No Pipelines, No Borders – The Sea belongs to All
We Smell Gas
read the Arabic version of the campaign text
WeSmellGas proudly joins f.Lotta’s mass occupation of the central Mediterranean, bringing climate and energy justice into the fight for a sea free of violence and exploitation, for a world where health, self-determination, ecology and free movement belong to everyone.
In the Mediterranean Sea, environmental catastrophy and border violence are two sides of the same coin. European imperialism keeps resources flowing into the imperial center, while the people are robbed of their land, water and energy resources, and kept from moving freely. The same guns and walls that protect pipelines, ships, and banks kill those forced to search for dignity and liveable futures. This is why freedom of movement and energy justice go hand in hand.
The Mediterranean Sea as a zone of sacrifice
The Mediterranean Sea, an important source of life, has been turned into a zone of sacrifice. The capitalist system we live in requires this brutal sacrifice of places, peoples, and nature to keep profits flowing.
Extracted energy resources move freely leaving behind destroyed lands, polluted ecosystems, precarious livelihoods, and stolen homes and dreams, all while people on the move are met with murderous borders.
The energy industry devastates land and life alike, impacting millions, only to enrich a powerful few. And it is through borders that the system contains the consequences of this destruction, keeping the suffering out of sight and under control. Not only do energy profiteers rely on national borders, they go even further and inflict new walls and fences on communities in grabbed lands, so-called “conservation” parks and internal zones of extraction, to hide and greenwash the violence at the heart of their actions.
At the same time, the EU border regime is a profitable industry of its own, one that uses weapons, surveillance, and policing to protect borders drawn by colonial histories. It upholds nationalism in Europe and deepens the instability and dependence of peoples in Africa, Asia and beyond.
Connecting the dots
Across the world, energy companies fuel wars and forced displacement. They steal Palestinian fossil gas during a live-streamed genocide and fuel the Zionist entity’s jets. They profit from the genocide in Darfur/Sudan, while pipelines cut through war-torn and starved lands. They drill into ancestral lands and sacred deserts in Namibia, chasing fossil fuels at the expense of ecosystems. They continue to make rich land and rivers unliveable and polluted in the Congo Basin, Mozambique, and Niger. While they try to hide the harm they cause, they try to trick us into believing that they are working towards a ‘greener’ and ‘safer’ world. But safer for whom? For big capital, European politicians and their elites – not for the Global Majority.
Even within Europe, the marginalized and underrepresented periphery of Europe, the many racialized populations as well as regions in the South and East, are sacrificed for the profit of the few. While millions struggle to make ends meet with rising energy bills and costs of living, fossil fuel companies make record profits. Rather than investing in care, health, and a fairer economy, European governments spend billions on fossil fuels, weapons, and borders, and scapegoat ‘foreigners’ to wip up nationalist sentiments.
Meanwhile, our collective ability to resist, act, and move freely in the world is being attacked. Although different in racialized and classed ways, the oppression of migrants and people on the move, poor people, land defenders and organizers increasingly resemble each other. “Counter-terrorism” measures and police states want to suppress people’s resistance, and political awareness and action.
The Mediterranean is a zone of collective resistance!
But wherever there is an extractive pipeline, wherever there is a violent border, there is also resistance. While companies, banks and governments try to uphold their unjust and unsustainable systems, social movements everywhere are fighting for real and radical solutions for everyone. People around the world expose the harm – from genocide to ecocide – and show how their own experience is inseparable from wider patterns of imperialism and capitalism. With more clarity than ever, we see that none of us is free until we are all free: to breathe, live and move.
From energy justice to migrant solidarity, people do not only engage in oppositional action; they also build alternative relations and systems as they go. We see the beauty of this everywhere – from harbor workers refusing to deliver goods and weapons that fuel Israel’s genocide, to people sailing to break the siege on Gaza, to local fishers and sea rescue workers that defy borders. The people have turned the Mediterranean into a space of struggle to defend life.
We join millions of people, who demand a world that rejects domination and hierarchy, and fosters justice, freedom and dignity for all. The only solution to the system based on death is to dismantle it. We must sail together towards reimagined futures of collective liberation.
- We want energy justice, where the people own the means of energy production, control their natural resources and sustain their land, in collectivity and cooperation.
- We want an energy economy built around meeting people’s needs, in harmony with all living beings and nature.
- We want popular education around energy systems and alternative economies, as we cannot transform anything until we understand it.
- We want a Mediterranean that is protected by its communities from all over its shores, connected through flows of humanity and nature, instead of pipelines and cables.
- We want self-determination over movement, land and life for all!
Let us unite our drops of resistance into a mighty river to the sea!
As we join the meaningful f.Lotta action, we invite all people fighting for freedom of movement to include energy justice in the struggle for a liberated future for all. As long as the deep economic infrastructure of global inequality remains rooted in extraction and exploitation, deadly borders and all other sacrifice zones will only continue to grow, and we will continue to resist them fiercely. From Lampedusa to Palestine to all resisting lands and peoples – solidarity is our strongest weapon!
WeSmellGas is an abolitionist collective of organisers, researchers and film-makers based in Northern Europe, working on understanding energy through an anti-imperialist, internationalist and abolitionist framework to fight for liberated futures for all living beings.
We encourage you to check out our website wesmellgas.org and check our resource library. Please also feel free to reach us at collective@wesmellgas.org.