With this years' Climate Camp (CC) well and truly over it is probably a good time to reflect on the climate change activists' seven days of direct action on Blackheath Hill.
While forecasters had been looking for a heat wave of demonstrations across the country, activists were busy changing the climate of protest. Contrary to previous stunts this year's swoop lacked the necessary conflict, tension or fresh noisy elements to stoke the frames of column inches for days on end.
Media Treatment
Apart from the usual spurt of coverage on launch day, the overall treatment by mainstream media has been fairly poor. Columnists seemed to sour at the prospect of having to operate outside of typical PR event indicators. No mass hijacking, blockading or noisy interruption was penned for execution in the swoop. Were the activists being even more troublesome by not reverting to stereotype? As an unusually empty source of sensationalism and newsworthiness, reporters became increasingly bored by the placid introspective camp.
Halfway through by Sunday there was no doubt around the Camp that the media had almost dropped CC wholesale. Columnists had moved to directing mockery at the purposes and participants of the action (see here and here). But was it justified?
Whether the mainstream media was on board or not, the climate change movement was widening in participation and outreach. So why wasn't this a problem for the movement, which quite obviously had relished the spotlight on grandstanding institutions of authority previously?
Peaceful Protest
The clearest example of this shift is the careful rethinking on peaceful protest in recent months. The G20 fallout made it unambiguously clear that traditional forms of peaceful protest are being stripped away and thinned down by processes of authorised intimidation, violence and obsessive information ordering regimes.
But new channels of communication have opened between the police and climate change activists in an attempt at restoring public confidence following this blatant attack on the right to protest. The Legal Support tent, for instance, announced an emergency session on Sunday to respond and feed into the new consultation on police conduct and protesting.
So, would protest be effective in this context, considering that the G20 Bishopsgate Swoop on the Carbon Exchange lost some of its political message due to the police violence? Furthermore, what could be achieved, by campers given they were being watched and listened to by the enforcers?
The Forward Intelligence Unit must have thought their harvests all came at once - the Swoop being more of a mine of information than a camp. The Action Support tent, which ran daily workshop training sessions on the practice and implications of direct action, were of course well aware of this:
" TENTS HAVE EARS Expect powerful directional microphones to be listening to camp Write Down action info (& dispense of it securely) Or discretely go off site to plan stuff"
The seven days in Blackheath were to be a collective calling for reflection, education and training on the causes and consequences of climate change and what the response from the environmental movement should be. This has been largely underappreciated. The Camp has had the intended effect of a more nuanced position as the climate change movement is now beginning to exemplify collective diverse partnerships rather being privy a single totem for public officials and commentators to demonise.
It also had more in common with a deliberative AGM than a seven day public rally. Of course, the intended effect cleverly executed both. Internal critical review, strategic knowledge and campaign education and support were all on hand to mobilise a long term community of affinity groups in the climate change movement in advance of December's Copenhagen Climate Summit and the Great Climate Swoop in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottingham, this October.
The Camp
At times, the camp itself was more reminiscent of a Climate Change College than an unorganised subterranean anti-institutionalist movement. The programme of activities speaks for itself. Amongst DIY wind power generator lessons, Indymedia training on citizen journalism, creative responses to public campaigns and participant-led discussions lay educative workshops and critical forums for social movement building. Three quick examples of these are the Direct Action workshop, the green authoritarianism debate and the alternatives to carbon trading discussion.
Direct Action workshop
The Sunday morning session in Action Support was an interesting workshop on the theory, practice, concerns and nuts and bolts of taking direct action. I found myself surrounded by hardened activists, one local resident and plenty of fresh newcomers to the movement who had never been at a CC event before. One lively newcomer mentioned his fear of "social kettling", commenting that "the system will only punish you if you challenge it [in this case, socially] as you can not live outside the system!" Alienation, it seems, is an acute issue as participation in the CC widens.
Our facilitator then informed us that you do not have to be arrestable to take part in direct action. What a relief! Even so, the overhang of a criminal conviction and the damage to future job prospects was raised by the group: "If you do get a criminal conviction for direct action ticking that box on job application forms is a social stigma regardless of what it was for - a CRB check is more informative." Compendium manuals on direct action and climate activist's guide to the law were soon passed around for informing specifics.
Green Authoritarianism debate
The Green Authoritarianism: Can we save the planet without surrendering our liberty? discussion is a good example of the variety of perspectives brought out by a shared participative debate. "The green movement is not anti-statist!" one observer commented. What about the risks of overpopulation? Asked another. What about the history of these arguments? Can tradition play a role - does it actually change things? Would Carbon taxes just be a poor tax? The packed marquee abuzz with questions, we were told to break up into groups of three and talk about taxation as a solution to climate change.
Without hesitation a woman sitting opposite me on the grass listens attentively, looks to the speakers, begins breastfeeding her baby and introduces herself to the person to her right. On with the group discussions! ‘Nationalisation?' one participant adds after regrouping, "I don't want to handover to state solutions of sustainability - that could lead to gated communities!" "To make demands of the state strengthens and empowers us", a man from the back responds. A mention of Sweden as a counterpoint of taxation that gleans good results is followed by cheers of approval. One of the speakers then rose to admit that across climate camp there was an interesting contradiction that divided the movement - they were:
I. Using existing power structures to green society - to have a greener state - people feel they should join parties when they implement greener structures, and;
II. Radical green politics through a non-centralised movement
Anti-capitalism, it was suggested, needs to be at the heart of climate change. A female anarchist clad in black then stood up, saying that direct action and anti-capitalism are spaces where we can voice opinions and discuss issues in the open as people. Mention of George Monbiot's tactical stances to support carbon cuts by any means necessary, it was suggested, was bereft of a critique of capitalism.
The split between the participants was summarily tidied up by the facilitator who finished by saying that "State-based and grassroots solutions are not mutually exclusive - they are a toolbox of transformation."
Protests and carbon trading
Bemused observers eventually got what they wanted on the 1st of September when various affinity groups broke off from the camp and began super gluing themselves and blockading the entrance to RBS; another group marching through central London from British Petroleum headquarters to the Shell Centre. What may have seemed like pockets of troublesome climate activists across the city was in actual fact a voluntary training exercise on effective civil disobedience for newcomers to the movement.
The idealists and pragmatists of the camp were finally brought to a head in the If not carbon trading, then what? discussion on Sunday evening. While dealing with the policy alternatives (Kyoto II, Cap and Dividend, Contraction and Convergence Rights and Taxable Energy Quotas) one enthusiastic audience member challenged the speakers to consider solutions that do not put market-based alternatives first.
Pressure then mounted on the NGOs to respond in a unified position on wealth transfer and climate change, with one activist remarking, "No NGO has had the guts to publicly call for equity distribution!" Ruth Davis, Head of Climate Change at RSPB, was a little more sceptical of what could be accomplished through the UN: "People go into a process with 102 [national] visions - very different ones -and countries begin trading off pieces" So what can we expect from an internationally negotiated mechanism? Davis believes that we can only expect an expression of ambition from the big countries and to increase a fund to deal with this.
Individual agency and meaningful engagement, it seems, are at the heart of her statement: "The key to what happened at the coal plants [Drax and Kingsnorth] was that it was the single most transformative process that equalled the outcome. You are disempowered when you engage on international frameworks. You are empowered when you stop coal plants." Greenpeace senior climate advisor Charlie Kronick concurred, asking everyone to "intervene at the place where you have some agency - frameworks are tools, not drivers!"
A final comment from the audience questioned institutionalism once more, where an unequal market that continues to encourage infinite growth does not contain the elements for a legitimate long term solution: "The state/economy binary is in shift in the current state of capitalism -we will still see a net flow of carbon and capital to the top, which is [therefore] a problem inherent to the system. The framing of the climate change problem is not properly addressing the root mechanism of the power relations that brought this problem about - in food and extract industries. Thinking about cap-based solutions is to narrow to the title of the workshop. We should break [the title down] and analyse it. We should accept responsibility for the level of consumption. Climate change, nationally, has not been aligned with growth."
While always prone to reductive interpretations by observers, like climate change itself, the movement has found a wide, colourful and complex pool of defenders to keep debates and policies on climate change on the top of cultural and political agendas. The contradiction in bottling a movement of hundreds of organisations and individuals into a single consumable platform has had the tendency to conceal the plurality and strengths of solidarity in a decentralised mass movement.
Following on from summer of rage predictions that had as much accuracy as the hot weather forecasts, talk, expectations and chatter were all waiting intensely for signs of some heat. Climate camp may have followed its own path in adjusting their preparation for another winter of discontent on climate change - but the humidity is certainly changing.
