Most criminals think they are right.
Pol Pot thought he was right and then he and the rest of the Kmer Rouge murdered two million of their fellow countrymen.
From Wired magazine, August 7:
Sabotage. Property destruction. For Léna Lazare and her cohort, radicalized by years of inaction on the environmental crisis, these aren’t dirty words. They’re acts of joy.
The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickax.
The then-24-year-old’s long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That’s important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she’s about to do. She drives the pickax into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they find what they’ve been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of the ground.
In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these mega-basins—which can hold up to 720 million liters, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are effectively hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and local groundwater systems depleted.
That’s why these projects are targets for sabotage, according to Lazare. She talks about “disarming” the reservoirs, as if they, not she and her fellow protesters, were the source of violence. She’s watching from the crowd on this clear day in March 2022 as a man in jeans and a white T-shirt strains to lever a piece of pipe out of the ground with rope. Someone produces an angle grinder. When a section is cut free, the crowd breaks into applause before a man in blue overalls brandishes the severed pipe above his head like a trophy. “At that moment,” Lazare recalls later, “the water gushed out and returned to the earth.”
Lazare is one of the 200 founding members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, a French organization that is the most extreme of a new wave of radical European climate groups formed in the past five years. In France, this soft-spoken former physics student has become a spokesperson for sabotage. “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings,” she says....
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