by Chris Hedges
It might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure.2
—FRIEDERICH NIETZSCHE, “BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL”
The man who waged the first significant war in North America against hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” was an eccentric, messianic Christian preacher named Wiebo Ludwig. Ludwig, with his small Christian community in the Canadian province of Alberta, sabotaged at least one wellhead by pouring cement down its shaft, and he blew up several others. The Canadian authorities, along with the oil and gas barons, have demonized Ludwig as an ecoterrorist—an odd charge given that they are the ones responsible for systematically destroying the environment and the planet.3
The anti-fracking movement, especially in rural communities in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York, is one of the most potent grassroots insurgencies in North America. The movement has been able to block the natural gas industry’s plans to exploit shale gas in New York State. And it is a huge stumbling block for the industry in many other parts of the United States and Canada. If the anti-fracking movement has a founding father, it is Wiebo Ludwig.
Ludwig swiftly understood that environmental laws are not designed to protect the environment. The laws are designed, at best, to regulate the environment’s continued exploitation. It was futile, he argued, to spend energy attempting to improve or adjust these regulations. We might be able to slow or delay environmental degradation, but we would not stop it.
Ludwig exposed the absurdity of attempting to build an environmental movement that had as its goal the more efficient oversight and regulation of the oil and gas industry. He realized that lobbying those in power, testifying in hearings, writing letters of protest, contacting celebrities to attract press attention, and organizing petition drives to get the government to intervene was useless. Corporations, he understood, determined and often wrote the laws that were ostensibly designed to regulate their activity. Environmental laws were, he found, a circular joke on the public. And the Big Green environmental groups that worked within these legal parameters were largely ineffectual and often complicit in the destruction of the ecosystems they claimed they wanted to protect. Resistance, he argued, would have to be militant and it would have to be local. It could not play by the rules imposed by the corporate state.
As Thomas Linzey, the executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has helped organize dozens of communities to impose local bans on oil and gas extraction, pointed out, “Forty years after the major environmental laws were adopted in the US, and forty years after trying to regulate the damage caused by corporations to the natural environment and our communities, by almost every major environmental statistic, things are worse now than they were before.”4
Calgary, Alberta, is a boomtown. Glittering skyscrapers, monuments to the obscene profits amassed by a fossil fuel industry that is exploiting the tar sands and the vast oil and natural gas fields, have transformed Calgary, declaring the city’s new identity as a mecca for money, dirty politics, greed, and industry jobs. The city is as soulless and sterile as Houston. The death of the planet, for a few, is very good business.
“Wiebo felt that our society was in a spiritual crisis, rather than an environmental or an economic crisis,” David York told me. York’s film Wiebo’s War is a portrayal of Ludwig and his fight with the oil and gas industry.5 “He felt that our addiction to fossil fuels, rampant consumerism and materialism, addictions, breakdown of family units, were all symptoms of a society that has lost its root connection to God. Further, he felt that we are in a kind of end times state, where the forces of good are in a terrible struggle with the forces of evil. He wasn’t so crass as to put a timetable on it, but in his view, ‘any fool can see the times.’ ”
That one of our era’s most effective figures of resistance against the oil and gas industry was a messianic Christian is perhaps not coincidental. He was propelled forward by a vision. I do not share Ludwig’s Christian fundamentalism—his community was a rigid patriarchy—but I do share his belief that when human law comes into conflict with what is moral, human law must be defied. Ludwig grasped the moral decadence of the consumer society, its unchecked hedonism, worship of money, and deadening cult of the self. He retreated in 1985 with his small band of followers into the remoteness of northern Alberta. His community, called Trickle Creek, was equipped with its own biodiesel refinery, windmill, and solar panels—which permitted it to produce its own power—as well as a greenhouse and a mill.6 Its members, who grew their own food, severed themselves from the contaminants of consumer culture. But like the struggle of Axel Heyst, the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, Ludwig’s flight from evil resulted in evil coming to him.
Ludwig’s farm was atop one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world. Landowners in Alberta own only the top six inches of soil. The mineral rights below it belong to the state. The province can lease these rights without the knowledge or acquiescence of the owner. Beneath Ludwig’s farm lay a fossil fuel known as sour gas, a neurotoxin that, if released from within the earth, even in small amounts, can poison livestock, water tables, and people.
“Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions,” wrote Henry David Thoreau.7 This is what happened to Ludwig.
The oil and gas companies began a massive drilling effort in the early 1990s. At first, like many other reformers and activists, Ludwig used legal and political channels to push back against the companies, which were putting down wells on the edge of his 160-acre farm. He spent the first five years attending hearings with civil regulators, writing letters—he even wrote to Jane Fonda—and appealing in vain to elected officials, government agencies, the press, environmentalists, and First Nations groups. His family—he had eleven children—posted a sign in 1990 that decried “the ruthless interruption and cessation” of privacy; “the relentless greedy grabbing of Creational resources”; “the caloused [sic] disregard for the sanctity of the Lord’s Day”; the legislation of land and mineral ownership policy “that does violence to the God-given ‘right to property.’ ”8 Ludwig then presented the offending oil company, Ranchmen’s, with a bill for the sign.
“He was primarily motivated by his love for his family and a strong sense of justice,” said Andrew Nikiforuk, the author of a book on Ludwig called Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, whom I met in Calgary. He told me, “It did not seem right to him that the oil industry could park a drilling well for sour gas in view of his family’s communal dining room. ‘Is a man not even master in his own house, let alone his own land, on matters like these?’
“His war against industry illustrated the cost of our addiction to hydrocarbons: our materialistic way of life is based on the destruction of groundwater, the devaluing of rural property, the invasion of rural communities, the poisoning of skies with carcinogens, the fragmentation of landscapes,” Nikiforuk said. “Urban people do not understand the sacrifices now being imposed on rural people.”
Ludwig’s first acts of sabotage, as Nikiforuk’s book and York’s film document, were minor. He laid down nails poking up out of boards on roads to puncture the tires on the industry’s trucks. He smashed solar panels. He blocked roads by downing trees. He disabled vehicles and drilling equipment. But after two leaks of hydrogen sulfide sour gas from nearby wells—which forced everyone on the farm to evacuate and were followed by numerous farm animals giving birth to deformed or stillborn offspring, as well as five human miscarriages or stillbirths within Ludwig’s community—and after the destruction of two of his water wells, he declared open war on the oil and gas industry. He began to blow up oil and gas facilities. He said he had to fight back to “protect his children.”
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, accompanied by private security agents hired by the oil companies, spent million
s to investigate and halt the sabotage. Ludwig’s farm was occupied by police five times and searched for incriminating evidence. The police and Encana Corporation infiltrated Ludwig’s tight community with an agent provocateur who, to prove he could be trusted, blew up a well owned by what was then Alberta Energy Corporation (now Encana). Ludwig was blamed for the explosion. The oil company also brought in a “terrorism expert” from Toronto to speak at local town hall gatherings—York filmed one of the talks—and the expert warned residents of the rising “terrorism” of religious cults led by fanatic, charismatic leaders.
Ludwig was undeterred. “People are talking here that maybe someone should be shooting guys in pinstripe suits to get them to stop,” he said.
Ludwig, whose intimate knowledge of the Albertan terrain allowed him to outfox hundreds of police officers, was never caught in an act of sabotage, but he probably had a hand in damage to hundreds of remote well sites estimated at $12 million. The federal government in Ottawa, in desperation, considered sending in the army. Ludwig was finally arrested in 2000 on five counts of property damage and possession of explosives and imprisoned for nineteen months. He spent his time in prison reading a treatise in Dutch—he was fluent—on the nature of hell.
He referred to the biblical tale of David and Goliath and quoted Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to justify his struggle against colossal corporate power, saying, “The war is won before it is fought.” Ludwig believed that if you fought for righteousness, you would always be assured of spiritual victory, even if you were defeated in the eyes of the world. “It’s not size,” he said. “It’s whether a man is right or not. The fight is won on principle.” In his home he kept a poster of activist and journalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian hanged in 1995 after he campaigned against Shell Oil’s exploitation of his country. The poster read: “The environment is man’s first right. Without a clean environment man cannot exist to claim other rights be they political, social or economic.”
Ludwig once invited visiting civil servants who worked for oil and gas regulators to dinner. He fed them homemade cheeses, preserves, jams, and wild cranberry wine. The pièce de résistance, which Ludwig unveiled with his usual flair, was the skull of a horse killed by sour gas. “It’s just a symbol of all the death we’ve had around here,” he informed his startled guests. On another occasion, he dumped noxious sour crude on the carpet in the office of local regulators to see if it “bothered” them.
The sabotage did not end with Ludwig’s death in 2012. There are periodic reports of ongoing sabotage along the path of the XL pipeline and in the Alberta oil fields. “I’d also say that sabotage in the oil patch is one of the oil and gas industry’s dirty little secrets,” York said. “It is widespread, and to many landowners it is a natural consequence of the industry’s attitudes and behavior to those whose land they are occupying. The industry doesn’t make a big fuss because they don’t want to encourage the response.”
But violence begets violence. And the more facilities Ludwig blew up, the harsher became the intrusion of the state.
“Meeting industrial violence against livestock and families with more industrial violence against oil and gas installations is not the answer,” said Nikiforuk. “It is an act of frustration as well as a reflection of the captured state of regulators. And it submits an entire community to a reign of industry- and state-sanctioned terror. A second war broke out in the bush in the 2000s during an intense period of hydraulic fracking. Six bombings occurred at Encana well sites in northern British Columbia just fifty kilometers from Ludwig’s farm. The government sent in 250 officers to investigate. They treated rural citizens like members of the Taliban. The campaign ended as mysteriously as it began and had all the earmarks of Ludwig. It did not change industry practices.”
Ludwig’s gravest mistake was his decision, or the decision of someone in his small community, to shoot at two trucks carrying rowdy teenagers. The sons and daughters of oil and gas workers roared through the group’s compound at about 4:00 AM on June 20, 1999. Karman Willis, a sixteen-year-old girl, was fatally shot by someone on the farm, and a second teenager survived a wound. York in his film shows Ludwig family members repeating like automatons that they thought they were under attack because the backfiring of the vehicles sounded like gunshots. No one on the farm took responsibility for the shooting. No one was charged. But after the killing of the girl, most of those in the area refused to associate with Ludwig and his community. Local businesses put up signs that read: No SERVICE FOR LUDWIGS.
Ludwig, before he died at age seventy after refusing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, denounced violence. With his family, he had read Jacques Ellul’s 1969 book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. Ellul, like Ludwig’s Dutch father, had been part of the resistance against the Nazis in World War II. “What constantly marked the life of Jesus was not nonviolence but in every situation the choice not to use power,” Ellul writes in What I Believe. “This is infinitely different.”9
“The Christian should participate in social and political efforts in order to have an influence in the world,” Ellul argues in The Presence of the Kingdom,
not with the hope of making a paradise (of the earth), but simply to make it more tolerable—not to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wants it to have—not to bring in the Kingdom of God, but so that the Gospel might be proclaimed in order that all men might truly hear the good news.10
“We feel weak in all the things we are fighting,” Ludwig reflected. “I think the match is very unequal. But it’s all right. Instead of griping about it, we might as well give ourselves to it.”11
The battle with the corporate state will take place not only in city streets and plazas but in the nation’s heartland. Ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens—often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat—have united with activists to oppose fracking and the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline. The Tar Sands Blockade (TSB), which is working to stop the northern leg of the Keystone XL from being built, is an example of this grassroots movement. The centers of resistance it has set up in Texas and Oklahoma and on tribal lands along the proposed route of this six-state, 1,700-mile proposed pipeline are fast becoming flashpoints.12
The XL pipeline, which would cost $7 billion and whose southern portion is complete, is a symbol of the dying order. If the northern section is built, it will pump 830,000 barrels a day of unrefined tar sand fluid from tar sand mine fields in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.13 Tar sand oil is not conventional crude oil. It is a synthetic slurry that, because tar sand oil is solid in its natural state, cannot flow without being laced with toxic chemicals and gas condensates. Tar sands are boiled and diluted with these chemicals before being blasted down a pipeline at high pressure. Water sources are instantly contaminated if there is a rupture.14
The pipeline, if built, would cross nearly 2,000 US waterways, including the Ogallala Aquifer, source of one-third of US farmland irrigation water. And it is not a matter of if, but when, it would spill. TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline, built in 2010, spilled fourteen times in its first twelve months of operation.15 Because the extraction process emits such a large quantity of greenhouse gases, the pipeline has been called the fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet. The climate scientist James Hansen warns that successful completion of the pipeline, along with the exploitation of Canadian tar sands it would facilitate, would mean “game over for the climate.”16
Keystone XL is part of the final phase of extreme exploitation by the corporate state. The corporations intend to squeeze the last vestiges of profit from an ecosystem careening toward collapse. Most of the oil that can be reached through drilling from traditional rigs is depleted. In response, the fossil fuel industry has developed new technologies to go after dirtier, less efficient forms of energy. These technol
ogies bring with them a dramatically heightened cost to ecosystems. They accelerate the warming of the planet and contaminate vital water sources. Deepwater Arctic drilling, tar sand extraction, hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking), and drilling horizontally, given the cost of extraction and the effects on the environment, amount to ecological suicide.
The pipeline has attracted construction crews and rebels alike. Surviving on canned food and bottled water, protesters carried out tree-sits in September 2012 to block the path of the pipeline near Winnsboro, Texas. Others chained themselves to logging equipment, locked themselves in trucks carrying pipe to construction sites, and hung banners at equipment staging areas.17 Doug Grant, a former Exxon employee, was arrested outside Winnsboro when he bound himself to clear-cutting machinery. Shannon Bebe and Benjamin Franklin, after handcuffing themselves to equipment being used to cut down trees, were tasered, pepper-sprayed, and physically assaulted by local police, reportedly at the request of TransCanada officials.18 The actor Daryl Hannah and a seventy-eight-year-old East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, were arrested on October 4, 2012, while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on Fairchild’s property. The Fairchild farm, like other properties seized by TransCanada, was taken under Texas eminent domain laws on behalf of a foreign corporation. At the same time, private security companies employed by TransCanada, along with local law enforcement, aggressively detained and restricted reporters, including a New York Times reporter and photographer, who were attempting to cover the protests. Most of the journalists were on private property with the permission of the landowners.19
I reached climate activist Tom Weis nearly 1,000 miles from the southern blockade, in Colorado. Weis was pedaling up and down the Front Range, hand-delivering copies of an open letter that activists had sent to the president. Weis had been joined in his protests and rallies by indigenous leaders, including Tom Poor Bear, vice president of Oglala Lakota Nation, and in Denver by members of the Occupy Denver community.