Central Otago Jane Shearer poses a moral dilemma in her new climate-change novel Threads of Connection. Photo / Kerrin Burnnand
A shocking act of eco-terrorism opens Kiwi author Jane Shearer’s new novel. With the world in crisis, she asks if taking direct action is more ethical than doing nothing at all.
“Breaking news: In the early hours of this morning, terrorists sank a foreign-owned coal ship in Ōhinehou (Lyttelton) Port … Eleven crew members are reported missing.”
The opening paragraph of Jane Shearer’s new novel, Threads of Connection, could be setting the scene for a spy thriller or a murder mystery.
Instead, it poses a moral dilemma. Should we keep playing by the rules when the climate crisis threatens our very survival? Or is direct action morally justified in the face of political inertia and a powerful fossil fuel lobby, even if it means breaking the law?
Of course, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. It turns out the only thing on board the ship at the time of the bombing was a full load of coal.
“Ecotage” is the term for environmental activism that aims to cause damage and disruption by targeting infrastructure – rather than people. Apparently its use dates back to the 70s.
Shearer, a trained geologist who’s worked in the science sector for 35 years, has given considerable thought to where her own sympathies lie.
“Obviously anything you do has some indirect harm to some humans somehow, to do with their jobs or their homes. There is going to be collateral damage,” she says.
“My line would be direct harm to humans. But I do think we’re at a point where sacrificing pretty much everything else is the only way anybody is actually going to listen. Because, right now, they’re not listening very hard.”
Threads of Connection is Shearer’s second foray into fiction, after the release of her debut novel, Broken is Beautiful, in 2022.
Based on an equally provocative premise, it explores the fracturing of a friendship during the Covid pandemic when two women find themselves on opposite sides of an ideological divide.
Shearer sees danger in such polarised thinking and the way holding entrenched positions suffocates genuine debate. The need to find connection is a theme referenced by the title of her new book.
Pitched just a few years into the future, the story unfolds in the Christchurch suburb of Sumner, where sea level rise and extreme weather events have become a life-altering reality for the local community.
Each of her key characters is affected by that central threat, but they react to it in very different ways.
“I wanted to challenge people’s thinking and set it in the near future so they feel some sense of imminency,” she says.
“With climate change, you tend to get pushed towards either a dystopian future in which everything’s falling apart or where all the problems are solved through technology.
“I wasn’t interested in either of those poles.”
The physical setting is familiar territory for Shearer, who used to live across the hill from Lyttelton Harbour before moving to Gibbston, about 30km inland from Queenstown. She also knows one of the port’s ex-CEOs, which was useful for researching the logistics of the opening attack.
The bombing of the coal ship deliberately echoes elements of the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, an act of state terrorism by the French in retaliation for Greenpeace protests against nuclear testing.
Photographer Fernando Pereira was trapped inside the ship and drowned.
Ironically, Shearer was a coal geologist when she did her PhD in the late 80s and early 90s. At the time, she thought the world faced more imminent concerns than climate change, such as antibiotic resistance and the threat from pandemics.
Growing up, she remembers feeling terrified that nuclear warfare would destroy the world. “That blighted my teenage years.”
While still deeply disturbed by the current state of global affairs, Shearer says she has learnt to cope by splitting her brain in two.
“I’m not gonna wreck my only life by being miserable all the time.
“But the more I look at the interwoven environmental pressures, of which climate change is the most obvious and most talked about, I’m really glad I live on a 6ha block where we have a degree of self-sufficiency.”
Threads of Connection follows hot on the heels of Eleanor Catton’s most recent book, Birnam Wood, in the growing cli-fi (climate fiction) genre.
Asked in one interview whether Birnam Wood was saying “Beware” to the reader, Catton replied, ‘I think every good novel is a warning”.
Tim Winton’s post-apocalyptic novel Juice, released last October, depicts Australia as a scorched earth where life is increasingly precarious.
Exacting revenge on the global corporations they hold responsible for the collapse of society, a secret paramilitary organisation is tasked with wiping out entire bloodlines of the rich, who survive in luxuriously equipped and heavily armed bunkers.
In 2023, a feature film adaptation was released of Andreas Malm’s non-fiction book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which advocates sabotage as a logical form of climate activism.
Playwright David Finnigan, the son of a climate change scientist, is another who gives voice to those willing to cross the line in Scenes from the Climate Era, which was staged in Auckland last year.
A series of vignettes from the past, present and future include the petrol bombing of a construction site and a workshop for eco-activists on how to disable gas-guzzling SUVs using a lentil seed.
The latter is a tactic used in real life by an international climate group, the Tyre Extinguishers. Inspired by Malm’s book, they’re thought to be responsible for more than a few flat tyres here.
So far, it doesn’t seem to have made a dent in sales, though: eight of the 10 top-selling cars in New Zealand last year were SUVs. Not a single electric vehicle made the list.
SUV sales illustrate the “massive disconnect” that still exists even as the mainstream conversation moves beyond climate scepticism, says Shearer. In 2024, the average global temperature exceeded the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5°C for the first time.
The latest report from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change found that climate-related health threats are reaching new records, including heat-related deaths, food insecurity and the spread of infectious diseases.
Political action, however, is painfully slow or has stalled. US President Donald Trump – who’s reported to have received more than US$75 million ($131.6m) in donations from oil and gas interests – began reversing climate policies on his first day in office.
In New Zealand, thousands marched to protest against the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill, which passed into law in December after speeches were disrupted by environmental activists who unfurled a “this bill kills” banner from the public gallery.
A study released late last year by Bristol University, titled “Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests”, found many countries are cracking down on such dissent.
Australia had the highest arrest rate at more than three times the global average, followed closely by the UK.
New Zealand wasn’t among the 14 countries included in the study, but activists who break the law here risk heavy penalties, too.
On Wednesday, the first of several Restore Passenger Rail trials began in the Wellington District Court. Protesters who climbed motorway gantries and abseiled above the Victoria Tunnel in late 2022 to disrupt traffic and demand government action on climate change are charged with endangering transport, which carries a 14-year maximum sentence.
An appeal by Climate Liberation Aotearoa on the crowdfunding platform Chuffed has raised more than $6000 to support the group, known as the “Aerial 7”, to help pay for their travel, accommodation and childcare costs.
Last September, Greenpeace programme director Niamh O’Flynn was one of five people arrested after she locked herself inside the Wellington office of mining lobby group Straterra to oppose its involvement in plans to fast-track a seabed mining project.
It’s the latest addition to a long rap sheet she’s accumulated since first becoming involved in environmental and social justice activism as a teenager. Her first arrest was in 2009 during a protest at a Fonterra-owned coal mine in Southland, where she was pushed off a tripod.
“I believe that when the laws of the day are protecting injustice, it’s our duty to be brave and do whatever it takes to stand up against business as usual,” she says. “Sometimes that means breaking the law or putting our bodies on the line.”
O’Flynn doesn’t do it for the kicks. Before the Wellington protest, she remembers feeling extremely anxious.
“It was so awful, but the moral imperative of it is stronger than your personal feelings.”
Despite its sometimes aggressive approach, Greenpeace has a written commitment to non-violent action, which includes a prohibition on extensive property damage. It’s a stance O’Flynn supports.
“Disruption is really important,” she says. “But for a lot of climate activists, certainly in my close circle, it’s not just wanting to stop bad things from happening. It’s also about what kind of world you’re creating on the other side.”
Outspoken ecologist Mike Joy is another fearless advocate for the environment, describing himself as the agriculture industry’s least-favourite scientist.
This week, he’s due to give evidence in the Christchurch High Court in support of Ngāi Tahu’s bid to assert its rangatiratanga rights and seek greater control over fresh water.
He was recently invited to join Scientist Rebellion, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion that’s committed to non-violent civil resistance. Its website lists dozens of scientists around the world on trial for their actions, including a scientist in Sweden facing up to four years in prison for sabotage after gluing herself to the road.
“It’s so tricky and I just don’t think I’m brave enough,” he says, when asked how far he’d be prepared to go to force change.
“I hate making a scene. I’m the kind of guy in a restaurant that if there’s a blowfly in my dinner, I’ll just quietly put it away.
“Obviously, I do get grumpy and speak out in the media when I get the opportunity, writing books and things like that. But I do kind of feel guilty for just being a keyboard warrior because it’s becoming clearer and clearer every day that’s not getting us where we need to go.”
For Joy, the focus on renewable energy – and the industry that’s built up around it – is a distraction from the real issue: the relentless pursuit of economic growth.
“We can’t keep growing and we can’t keep consuming – especially in New Zealand, where half of the population are in the top 10% of wealth responsible for 50% of the emissions, and more than that of the harm.
“If we carry on these lifestyles, then we won’t have a planet. We are the problem. We talk about it endlessly and we don’t just not face up to the harm, we double down on it.”
Shearer, too, has little time for “techno-optimists” who are convinced we can solve our way out of the world’s problems with technology, instead of having to fundamentally change the way we live.
It’s not exactly a popular position but she thinks New Zealand’s most positive contribution would be to significantly restrict international tourism, one of the country’s key economic pillars. Shearer doesn’t see it being viable in the long term, anyway.
“All sorts of things are coming our way that mean we need to live within our means, rather than expand our means to expand our wants,” she says.
“I think that’s where thoughts of ecotage and terrorism come in because we’re at a point where a revolution is about the only way that things might change.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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