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Reading Wednesday
Mar. 29th, 2023 07:02 am Just finished: How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. Well, RIP to the CSIS agent stuck with monitoring my social media now. I sure hope you like cat pictures.
This is the best possible chaser to the IPCC report (bold of you to think I have read the IPCC report—I can look at the headlines and extrapolate from this, as Elizabeth Sandifer so succinctly put it, "let us consider that we are fucked). This book is about continuing beyond that. At its heart are two questions: 1) Why has the environmentalist movement, the movement that stands against the destruction of all life on earth, the movement tasked with the most urgent of injustices, embraced pacifism? and 2) How do we move past climate despair?
These are both very good questions to ask. I like Malm a lot, even when I don't agree with him—he is probably one of the most concise, thoughtful writers on the climate crisis that I've encountered. In examining the first question, he looks at the history of the anti-blow-up-the-world movement and some of its major thinkers, saving some particular ire for Richard Hallam, who absolutely deserves it. He absolutely destroys the strategic pacifism argument with historical examples, and counsels sabotage. (As well as pointing out that sabotage still fits within a nonviolent framework—there are some examples of attacks against infrastructure that have resulted in deaths and injury, but practically none by environmentalists.) It's interesting to me that he, er, confesses to several things that are almost certainly crimes in this book.
The second question is actually more interesting to me (since, sorry to disappoint you CSIS agent, I am not personally engaging in acts of sabotage), because it goes to a very critical question of how you keep up a necessary fight when, as stated earlier, we are fucked. He draws on historical examples like the Warsaw Ghetto as precedent—all of those people knew they were going to die, but this doesn't render the fight meaningless or useless. Even, Malm argues, if we blow past the 1.5°C target, even if civilization falls and what's left of humanity gathers on the poles because they're the only liveable parts of the planet, do you want to tell your children that you resisted or that you acquiesced? If we are on track for 5°C, you can still stop it from being 6°C. Etc.
I do take issue with some of his assertions—I think he's unfair to Earth First! by putting them in the same category as organizations like ALF and ELF, which are ideological dead ends. Check out Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's double episode on Earth First! for more on that—it's very well-researched and I think at least Judi Bari's chapter was a good example of the actual thing that Malm is advocating here. I would—and I see why he didn't write about it—be interested in his opinion on the moral/pragmatic calculus of actual violence as opposed to sabotage. But it's a short book. Anyway, highly recommended.
Currently reading: Buffalo Is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel. We stan Vowel on this blog, so I am absolutely stoked that she has released an entire book of her short(er) stories. I haven't gotten that far yet—there are two fairly lengthy and detailed introductions, and the first story in the collection is quite long and includes a lot of footnotes. She's an imaginative and skilled writer, situating her stories in the tradition of Métis futurism and her community of origin, manitow-sakahikan (Lac Ste. Anne). The first story is about a Two-Spirit rougarou in an alternate 19th century solving a murder that was maybe committed by another rougarou, so already I'm very into it.
If I have one critique it's that the footnotes are a bit distracting to immersion. Everything is intricately researched, and her notes are fascinating but every time I have to keep clicking back and forth, I have to go back to read the sentence before for context. I'm not sure how else to get her research in, and I guess I could just read the entire story, but you can't throw a footnote in there and have me not read it, unfortunately. But if you are a normal person I suggest reading the story and then looking at the footnotes.
This is the best possible chaser to the IPCC report (bold of you to think I have read the IPCC report—I can look at the headlines and extrapolate from this, as Elizabeth Sandifer so succinctly put it, "let us consider that we are fucked). This book is about continuing beyond that. At its heart are two questions: 1) Why has the environmentalist movement, the movement that stands against the destruction of all life on earth, the movement tasked with the most urgent of injustices, embraced pacifism? and 2) How do we move past climate despair?
These are both very good questions to ask. I like Malm a lot, even when I don't agree with him—he is probably one of the most concise, thoughtful writers on the climate crisis that I've encountered. In examining the first question, he looks at the history of the anti-blow-up-the-world movement and some of its major thinkers, saving some particular ire for Richard Hallam, who absolutely deserves it. He absolutely destroys the strategic pacifism argument with historical examples, and counsels sabotage. (As well as pointing out that sabotage still fits within a nonviolent framework—there are some examples of attacks against infrastructure that have resulted in deaths and injury, but practically none by environmentalists.) It's interesting to me that he, er, confesses to several things that are almost certainly crimes in this book.
The second question is actually more interesting to me (since, sorry to disappoint you CSIS agent, I am not personally engaging in acts of sabotage), because it goes to a very critical question of how you keep up a necessary fight when, as stated earlier, we are fucked. He draws on historical examples like the Warsaw Ghetto as precedent—all of those people knew they were going to die, but this doesn't render the fight meaningless or useless. Even, Malm argues, if we blow past the 1.5°C target, even if civilization falls and what's left of humanity gathers on the poles because they're the only liveable parts of the planet, do you want to tell your children that you resisted or that you acquiesced? If we are on track for 5°C, you can still stop it from being 6°C. Etc.
I do take issue with some of his assertions—I think he's unfair to Earth First! by putting them in the same category as organizations like ALF and ELF, which are ideological dead ends. Check out Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's double episode on Earth First! for more on that—it's very well-researched and I think at least Judi Bari's chapter was a good example of the actual thing that Malm is advocating here. I would—and I see why he didn't write about it—be interested in his opinion on the moral/pragmatic calculus of actual violence as opposed to sabotage. But it's a short book. Anyway, highly recommended.
Currently reading: Buffalo Is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel. We stan Vowel on this blog, so I am absolutely stoked that she has released an entire book of her short(er) stories. I haven't gotten that far yet—there are two fairly lengthy and detailed introductions, and the first story in the collection is quite long and includes a lot of footnotes. She's an imaginative and skilled writer, situating her stories in the tradition of Métis futurism and her community of origin, manitow-sakahikan (Lac Ste. Anne). The first story is about a Two-Spirit rougarou in an alternate 19th century solving a murder that was maybe committed by another rougarou, so already I'm very into it.
If I have one critique it's that the footnotes are a bit distracting to immersion. Everything is intricately researched, and her notes are fascinating but every time I have to keep clicking back and forth, I have to go back to read the sentence before for context. I'm not sure how else to get her research in, and I guess I could just read the entire story, but you can't throw a footnote in there and have me not read it, unfortunately. But if you are a normal person I suggest reading the story and then looking at the footnotes.
