The New Face of Climate Sabotage: How Radical Activism Is Redefining Europe’s Climate Movement

The air hums with the energy of a community festival, not a crime scene. An accordion player belts out folk tunes, while two men in knit beanies hammer out a steady rhythm on drums. It’s a crisp, sunlit spring afternoon in the farmlands of western France—but the crowd gathered in this open field is technically trespassing, and every small detail hints they are braced for conflict. One attendee has a gas mask slung loose around their neck; a whole block of protesters wear full balaclavas. Others hide their features behind dark goggles or cloth face coverings, and a small crew holds up a broad fabric canopy to block the view of patrolling police drones. At the center of it all stands Léna Lazare, gripping a pickaxe.

Her long brown hair falls loose, and her face is completely uncovered—a choice she says is deliberate, meant to lend legitimacy to the work they are about to do. She drives the pickaxe’s sharp edge into the hard, dry earth, the crowd watching silently as she strikes again and again. When her arms give out, another protester steps forward to take her place. Several meters down, they hit what they have come for: thick plastic pipes. Buried beneath this field lies a network of lines built to feed a new “mega-basin”—a massive private reservoir under construction near the small village of Épannes. The group’s mission that day is to yank one of these pipes clean out of the ground.

Across the globe, climate activists often target oil conglomerates, new airport expansions, and fossil fuel-financing banks, throwing wrenches into the operations of corporations they hold responsible for speeding global warming. For French climate organizers, these mega-basins have become the defining symbol of the French government’s wrongheaded approach to climate adaptation. As droughts grow more intense across the country, officials have approved hundreds of these giant storage systems to let large commercial farms access water during dry summer months. Critics argue the reservoirs—some of which hold up to 720 million liters, enough to fill nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—amount to water hoarding: they reserve critical water supplies for wealthy private landowners, leaving local rivers dry and regional aquifers depleted.

That is why these projects are fair game for sabotage, Lazare explains. She frames the work as “disarming” the reservoirs, as if the infrastructure itself—not the protesters—is the source of violence. On that clear March 2022 day, she stands back in the crowd watching as a man in jeans and a plain white t-shirt strains to pull a section of pipe loose from the dirt with a rope. Someone pulls out an angle grinder, and when a segment is cut free, the crowd erupts in applause before a man in blue overalls hoists the severed pipe above his head like a sports trophy. “At that moment,” Lazare recalled later, “the water gushed out and went back where it belonged, into the earth.”

Lazare is one of 200 founding members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre—Earth Uprisings—a French climate group that stands as the most radical iteration of a new wave of far-left climate organizations that have emerged across Europe in the last five years. A soft-spoken former physics student, she has become the public face of climate sabotage in France. “We only act when infrastructure causes severe harm to ecosystems and all living things,” she says.

Now 26, Lazare comes off more as a researcher than a radical activist—quiet, deliberate, and sparing with her words. She has a thick mane of unkempt brown hair, a soft even tone that occasionally breaks into a high, nervous giggle, and flashes of unshakable defiance when talking about her work. “We refuse to be labeled criminals,” she says. When French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin labeled some members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre ecoterrorists and the government moved to ban the group in June 2023, it was Lazare who stepped onto national television to defend the group’s mission.

Over the last few years, radical climate activists across the continent have smashed bank windows, targeted gas stations, broken into oil pipeline control centers, deflated the tires of hundreds of SUVs, and just this past summer, doused England’s Stonehenge in removable orange paint to draw attention to their cause. They take these actions for a range of reasons: to earn blanket media coverage, to argue their case in open court, or to make operating too costly for companies they blame for pumping excess carbon into the atmosphere, fueling catastrophic extreme weather and pushing the planet toward mass extinction.

If Greta Thunberg defined the early, mass protest phase of the modern global climate movement, Léna Lazare embodies what comes next. Today’s activists are deeply disillusioned that the huge 2019 global climate strikes failed to spark meaningful policy change, and they are convinced the world is running out of time to avoid irreversible climate catastrophe. A toxic mix of urgency and despair has pushed them to adopt tactics that were once only embraced by the most extreme fringe of the environmental movement.

Sabotage has been part of the modern environmental movement for more than 50 years. In 1975, two homemade bombs detonated at an under-construction French nuclear power plant, delaying its opening by months. In 1986, activists sank two 430-ton whaling ships off Iceland and destroyed processing equipment at the country’s only whale oil plant with sledgehammers and acid. In 1998—the year Lazare was born—a cell linked to the Earth Liberation Front set fire to a planned expansion of a Colorado ski resort into endangered lynx habitat, causing more than $12 million in damage.

Growing up, Lazare’s family ran in creative circles: her father managed an independent art house cinema, and her mother worked in film communications. The family had close ties to friends in Japan, and the country felt like a second home to Lazare. When she was 12, a massive tsunami triggered the catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in 2011. Lazare spent days glued to her computer, reading everything she could find about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people forced to flee their homes. She also encountered reporting that plant operators had cut corners on safety protocols to cut costs, sparking a lifelong recognition of the conflict between corporate profit and public and environmental health—a tension she says is everywhere today. “Every decision was made to put economic interests ahead of the well-being of regular people,” she says.

Seven years after the Fukushima disaster, Lazare moved to Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne University. There she met other student activists and began joining small protests. Then, in spring 2018, she watched police fire tear gas on environmental activists squatting at an abandoned airport project in western France, and she began to believe that peaceful marches alone would never be enough. That same year, Thunberg launched her school strike for climate that catapulted her to global fame, and Lazare launched her own local group: Paris Environmental Disobedience (Désobéissance Écolo Paris), focused on testing strategic disruptive tactics. The group started with small, low-risk actions like painting bank facades with easy-to-wash black paint, Lazare says, but they ended up talking about breaking the law far more than they actually did it.

Around the same time, the mainstream global climate movement was gaining massive traction with peaceful protest tactics. Millions of young people poured into the streets of capitals around the world, demanding action to avoid inheriting an uninhabitable planet. When mass strikes came to Paris in early 2019, Lazare joined, and quickly rose to become a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the French counterpart to Thunberg’s Fridays for Future. She appeared on national television and in major newspapers talking about the climate crisis and her choice to stop flying entirely.

But even as the movement grew, Lazare grew restless. “Things weren’t moving nearly fast enough,” she recalls. By the end of 2019, she had dropped out of university entirely. “We have to reinvent our tactics, push people toward mass civil disobedience, organize more radical actions,” she told French magazine Politis. She began pushing her fellow organizers to cross the line into open sabotage. “It was about daring to damage physical property,” she explains. Before that point, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had never been willing to cross.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic pulled the world’s focus away from climate action, and France went into strict lockdown. Lazare was traveling in Japan, taking a break from protesting, and was stuck there for six months unable to return home. When she finally got back to France, she picked up a newly released book about climate protest: How to Blow Up a Pipeline, by Swedish activist and academic Andreas Malm.

A few years earlier, Malm had been working on a book about ancient Egyptian history when Sweden suffered the worst wildfires in modern recorded history. More than 60 blazes burned across the country, from the Arctic north down to the southern island of Gotland, and the fire crisis wasn’t limited to Sweden: parts of Greece, California, and the UK were also engulfed in flames that summer. Malm couldn’t justify continuing his work on ancient history “while the world was literally burning,” he later said, so he set aside the Egypt manuscript and wrote a polemic arguing that sabotage is a necessary tool for the climate movement to achieve real change. “The situation is so dire, we need to go beyond purely peaceful civil disobedience and start testing new tactics,” Malm argues. He doesn’t say peaceful marches should end; instead, he says the climate movement needs a radical flank that applies extra pressure on policymakers to negotiate with and make concessions to moderate activists. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he draws a parallel to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, arguing that the threat of Malcolm X’s growing popularity pushed presidents John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson to work with Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights reform.

This radical flank, Malm writes, should target only property, never people—a line he says is non-negotiable both morally and strategically. “The only time this gets complicated,” he says, “is when police are protecting the infrastructure you want to destroy.” In other words, police may be the exception to that rule.

Lazare doesn’t fully align with Malm politically—he has advocated for “ecological Leninism,” which calls for top-down state intervention into the economy. “We don’t agree at all on political strategy,” she says. But his book had a profound impact on her activism: in a 2021 Instagram post, she posed for a photo with the words “Let’s Blow Up Pipelines” printed across her t-shirt. Malm, for his part, has joined Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and calls the group a vanguard. “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.”

While sabotage may have deep roots in French radical climate activism, the tactic has spread rapidly across the continent. Around the same time Lazare was digging up pipes in western France in early 2022, 30-year-old German psychologist Lars Werner was trekking through the German countryside with a portable ladder hidden in his backpack. The trip was the culmination of months of poring over maps to locate spots where oil pipelines surfaced above ground across his home country.

Werner is a member of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a German climate group best known for disruptive road blockades, where members sit in highways to stop traffic until they are arrested. A veteran of those blockades, Werner says he and his fellow activists were “ready to go to prison” to force the public to pay attention to the climate crisis. Now he wanted to bring that same commitment to sabotage. Their plan wasn’t to permanently damage the pipelines; they just wanted to break into control stations and shut off the flow of oil. A photo from that day, posted to Instagram, shows Werner gripping a black emergency shutoff valve, staring solemnly at the camera through small round glasses. That spring, he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline control stations across Germany. Public and media response to the actions was muted, Werner says: coverage was sparse, and the pipeline’s owner, refinery PCK Raffinerie, refused to confirm or deny if the oil supply had been disrupted.

Not long after Werner’s first pipeline action, British doctor Patrick Hart joined a new UK-based group called Just Stop Oil, which is demanding the government end all new fossil fuel licensing. Before sunrise one August 2022 morning, Hart arrived at a gas station on the outskirts of London and used a hammer and chisel to smash the price display screens on every pump. Then he sat down and waited for police to arrive. Hart chose the price screens specifically, he says, because they were the only part of the gas station he could damage without risking a fuel spill or harming any person. Beyond targeting gas stations, Just Stop Oil activists have attacked famous works of art, stormed major sports venues, and sprayed removable powder paint on Stonehenge to send a message: the public may want to ignore the climate crisis, but its worst impacts are still coming.

Hart circles back to one core point again and again: the world is on track for catastrophic warming, and if we don’t end our reliance on fossil fuels, billions of people will die. “I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but we are so fucked,” he says. Getting opportunities to spread this message is the entire point of his actions, he adds: his sabotage generates massive media attention, which leads to interviews like this one, where he can repeat the warning. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change course now, we have no hope at all.” When I met Hart in London, he was wearing a sharp blue suit, on his way to court for releasing a cloud of orange powder onto the pitch during a rugby match at Twickenham Stadium. At the time, it was just one of four pending cases against him; while it’s unclear if any will result in jail time, he says he is fully prepared if they do. “People are desperate,” he says. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

These climate saboteurs live in different countries, speak different languages, and target different infrastructure, but they share a core set of beliefs. They want to show their faces publicly, to explain that their actions are a rational response to an existential crisis. “We are not the violent ones,” they argue. “Real violence is being committed by corporations that destroy the planet for profit.” They all agree sabotage should target property, never people, and should never cause permanent, irreversible harm to the natural environment.

Of course, history shows that individual sabotage actions rarely stop large projects entirely. The 1970s bombs at the French nuclear plant didn’t stop France from becoming Europe’s largest producer of nuclear power. Whaling still continues in Iceland. The Colorado ski resort expansion targeted by the Earth Liberation Front was eventually rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines Werner shut off, and fuel still flows through the London pumps Hart smashed.

But Lazare argues her group’s actions are already having tangible disruptive effects. By spring 2023, she had taken part in three separate sabotage actions against mega-basins: in Cram-Chaban, Épannes, and Sainte-Soline. Les Soulèvements de la Terre does more than just generate headlines, she says: the group has inspired copycat actions that have vandalized mega-basin construction sites across western France. She says this has driven up construction costs dramatically: builders now have to pay for private security guards and motion sensors to protect sites from activists like her. But the group has also drawn the full attention of the French state.

In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second large protest at the under-construction mega-basin near Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters faced off against 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, who formed a human barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some protesters turned back; others tried to push through the police cordon to reach and sabotage the construction site.

The clash that followed shocked France. Police fired 5,000 tear gas canisters in less than two hours. Soon protesters were covered in blood: according to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two fell into comas, and organizers say one protester lost an eye. Police report 47 officers were injured and four police vehicles were burned. “A lot of us were completely traumatized by what happened,” says Lazare, who stayed behind the front lines treating injured protesters. A friend of a friend was hit in the leg by a tear gas stun grenade, leaving a deep gushing wound; it took ambulances hours to reach the site, and Lazare says she felt completely overwhelmed.

Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day, watching as the question of violent confrontation he had written about played out in real time between protesters and police. “I think this was the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to push past police lines. “It would have been a total surrender to state power to just say, ‘OK, you’re protecting this property with overwhelming force, so we’ll just give up and go home.’”

The clash became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline, and blanket media coverage turned Les Soulèvements de la Terre into a household name across France. Public opinion polling showed the public blamed both protesters and police equally for the violence. (Lazare notes only a small minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.)

Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violence at Sainte-Soline as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre entirely. Two months later, a French court stepped in, granting the group temporary permission to continue operating while the ban was appealed.

In August 2023, exactly one week after that court ruling, I cycled for two hours through the sweltering western French countryside to meet Lazare. Activists had gathered in the small village of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris. The trip was part protest against the mega-basins, part show of support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban. This corner of rural France was bracing for another heat wave, and the national geological survey was warning of another summer of record-breaking drought. Villagers stared as I rode past, no doubt assuming I was one of the “ecoterrorists” the government had been warning about.

By the time I arrived in Lezay, my clothes were soaked through with sweat and my head was spinning from the