“The more effective people are becoming in mobilizing, the more backlash they’re going to face … If you corner a wild animal, they’re going to come really hard back at you. The more we can voice that these things are happening, the more strength that we can provide to those people that are on the frontlines of these very dangerous situations.” Rodrigo Estrada, senior communications specialist at Greenpeace
I have to give a big shout out to Justine Calma and Paola Rosa-Aquino of Grist for one of the most brilliant pieces on the state of worldwide environmental activism that I have read. It is about a blizzard of new assaults against green activists and what that means for today and the future, as the climate crisis unfolds. It won’t be long either, 2019 is predicted to be the hottest year on record with the following 4 years in hot pursuit.
The Grist article is lengthy and jam-packed with linky goodness. I have shared some excerpts below, but they barely scratch the surface of this piece which reveals the dark side of the powerful and their war on the climate and those attempting to stop them.
When devastating wildfires were sweeping the West last fall, Ryan Zinke, who recently announced his resignation as Interior secretary, lay the blame for the blazes on a ragtag group of environmentalists. “We have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access, that refuse to allow the harvest of timber,” Zinke said in an interview with Breitbart News.
Environmental activism has long put protesters at odds with government officials. But instead of dismissing climate-conscious demonstrators as hippies or “tree huggers,” government officials have begun using more dangerous labels — including “terrorist.”
It’s happening all over the world, from the U.S. to the Philippines to Brazil (which just yesterday inaugurated particularly anti-environmental/indigenous President Jair Bolsonaro). It even happened at the recent United Nations climate talks in Poland. More than two dozen climate activists headed to the summit in Katowice were deported or refused entry on the pretext of being national threats.
The below refers to the United States. It could get ugly again this year at Standing Rock and other pipeline protests.
Activists say this is part of an aggressive campaign by fossil fuel companies and their government allies to increase criminal penalties for minor violations — such as trespassing on a pipeline easement — as a way of suppressing climate action. Eighty-four members of Congress sent a bipartisan letter to the Department of Justice last fall, asking officials to prosecute pipeline activists as “terrorists.” And bills introduced in Washington and North Carolina would have defined peaceful demonstrations as “economic terrorism.”
And as we know in the U.S., branding a group of people as “terrorists” is kind of a big deal.
snip
In September, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained emails in which U.S. government officials characterized pipeline opponents as “extremists” and violent criminals that could commit potential acts of “terrorism.” The documents suggested that police were organizing counter-terrorism tactics to clamp down on possible Keystone protests. (If construction on the embattled Keystone XL pipeline advances in the coming months, it will likely draw protests from indigenous and environmental activists.)
“Evidence that the federal government plans to treat Keystone XL protests with counterterrorism tactics, coupled with the recent memory of excessive uses of force and surveillance at the Standing Rock protests, raises immense concerns about the safety of indigenous and environmental protestors who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights,” wrote Jacob Hutt, a fellow at the ACLU, in a blog post for the organization.