Radicals Chasing Utopia by Jamie Bartlett

Author:Jamie Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Activists’ Paradox

Only a very particular type of person becomes a committed activist. To stick your head above the parapet commits you to a life of early mornings, cold exhausting afternoons and evenings lost to tedious organising. That angry-looking person marching, chanting and waving a banner is usually damp, sleep-deprived, hungry and worried about getting arrested. Most ordinary people soon tire of this thankless life, but the activist is obsessive and determined. They always conclude that even if the prospects of success are limited, it is worth the effort. There are benefits to this life, of course: the thrilling victories, the camaraderie of purpose that comes with confronting ‘the system’, the powerful social and emotional ties. But by Einstein’s definition of insanity—doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result—the activist is slightly mad.

Slightly mad was, at any rate, how I was feeling early one freezing morning in May, as I approached the United Kingdom’s largest coal mine along with 300 direct-action, climate-change activists. These activists believe the ‘softly softly’ approach to climate change hasn’t worked; that the familiar NGOs like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the WWF, with their legal lobbying and palatable messages about flying less, are too supine, and that our best hope to stop catastrophic climate change is to physically prevent fossil fuels being burned. Even if it means civil disobedience.

Ffos-y-fran, which is just outside Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, is a gaping 178-metre-deep hole in the ground, owned and excavated ten hours a day by the mining firm Miller Argent. When Ffos-y-fran was first opened in 2006 it sparked considerable local protest, and was appealed all the way up to Welsh Assembly.*

Fifty of us in my group—Block C, all wearing red, with the phone number of legal advisers written on our forearms—slowly scaled the Ffos-y-fran perimeter fence. At the other side of the site, Blocks A, B and D were doing the same. Clambering into the mine was surprisingly easy. But I’m naturally a rule follower, a queue-abiding type of person, so breaking the law took some mental effort. Indra, a veteran of the environmental movement who’s in my block, has been arrested eighteen times on ‘actions’ like this. She breezes over the fence with a smile on her face.

We marched up the muddy dirt path toward the lip of the mine, surrounded by overflow of discarded soil, which contrasted with breathtaking views of the Welsh Valleys. One of us played a trumpet and periodically someone raised a chant:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.