In October 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report confirming that there is very little time for world governments to avert irreversible climate catastrophe. The new crackdown comes amid urgent warnings from climate scientists about the dangerous impacts of climate change. government, in the interest of companies who profit from damaging the Earth, sought to squash animal rights and environmental activism. The original Green Scare was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when the U.S. “I do believe we are re-entering a phase when there is greater and more obvious cooperation between corporate interests, especially energy and extractive industries, and the state,” Loadenthal says. For Michael Loadenthal, visiting assistant professor of sociology and social justice at Miami University in Ohio and an expert on the repression of social movements, these penalties indicate a resurgence of the Green Scare. Such charges are part of a wave of penalties faced by eco-activists in recent years, spurred in part by new laws passed in the wake of the massive protests near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. “I do believe we are re-entering a phase when there is greater and more obvious cooperation between corporate interests, especially energy and extractive industries, and the state.” Activists have now been using direct action to block construction of the pipeline in West Virginia for more than a year.Īfter being removed from the pipeline, Alex was brought to the police station, facing two felonies and a terrorism charge-exactly what Alex had feared. Two more protesters were charged soon afterward for similar offenses, and dozens of people have been arrested since. Just a month before, twenty-two-year-old activist Holden Dometrius became the first Mountain Valley Pipeline protester to be charged with a terrorism crime, after he chained himself to construction equipment. “What was going through my mind was, ‘Try not to say anything that will be considered a threat of terrorism, because they’ve been charging people with that,’ ” Alex tells The Progressive. The project, an under-construction natural gas pipeline owned by Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, will span the Virginias and poses a major threat to the local ecology, including many endangered species.Īfter police arrived at the scene, a state trooper used a rope to drag Alex from the pipe, feet first. It was May of this year, and Alex (a pseudonym) was physically attached to cement-filled tires inside a section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia.
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