On taking direct action to save the climate and make the world a fairer place
It’s the belief of the people organising the Camp for Climate Action that creative, focussed, confrontational direct action is an essential part of a rational response to the unprecedented global emergency that is climate change. This piece hopes to provide some back-up to that statement.
If you wake up on planet earth in 2006, you could be the last in many a generation to be able to say there was still plenty to play for. While the climate chaos rollercoaster looks set to be a very bad dream, especially for the global underclass, there is an opportunity in there as well, that is if you’re able to look beyond the needless tragedy of the lost human lives and the species that are already bound for extinction in the next fifty years. Nevertheless, this is the best chance people are ever likely to get of seeing what happens when those running the show value money above all else, and when, possibly as a result, huge swathes of the human population have their elemental connection to the natural world severed. For that reason, and because living low-carbon lives is a debate soon to become an unavoidable reality, now’s an extraordinary time to be exposing inequalities of power, confronting that power and putting our principles into practice in a way that is inspiring to others who are weary of the shiny baubles of industrial capitalism.
It’s hard to navigate through the saccharine-coated fog of ‘trust us’ greenwash/propaganda that emanates from government and business these days. But there’s never been a more necessary moment to turn away from the illusion of their calm, authoritative hand on the tiller, and get stuck into sorting out the problem ourselves. And a central part of that process, integral to the building of a brighter, more joyous low-carbon future, will be getting in the way of the bad stuff happening. We are going to have to intervene with our bodies, our minds and our hearts far more than our votes, if we want to keep the carbon out of the atmosphere and preferably, for the sake of those living on top of it, to make sure that carbon is left in the ground.
Attitudes to direct action are defined in part by the carefully-manufactured illusion that democracy is supposed to have all our problems sewn up. After all, our elected leaders have our best interests at heart and have been blessed with an immaculate set of psychological credentials for the job, (nothing to do with a pathological desire to be loved, give orders and accumulate absurd quantities of power and wealth). Therefore, if anyone dares to stick her head above the parapet and say ‘I think I or my community could improve this situation or prevent this injustice more effectively than our elected representative’, she’s reminding the rest of the tribe of our enormous individual as well as collective power. Now that’s a truly subversive stance that the guardians of our economy have no choice in their minds but to smother at birth if that economy is to grow unthreatened.
And here are some reasons to do it in our beautiful, blighted century:
- to bypass our corroded-by-the-acid-of-power leaders and resist oppression, ecological destruction or injustice
- to bypass them to foster freedom, justice or ecological sustainability
- to stay sane in a world driven crazy by inequalities of power
- because resistance is an everyday prerequisite for survival for countless people in the global south, and we have to stand together with them
- because time is running out
- to live life absolutely to the full
- because the future of this planet and all its creatures is just too important to sign away to the powerful.
There’s no doubt that lobbying can bring about change, but that change is more likely to be short-term and piecemeal than actions that try to dismantle institutions of power, or set up post-capitalist structures in the heart of capitalism, like for example a squatted community garden or free caff.
Public attitudes to climate change are on the move, and we can only hope that goodwill towards oil companies and governments is melting faster than the polar icecaps, with our actions just one small bunsen burner adding to that big heat. Whoever’s winning, we’ll stick at it maybe more out of love than hope, since everything we do will with any luck reduce suffering and destruction to some degree.
Climate change could well be the greatest injustice of the twenty-first century. Of all the forms of action to take, the one that gets closest to the heart of the problem as well as closest to the beating heart of a truly sustainable, socially just, fossil fuel-free future, is direct. And now’s the time to take it.