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Activist: Environmentalists Should Start with ‘Property Destruction’ as Peaceful Protests Aren’t Enough

‘We need to step up’

EXCERPT:

HOST: “The United Nations Climate Meeting in Glasgow, which starts on October 31st, is described as the most important since the Paris agreement was adopted in 2015. We could see major policy announcement from the Biden administration of governments from around the world. But the summer we just had with this appalling wildfires and its record floods provides ample evidence that the effects of climate change are already here, and they are catastrophic. And frankly, nothing that governments are likely to do this year will be to reverse those trends. Andreas Malm is a professor at Lund University in Sweden. He studies the relationships between the climate change and capitalism. And he advocates for far more drastic action than we've seen so far. His recent book 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline' is bit more nuance than the title suggest but at its core he really does want environmental activists to rethink their commitment to non-violence and embrace tactics of sabotage. I spoke with Andreas Malm last week. Andreas, you've been a climate activist now for a long time and in 2007 you were part of a Swedish group that started deflating the tires on SUVs. Tell me about that. What was the impulse and how did it work?"
MALM: "Yes. What we did was went through rich neighborhoods and picked out SUVs. This was in the early career of SUVs when they were still remarkable on streets, before that become completely [indecipherable]. And it's very easy to deflate the tires of a car. You just unscrew the valve and you insert a little gravel or piece of stone or something like that and then you screw the valve back on and the air will be out of a tire in a couple of hours. So this was not property destruction. We didn't damage anything. It created an inconvenience for the owners of SUVs.”

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