In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm advocates, but also shits on direct action. Clearly detached from ecological struggles, referring to anarchists attacks as not big enough, he draws on the work of Micheal Loadenthal who documented “27,100 actions between 1973 and 2010,” in an attempt to discredit decentralized action.

“All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions achieved little if anything,” explains Malm, “and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.”

Ignoring the actions of the remaining Leftist governments (Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.), it is clear Malm has no idea what these actions advocate, let alone the continuation and intensification of eco-anarchist attacks in Europe and the rest of the world between 2010–2016 (see Return Fire magazine, 325, Act for Freedom Now, Avalanche etc.). More still, many of these actions, especially Earth Liberation Front (ELF) actions, were supported by local struggles.[5]

He conveniently forgets all the direct actions and sabotage in direct connection to popular movements that helped save wetlands and stop motorways across the UK [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.4 pg89], or the vital role decentralized direct action and sabotage play in the highly effective struggle of the Mapuche people to recover their territory [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.3 pg59], to name just two examples – and there are countless.

And because environmental justice and social justice go hand in hand, we shouldn’t forget the vital role that arson attacks and other major decentralized sabotage actions had in the divestment campaign against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1980s, or the change in public attitudes towards the racist police in the United States accomplished by direct and decentralized attacks across that country [R.F. – see The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis].