Category: Activism

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Activism United Kingdom

August 31, 2005 – “Stop Climate Chaos” launched

August 31, 2005 – “Stop Climate Chaos” launched

On this day, August 31, 2005 the “Stop Climate Chaos” coalition was launched in the UK – the usual suspect NGOs big and small.

“Up to 500 campaigners formed a giant human banner next to the London Eye to launch a major new alliance. Eighteen groups representing millions of supporters have created the UK’s biggest climate change coalition.

“The Stop Climate Chaos group wants to put pressure on the government to reduce gas emissions. At the G8 summit, the US and UK called for greater investment in clean technology to replace Kyoto-style curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. But others warn new technology will come too late and emissions targets are needed to tackle the problem. The group of volunteers lined up along London’s South Bank to form a giant “human banner” in Jubilee Gardens in the shape of the group’s logo.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4201400.stm

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 378.9 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

We’ve had coalitions of NGOs. They tend to be “lowest conman denominator”, with the most staid organisations vetoing anything at all useful, so that even a march comes to be seen as “edgy.” 


FFS.

What happened next?

The terminally stupid “wave” march in December 2009 was the end of the road for “Stop Climate Chaos”, and, effectively, that particular “wave” of climate concern. It was avoidable, but would have required guts and brains that outfits like Stop Climate Chaos did not have. So it goes. There are other outfits now, I think there is one called the “Climate Coalition”. All failed, all useless. We’re toast.

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Activism anti-reflexivity Australia

August 31, 2011 – anti-carbon tax protesters call Anthony Albanese a “maggot”

On this day, 31 August 2011

“protesters besieged the Marrickville office of Labor MHR and minister, Anthony Albanese. News reports record that ‘angry’ demonstrators jeered and booed: one ‘female protester grabbed Mr Albanese by the tie and called him “gutless” and a “maggot”’ (AAP 2011). This was one of a series of anti-carbon tax protests held during 2011–12.”

(Ward, 2015: 225)
See also – Lentini, R. 2011. Democracy-is-dead mob takes its anger to Anthony Albanese’s door. Daily Telegraph 2 September.

On this day the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 390.33ppm. Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that this happened, that there are people who will scream blue murder at the smallest effort to do anything about climate change

What happened next?

The legislation got through. Then it was repealed by the Liberal-National Party government. Albanese… dunno what he did next..

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Activism United Kingdom

August 26, 2006 – First “Climate Camp” begins

On this day, 26 August 2006, after many months of planning the first “Camp for Climate Action” begins, near Drax Power Station, in Yorkshire.

However, we now know that the police let it happen as a “wave through”. Given how many undercovers there were (just the ones we know about!) they could have stopped this if they’d wanted to. They didn’t, because they didn’t want to. Too many opportunities to track who got involved. A honey pot. And here we are.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 380.6 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

We mustn’t forget previous resistance, or what happened to it. Hell, we might even learn something from it, and not make exactly the same mistakes, over and over again.

What happened next?

Climate Camp kept having annual camps for a few years, and then imploded.

Climate camps happened in other countries, for a whiile.

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Activism United Kingdom

August 4, 2008 – Police pepper spray #climate campers

On this day, August 4, 2008, the forces of law and order provided law. And order. Forcefully.

At the Third Climate Camp

“Police used pepper spray on the crowd at the Climate Camp 2008. It was around 6am Monday 4th August and campers had been woken to the alarm of ‘cops on site’. They were trying to seize vehicles that campers had parked at a top gate of the camp. It was denied later the same day by Sir Ian Blair that any pepper spray would have been used, but this footage clearly shows its unnecessary use.

This was the same Climate Camp where the Met put it about that police had suffered injuries and been hospitalised. A Labour Minister said 70 police had been injured.

The right wing media picked this up (of course) and ran stories about crazed violent eco-anarchists.  

But guess what, it turned out that NONE OF THIS WAS TRUE.

The Liberal Democrats put in a Freedom of Information Act request. The answer 

“showed that no officers in the £5.9m police operation at Kingsnorth power station in Kent during August had been injured by protesters. Instead, police records showed that their medical unit had dealt mostly with toothache, diarrhoea, cut fingers and “possible bee stings”.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/dec/16/kingsnorth-environment-police-inquiry-injuries

And, of course

Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, told MPs at Commons question time yesterday [December 15]: “I was informed that 70 police officers were hurt and naturally assumed that they had been hurt in direct contact as a result of the protest. That clearly wasn’t the case and I apologise if that caused anybody to be misled.”

“If”. Yeah, sweet non-apology apology. Stay classy, Vern.

On this day the PPM was 384.32 ppm. As of August 2021  it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

The media love a good beat-up. And most are in a symbiotic relationship with our lords and masters.

What happened next?

Climate Camp imploded (it wasn’t just down to the undercover cops, btw). Various groups kept the NVDA flame alive. Extinction Rebellion came along in 2018 and learnt absolutely nothing from the history. Nothing. Nada. Nowt.  

Oh well.

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Activism United Kingdom

July 22, 1966 – “The Conservation Society” holds launch event

On this day, July 22, 1966, the Inaugural meeting of the “Conservation Society”

There’s this corking article if you’re interested-

Herring, H. (2001) The Conservation Society: Harbinger of the 1970s Environment Movement in the UK. Environment and History 7, 4 pp. 381-401.

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that organizations come and go, and are creatures of their time, and can be “trapped” – by their own cognitive and emotional settings, by others expectations and perceptions of them. A little like humans themselves, donchathink?

What happened next?

The Conservation Society was influential and important in the late 60s – we will come back to the 1968 lecture by Ritchie Calder. Its apogee was 1971-2, when it hosted a conference with Paul Ehrlich as a guest speaker. Its decline in influence through the 1970s and 80s (it was wound up in 1987) was tied to the rise of groups like Friends of the Earth and The Ecology Party (aka The Green Party), not tied to population concerns and not perceived as old, white and conservative.

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Activism Australia

July 10, 2008 – first Australian #Climate Camp begins, near Newcastle

On this day in 2008 the first Australian climate camp began near Newcastle.

Climate Camps were all the rage at the time, after the first one, in Yorkshire, England in August/September 2006.


Time travel cheat, a bit, here’s an account of what happened days later – 

July 13 & 14, 2008: Newcastle, NSW, Australia Climate Camp stops coal trains at worlds’ largest coal export port

On July 13, 2008 approximately 1000 activists stopped three trains bound for export at the Carrington Coal Terminal for almost six hours. Dozens of protesters were able to board and chain themselves to the trains while others lay across the tracks. Hundreds were held back by mounted police. Police arrested 57.[19]             

Sunday 13th July 2008: 1000 people gathered at Islington Park in Newcastle for a rally and march to the Carrington Coal Terminal. It was a colourful and eclectic crowd of local residents, parents and children, percussionists, clowns, students, and concerned citizens from every state in Australia. Their message was simple and clear: let’s see renewables instead of more new coal.             

Source: Greenpeace

See photos and account on peacebus.

Climate Camp Australia 2008

Why this matters. 

We have tried to resist. That resistance has been regularly exhausted, repressed, derided. But those who resisted were right, even though they lost.

Those who derided, smeared, laughed? They can go… well, this is a family website, so let’s just use the word “away” – they can go… away.

What happened next?

The coal kept being dug up, exported, burned. The carbon dioxide molecules kept warming the planet.

Categories
Activism Denial United States of America

June 19, 1997/2009 – children of colour used as propaganda tools by #climate wreckers/greens do “motherhood”

On this day in 1997, the cuddly-sounding but actually simply evil “Global Climate Coalition” ran the following newspaper advert, as part of the huge, well-funded and well-coordinated campaign to … (checks notes)… render human civilisation quite unlikely in the second half of the 21st century.

Image via the fantastic “Inside Climate News” site.

Exactly 12 years later, on June 19, 2009 there was a “Mothers Day of Action” in the US, as part of a push for a climate and energy act.

“On Friday, June 19th, 1Sky and groups like MoveOn, Green for All, Oxfam and others are calling for a national day of action to make the climate bill stronger. It’s a day for you to “get visible” in your community. Please invite your family, friends and neighbors to rally at your representative’s district office and make your voice heard loud and clear.

Sign up now for this national day of action: http://www.1sky.org/getlouder

Your voice lets your representative know that there are concerned citizens — like you — who want a stronger bill to create millions of clean energy jobs and begin to tackle climate change. So now it’s time to get louder!…..

Why June 19th? Right now, several committees are working on this bill, and we expect a House floor vote by the end of June. This is the critical moment we’ve been working for in the House, so it’s time to make ourselves visible!

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that the language of motherhood has been used a lot (I think it is a two-edged sword, tbh) – that this did not suddenly emerge in about 2018. Corporations and threatened industries can cloak themselves with the mantle of the underdog, of innocence, and go all DARVO too…

What happened next?

GCC shut up shop in 2002, “mission accomplished”.

MAU shut up shop in 2011 – mission not really accomplished. So it goes.

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Activism United Kingdom

June 13, 2008 – activists stop coal train, throw coal off. Convictions eventually quashed…

On June 13 June 2008 climate activists involved in the whole “camp for climate action” thing stopped a train heading to Drax power station in Yorkshire (the site of the first Camp for Climate Action, in August-September 2006).

They shovelled coal off it before the police arrived and arrested them all.

See Indymedia for more pictures.

They went on trial A year  later 

“Twenty nine people were convicted in July following a four-day jury trial at Leeds crown court. Today, at the same court, Judge James Spencer QC, ordered five, who had previous convictions, to do 60 hours unpaid work and three were ordered to pay £1,000 in costs and £500 compensation to Network Rail. The judge said the loss to the company had been almost £37,000. Twenty one members of the group were given conditional discharges for 12 months.”

And in January 2014… those convictions were quashed because the driver for the activists had been… undercover cop Mark Kennedy.

A re-do action by Greenpeace in September 2014 got no coverage, as best I can tell…

Why this matters. 

We should know about the brave history of direct action on climate change. It didn’t start with Extinction Rebellion.

What happened next?

Drax is now telling the world it will be storing its emissions under the North Sea

Categories
Activism United States of America

March 27th, 1977- what we can learn from Dutch arrogance and aviation disasters

On March 27th 1977 there was a major aviation disaster;  still the biggest loss of life in a single aviation accident. (Obviously, 911 cost more lives in toto). This was the collision by a KLM jumbo jet with a Pan Am jet in the Canary Islands. And there are various accounts of it and why it happened but the consensus is that the KLM chief pilot was an arrogant “my way or the highway” dick, and the inability of the co-pilot to challenge him [the co-pilot almost certainly understood that the control tower had NOT given them permission to take off, but wasn’t willing to challenge The Boss] led to hella lotta death. 

What are the lessons here?

Firstly that arrogant Dutch men are more trouble than they are worth. And the more we learn to tell them to shut up, the more we ignore them, the happier and safer everyone will be.

On a serious note we could learn a lot from the aviation industry, which is safer than ever (give or take some 787 Max disasters). In terms of notechs for social movement organisations, I think that would be really handy.

You can have the technical systems, but the human factor will still get you all killed. 


For more on “notechs”- 

Nobody really likes it when planes drop out of the sky full of passengers.
Categories
Activism

March 22, 2012 – flash mobs and repertoire exhaustion

On this day, March 22 2012, exactly 10 years ago, the then new organisation 350.org, held a flash mob on a university campus in Canada to try to drum up interest in its divestment from fossil fuels activities.

On March 22nd, approximately 30 students met on campus at 1pm with their ipods ready. At 1:10, we pressed play simultaneously and followed the instructions on the 14 minute long mp3. The energy was high, and curious onlookers were already starting to gather. THREE, TWO, ONE, START! The voice told us about the horrors of climate change while we participated in a giant shoulder massage train. Later we caused a stir in a high-traffic area on campus with 2 minutes to high five as many non-participants as possible. http://350.org/flash-mobs-and-mysterious-mp3s-tools-raise-climate-awareness-yes-please/

This was not a big or important event. And I mention it because it’s 10 years ago and flash mobs are so over. And 350.org has had a fairly typical story of late in that it tried to expand too quickly and has had to pull its horns in. And it continues to have the same problems that all the big green organisations have around black and ethnic minority representation. And this has been going on since – well this has been spoken of – the late 80s, early 90s. And of course it’s been going on even longer than that.

Meanwhile, about flash mobs: Repertoires get old fast, but they continue to be used after they have lost their novelty value because people struggled to innovate understandably and you want to sweat your assets. In some ways. NGOs and civil society organisations are under the same forces as big industrial outfits you have skill sets repertoires things that feel and are “right” and you keep doing them. And that isn’t automatically a bad thing. You know, you wouldn’t want to have surgery from a surgical team that had given up on hand-washing, because that was an old thing. Some things are really, really worth keeping. But at the same time, you wouldn’t want the surgery from a surgeon who hadn’t learned anything from his failures, or an anaesthetist or nurses who hadn’t kept up with the latest research. And we’re still using techniques which were proven to be less effective than more recent ones. Now, the analogy of the human body in a society is an old one. And the analogy I’m telling around in a medical innovation and social movement, innovation is not perfect. That’s because it’s an analogy, a metaphor. See the 1931 Robert Frost essay about this….

“All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself”

But I am digressing…