This Changes Everything (48 page)

As far as checkpoints go, I’ve seen worse. In post-invasion Iraq, everyone had to submit to full pat-downs in order to get in and out of any vaguely official building. Once on the way in and out of Gaza, we were scanned eight different ways and interrogated at length by both the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas. What’s strange about what
is happening on this dirt road is that we are not in a war zone, at least not officially. Nor is this a military regime, or an occupied territory, or any other place you might expect to be held and interrogated at length without cause. This is a public road in Greece, a democratic state belonging to the European Union. Moreover this particular road is in Halkidiki, a world-renowned tourist destination
that attracts many thousands of visitors every year, drawn to the peninsula’s stunning combination of sandy beaches, turquoise waters, olive groves, and old-growth forests filled with four-hundred-year-old beech and oak trees and dotted with waterfalls.

So what’s up with all the riot police? The barbed wire? The surveillance cameras strapped to tree branches?

What’s up is
that this area is no longer a Greek vacationland, though the tourists still crowd the white-washed resorts and oceanfront tavernas, with their blue-checked tablecloths and floors sticky with ouzo. This is an outpost of a territory some have taken to calling “Blockadia.” Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing
frequency and intensity wherever ex
tractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.

What unites these increasingly interconnected pockets of resistance is the sheer ambition of the mining and fossil fuel companies: the fact that in their quest for high-priced commodities and higher-risk “unconventional” fuels, they are
pushing relentlessly into countless new territories, regardless of the impact on the local ecology (in particular, local water systems), as well as the fact that many of the industrial activities in question have neither been adequately tested nor regulated, yet have already shown themselves to be extraordinarily accident-prone.

What unites Blockadia too is the fact the people at the forefront—packing
local council meetings, marching in capital cities, being hauled off in police vans, even putting their bodies between the earth-movers and earth—do not look much like your typical activist, nor do the people in one Blockadia site resemble those in another. Rather, they each look like the places where they live, and they look like everyone: the local shop owners, the university professors,
the high school students, the grandmothers. (In the quaint seaside Greek village of Ierissos, with its red roofs and lively beach promenade, when an anti-mining rally is called, the owners of the tavernas have to wait tables themselves because their entire staffs are off at the demos.)

Resistance to high-risk extreme extraction is building a global, grassroots, and broad-based network the likes
of which the environmental movement has rarely seen. And perhaps this phenomenon shouldn’t even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival—the health of the water, air, and soil. In the process, these
place-based stands are stopping real climate crimes in progress.

Seeing those successes, as well as the failures of top-down environmentalism, many young people concerned about climate change are taking a pass on the slick green groups and the big U.N. summits. Instead, they are flocking to the barricades of Blockadia. This is more than a change in strategy; it’s a fundamental change in perspective.
The collective response to the climate crisis is changing from something that primarily takes place in
closed-door policy and lobbying meetings into something alive and unpredictable and very much in the streets (and mountains, and farmers’ fields, and forests).

Unlike so many of their predecessors, who’ve spent years imagining the climate crisis through the astronaut’s eye view, these activists
have dropped the model globes and are getting lower-case earth under their nails once again. As Scott Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: “People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment
movement has broken with Washington’s embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks.”
³
And it has taken the extractive industries, so accustomed to calling the shots, entirely by surprise: suddenly, no major new project, no matter how seemingly routine, is a done deal.

In the Skouries forest near Ierissos where our van was stopped, the
catalyst was a plan by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold to clear-cut a large swath of old-growth forest and reengineer the local water system in order to build a massive open-pit gold and copper mine, along with a processing plant, and a large underground mine.
⁴
We were pulled over in a part of the forest that will be leveled to make way for a large dam and tailings pond, to be filled
with liquid waste from the mining operation. It was like visiting someone who had just been given six months to live.

Many of the people who reside in the villages nearby, who depend on this mountain for freshwater, are adamantly opposed to the mine. They fear for the health of their children and livestock, and are convinced that such a large-scale, toxic industrial operation has no place in
a region highly dependent on tourism, fishing, and farming. Locals have expressed their opposition through every means they can think of. In a vacation community like this, that can make for odd juxtapositions: militant marches past miniature amusement parks and heated late night political meetings in thatched-roof bars that specialize in blender drinks. Or a local cheese maker, the pride of the village
for his
Guinness Book of World Records
largest ever goat cheese, arrested and held in pretrial detention for weeks. Based on circumstantial evidence, the cheese maker and other villagers were sus
pects in an incident in which mining trucks and bulldozers were torched by masked intruders.
^I
5

Despite its remote location, the fate of the Skouries forest is a matter of intense preoccupation for the
entire country. It is debated in the national parliament and on evening talk shows. For Greece’s huge progressive movement, it is something of a cause célèbre: urban activists in Thessaloniki and Athens organize mass demonstrations and travel to the woods for action days and fundraising concerts. “Save Skouries” graffiti can be seen all over the country and the official opposition party, the left-wing
Syriza, has pledged that, if elected, it will cancel the mine as one of its first acts in power.

The governing, austerity-enforcing coalition, on the other hand, has also seized on Skouries as a symbol. Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras has announced that the Eldorado mine will go ahead “at all costs,” such is the importance of protecting “foreign investment in the country.” Invoking Greece’s
ongoing economic troubles, his coalition has claimed that building the mine, despite the local opposition, is critical to sending a signal to world markets that the country is open for business. That will allow the nation to rapidly move ahead with a slate of other, highly controversial extractive projects currently in the pipeline: drilling for oil and gas in the Aegean and Ionian seas; new coal
plants in the north; opening up previously protected beaches to large-scale development; and multiple other mining projects. As one prominent commentator put it, “This is the type of project that the country needs to overcome the economic crisis.”
⁶

Because of these national stakes, the state has unleashed a level of repression against the anti-mine movement that is unprecedented in Greece since
the dark days of dictatorship. The forest has been transformed into a battle zone, with rubber bullets reportedly fired and tear gas so thick it caused older residents to collapse.
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And of course the checkpoints, which are staggered along all the roads where heavy construction equipment has moved in.

But in this outpost of Blockadia, the police aren’t the only ones with
checkpoints: In Ierissos,
local residents set up checkpoints at each entrance to their village after over two hundred fully armed riot police marched through the town’s narrow streets firing tear gas canisters in all directions; one exploded in the schoolyard, causing children to choke in class.
⁸
To make sure they are never taken by surprise like this again, the checkpoints are staffed by volunteers around the clock, and
when police vehicles are spotted someone runs to the church and rings the bell. In moments the streets are flooded with chanting villagers.

Similar scenes, more reminiscent of civil war than political protest, are unfolding in countless other pieces of contested land around the world, all of which make up Blockadia’s multiplying front lines. About eight hundred kilometers to the north of the
Greek standoff, the farming village of Pungesti, Romania, was gearing up for a showdown against Chevron and its plans to launch the country’s first shale gas exploration well.
⁹
In the fall of 2013, farmers built a protest camp in a field, carted in supplies that could hold them for weeks, dug a latrine, and vowed to prevent Chevron from drilling.

As in Greece, the response from the state was
shockingly militarized, especially in such a pastoral environment. An army of riot police with shields and batons charged through the farm fields attacking peaceful demonstrators, several of whom were beaten bloody and taken away in ambulances. At one point angry villagers dismantled the fence protecting Chevron’s operation, sparking more reprisals. In the village itself, riot police lined the streets
like “a kind of occupying army,” according to an eyewitness. Meanwhile, the roads into town were bisected with police checkpoints and a travel ban was in force, which conveniently prevented media from entering the conflict zone and even reportedly blocked residents from grazing their cattle. For their part, villagers explained that they had no choice but to stop an extraction activity that they
were convinced posed a grave threat to their livelihoods. “We live on agriculture here,” one local reasoned. “We need clear water. What will our cattle drink if the water gets spoiled?”
¹⁰

Blockadia also stretches into multiple resource hot spots in Canada, my
home country. For instance, in October 2013—the same time that Pungesti was in the news—a remarkably similar standoff was playing out in
the province of New Brunswick, on land claimed by the Elsipogtog First Nation, a Mi’kmaq community whose roots in what is now eastern Canada go back some ten thousand years. The people of Elsipogtog were leading a blockade against SWN Resources, the Canadian subsidiary of a Texas-based company, as it tried to conduct seismic testing ahead of a possible fracking operation. The land in question has
not been handed over by war or treaty and Canada’s highest court has upheld the Mi’kmaq’s right to continue to access the natural resources of those lands and waters—rights the protesters say would be rendered meaningless if the territory becomes poisoned by fracking toxins.
¹¹

The previous June, members of the First Nation had announced the lighting of a “sacred fire,” a ceremonial bonfire that
would burn continuously for days, and invited non-Native Canadians to join them in blockading the gas company’s trucks. Many did, and for months demonstrators camped near the seismic testing area, blocking roads and equipment as hand drums pounded out traditional songs. On several occasions, trucks were prevented from working, and at one point a Mi’kmaq woman strapped herself to a pile of seismic
testing gear to prevent it from being moved.

The conflict had been mostly peaceful but then on October 17, acting on an injunction filed by the company, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police moved in to clear the road. Once again, a rural landscape was turned into a war zone: more than a hundred police officers—some armed with sniper rifles and accompanied by attack dogs—fired beanbag rounds into
the crowd, along with streams of pepper spray and hoses. Elders and children were attacked and dozens were arrested, including the elected chief of the Elsipogtog First Nation. Some demonstrators responded by attacking police vehicles and by the end of the day, five cop cars and one unmarked van had burned. “Native shale-gas protest erupts in violence,” read a typical headline.
¹²

Blockadia has
popped up, too, in multiple spots in the British countryside, where opponents of the U.K. government’s “dash for gas” have used a range of creative tactics to disrupt industry activities, from protest picnics blockading the road to a fracking drill site in the tiny hamlet of Balcombe,
West Sussex, to twenty-one activists shutting down a gas power station that towers over the abandoned historical
village of West Burton and its beautiful river, the “silver” Trent, as Shakespeare describes it in
Henry IV
. After a daring climb, the group set up camp for more than a week atop two ninety-meter-high water cooling towers, making production impossible (the company was forced to drop a £5-million lawsuit in the face of public pressure). More recently, activists blocked the entrance to a fracking
test site near the city of Manchester with a giant wind turbine blade laid on its side.
¹³

Blockadia was also aboard the
Arctic Sunrise,
when thirty Greenpeace activists staged a protest in the Russian Arctic to draw attention to the dangers of the rush to drill under the melting ice. Armed Coast Guard officers rappelled onto the vessel from a helicopter, storming it commando-style, and the activists
were thrown in jail for two months.
¹⁴
Originally facing charges of piracy, which carry sentences of ten to fifteen years, the international activists were all eventually freed and granted amnesty after the Russian government was shamed by a huge international campaign, which included not just demonstrations in at least forty-nine countries but pressure from numerous heads of state and eleven Nobel
Peace Prize winners (not to mention Paul McCartney).