Jennifer Mills is an author, editor and critic based on Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide). Her latest novel is The Airways, published by Picador in 2021. Dyschronia (2018) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Aurealis, and Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. In 2022, Mills is Artist in Residence at Vitalstatistix.
Source: Jennifer Mills | Sydney Review of Books
…In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm cites the September 2019 protests as the latest peak in three recent waves that have centred around climate summits, blockades, and school strikes. He is initially excited about the climate movement’s obvious growth and reach, as well as its diversity of tactics: ‘The movement must learn to disrupt business as usual. To this end, it has developed an impressive repertoire: blockades, occupations, sit-ins, divestment, school strikes, the shutdown of city centres, the signal tactic of the climate camp.’ By late 2019, he enthuses, ‘the climate movement had become the single most dynamic social movement in the global North.’ In numbers alone, the protests were turning-point exciting.
Malm began his previous book, 2018’s The Progress of this Storm, with a question: ‘Is there any time left in this world?’ In that book he argued for theory that works in service of political action. Here, he turns more directly to the tactics of climate activists, but retains that keen and infectious sense of urgency. Given the sluggishness of much academic reaction to world crises, it’s encouraging to read a theorist so invested in demands for change. But in responding to the temporality of the climate crisis, Malm can sometimes seem less interested in refining his own position or working through its inconsistencies. This makes him both exciting and frustrating to read.
You don’t need me to tell you that since those protests, delayed COP26 negotiations finished with a continued commitment to global heating from world leaders. The latest IPCC report has us on a trajectory for 1.5 degrees of warming next decade, exceeding 2 degrees by the end of this century. New coal mines continue to open and gas and fracking industries continue to expand. The Australian government subsidises this with one hand and throws expensive band-aids at the Reef with the other, all the while spruiking non-existent ‘technological solutions’ to rising emissions, a problem we already have the means to solve.
‘To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement,’ writes Malm, before he diagnoses what he calls ‘the general deficit of action in response to climate change.’ It’s not the quantity of people that he has trouble with, but the quality of our actions, not militant enough to effect change quickly enough to matter.
Leave a Reply