Excerpt from the foreword: Oliver Ressler, “Artists and Climate Action in the Age of Irreversible Decision”

Many people today see a change in personal behavior as a solution to the climate crisis. It is important to take a train instead of a plane, eat vegetables instead of meat, or put solar panels on a residential roof instead of burning gas. But private gestures of good faith alone are not equipped to stop epochal climate vandalism on a planetary scale. Planetary life is more than consumer behavior. Our power and responsibility as inhabitants of the Earth are collective and social, not private and personal. Powerful structures, not personal decisions, force us into lives that destroy livelihoods, devalue life, and ultimately endanger survival. We who suffer from those structures are collectively implicated in them, which is why they must be changed by our collective action or not at all. As Lenka Kukurová writes in her essay “Dancing on the Ruins”: “Individual and systemic change must be combined, and the latter should be the focus of energy” (p. 29).

Today, the climate movement is stronger than ever. Polite symbolic protest is a distant memory. In the last couple of years, the movement has materially obstructed “flagship” fossil-furnace projects all over the world. Arctic drilling, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and shale frackers were stopped in their tracks by collective action. Some of Europe’s filthiest coalfired power plants were shut down by non-violent sabotage. Institutional investors began unloading fossil-fuel stocks in an act of tacit surrender to relentless climate movement pressure. More recently, Extinction Rebellion brought business as usual in London to a standstill for days at a time with blockades of bridges, successfully pressuring the British parliament to declare a “climate and environment emergency”—the first such proclamation by any European state. Such actions have immediate, concrete impact at the local site; and thanks to new means of communication, their “virtual” impact is felt across the planet. In his reflection on “Art, Activism, and the Politics of Pipelines,” Imre Szeman observes that the “existence of virtual worlds means that demonstrations today need to be designed to generate traffic on the web as much as to block traffic in the streets” (p. 49).