Thursday, August 16th. It’s early morning and 10 protestors sit attached to the gates of Biggin Hill airport, the famous war-time RAF base now used for private jets. Despite the sun rising over the runway in the distance, it’s cold. Chained by our arms and necks, we’ve been up since 5:30am and we haven’t had breakfast. No matter, because we had, prior to this action, decided that we’d stay put until the arrival of the mainstream media and as much of the metropolitan police force as we could muster. We’re here to raise awareness of the threat posed by aviation to our environment, to our generation and those of the future. To raise that awareness, we need the media. And so, we wait.
I was one of those 10 protestors, chained to the Biggin Hill gates. I had agreed, by a process of consensus decision-making, to involve myself in non-violent direct action, and subsequently, to hold my position until removed by the police. I was also one of over 1000 climate campers resident in Heathrow who intended to show the world that another way of being, and a different way of making decisions was possible, if only for a short time.
The Camp for Climate Action was not simply a festival for earnest activists intent on showing off their yoghurt-weaving skills to big businesses and nasty corporations. As many have emphasised, it was also a meeting for concerned scientists, a forum for education and skills-sharing through workshops and discussions. From making your own wind turbine or your own energy efficient rocket stove, to listening to Mark Lynas proselytise his vision of another end of the world, the camp was packed with DIY tips for environmental self-education. Here was an arena from which to challenge, through media attention and through mass action, the governments, businesses and aviation industries that many see as intent on perpetuating climate destruction. These challenges were put forward in actions like that at Biggin Hill and the Department of Transport, but also through the adept media campaign co-ordinated by the on site media team.
Crucially, however, Climate Camp was also a demonstration of the kind of mass organisation and structural solidity that activist groups and movements have been trying to achieve for decades. It was this ability to organize a disparate multitude of individuals in a new way and to have everyone learn through this organizational process that for me truly encapsulates the Camp’s success.
The Camp was divided into “neighbourhoods” built according to area codes. The South Coast neighbourhood nestled comfortably alongside the colourful London marquee, sharing a set of intricately designed compost toilets. London met Westside at its borders. Scotland was further south, its blue tarpaulin structures blowing in the wind. From Yorkshire to the Mid-West, Wales to Manchester, there was a neighbourhood for everyone who wanted one.
Each neighbourhood had its own kitchen, sheltered meeting space and toilet area. Each ran its own cooking and recycling rotas, its own daily meetings. And each liaised with the site working groups to ensure the smooth running of the Camp as a whole. Individuals volunteered on a daily basis to help with the main site jobs. From legal support, media, gate duties and ‘cop-watch’ to the more down and dirty jobs related to the toilets and recycling, there was a huge array of things to be done in the running of this temporary ‘protest city’.
What was remarkable about the organisation of the camp was just how smoothly things got done. Activists are too often seen as eccentric individualists. They’re renowned for their love of meetings, endless argument and the sheer boredom, acrimony, ideological splitting, and levels of inactivity normally associated with all this. But not at Climate Camp, where a model of participational democracy reigned – an action perhaps as important as the demonstrations, “lock-ons” and gluings to Whitehall walls.
Every morning at 9am each neighbourhood hosted its own meeting in their communal space. From these meetings two ‘spokespersons’ would then go on to attend the main site meetings, held at 9:30am in the ‘Big Marquee’. Here the ‘spokes’ would feed back decisions made by their neighbourhoods relating to the general running of things, or on specific issues: whether people were happy with the allocated press hour in which members of the press were allowed on site to photograph and interview; whether the fact that the police liaison team had, after long negotiations with the police, allowed a small police presence on site at all times was a legitimate decision; whether the signposting on toilets that made clear that pee was not welcome in the ‘crappers’ was, indeed, clear enough.
Throughout the day there would then be further meetings. Kitchen meetings for the coordination of food allocation. Media meetings for the discussion of press releases. Legal meetings to train increasing numbers of ‘legal observers’ as the police presence mounted. Meetings, then, for everything that one could ever imagine was deserving of a meeting.
What is crucial was the style of these meetings. They were all run by what my generation have come to understand as ‘consensus’ – a model both of democratic participation and yes, efficiency.
Consensus decision-making processes are no historic novelty. They have their roots in the Quaker movement and anarchists globally have been using some form of consensus for decades. The ‘Reclaim the Streets’ movement of the 1990s made decisions by consensus. But, in the environmental movement, consensus is still relatively new. Greenpeace is, after all, a hierarchical organisation. With the ‘new’ environmentalists, consensus has now caught on as a ‘way of doing’. The strange gestures and coded sign language are what many would claim a more genuine, inclusive democracy should look like. For us at the Climate Camp, intent on a non-hierarchical structure, real consensus based decisions were a must-have. Strange hand gestures and all.
I first encountered mass consensus meetings at the G8 protests in Gleneagles in 2005. Everyone who attended these understood the aims of consensus and the process itself – or at least, if you didn’t, you pretended you did until you caught on. At Climate Camp, the spectrum of protestors in attendance was broader. Not only were there the usual brand of earnest and hardened activists who accept consensus as a way of life. There were also first time protestors, drawn to the camp by its open and media-friendly image. Then there were the local Heathrow residents, most of whom had never encountered the consensus decision-making process. And so, at the beginning of each meeting, the facilitator of that meeting – again, a role rotated throughout the camp – explained consensus in full.
So what is this new political beast? Consensus decision-making is inclusive, co-operative and egalitarian. It is solution-orientated. Unlike majoritarian voting, it does not exclude or disempower the minority who may disagree with the proposed plan or decision. Rather, it empowers them and brings about compromise.
In the meetings at Climate Camp the facilitator began each meeting, not only with the usual welcome and read-through of the agenda, but with an explanation of the consensus process. The ideal process works as follows: items are discussed, opinions voiced and from that a proposal is formed. Then, consensus is called for, and, hopefully, found. Each part of this process has an accompanying hand movement. To add a point to the discussion, you raise your hand and wait for the facilitator to confirm that it is your turn to speak. You must not speak over anyone else, for one of the aims of such a process is to foster a comfortable environment based on respect in which even the least experienced feels able to contribute. If you have an immediate answer to someone’s query or point, you raise both hands and signal that you have a ‘direct response’. A T-shaped hand motion indicates a technical point. Twinkling jazz hands demonstrate consensus.
Few proposals ever meet with immediate consensus. Once a proposal has been arrived at, you can ‘stand aside’. This means that although you personally may not agree with the proposal, you are happy that it goes ahead. For example, you may not be willing to go and dance with the samba band in BAA’s car park, but you are happy for such a proposal to be passed. You do not feel that dancing with the said samba band is against the ethos of Climate Camp, and neither does it hinder the movement of the campaign against climate change. To indicate that you are happy for the proposal to go ahead, for the good of the larger community, even if it means renouncing your personal part in the proposed activity, you may ‘stand aside’. Your hands remain motionless.
More radically, you can also ‘block’ a proposal by raising your fist. This is tantamount to a veto. Someone once told me that you should only use the block 5 times in your lifetime. I have yet to see one in use. Blocking is in many ways against the aims of consensus. Without a block it is possible to rework a proposal until all are happy with it. So blocks are, mostly unnecessary. The stark aggression of a raised fist is quite unwelcome in the jazz hands-filled sphere of a consensus meeting.
During the extended week that I was resident in Heathrow, I saw dozens of consensus meetings take place. I facilitated some, and attended many. Not only the daily site meetings, but the frenzied mass action planning meetings and smaller affinity group meetings. At Biggin Hill we might well have called an emergency consensus meeting to decide on our response to police demands, but we had already reached agreement in advance.
The people who believe in working by consensus are those who believe in a different kind of government. They criticize representative government in the name of a more participatory direct democracy. They reject hierarchy for collective responsibility. My point is not, however, that the Climate Camp embodies the possibility of a golden goal to which we must all aspire. Rather, the Camp shows that there is a new generation of activists, with a demographic much broader than the previous generation’s, who are coming into the world of politics with a clearer understanding of what it means to work together. They know what it is to feel included in a process by which agreement is achieved.
The new environmentalism is not about ‘us versus them’; it is about ‘us’. The politics that goes with it are being disseminated across a broad spectrum of people. Consensus decision-making is not perfect by any means. It can be inefficient, and it doesn’t always live up to its aims. But what was important about the regularity of the meetings at Climate Camp, the transparency of the deliberative process and the organisation at large was the sense of inclusivity that it fostered. In consensus run meetings, everyone is treated as equal, even if some have greater expertise in matters of law, administrative or the disposal of compost toilets. Any actual, inescapable inequality of that sort ceases to matter, while the transparency of the consensus based deliberative process increases morale. Even beyond the semi-utopian summer camp at Heathrow, consensus engages young people in a way that mainstream politics is failing to do.
Climate Camp may have educated hundreds in the importance of stopping the expansion of the aviation industry. It may also have shown many what really happens on the ground between police and protestors. To me, the greatest lesson it has imparted is that there are environments in which, if you could pluck up the courage to speak, in front of those hundreds of faces, they would listen.
On Monday the 20th August in the car park of BAA, over one hundred protestors called a meeting to discuss their time of departure back to the Camp. The proposal was that the protestors would remain where they were until 3pm, rather than the pre-planned 12pm, if the police were happy with this alteration. “Do we have consensus?” the facilitator asked. Two hundred pairs of hands twinkled back at him, unanimous in their agreement.
One hundred of those pairs were hands belonging to policemen and women. They had not waited for their commanding officers to make the decision. Instead, they had listened to the facilitator’s explanation of the consensus process and had, in turn, felt sufficiently empowered to take part in that process.
Thanks to the police’s sudden and unexpected participation in that meeting, a true consensus was reached. The protestors stayed in place until 3pm, at which point they packed up their make-shift tents and headed back to the site, where they began to say their goodbyes.
Goodbye climate camp. Hello to a growing awareness of the ways in which government and individuals can contribute to shaping a sustainable environment. Hello, too, to new forms of political procedure in which ordinary people play a direct part.
Moderator: Click HERE for the OurKingdom blog and HERE for a great picture of Katrina at the camp.
