How to Blow Up a Pipeline-Fast Shipping

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Property will cost us the earth

Thescience on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades ofappeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, risingseas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakesso high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest?

In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur ofSUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for theclimate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecologicalcollapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction tostop–with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroyingits tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.

Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred,from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movementagainst apartheid and for women’s suffrage, Malm argues that thestrategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been theonly route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.