A review essay by Flyway Book Review Editor, Zachary Calhoun, about Andreas Malm’s nonfiction book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Daniel Goldhaber’s fictional film adaptation, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
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When Daniel Goldhaber began shooting his latest independent film in the high deserts of New Mexico—shot in the unseasonably warm November of 2021—he instructed his young cast and crew to tell any passerby that they were filming an innocuous movie called Wild West. They shot on 16mm film to capture New Mexico’s bright desert vistas with more grainy punch than digital cameras can capture, but they could only develop that film, or discuss its plot, with real anxiety.
They were not actually filming a movie titled Wild West. But revealing its true title to strangers could have drawn suspicion from law enforcement or vigilantes. They were really filming an ecological thriller that sympathetically depicted the use of sabotage and property violence as a form of self-defense against the capitalist ultra-violence of oil infrastructure in West Texas.
The actress Jayme Lawson, best known for her roles in The Batman and The Woman King, told Brian Formo: “We couldn’t tell the locals too much of what we were doing, and had to be incognito. There was a real, genuine concern amongst family and friends: ‘Are you going to be okay? Should we be concerned about you and the FBI? How deep is this film going?’”
The film was going pretty deep. As The New York Times reported after the film’s national release in April 2023, the filmmakers worked with a rogue U.S. counterterrorism contractor (one who simply loved movies) to depict the process of constructing and detonating an explosive device capable of destroying the thick pipelines used to transport crude oil in the American West. (That fact, combined with a few dangerous bombmaking decisions in the film, have prompted a few conspiracy-prone online commentators to wonder if the contractor intentionally misled the filmmakers, making it more likely that real-world sabotage actors would hurt themselves.)
Months before Oppenheimer’s Trinity test sequence, Goldhaber used real explosions, captured on real film in the deserts of northern New Mexico, to destroy pipeline structures under bright daylight. The cast and crew filmed their scenes as remotely and deep into the desert as possible to evade incrimination. The filmmakers even underwent a grueling six-month editing process in secret guerilla conditions, working in a small suite where they would not be interrupted or found out. They only announced the real title of their film after it was completely finished, when they submitted it to the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival—where critics were blown away.
The secrecy and fear behind the film’s production may sound extreme, but only to those unfamiliar with the history of state reactions to revolutionary cinema.
The director and producers decided to film their movie in secret to protect their young, relatively powerless cast and crew. When Goldhaber first sought funding for a sympathetic film about ecological sabotage, he couldn’t even land initial meetings. His parents were climate scientists, and his previous credits included the critically beloved social-horror thriller Cam (2018) and a previous climate documentary, but nobody would meet with him. Nicolas Rapold reported that Goldhaber and his co-writer Ariela Barer, who also co-produced the film and starred as Xochitl, only secured the funding after they snuck into Cannes and chatted up producers at afterparties.
The film, which has been criticized by a few hardline activists for drawing funding from banks linked to fossil fuels, might never have received sufficient funding in any other way, so deep are fossil fuel interests embedded into film production and finance circles. Discussing capitalism and resource extractivism—the institutions that created the climate crisis—the star and co-writer Ariela Barer said, “I realized at a certain point that these things had not just betrayed me, they had never existed to support me and they were never going to support my community or me.”
Clearly at odds with mainstream film production, Goldhaber and Barer also faced a national landscape where environmental protest has been increasingly criminalized. In many ways, the secrecy of its production only demonstrated that the filmmakers have studied their film history. When the filmmakers Michael Wilson, Herbert J. Biberman, and Paul Jarrico assembled to film The Salt of the Earth in the same northern New Mexico deserts in 1953, during the height of McCarthyism, their attempt to cinematically depict the real-world 1951 miners’ strike against the Empire Zinc Company led to an intense government backlash. The filmmakers—who had been blacklisted by Hollywood in 1947 for their involvement in the Communist Party USA and their refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee—were forced to create their film without conventional funding or industry support. The production even led to violence.
The director, Biberman, had recently served six months in a federal penitentiary in Texas for his suspected leftist politics, including not only his association with Communists, but the fact that he had co-founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The filmmakers hired real mining families to portray the mining families in their story—miners who famously relied on women to succeed in their actual strike—but despite their ramshackle, neorealist approach to production, the FBI investigated their financing and surveilled their film set. During production, anti-Communist vigilantes fired live ammo at the film set; other vigilantes descended on the set and destroyed equipment; the house of one actor was burned down; music was blared on loudspeakers and airplanes spiraled overhead to ruin the film’s sound design; the lead actress Rosaura Revueltas was arrested by immigration agents and deported to Mexico; and the American Legion finally launched a preemptive national boycott of the film. The film was largely edited in a women’s restroom in an abandoned movie theater. The film also had to be transported in unmarked canisters, and after eight labs refused to develop the footage, Biberman could only find a lab to develop the film when he submitted it under the title of a nonexistent Western, Vaya Con Dios.
The film caused a national conservative uproar for its sympathetic portrait of feminist labor organizers who resisted a mining company’s mistreatment of the land and its workers. The hopeful, earthly, and Chicano story at the core of the film did not sit easy with U.S. capitalism.
When The Salt of the Earth was finally released in 1954, only thirteen theaters in the country agreed to screen it. The film was officially blacklisted and the life of its lead actress was made significantly more difficult: Revueltas had later success as a stage actor and film festival judge in East Germany, Cuba, and Mexico, but she was never again allowed to act in an American movie.
In the same New Mexican deserts, but almost seventy years later, Daniel Goldhaber did what he could to ensure that his own cast and crew did not suffer a similar fate. He kept the production completely stealthy until he submitted its final cut to a film festival.
That would not protect the artists from investigation or criticism. But secrecy did make life easier for the activists and environmentally committed artists who worked quietly on the movie that was never really titled Wild West. When they pitched festivals, Goldhaber, Barer, and the rest of the cast and crew revealed its true title, known to them all along as How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
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In January 2021, Swedish scholar Andreas Malm—previously known for environmental history tomes approaching 500 pages—published his shortest, best-selling book yet: How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In 160 small pages, Malm’s brief manifesto defended the efficacy of property violence in the climate justice movement, arguing that climate activists should seriously entertain eco-sabotage and property destruction as viable tactics to overthrow fossil-fueled capitalism.
The short book spent much of its length defending “radical flank theory”: the idea that successful resistance movements have always relied on a “radical flank” threatening violence, to present the mainstream, nonviolent alternative as a less radical “compromise.” The civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid, the suffragette movement, the abolitionist fight against slavery, and countless other social justice movements used a “diversity of tactics,” with a nonviolent mass movement and a radical flank, advancing the cause on multiple fronts. Arguing pointedly against ahistorical claims that civil rights activists and other freedom fighters in the past were uniformly “nonviolent,” Malm made a compelling case for the efficacy of radical solutions to environmental injustice. Aligning himself with Frantz Fanon’s masterpiece of anticolonial theory, The Wretched of the Earth—an anti-imperialist, socialist volume of political theory from 1961 that defended the right of colonized peoples in the Global South to defend themselves against the ultra-violence of colonial exploitation with violent self-defense strategies of their own—Malm begged current climate activists to recognize sabotage and property destruction as viable tactics capable of interrupting the profit motive that fuels environmental destruction.
If enough activists blow up pipelines and puncture the air in SUV tires, Malm’s argument holds, profits will go down, disincentivizing the pillage of nature. The rationale resembles the ideology of Earth First (still active) and especially the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, which burned down ski resorts and factory farming lots between 1996 and 2002 and was dubbed the nation’s top domestic terrorism threat until the FBI caught and prosecuted its central members. As the ELF announced in a 1990s communiqué, “We are the burning rage of this dying planet.” Or, “ELF works to speed up the collapse of industry, to scare the rich and undermine the foundations of the state.” The tactical approach and strategic mission of ELF incorporated eco-sabotage and property destruction to disincentivize environmental destruction, making industry much costlier.
For Malm, if activists get radical, modest proposals for climate justice that avoid sabotage and property destruction will come to seem far more acceptable in political discourse. As the extreme moves further left, climate action will slide with it into the Overton window: the span of policy proposals considered reasonable and moderate by electoral society. When that happens, “reasonable” climate policies—policies of the sort that conservative writers currently depict as apocalyptic and authoritarian—may soon come seem like a refreshingly moderate alternative. And for that reason, serious climate activists need to research strategies of industrial sabotage.
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Already, despite my dry tone, I suspect this purely expository summary of Malm’s book may have inspired some readers to click away from this review essay, perhaps hurriedly clearing their internet browser’s cache and search history to evade the risks of incrimination. The FBI did issue a bulletin encouraging federal and state law enforcement agencies to increase surveillance precautions to coincide with the film adaptation’s early 2023 release. In response, former FBI agent Mike German said to Politico, “Law enforcement fusion centers shouldn’t be writing book reviews.” All this came in response to Malm’s 2021 book and its 2023 film adaptation, making How to Blow Up a Pipeline only the latest instance of a troubling trend in anti-environmentalist state behavior. Most recently, 61 environmental activists near Atlanta, Georgia, were surveilled and charged with racketeering in early September 2023 for protesting the construction of a militarized police training facility commonly called Cop City, an ongoing development that is destroying the Weelaunee Forest. Dozens of environmental activists were charged with domestic terrorism earlier in the year after the “Stop Cop City” protests increased in response to the police killing of the Venezuelan environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán on January 18, 2023. Terán, known to many land defenders by the name Tortuguita, was sitting cross-legged with their hands in the air when police shot them dead. Police shot them with at least 57 bullets.
The use of violence, surveillance, and prosecution against environmental activists is nothing new. At least 177 environmental activists were killed globally in 2022, with almost 2,000 confirmed killings between 2012 and 2022, at a rate higher than one execution every other day.
Indeed, this pattern of violence and reaction is the historical basis for Malm’s argument. The fossil economy is anything but nonviolent. From the continuing violence visited by coal mining company strikebreakers and police against coal miners and their families from the early twentieth century to the present, to the recent surge of anti-environmentalist killings, the fossil economy was built through an aggressive, violent process that still relies on state suppression to operate. In addition, the fossil economy is violent even when guns are not present; a new study by Lucas Henneman and his international team of research collaborators showed that the air pollution of sulfur dioxide particulates, spewed from coal-fired power plants in the United States alone, killed at least 460,000 people in the last twenty years. And those who resist are often shot.
With such histories, Malm’s words can inspire feelings beyond mere illicit curiosity. His book has passages that feel dangerous to read. The title of his book—smartly foregrounded with massive typography on Chantal Jahchan’s award-winning cover for the Verso edition—promises to teach you “how to blow up a pipeline.” It sounds like a new Anarchist Cookbook for the age of climate collapse (even if William Powell, the author of 1969’s The Anarchist Cookbook, has since rebuked violence). True to the threatening tone implied by its title, Andreas Malm’s book, along with the movie it inspired, sparked dozens of warnings from federal intelligence agencies. It may very well be the case that discussing his ideas in public can land your name on a “list.”
That certainly does sound scary, especially to readers unfamiliar with the history of climate justice. But there is a reason Malm and his readers aren’t too frightened by likely surveillance.
Sure: by taking these ideas seriously, there is a risk of seeming radical, subversive, or even legitimately dangerous. Writers who defend the right to sabotage not only appear impolite; they might also risk their lives and livelihoods, given that more than 200 environmental land defenders are now killed every year. Critics and filmmakers who share their ideas publicly face reputational challenges, especially if the McCarthyist investigations against environmentalists around the world are any indication of future trends. Worse still, reviewers who kindly appraise environmentalist stories might fall prey to the pen of conservative critics like Armond White at National Review, who claims that “some movies and some reviewers are pernicious,” including especially the defenders of the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline. “Bowing to the film’s ideology,” he scowls, “is a dereliction of journalistic probity as alarming as the film itself.”
There are, of course, consequences even worse than earning the ire of National Review writers. Careers, reputations, and even life expectancies can fall on the line in debates on climate praxis.
But when the alternative means leaving our heirs an uninhabitable earth, what difference can anyone’s professional reputation possibly make? That’s the question Malm forces us to ask.
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Before publishing his incendiary manifesto of political theory with the provocative title, Malm adapted his PhD dissertation for public consumption and in 2016 published his first book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. That 2016 history tome has been cited by nearly every radical environmental writer working today, from Amitav Ghosh and Naomi Klein to Kim Stanley Robinson and Matthew T. Huber. With a daunting ambition and nearly overwhelming erudition, Fossil Capital traced the origins of the climate crisis to the adoption of steam power by British industrialists in the 19th century. His central contention—and the reason Fossil Capital has already proven so broadly influential—is the idea that steam power was not adopted because burning coal was cheaper or more efficient than water mills, nor because steam was an inevitable result of apolitical, technological innovations. Indeed, burning coal and gathering steam power was significantly more expensive and difficult than utilizing the “free” energy of water mills, which nature continuously powered with the organic flows of rivers.
If water mills were cheaper and easier to use, why burn coal inside dirty steam mills instead?
Malm’s answer is that steam power allowed early capitalists to bring the means of industrial production to urban centers with large masses of workers, which initiated the still-dominant trend that capitalists will spare no expense to relocate their factories to territories and nations with cheap, docile labor. Previously dominant water mills could not be moved—they were restricted to rivers—and they were staffed by workers with a strong connection to the land, the water, and local communities. In such locations, worker resistance was common, and capitalists struggled to overpower labor movements. But coal was a moveable source of power, one that capitalists could ship to factories far from the sites of extraction and agricultural production. That motive power gave capitalists considerable social and political control over their workers. This is precisely the same pattern used by capitalists today, who relocate industrial manufacturing to China and other regions with cheaper workforces and laxer environmental safeguards. That old logic remains the same. Climate-wrecking fuels like coal (and, later, oil) were adopted because they furthered capitalist interests in the class struggle. There was nothing “inevitable” about them.
This means the early capitalist adoption of steam power was a political decision, one that allowed capitalists to extract additional surplus value at the expense of the working class, who subsequently mounted work stoppage strikes against the very idea of coal. In the process, 19th-century striking workers often sabotaged steam boilers and coal facilities. The most famous instance of this ecological sabotage, the Plug Plot Riots of 1842, shut down industrial production in an effort to increase worker safety, clean the air of England, and rebalance economic power. Malm argued in Fossil Capital that events like the Plug Plot Riots of 1842 were an example of a “proto-environmentalist” critique of steam, and he spent many pages quoting abundant criticisms in texts from 1842 featuring a “persistent imagery of belching smoke and consuming fire, noxious atmosphere and receding nature, extinct vegetation and unbearable heat.” Just as class war from above began a regime of fossil capital that sent emissions into the sky, class war from below, waged against capitalists, was essentially proto-environmentalist even back in the 1840s.
A general strike where factory workers and coal miners shut down the fossil economy? Considering the complex ways coal has been politicized by representatives of the fossil economy as pro-working-class in recent years, this story of working-class resistance to coal and steam power almost sounds like an anachronistic fever dream from a utopian solarpunk novel. One of the many merits of Fossil Capital is Malm’s ability to revitalize such histories for our times. It is no surprise that Matthew Huber’s excellent 2022 book, Climate Change as Class War—which focuses on the shortcomings of professional-class environmental politics, and the urgent need for a working-class response to the climate crisis, especially among utility workers and organizers seeking the unionization of the energy industry—repeatedly cites Malm’s argument as precedent. More broadly, as Chad Montrie showed in 2018, it has always been workers who suffered most from environmental catastrophes—and working class coalitions who most often campaigned for clean air, water, and energy. As Malm shows, it was not industrialism in general, technological progress, market inevitability, or vague facts like population numbers, but specifically capitalists in control of production who instituted the regime of fossil fuel dependency and global warming.
Malm’s account runs parallel to common narratives about the Industrial Revolution while confidently flouting unexamined assumptions and received wisdom about its actual economics. As Malm asserts 53 pages into Fossil Capital, “the many experiments with steam,” from Hero of Alexandria to the Watt patents, “form an endlessly retold bildungsroman, one of the most closely studied and adulated sequences in the annals of Western science; there is no need to retrace it here.” However, retell the coming-of-age of steam power is precisely what Malm proceeds to do, not by exhaustively listing early experiments with steam, but instead by exposing the economic conditions that allowed steam power to overtake water mills and corner the market. As Malm’s epic tome debunks popular, benign assumptions about steam, it resuscitates a Marxist tradition that criticizes the wanton combustion of fossil fuels not only for harming nonhuman nature, but for ruining the metabolic balance between humans and their precarious natural environment.
As Marx famously claimed in Capital Volume I, capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth.” This applies not only to industrial production with steam power, but to everything capitalism touches, including agriculture. As Marx wrote: “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” The scholar John Bellamy Foster refers to Marx’s theory of human society and nature as “metabolic rift theory,” pulling its name from Marx’s claim that capitalism’s ecological consequences amount to an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.”
By interpreting the environmental ravages of capitalist industrialism as a disruption in the “metabolism” of the earth, Marx’s interpretation of capitalism presciently anticipated works like Fossil Capital that were written much more recently to grapple with the era of climate change: a time when the symptoms of climate shifts are disproportionately visited upon the global poor, such as the miners, fishers, and factory workers laboring in exploitative conditions in the Global South. Laborers only work in such conditions, according to Malm, because of the choices made by a few capitalists primarily located in rich cities and countries, often in Britain and the U.S.
In later texts, Malm reflected theoretically on the partition between nature and culture, joining scholars like Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Carolyn Merchant who have criticized the so-called “modern” split between “civilized culture” and “brute nature.” In 2017’s The Progress of This Storm, Malm made such arguments by advancing a philosophy of history that combined Marxist historical materialism with the findings of ecology and the history of steam. In 2021’s White Skin, Black Fuel, Malm co-authored a book with the antifascist Zetkin Collective warning of the dangers of fossil fascism: fascist movements marshalled to violently defend fossil capital.
But it was only with his 2021 theory of ecological violence theory, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, that Malm really entered the popular conversation beyond environmental academia. This is what it takes to gain popularity as a theorist of climate change. It does seem reflective of the stakes of our discussion, and the political character of our times, that you either go bold, or you go unread.
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I have encountered How to Blow Up a Pipeline several times. I first read it in early 2021, during lockdown, because I’d followed Malm for years. After the initial shock of the title, what stood out most on a first reading was the persuasiveness of his argument about radical flank theory. He mentions figures famous in popular culture but rarely examined as serious counterexamples to the theory of nonviolence or the idea of a radical flank, from The Black Panthers in the Civil Rights Movement to rebels like John Brown and Toussaint Louverture in the abolitionist and anti-colonial movements. Notably, such movements used a diversity of tactics, not violence alone, building counter-hegemonic institutions like free breakfast programs, health clinics, and community gardens along the way. Nevertheless, violence hovered nearby, either as an overt act or as an implied threat, making piecemeal reform feel moderate by comparison, even where such changes had seemed radical only a decade or two before. Malm contrasts these movements with climate activists making no real gains today, even as new fossil fuel contracts continue to be leased at still-accelerating rates of sale. Fossil fuel subsidies even catapulted to an all-time record high of over $7 trillion in 2023. There is a prevailing sense among my friends and colleagues that, since climate change is now a mainstream concept, things are getting better. But according to available economic, political, and material metrics, fossil burning is still getting far worse.
Malm’s contrast of successful social justice movements against current climate inaction was as striking as it was obvious. I wondered how I hadn’t thought of it before. I was writing a climate fiction novel at the time. Malm’s argument inspired me to mention his book within it.
I next encountered How to Blow Up a Pipeline in late 2022 as part of a reading group in Iowa that studied classic and contemporary texts of ecology and political economy. We read the book shortly after reading a selection by Karl Marx, and before turning to the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. Couched between Marxist theory and Hayao Miyazaki’s ecological fable about the humanity of extraction laborers caught up in the proto-capitalist destruction of forests, Malm’s book felt still more relevant and timely than it had in 2021. Even more striking than its similarity to other texts on our syllabus was the group I studied it with. We sat on mismatched chairs in my friend’s living room in central Iowa under warm, soft lights. For those working parents and environmentally concerned friends, Malm inspired a livelier discussion than almost any book I’ve read alongside other people. The argument reminded us that it is unthinkable to idly sit back as fossil capital imperils the possibility of a survivable biosphere. Doing nothing is a choice. The parents in the room were particularly energized to consider new roads to the future.
I read the book for a third time when the film adaptation was released in the icy early months of 2023. The movie, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, had a fairly small marketing budget. I only discovered the film through links and mentions from the climate activists I follow on social media. A series of links led me to the movie’s website. That site includes a page called “Take Action” listing sites of recent oil pipeline spills, a map of critical pipeline junctions in the United States, and a selected list of frontline climate justice movements. As that page notes:
Since the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline
in 2017, 19 states in the US have passed “critical infrastructure laws,”
and similar bills are pending in 5 other states. Many of these bills
transform misdemeanors like trespassing on, disrupting, or otherwise
interfering with operations at critical infrastructure facilities into
felony charges. If we want to survive we must protect the revolutionaries
who take necessary actions to fight the fossil fuel industry and protect
our existence.
The movie didn’t show in any of the theaters in Ames, Iowa. It was apparently too niche for a college town with over 66,000 people. I had to travel to an independent theater in Des Moines to catch it on the big screen. Driving alone for 80 miles, round-trip, felt to me at the time like a hypocritical way to catch a movie about the ecocidal ramifications of fossil fuel emissions, so I waited until I had to make my way to Des Moines for other reasons. I then caught the film in a double feature with Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid. In every way, How to Blow Up a Pipeline was the better film. And yet the theater was, by comparison, much emptier. When I caught the movie a second time with a friend, the audience was larger—it is undoubtedly the kind of film that finds its audience slowly, through word of mouth—but it was still not as popular as I’d have hoped.
The film was riveting: an expertly constructed, nail-biting heist masterpiece. My friend agreed. I checked Letterboxed; every log I saw agreed, with a four-star review stating, “i hope my rating doesn’t get me put on a government watchlist,” a five-star review claiming “it blew me away. (full disclosure: i’m a pipeline),” and a popular four-and-a-half-star review calling the film: “A huge middle finger to the fucking goons who run this world. Loved every second of it.”
But it came and went. It made those aforementioned headlines for inspiring FBI warnings and intelligence bulletins, but it didn’t make headlines for reaching box office thresholds of any kind.
When I decided to design and lead a seminar about environmental justice cinema at the college where I teach, this was one of the very first films I thought to include. Dozens, maybe hundreds of movies have depicted environmental justice, but this is one of the first films to be all about environmental justice debates. In Goldhaber’s film, the theme of environmental justice is not made secondary to anything else, including the design of believable characters, strong narrative, or action thrills. The message is the medium: Andreas Malm’s political theory is the pan through which all the filmmakers’ writing decisions have been sieved. So I knew I had to teach the book in order to fully communicate the intentions and narrative innovations of the film to my students.
That college seminar about environmental justice cinema began to meet recently. On our first day, I asked my students to list the movies they think about when they think about environmental justice. There were several unsurprising contenders: Wall-E, Avatar, The Lorax, Interstellar, Mad Max: Fury Road, and a few other blockbuster movies that seem to wear their ecological messaging on their sleeves. Two students mentioned Studio Ghibli masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke. The students also cited Cars.
After they spent several minutes struggling to find more examples, only one student eventually mentioned How to Blow Up a Pipeline. When he finally named the thriller inspired by Malm’s text, I saw the eyes of several other students in that late, nighttime seminar room light up.
They hadn’t heard of the movie. I saw something on their faces: they felt, it seemed to me, like they’d been missing out on something important and worth understanding.
As one student asked, “The movie’s called what?”
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It’s a strange thing to explain to people who have no exposure to the book or the film: How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not only the title of a book of complex political theory from 2021; How to Blow Up a Pipeline is also the title of a 2023 heist thriller from director Daniel Goldhaber, and distributed by the independent company NEON (whose cofounder, Tim League, got his start at Shell Oil Company). Billed by NEON as an “adaptation” of Malm’s book, Goldhaber’s film—which includes a long shot of Malm’s orange-covered book being held by a curious reader in a bookstore—is a fictional story about eight people who set out to blow up an oil pipeline in the deserts of West Texas, a vista actually filmed in the high deserts of my home state, New Mexico.
Since Malm’s book of scholarly history and theory includes no such heist story—except perhaps implicitly, through the provocative choice of its title, which probably does inspire anyone browsing a bookstore to imagine young radicals doing something drastic—it is fascinating that the filmmakers consider their movie an “adaptation,” and that it retains the name of Malm’s book. There are countless examples in film history of adaptations that creatively diverge from their nonfictional source material. This is true not only of films in general, but of ecological films in particular. Most famous, perhaps, is Charlie Kaufman’s script for the 2002 film Adaptation, an extremely loose adaptation of Susan Orlean’s 1998 book The Orchid Thief. Kaufman’s script is less a retelling of Orlean’s original ecological tale than it is a new story about how hard it is to be a screenwriter tasked with adapting a nonfiction book about ecology. Memorably starring Nick Cage—who plays dueling writer twins, in a highlight of his career—Adaptation is a fictional film about a real-life adaptation of a real nonfiction book. Central to all of the movie’s nesting-doll meta-narratives is the true story of orchid poachers extracting nature for profit, an act of ecological thievery the script parallels with the act of stealing someone else’s book for a film.
Kaufman’s script highlighted its divergence by bearing a different title than the book. Paul Thomas Anderson traveled the same path when he adapted Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel Oil!, which Sinclair called an “oil novel,” and which Michael Tondre, writing for The Paris Review, called “one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed,” dubbing it the first instance of a critically important new genre: “the petro-novel.” Anderson turned Oil! into the markedly different 2007 film, There Will Be Blood. Also an ecological parable—this time about the violent rise of an oil baron from deep within the bowels of the earth into the upper, godless ranks of twentieth-century fossil capital—Anderson’s film features the oil-soaked imagery of hellfire and disturbing string quartet music from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to foreground the violent, exploitative history that led to the film’s climactic laying of America’s oil pipelines. In hindsight—regarded from the vantage of 2023—Anderson’s film functions like a sequel in a trilogy that begins with Fossil Capital and ends with How to Blow Up a Pipeline. There Will Be Blood tells the story of oil as a follow-up to earlier tales of coal and steam-powered capital, ending in the birth of the oil pipeline network later overthrown in How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
These aren’t the only oil book adaptations. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece, The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur), adapted Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel into a film with the same name. Both narratives are about oil well fires. In each telling, unemployed people living in Guatemala are hired by an American oil corporation to drive trucks loaded with highly explosive nitroglycerin to the site of an uncontrolled oil well fire, where the explosives will hopefully put out the oil flame. The film is a nail-biting thriller (one that Dennis Lehane called “the purest exercise in cinematic tension ever carved into celluloid”) because the road those poor drivers must travel for food money is rickety, and the cargo could explode at any turn along the way. The film was blocked by U.S. censors and had to cut 21 minutes from its reels before it could be screened in the U.S. because censors deemed its anti-corporate story un-American. Clouzot’s film, itself an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel by Arnaud, was then remade into a 1958 film by Howard Koch (not to be confused with the oil baron Koch family) called Violent Road, before being remade yet again into William Friedkin’s 1977 film Sorcerer. Repeatedly remade and retold, Arnaud’s/Clouzot’s tense drama of class, explosives, and oil was referenced by How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a film using similar tension mechanics to tell its tale.
Unsurprisingly, I included the adaptations There Will Be Blood and The Wages of Fear alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline in my syllabus for the environmental justice cinema class. There are more than a dozen movies on that syllabus—including other predictable picks like Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Even the Rain (2010), Dreams (1990), Matewan (1987), and Godzilla (1954)—but the most surprising film I added to the list was probably The Tree of Life, a 2011 movie by Terrence Malick that juxtaposes the quiet story of a suburban childhood in 1950s Texas against the ambitiously-shot cosmic origin story of life on earth. The Tree of Life is not an adaptation—unless you could consider it an adaptation of biophysics or cosmology textbooks—but Malick directed another film about nature that was adapted from a book: The Thin Red Line. That adaptation, perhaps more than any other, helps explain what Goldhaber’s film achieved.
Ostensibly about the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Pacific Theater of World War II, The Thin Red Line is a tender, gentle, and oddly quiet work of philosophical filmmaking that deploys pensive voiceovers and John Toll’s gorgeous nature cinematography to tell its tale. The war novel it was based on, James Jones’s 1962 The Thin Red Line, is very different from Malick’s film, which was largely crafted not in the writing process, but on the editing room floor, where Malick and his three editors—Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, and Billy Weber—infamously cut most of Adrien Brody’s appearances out of a film Brody had been told he would lead as the main star. After a rigorous, demanding shoot, Brody thought he was the lead actor—right up until attending its premier. While editing, Malick and his editors had found a new protagonist in Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt, a minor character in the novel. In addition, as the editor Saar Klein said in an interview for the Criterion Collection, the film “is organized by a bunch of nature shots.” The natural ecology of the Pacific is front and center. This is also true in the sound design. As editor Billy Weber said of Malick’s approach to sound editing, “It’s the sounds of nature that he really cares about. It brings you into the reality of the situation, and at the same time it’s universal.”
If you open the Criterion Collection blu-ray disc menu, it warns you that Terrence Malick prefers you watch the movie “loud.” The opening shot of a crocodile submerging into a green wetland is accompanied by jungle caws and a ringing score, as faceless voiceovers wonder: “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power but two?” The rest of the film grapples with that, far more than it grapples with any of the genre conventions of the war novel that inspired it.
But despite the film’s narrative and thematic divergences—which foreground natural compositions and the lived experiences of a pensive private who wonders whether the earth is capable of fighting back against incursions—the film still retained the title of the original novel. That title, The Thin Red Line, has two sources, both cited in epigraphs, that speak to the false stories of power that rule our world and prevent us from living harmoniously with nature.
The novel’s first epigraph draws from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Tommy,” in which a British soldier is maligned as a killer by the British public during peacetime. Barkeeps and service workers in theaters refuse Tommy service because of his uniform. People ask him to step aside, or they tell him that his soul has no chance to be saved. At the same time, Tommy’s brothers in arms are heralded as a “thin red line of ‘eroes” when they are called to the front line:
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, ‘ow’s your soul?
But it’s ‘Thin red line of ‘eroes,’ when the drums begin to roll.
The valorization of soldiers on the front line almost seems like an attractive alternative to the mistreatment Tommy receives at home, but what interests Tommy (and Kipling) is the sharp difference between the two receptions soldiers receive. Later in the poem, Tommy realizes, “We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too, / But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.” With a direct, imperative appeal to the reader—to “you”—the poem insists Tommy and his kin are more like the average member of the reading public than any kind of demon or “saint” (something Tommy insists “men in barricks” will never be). In Kipling’s poem, “the thin red line” is a phrase that calls attention to the shallow praise and chauvinistic reverence that nationalists bestow on the idea of soldiers, only to ignore their bodily, organic needs as living beings after the war. It’s a fundamentally ecological idea, one that acknowledges humanity and bodily autonomy even among the footsoldiers of the ecocidal empires of the capitalist West.
But the novel also offers a second epigraph: “There’s only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.” This new line is attributed to an “old Midwestern saying,” nothing more.
When Malick decided to name his work The Thin Red Line, he firmly placed his film not only within the context of the genre novel by James Jones that formed a loose basis for the script, but also the politically accusatory poem by Kipling and the “old Midwestern saying” about sanity and madness. The philosophically freewheeling voiceovers, the stunningly wandering nature cinematography, and the idiosyncratic decision to cast a vast number of celebrity actors in minor roles made Malick’s film a unique entity that transcended its source material. It was a film that showed how war silences natural landscapes and community bonds alike. The film diverges significantly from the plot of the novel, much as it dramatically alters the novel’s aesthetic and thematic substance. Yet it retains that name. This is still The Thin Red Line. The film’s formal aberrations and unpredictable experiments with cinematic language claim a prominent spot in the lineage that links Kipling, Jones, and the Midwestern dialect of homegrown aphorisms. Malick’s film encompasses and surpasses all that. Juxtaposed against the film’s disarming novelty, its recycled title announces that the movie has something new, something transformative to say.
Goldhaber’s film How to Blow Up a Pipeline does the same thing: it retains the name of Malm’s book, as if insisting that it will not transform its source material. But transform its source material is exactly what the film proceeds to do. From the first frame to the last, the film invents.
For one thing, the book has no protagonists. The movie, by contrast, has many.
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When Daniel Goldhaber decided to transform Malm’s book of political theory into an eco-heist thriller, he understandably didn’t do it alone. Co-written with the film scholar Jordan Sjol and the top-billed star of the film, Ariela Barer (who also co-produced the film with Goldhaber), How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a deeply collaborative creative process from the outset. In this way it resembles Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), a collaboratively-designed narrative film about climate justice made in low-budget, “guerrilla filmmaking” conditions. Written by many and shot in secret, How to Blow Up a Pipeline centers eight protagonists, each with their own unique reason for sacrificing the comforts of daily life to join the frontline climate justice struggle.
The writer-producer Ariela Barer (Runaways, Ladyworld) stars as Xochitl, the central organizer in the film who largely brings the group together. Her mother, weakened after a life spent downwind of oil refinery pollution, had been killed by a heat wave caused by fossil-fueled climate change. Meanwhile, Xochitl’s close friend Theo, played by Sasha Lane (Loki, American Honey), confronts a recent cancer diagnosis, caused by the polluted air in her oil refinery town. Theo’s girlfriend Alisha, played by Jayme Lawson (The Batman, The Woman King), is an initially nonviolent activist who has dedicated her life to mutual aid, providing food and housing assistance to those left in the margins by capitalism. Faced with the likely death of her girlfriend, Alisha reluctantly joins Xochitl’s more militant group. Xochitl also enlists her film student friend Shawn, played by Marcus Scribner (Black-ish), to join the cause. Shawn, frustrated as he works on a milquetoast environmental documentary, helps recruit one of its subjects, Dwayne—played by Jake Weary (It Follows, As the World Turns)—whose land has been stolen by an oil company that cited eminent domain when it built an oil pipeline across his land in West Texas. The film also features two Pacific Northwest punks, Logan and Rowan, played by Lukas Gage (Euphoria) and Kristine Froseth (Looking for Alaska), who are tasked with infiltrating pipeline controls to stop the pipeline’s continuous flow, preventing the impending explosion from polluting the land. All these people, united by the commanding Xochitl, are played with incredible physical acting.
But the most impressive physical acting scenes in the film are given to Michael. Michael is played by Forrest Goodluck, an actor of Diné, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Tsimshian ancestry, who was best known for playing Hawk, the half-Pawnee son of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass, in Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015). The Revenant was also an ecological adaptation of a novel about resource extractivism, in which the violent, ecocidal forces of colonialism and capitalism forced Arikara and Pawnee populations to defend their land—and lives—with force. Much like Terrence Malick, but with a more overtly activist and anti-capitalist intention, Iñárritu took the white savior story of his source material and shot a film about nature and real resistance.
In a similar way, Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon adapted its nonfiction source material, David Grann’s book of the same name, but removed the white savior narrative of its FBI-centered tale, focusing instead on the killers and the Indigenous victims and survivors of the Osage Killings to tell a powerful, disturbing tale of the colonialist genocide that capitalism used to secure oil rights and private ownership over oil extraction leases in the American West. Much like The Revenant, Scorsese’s film is deeply difficult to watch, as its star Lily Gladstone recently warned Indigenous audiences: “In this process of learning about the horrific Reign of Terror, remember that the Osage remain. Native People remain. And this story is a lot to take in. Be kind, and please be gentle with each other. There is much to process, and much to heal.”
At the core of The Revenant was a Pawnee teenager, Hawk, played with understated power by Forrest Goodluck. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Goodluck’s amateur explosives expert, Michael, has studied chemical reactions on YouTube while experimenting with bombs capable of destroying the fossil fuel infrastructure that impacted reservation life near an oil man camp. Openly unafraid of any legal consequences, Michael channels his rage into bomb construction. Every character in the film has a unique motivation and political compass—the Texan father Dwayne is an American patriot and conservative Christian, while most of the others are various shades of leftists, some with financial security but most from working-class backgrounds—but Michael is the only character in the movie who spends most of his screen time hovering over half-built bombs and faulty fuses as the film ascends to its high points of tension and suspense. With powerful physical acting and his anti-colonial motivation, Michael often steals the show.
There are many reasons How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels reminiscent of The Wages of Fear, from its plot about oil and explosives to its emphasis on oil extractivism’s link to the colonial logic that sent American capital spreading across the globe. But the best influence Goldhaber’s film takes from Clouzot’s masterpiece is its near-constant emphasis on excruciating tension, in each of those scenes when Michael hovers over explosives and works in dusty, Texan landscapes to create the loud devices that might destroy fossil capitalism, hopefully without blowing himself up in the process. These scenes have a greater tension and work to patiently build an atmosphere of explosive anxiety even more powerful than anything in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), or the best heist thrillers, activist dramas, and political films that inspired Goldhaber and Barer, films including Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Nocturama (2016), Zabriskie Point (1970), Thief (1981), Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Battle of Algiers (1966), and Army of Shadows (1969).
Goldhaber and Barer have also cited specifically climate change-oriented films about property destruction like Woman at War (2018), the excellent Earth Liberation Front documentary If a Tree Falls (2011), and the suicide bomber thriller Four Lions (2010). At the same time, they have noted a much quieter inspiration in Robert Bresson’s masterpiece, A Man Escaped (1957), a film that Paul Schrader called an example of “transcendental style in film” for the way Bresson depicted the quiet significance of ordinary objects in a life spent imprisoned. Bresson’s delicate attention to slowly moving images of ordinary things from real life inspired Schrader to direct the Ethan Hawke-starring climate change bomb drama, First Reformed (2017), inspired most immediately by Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951). The midcentury director Robert Bresson, who also made Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)—a film about the human treatment of a donkey that most recently inspired Jerzy Skolimowski’s Polish-Italian donkey film EO (2022)—has held a surprisingly persistent significance for environmental filmmakers, likely due to Bresson’s profound concerns for animals, materiality, and our changing, physical world. An anti-capitalist who may have resisted revolution, yet directed an entire film about the horrible power of money, L’Argent (1983), Bresson saw the real world of the living earth as his aesthetic guide.
But at the same time that How to Blow Up a Pipeline pulls much of its power from quiet films about the natural world and thrillers about the tense, extended moment before an explosion, it also has much in common with George Miller’s visionary Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the final film on the syllabus for the seminar I am teaching about environmental justice cinema. Fury Road is an all-time masterpiece, one of the strongest examples of film as an artform. During its production, George Miller wanted to lean into what made films unique, so he refused to write a verbal screenplay and instead relied on the creation of extensive visual storyboards. He wanted to create a film so viscerally and visually impactful that it could be fully understood by someone watching the film without noise or subtitles, in a manner akin to the best silent movies. By relying on what makes movies unique—the motion of images—Miller famously used the clarity of center-framing and the impact of physical stunts in the Namibian desert to almost wordlessly communicate the essential features of his bizarre postapocalyptic world, where fascist warlords beholden to militarization, car culture, fossil fuels, patriarchy, and the privatization of water and food can only be resisted with militant force. By using incredible tension and visual drama to communicate its mythic story of surviving—and then thriving—in the face of ultra-violence in the climate apocalypse, Fury Road was chosen by critic polls as the greatest film of the century, or one of the best ever made. As Goldhaber said, it is a film where there is “not a wasted frame.”
Many parts of the above paragraph could apply just as well to How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a film that did have a screenplay, and that may not be a contender for the greatest film ever made, but that has a clarity of vision that easily does rise above most movies from this century. It relies on tools unique to cinema to tell its story. Visual tension, the fear of sound bursts, and the drama of vast landscapes in motion are the motors of this story, not words on a page. Its themes are also nearly identical to the themes of Fury Road: both movies are about ordinary, racialized, gendered people forming justice coalitions to militantly resist the hyper-violent regime of fossil fuels and capitalist extractivism that destroys their world and poisons their bodies. And they may both be the best film released in their respective calendar years. How to Blow Up a Pipeline occasionally comes surprisingly close to the heights of Fury Road, elevating a similar story with similar tools.
There is one area where How to Blow Up a Pipeline even rises above Fury Road: it is set right now. Now—not decades or centuries from now—is the time to intensely resist climate violence. There is an accuracy and urgency in its setting that makes it feel suitably timely and necessary.
There are other areas where How to Blow Up a Pipeline fell short for many activists and film critics. The movie may be too short for its eight protagonists to feel equally well-rounded, an arguably inevitable consequence of the film’s smaller budget and extremely rapid production schedule. The movie also falls into the ideological danger zone of depicting rogue vigilantes as the primary agents of the struggle against fossil capitalism. Although Malm is a Leninist theorist, wholly unafraid of vanguard politics, the real-world Lenin situated his revolutionary vanguard party in working-class struggle. By contrast, Goldhaber’s film never roots the struggles of its central characters in broader social movements; its characters only consult one another. They do not form any kind of party, revolutionary bloc, coalition, or network with the capacity to replace the violent world they hope to deconstruct; Michael insists he has no interest in building another world after he helps to detonate the machinery of ecocide. Their sabotage might even risk making life more difficult for the frontline activists who regularly have to face state violence.
These facts alone are not unanswerable strikes against the film’s integrity. There are always risks involved in depicting dramatic, political actions in a concise story. And compared to most of its peers in the eco-sabotage film space—such as Night Moves, which depicted monkeywrenching environmentalists as violent idealists without integrity; or Woman at War and First Reformed, which feature solo actors taking matters into their own hands—Goldhaber’s film does place more of an emphasis on community and collaboration. As Alan Zilberman wrote for the Washington City Paper (in a review my students brought to my attention), the film “unfolds like a much more intense, combustible version of The Breakfast Club.” This community-based hope is refreshing to find in a genre that often feels nihilistic or depressing. The problem is simply that the movie never directly confronts the revolutionary strategy of building another world. It leaves such questions to its audience: those who, the film hopes, might take the root of the film to heart.
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What does it mean to adapt a work of environmentalist political theory into a fictional film? Goldhaber recently said, “Filmmakers can sometimes mistake making a movie for doing the work, the same way that sometimes people can mistake consuming a movie for doing the thing.” In other words, creating a film does not replace the foundational work of seizing the means of production and building a new economic logic capable of undoing the violence of ecocide. “At the same time,” Goldhaber added, “activists who are out there on the front lines, doing the work, do rely on cultural production, to not only bring awareness to what they’re doing, but to create cultural context for what they’re doing.” Film adaptations, in other words, can give context and narrative shape to political theory, lending a cultural stage and a thematic thrust to activist work.
Importantly, the film never blames ordinary people for using cars or technology. This decision directly follows Malm’s book, which insists on the crucial distinction between “luxury and subsistence emissions.” As Malm explains, poorer people who are “locked in a fossil economy” ultimately “have little choice but to use the CO2-emitting energy on offer.” Working people need to drive cars to reach work, light their house with electricity from coal-fired power plants, and even use coal to cook their food—but only because they must eat to simply survive. Meanwhile, “someone who drives a superyacht cannot be thus exonerated: he could easily abstain from his boat without foregoing a vital need or right, indeed without experiencing any discomfort whatsoever.” This distinction boils down to a simple difference in necessity: “Subsistence emissions occur in the pursuit of physical reproduction, in the absence of feasible alternatives. Luxury emissions can claim neither excuse.” Much as Matthew T. Huber later showed—by demonstrating that the vast majority of emissions are rooted in industrial production and profit-driven processes like U.S. militarization and international shipping—the consumer emissions of ordinary people are minimally significant, at most. What matters is the excess of private capital.
A similar insistence oriented the only part of Malm’s book that actually taught the reader “how to” do anything specific. On page 81, Malm adopted the imperative, instructional voice to recount a direct action in which he participated, writing:
Unscrew the cap on the valve of the tyre. Inside, there is a pin that
will release the air if pushed down. Insert a piece of gravel the size
of a boiled couscous grain or corn of black pepper—or, we suggested,
use a mung bean—and screw the cap back on. With the little object
pressing down the pin inside the valve, the tyre will be fully deflated
after about an hour. Don’t forget to stick the printable leaflet under
the windscreen wiper, so the owner can’t miss the tinkering and won’t
drive off with empty tyres, but will have a chance to ponder his choice.
But Malm immediately cautions against sabotaging any oil-powered vehicle, because many vehicles are driven by ordinary people who only create subsistence emissions:
Avoid trucks used by artisans and workers, jeeps for people with disabilities,
minibuses and ordinary cars, we advised any imitators: aim straight for the
SUVs of the rich.
This mantra was directly repeated in the film, which opens with Barer’s character following the exact process outlined in Malm’s instructions. She ends by leaving a leaflet on the windshield, explaining the class roots of the climate crisis and the motivation for her sabotage. By repeatedly emphasizing that climate activists pursuing direct action must avoid causing damage to the personal property or livelihoods of ordinary workers, Malm’s book also emphasized the class divisions of climate change, which overwhelmingly harms the poor and working people of the world, despite being caused by those in the latter half of the catchy equation offered by Chris Cooper’s union organizer character Joe Kenehan in John Sayles’s 1987 coal war film, Matewan:
Now they got you fighting white against colored, native against foreign,
holler against holler, when you know there ain't but two sides to this
world: Them that work, and them that don't. You work. They don't. That's
all you got to know about the enemy.
In the film that Goldhaber, Barer, and Sjol wrote together, an Indigenous land defender, Black lesbian workers, Seattle punks, and a rural white Texan father in a trucker hat can work together to dismantle the fossil economy. Their backgrounds may differ, but their common enemy has clearly marked its territory and announced its omnipresence by writing its geological signature into the landscape as a network of dark pipelines etched into the hills of West Texas. The film does not waste any time or energy with soapbox defenses of the politics or tactics of its protagonists. Instead, the film shows the motives of its protagonists with montages and visceral flashbacks of pollution sickness, stolen land, and anti-Indigenous violence at oilfield man camps. The horizons in the background of the film’s flashbacks are overwhelmed by industrial machines so massive in scale that they drown out the landscapes of the living and bathe them in shadows.
All but one of the characters in the story are workers without economic privilege who receive no economic benefit from the destruction of the planet that looms above their lives. This is a story where the protagonists come from every background but one: them that don’t work.
Them that don’t work are also those who force what the environmentalist scholar Rob Nixon calls a slow violence on the rest of us: a kind of violence too creeping and insidious to register as violence, because it kills us through corporate decisions and long-term environmental impacts, without the spectacle effect provided by gunshots or explosions. As Nixon explained in 2011, “By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Rob Nixon primarily has in mind the violence of environmental crisis. This is the sort of violence that was depicted in the harrowing Todd Haynes film Dark Waters (2019), which showed the slow creep of DuPont’s real corporate act of chemically poisoning a small town in West Virginia with PFOA and other chemicals that killed the animals and made the humans sick with cancer. These contaminants are known as “forever chemicals” because they slowly accumulate over time and never leave the bloodstream. Stories like this occur constantly in the Anthropocene. Many recent events come to mind, like the deeply harmful chemical leaks after the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which left residents with burning eyes, aching throats, skin rashes, and asthmatic coughs that public officials initially ignored. The most important first line of resistance to such violence is simply to lift the veil of silence and to speak out about what happened. After Dark Waters was released in 2019, the film was snubbed from the Academy Awards, but DuPont market shares dropped over 10%, as Haynes had intended. His was a story that aimed to use ideological aims to achieve material ends for tangible justice, striking directly at the profit motive of the corporations who led human communities into ruin.
As Nixon explores in his 2011 book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, there are significantly more instances of environmental slow violence in the Global South, where American corporations—as depicted in films like The Wages of Fear and The Host—leave abundant environmental catastrophes behind them as they exploit cheap labor in countries that have already been ransacked by profit-driven resource extractivism and colonial plunder. This is not an accident caused by “bad apples,” but an intrinsic feature of capitalism, which lives or dies on its ability to neverendingly extract greater surplus value from unexplored extraction markets, manipulating human laborers and ransacking the earth wherever it travels. “Them that work” are those who bear the earthly, bodily cost of capitalist slow violence abroad. That that don’t—don’t.
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We can only overcome this violence by building a new world that outright contradicts the profit imperative and fundamentally rejects the regime of dispersed violence that such profits require. As Matthew Huber wrote in 2022, “At a certain point, climate action requires a massive buildout of energy infrastructure that does not satisfy the ‘profit imperative’; it would mean production for the public good of a stable climate regardless of the cost.” As Huber insists, “this requires challenging the private control over energy production itself,” because private control over the energy production of society—the hoarding of nature for a few capitalists at the expense of the working masses and the planet—can only be maintained by a regime of violence and mass death.
The world of 2023 is a world of increasing violence, both “slow” and “fast,” that we can barely follow as it cascades into greater and greater scales of calamity. This is where storytelling and fiction step in to assist political theory. Andreas Malm’s book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, was an incredibly persuasive and influential work of political theory about property violence in the age of climate change, but it lacked a coherent narrative capable of giving voice to the urgent need for serious climate actions that ignore the polite expectations of respectable academic work.
That is why the film adaptation is so important: it supplies the theory with a story, with concrete characters and human lives to make the risky business of resistance feel possible. Stories like Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, had already depicted a ragtag group of young environmentalists destroying the machinery that powers environmental destruction, but that novel is outdated and never mentions climate change, while more recent eco-sabotage films like Woman at War and Night Moves typically feel either overly whimsical or nihilistic: never realistically or actionably grounded in theory. But the story of How to Blow Up a Pipeline gives new wings to Malm’s bold book. It foregrounds the fact that we are human. Unlike almost all contemporary climate writing, Goldhaber’s film does not end with denial, despair, or even the passive faith offered by techno-optimists who hope some holy technological innovator might save us from ourselves with a patent to save the world—a worldview that breeds passivity and silence. Instead, as the video essayist Jacob Geller beautifully emphasized, the film ends in hope. This is not the idle hope of techno-faith, but the active, rational hope that justifies itself only when we leave dim doomerism behind and teach ourselves how to fight for this world. The film embodies the militancy behind Antonio Gramsci’s slogan: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” For Gramsci, optimism of the will depended on an awareness of the dire stakes. And there is no better way to develop the imaginative muscle that drives such hope than to tell stories.
Malm has noticed something similar. In a recent post on the website of his publisher, Verso, Malm discussed the 2017 academic paper that inspired Kim Stanley Robinson to write The Ministry For the Future, a 2020 near-future cli-fi novel that began with a harrowing account of a heat wave in India with an enormous death toll. As Malm recognized, the fictional novel told a story that was a necessary extension of the ideas found in recent research. The research issues a dire threat about the rising danger of mass deaths induced by climate change. The story—as novelist Kim Stanley Robinson told it—conveyed what Malm calls “a utopia more than a dystopia,” because the social forces who inherit the world after an intensely violent heat wave successfully rid the earth of fossil fuels. Robinson’s novel depicts a militant peoples’ campaign to deploy bombs, drones, hacks, and protests in a full-frontal assault on fossil fuel infrastructure and even the very lives of oil company executives. “In this imagined transition,” Malm writes, “militant resistance is the propulsive force” that makes a just climate transition possible. Malm is discussing another writer’s world, but he openly calls Robinson’s vision a “utopia” driven by “optimism.” That same human, optimistic passion drives the film adaptation of Malm’s ideas.
In his book, Malm also considers the deeply emotional dimension of radical climate activism, including its occasionally dangerous mental health impacts, the fear that prevents activists from escalating their tactics, the rage that drives resistance, and the surprising catharsis Malm felt after committing sabotage himself. As he concludes, in the final lines of How to Blow Up a Pipeline:
But if destroying fences was an act of violence, it was violence of the
sweetest kind. I was high for weeks afterwards. All the despair that
climate breakdown generates on a daily basis was out of my system, if
only temporarily; I had had an injection of collective empowerment.
There is a famous line in The Wretched of the Earth where Frantz Fanon
writes of violence as a “cleansing force.” It frees the native “from his
despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
Few processes produce as much despair as global heating. Imagine that,
someday, the reservoirs of that emotion built up around the world—in
the global South in particular—find their outlets. There has been a
time for a Gandhian climate movement; perhaps there might come a time
for a Fanonian one. The breaking of fences may one day be seen as a
very minor misdemeanor indeed.
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In the same month that I largely spent writing this essay—September of 2023—floods and infrastructure failures caused by record-breaking storms cumulatively killed tens of thousands of people. Tens of thousands of additional humans went missing in climate disasters that struck the earth in September alone. New radioactive wastewater was released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan this September, causing many people in China, South Korea, and elsewhere to stop purchasing fish. Even here in the quiet Midwest, it is currently September 29th in central Iowa, and the coffee shop where I am writing is serving a full menu of fall-themed drinks and pastries—but it is 91°F outside as a record-breaking heat wave forces Iowa’s autumn to recede back into summer. There are currently record-breaking rains and floods in New York City, where Brooklyn basements and many first-floor apartment units are underwater, the subways are leaking torrents of gushwater from the ceilings, and today a sea lion escaped its enclosure in the Central Park Zoo when her pool flooded too high for the constraints to keep her.
Then there have been even more natural disasters unrelated to climate change this month, like the earthquake in Morocco that killed almost 3,000 people, injured 5,500 people, and even created a bizarre, only partly-understood phenomenon called earthquake lights that illuminate the night of an earthquake. Stories like these remind us the earth is not some motionless, inert thing. The shifting climate of this planet is working in concert with a moving crust under living skies.
Then there was Storm Daniel, a tropical cyclone that killed over 11,000 people in Libya this month. Initial reports worried that up to tens of thousands of people went missing, a number that fell last week to 10,000 missing, even as fears of the total death toll have risen to 20,000. This was an unprecedented storm for the Mediterranean. Daniel destroyed dams, killed a famous poet named Mustafa al-Trabelsi, sent chunks of the city Derna into the sea, and turned the sea brown.
This unprecedented storm—like so many storms before it—is attributable to the complex, fossil-powered crisis of capitalism, imperialism, and the onslaught of profit-driven extractivism. These storms began in the oil pipelines that Daniel Plainview stretched across the earth in There Will Be Blood; the pipelines that spilled and killed poor workers in Latin America in The Wages of Fear; the oceanic pipelines that killed millions of sea animals in Deepwater Horizon (2016); and the endless expanse of cars and highways that stretched from horizon to horizon in the earth-based opening scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece about living planets, Solaris (1972). Storms that kill and disappear tens of thousands of people, month after month, still do not feel to us like an actual kind of violence. Even the sight of entire civilian neighborhoods dragged back into the sea still feels to us like a random act of impersonal nature.
But there is nothing random about it. This destruction is what fossil capital has wrought. Fossil capital—as Malm described it—is not an inevitable economic system, or even a politically neutral status quo. As countless writers before me have forcefully insisted, the profit drive powering economic extractivism is a regime of ultra-violence so ugly that it makes the fashion-famous “droogs” in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) look pleasant by comparison. Indeed, psychologists and sociologists have noticed that interpersonal violence, violence against women, patterns of collective violence, and regional war all increase with climate change. The violence of climate change is plainly visible in Palestine, an occupied region facing the worst impacts of climate change: as temperatures rise much faster than the global average, precipitation is dropping, and sea levels rise against the shores of Gaza. These forms of slow climate violence compound the patterns of fast colonial violence that Israel commits against Palestinians, like land dispossession and the targeted damage to Palestinian water infrastructure, as many writers, like Zena Agha and Molly Taft, have repeatedly shown. The image of settlers burning down olive trees has become synonymous with Israel/Palestine, to the point that the Israeli paper Haaretz links climate justice with Palestinian liberation. In places like Gaza, then, we can see our global future. A warming world brings the threats of state repression, hardened borders, and genocide.
This becomes clearly visible at sites of protests against pipelines. The militarized police response to 2016’s #NoDAPL protests in the US—which were organized to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from entering unceded Standing Rock Sioux land—prompted organizations like the ACLU to caution against “the devastating effects of tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, mace, and water cannons used on 400 peaceful protestors in North Dakota.” That line is in reference to only one day amid a many months-long protest that met with nonstop violence. A headline in The Guardian referred to the “extraordinary police violence” exhibited by police against the nonviolent coalition of largely Indigenous water protectors and land defenders.
At sites of extraction, transportation, and emission—all of which still too often become sites of environmental spills, killings, or state suppression—it is clear that the economy of fossil capital is a fundamentally violent enterprise. Its most terrifying effects are felt across decades and generations, through the gradual machinations of slow violence and environmental poison; but frequent flashes of fast violence reliably interrupt the regime at every step along the way.
In light of this well-documented reality, Malm’s argument begins to look surprisingly sober, even measured, especially because he repeatedly insists that, for him, sabotage is a last line of defense, a last resort. Earlier, I mentioned Armond White’s declaration that reviewers who reflect on Goldhaber’s film with sympathy are “pernicious,” because such writers “bow to the film’s ideology” with what could only be called “a dereliction of journalistic probity.” Notably, not even once did White’s review acknowledge or cite the violence of fossil capital. It is always those who know least about the violence of the world who find resistance and self-defense in the face of systemic violence pernicious. Goldhaber’s film announces that what it depicts is self-defense, a method for countering the ultra-violence of fossil capital with moderate survival tools. All its characters ask for is survival. And all they harm is the profit motive, not any human lives.
While remembering this violent pattern powering the economy that is sending our shared climate to ruin, consider once more the cyclone in Libya—Storm Daniel—which killed at least eleven thousand people and pulled entire city neighborhoods into the sea earlier this month. I want to end this essay with a poem that was written by the Libyan poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, a poem that people in Derna are sharing on social media. Titled “The Rain,” it is a poem where the activist poet talks about a storm coming that will totally drench the streets because of preventable infrastructure failures. On September 10th, al-Trabelsi was killed by the floods that overwhelmed Derna. He wrote this poem two days before the stormwaters killed him. On September 6th, he even attended a meeting about the poor state of the dams and the high risk of catastrophic floods in Derna, which would indeed fall into the sea less than four days later, when the dams gave out and flooded. People are calling the poem “prophetic.” Here’s that poem he wrote two days before being killed by a dam that failed to contain catastrophic rains made ruinous by climate change:
The rain
exposes the drenched streets,
the cheating contractor,
and the failed state.
It washes everything,
bird wings
and cats’ fur.
Reminds the poor
of their fragile roofs
and ragged clothes.
It awakens the valleys,
shakes off their yawning dust
and dry crusts.
The rain
a sign of goodness,
a promise of help,
an alarm bell.
Maybe if more people listen to environmentalists like Malm, Goldhaber, and Barer, poets in the future will no longer need to appeal to the impersonal forces of prophecy and the cleansing power of rain. They might instead appeal to themselves, to each other, and to the power of their own living arms, as they formulate a radical, material plan to build a world without oil pipelines.
Until then, we should show more gratitude to the poets among us who are still breathing. Without the adaptation artists who give narrative shape to our struggle, we’d all be lost at sea.
Zachary Calhoun is the Book Review Editor of Flyway, a Faculty Steward of the Everett Casey Nature Center & Reserve, and an emerging fiction writer from New Mexico. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in Philosophy from Tulane University. He was the 2018 recipient of the Aristotle Prize and the 2022 Writer-in-Residence at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. His work has appeared in From Sac, After the Pause, The Review of Metaphysics, and Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. He teaches creative writing, film studies, and environmental literature and philosophy at Iowa State University.
