Climate Change and the New Politics of Violence

Abstract

Climate change complicates political violence while producing new forms and scales of it. This has led the climate movement to fail to come to terms with both the violence of climate change and nonviolence as a tactic of resistance. The article begins by counterposing the violence of climate change to the consensus for nonviolence as the only tactic for achieving systemic political change. It then moves beyond that consensus by drawing on Andreas Malm’s Marxist response, Bruno Latour’s claim that climate change puts us in a situation of war, and a critique of the linkages between consumption, carbon, and imperialism. The article concludes that climate change makes the choice between violence and nonviolence a false one, necessitating new hybrid strategies of violence and nonviolence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kevin J. O’Brien, The Violence of Climate Change: Lessons of Resistance from Nonviolent Activists (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 3–4.

2 Roger Hallam, “The Civil Resistance Model,” in This is Not a Drill (London: Penguin, 2019), 100.

3 William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 188.

4 Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (New York: Verso, 2021), e-book.

5 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

6 Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline.

7 Ibid.

8 Rebecca K. Smith, “‘Ecoterrorism’? A Critical Analysis of the Vilification of Radical Environmental Activists as Terrorists,” Environmental Law 38, no. 2 (2008): 537–76; If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, DVD, directed by Marshall Curry (New York, NY: Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2011).

9 Marc Hudson, “Extinction Rebellion: ‘Terror Threat’ Is a Wake-up Call for How the State Treats Environmental Activism,” The Conversation, January 13, 2020, https://theconversation.com/extinction-rebellion-terror-threat-is-a-wake-up-call-for-how-the-state-treats-environmental-activism-129804; Letta Tayler and Cara Shulte, “Targeting Environmental Activists With Counterterrorism Measures is an Abuse of the Law,” Euronews, November 28, 2019, https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/28/targeting-environmental-activists-with-counterterrorism-measures-is-an-abuse-view.

10 Peter Schwartzstein, “The Authoritarian War on Environmental Journalism,” Report for The Century Foundation, July 7, 2020, https://tcf.org/content/report/authoritarian-war-environmental-journalism/?agreed=1; Jeanette Cwienk, “Environmental justice reporters face deadly threats, intimidation,” Deutsche Welle, November 13, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/environmental-justice-reporters-face-deadly-threats-intimidation/a-55593140; Juliette Garside and Jonathan Watts, “Environment Reporters Facing Harassment and Murder, Study Finds,” The Guardian, June 17, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/17/environment-reporters-facing-harassment-murder-study; Jonathan Watts, “Environmental Activist Murders Double in 15 years,” The Guardian, August 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/05/environmental-activist-murders-double; “Global Witness Records the Highest Number of Land and Environmental Activists Murdered in One Year – With the Link to Accelerating Climate Change of Increasing Concern,” Global Witness, July 29, 2020, https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/global-witness-records-the-highest-number-of-land-and-environmental-activists-murdered-in-one-year-with-the-link-to-accelerating-climate-change-of-increasing concern/#:∼:text = Wednesday%2029%20July%202020%20%E2%80%93%20Global,to%20the%20destruction%20of%20nature.

11 Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change (Boston: Beacon, 2007).

12 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

13 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

14 Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: Why People Will be Killed in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).

15 Kari Marie Norgaard, “Climate Denial and the Construction of Innocence: Reproducing Transnational Environmental Privilege in the Face of Climate Change,” Race, Gender & Class 19, no. 1–2 (2012): 80–103.

16 Douglas Rushkoff, “Survival of the Richest,” in This Is Not a Drill (London: Penguin, 2019), 58–64.

17 Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 11.

18 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

19 Marlene Brito-Millàn and others, “No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate Change Solutions,” Science for the People 22, no. 1 (2019).

20 China Mièville, “The Limits of Utopia,” Salvage 1 (2015), 180.

21 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, Winter 2009, 218.

22 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 208–21.

23 Rebecca Solnit, “Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence,” The Guardian, April 7, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-change-violence-occupy-earth.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 See for example Naomi Klein’s On Fire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019) and This Changes Everything (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), and Matt Huber, “Rich People Are Fueling Climate Catastrophe — But Not Mostly Because of Their Consumption,” Jacobin, May 2, 2021, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/rich-people-climate-change-consumption.

29 Paris Marx, “Only Class War Can Stop Climate Change,” Jacobin, October 19, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/class-war-climate-change-overpopulation-carbon

30 Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline.

31 George Monbiot, “If Defending Life on Earth Is Extremist, We Must Own That Label,” The Guardian, January 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/22/defending-life-earth-extremist-police-extinction-rebellion.

32 Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Stefan Wagstyl, Steven Bernard and Chelsea Bruce-Lockhart, “Climate Change Is Becoming Less a Battle of Nations That Rich vs Poor.” The Financial Times, May 20, 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/4788beae-9035-4449-b5cd-200dc7b6ea9d#comments-anchor.

37 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Medford, MA: Polity, 2017), 3.

38 Ibid, 227.

39 Ibid, 251.

40 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018).

41 Latour, Facing Gaia, 238, 244.

42 Latour, Down to Earth, 10–1.

43 Latour, Facing Gaia, 252.

44 Andreas Malm, The Progress of this Storm (New York: Verso, 2018).

45 Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2021), e-book.

46 Latour, Facing Gaia, 31.

47 Bruno Latour, Interview by Mark B. Salter and William Walters, “Bruno Latour Encounters International Relations: An Interview,” Millenium 44 (2016), 6.

48 For a more detailed analysis of Latour’s engagement with Schmitt, see chapter four of Kellan Anfinson, The Ethos of the Climate Event: Ethical Transformations and Political Subjectivities (New York: Routledge, 2021).

49 Latour, Facing Gaia, 152–3.

50 Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future (New York: Verso, 2020). They also chart two other possibilities.

51 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 32–3.

52 Latour, Interview, 18.

53 Andreas Malm, “The Moral Case for Destroying Fossil Fuel Infrastructure,” The Guardian, November 18, 2021, https://www.2021 theguardian.com/commentisfree /nov/18/moral-case-destroying-fossil-fuel-infrastructure.

54 Malm argues that this is the case and that sabotage is a useful source of this energy.

55 Bruno Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World Through Art and Politics,” French Institute Lecture, London, November 6–7, 2011, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf.

56 Latour, Down to Earth, chapter five.

57 Ibid, chapters 10 and 11.

58 This is the project of Down to Earth, which concludes with Latour’s own map as a starting place for diplomacy.

59 Latour, Interview, 18–9.

60 Vinay Gupta, “Time to Stop Pretending,” Talk given at Uncivilization Dark Mountain Festival, Llangollen, Wales, May 29, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQCy-UrLYw.

61 Ibid. For more on climate change and colonialism, see Ghosh, The Great Derangement, chapter two.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline; Marx, “Only Class War Can Stop Climate Change”; Huber, “Rich People Are Fueling Climate Catastrophe.”

66 See for example Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Brooklyn: Verso, 2011).

67 Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, “Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris,” Paris School of Economics, November 3, 2015. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf.

68 The Salvage Editorial Collective, “The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene,” Salvage, January 31, 2020, https://salvage.zone/editorials/the-tragedy-of-the-worker-towards-the-proletarocene/.

69 Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency.

70 George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Cambridge: South End Press, 2009), 215; David W. Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7.

71 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 111.