Andreas Malm arrived in Barcelona by train from Sweden, where he was born in 1977, stopping in Paris, because he never takes planes to get around Europe. Even so, he is not the one who harangues about going to the supermarket with a cloth bag, rather he is the kind of environmentalist who advocates blowing things up. This is the title of his latest book, not yet translated into Spanish,
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
(how to blow up a pipeline), published by Verso Books, in which he condenses his experience in both research - he is a tenured professor at the University of Lund and author of essays as
Fossil Capital
(Captain Swing), in which he explains in hyper-detailed global warming starting from the British industrial revolution - as in street activism.
Malm became known in his country when he began to puncture the wheels of jeeps in the affluent neighborhoods of Stockholm.
He left them a note that said: "Don't take it personally, it's your car that we don't like."
Andreas Malm does not take airplanes to travel in Europe.
Anna huix
Malm suspects that the time has come for the movement against climate change to stop being "cute" and start appearing pissed off. "For a long time, the aesthetic of the movement has been like, 'oh, we're nice, nice people asking for reasonable things.' But the real emotion that the climate movement has to learn to channel is anger, which is what fuels social movements. This has long been learned by feminism and anti-racism in the United States ”. The climate struggle, he believes, has more than enough "strategic pacifism" and assemblies without leaders and lacks organized direct action. “On platforms like Extinction Rebellion there is a doctrine that you should never deviate from non-violence. I think that is wrong. The climate movement needs a radical flag ”. It is also necessary, he believes, clear leaders,some structure in the environmental movement. “They always want to be horizontal and are very nervous about conquering power. I do not like that. Sometimes there are eruptions of protest, people join in, there is a wave, but then it disappears and leaves no trace in politics. Organizations with elected leaders are necessary to give solidity to these movements ”.
One of the books translated into Spanish by the ecologist Andreas Malm, at the Finestres bookstore in Barcelona.
Anna huix
Climate action, he thinks, does not go through corporate environmentalism, which is practiced by companies that do
greenwashing,
and neither through international summits such as the next COP26 in Glasgow, nor through the decisions they may make when they make the purchase or when "a few enlightened individuals" go on vacation.
“In Sweden we have the
flygskam
phenomenon
,
which makes people feel embarrassed about taking planes.
I am not against it, I am not like those who say that it does not matter what you do in your private life, but the fault of the individual consumer will not solve anything ”.
The only possible way, he argues in his many academic and informative publications, is to stop production with fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy. "Only a few sectors would suffer," he says. For example, aviation. Should all short flights and private jets be canceled? "Private planes must be criminalized, of course." He came home as he came, by train.
