Category: Uncategorized

“Put out that joint right now!”, yells the cop.

“Of course”, I reply, almost without thinking. I rub the joint against the grass and show it to him.

“Smoking weed in front of the police station! Unbelievable!”, he mutters begrudgingly, and goes back in.

I’m still processing what just happened. I had just arrived at the urban garden, and as a welcome gesture somebody had handed me that joint. Right beside the fence of the garden lies the police station. Two different worlds very close to each other.

It’s the first time I’m working on this garden. While uprooting grass near the spinach, I’m having a conversation with two women about feminism. One of them criticizes how indigenous men from her hometown make their wives carry all their heavy stuff, including their babies, while they themselves don’t carry a thing besides a machete.

In their culture, I tell her, the men need to protect the women from the many dangers of the jungle. She then tells me her mother is indigenous and she was bullied and shamed growing up because of it.

Later on, as we’re starting to light a fire, another cop arrives. He’s asking what we’re gonna cook. We’re just gonna make some aguapanela, we explain. “Only aguapanela?”, he asks. “Y’all should add some alcohol to it”. Which is a really weird thing for a cop to say.

He also gives advice on how to light a fire in such a way that’s suitable for cooking. He is very knowledgeable. He probably comes from the countryside. But he keeps giving us orders, which feels weird. Before he leaves I shake his hand, ask him his name (he gives me his surname), and promise to bring him some aguapanela later.

The water is boiling. We add panela to it, as well as lemongrass, mint, rhubarb and a few other herbs from the garden. A fellow gardener tells us she, as a victim, was feeling very uncomfortable with that cop. This is supposed to be a safe space, she says, free from guns and uniforms. She doesn’t say what she’s a victim of, but it was probably cops. Or soldiers.

Two cops arrive on a motorbike. “Put that fire out”, one of them shouts. We approach the fence to talk to them and explain we have a permit from the city’s Botanical Garden. “We’ll see about that”, he replies. These cops clearly don’t belong to the police station because they arrived from the other side of the park.

We realize we don’t have any cups, so I go to a nearby tienda to buy some. When I come back, a middle-aged woman and her son are talking to some gardeners. Apparently they’re upset that there is a community garden here.

“Where do you live?”, she asks me, defiantly, when I join the conversation. I tell her my address. As it turns out, I live nearby, as do most of the other gardeners. But I know she was assuming I lived in a faraway, poorer part of town, and she was getting ready to tell me to go back there and make a fire there. Now she’s feeling uneasy but still tells me to go make a fire in my home.

I still try to explain to her this is an initiative to create a more sustainable way of living in the city, and to strengthen community bonds in the neighborhood. But her son replies that this is not a good park to have a garden because it attracts junkies.

They seem unable to truly say why they dislike the garden, but I assume they’re frightened conservatives. When the mother leaves, however, the son changes his tone and seems eager to learn about the garden. Even though he doesn’t stay for the aguapanela, he still asks for our numbers.

We’re drinking the aguapanela and doing some planning. We want this year’s garden activities to follow the Muisca calendar. But we don’t get very far because all of a sudden twenty cops arrive.

They stand defiantly at the fence and tell us it is forbidden to light fires in Bogotá, unless we have a permit from the Mayor’s ffice. This is a tense moment. We tell the policemen about a decree from the Botanical Garden, but they don’t seem to buy it. We don’t have that decree handy. We need to look it up on our phones.

An authoritarian woman arrives. She’s a city official. She’s accompanied by other city officials and some cops. “Put that fire down immediately”, she screams. We don’t comply. Somebody scrambles to find the decree and shows it to her on a phone, but she wants none of it. She’s asking for a permit, not a decree. Some of the gardeners get angry. One of them is recording the scene with her phone.

The police chief, however, is trying to de-escalate. He takes the phone we’re handing them, reads the relevant paragraph, and explains the situation to us. Apparently some neighbor called them because they didn’t like the fire. “These are fake environmentalists. They say they wanna protect the Earth, yet they burn wood” is what the neighbor had said. To be fair, that’s not a bad argument.

We end up putting out the fire as an act of goodwill. After all, this is a community thing, and if a neighbor is bothered by the smoke, we respect that. But why do they have to call the cops on us? And why do cops behave like butlers of rich people?

We still end up bringing some aguapanela to the police station later on.

Learn more about our urban garden at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100080354461241

Ten years ago, on this day, January 7, 2013, an Australian climate activist sent out a press release pretending to be a bank…

Jonathan Moylan of Front Line Action on Coal … purported to be ANZ’s Group Head of Corporate Sustainability, Toby Kent. Mr Moylan falsely claimed that ANZ was cancelling its $1.2 billion loan facility for Whitehaven Coal’s open-cut mine project in Maules Creek, NSW.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/thefeed/story/jonathan-moylan-and-300-million-dollar-hoax 

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 395.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 419. .

The context was that, as ever, state governments were bending over forwards, backwards, sideways to make it easier for companies to dig up and sell coal to people who would burn it.  And activists had tried all the legal means to try to stop it, getting tied up in consultations, petitions etc etc. And then they branched out, into other non-violent (but certainly illegal) tactics…

As ABC journo Sarah McVeigh wrote in 2017

Moylan had been living in the forest for months. He’d started the Maules Creek blockade in the hopes of stopping the mine. The protest made headlines when Wallabies star David Pocock was arrested for chaining himself to a bulldozer. But when the New South Wales government gave it its final tick of approval, Moylan’s hopes were dashed.

“The only two legitimate options were to try and get the (then) federal environment minister Tony Burke to protect the critically endangered woodland in the Leard State forest or to get the ANZ Bank to try and change its decision about financing the project.”

What I think we can learn from this

Making fun of money gets you in trouble.  See that early Michael Haneke film “The Seventh Continent”, where well, spoilers, cash is destroyed

What happened next

On Friday 25 July 2014 Jonathan Moylan was sentenced by the Supreme Court: 1 year 8 months, suspended with the condition of good behaviour for 2 years.

Non-violent protest continues in Australia, despite the best efforts of State and Federal governments to chill it with ever more draconian policing and sentencing

See also

Tim DeChristopher.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

References

McVeigh, S. (2017)  “I wanted to stop the mine”: Jonathan Moylan and the $300 million hoax. ABC 3 October https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/jono-moylan/9010874

On this day, December15  in 2009 those galaxy brains at the Daily Express ran a front cover “100 reasons why global warming is natural.”

Pricks.

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 387ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

The newspapers at this point were full of stories about climate change because the Copenhagen COP15 conference was underway and since 2006, a wave of climate activism and legislation had been happening. The Daily Express readers wanted to be able to dismiss it all as just another green hoax-  god forbid it turned out that the hippies and the eco nuts were actually right.  That would cause mental anguish in the tiny brains of Express readers.

Why this matters. 

We need to remember just how how stupid and irresponsible the popular press has been on the question of climate change (for well understood reasons – grok the Propaganda Model of Herman and Chomsky).

What happened next?

The Daily Express has continued to be a newspaper by and for idiots.

On this day, October 25 in 1982, the “Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity” symposium opened in New York.

And Exxon knew about this. How do we know Exxon knew?

Because, um, they sponsored it, and one of their guys gave a speech.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2017/David.E.E.1982.EXXON.EwingSymposium.pdf

First day of Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity . … Biennial Maurice Ewing Symposium held at Palisades, New York, October 25-27, 1982  

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 338.41ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this –  The late 70s effort to get politicians onboard had failed. The work, however, continued.

Why this matters. 

The “we didn’t know” defense is no good…

What happened next?

In 1984 a book of the same name was published https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984GMS….29…..H/abstract

Exxon? Exxon went on to help launch the Global Climate Coalition and to delay action on climate change. Of course it did.

On this day, October 7 [okay, possibly the 8th] 1989, future Liberal leader (for five gruesome minutes) and Foreign Affairs Minister (for one gruesome decade) Alexander Downer spoke out about environmental issues. Clearly he hadn’t received/read the memo that the Liberals were trying to catch soft-green votes at the upcoming Federal Election…

Alexander Downer, who was the Opposition’s spokesman on the environment, outlined another approach at the weekend. [7 or 8 October]  Downer’s views were made public when opening a fair at Yankallila on the Fleureau Peninsula south of Adelaide, a venue unlikely to attract too many aggressive miners. This was just as well, as Mr Downer told the fair-goers that the conservation lobby was getting more than a fair go, largely  because the mining lobby had allowed conservationists to dominate the environmental agenda. As he had been the Opposition spokesman on the environment during-the last election campaign Mr Downer felt especially strongly about the issue, as while he saw Greenies, coming to the aid of the ALP, the mining industry was not as forthcoming in their aid for the coalition.

At Yankallila, he first called the mining industry “weak and gutless”, then accused them of letting “radical Greens” dictate the agenda so that “what were previously regarded as extreme conservationists have become the mainstream spokesman of responsible conservation”.

“The business community and level-headed conservationists must now change radically the way they approach conservation issues by applying the logic of the marketplace and putting a price on Australia’s natural environment,” he said. Big

Mr Downer’s argument was that if Australia “was to pursue responsible conservation policies it would have to put a price on the environment” which would “change the signals sent out to decision-makers by , introducing market forces”.

Fraser, A. 1989. The Right forfeits claims on ecology. Canberra Times, 12 October, p.8.

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 350.33ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – by this time the Australian Labor Party had been in office 6 years. There was an election coming, and green issues would matter to voters. Who would get which preferences?

Why this matters. 

Big picture? It doesn’t

What happened next?

The ALP squeaked home in March 1990 thanks to green-minded voters. Downer was briefly and disastrously Opposition Leader in 1994-5. He was then John Howard’s Foreign Minister from 1996 to 2007.

Google Downer, Woodside and East Timor. Read it and weep.