Take Concrete Action - Pulp Fiction

We have feared it, we have lived from and in it, processed and over the centuries shaped it, so that today perhaps above all we project dreams and wishes onto it. Through the Nordic countries' common law, we have, to varying extents, the right to move through it. We take the mushroom, the berries and the animals that live in it for granted. Everyone has a relationship with it. It is spoken of as a commodity and an asset.

But how do green forests become gold? And what does it do to the forest?

We are facing complete climate disaster. As a result of the emissions of greenhouse gases changing the chemical balance in our atmosphere, the earth is heating up. Floods, droughts and conflicts over dwindling resources follow as a consequence.

The establishment says that the forest is the salvation. The forest binds carbon dioxide, and for every tree cut down, two new ones are planted. Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple.

For the forest to bind something effectively, it needs to stand, and for a long time. What is produced from the forest also needs to be used for long-lived products, so that they are not immediately consumed and release the carbon dioxide again. Carbon is also stored not only in the trees but also in the ground where the trees once stood. After clear-cutting, the land has been left bare and releases tons of greenhouse gases.

In Sweden, almost 80% of harvested forest is used for short-lived products, and 25% for specific paper pulp, in an enormously energy-demanding industry. The pulp and paper industry is the main driver of clear-cutting, as it provides quick access to cheap, low-quality lumber. They are the engine of the death machine.

The new trees are also not the same as the forest that was there before. A forest is a biodiversity, a mix of old and new, not just a row of trees but an advanced ecosystem and home to thousands of endangered species. But that kind of forest is not easy to make money from. The forest industry wants straight rows of identical trees.

What lobby organizations, easily bought politicians and dubious scientists call a forest is not the same as what most of us think of when we hear the word. It's not a snarky, messy, busy place. These are gigantic plantations. Since the end of the nineties, both the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Swedish forestry companies have been using a definition of forest that even includes clear-cutting. An incestuous relationship exists between Swedish authorities, the forest industry and research.

When Bolsanaro authorizes the devastation of remote rainforests, it's easy to be appalled from a distance, but it's time we turn our attention to the threat of a much closer forest. The clear-cutting in Sweden and the water crisis in Brazil are connected, not least through the forestry group Stora Enso, who are the ones who make the big money, while indigenous people are forcibly relocated there and the rights of Sami villages are violated here. We turn our gaze to the forest, not just for the forest itself, but for the climate and the future.

The PR image that the forest industry has managed to establish on its business is total fiction - pulp fiction.
We need to do something about it, and we understand that we need to do it now

The rescue from the climate emergency is often presented as a question of our consumption. To some extent that is true, of course, but it is a shifting of blame from those who got rich off the sale of short-lived junk to us who were forced to buy it. Disposable packaging, advertising leaflets and paper receipts are just a few examples of things that would do more good in their original form: the forest. Conscious consumption choices are not enough, we have to change the whole shit.

We believe that climate policy is, at its core, class politics and that the struggle for transformed production is ultimately a matter of ownership. Thus, solidarity between workers will be decisive. But our power goes beyond power at work. Just as colleagues discover their power when they make common demands or take on a collective conflict, in the same way we discover our power in mass action.

When hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people get together and decide to close a cement quarry on Gotland, block the way for fascists or take the night back on International Women's Day, they discover their collective power as a mass. Stopping the climate catastrophe will require a mass movement on streets, in lime quarries and on moss-covered paths.

We are forced to work for wages to survive, but at the same time our survival is jeopardized by the emissions from the industries many of us work in. Workers are held hostage by fossil capitalism. As soon as we demand action against the climate crisis, we are threatened with the loss of our jobs.

Climate activists are expected to answer the question of which jobs would replace, for example, an environmentally and climate-unfriendly cement quarry. Despite the fact that Sweden is one of the richest countries in the world and that many have become filthy rich from our natural resources, it is not on the map that companies or the state would compensate the workers who would need to be retrained in a green transition. No one should have to choose between unemployment or climate disaster. The conversion should not hit you and me
Let those who profited from the climate crisis pay for it!

Of course, that's just the beginning. Because as long as our civilization requires constant growth and profit, the earth's resources will always be under negotiation and attack. We cannot hope that our current economic system will make any kind of adjustment.

Too many people profit too much from that not happening. We have to work together to get out of it and create something new together. A way of life that does not require the profitability and productivity of everything, but sees value in life as such, for itself. A world without forest barons, starvation and coercion.

In the summer of 2024, we will meet in Gävle, not because a single mill in a particular place is worse than anything else, but because Swedish forests are threatened, and with it a habitable earth.

In the summer of 2024, we will show our collective power. We do this together, by meeting, networking and acting on the basis of a large climate camp, thereby finding the strength and resources we need to take the next step:

To not just shut down a pulp mill or block an industry, but to shut down the entire system that is destroying our planet and to build something else together! See you! 15-19 June

Sted

Take Concrete Action

Gävle (Sweden)