Members of our group took to the streets around the G20 Summit in Toronto with concerns about climate change, the Alberta tar sands, assaults on native sovereignty, and other environmental injustices. The Summit police in Toronto threatened, searched, arrested, and detained Climate Justice London activists, while other local climate justice activists stayed away from Toronto to avoid the G20 police regime. Our dissent was not permitted at the Summit. In fact, anyone who was outdoors in downtown Toronto was a potential target for the snatch squads, the riot cops, the mounted horse brigades, and thousands of other police at the Summit. Our allies and our friends were pulled into this ‘security’ sweep, and all of us are left wondering which of the local police officers we encounter have brought their G20 summit training and hostility back to our cities.
Because we condemn this trampling of civil liberties, and because we always will call for democracy and social justice, members of our group have taken on leading roles in preparing a statement about police conduct and detention conditions at the G20 summit in Toronto. People for Peace (London) activists helped to develop that London-specific version of the original statement from Toronto. We hope that more Londoners will sign on to communicate their support.
Threats to our civil liberties will make it even more difficult to continue campaigning against environmental injustices — in a non-violent manner, without destructive sabotage tactics.
March 3rd was a day of action against tar sands financing from RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada).
Here are various photos, video, and writing about the actions that day — in several Canadian cities.
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In Toronto
4 of us went out to Toronto to join the protesting there. We brought a banner and signs. Here are remarks about other contributions that our London delegation made that day.
UK Climate Campers have said this on Twitter (in their “bio” statement) -
“It’s time to show our ‘leaders’ how we’re going to take action to reduce emissions ourselves. Because it’s business as usual at Copenhagen.”
Common people are going to have to sort these problems out;
and to accomplish that, we’re going to have to rise up — to take power.
We need to collectively re-make this world; and to do that, we’ll need to motivate and mobilize a lot more people — including ourselves, in some cases.
What are we waiting for? Let’s do this.
A lot more of us will have to be a lot more engaged in making this change happen.
Obama is not a radical superhero; and no one else out there is either. There are no hero-saviours out there who are going to turn around these crises on, their own.
Join us in the climate justice movement
AND/OR
Join us in the pursuit of practical, community-level solutions.
In this post, I’ll be sharing photos, videos, and a write-up about Switch Off Hazelwood anti-coal campaign rallies and interventions in Australia, earlier in September. I also will be offering a little commentary.
(This post isn’t about breaking news. But I happen to think that we should remember and continue to talk about previous actions — well after a couple of weeks have passed.)
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“COMMUNITY DECOMMISSION ORDER”
(Like the other images in this post, that photo is from the “hazelwood2009″ pages on Flickr — where you can see a lot of other photos.)
That video is an introduction to the overall campaign — in relation to a wider movement against fossil fuel consumption (which activists are just beginning to bring together — in Australia, and elsewhere). The video calls for proactive activist responses to mounting global warming threats — above all.
This Diggers’ Song video was posted during the summer Climate Camp in England -
With that song, these Climate Campers have affiliated themselves with previous attempts to share and maintain “a common treasury for all” — which some simply would describe as a “commons.”
Like the Diggers, the Climate Campers rally around common environments — protected or claimed through civil disobedience, and other activism. At a very basic level, their goals and tactics are similar.
But the Climate Camps and the Diggers have approached these common environments from different angles. While the Climate Campers have been more inclined to approach fields as meeting places, and as launching-off points for nearby protests, the Diggers attempted to claim lands that could be farmed in common. They mainly were after agricultural lands which they might have used to sustain farming collectives. Food concerns have not been central at Climate Camps, but food issues are not completely off the ‘map’ at Climate Camps either — as this Climate Camp TV video about fruit smoothies indicates. Yet, as Climate Campers have focused on greenhouse gases, and on other fossil fuel pollution released into our common atmosphere, it seems that they haven’t devoted much attention to emissions from industrial agriculture, and other mainstream food systems. (Here is a post that addresses interconnections between food systems and greenhouse gas emissions — approached through generalized statistical estimates.)
I’m raising those points about distinct focuses and limitations to compare the two approaches to common environments.
George Monbiot (in this article) -
“Eco-terrorism is a charge repeatedly levelled against the environment movement, mostly by fossil fuel lobbyists. But, as far as I can discover, there has not been a single recorded instance of a planned attempt to harm people in the cause of environmental protection in the United Kingdom over the past 30 years or more.”
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Here are a few blog posts about police crackdowns -
