There’s a provocative book by Lund University ecology professor Andreas Malm suggesting that maybe environmentalists should reconsider their pacifism and start sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, deniers are up in arms about it. The book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has been around a bit, but Fox et al. discovered a recent New Yorker and WNYC Studios podcast interviewing Malm, and now deniers are using it to claim that greens are getting violent.
Marc Morano, who was encouraged by the January 6 insurection and felt conservatives needed to replicate it at statehouses across the country, and tweets regularly about his refusal to protect others by wearing a mask or getting the covid vaccine (even though the disease may cause restless anal syndrome, he tweeted he still won’t get vaccinated) is now very concerned about political violence. At Climate Depot, he made a post himself and posted a link to a Newsbusters piece calling the New Yorker interview with Malm “taxpayer-funded CRAZY”, as it was co-produced by WNYC Studios.
The write-up closes with an extensive quote from Marc, in which he says of the interview asking IF environmentalists WOULD be justified to consider whether they SHOULD embrace more extreme measures they currently avoid, that the outlet interviewing an academic “appears to be joining the growing movement of green activists endorsing intimidation and coercion to achieve environmental and climate goals.”
Malm’s point is that green groups are NOT engaging in these types of tactics, and Morano suggests that simply by talking to him, The New Yorker is “joining the growing movement.” Apparently, per Marc, the “era of COVID mandate coercion may be further radicalizing” activists jealous of COVID lockdowns, and “many environmental activists seem to be asking themselves why not use violence and threats of violence to achieve their ends.”
Are they though? What growing movement? What groups, specifically, are asking themselves these questions about violence, Marc?
For the best we can see as an answer, we turn to the Daily Wire, where “reporter and columnist” Ashe Schow has more on this obviously false narrative. Schow’s bylines can be seen anywhere ranging from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation to Koch-funded Real Clear to Koch-funded Federalist, so it’s not exactly a surprise that she took a break from writing about the terrors of teaching about racism, defending a January 6 insurrectionist from false reports that his LEGO set of the Capitol was assembled, praising the censoring of books conservatives don’t like and another complaining about “cancel culture” to warn that “leftists [are] increasingly accepting of environmental terrorism.”
How so? Well in addition to Malm’s book about how the environmental movement isn’t embracing violence, the single other example of “a shift in mainstream Leftist acceptance of and even advocacy for environmental terrorism in recent months” is that President Biden nominated Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Managment.
Is Stone-Manning an eco-terrorist who has embraced violence? No! Quite the opposite, actually!
Back in the early ‘90s, Stone-Manning’s associates protested logging by tree spiking, a briefly-used tactic to save forest from the timber industry by driving a metal rod into trees to damage the saw blades. Part of the reason for its brief use is that a sawmill worker did get gravely injured when his saw blade hit a nail, and the company blamed eco-terrorists. But it’s actually doubtful that the tree was spiked by an environmental group, as it wasn’t an old-growth tree, which was the priority, and no one had warned the company to stop it from getting cut in the first place, which was the whole point. And given the placement of the nail 10 feet up the trunk, it was likely spiked after it had been cut, which was the opposite of how activists who wanted to save the trees from being cut operate. As for other suspects, there was also a local weirdo in the area who was engaged in similarly-not-quite-green intimidation tactics like putting a skinned dog on a bulldozer and hanging a beheaded deer from a tree, according to Judi Bari’s 1994 book on the Timber Wars.
Regardless, groups like Bari’s EarthFirst! stopped embracing tree spiking after the fall-out, and even that radical fringe of the environmental movement hasn’t engaged in it for decades. But that’s not even what Stone-Manning is accused of doing!
Stone-Manning didn’t spike any trees. In fact, quite the opposite, she retyped and sent a letter warning that someone had spiked some trees. Later, Stone-Manning testified against those who did spike the trees, resulting in the actual tree-spikers getting convicted and serving time.
But to deniers who scapegoat environmentalists to protect polluters, these two examples, decades apart, of environmentalists eschewing violence, are actually evidence they’re embracing it more now than ever.