by Naomi Klein
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.7 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).
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 de
ad outside the mines and blockades of coal trucks, locals have staged rolling protests around the region and have been met with ferocious state repression.15
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.16
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.17
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.18
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.19
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.20
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 minister 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.21
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.”22
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).II23 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.
Somethin
g 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.”24
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.
