How to Blow Up a Pipeline is the perfect blend of radical politics and heist-movie thrills
In 2021, Swedish author and human ecology professor Andreas Malm published the nonfiction book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which argues that sabotage of industrial facilities and other pollution-causing property is a necessary part of the climate activism movement.
Two years later, director Daniel Goldhaber (Cam) and his co-writers Jordan Sjol and Ariela Barer (who also stars in the movie) have taken that message and run with it, delivering an unconventional and captivating adaptation of the book. Instead of a straightforward conversion of the source material, the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline builds off the book’s ethos with a fictional scenario, to great success.
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In the movie, a coalition of young people from many different backgrounds and areas of the United States come together to bomb an oil pipeline in West Texas. There are college students, domestic and service workers, a local country boy, and a couple best described as “chaotic punks.” They hail from places like North Dakota, Texas, California, and Chicago. They each bring their own skills to the job, and their own reasons for being there — it’s a true coalition of people coming together to make a real difference against the forces wreaking havoc on the environment for their own profit.
The movie immerses viewers in this group with a
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