Ecosabotage

by Liam Campbell Humanity has a long history of environmental activism, likely extending far beyond the reaches of recorded history. It’s easy to imagine warring tribes of indigenous peoples struggling against exploitative and excessively greedy neighbours. Competing tribes probably used violence to prevent each other from overconsuming fisheries, harvestable plants, and driving game to extinction. These actions maintained equilibrium within the broader ecosystem and allowed the indigenous humans to survive indefinitely. Fulfilling these obligations to nature would not have been easy; people would have experienced more frequent hunger, higher rates of mortality, and for frequent incidents of violence. Most of these cultures had warrior classes whose obligations often included ritualised violence against competing groups, though rarely did conflict escalate into total war. ...

By Max Wilbert / Featured image: an oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia, Planet Labs, CC BA-SA 4.0 On Saturday, September 14th, a “suicide drone” attack struck the Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqayq, Saudi Arabia. The drones were destroyed in the attack, but at this time it is not believed that the operators were exposed or harmed in any way. Abqaiq is the largest oil facility in the world, with the capacity to process 7% of global oil supplies. Before the attack it was refining around 6.8 million barrels of oil per day. The attack is believed to have reduced Saudi Oil production by 50 percent, or 6 million barrels per day. That’s equivalent to the national usage of India and Australia combined, or more than 1/3rd of the United States oil consumption. ...

Featured Image: thousands of acres of Pinyon-Juniper forest bulldozed by the BLM in Nevada / by Max Wilbert / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. This video is an interview between him and Deep Green Resistance co-founder and author Derrick Jensen. They discuss Ketcham’s new book " This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West." It’s the product of ten years of research and travel across the public lands of the West. ...

By S.O. Dear readers, I am one of the researchers on the Underground Action Calendar. I really love it. I can’t help but smile when I read of efforts to try to destroy parts of the infrastructure of civilization. Around the world individuals are burning, bombing, dismantling and sabotaging telephone towers, electrical stations, pipelines, mines, communication cables, cyber networks and more! But there is a problem in my research efforts at this time and I need your help. Specifically, there seem to be fewer and fewer publications of the incidents (action items) that I need for the calendar. I think that this problem is so pronounced now due to the current political climate in the U.S. where I live. ...

Editors note: sabotage is a key tactic for asymmetrical conflicts, such as the struggle to defend the planet from capitalism and industrial civilization. This material is excerpted from a paper written by U.S. Air Force Captain Howard L. Douthit III. You can read the full paper on Archive.org. The Use and Effectiveness of Sabotage as a Means of Unconventional Warfare — an Historical Perspective from World War I Through Vietnam By USAF Captain Howard L. Douthit III ...

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. ...

By Max Wilbert 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. ...

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. ...

Introduction Perhaps the single most important aspect of our work as aboveground organizers and activists is to promote and normalize militant, underground resistance against industrial civilization. There is a lot of other important work that we do as well—organizing alternative institutions, landbase restoration, and aboveground political work to dismantle dominant power structures—but ultimately, civilization won’t be stopped (and we won’t be successful) without coordinated and strategic underground action. Working to promote and normalize militancy is incredibly important for aboveground individuals and organizations, because it prepares and tends the soil from which such action will spring. Without this support—a culture of resistance that embraces, celebrates, and promotes underground action—it is much more difficult for underground groups and networks to become established and be effective. ...

by Norris Thomlinson / Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i Puget Sound Anarchists and It’s Going Down have reported on four recent incidents of simple sabotage against rail operations. Using copper wire to signal track blockage (as depicted in a video on how to block trains), actionists have executed cheap and low-risk attacks to temporarily halt: November 27: trains around Oakland, California November 30: trains near Medford, Oregon December 5: coal, oil, lumber, and chemical trains on the Columbia River December 9: coal trains in Nebraska The Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy of Deep Green Resistance aims for cascading systems failure to shut down industrial destruction for good. Though these acts of sabotage are unlikely to cause more than minor inefficiencies in rail transport, they offer more return on investment than even the most successful aboveground actions. ...