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category: Climate change

Environmental activists may soon benefit from “paradox of repression”

According to The Guardian, the head of a right wing group known as the Young Britons’ Foundation has called for trespassing environmental activists to be “shot down” by police.

In October last year, when Greenpeace activists scaled the Palace of Westminster to protest against climate change policy, he called on police to “next time shoot them down … start with water cannon and if that doesn’t work, maybe crank it up a level or two”.

His words are more than just bluster, however, considering that the Young Britons’ Foundation is in the business of training Tory parliamentary candidates.

So what if police did start using water cannons on climate protesters? My hunch is that such brutality would result in what Michael Nagler calls a “paradox of repression.” Environmentalists might gain more public sympathy than they have ever enjoyed before, much like the civil rights movement did after Birmingham.

Does that mean they should welcome the water cannons? No. But it does mean that protesters shouldn’t let threats such as these scare them away from taking action. They pose a threat of their own if they remain committed to action.

What do you think? Am I being to optimistic? Would the general public ignore, or perhaps even applaud the use of water cannons against a Greenpeace activist who scaled a government building or national monument? Would the mainstream media not be sympathetic?

Experiments with truth: 3/4/10

  • An Irish town council has removed a page in its guestbook signed by the Israeli ambassador to protest Israel’s diplomatic record after the alleged use of fake Irish passports by the Jewish state’s spies.
  • Students at Sussec University in England are staging a sit-in to protest plans to make 115 staff redundant, which will close the environmental science degree and impact on English, history and life science departments.

Experiments with truth: 2/26/10

  • Hundreds of students from several Jordan, Utah district schools walked out of their classes Thursday morning to protest announced budget cuts that could slash teacher ranks, increase class sizes and impact extracurricular activities.
  • Nine days after an off-campus student party mocked Black History Month, UC San Diego went through a day of protests, on Wednesday, drawing attention to the small number of African American students enrolled at the beachside campus.

Experiments with truth: 1/29/10

nduprotest

  • Hundreds of Notre Dame University students and faculty members gathered on campus yesterday to demand more equality for LGBT students. The protest was in response to an anti-gay comic strip which appeared in the student paper a few weeks ago.
  • Climate activists in South Lanarkshire closed down one of Scotland’s main coal terminals yesterday when one of the protesters chained himself to a digging machine. This led to 11 coal trucks queuing at the terminal’s gate and prevented a coal train being loaded.
  • Dozens of people gathered in front of Camp Phoenix, an ISAF military base in the eastern part of Kabul, to protest the death of a civilian by NATO forces. They blocked the road that links the Afghan capital to eastern provinces.
  • Hundreds of students and alumni packed the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson yesterday to show their support for higher education funding and their opposition to proposals that call for merging some Mississippi universities.
  • About 1,400 construction workers defied a court order to end their strike at the $13 billion liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia. The strike started Jan. 22 to protest Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s plans to make the workers change accommodation every month instead of providing permanent housing.
  • Five concerned parents barricaded themselves inside a primary school in Glasgow this week to protest proposals to shut down the school. It was the latest in a series of school occupations which have taken place over the past year.

Experiments with truth: 1/27/10

(Bay Ismoyo / AFP/Getty Images / January 18, 2010)

  • In Albany, New York, a rally was held on Monday over plans to allow for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in upstate New York. Critics say the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” could contaminate the water supplies of New York City and other areas of the state.
  • Police officers in Balochistan (Pakistan) staged a sit-in on Monday to protest the fact that their salaries haven’t been increased.
  • The Cairo Public Transportation workers are starting a strike in all the Cairo garages, at 6am today, demanding the modernization/replacement of the obsolete buses and spare parts, raising allowances related to work hazards, increasing bonuses, reforming the health services, and calling for the formation of a free union, independent from the corrupt state-backed NDP-run Egyptian General Federation of Trade Unions.
  • Three anti-coal activists in West Virginia have entered their fifth day of a tree-sit on Monday as part of an effort to shut down a mountaintop removal site run by the mining giant Massey Energy. The three activists are perched atop platforms on trees on Coal River Mountain.

Experiments with truth: 1/25/10

Credit: The Daily Mail

  • A 150-strong group of Belgian firefighters sprayed foam from 20 trucks over a main road in central Brussels, blocking traffic in an effort to press for speedier promotions. Government buildings, including the Minister President’s office, were targeted.

  • About 2,000 photographers gathered in London over the weekend to protest stop and search methods by British police. The photographers say they’ve been unduly targeted by Section 44 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which was designed to give police greater powers to fight terrorism.

Experiments with truth: 1/22/10

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    • About 100 inmates at the Varick Federal Detention Center in Lower Manhattan refused to go to the mess hall on Tuesday morning and gave guards a flier declaring they were on a hunger strike to protest detention policies and practices.

    Experiments with truth: 1/19/10

    In Phoenix, more than 20,000 people marched on Saturday to protest the indiscriminate attacks and race-based raids conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against residents of Maricopa County. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

    In Phoenix, more than 20,000 people marched on Saturday to protest the indiscriminate attacks and race-based raids conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against residents of Maricopa County. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

    • In India, leaders of all-party Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Telangana Saturday began a hunger strike to demand that the central government immediately initiate the process for formation of the state.

    Experiments with truth: 1/11/10

    • Residents of cities in southern Yemen on Sunday staged a general strike to protest what they termed government oppression as well as action taken against a daily newspaper, activists and witnesses said. The strike was almost total in the southern provinces of Dhale, Lahaj, Shabwa and Abyan as all shops were shut and transportation ground to a halt,
    • In Iran, more than 100 police and plainclothes officers broke up a gathering of the Mourning Mothers in Laleh Park Saturday afternoon. The group — formed by women whose children have been killed in recent anti-government protests — gathers every weekend at the park to call attention to the deaths.
    • About 300 Egyptian workers at the fishing boats of Nea Michaniona (a village near Thessaloniki, Northern Greece) continue their strike, which began on Christmas, after blockading the small port of the village last week to protest a severe decrease in their income over recent months.

    Experiments with truth: 1/6/10

    A pro-Kurdish demonstrator flashes a victory sign during a sit-in protest in central Istanbul January 3, 2010. Hundreds of Kurdish women gathered in central Istanbul to protest against a ban on the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party.

    A pro-Kurdish demonstrator flashes a victory sign during a sit-in protest in central Istanbul on January 3. Hundreds of Kurdish women gathered in central Istanbul to protest against a ban on the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party.

    • In Manhattan yesterday, about 100 people protested the detention of Jean Montrevil, a Haitian who has had a green card since 1986 but, owing to a drug conviction for which he served time in the 1990s, has been subject to supervision and was detained by U.S. Immigration authorities on December 30. Ten protesters were arrested after failing to heed a police order to disperse as they blocked traffic.
    • Angry farmers wearing broad-brimmed hats and cracking kangaroo-hide whips rallied outside Parliament in Canberra on Monday as one of their colleagues, sheep farmer Peter Spencer, entered his 43rd day on a hunger strike to demand compensation for Australian climate change policy.
    • A two-day strike by Kenya’s matatu minibus taxis, which had stranded thousands of commuters, has been called off after government intervention. Matatu operators agreed to go back to work after the government promised to deal with their grievances.

    Experiments with truth: 1/4/10

    dont-believe-in-global-warming-graffiti-photo1

    • Hundreds of demonstrators rallied on opposite sides of an Israeli-Gaza border crossing on Thursday to protest at the blockade of the strip imposed by Egypt and Israel. In Gaza, about 100 international activists staged a rally with some 500 Gazans, chanting and carrying signs denouncing the blockade. A small number of anti-Zionist, Orthodox Jews were among them.
    • Internally displaced people at a campsite in Nakuru, Kenya demonstrated along a highway to protest their poor living conditions following the onset of rains and demanded building materials.

    Brooklyn hipsters take on Hasids in fight over bike lane

    hasid_picBicyclists in Brooklyn were upset when Mayor Bloomberg recently closed a bike lane in Williamsburg over purported safety concerns. But they were even more upset when rumors started circulating that it had more to do with the neighborhood’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents, who complained of seeing too many scantily-clad female bikers.

    To protest this decision, Brooklyn bicyclists planned what they called a “Freedom Ride”, or, more accurately, a topless ride. But when the day came, temperatures were too low to go without some sort of insulation. So many of the bikers pinned fake breasts over their clothes.

    Haaretz reported on the event:

    The bike lane battle is pitting Hasids against hipsters and, in some cases, Jew against Jew.

    Those who say safety is the main reason for doing away with the lane “are lying,” says Herzfeld, who was born a Satmar but says certain practices should be abolished.

    “The mayor made a deal with religious fanatics trying to enforce old traditions that don’t belong in the 21st century,” he said.

    Our own Nathan Schneider also covered the protest over at Religion Dispatches:

    It was sponsored by Candy Rain, “a lifestyle magazine for women that love d**ks,” according to Calisha Jenkins, who works for the magazine. She said in an interview while riding her bike, “They’re essentially moving it because they don’t want to look at girls dressed like sluts. And I want to dress like a slut.” Lead organizer Heather Loop, a 27-year-old bicycle messenger with a purple fixed-gear and a septum ring, added, “I feel like they’re forcing their beliefs on us. It’s in the Bill of Rights to not force your religion on anybody.”

    The evening’s weather turned out to be especially hostile, with a snowstorm already underway, so all the cyclists remained fully clothed. Of the 40 or so present, at least half were journalists, disappointed to miss the prime photo-op of more-than-half-naked hipsters and bewildered Hasidim. Many rode with the activists as part-participant, part-observer. Trailing them, with lights flashing, was a police car and a van full of officers at the ready.

    Having lived in Williamsburg, I can attest to the tension that exists between Hasids and other residents of the neighborhood. It’s somewhat predictable, if not understandable. The Hasids live very seperately and tend not to interact with anyone who is not Hasidic, unless it’s for business. Meanwhile, the young hipster population has very little patience for any kind of conservative religious behavior.

    Read the rest of this article »

    Celebration or criticism: What’s more vital to the climate justice movement?

    cop15Rising Tide North America has created a new website that assembles “images, reports, videos, and education resources” from the UN Climate Conference in Denmark as a tribute to the thousands of activists who came to Copenhagen in support of climate justice. While www.WhatIsCop15.net seems like a great idea, it sounds like the intentions of the site might be a little too celebratory. In a post for the youth activist blog It’s Getting Hot In Here, Rising Tide organizer Cascadia Brian wrote:

    Much has been said about the failure and collapse of the climate of COP15 last weekend to reach a binding agreement, and you’ll find lots of analysis at www.WhatIsCop15.net.

    But the real story from the climate summit — which at best was expected expand the carbon market and entrench corporate control of climate policy — is a happy one.

    It’s the massive organizing success and coming of age of the climate justice movement. 100,000 in the streets, tens of thousands in attendance at the climate justice oriented Klimaforum, and countless actions against the root causes of climate change.

    While we certainly shouldn’t belittle the efforts of the thousands who traveled to Copenhagen and put their freedom and safety on the line to protest the inaction of world leaders, I’m not sure we should celebrate either. With as little time as there is to prevent catastrophic climate change, activists should be analyzing their efforts in Copenhagen to figure out what went wrong and how to improve.

    It seems like far too many of the exciting actions planned to disrupt the UN meetings were foiled by a massive police crackdown. For instance, the Bike Bloc, which we wrote about, was broken up by police before it ever formed. The UK group Camp for Climate Action, which organized the action, never even updated its blog to reflect upon what happened.

    More than anything, activists need to examine the movement’s failure to anticipate the police crackdown or deal with it in a way that benefited the movement. Ideally the footage of nonviolent protesters getting beaten by police would have gotten some mainstream press attention. But, as should have been expected, they instead focused on the small and scattered acts of vandalism committed by a few misguided anarchists.

    All of this isn’t to say that activists shouldn’t draw attention to the injustices perpetrated by law enforcement or the media, but these institutions act in predictable patterns. It’s time climate activists put as much thought into self-analysis as they do into their creative protests.

    Experiments with truth: 12/23/09

    • The streets of Qom, Iran’s holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners on Sunday. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.
    • In New York City, students left school early on Monday in a walk-out to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to stop giving students free Metrocards. The youngsters left school at 2 pm and gathered in front of the MTA’s headquarters to demand that the agency find a way to fill its $400 million budget shortfall that won’t force students to pay to commute to city schools.
    • Over 5,000 indigenous, Afro-Colombian and farming community members are occupying the community center of Piñuña Negro in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. A crowd of all ages has gathered at the highest government office in the area—the Police Inspector’s office—to demand negotiations with local and national government representatives and an end to military and paramilitary harassment and coca eradication programs that are causing thousands of residents to be displaced.

    Experiments with truth: 12/21/09

    Rising Tide via ABC News

    • Greenpeace declared the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C. a “climate crime scene” on Thursday to protest the business federation’s continued dismissal of global warming. Activists scaled the Chamber’s building and draped it in yellow crime scene tape, while simultaneously surrounding it with vehicles designed to look like police units and ambulances marked “Climate Crime Unit”.
    • Thousands of people took to the streets of southern Yemen on Friday to protest a recent military operation against suspected al Qa’eda militants which claimed the lives of dozens of innocent civilians.