As the Glasgow climate conference begins, and the time we have to avert a climate crisis narrows, it is time to revisit successful First Nations campaigns against the fossil fuel industry.
Like the current fight to avert a climate catastrophe, these battles are good, old-fashioned, come-from-behind, David-versus-Goliath examples we can all learn from. The Jabiluka campaign is a good example.
In the late 1990s, a mining company, Energy Resources of Australia, was planning to expand its Kakadu uranium mine into Jabiluka, land belonging to Mirarr Traditional Owners in the Northern Territory. The adjacent Ranger Uranium mine had been operating for 20 years without Traditional Owners’ consent and against their wishes, causing long-term cultural and environmental destruction.
But the expansion of the mine ultimately failed, thanks to an extraordinary campaign by the Traditional Owners, led by Yvonne Margarula and a relative, the lead author of this article, Jacqui Katona (a Djok woman).
In recognition of our work, we shared the 1999 Goldman Environmental Prize, one of the most prestigious international grassroots environmental awards.
Yvonne Margarula and Jacqui Katona after accepting the Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots activism, Island Nations 1998.Provided by author.
The campaign included a huge on-site protest camp, shareholder action and significant overseas support (including from the European Parliament, US Congress and an expert committee to UNESCO). It also included a blockade of the mine site – one of the biggest blockades Australia had ever seen.
These are valuable lessons for those wanting to take decisive action against the fossil fuel industry. Here are six ways to learn from our experience:
1. Put pressure on the financial sector
Continuous pressure on companies in the financial sector (such as banks), which are complicit in the success of fossil fuel companies, can have an impact. This can be done by exposing their involvement with fossil fuels and pressuring them to be held accountable for these partnerships.
One of the most successful actions of the Jabiluka campaign was the coordination of protests at Westpac, which financed the mine’s owner, Energy Resources of Australia. Not only did protesters raise awareness about Westpac’s investment at local branches, they created bureaucratic chaos by opening and closing bank accounts.
This resulted in a corporate shift in Westpac towards better accountability on issues affecting First Nations people. Coordinated protests like this are an effective way to empower people to participate in positive action for change.
First Nations campaigns against mining and other fossil fuel companies show the single most important factor in successful protests is leadership by politically powerful organisations or alliances.
In the Jabiluka campaign, Katona and Margarula were successful in large part because of their insistence on a Mirrar-led campaign forming strong alliances with powerful unions, environmental groups and other national and international organisations.
Shareholders were then able to have some influence over corporate responsibility and accountability, including the appointment of a sustainable development manager. While the government ultimately amended the Corporations Act to make such actions more difficult, this nevertheless shows that creative direct action can be successful in holding corporations accountable.
4. Win over the right people
When Rio Tinto detonated 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge on the traditional land of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples last year, it was not only public outcry that led to the resignation of three senior executives, including the chief executive.
Katona led the Jabiluka campaign while a mother to two small children, juggling local work with international activism. She was jailed for trespassing on Aboriginal land. She was hospitalised with complications from lupus, which required a long recovery.
Be strategic about your participation in high-energy campaigns and find ways to support the efforts of key activists. But also know the fight against the fossil fuel industry takes more effort than just changing your social media profile picture.
There is no perfect time, or single solution, to campaigning for a better future. The power of people is a resource which often delivers inspiration to disrupt and needs to be nurtured.
6. Believe you can win
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have faced hundreds of years of colonisation, industrial desecration of their sacred lands, and destruction of their Country. However in many cases, they have won battles against the odds.
The Mirrar faced a discriminatory system which sidelined their interests in Kakadu for more than 20 years. But they continued their fight to protect Country, and ultimately succeeded in preventing Jabiluka’s expansion.
So take heart and don’t give up. This is a fight that can be won.
Editor’s note: From the 15th to the 22th of November, in different countries, the Glasgow Agreement is articulating mobilizations, protests and blocks against one of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world: Total.
The social alliance to take on global capitalism must be global, radical, popular, tactically, and strategically focused, while at the same time flexible and imaginative.
Is climate collapse close to being averted? How close are we to winning? Is the climate justice movement organized to win? Are current strategies and tactics enough? What else do we need to try and how fast? The Glasgow Agreement, People’s Climate Commitment, is a global platform of grassroots and social movements for climate justice. It is planning on going after French multinational Total simultaneously all around the world this November, in an action called Collapse Total, and organising climate justice caravans in all continents next Spring.
As fossil fuel investment and projects jump from country to country, as their destruction-ridden profit keeps on building on the collapse of the climate, tactics and strategies on the global scale must be tried.
The climate justice movement is pursuing the task of taking on the entire global fossil industry, that is, global capitalism. Yet, as it remains mostly a group of dispersed, uncoordinated, and loosely connected movements, how can this task become achievable? Fossil capitalism has its fingers everywhere, in each government, every press agency, every media outlet and network, in anything that money can buy. It articulates its strategies, coordinates its wars and dictates the policies that have been dooming us to climate collapse. They have known about climate change since the 1960’s. They have coordinated for decades to spread misinformation to mislead Humanity and cut the essential action to prevent climate chaos.
The climate justice movement needs a lot of imagination to break the mold of its own business as usual, like most social movements that have gotten used to normality, procedure, method and repetition. To overcome these challenges, the movement needs to permanently test new tactics and strategies.
Collapse Total is focusing on one of the many and influential tentacles of fossil fuel capitalism. From the 15th to the 22th of November, in different countries, the Glasgow Agreement is articulating mobilizations, protests and blocks against one of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world: Total. This French multinational is neck deep into promoting the climate collapse, with mass investments in new fossil fuel projects, oil and gas fields, pipelines, offshore drilling, fracking destruction, tar sands and the destruction of lives and the livelihoods of millions of indigenous communities, peasants and every landscape they set their eyes on. They have spent billions to make trillions. They have hired armies of lobbyists, mercenaries, and political campaigners to keep oil and gas flowing, in whichever situation. They have known about their impact on the climate since at least 1971, yet have always promoted denialism. They are the glowing example of the fossil fuel multinational, dooming us while hiring public relations’ experts. It has recently changed its name to Total Energies, changed its logo and announced a net zero target for 2050. Yet, Total it is planning to drill around fifty exploratory oil and gas wells this year alone (in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, Lebanon, Oman, USA, Bulgaria, Bolivia, two in Angola, two in Papua New-Guinea, two in Norway, two in Malaysia, two in Mexico, three in Cyprus, three in the UK, four in Brazil, four in Myanmar, six in Guyana and eight in Suriname).
Total is one of the biggest historical contributors to the climate crisis, with higher emissions than most countries in the world. With the pushback from climate protests in the last years, they have greenwashed themselves to try and look like something else, while pushing for EACOP, a new massive pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania, increasing the production oil and gas in war-devastated Iraq, prompting a military dictatorship in Myanmar or receiving full state protection in Northern Mozambique, while local communities are devastated by climate change and gas-related terrorism. They maintain their support for fracking in Vaca Muerta, Argentina, for tar sands in Canada and oil and gas all around. They never stopped. They never will. Unless they are forced to stop.
As fossil fuel investment and projects jump from country to country, as their destruction-ridden profit keeps on building on the collapse of the climate, tactics and strategies on the global scale must be tried.
Has a similar tactic to this been tried before? Shell Must Fall is probably the referential for going after a single company, with a strong focus on Royal Dutch Shell’s AGM in the Netherlands and its shareholders, with a focus on disrupting it to prevent the company from proceeding with its regular business by disrupting its administrative order. Collapse Total proposes to act in a broader sense, by going after Total’s infrastructures, headquarters, offices, banks and gas stations, with different tactics that fit local conditions.
This is, of course, only a small step, as there are dozens of other companies willing and able to take over Total’s place that need to be dismantled, and after this action, a thorough evaluation of its impact must be made. Will it be something to replicate, to adjust or to be written off the movement’s parafernalia of tools? Does it contribute to building up the movement and to weaken fossil capitalism? Only experience will provide the answer.
On the other hand, in the Spring of 2022, a great climate justice caravan will travel in different continents, crossing territories in the frontlines of the climate crisis and the climate justice struggles to directly connect to communities. Much like great historical political caravans—the Salt March, the Selma to Montgomery march, the World March of Women—this caravan will walk for hundreds of kilometers and talk to thousands of people, to bring the climate crisis and its connections to the capitalist system of destruction and oppression to the fore. It will signal top-emitting infrastructures in its path, pointing out the culprits for the current situation. It will look to broaden alliances, campaigns, connecting struggles and peoples to achieve an ever broader scope of action and a vision for the future.
The social alliance to take on global capitalism must be global, radical, popular, tactically and strategically focused, while at the same time flexible and imaginative. It must try, try and try until it finds the tools to win. It is quite an enormous task, to take on global capitalism, and it will need to be taken one step at a time, but there’s a deadline. We need to win before we are out of time.
The deep-sea may be vast and unexplored, but it is incredibly important. It encompasses 75% of the ocean’s volume and is the largest and least explored of Earth’s biomes. Some scientists believe that the deep sea and its water column may be the largest carbon sink on Earth. Plus, new species are still being found there, and sometimes, entirely new ecosystems are discovered.
A UN body called the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is responsible for governing and protecting the deep seabed on behalf of humankind as a whole. In practice, the ISA Secretariat routinely prioritizes the interests of pro-mining governments and companies over the protection of our fragile ecosystems.
The Republic of Nauru turned the deep-sea mining world on its head this summer when it invoked Article 15, colloquially known as the Trigger, starting a 2-year countdown on the finalization of mining regulations for polymetallic nodules in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
Deep-sea mining has been given the go-ahead to commence in two years, after the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru notified the UN body governing the nascent industry of plans to start mining.
The stakeholder consultation process is to provide the stakeholder community — citizens of the Republic of Nauru, scientists, government and non-governmental officials, industry representatives, and other interested members of the public — with the opportunity to discuss, review, comment, and guide revisions to the Nauru Ocean Resources Incorporated (NORI) Collector Test Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) received by the ISA. Stakeholder consultation is recommended by the ISA’s Legal and Technical Commission.
NORI (a wholly owned subsidiary of The Metals Company of Canada) Stakeholder Consultation Process concludes on Friday November 19, 2021
This is a call to action for people to SUBMIT comments on the Environmental Impact Statement for a Deep Sea Mining Test Collection. Exploratory mining is the first step towards exploitation of the deep sea. Until Nov 19th, we have the opportunity to submit comments on the Collector Test EIS, to show that there is widespread opposition to deep seabed mining. Please feel free to copy and paste the included comments into the entry fields within the NORI Collector Test consultation web page.
There are two categories: 1.General Comments 2. Specific Comments . So, for example, you can simply copy the ‘General Comments’, and paste them directly into the General Comments field.
1. Scroll down to the form under the heading “Participate in the Stakeholder Consultation Process & Submit Written Comments”.
2. In the “specific comments” boxes, include the page number and section that correspond to the responses.
3. Copy and paste the responses below as a guideline or use them as a template to write your own comments.
General Comments
In light of the already-substantial research around deep sea disturbances due to mechanical strain, the proposed NORI-D collector test to be conducted within the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), under the management of The Metals Company (TMC), should not be allowed to go any further.
The most notable, and comprehensive research to date being DISCOL (DIS-turbance and re-COL-onization experiment in a manganese nodule area of the deep South Pacific) conducted in 1989 by Hjalmar Thiel and his team of researchers. In 2015, 26 years later, scientists returned to the DISCOL site located within the Peru Basin, and discovered that little to no life had returned to baseline levels — including characteristic animals such as sponges, soft corals, and sea anemones, amongst many others. In the words of Thiel himself, “The disturbance is much stronger and lasting much longer than we ever would have thought.” Over a quarter of a century later, and still next to no life has returned to the area where the tests were conducted. It is clear that there is no feasible process which could in any way mitigate the kinds of disturbances created by the tests TMC wants to perform.
The Prototype Collector Vehicle (PCV) that will be used during NORI-D will, at the very least, totally disturb the top 1-10 cm of sediment on the sea floor in order to extract the polymetallic nodules. This incredibly invasive process will rip apart benthic communities that have taken thousands of years to develop. Possibly even more destructive are the two sediment plumes that will result both from the PCV’s articulation (rolling, tracking, turning, sucking, and depositing fine sediment and crushed nodules) and the return pipe from the Surface Support Vehicle (SSV) where the unwanted fine sediment, warmed seawater, and crushed nodules will be returned to a depth of 1200 meters. This agitated combination of silt and heavy metals will blanket, and coat countless organisms, preventing them from breathing, and eating. It will also block bioluminescent light that some use to attract prey and find mates. This is an unacceptable level of loss and disturbance, and the International Seabed Authority (ISA) must act unanimously to halt all such tests.
The ISA has the historic opportunity to fulfill its mandate of “ensuring the effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects that may arise from deep-sea-related activities.” Without question, the NORI-D collector test will be harmful, and more importantly catastrophic to the living communities of megafaunal, macrofaunal, meiofaunal, and microbial organisms that live in the NORI-D test area, and beyond. The campaign will not yield any further insight — the destructive, and long-lasting disturbances of polymetallic nodule collecting are unavoidable within the domain of seabed mining.
Indeed, even within the context of ALARP, or the mitigation of harms to ‘as-low-as-reasonably-possible,’ it would be hard to imagine a more devastating activity than seabed mining within the incredibly complex, and fragile ecosystem of the benthic-abyssal plains within the CCZ, and globally over any portion of the seabed.
Please act quickly to halt this test, and any subsequent proposals for such activities which will cause irreparable harm to the seabed and its living communities.
For the Specific Comments Section go to this link in Cryptpad:
This piece, by Paul Feather, explores what it means to be a citizen of system ruled by the machine, placing it in context of the recent elections that offers no real choice to the voters.
I voted today, even though I think it’s a crock of shit.
It’s easy enough and doesn’t hurt anything. At least not as far as I can tell. I took the sticker that proclaims, “I secured my vote,” from the smiling lady by the exit, but I didn’t post a selfie with the sticker to let everyone else know how easy that was, or how civic minded I am, or to remind them of their duty to democracy. Don’t get me wrong. I hope all y’all vote. Go team.
I won’t say that voting doesn’t matter. I’m sure it does. If nothing else, votes are expensive. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump and Clinton spent a combined 1.8 billion dollars on their campaigns with Clinton outspending Trump by nearly two to one. Since there were about 129 million votes cast for these two candidates, this comes to about $14/vote, (with Clinton paying $19/vote and Trump paying a little less than $10). Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, got about 4.5 million votes and only paid about $2.60/apiece for them, but he didn’t scrape up too many at that price, and his campaign spending was literally pennies to Trump and Clinton’s dollars. I’m sure there’s more to it than money, but not terribly much more. Votes are expensive, and the more of them you need the more they cost. Roughly speaking, I figure my vote for president’s worth about 15 bucks.
So by all means, go spend your vote, but can we stop pretending that it’s worth much more than dinner for two at a cheap Mexican joint? (Throw in the value of the down-ticket votes and you’ve earned a Miller Lite with your chile relleno.) Can we stop pretending that this is the most important election of our lifetimes? Can we stop pretending that we’ve got to “vote like our democracy and freedom are on the line?” I hear people saying things like this, and I don’t even know what it means. How do you vote like your freedom’s on the line? You vote or you don’t. You can’t do it extra hard so it counts double. Damn straight our democracy’s on the line, but it ain’t the line outside the precinct. Vote, but can we stop pretending?
I feel like this election is something out of the Salem witch trials…
when Puritan settlers would throw a woman in the lake to see if she sank or swam; if she didn’t drown, they burned her. Poor Lady Liberty’s on trial for devil worship. The blue team will drown her, the red team will burn her, and there’s no way out of this one. Go team.
It’s not really a fair metaphor, I know. I’m comparing Lady Liberty to some poor woman that the Puritans probably killed for a heinous crime like midwifery, herbalism, or refusing to suck the parson’s cock. Lady Liberty is not that blameless lass, and if we’re equally lost when we sink or swim, maybe we should admit to some dealings with the devil. Not you, of course. Nor me either, but the whole body politic of the USA—who will ostensibly choose a president next week—has sold its soul for sure.
That’s why we can’t tell what’s true anymore.
Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be a citizen of the USA, and maybe I’m glad for that because I’m not sure how I’d choose. There are some obvious benefits. It’s possible to live off reasonably well in this country of what other people throw away. That—or rather the general opulence it implies—is a very big deal. But there are costs as well. Perhaps I lean too heavily on metaphor when I say we have sold our collective soul, but the food we eat is grown on land that was stolen from people who now go hungry. I don’t drink the water that was poisoned in the manufacture of the computer I use to write these words, but other people do. To be a citizen of the USA means that other people in other places will bear the material cost of our consumption, our decisions, and our lives.
We can imagine that the food we eat, our energy, our clothing, every need or whim that we fulfill finds provenance in a sort of materialist soul.
Without that food, we die. Without that warmth or clothing, we can’t survive. But we don’t fulfill these needs alone. The days of rugged self-sufficiency are over. We fulfill these needs as participants in the body politic. We will not eat without the functioning of a whole production and distribution system involving untold numbers of people—and very often sitting at the bottom on stolen land. What is the word for the totality of these systems that keep us alive both individually and collectively? This is literally the source of our being; it existed before we were born; and so I will call it our soul.
This soul of ours is not nice to look at, so mostly we don’t. We’d rather pretend we don’t have a soul, or that the source of our existence is abstract and ethereal. Fast for a week and get back to me on that one. I think when our soul is ugly—when the material systems that form the source of our existence are exploitative, unjust, and criminal—then we tend to turn away from that. We cover our soul up with distractions and stories we’d rather hear, but in doing this we deny the source of our existence. In the end—and this is starting to look like an ending—we lose our bearings. We can’t tell what’s true anymore.
When this happens, I suspect there is no way out. We will sink, or we will burn.
If, by chance, an individual attempts to come to terms with her soul, she may find the drama of presidential elections to be less exciting. Not because their outcomes don’t directly affect quality of life for a great many people. I’m sure they do, so go vote. But if one places her full attention upon our soul—again speaking of the whole and material systems that are the source of our lives—she will be disappointed to find that no one else is talking about this. She will not be able to play with either team.
The other thing this individual will notice (if she hadn’t already) is that neither side is willing to look at the truth about who we are and how we got here, and so both sides are locked inside of a strange simulacrum of the world that has no soul. In that world, the only thing that matters is power, and the only way to get votes is to buy them.
The soul functions as a bedrock of reality…
for without it we are dead—and in its absence nothing is real, nothing is sacred; we find ourselves in a post-truth world where the only thing that matters is power.
A soulful vision perceives our electoral process to be a sham, not only because that vision is entirely unrepresented, but because the process itself isn’t sacred. There is no integrity, no trust; it’s not even possible to cheat, because the only real rule—the only sacred thing—is power. It’s not cheating as long as you win, and deep down everyone knows this. We may be close to the breaking point—where the absence of any inviolable law forces one or both contenders to claim the presidency on terms of power alone. We won’t be able to pretend anymore, and I don’t expect that’ll be pretty.
I suspect the only way out is this: to turn the consciousness of the body politic to the real and material systems that support our lives. To illuminate the soul. We can fight about two healthcare systems that are equally devoid of connection to the source of our medicine, or we can bring people to that source. We can vote for one or another plan to keep anonymously packaged food on indistinguishable grocery shelves, or we can anchor our souls in the black dirt of home. This collective shift may not be wholly possible until our souls become so hollow that they collapse and people die—it may be that this is already happening—but incremental shifts toward soulful connection are possible and even inevitable.
You may (and certainly should) attempt to recover your soul on your own, but I’ll warn you that this attempt will be only partially successful. There may once have been a time when there were enough commons left that one could escape into them and live on chestnuts and game, but the commons are now fenced, and the chestnuts are gone. You will continue to live alongside and even inside the soulless simulacrum that we have co-created.
If this election has stirred up a brief moment of civic-mindedness, I hope to leverage that moment not to remind you to #vote, but to question our concept of citizenship. Materially, what are we citizens of except of this massive machine that keeps us alive—that moves bananas and timber and textiles from wherever they’re produced to wherever someone needs them to live? And although most of our consumption goes far beyond mere survival, the conditions of our survival must be met. It is the machine that meets them. You and I are citizens of the machine. Look at it. Look at it squarely. Do not flinch. That machine is your soul. That machine is your center.
Let us stop pretending.
Note: Editor’s introduction to the piece has been edited.
How bad is our current trajectory? Looking back through geologic history, there are a handful of examples of abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse, periods when runaway feedback systems changed the planet so suddenly that biomes didn’t have time to adapt. These events were always accompanied by mass death. About 55 million years ago the Earth experienced an era of rapid ecosystem collapse called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which was most likely triggered by a sudden increase in atmospheric CO2 and a cascade of self reinforcing climate feedback systems; this is eerily similar to what we’re witnessing unfold today. One shocking difference between today’s events and the PETM is the rate of change. It’s estimated that the PETM released about 0.24 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, over the course of 20,000 to 50,000 years. By contrast, humans are now releasing over 37 gigatonnes of CO2 per year (~150 times more). Compared to the PETM, what’s unfolding today is more akin to an explosion, which means Earth’s ecosystems will have dramatically less time to adapt. Any reasonable person would conclude that we’re now in the midst of a global mass extinction, and that the only rational response is to cease all industrial scale ecosystem destruction in order to mitigate the harm.
Unfortunately, humans have developed an extreme addiction to industrialism, an addiction so severe that many people prefer to retreat into delusion rather than face the consequences of withdrawal. A common excuse for continuing the addiction is that “ceasing industrial-scale exploitation of Earth’s ecosystems would result in a lot of people dying.” While this is technically true, it blatantly ignores the obvious conclusion that continuing industrial scale ecological exploitation will result in essentially all people dying, alongside the vast majority of other species. These ridiculous mental gymnastics would be painful for a healthy person, but they are commonplace among addicts — after all, immense cognitive dissonance is less excruciating than consciously acknowledging that you are cannibalising your children’s futures in exchange for modern concenviences. How then are we supposed to mitigate ecological destruction in the midst of a planet ruled by irrational addicts? It seems reasonable to rule out the possibility of doing so via consensus. What about mass mobilisation against industrialism? Given the fact that any meaningful action would result in a significant decline in the quality of life of every “civilised” culture on the planet, mass mobilisation seems unlikely; most of these people will be easily distracted by delusions and false solutions, both of which will be sold at rapidly inflating prices. So that leaves us with asymetric and unpopular solutions — after all, the majority of the world is addicted and addicts become upset when you take away their drug.
Deep Green Resistance approaches the problem from this perspective, that any viable strategies must be executable by small numbers of people and must not require public support.
