Time To Stop Playing Along

When I was asked to review a chunk of the 2008 Climate Safety report from the Public Interest Research Centre, I was less than positive about the social movement building outlined in the recommendations for “mobilisation” of the public (see below).

Tim Holmes, one of the people involved in the Climate Safety report, has started a new web log critiquing the very same issues :-

http://convenientlies.wordpress.com

http://convenientlies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/greenwashing-government/

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Message To You, Rudy

Well, the Metropolitan Police in London have tried a charm offensive to make nice with the Climate Camp before it all kicks off. Or have they ? Many Campers have been suspicious of the softly, softly propaganda, and have put together a little message to give right on back to the Met, and it reads a lot like this :-

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One Dead Man

Good Friday. The start of the special Christian weekend when we remember brutal, inhuman torture and a completely unnecessary death.

With the emergence of the social movement around Climate Change and Energy policy, it was to be expected that campaigners and protesters would come up against the ruling systems of the day.
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G20 Direct Action : Photographs of Vegetables

I got on the train yesterday evening with a very gentle fellow, who was reading a free newspaper intently.

I noticed he was carrying a camera with quite a large lens, so I said to him, “You can’t believe anything you read in the papers”, trying this gambit to get him to spill about what he was doing.

He gave a non-commital response, and we didn’t strike up.

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G20 Action : Your Options : Amuse or Annoy

The “protest community” have a very stark choice about options for non-violent direct action and other forms of demonstration this week. Either you do something to entertain and amuse people, or you do something to annoy.

At a stretch you might even manage to do both, but for the most part it is an either-or situation. Do you hold a street party in fancy dress, or do you try to blockade something, lock on and shut it down ?

Do you publish a newspaper pulling apart current Economic, Energy and Climate policy ? Or do you set up a tent outside the London Climate Exchange and refuse to leave ?

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Shake Things Up

Some of us will be arrested. Some of us can’t afford to be arrested. But all of us are committed to some kind of direct action on 1st April, Fossil Fools Day 2009.

We are going to shake things up.

We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to our children, our neighbours, the dirt-poor drought-ridden farmers in the Global South. Even the wretched polar bears.

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