Burn the Planet and Lock Up the Dissidents - Read by Eunice Wong

Text originally published Oct. 06, 2024

Roger Hallam — by Mr. Fish

Norfolk, U.K. — I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing. The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are. Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky frame tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.   

Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”

He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses. 

This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.

Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. NASA scientists warn that “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.” 

The more the planet warms, the more extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, intense storms, and heavy rainfall intensify. The extinction of animal and plant life — one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction — accelerates.

We are on the verge of tipping points, thresholds beyond which ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, and other components of the climate system sustain and accelerate irreversible changes. There are also tipping points in ecosystems, which can become so degraded that no effort to save them can halt the effects of runaway climate change. At that point “feedback loops” see environmental catastrophes accelerate each other. The game will be up. Nothing will save us.

Mass death from climate disasters is becoming the norm. The official death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 227, making it the deadliest in mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In North Carolina, South Carolina and northern Georgia 1.1 million people remain without power. Mountain towns, without electricity and cell phone service, are cut off. Hundreds of people are missing with many of them feared dead. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people were killed last year in a single night by Cyclone Daniel in Libya.

These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us.

 “A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.”

And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture, which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering, carbon capture and artificial intelligence. 

Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from  $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

The governments that facilitate genocide in Gaza are, not surprisingly, the overlords of global genocide. 

As the Swedish author and professor of human ecology Andreas Malm writes, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth.”

“The destruction of Gaza is executed by tanks and fighter jets pouring out their projectiles over the land: the Merkavas and the F-16s sending their hellfire over the Palestinians, the rockets and bombs that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right trajectory,” writes Malm who with Wim Carton wrote “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.” “All these military vehicles run on petroleum. So do the supply flights from the US, the Boeings that ferry the missiles over the permanent airbridge. An early, provisional, conservative analysis found that emissions caused during the first 60 days of the war equaled annual emissions of between 20 and 33 low-emitting countries: a sudden spike, a plume of CO2 rising over the debris of Gaza. If I repeat the point here, it is because the cycle is self-repeating, only growing in scale and size: Western forces pulverize the living quarters of Palestine by mobilizing the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give.”

The genocide is tied to fossil fuels in other ways. 

“One of the many frontiers of oil and gas extraction is the Levant basin along the coast running from Beirut via Akka to Gaza,” Malm writes. “Two of the major gas fields discovered here, called Karish and Leviathan, are in waters claimed by Lebanon. What does the West think of this dispute? In 2015, Germany sold four warships to Israel so it could better defend its gas platforms against any eventualities. Seven years later, in 2022, as the war in Ukraine caused a crisis on the gas market, the state of Israel was for the first time elevated into a fossil fuel exporter of note, supplying Germany and other EU states with gas as well as crude oil from Leviathan and Karish, which came online in October of that year. 2022 sealed the high status of Israel in this department.”

“A year later, Toufan al-Aqsa [the incursion into Israel from the Gaza by Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7, 2023] threw a spanner in the expansion,” Malm notes. “It posed a direct threat to the Tamar gas platform, which can be seen from northern Gaza on a clear day; in the range of rocket fire, the platform was shut down. A major player on the Tamar field is Chevron. On 9 October, the New York Times reported: ‘The fierce fighting could slow the pace of energy investment in the region, just as the eastern Mediterranean’s prospects as an energy center have gained momentum.”

Expanding Israeli production requires occupying Gaza’s coastline and the removal of the Palestinians.

“Five weeks after 7 October, however, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Chevron resumed operations at the Tamar gas field,” Malm continues. “In February, it announced another round of investment to further bolster output. In late October, the day after the ground invasion of Gaza began, the state of Israel awarded 12 licenses for the exploration of new gas fields — one of the companies picking them up being BP, the very same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline.”

The connection between the genocide in Gaza and global mass death is not lost on the Global South, where climate refugees are dying on the open seas and in deserts as they attempt to flee north. UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, calculates that weather-related “sudden onset hazards” — such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures — forcibly displaced an annual average of 21.5 million people every year between 2008 and 2016. There are now 260 million people in coastal areas — an increase of 100 million from three decades ago — who are at “high risk” of being displaced by rising sea levels. Ninety percent of them live in poor developing countries and small island states.

As the ecocide and genocide in Gaza accelerates, we also get more draconian laws to criminalize protests. 

Laws designed to protect the fossil fuel industry in the U.K. include “conspiracy to interfere with national infrastructure” or the new “lock on” offense that can see a protester who attaches him or herself to an object, land or another person with some form of adhesive or handcuffs, in a manner that is capable of causing serious disruption, go to prison for six months and receive an unlimited fine. 

The trajectory is clear. Burn the planet. Lock up dissidents. Censorship. Crush those who resist, especially those in the Global South, with industrial weapons and indiscriminate violence. And, if you are part of the privileged class, retreat into gated compounds that provide food, water, medical care, electricity and security that will be denied to the rest of us. 

In the end, everyone will go the way of the dinosaurs, who, at least, were not responsible for their own demise. The tragedy is that most of the ruling criminal class will probably survive a little longer than the rest of us. 

Collective suicide will define what we call human progress.

The three-week trial for the Just Stop Oil activists, like the court hearings for Julian Assange, denied the accused the right to submit objective evidence. The defendants were not permitted to speak about climate change, the motive for their protest. Roger, defying the ban, attempted to address the jury about the climate crisis. The judge ordered him arrested for contempt of court. He was removed from the courtroom by six police officers. When the judge sentenced Roger and his co-defendants, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin, he told them that they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.” 

The five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protests, but for its planning. The evidence used in court to convict them came from an online Zoom meeting that was captured by Scarlet Howes, a reporter posing as a supporter from the tabloid newspaper “The Sun.” No doubt some fossil fuel think tank is dreaming up a journalism prize for Howes now. 

Sentences for those engaging in climate protests have steadily got harsher, longer than many of the sentences imposed on those who engaged in acts of violence during the racist riots in Southport, as Linda Lakhdhir, the legal director of Climate Rights International, points out. 

I have long admired Roger, who has on the rust-colored vest all prisoners in the visiting room are required to wear, not only for his courage, but for his belief that resistance against radical evil is a moral imperative. It is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about defying, quite literally when we speak of the ecocide, the forces of death to protect and nurture life.

I addressed a crowd in London on Sept. 11 to raise money for the legal defense of the five imprisoned activists. The organizers at the Kairos Center played a recorded introduction Roger had sent from his prison cell before my talk. 

“Change,” he said in the taped message, “comes about not through instrumental reason, that meaning, you do something in order to get something to happen, but rather because you cannot stand by, and so you act, in order to be what you are. The critical reason we’re failing, in my view, is because we buy into the idea that they can oppress us by sending us to prison. While in fact, power resides in our fear of going to prison, not the act of doing it in itself. Once we realize it’s all about fear, we have that lightbulb moment. It’s not what they do to us, it’s how we choose to react that determines their power.”

“You carry out the good, not to create good outcomes,” he says to me, “but because it is good, because it’s truthful, because it’s a beautiful thing to do, because it creates a metaphysical harmony, a balance.”

The tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists — marching, lobbying, voting and petitioning — have failed. 

In 1900, the burning of fossil fuel — mostly coal — produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That number rose threefold by 1950. Today the level is nearly 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the six decades the increase in CO2 was 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

This is Roger’s seventh time incarcerated in the British prison system which is plagued by a lack of adequate funding, decaying infrastructure, reduced services, staff recruitment and retention issues and severe overcrowding.

 “When I first went to prison the guards could be sadists, ex-military from our colonial wars,” he says. “Now they are usually polite, but nothing works.”

His shoes disintegrated, but his repeated requests for new shoes were ignored. Another prisoner, who had an extra pair, gave them to him.

I line up at the small canteen to buy us something to eat. I have been allowed to bring 40 British pounds into the prison. On the menu they have a vegan sausage sandwich. Roger and I are vegan. But when I get to the counter, I am curtly informed the vegan options are unavailable. 

Roger argues that if 10,000 people are willing to engage in civil resistance, which means accepting prison terms for non-violent civil disobedience, carry out grassroots educational campaigns and mobilize public assemblies, they can ignite one to two percent of the population to embrace the militancy to rupture the existing order.

He draws on the research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and Maria J. Stephan who examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

“It’s not only about changing the world,” Roger says. “It’s about seeing the world in a different way, one that rejects the narrative of the dominant ideology. It is a re-enchantment of the world. It is about our spirit taking center stage. This is where it belonged all the time. But the spirit only becomes real through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.”

“I am not calling for an individualistic journey to personal enlightenment, which is a contradiction in terms,” he says. “I am not calling for calmness that never leaves your head, that never gets you off the couch and into the streets. The spirit is in the street. The street is the spirit. The spirit is in the prison cell. The time for pretending is over. We are facing the end of the old world, and we are going to have to battle to create what comes next.”

And then it is time to leave. We embrace. I promise to mail him books. Those of us in the visiting room are lined up and escorted by the guards through a series of locked doors to the prison courtyard. 

Roger is paying a steep price for resistance, for the moral life. 

Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which he condemned as an effort to seize territory to expand slavery. He was arrested and jailed for tax evasion in 1846.

“I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher whose Divinity School address provoked outrage among the clergy and led Harvard University not to invite him back to speak for another thirty years, visited Thoreau in jail.

“Henry, what are you doing in here?” Emerson asked.

“What are you doing out there?” Thoreau responded. 

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