Last March For Planet Earth by Kell Cowley

Author:Kell Cowley [Cowley, Kell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Odd Voice Out
Published: 2018-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

“Mr Lambert!” the university Dean hailed, speaking into a bullhorn. “I hope you realize the moment this attention seeking stunt is at an end we’ll be signing your expulsion papers! As for the others who’ve joined you…I’m willing to let them off with a warning. Provided that they get down from the roof immediately!”

Ben swallowed. Admittedly, getting up onto the canteen roof had been the beginning of the end for his hunger strike.

“Do what you have to do,” Ben told his fellow activists who’d sat with him and starved with him during the last three days. “I won’t blame any of you for quitting...”

Ben’s protest had begun on Monday morning in the breakfast line. It’d all kicked off when Dita the dinner lady had informed him that they were no longer offering plant-based alternatives in the university canteen due to a new initiative to support British meat and dairy farmers whose businesses were being harmed by the rise of veganism. And of course Ben had realised this new lunch policy was intended to ostracise the environmentalist students in the last week leading up to the Earth Day march. He knew that he shouldn’t have taken the bait. But the fact was that Ben hadn’t slept all weekend and now he couldn’t even get a simple coffee with soy milk. He supposed he could have drunk it black, but he’d felt an urgent need to boycott this bullshit. So letting out a snarl of frustration, Ben had sat down on one of the canteen tables, refusing to eat, sleep or move until…until the world stopped being so intolerably shitty.

“If that’s your cause, you know you’ll be sitting here forever, right?” Mo had told him after Ben had explained the motives of his martyrdom to her. “You’ll be sat here till you die.”

“Fair enough,” he’d replied. “I’ll just sit and wait.”

Mo had squeezed his shoulder and left him to it. Since their clumsy one night stand they’d been distant, attending separate demos and taking their own paths as they tried in their insignificant way to do something. There were others who’d joined Ben in his canteen protest though, throwing down their lunch trays and getting on the table beside him. A week before the referendum and the press were already declaring the old environmentalist ways to be a thing of the past. But there were still eco warriors unwilling to accept defeat and joining whatever desperate action was on offer.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, Ben knew his hunger strike wasn’t really a protest. It was a breakdown. It’d finally hit him. The same way that it had hit Mo on New Year’s Day. The inevitable result of the vote on geoengineering. The realisation that the mass media would control the result and that the majority of people would choose whatever option seemed the easiest. They had failed to offer any solution that was more appealing than the wave-a-magic-wand-over-the-planet techno-fix. That was democracy for you. It had put Ben off his food.

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