AGENDA
- No office hours today, no class on Monday, Happy Thanksgiving!
- Ecosabotage
What can I do about environmental problems?
- Change my own behavior
- Work toward collective solutions ("activism")
Types of activism--which are ethical?
Blowing up pipelines..................................................voting for green candidates
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Ecosabotage--destructive or obstructive action to achieve environmental goals
Example--deflating tires in Boston
Types of activism
- Legal activism
- supporting/becoming a green candidate
- joining environmental organization
- participating in legal demonstrations
- boycotts
- civil disobedience
- disobeying laws to achieve change
- civil means both non-military and "with civility"
- example: blocking traffic
- Uncivil disobedience
- disobeying laws to achieve change
- uncivil
- obstructive (e.g. shouting down a meeting)
- destructive (against property).
- violent (against persons)
- Ecosabotage
- uncivil disobedience
- stops harm to environment
- "direct action" -- tree sit-in, tire deflating, Sea Shepherd stopping whaling ships
- Terrorism--random violence against civilians designed to terrorize population
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up A Pipeline --
- Swedish professor of ecology
- participated in similar action in Stockholm (later in book)
His argument--
- Climate change activists like Extinction Rebellion (XR) use civil disobedience but reject ecosabotage and other property crimes.
- Pacifism isn't ethically or strategically required
- Property crimes have been a tactic of many successful protest movements
- The climate change movement is not different from these movements--not less important or less urgent, for example. THEREFORE
- Climate change activists should not limit themselves to civil disobedience.
How would you respond to this argument? Is environmentalism different from the other protest movements, so that property crimes are less justifiable in this case?
Examples of protest movements--
- Suffragetttes (p. 41): London, beginning of 20th century--used property crimes as tactic to win vote for women (they split from the Suffragists, who used peaceful means)-- breaking windows, arson, throwing pepper at people. Came to an end with WWI.
- Abolitionism in the US
- Civil Rights movement--Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X, peaceful protest plus riots
- Gandhi's movement for Indian independence from Britain--rejected violence against the British, but not against fighting with the British in WWI (p. 43)
- ANC and Nelson Mandela fighting apartheid in South Africa--mostly peaceful, but also "Spear of the Nation"