The Attack on Climate Justice Movements

"Recent developments make clear there is little time left before the effects of environmental destruction threaten the survival of most humans, animals, and ecosystems. A 2018 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we have only 12 years before the devastating impacts of climate change become reality. As conditions worsen worldwide due to rising temperatures and extreme weather events, additional consequences include climate refugees, disputes over resources, deteriorating infrastructure, new health concerns, and challenges to food production and distribution. Moreover, those most affected by toxic pollution and climate change are often people of color in politically marginalized communities who have contributed the least to the current environmental crisis.

As the dangers of planetary destruction become increasingly dire, there is a corresponding growth in the strength, coordination, and urgency of movements for environmental justice and sustainability. Coalitions of activist groups, nonprofit organizations, progressive politicians, and communities are striving to reverse the disastrous consequences of overconsumption, pollution, and fossil fuel extraction. However, the visibility and success of environmental movements has led to attempts to criminalize activists and discredit the goals of ecological campaigns. Legislation raising penalties for environmental activism, surveillance of environmental campaigns, attempts to label activists “terrorists,” and reports designed to undermine the legitimacy of environmental advocacy are all strategies used by the U.S. government, private security operations, fossil fuel companies, corporate foundations, and conservative think tanks.

The IPCC report authors point to the complete transformation of the world economy within the next few years as the only hope for a sustainable future, placing the aims of environmentalism in direct opposition to the continuation of capitalism as the dominant global economic system. The role of law in this conflict is complex, with legal strategies being deployed on all sides to further very different aims. While environmental activists support model legislation, invoke the necessity defense in court, and demand injunctions on ecologically dangerous projects, the Trump administration, private companies, and law enforcement agencies are criminalizing environmental activism, harassing individual activists and organizations through frivolous lawsuits, and preparing for military-level interventions. The stage is set for a showdown between environmental movements determined to make the planet livable for future generations and a small but powerful group of right-wing politicians and corporate leaders determined to profit at any cost. The fate of the world is literally at stake in these struggles.

Capitalism vs. the Environment

The current conflict can be traced back to the 1960s, when a rise in environmental consciousness led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, criticisms of the role of corporations in causing environmental pollution, and new regulations to curb the excesses of business practices damaging to the environment. For a brief time, there appeared to be growing consensus in many countries that environmental protection was an important priority. However, throughout the 1970s, corporate leaders began organizing to constrain the increasing influence of environmental (and labor) movements. Putting aside competitive rivalries, the American business elite turned to the political sphere and invested enormous amounts of money to overturn or weaken most of the environmental advancements made during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government backtracked on environmental protections, guided by the logic of neoliberal free-market policies prioritizing corporate profits and individual consumption. Promising to remove obstacles to economic growth, Reagan decimated environmental regulations. As a result, environmental disasters proliferated (e.g. Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill). While corporations and conservative politicians were successful in halting new environmental regulations, public concern again began to grow in reaction to scientific reports on ozone depletion and global warming. Alarming accounts of rising temperatures led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 1988 and multiple global environmental treaties in the late 1980s and 1990s. Despite these scientific discoveries, Republican lawmakers and business leaders doubled down on their anti-regulatory position. Using new public relations techniques, emerging technologies, and the power of lobbyists, anti-environmentalists continued framing pollution and global warming as the responsibility of individual consumers instead of a problem requiring government or collective action.

Throughout the 1990s, multinational corporations increasingly relocated to countries and free trade zones where environmental considerations would not affect their profit margin. These conditions eventually contributed to the massive anti-globalization protests which took place across the world from 1999-2003, in which environmental and labor activism intersected to critique the neoliberal policies of international trade organizations. The power and visibility of these protests—combined with increased public attention to radical direct action groups like Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front—led to heightened anti-environmental backlash in the form of a “green scare.” By the late 1990s, the U.S. government was holding hearings on environmental “terrorism” and in 2004, multiple environmental and animal activist investigations were combined in “Operation Backfire,” with the FBI citing “eco-terrorism” as the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” The corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) introduced model legislation in multiple states based on the federal Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act (AETA), creating harsh penalties for environmental and animal rights activists. These nonviolent movements were subjected to constant surveillance, infiltration, harassment, entrapment, and arrest by law enforcement. As a result, environmental and animal rights movements were considerably weakened for the following decade.

In recent years, the most confrontational environmental campaigns are focused on the catastrophic consequences of fossil fuel projects such as oil pipelines, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, and mountaintop coal removal. Starting in 2008, environmentalists joined Indigenous activists to resist the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline designed to bring crude oil from Canada to Texas. In 2016, the occupation at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline brought environmental protests into the public eye and the mainstream media. Tying together resistance to fossil fuels, Indigenous rights and sovereignty, critiques of corporate greed, and the power of long-term demonstrations, Standing Rock became a rallying point for the environmental movement as well as a target for law enforcement, corporate executives, and conservative politicians. Since then, movements against fossil fuel extraction have proliferated amidst an atmosphere of harassment, surveillance, and criminalization.

Attacks on Environmental Activism . ."

https://mronline.org/2019/03/15/the-attack-on-climate-justice-movements/