The New Face of Climate Activism Wields a Pickaxe

Léna Lazare speaks on October 2023 on behalf of Les Soulevements de la Terre (the Uprisings of the Earth), outside a Paris courthouse where the activist collective was appealing an order to disband.Michel Christophe/Abaca/ZUMA

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

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 pickaxe.

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 pickaxe 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 about 190 million gallons, 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.

Now 26, Lazare makes more sense as a scientist than as an activist—mostly quiet and serious and economical with her words. She has a mane of unkempt hair and a soft, flat voice that sometimes gives way to a high-pitched giggle and flashes of steely defiance. “We refuse to be labeled as criminals,” she says. After French interior minister Gérald Darmanin compared some members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre to ecoterrorists and the government outlawed the organization in June 2023, it was Lazare who went on TV to defend the group’s activities.

In the past few years, activists have smashed bank windows, attacked gas stations, broken into oil-pipeline control stations, deflated hundreds of SUV tires, and, just this summer, doused Stonehenge with temporary orange paint. They do this for different aims—to attract media coverage, to argue their case in front of a jury, or to make business untenable for companies they see as responsible for loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, driving calamitous weather events, and courting mass extinction.

If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier stage of the global climate movement, Léna Lazare signals what comes next. Today’s activists are wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big changes, and a certainty that they are running out of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combination of urgency and despair is pushing them to actions previously seized by only the most radical fringe of the environmental movement.

Sabotage has been a strand of the modern environmental movement for half a century. In 1975, two homemade bombs exploded in a yet-to-be opened French nuclear power station, delaying its construction by several months. In 1986, activists sank two roughly 430-ton Icelandic whaling ships and used sledge hammers and acid to destroy processing equipment in the country’s only whale oil plant.

In 1998, the year Lazare was born, a group associated with the Earth Liberation Front caused more than $12 million in damage when it torched a mile-long strip of a Colorado ski resort that had been planning to expand into an area considered a potential habitat for a threatened lynx.

Growing up, Lazare’s family—her father was the director of an art house movie theater, and her mother worked in film communications—had friends in Japan, and she felt a strong connection with the country. In 2011, when she was 12, a tsunami triggered a major disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Lazare spent days afterward obsessively reading about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. She also read reports claiming those in charge of the plant had cut corners with safety measures in part to save money. And that introduced her to a tension—between what is best for business and what is best for the local environment—that she now finds ubiquitous. “Everything was done to prioritize economic interests before the well-being of the population,” she says.

Seven years after Fukushima, Lazare moved to Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne University. There she met, and began protesting alongside, fellow student activists. Then, one day in the spring of 2018, she watched police fire tear gas at environmentalists squatting on an abandoned airport in western France, and she began to feel that protests alone were not enough.

That year, Thunberg started the peaceful school strike that made her famous, and Lazare launched her own group. Paris Environmental Disobedience, or Désobéissance Ecolo Paris, was about figuring out ways to be strategically disruptive. The group tried out a few small, risk-averse actions like daubing banks in a type of easy-to-remove black paint, says Lazare, but they ended up talking about breaking the law a lot more than actually breaking it.

At around the same time, the mainstream climate movement was starting to gain momentum with peaceful tactics. Millions of young people began marching in capital cities across the world, making it clear they did not want to inherit a ruined planet. When the protests arrived in Paris in early 2019, Lazare joined them. She became a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the French equivalent of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, appearing on TV and in newspapers talking about the climate crisis and her decision to stop traveling by plane.

All the while, she was restless. “It wasn’t moving fast enough,” she remembers. By the end of that year, Lazare had dropped out of university. “We must reinvent ourselves, lead people toward civil disobedience, mount more radical actions,” she told the French magazine Politis. She was trying to get her comrades to take the leap toward sabotage. “It was about daring to damage material stuff,” she explains. Until then, she says, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had not been ready to cross.

Then the pandemic distracted the world from the climate. France went into lockdown. Lazare was in Japan, taking a break from protesting, and couldn’t get home for six months. When she finally made it back she got her hands on a book about environmental protests that had just been released, called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

A few years earlier, its author, the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, had been working on a book about ancient Egypt when his country experienced its worst wildfires in modern history. Upwards of 60 fires were burning, from the Arctic north to the southern island of Gotland. And it wasn’t just Sweden: Parts of Greece, California, and the UK were all burning too.

Malm could no longer justify “geeking out on this moldy old historical stuff while the world was literally on fire,” so he forgot the book on ancient Egypt and instead wrote a treatise arguing that sabotage is necessary for the climate movement to make real progress. “The situation is so dire, we need to go beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience and start experimenting,” Malm says. The peaceful marches shouldn’t stop, he argues. Rather, the climate movement needs to develop a radical flank—one that will also apply pressure on policymakers and politicians to work more closely with moderate activists.

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he compared this dynamic to the US Civil Rights Movement. In his telling, it was the threat of Malcolm X’s growing popularity that had spurred successive presidents, first John F. Kennedy then Lyndon Johnson, to work with Martin Luther King Jr.

This kind of flank, he wrote, was about harming property and not people—something he considers a red line, morally and strategically. “The one point where it becomes complicated,” he says, “is when you have cops protecting the things you want to destroy.” Police, in other words, may be an exception to the rule.

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with Malm, who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy. “We don’t agree at all politically,” she says. But his book had a profound impact on her—in an Instagram post from 2021, she poses for the camera with the words “Let’s Blow Up Pipelines” across her shoulders. Malm, for his part, has been to Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and expresses an ideological affinity. “Sabotage is a French term,” he says. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

Sabotage might be a French term, but it is a tactic that is spreading across Europe. Around the same time Lazare was digging up pipes, in early 2022, the 30-year-old psychologist Lars Werner was trekking through the German countryside, a portable ladder stashed in his bag. It was the culmination of months of poring over maps, looking for places where oil pipelines were likely to jut out of the ground in his home country.

Werner was part of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a climate-activist group best known for its road blockades, where members sit and refuse to let traffic pass until they are arrested. A veteran of those protests, Werner and his colleagues were “ready to go to prison,” he says, to grab the public’s attention. Now, he wanted to apply that idea to sabotage. The plan wasn’t to damage the pipeline permanently; he just wanted to break into a control station and stop the flow of oil.

A photo from that day, posted on Instagram, shows Werner grasping a black emergency valve and looking solemnly into the camera through small round glasses. That spring, he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline control stations around the country. (Response to the pipeline protests was tepid, Werner says. Media coverage was sparse—not helped by the fact that the company that owned the pipelines, refinery PCK Raffinerie, refused to say whether the oil supply had been disrupted.)

Not long after Werner’s first pipeline protest, a British doctor named Patrick Hart joined a new UK group called Just Stop Oil, which called for “bold action” until the government pledged to stop licensing new fossil fuel projects. Before sunrise one day in August 2022, Hart arrived at a gas station on the outskirts of London and started smashing the price screens on each pump using a hammer and chisel. Then he sat down and waited for the police to arrive.

Hart chose the fuel pump’s screens, he says, because they were the only part of the gas station he believed he could damage without risking a spill or harming another living being. In addition to gas stations, Just Stop Oil members have attacked famous paintings, stormed sports venues, and sprayed powdered paint on Stonehenge to send the public a message: You might want to forget that climate change is happening, but its most dramatic consequences are yet to come.

As he talks, Hart returns to variations of the same refrain: The world is on course for catastrophe, and if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, billions of people will die. “I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but like, we are so fucked.” Getting more opportunities to convey this message is, to him, the whole point. His actions generate a lot of press interest, which in turn gets him a lot of interviews—like this one. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change now, then we have absolutely no hope.”

When I meet Hart in London, he’s wearing a smart blue suit. He’s on his way to court for releasing plumes of orange powder onto the pitch at a rugby game at Twickenham Stadium. At the time, this is just one of four cases he’s fighting—it’s unclear whether any will end in jail time, but if they do, he says he’s prepared. “People are desperate,” he says. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

This cast of climate saboteurs live in different countries and speak different languages, but they have so many similarities. They want to show their faces, to explain that what they’re doing is a rational response to the current crisis. We’re not the violent ones, they say. Real violence is committed by companies that are wrecking our planet for profit. Sabotage must target property, never people. The environment must not be permanently harmed.

Of course, the bombs placed in the French power station in the 1970s didn’t stop the country from growing into Europe’s biggest generator of nuclear power. Whaling continues in Iceland. The Colorado ski resort burned by the Earth Liberation Front was rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines shut off by Werner, and gas through the English pumps smashed by Hart.

But Lazare claims her actions are causing real disruption. By last spring, she had taken part in three acts of sabotage against the mega-basins: in Cram-Chaban, in Épannes, and in Sainte-Soline. Les Soulèvements de la Terre is doing more than just attracting media attention, she argues. The group has inspired copycat attacks that have vandalized mega-basins throughout western France. She claims this has pushed up the cost of building mega-basins; construction companies now have to pay for security guards and motion detectors to guard against people like her. And it’s not just the owners of the mega-basin that are keeping an eye on Les Soulèvements de la Terre.

In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second protest at the mega-basin under construction near Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters were met by some 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, creating a barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some demonstrators turned back; others attempted to push through the cordon, trying to reach and sabotage the site.

The ensuing violence shocked France. Police fired 5,000 tear gas canisters in just under two hours. Soon protesters were covered in blood; according to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two people were left in a coma. Organizers claim someone lost an eye. Police say 47 officers were hurt and four vehicles burned. “A lot of us felt completely traumatized about what happened,” says Lazare, who says she stayed behind the front line helping to look after the injured. A friend of a friend had been hit in the leg by a tear gas stun grenade. The open wound was streaming with blood. It took the ambulance hours to arrive; Lazare felt totally overwhelmed.

Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day too—watching a real-world exploration of the limits of violence cited in his book as demonstrators clashed with police. “I think this was the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to try to push through police lines. “It would have been a surrender to the armed forces of the state to just say, ‘OK, you are protecting this piece of property with overwhelming military force, so we’re just giving up and going home.’”

The day became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Media coverage brought Les Soulèvements de la Terre a new level of notoriety. And surveys showed that the public blamed both the protesters and the police for the violence. (Lazare says a small minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.)

Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violent event as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Two months later, a court intervened, giving the group permission to continue operating until its case could be properly reviewed.

In August 2023, exactly one week after the court intervention, I cycle for two hours through the sweltering countryside of western France to meet Lazare. Activists are gathering in the village of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris, partly to protest the mega-basins and partly to express their support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban. This corner of rural France is bracing for a new heat wave; the geological research office is warning of another summer of record-breaking drought. Villagers stare as I pass, perhaps assuming I’m one of the people the government calls ecoterrorists.

By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press.

“The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism.

Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.