The top 3 reasons why civil disobedience matters

What did they do? First, they blockaded a giant dump truck and shovel at Shell’s massive Albian Sands open-pit mine in northern Alberta. Next, they stopped two giant conveyor belts that carry bitumen from Suncor’s mine on the east side of the Athabasca river to its upgrader on the west side. Finally, they entered a site where Shell upgrades the raw crude extracted from the tar sands into usable oil, occupying several structures in the heart of what many affected land owners call 'cancer alley.'

Why did they do it? Here are the top three reasons civil disobedience matters in the tar sands, and for all of us.


1. The world needs to know what's happening.

We knew from our colleagues in other Greenpeace national offices that, outside of Canada, the tar sands were almost completely unknown. That meant the world wasn't aware of the massive climate crime taking place in northern Alberta. It also meant that our political leaders weren't feeling the heat from other politicians and international customers of tar sands oil. That's one reason we decided to stage large-scale, spectacular actions in the tar sands in the lead up to December's United Nations climate change meetings in Copenhagen, Denmark. The actions included colleagues from other Greenpeace offices to increase media interest outside of Canada. And it worked. The actions secured headlines around the world.

2. Real change can mean changing the rules.

As the Anne Feeney song says, laws are made by people, and people can be wrong. Laws that protect profit and property over the health of communities and—quite literally—the future of our planet, can be (in our opinion) legitimately challenged. For Greenpeace, that doesn't mean putting people in danger—all of our actions are peaceful, and we always put the safety of our activists and other people on the site first—but it can mean (after the consideration of many variables, including a legal strategy) risking arrest. As Greenpeace Executive Director Bruce Cox (who himself was arrested during a tar sands action) wrote in a recent blog post :  

      How can it be legal for 11 million litres a day of contaminated water to leech into  the Athabasca watershed? When Greenpeace takes peaceful direct action, we are  challenging the authority of the government, holding its decisions up to the light  and exposing the hypocrisy of jailing young activists while oil executives walk  free to pollute.

The view that civil disobedience is an essential component of society is shared by many, and detailed in a recent opinion piece in the Edmonton Journal in defense of civil disobedience in general, and Greenpeace's recent actions in particular.

3. Action is hope.

We are told in many different ways that there is nothing we can do. The messages we get implicitly and explicitly from government, from industry and from the media are almost unanimous: the status quo, while it can tweaked around edges, is the only way. Environmental destruction and other injustices are just 'sad realities.' This, of course, is not the case. Things can change. They have, and they will again. These messages about 'practicality' are just (very effective) public relations in the service of how things work now. Civil disobedience is public relations in the service of how things could be.

Cynicism is not a state of mind, it is a state of stasis. Hope—not day dreaming, real hope—is not a state of mind, it is a state of action. In undertaking peaceful direct action in the tar sands, Greenpeace activists are literally embodying hope. They are demonstrating that the large-scale environmental destruction we are seeing in Northern Alberta is not 'normal' or 'practical' at all. Instead, it is alarming enough to force individuals to face arrest in order to suggest that, in reality, things can be different.