To the Ends of the Earth
Does radical activism help or hurt the climate movement?
SEPTEMBER 5, 2024
On July 19, an orange kite emblazoned with an orange butterfly appeared over a water reservoir in Deux-Sèvres, in western France, a small bundle fastened to its string. In the fields below, set back from the reservoir by a line of police, a crowd of people wearing hazmat suits, animal masks, goggles and bike helmets closely tracked its progress. When the package dropped from the sky and into the reservoir, arms shot into the air in triumph. “The butterfly laid an egg!” someone yelled.
The kite was an experiment in sabotage, carried out during a protest led by the French climate movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre (SDLT), whose name translates to “Earth Uprisings.” Inside the package were duckweed and seeds that the activists hoped would spawn enough leaves to clog the water reservoir’s mechanisms, ultimately disabling them.
The activist group argues that these reservoirs — publicly funded infrastructure used by the farming industry to store fresh water for irrigation — are harmful to the environment, encourage excessive water use by agro-industrial companies and worsen droughts by depleting groundwater reserves. Sixteen such reservoirs are slated to be built in the region; SDLT is calling on the government to issue a moratorium.
Members of the French government have criticized SDLT’s actions and labeled its activists “ecoterrorists.” Their focus has been on the movement’s radical flank, which includes members who perform acts of sabotage and clash with police at demonstrations.
In the week leading up to the protest, some 6,000 people had gathered at an encampment near the reservoir to prepare and debate. Guest speakers included environmental organizers, politicians and scholars who had traveled from as far as Mexico and Morocco. The encampment –– dubbed a “water village” and designed to show “other ways of doing and being together are possible,” according to a video posted by the movement –– included a gazette, a day care, a library and a concert tent with nightly performances.
SDLT, founded in 2021, aims to gather people who have become disillusioned with traditional forms of climate activism to fight industrial models of agriculture and production. It describes itself as a leaderless climate movement. Rather than look to sway public opinion in cities, SDLT collaborates with farmers and local environmental groups in rural areas. Its actions focus on disrupting infrastructure, including water reservoirs, highways and factories. Activists have staged blockades, set cement trucks on fire and damaged industrial incinerators.
Members of the French government have criticized SDLT’s actions and labeled its activists “ecoterrorists.” Their focus has been on the movement’s radical flank, which includes members who perform acts of sabotage and clash with police at demonstrations. During this year’s July protests, participants in a march in La Rochelle reportedly smashed up a supermarket, a bus stop and a bank. Seven people were arrested and nine were wounded, including four police officers.
But SDLT supporters and human rights watchdogs point out that the high number of injuries at previous demonstrations has been the result of an outsized police response and violence from officers who indiscriminately harmed peaceful protesters.
SDLT is not alone in causing controversy by embracing acts of sabotage –– a protest tactic involving property damage –– as part of its activism. Across Europe, climate activists have adopted increasingly disruptive methods. In the past few years, members of groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Last Generation have glued their hands to roads, occupied the offices of government officials and camped out at coal mines. In the U.K., Just Stop Oil activists threw soup at a Van Gogh and covered Stonehenge with powdered paint as part of their call for countries to ban new oil and gas infrastructure. Politicians condemned the acts as “disgraceful” and “pathetic,” and a majority of people surveyed in the U.K. said they disapproved of Just Stop Oil’s actions, even if some also agreed that the country should stop subsidizing domestic oil and gas companies.
SDLT now regularly hosts some of the largest mobilizations of environmental activists in France. The question is whether SDLT’s actions help or hinder existing efforts to halt industrial projects. Recent research has shown that radical flanks of environmental movements can either increase support for more moderate groups or produce the opposite effect, making moderates appear more radical by association. Some traditional green groups in France fear the latter.
SDLT has been successful in mobilizing protesters, but its overall strategy is “counterproductive,” said Jon Palais, co-founder of Alternatiba, a French environmental group that focuses on peaceful protests. SDLT has opened itself up to attack for being too extremist, he warned, “and the more a movement is demonized, the more it can be repressed.”
The movement has said that its tactics join, rather than replace, existing ones — like peaceful protest and litigation — to pressure for change on multiple fronts. But support for SDLT from traditional groups, even those who oppose the same projects, has been limited — in large part because they are wary of the media’s focus on the property destruction and confrontations with the police. As the group struggles to convey its message, it now must weigh the risks of police repression and self-sabotage.
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SDLT’s birthplace lies on an abandoned construction site in the western commune of Notre-Dame-des Landes. Starting in 2008, activists established a “zone to defend” across 1,650 hectares (4,076 acres) to prevent an airport from being built. They squatted abandoned homes, built shelters from wood and scrap and farmed the land for subsistence.
At first, SDLT actions focused on occupations and blockades, alongside traditional protest methods like marches. Then, in the summer of 2021, SDLT activists staged attacks on machines at the factories of Lafarge, the world’s largest cement manufacturer, and adopted a policy of what it calls “disarmament.”
Over the next decade, the encampment grew into a 300-person community that welcomed visitors to participate in mass marches, occupations and acts of sabotage. French President Emmanuel Macron conceded in 2018, calling off construction of the airport and sending police to clear the area. Some 150 to 200 residents, many of whom signed leases with the local government, stayed on, and the area soon became a utopic symbol for the climate movement.
By January 2021, eager for renewed action after a pandemic lockdown, around 100 people — including farmers and veteran activists who had participated in the initial occupation — reconvened at Notre-Dame-des-Landes and laid plans for a national movement.
A core group of activists consolidated their views in a manifesto that laid out three main goals: dismantle the pesticide, concrete and synthetic fertilizer industries; stop large-scale land acquisition by agro-industrial companies; and transfer decision-making power from the political institutions and polluting industries back to local farmers and residents.
At first, SDLT actions focused on occupations and blockades, alongside traditional protest methods like marches. Then, in the summer of 2021, SDLT activists staged attacks on machines at the factories of Lafarge, the world’s largest cement manufacturer, and adopted a policy of what it calls “disarmament.”
In a book published by SDLT in 2023, the group explains: “Each demonstration translates our anger and aspirations into a concrete gesture rather than a vain plea addressed to those who govern us, oppress us and are in the process of destroying the very possibility of our future on earth.” The term “disarmament,” according to an essay in the book, is intended to redefine sabotage as “a matter of self-defense in the face of disaster” that “targets toxic and destructive infrastructure.”
“From the start, it was a project that assumed the fact that we would carry out actions that had an element of illegality,” said Nicolas Garrigues, who moved to the area to protest the airport and never left. Now an SDLT spokesperson, he goes by Benoît Feuillu (“Leafy”) in the field. (Activists often use nature-themed pseudonyms to protect their identities.)
SDLT protesters use tactics that are also commonly deployed by French farmers’ and working class protests. Earlier this year, demonstrations led by a farmer’s union that strongly opposes SDLT also featured blockades, arson and the defacement of government buildings. Black blocs, autonomous anarchists who reportedly destroy property and confront police at SDLT protests, also took part in Yellow Vests protests against a fuel tax in 2018.
SLDT’s approach also draws on a long history of sabotage as environmental protest. The movement, its members have written, “carefully considers” but does not credit the arguments of Andreas Malm, the Swedish author of How To Blow Up a Pipeline. His manifesto, published in 2021 and adapted into a Hollywood thriller, critiques the commitment to nonviolence in Extinction Rebellion’s charter and argues for property destruction in the next phase of the climate movement. Malm, who has attended SDLT actions, has said he considers the group to be the most exciting development in climate activism.
Maitlin left the protest unharmed but emotionally numb. “I was zombified,” he recalled.
The group quickly attracted activists who were frustrated by mass marches that failed to produce tangible results. Among them is Léna Lazare, a 26-year-old farmer who was previously a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the movement inspired by the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, and joined the “zone to defend” in Notre-Dames-des-Landes. “If there’s one thing the climate movement understood in 2019, it’s that the institutional route is a dead end,” she wrote in an essay published by the group.
SDLT’s biggest campaigns have targeted water reservoirs. Its most well-known — and controversial — reservoir action took place in the commune of Sainte-Soline, in western France, in March 2023. Around 25,000 activists according to organizers, and 6,000 according to local authorities, showed up to protest the reservoir, where they were met with more than 3,000 members of police armed with tear gas grenades and rubber bullets. Nine police helicopters circled the area.
Maitlin, a 25-year-old farmer in training who asked to be identified only by his first name, had never been to an SDLT protest of this scale before. In an interview, he recalled forming a human chain with several politicians who had attended the protest — including the European Parliament member Benoît Biteau and Clémence Guetté, a deputy of the National Assembly — to protect the wounded. Some protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. More than 200 protesters were injured, and two people fell into comas. Several dozen police were injured.
Maitlin left the protest unharmed but emotionally numb. “I was zombified,” he recalled. On the ride home, he started drafting a detailed account of events, which he shared with The Dial, recounting his shock at the police response and the memory of watching injured activists being evacuated. “This is the first episode of my radicalization,” it concludes. At another SDLT protest a few months later, he played a more active role, serving as a police lookout for activists, some of whom set trucks on fire at a cement factory.
While many green party members, some of whom were present at the protests, decried the use of police violence, the government and many center and right-wing politicians harshly condemned the activists’ behavior.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said it was “unacceptable” that activists were being “extremely violent against our policemen.” President Emmanuel Macron said the protesters “came simply to wage war,” and warned: “In a democracy, people don’t have the right to violence.” Guillaume Kasbarian, a member of Macron’s centrist party who later became the housing minister, described the activists as “a hoard of savages.”
Across Europe, governments have responded aggressively to climate activists’ civil disobedience.
The U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, condemned the police response “vastly disproportionate” and has called France “the worst country in Europe for police repression of environmental activists.” But he also warned that the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights Defenders only protects nonviolent activists: “Ultraviolent groups are diverting nonviolent protests from their purpose and contributing to discrediting the cause of environmental activists.”
For Rémi Barroux, a journalist at the French daily Le Monde who covers the movement, the Sainte-Soline protest revealed the hazards of SDLT’s broad church. SDLT’s more radical members exist within a movement that also includes a farmers union, pacifists, scientists, families, politicians and naturalists who don’t necessarily support “disarmament” but are unified in their opposition to a given industrial project.
“It is both an asset and a weakness of SDLT that, in the same demonstration, you can have people who come as a family with children, and then people who want to affront,” Barroux said. “A confrontation puts everyone in danger because of the violence from the state.”
A poll conducted this March, a year after the Sainte-Soline protest, found that 76 percent disapproved of and considered protesters’ actions violent, compared with 53 percent who disapproved of the police’s actions and considered them violent.
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Tensions between SDLT protesters and the government reached a boiling point after Sainte-Soline, when Darmanin invoked counterterrorism laws to temporarily dissolve the movement. The decree, issued in June 2023, read: “No cause justifies the particularly numerous and violent actions that SDLT group calls for.” Involvement in SDLT became punishable by up to three years in prison and 45,000 euros in fines. At least 15 members of the movement were arrested across the country.
The response was in line with the government’s previous approach to climate activism that it considers radical. In the past decade, it has deployed a variety of repressive tools — wiretaps, arrests, criminal conspiracy charges, specialized national police cells, protest bans — that have sparked condemnation from human rights groups.
These tactics are not unique. Across Europe, governments have responded aggressively to climate activists’ civil disobedience. In Germany, activists have been subjected to home raids, wiretapping and website shutdowns. In Italy, the government has used anti-mafia laws and a counterterrorism unit to target the Ultima Generazione, the country’s chapter of the Last Generation climate movement. The U.K., meanwhile, has expanded stop-and-search powers, criminalized blockade tactics and introduced protest bans for individuals — measures that U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk has asked the British government to reverse.
In reaction to the French crackdown on SDLT, more than 100,000 people signed a petition protesting the dissolution and declaring themselves members of the movement. Among them were the Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, the anthropologist Philippe Descola, the actress Adèle Haenel and the writer Naomi Klein. SDLT members also called on supporters to create local committees across the country that could carry on the movement’s work. According to Garrigues, the SDLT spokesperson, there are currently around 200 active local committees of SDLT across France, Belgium and Switzerland.
A few months later, in August 2023, the highest jurisdiction in France, the Conseil d’État, suspended the dissolution on the basis that it infringed on the members’ freedom of assembly and that there was insufficient evidence to prove that SDLT condoned violence against individuals. It confirmed that judgment in November, ruling that the government had acted illegally. SDLT had not provoked violence against people, only property, and the order for dissolution was determined to have been a disproportionate measure for the group’s disruptions. The decision nevertheless granted the state permission to continue surveilling the activists.
In a political landscape where climate issues have become highly divisive, green activists are split as to whether SDLT’s disruptive methods can be effective — or whether they will further divide.
Among those arrested in the government crackdown after Saint-Soline was Loïc Schneider, a 29 -year-old part-time farmer. Dressed in a monk’s robe, he had held up a police vest during the protest and spray painted a police car. He was sentenced to six months in prison for concealment of a police vest and participation in a group aiming to commit violence or damage. He told The Dial the experience only reinforced his convictions. “It’s a philosophical choice,” Schneider said of the form of activism he’s embraced. “I would not be able to have a normal life anyways in a society that is collapsing.”
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SDLT’s victories include the cancellation of 15 water reservoirs and construction delays for several infrastructure projects. But the minister of agriculture promised to speed up construction for at least 100 more water reservoirs across the country by the end of the year. A highway project SDLT has opposed near Toulouse is nearly complete, and at least three other highways are slated for construction. As part of the government’s plan to make France “a major industrial power again,” 55 sites have been chosen for new infrastructure projects.
France, already a top emitter of greenhouse gas in the EU, is lagging behind on its green transition targets. In 2020, the state failed to meet renewable energy targets that had been set in 2009; it has also been fined 30 million-euro for not curbing air pollution in 2022-2023. Under pressure to counter the growing appeal of the far-right National Rally party, Macron has called for a “pause” on new European environmental regulations and rolled out a new policy package focused on creating industrial incentives rather than obligations for cutting carbon emissions by 2030. The National Rally — which has decried climate policy as “punitive ecology” — went on to win the most seats of any single party in July’s snap parliamentary elections, though it fell short of an absolute majority.
In a political landscape where climate issues have become highly divisive, green activists are split as to whether SDLT’s disruptive methods can be effective — or whether they will further divide.
“Go twice a year to a big demonstration with 4,000 people to shout for two days and go home for the rest of the year — for me, that’s not a mobilization,” said Antoine Gatet, the president of France Nature Environnement, a national federation of environmental organizations.
Some of these organizations coordinate with SDLT to plan protests. Gatet noted that SDLT skews activist and media attention toward single projects, obscuring others. “The Sainte-Soline reservoir is only one among 16 in the region, among 93 that we have been battling for years,” he said.
Some environmental organizations — among them Greenpeace, the farmers’ union La Confédération Paysanne [1] and Oxfam — have joined a new alliance that shares some of SDLT’s demands and sometimes collectively attends SDLT protests. Oxfam joined to “show that civil society stands in a common front,” said Elise Naccarato, the leader of the climate campaign at Oxfam France. Protests are chosen carefully, she said, due to the criminalization of activists and coverage of SDLT protests. Oxfam was present at the encampment before the July protests, for example, and supports a moratorium on reservoirs — an issue it has been working on for years, Naccarato said.
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Over the past several months, new zones of defense have sprung up along a highway linking the cities of Castres and Toulouse, the construction of which is razing hundreds of hectares of farmland and forest. Two major protests targeting the project drew thousands of people, and police responded with tear gas and riot gear, clashing with activists, arresting dozens and destroying the encampments. In May, SDLT staged a protest at a warehouse complex along the Seine where almost 60 protesters were arrested. This month, members will collaborate with the Venice Climate Camp to protest artificial snow reservoirs slated to be built for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina.
But the group is also making some adjustments. Premières secousses, a new book authored by several of SDLT’s core members and published this year, suggests that the movement is adapting its strategy as it thinks about how to ensure its longevity. The movement, the authors write, needs to make an impact “beyond local victories and media blitzes.”
Lazare, the 26-year-old SDLT member, said the group wants to better protect its activists to ensure fewer people are wounded or face trial; it also wants to avoid confrontations with police. At the encampment ahead of July’s water reservoir action, there were daily workshops on how to recognize police weapons and reduce physical risks during protests.
Still, the group’s sense of urgency has remained the same, she said: “If we don’t act, terrible things await us.”
✺ Published in “Issue 20: Lessons” of The Dial
