Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Andreas Malm, a climate activist and senior lecturer at Lund University, in Sweden, studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism. With the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow rapidly approaching—it begins on October 31st—Malm tells David Remnick that he believes environmentalists should not place too much faith in talks or treaties of this kind. Instead, he insists that the climate movement rethinks its roots in nonviolence. His book is provocatively titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” though it is not exactly an instruction manual. Malm advocates for “intelligent sabotage” of fossil-fuel infrastructure to prevent more carbon from being emitted in the atmosphere. “I am in favor of destroying machines, property—not harming people. That’s a very important distinction,” he tells Remnick. Plus: Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker’s newest staff writer, introduces David Remnick to some notable works off the syllabus of a class she is teaching. It’s called “Writing the Unspeakable,” about the literature of trauma and atrocity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.4	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The United Nations Climate Meeting in Glasgow,
0:15.8	which starts on October 31st, is described as the most important since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015.
0:24.2	We could see major policy announcements from the Biden administration or governments from around the world.
0:30.5	But the summer we've just had, with its appalling wildfires and its record floods,
0:37.2	provides ample evidence that the effects of climate
0:39.8	change are already here, and they're catastrophic. And frankly, nothing that governments are likely
0:46.3	to do this year will be enough to reverse those trends. Andre's mom is a professor at Lund University
0:52.3	in Sweden. He studies the relationship between climate
0:55.7	change and capitalism, and he advocates for far more drastic action that we've seen so far.
1:02.7	His recent book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is a bit more nuanced than the title suggests,
1:07.3	but at its core, he really does want environmental activists to rethink their
1:12.8	commitment to nonviolence and embrace tactics of sabotage. I spoke with Andreas Maum last week.
1:20.9	Andres, you've been a climate activist now for a long time, and in 2007, you were part of a
1:26.8	Swedish group that started deflating the tires on
1:30.9	SUVs. Tell me about that. What was the impulse and how did it work? Yeah, so what we did
1:38.0	was we went through rich neighborhoods and picked out SUVs. This was in the early career of SUVs when they were still remarkable on streets,
1:48.9	before they had become completely ubiquitous.
1:51.7	And it's very easy to deflate the tires of a car.
1:56.4	You just unscrew the valve and you insert a little gravelvel or a piece of stone or something like that
2:01.0	and you know you screw the vault back on and then the air will be out of the tire in a couple of
2:06.6	hours. So this was not property destruction. It didn't damage anything. It created an inconvenience
	...

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