Property Will Cost Us the Earth:Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement

An urgent, freely downloadable ebook that asks: should we start blowing up pipelines, occupying coal mines, and destroying property to address global climate change?

Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, with its call for the environmental movement to start sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure to save our planet, has sparked a vibrant discussion on the left about “the green state,” direct action and violence, ecological Leninism, and existing pipeline struggles. It has also reignited longstanding fears of eco-sabotage on the right.

Collected here are a set of essays that grapple with the idea of direct action and eco-sabotage, survey climate activism around the world, and argue for the necessity of building a fighting global movement against capitalism and its fossil fuel regime.

Moving from Mozambique, the Niger Delta, and the coal mines of India to the forests of Ecuador and the watersheds of North America, Property Will Cost Us the Earth details the global scale of climate devastation as well as active struggles around the world to halt further extraction. From this come tactical and strategic questions: how can local direct actions relate to political work forcing states to end reliance on oil, coal, and gas? What kind of protest movement can we build that reflects the urgency of our moment? What does a direct action–based movement require from those on the frontlines of struggle?

On one thing these essayists are agreed: protecting private property at the expense of our planet and our children’s lives is not a cost we should be willing to pay.

Contributors include: Alyssa Battistoni, James Butler, João Camargo, Jen Deerinwater, Ben Ehrenreich, Madeline ffitch, Frente Nacional Anti-Minero (Ecuador), Bue Rübner Hansen, Tara Houska, Jessie Kindig, Benjamin Kunkel, Anabela Lemos and Erika Mendes from Justiça Ambiental! (Mozambique), Andreas Malm, MOTH Collective, Vanessa Nakate and Amy Goodman, Siihasin Hope, Brototi Roy, Andrea Sempértegui, Richard Seymour, and Adam Tooze.