This Changes Everything (49 page)

The spirit of Blockadia can be seen even in the most repressive parts of China, where herders in Inner Mongolia have rebelled against plans to turn their fossil fuel–rich region into the country’s “energy base.” “When it’s windy, we get covered in coal dust because it’s an open mine. And the water level keeps dropping every year,” herder Wang
Wenlin told the
Los Angeles Times
, adding, “There’s really no point living here anymore.” With courageous actions that have left several demonstrators dead outside the mines and blockades of coal trucks, locals have staged rolling protests around the region and have been met with ferocious state repression.
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It’s partly due to this kind of internal opposition to coal mining that China imports
increasing amounts of coal from abroad. But many of the places where its coal comes from are in the throes of Blockadia-style uprisings of their own. For instance, in New South Wales, Australia, opposition to new coal mining operations grows more serious and sustained by the month. Beginning in August 2012, a coalition of groups established what they call the “first blockade camp of a coal mine
in Australia’s history,”
where for a year and a half (and counting) activists have chained themselves to various entrances of the Maules Creek project—the largest mine under construction in the country, which along with others in the area is set to decimate up to half of the 7,500-hectare (18,500 acre) Leard State Forest and to wield a greenhouse gas footprint representing more than 5 percent
of Australia’s annual emissions, according to one estimate.
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Much of that coal is destined for export to Asia, however, so activists are also gearing up to fight port expansions in Queensland that would hugely increase the number of coal ships sailing from Australia each year, including through the vulnerable ecosystem of the Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Site and the earth’s largest
natural structure made up of living creatures. The Australian Marine Conservation Society describes the dredging of the ocean floor to make way for increased coal traffic as an “unprecedented” threat to the fragile reef, which is already under severe stress from ocean acidification and various forms of pollution runoff.
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This is only the barest of sketches of the contours of Blockadia—but no
picture would be complete without the astonishing rise of resistance against virtually any piece of infrastructure connected to the Alberta tar sands, whether inside Canada or in the United States.

And none more so than TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Part of the broader Keystone Pipeline System crisscrossing the continent, the first phase of the project, known as Keystone 1, got
off to an inauspicious start. In its first year or so of operation, pump stations along the pipeline spilled tar sands oil fourteen times in the U.S. Most spills were small, but two of the biggest forced the entire pipeline to shut down twice in a single month. In one of these cases, a North Dakota rancher woke up to the sight of an oil geyser surging above the cottonwood trees near his farm, remarking
that it was “just like in the movies when you strike oil and it’s shooting up.” If Keystone XL is constructed in full (the southern leg, from Oklahoma to export terminals on the Texas coast, is already up and running), the $7 billion project will add a total of 2,677 kilometers of new pipeline running through seven states and provinces, delivering up to 830,000 barrels per day of mostly tar
sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries and export terminals.
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It was Keystone that provoked that historic wave of civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., in 2011 (see page 139), followed by what were then
the largest protests in the history of the U.S. climate movement (more than 40,000 people outside the White House in February 2013). And it is Keystone that brought together the unexpected alliance
of Indigenous tribes and ranchers along the pipeline route that became known as “the Cowboy and Indian alliance” (not to mention unlikely coalitions that brought together vegan activists who think meat is murder with cattle farmers whose homes are decorated with deer heads). In fact the direct-action group Tar Sands Blockade first coined the term “Blockadia” in August 2012, while planning what
turned into an eighty-six-day tree blockade challenging Keystone’s construction in East Texas. This coalition has used every imaginable method to stop the pipeline’s southern leg, from locking themselves inside a length of pipe that had not yet been laid, to creating a complex network of treehouses and other structures along the route.
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In Canada, it was the Northern Gateway pipeline, being
pushed by the energy company Enbridge, that similarly awoke the sleeping giant of latent ecological outrage. The 1,177-kilometer pipe would begin near Edmonton, Alberta, and carry 525,000 barrels of mostly diluted tar sands oil per day across roughly one thousand waterways, passing through some of the most pristine temperate rainforest in the world (and highly avalanche-prone mountains), finally ending
in a new export terminal in the northern British Columbia town of Kitimat. There the oil would be loaded onto supertankers and then navigated through narrow Pacific channels that are often battered by ferocious waves (resorts in this part of B.C. market winter as “storm-watching” season). The sheer audacity of the proposal—putting so much of Canada’s most beloved wilderness, fishing grounds,
beaches, and marine life at risk—helped give birth to an unprecedented coalition of Canadians who oppose the project, including a historic alliance of Indigenous groups in British Columbia who have vowed to act as “an unbroken wall of opposition from the U.S. border to the Arctic Ocean,” to stop any new pipeline that would carry tar sands oil through their collective territory.
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The companies
at the centers of these battles are still trying to figure out what hit them. TransCanada, for instance, was so sure it would be able to push through the Keystone XL pipeline without a hitch that it went ahead and bought over $1 billion worth of pipe. And why not? President Obama has an “all of the above” energy strategy, and Canadian prime min
ister Stephen Harper called the project a “no-brainer.”
But instead of the rubberstamp TransCanada was expecting, the project sparked a movement so large it revived (and reinvented) U.S. environmentalism.
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Spend enough time in Blockadia and you start to notice patterns. The slogans on the signs: “Water is life,” “You can’t eat money,” “Draw the line.” A shared determination to stay in the fight for the long haul, and to do whatever it takes to win.
Another recurring element is the prominent role played by women, who often dominate the front lines, providing not only powerful moral leadership but also some of these movements’ most enduring iconography. In New Brunswick, for instance, the image of a lone Mi’kmaq mother, kneeling in the middle of the highway before a line of riot police, holding up a single eagle feather went viral. In Greece,
the gesture that captured hearts and minds was when a seventy-four-year-old woman confronted a line of riot police by belting out a revolutionary song that had been sung by the Greek resistance against German occupation. From Romania, the image of an old woman wearing a babushka and holding a knobby walking stick went around the world under the caption: “You know your government has failed when
your grandma starts to riot.”
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The various toxic threats these communities are up against seem to be awakening impulses that are universal, even primal—whether it’s the fierce drive to protect children from harm, or a deep connection to land that had been previously suppressed. And though reported in the mainstream press as isolated protests against specific projects, these sites of resistance
increasingly see themselves as part of a global movement, one opposing the latest commodities rush wherever it is taking place. Social media in particular has allowed geographically isolated communities to tell their stories to the world, and for those stories, in turn, to become part of a transnational narrative about resistance to a common ecological crisis.

So busloads of anti-fracking and
anti-mountaintop-removal activists traveled to Washington, D.C., to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, knowing they are up against a common enemy: the push into ever more extreme and high-risk forms of fossil fuel. Communities in France, upon discovering that their land has been leased to a gas company for something called “hydraulic fracturing”—a previously unknown practice in Europe—got in contact
with French-speaking activists in Quebec, who had successfully won a
moratorium against the practice (and they, in turn, relied heavily on U.S. activists, in particular the documentary film
Gasland
, which has proved to be a potent global organizing tool).
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And eventually the entire global movement came together for a “Global Frackdown” in September 2012, with actions in two hundred communities
in more than twenty countries, with even more participating a year later.

Something else unites this network of local resistance: widespread awareness of the climate crisis, and the understanding that these new extraction projects—which produce far more carbon dioxide, in the case of the tar sands, and more methane, in the case of fracking, than their conventional counterparts—are taking the
entire planet in precisely the wrong direction. These activists understand that keeping carbon in the ground, and protecting ancient, carbon-sequestering forests from being clear-cut for mines, is a prerequisite for preventing catastrophic warming. So while these conflicts are invariably sparked by local livelihood and safety concerns, the global stakes are never far from the surface.

Ecuadorian
biologist Esperanza Martínez, one of the leaders of the movement for an “oil-free Amazon,” asks the question at the heart of all of these campaigns: “Why should we sacrifice new areas if fossil fuels should not be extracted in the first place?” Indeed, if the movement has a guiding theory, it is that it is high time to close, rather than expand, the fossil fuel frontier. Seattle-based environmental
policy expert KC Golden has called this “the Keystone Principle.” He explains, “Keystone isn’t simply a pipeline in the sand for the swelling national climate movement.” It’s an expression of the core principle that before we can effectively solve this crisis, we have to “stop making it worse. Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil
fuel infrastructure that ‘locks in’ dangerous emission levels for many decades . . . step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging.”
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So if Obama’s energy policy is “all of the above”—which effectively
means full steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the margins—Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be described as “None of the below.”
It is based on the simple principle that it’s time to stop digging up poisons from the deep and shift, with all speed, to powering our lives from the abundant energies on our planet’s surface.

While the scale and connectivity of this kind of anti-extraction activism is certainly new, the movement began long before the fight against Keystone XL. If it’s possible to trace
this wave back to a time and place, it should probably be the 1990s in what is surely the most oil-ravaged place on the planet: the Niger Delta.

Since the doors to foreign investors were flung open near the end of British colonial rule, oil companies have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of crude out of Nigeria, most from the Niger Delta, while consistently treating its land, water,
and people with undisguised disdain. Wastewater was dumped directly into rivers, streams, and the sea; canals from the ocean were dug willy-nilly, turning precious freshwater sources salty, and pipelines were left exposed and unmaintained, contributing to thousands of spills. In an often cited statistic, an
Exxon Valdez
–worth of oil has spilled in the Delta every year for about fifty years, poisoning
fish, animals, and humans.
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But none of this compares with the misery that is gas flaring. Over the course of extracting oil, a large amount of natural gas is also produced. If the infrastructure for capturing, transporting, and using that gas were built in Nigeria, it could meet the electricity needs of the entire country. Yet in the Delta, the multinational companies mostly opt to save money
by setting it on fire, or flaring it, which sends the gas into the atmosphere in great pillars of polluting fire. The practice is responsible for about 40 percent of Nigeria’s total CO
₂
emissions (which is why, as discussed, some companies are absurdly trying to collect carbon credits for stopping this practice). Meanwhile, more than half of Delta communities lack electricity and running
water,
unemployment is rampant, and, in a cruel irony, the region is plagued by fuel shortages.
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Since the 1970s, Nigerians living in the Delta have been demanding redress for the damage done to them by multinational oil giants. The fight entered a new phase at the start of the 1990s when the Ogoni—a relatively small Indigenous group in the Niger Delta—organized the Movement for the Survival of the
Ogoni People (MOSOP), led by the famed human rights activist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. The group took particular aim at Shell, which had extracted $5.2 billion from Ogoniland between 1958 and 1993.
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The new organization did more than beg the government for better conditions, it asserted the rights of the Ogoni people to control the resources under their lands and set about taking those rights
back. Not only were oil installations shut down, but as Nigerian political ecologist and environmental activist Godwin Uyi Ojo writes that, on January 4, 1993, “an estimated 300,000 Ogoni, including women and children, staged a historic non-violent protest, and marched against Shell’s ‘ecological wars.’ ” That year, Shell was forced to pull out of Ogoni territory, forsaking significant revenues
(though the company remains the biggest oil player in other parts of the Delta). Saro-Wiwa stated that the Nigerian state “will have to shoot and kill every Ogoni man, woman and child to take more of their oil.”
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