside of this culture.
First, you wake up on top of a foam mattress offgassing toxic VOCs that will not biodegrade in 10,000 years. You sit up and put on your clothes — all with tags reading “Bangladesh” and “Puerto Rico” and “Dominican Republic.” These clothes were made by virtual slaves.
You walk downstairs and fill a glass with water from the tap. The water comes from a local river that was dammed 127 years ago. Ever since, native species in the watershed have been in decline. You drink the water.
You pour yourself a bowl of cereal. The cereal is made of wheat and corn grown in what was once the tallgrass prairie of the eastern Great Plains. Ninety nine percent of that habitat – millions of acres – was plowed and utterly destroyed to grow those crops. The soil is gone now; your meal is only possible through fossil fuel fertilizers.
You add milk; it comes from a factory farm nearby, where cattle are packed in next to each other in squalor and pumped full of antibiotics and rBGH (genetically modified growth hormone) to increase production. The cows are in pain; their imprisonment is fouling the land around them. The cereal tastes good.
It’s almost time for work, so you walk down to your car. You’re somewhat environmentally conscious, so you’ve bought an electric car. It makes you feel a lot better. The car has 1000 pounds of lithium-ion batteries under the hood. The lithium for those batteries was strip-mined in the Peruvian desert; the pollution and land destroyed by the mine has devastated local people’s traditional livelihoods. You get inside the car and start the engine. It’s a push-button startup system; there is a fancy LCD screen inside. It’s modern and sleek; you pull away from the curb.
You drive on paved streets to your destination. Under those streets are indigenous burial grounds. There used to be thick old-growth forest here; now it’s a trendy, up-and-coming neighborhood. There are a few run-down houses here and there; the poor people who used to live in this neighborhood and are being forced to move, many after generations here; it’s just the latest set of refugees that have walked through this place.
You pass a police officer. The precursor of the modern police force was the slave patrol in the antebellum South. Many people live in constant fear of them.
It’s cold outside, but inside the car you’re warm and happy. You’re listening to the radio; the transmission towers are responsible for a few hundred thousand bird deaths a year. The radio is on a news station. The news person is talking about the latest bombing campaign your government is conducting. It’s taking place far away; you don’t think about it too much.
You’ve arrived at work. You work at a hospital. The hospital is on a hill. Before the concrete and buildings, there was a meadow here. It was full of flowers in the spring. Insects came from a long way away to eat from the flowers. It made the flowers happy. Many people walked through the meadow in those days. There was a good view from there. Sometimes lovers would walk there to be alone. That all changed when the settlers came with their earth-movers and road-builders.
You park your car, then walk inside. The sun is shining. It’s a nice day. You pass the gardeners working outside, spraying herbicide on the weeds. It wouldn’t do to have weeds. The gardeners have brown skin. They came from Mexico. They used to grow their own food and sell the rest in the village down the road, but after the free trade agreements opened them up to competing with Cargill, they couldn’t stay anymore. They became refugees and crossed the border. Technically, they’re in the country illegally. The land they’re on was part of Mexico before the war.
Inside the hospital, there are people waiting to be seen for appointments. They’re reading magazines. Most the magazines have pictures of women in them. The women aren’t wearing many clothes. They’re being used to sell products. A girl is reading one of the magazines. She looks about 10 years old. The leading cause of death for girls a few years older than her is eating disorders.
Another woman is hoping to have an abortion. She is only 19 years old. The hospital has Catholic roots; she won’t be allowed that level of control over her body and her future.
You walk past them, past examination rooms and surgical rooms and recovery rooms. There are receptacles everywhere for gloves, needles, and other medical waste. All the garbage from this hospital is shipped to an incinerator; it’s illegal to send it to a landfill. The incinerator is located in the middle of a poor neighborhood two states away. The smoke that comes out of its smokestack contains some of the most toxic substances known to science. There is a school a block away from the incinerator. They keep their windows closed and keep the kids inside when the smoke is rising from the facility. It doesn’t help much.
You get to your office. You touch the door as you walk in. It’s made of dense chipboard. The wood in the chipboard used to be an old-growth boreal forest. Formaldehyde and other chemical glues hold it together. Like the light switch, the computer, the examination table, the chairs, the desk, the floor tiles, and the light fixtures, the paint on the door is made from oil. The oil used in these specific light fixtures and floor tiles came from Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and Texas and Canada.
You sit down and get to work.
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This was a very partial description of the violence in modern society. Make no mistake: this is a war.
When we are honest about the level of violence in this culture, not resisting becomes a sickening thought.
But false solutions abound; almost all of the solutions put forth to solve these problems of violence continue it in another form, or simply displace it to another area of the world or a new type of impact.
True solutions undermine the ability of industrial civilization to continue its destruction. A longtime military maxim has been that victory requires removing the ability or will of the enemy to continue their fight. This is a situation of planetary self-defense. All options are on the table, from revolutionary law-making to strategic non-violence to coordinated sabotage of industrial infrastructure.
If you’re contemplating entering the fight, remember what Andrea Dworkin famously wrote: “Resist, do not comply.”
22 years ago on this very continent was brought to the negotiating table the crisis of climate change. Many evasive proposals, claims to turn the crisis into an opportunity for business, denials, omissions and grand tragedies embody the climate crisis in the territories. A balance of 22 years of indifference and cynicism.
Governments and transnational interests continue to invest in the destruction of forests, rivers, oceans, jungles, mashlands, mountains and deserts; living spaces that end up being sacrificed in the name of “development” and “progress”.
In these 22 years, we are far from believing that the solution will come from governments; that the market will contribute to environmental conservation, or that the commodification of nature will protect the climate.
Our view is the way of indigenous communities that have known to preserved ecosystems, in farming communities who struggle to protect their lands, in women who work caringly in the rivers, in the children that keep alive their capacity of fascination with nature, and in the inhabitants of large cities who know that they have been robbed from nature since birth. Our guardians.
Us, the very ones who we are, have come here to convince you (and convince ourselves of the certainty that the world we want already exists), as there are colors of the earth, the suns that shine us, and the ways of our guardians that defend the territories around the globe.
This is why we call to find ourselves on the road to the COP20, to join our histories, our views, and our ways that demand climate justice under these guiding principles:
1. Maintain the fossil fuels underground is not only a priority to halting environmental devastation, but to end one of the evils that has so hurt and changed the pace of the climate in very few decades.
2. Ban the financialization of forests and the commodification of the functions of nature, as they are not a solutions to reduce emissions of carbon gases into the atmosphere; strategies which represent false solutions that have increased the destruction of ecosystems, the breakdown of communitarian social fabric and organization.
3. Water, as a common good can no longer be conceived as a commodity. Dams and hydroelectric dams are part of the mining and energy industries. The production of hydroelectric power is what keeps widening the gap of environmental devastation.
The aggressiveness with which the occupation of territories intends to expand itself does not depend on the political color of governments, but rather is linked to the perpetuation of the capitalist system under the same logic of accumulation at the expense of nature and communities.
Therefore, it becomes more urgent to find one another, Us.
They are the ones who will find the solutions- It’s us, the unadaptaded, the unadaptable climate change- It is us that can and must contain the war against nature.
Over five hundred Indigenous Peoples from Brazil and throughout the world gathered at Kari-Oca II, an encampment seated at the foot of a mountain near Rio Centro, to sign a declaration demanding respect for Indigenous Peoples’ role in maintaining a stable world environment, and condemning the dominant economic approach toward ecology, development, human rights and the rights of Mother Earth.
“We see the goals of UNCSD Rio+20, the “Green Economy”, and its premise that the world can only ‘save’ nature by commodifying its life-giving and life-sustaining capacities as a continuation of the colonialism that Indigenous Peoples and our Mother Earth have faced and resisted for 520 years”, the declaration states.
Hundreds of Indigenous representatives plan to march from Kari-Oca on Wednesday, June 20, to deliver the declaration to world leaders at the opening of the Rio+20 Summit.
“This document is a wind that will enter the doors of Rio+20 to open the minds of the politicians, to show them that we are not merely the Indigenous Peoples that live in their countries, we are sons and daughters of the Mother Earth”, said Marcos Terrena, an indigenous leader from Brazil, and one of the founders of Kari Oca.
“We are not ‘interested parties,’ we are essential parties”, said Terrena. “We are committed to the life of the earth and future generations. This declaration sends a message to the politicians that the economy has to change, to embrace social, cultural and spiritual values, not just economic value.”
The Kari Oca II encampment, a cultural and spiritual center located in a ramshackle neighborhood not far from the site of the UN negotitations, is a historic follow-up to the Kari Oca I, which gathered at the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The Kari-Oca conference, and the mobilization of Indigenous Peoples around the first UN Earth Summit, marked a significant step forward for an international movement for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the important role that Indigenous Peoples play in conservation and sustainable development.
But, according to leaders at Kari-Oca II, the agreements made twenty years ago have been largely ignored by world leaders, to the world’s peril.
“The Kari-Oca II declaration is not just a paper. It is a sacred document that encompasses our struggles worldwide. It makes clear that we will walk the path of our ancestors,” said Windel Bolinget, of the Igorot people in the Philippines.
The signing ceremony took place in the early evening outdoors amidst smoke, drums, and dancing, with hundreds of celebrants in ritual dress, and in a spirit both solemn and jubilant. The document was blessed in ceremony by spiritual elders before signing.
Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, from North America said, “Goose bumps ran up my body as I observed hundreds of brothers and sisters from around the world standing in silence acknowledging the spiritual significance of this historical moment.”
“This is far more than a political declaration,” Goldtooth said.
“We are happy tonight because our sacred word is written and agreed to by peoples from all over the world,” said Mario Santi of Ecuador.
“The importance of this declaration is in the sacred recognition that we cannot sell the rights of our Mother Earth, and we cannot accept false solutions that manipulate nature for profit,” said Berenice Sanchez, Nahua from Mexico.
Editor’s note: “There is an ambitious plan to ‘protect’ Northern California’s Plumas National Forest from wildfires. Their plans were aimed at making communities safer and forest stands more ‘resilient’ to drought, insects, and other climate-driven disturbances. Community protection was the first priority, forest resilience the second. The urgency of imminent wildfire caused the Plumas Forest officials to pare down the environmental analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Instead of conducting full environmental impact statements, with scrutiny of cumulative impacts and years-long public comment periods, officials used less rigorous environmental assessments. Work on at least 70,000 acres was fast-tracked under emergency declarations, which eliminate public objections. NEPA processes that would normally take as long as seven years took an average of about 20 months. Forest Service officials have held few public meetings and refused to provide basic details of the project with reporters.”
Why the forests needs dead trees. Dead trees are not “wood waste.” They provide vital energy and habitat for the whole forest ecosystem. Those who want to remove dead trees from the forests are depriving the forest of what it needs to live and thrive. Here’s how that works.
Are the tools to blame?
But a primary contention of active management skeptics like DellaSala is that applying the same tools that caused the problems in the first place is illogical.
“That’s circular reasoning,” DellaSala says. “You can’t ignore the consequences, the collateral damages to ecosystems, the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere from logging to contain natural disturbances.”
He and his colleagues question the broad application of these tools. They say that thinning, for example, is often used as an excuse to take out larger, more valuable trees for commercial logging, when these trees should be left behind because of their importance in biodiversity and carbon storage. Old-growth trees not only anchor ecosystems, but are often the most resistant to climate-driven shocks like fire, drought and beetle infestations.
“When we do active management, we choose which trees die, which ones remain, and we probably have it mostly wrong,” says Diana Six, a forest entomologist and professor at the University of Montana who collaborated on two recent articles with DellaSala. Removing resistant trees means that their genes won’t filter down to the next generation, she adds, potentially setting up even greater vulnerabilities later on.
“Natural fires are as essential as sun and rain in fire-adapted forests, but as humans encroach on wild spaces, fear, arrogance, and greed have shaped the way that people view these regenerative events and given rise to misinformation that threatens whole ecosystems as well as humanity’s chances of overcoming the climate crisis.
Scientist and activist Chad T. Hanson explains how natural alarm over wildfire has been marshaled to advance corporate and political agendas, notably those of the logging industry. He also shows that, in stark contrast to the fear-driven narrative around these events, contemporary research has demonstrated that forests in the United States, North America, and around the world have a significant deficit of fire. Forest fires, including the largest ones, can create extraordinarily important and rich wildlife habitats as long as they are not subjected to post-fire logging.
The federal government has recently rolled back protections on more than half of our national forests, opening the door to widespread logging. These industrial operations replace biodiverse forests with flammable tree plantations, often sprayed with glyphosate, which kills soil microbes and dries out the land. The result? Drier forests, more intense fires, and greater threats to people, homes, wildlife and the ecosystems that sustain us.”
Proforestation: The case for leaving trees alone. How do you save a rainforest?
Leave it alone. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
In 1994, for example, the Forest Service issued a study finding that the agency’s successful elimination of wildfires for more than a century was actually killing the sequoia groves and threatening their survival. The old “monarch” sequoias were slowly dying off, and new sequoia seedlings and saplings were almost completely absent, resulting in a “massive failure of sequoia reproduction.” The study found that, in order to maintain stable or increasing populations, giant sequoias depend specifically on high-intensity fire in patches, noting that the “giant sequoia is what is known as a ‘pioneer species,’ requiring canopy-destroying disturbance to complete its life cycle.”
“While some ponderosa pine stands historically burned at frequent intervals that reduced fuels, and today have higher density and are burning more intensely than in the past, this does not apply to most plant communities in the West. Indeed, it doesn’t even apply to many ponderosa pine stands.
Nearly all the fire-dependent plant communities in the West, including aspen, sagebrush, juniper, fir, spruce, hemlocks, cedars, and even many pines, have very long intervals between wildfires of decades to centuries. They are not “overly dense” and naturally accumulate biomass over time, thus burning as “intense, large wildfires.” Even if it were practical, fire suppression has had little influence on these plant communities.
In other words, most wildfires in the West are burning at absolutely normal conditions under their ecological regimes.”
The ultimate cause of our large fires is climate warming. Solutions proposed by agencies and politicians like thinning forests and even prescribed burning ultimately fails when there are extreme fire weather conditions. In some cases, this kind of “active forest management” can even enhance fire spread. For instance, one review article found that protected landscapes where logging is prohibited, like parks and wilderness, tend to have lower severity blazes compared to lands where logging and other “active management” is permitted.
The myth and reality of Indian burning landscape management
Logging doesn’t prevent wildfires, but Trump is trying it anyway. The Agriculture Department is opening more than 112 million acres of federal forests to logging in a misguided bid to prevent fires and boost timber production.
Forest management approaches promoted as “resilience,” “restoration,” “fuel reduction,” and “forest health” often degrade natural systems and reduce carbon stocks.
Over the past few years, many decisionmakers and forest managers have increasingly called for “active management” of natural forests — human intervention via mechanical thinning and other forms of commercial logging and road building — in response to increasing wildfires, beetle outbreaks, and intense storms. Many activists oppose these methods, saying they do more harm than good. For instance, actions that seek to suppress naturally occurring wildfires may make those fires more intense when they happen.
But active management activities have scaled up in response to economic drivers, misinformation on natural disturbance processes, and more climate-driven extreme events that trigger large and fast-moving fires.
“Active management” via mechanical thinning and overburning has type-converted this dry pine forest in the Santa Fe watershed to a weed-infested, overventilated savannah where remaining trees are exposed to blow down (Photo: D. DellaSala)We have published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and books on the impacts of active management on natural disturbance processes in forests. As active management begins to take on an even bigger role, conservation groups frequently call upon us to submit testimony, legal declarations, and science support. Meanwhile our key findings are often neglected by well-intended researchers who promote widespread active management but do not fully acknowledge the dramatic and often cumulative ecosystem consequences.
The active management activities we are most concerned about include:
Clearcut logging of live and dead patches of trees, especially over large areas.
Mechanical thinning of large trees via commercial removal.
Too-frequent burning of forest understories, especially of logging slash in dense piles that cook soil horizons and encourage weeds.
Post-disturbance logging that removes biological legacies (e.g., large live and dead trees) and damages natural processes and soils.
Construction of major road networks that alter forest-hydrological connections, some of which are supposed to act as firebreaks.
Active management impacts depend on the intensity of removals, frequency and duration of impacts, and scale (site, landscape, ecoregion, biome) that often combine with the natural disturbance background in exceeding disturbance thresholds that degrade ecological integrity. Such practices have been widely accepted on at least three continents — North America, Australia, and Europe — where our research has been exposing severe impacts.
What Are the Ecological Costs of Active Management?
As we’ve shown in our recentstudies, scaling up these types of activities comes with severe costs to natural ecosystems. The impacts of active management can even approach the effects of deforestation as they ramp up in application and intensity.
In the United States, this is especially apparent in relation to the recent executive orders that President Donald Trump announced under the rubric of a national timber emergency, cloaked in wildfire prevention. Even some progressive states, like California, have taken drastic measures to log vast areas with minimal environmental reviews in response to wildfires. Canada and European nations also have been driving up the active management rhetoric.
We used a series of case studies that demonstrated substantial negative and prolonged impacts of active management on a broad suite of ecological integrity indicators (including soil integrity, species richness, forest intactness, and carbon stocks) relative to more natural areas (reference sites). Active management, we found, is particularly consequential in high conservation value forests such as old-growth forests, intact watersheds, and complex early seral forests (“snag forests”) that follow severe natural disturbances but are rich in biodiversity. Such forests collectively play a pivotal role in maintaining ecological integrity while serving as natural climate solutions.
Natural disturbances are part of the necessary cycle of renewal and aging that has occurred in forests for millennia. There are well-documented patterns of forest rejuvenation following natural disturbances, even the severe ones, although we acknowledge that climate change is interacting with logging in a way that’s altering forest dynamics in places where forests may not come back on their own.
Natural disturbances create a pulse of biological legacies that sustain forest ecosystems for decades, including dead trees, surviving shrubs, fallen logs, and other structures that are associated with complex early seral forests and are not replicated by forest management. Many species, including some rare and threatened ones, are dependent on these legacies. The post-disturbance environment places the pioneering stage following a disturbance on a trajectory to old growth and then back again to the early stage when naturally re-disturbed.
We describe this process as “circular succession.” Active management can disrupt the natural flow of forest trajectories by breaking the cycle between rejuvenation and aging of forests such that forests never become old again (as in industrially logged landscapes).
Repeated thinning operations also remove key elements of stand structure such as large trees that are important habitats for a wide range of forest-dependent species. Often the large trees are relatively fire resistant and contain important adaptations such as epicormic branching near the crowns that allow the tree to survive and post-disturbance sprouting.
Our studies in Australian and western North American forests demonstrate that activities like commercial logging of large, old trees that are intended to reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires may have the opposite effect and increase fire severity and fire spread.
Similarly, there are cases where too-frequent prescribed burns on a site can alter the ecological condition of forest ecosystems in ways that, in the event of a subsequent wildfire, lead to significantly impaired forest regeneration and ecosystem type conversions to savannahs. This ostensibly is already underway in low productivity dry forests of the southern Rockies, which face a hotter, drier, and more frequent fire environment from natural and prescribed fires that together are ostensibly retarding forest renewal in places.
Active management may also increase the risk of high-severity wildfire by creating drier conditions that shift fuel types and fuel distributions, increasing fine fuels that dry quickly, while over-ventilating forests from the unravelling of intact canopies that otherwise buffer forests from high wind speeds associated with fast moving flames (as in the photo above).
Similarly, the construction of roads and firebreaks (chronic and cumulative disturbances) fragment landscapes and wildlife populations, paving the way for invasive species, and increasing the risk of human-caused ignitions (such as arson or accidental burns).
Impacts like these highlight the importance of understanding the overall disturbance burden in an area that accumulates from the combination of large tree logging, over-burning, livestock grazing, off-road vehicles, and road building, in addition the natural disturbances running in the background. Disturbance burden is a key issue that we highlighted in our recent research paper that is often neglected in active management circles.
An additional problem with active management is that tree removal or retention based on forestry prescriptions, particularly old growth or young trees establishing after disturbance, may reduce adaptation potential that would otherwise occur via natural selection that favors surviving trees better suited to the novel disturbance regimes resulting from climate change and insect outbreaks.
Simply put, foresters do not consider the genetic adaptations that are so crucial to forest persistence over time.
When Is Active Management OK to Use?
We acknowledge there will most certainly be cases where active management is a necessary part of ecological restoration practices that seek to improve ecological integrity and follow the internationally accepted precautionary principle (do no harm to native ecosystems).
Some examples include the control of invasive species that have colonized natural forests; removal of livestock and feral animals; replanting forests with native species where there has been natural regeneration failure or ecosystem type shifts underway; obliterating roads to increase connectivity and hydrological functions; upgrading culverts to handle storm surge; and reintroducing extirpated and keystone species (such as beavers).
However, other kinds of active management — like commercial thinning in high conservation value forests — may inadvertently accelerate degradation of these critical ecosystems with perverse impacts on biodiversity and carbon stocks. And while there are certainly cases where light-touch thinning (below-canopy, noncommercial) or prescribed fire alone can reduce high severity fire effects, the efficacy of tree removal in a changing climate is dependent on many factors, including extreme fire weather that is increasingly overwhelming treatment efficacy.
What’s Needed to Avoid Degradation?
Our precautionary approach to active management also underscores the significance of completing protection efforts that set aside large, representative protected areas (such as 30×30 and 50×50 campaigns) which, at a minimum, can serve as reference areas to gauge the efficacy and impacts of active management.
As we state in our research, this can be done using standardized metrics to assess the degree of degradation in comparison to reference sites along a continuum of relative loss. However, it must be understood that a complete assessment of active management on high conservation value forests, particularly attempts to recreate the later stages of succession, may not become realized for decades, if not centuries. Importantly, in some areas, reference conditions free of industrial activities and fire suppression may no longer exist and thus semi-natural areas may have to suffice as the reference for restoration.
We suggest that decisionmakers and managers invest in research that expands the understanding of natural disturbance regimes in forests, the effects of active management on ecological integrity (ecological restoration vs degradation), and that supports adaptive management strategies that are consistent with ecological integrity and conservation biology principles.
The bottom line: Active management needs a proper cost-benefit analysis to minimize trade-offs, lest the treatments may be much worse than the problems they seek to resolve. Our research daylights the expanding active management footprint while creating science support for decision-makers to choose more prudently on behalf of maintaining or restoring integrity and for activists to push back when policy is inconsistent with conservation science principles.
Editor’s note: “Protest alone, disconnected from more substantive action, is akin to screaming in the wind. Protest is not resistance. Protest, whether conscious to it or not, often reinforces the belief that the system is fundamentally sound, and that with reform it can resolve the issue that sparked the protest. We must confront the truth: our system of governance is fundamentally flawed. It is corrupt, hierarchical, unfair, and thoroughly infiltrated by corporate power and special interests.”
“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” said Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law.
What do we do when protests and elections fail?
People deserve to be included in the processes of making political decisions about the places where they live. People deserve equal access to economic resources and opportunities. People deserve to have a say in environmental decisions that affect the health and well-being of their communities. People deserve to be able to govern their places in a way that maintains healthy, long-term relationships among humans, other living things, and the physical environment.
It is the final week of February 2024, and the City of London, the capital’s ancient financial district, where corporations cluster like woodland trees, is teeming with climate activists. For three days they march the streets, block the entrances, and infiltrate the lobbies of major insurance companies. They act as part of a global campaign by an alliance of groups, and their aim is simple: stop the insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel infrastructure. This protest will end up showcasing both the pruning of one type of climate activism, and the blossoming of another.
The first activists to be arrested are a five-strong Extinction Rebellion troupe dressed like 1940s washerwomen, complete with hair curlers, heavy makeup and rubber gloves. Known as the Dirty Scrubbers, their plan is to performatively clean some corporate entrances, and dye some fake money green in their ‘greenwashing machine’ – an old washing machine on bike wheels. The action encapsulates much of what made Extinction Rebellion a global phenomenon – fun, theatrical, eye-catching activism that still has a bit of bite. The police commander is informed by protest organisers and gives the performance the go ahead. But half an hour later, the police on the street have other ideas. Thirty officers surround the Dirty Scrubbers as they wheel their greenwashing machine into the protest zone, and arrest them for conspiring to cause criminal damage. Only some are handcuffed, but all are loaded into vans and held in police cells until the evening. Their greenwashing machine is impounded.
On the third and final day of the protest, in the early hours of the night, a previously unknown group makes its debut. Hooded activists wielding paint-filled fire extinguishers spray the entrances of three insurers and flee the scene before the police arrive. Rather than getting cleaned by the Dirty Scrubbers, the skyscrapers end up stained blood-red by anonymous members of Shut The System (STS).
The Dirty Scrubbers are led into police vans, City of London, February 27, 2024. Photo: Extinction Rebellion UK
In their online manifesto (now taken down), Shut The System promise to “shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy” by waging an escalating “campaign of sabotage.” True to their word, their sabotage escalates. When they return to the streets four months later, this time to target Barclays bank in a joint action with Palestine Action, they don’t just spray-paint the bank’s glass fronted buildings, they smash them too. More than 20 branches are temporarily shut down across the UK to pressure the bank to divest from fossil fuels and Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer. Weeks later, they return to the City of London to deface and smash insurance company windows.
Then in January of this year, Shut The System try a new, more sophisticated kind of sabotage – cutting fibre optics cables. First to be forced offline is a collection of climate-denying lobby groups housed a stone’s throw from the British Parliament. Two weeks later, Shut The System target those major insurers again, this time severing cables of firms not just in the City of London but also in Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield.
Most recently, they target the private homes of three Barclays executives. On the morning of the bank’s AGM, its CEO, global head of sustainable finance, and president find their luxury properties spray-painted with messages demanding an end to fossil fuel investments. Cables are also cut at Barclaycard’s UK headquarters, and more than 20 bank branches have their door locks and ATMs superglued shut.
The ‘campaign of sabotage’ quickly bears fruit. A week after its entrance is stained blood-red, the insurance company Probitas declares it will not insure two ‘carbon bomb’ projects singled out by protesters (the East African Crude Oil Pipeline and a proposed coal mine in North West England). Days after Shut The System and Palestine Action shatter Barclays bank branches, its CEO writes an op-ed in the Guardian renouncing the damage and voicing concern about the “overall suffering” in the Middle East. Four months later, the bank has sold all of its shares in Elbit Systems.
A long-term member of Shut The System, who required total anonymity to be interviewed, was happy to outline the strategy behind their ‘campaign of sabotage’: “We want to give the climate movement more teeth by training up people and getting them into these sorts of actions, mobilising further across Europe and the world,” they say. “So when fossil fuel companies are presented with demands by protesters, they can expect the tactics we provide. There’s power in that. These industries will know that we’re escalating, know that we care about this, and know that we’re not going away.”
In adopting and spreading sabotage, Shut The System doesn’t see itself as breaking away from the climate movement’s sustained adherence to non-violence. My contact instantly references the author of the manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline to explain: “I’m in complete agreement with Andreas Malm. Violence can be done to people, but not to buildings or infrastructure. We will not harm individuals.” Asked if they’d be willing to cut the cables of the home of, say, an oil company CEO, they don’t hesitate; “personally speaking, that’s within my limits. These people are killing people.”
But the use of sabotage does mark STS apart from the climate movement in other ways. The tactic necessitates a radically different culture to earlier organisations like Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil (JSO), one where the need for security, and the fear of infiltration, reshapes nearly everything else. Reaching a member of STS for interview required multiple approaches. Once contact was made, Signal had to be jettisoned for a more anonymous messaging app. The days of open meetings in community halls and welcoming spokespeople is long gone. It begs the question, if you want to be a part of STS, how do you join? “We grow through people who know people, reaching out through a chain of trust,” says my contact. To become a member, you must be vouched for by at least two current members of STS, and members with deep roots in the climate movement are encouraged to scour their contacts for candidates. “We often find that people we’ve reached out to have been seeking a route in for a long time.”
This chain of trust spreads right across the UK, but it is a patchwork quilt, not a uniform fabric. Nobody can know everybody in STS, and group meetings are deliberately avoided. “Someone could have their phone taken away by police or put on remand. One person’s security failure could take out a lot of people” says my contact. Instead, a central team of organisers will chat with local leaders to agree on targets and dates and times, as well as pass on tactical knowhow. When it comes to deciding the specifics of an action – who takes which target, who adopts what tactic – the group operate like a take-away restaurant. “A long menu of possible options is sent around, and local cells then decide what they want to do based on location recces and capacity.”
A Barclays bank branch in Bristol after a joint nationwide action by STS and Palestine Action, June 10, 2024. Photo: Martin Booth
Shut The System is a year old, and the menu system appears to be working. But it does raise issues around power distribution and decision-making. A typical STS activist will not know who writes the menu, nor have a say over what dishes are made available. Their experience of STS will rarely if ever breach the limits of their local cell. It’s a long way from the open strategy meetings of XR, or the large social soup nights of JSO, where power is mitigated and community fostered as much as possible. My contact accepts the criticism: “There are no elections right now for the central team, but questions are being asked about this. And we do want a system of feedback, but security is just so important.”
Questions are also being asked in the central team about money. Namely, how can supporters chip in so STS members can focus on action research and development full-time. “Applying for funding through the normal climate movement routes is very difficult,” confirms my source. “So far we’ve raised small amounts, mostly on the backs of individuals. We have plans afoot for many more types of sabotage, but the scope to try different things is dependent on finding funding.” Asked for possible solutions, my source can only say, “we’re working on it.”
The artistic side of the climate movement, so intrinsic to XR and offshoots like the Dirty Scrubbers, has also been sacrificed on the altar of security. The central team have little interest in branding, messaging, or media. “We do have a logo on Instagram,” points out my contact. “But our visual and social media content is minimal – a recognition that being in any kind of contact with our group holds risk. It’s not a philosophy, just a result of priorities. Our circle’s central concern is security.”
If STS is the vanguard of a new phase in the UK’s climate movement, this phase isn’t as accessible, transparent or fun as what came before. But my contact is sure that this self-described “darker, more serious wing” is needed. With a climate denier in the White House, Big Oil ripping up pledges to decarbonise, the planet heating faster than predicted, and climate scientists warning that cataclysmic tipping points could happen as soon as this year, it’s not surprising that some ecoactivists are ready to embrace more militant tactics. But when I ask my contact what drew them to sabotage, the worsening status quo, and the apparent failure of traditional protest tactics to reverse it, weren’t the only factors.
My contact first got involved in ecoactivism after the Covid pandemic, when a friend invited them to a local XR meeting. Impressed by the confident activists they found there, they started taking part in actions. As they spent more time in the movement, they learned about the global struggle for environmental justice, including brutal events like the Ogoni 9, where nine Nigerian activists opposing Shell’s drilling of the Niger delta were framed for murder and hanged in 1995. The UK-based oil giant was implicated in both their false charges and a long campaign of violence in the region. These corporate crimes fundamentally shifted how my contact saw XR’s activism: “What we were doing was engaging the public, but it started to feel too performative, like an illusion. We had this messaging of crisis, of lives being at risk, of needing to change right now! But we weren’t willing to really threaten the institutions most responsible.”
I put the criticism to Richard Ecclestone, an XR spokesperson and former police inspector. He is sympathetic: “I understand why they expressed those views. I’m horrified by the behaviour of companies like Shell, Barclays, Perenco (an Anglo-French oil company accused of ongoing ecocide in the DRC).” Ecclestone is also sympathetic towards their use of sabotage: “Personally, I don’t believe action against property is violent when you consider the harm being done by these companies to people and planet. A tiny amount of damage to their operations could be justified. That’s my take. Others within the movement will think different. We’re a broad church.”
But this doesn’t mean Ecclestone will be joining Shut The System anytime soon, nor that he would welcome their tactics in future XR campaigns. “Our actions need to stick to our principles and values, and one of those is that we are accountable,” he says, meaning XR activists must accept the repercussions of their actions, including arrest. “If there’s no firewall between accountable and nonaccountable actions, we expose our people to extra risk, and that will hurt marginalised groups who for one reason or another can’t take on that risk. We have to do our best to be a home for everyone in the UK who wants to express their right to protest.”
City of London insurance firms are again visited by STS overnight, July 24, 2024. Photo: Shut The System
Another factor that steered my STS contact towards unaccountable sabotage was the increasingly draconian punishments the British state was dishing out to peaceful protesters. “Just Stop Oil’s campaign of blocking roads and disrupting sports events really boosted the signal – put the words just-stop-oil in every mind in the country,” they enthuse. “But the prosecutions and prison sentences have been ridiculous. If I’m going to go down and do time, I want to cause the maximum amount of disruption in the time I have, and that means covert actions.”
Since the rise of groups like XR and JSO, the UK government has been introducing increasingly repressive anti-protest laws, at least some of which were drafted by an oil-funded lobby group targeted by STS cable-cutters. The latest legislation started being enforced by police last year. As a result, unprecedented numbers of nonviolent protesters, mostly members of JSO, have been either imprisoned for years or paralysed by bail conditions for years as they wait for the overwhelmed justice system to put them on trial. The new laws have been used for even mildly disruptive actions like slow-marching, and when activists do have their week in court, the new legislation allows judges to strip them of all legal defences and ban them from mentioning climate change to juries.
After nearly 200 prison sentences, thousands of court cases, and the government adopting their core demand to stop new oil and gas, JSO has ended its three-year campaign. Their final action, a celebratory march through central London, took place last month. Mel Carrington, a JSO spokesperson, is bullish about the group’s achievements: “We won our demand, and we made the need to end new oil and gas a national talking point.” But she also acknowledges that the group failed to mobilise enough people to continue, and that the state crackdown on protest played its part in that: “To do street level actions you need a broad base of support. Since 2022, fewer and fewer people have mobilised, even for modest actions like slow marching. That’s the trend.”
While part of JSO will remain to support its many activists still trapped in the justice system, the bulk of the organisation will now metamorphosise into something new. And while Carrington is in dialogue with groups like Shut The System, and open-minded about their tactics, she is confident that JSO’s successor organisation will not adopt them. Again, the key issue with STS is their lack of accountability, and how that undermines JSO’s understanding of nonviolence. “Nonviolence uses disruption to create moments of tension and an emotional response, and accountability is an essential part of that,” she says. “As we don’t hide our faces or identities, we show that we are willing to stand up for what we believe in and to accept the legal consequences.” By ensuring actions are public displays of human vulnerability and courageous defiance, accountability is also a major catalyst for press attention. “Disruption, arrests and imprisonment are typically what drives our media coverage” continues Carrington.
While JSO and XR are both firmly wedded to accountability, they have very different takes on the virtues of disruption. On New Year’s Eve of 2022, XR renounced public disruption as a primary tactic, and started to prioritise attendance over arrests to stem waning participation post-pandemic. This led to ‘The Big One’ a few months later, a four-day rebellion outside the British parliament that was carefully marshalled by XR to minimise risk and maximise participation. And while The Big One did draw huge crowds, media interest was threadbare, the government ignored it, and it failed to match the impact of previous rebellions. Or as Carrington puts it: “XR got 90,000 onto the streets, but no one cared because it wasn’t challenging anything.”
Ecclestone gently refutes the idea that no one cared about The Big One, noting how XR collaborated with more than 200 organisations for the event, and how much hard work went into forging that grand alliance behind the scenes. For him, media coverage is not the only way to engage more of the population, and XR has no plans right now to go back to disrupting the public. “XR has remained consistent over the years. Our principles and values haven’t changed. We’ve always tried to be inclusive and accessible, and a home for everyone in the UK.”
What has changed for Ecclestone is police strategy. “In the 1990s, when I was policing protests against live animal exports, we had no interest in arresting the activists, or punishing them for blocking the trucks. We let them express their right to protest, and let the trucks get through with a minimum of fuss,” he says. “This new legislation is a way for police to abdicate their responsibility to enable peaceful protest. If you extinguish people’s right to protest, they’ll go to Shut The System to take it out on perpetrators directly rather than trying to persuade politicians.”
Although my STS contact will not be drawn into details, the group have big plans for this year, and they will not be alone in bringing sabotage to British streets. In February, another new climate group, Sabotage Oil for Survival, kicked off their campaign by drilling into the tyres of over 100 gas-guzzling SUVs across three Land Rover dealerships. Palestine Action will also continue to share knowledge and collaborate with Shut The System, and although there is no formal union between the two organisations, my contact describes the pro-Palestinian network as their “biggest inspiration.”
As for what this sabotage-filled future might mean for the rest of the climate movement, my STS contact focuses on the positives. They cite a recent academic study showing the “radical flank effect” of JSO, where that group’s disruptive actions made the moderate campaign of Friends of the Earth more popular. With global warming already exceeding 1.5°C, the Paris Agreement now a roadmap for a bygone era, and even the sober risk analysts of the insurance industry now warning that four billions lives could be lost by 2050, the belief that only moderate means can divert us from disaster feels increasingly delusional. If the climate movement adds sabotage to its arsenal, and breaking glass ends up breaking the political impasse, such actions should be seen not as sneaky sabotage, but heroic self-defence.
Berlin Blackout Attack On Industrial Park
It was “by no means our intention” to cut power to households, says communiqué, but to “turn off the juice to the military-industrial complex”
Anarchists have taken responsibility for a major power outage in southeast Berlin early Tuesday, after two high-voltage pylons were set on fire in Johannisthal, Treptow-Köpenick.
The attack, which began around 3.30am according to police, cut electricity to some 43,000 households and 3,000 businesses. Entire areas were left without power, public transport was paralysed, traffic lights went dark, and mobile police units with loudspeaker vans were deployed to inform residents.
The state security division of the Berlin criminal police has taken over the investigation. A police spokesperson said arson was suspected and that a political motive “could not be ruled out”.
Later, a lengthy statement appeared on Indymedia in which a group of anarchists claimed the action, which they say targeted Adlershof technology park. The authors apologised to local residents for the blackout in private homes, saying this was “by no means our intention”, but described the collateral damage as “acceptable compared with the destruction of nature and the often deadly subjugation of people” caused by the targeted industries.
The communiqué singled out several companies, including Atos, Jenoptik, Siemens, and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), accusing them of supplying militaries, enabling border surveillance and fuelling environmental destruction. “Their well-sounding slogans of innovation, sustainability and progress are nothing more than a manoeuvre on the battlefield of discourse, to cover up that they are actually building instruments that bring death and destruction”, the statement declared.
Tuesday’s fire is the most significant infrastructure sabotage in Berlin since a 2024 pylon attack cut power to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Grünheide.
In recent weeks there have also been attacks on vehicles and businesses linked to the landlord of Rigaer 94, a left-radical housing project which faces multiple court cases and eviction proceedings this month.
