As PN went to press, police were suspending the clearing of treehouses in Hambach Forest in western Germany, and memorial vigils were being held throughout the country.
On 19 September, a freelance journalist covering the resistance to opencast coal mining fell over 60 feet to his death from a rope bridge linking two treehouses. Steffen Meyn, 27, was working on a documentary about the occupation of Hambach Forest.
The forest is being cleared to make way for the…
Climate change & climate action
On 12 July, Ireland became the first country to commit itself to completely divesting from fossil fuels. The country’s €8bn sovereign wealth fund will sell €300m of investments in 150 oil, gas and coal companies within the next five years.
Fossil fuel companies are defined as ones that have 20 percent or more of their revenues from exploring for, extracting or refining fossil fuels.
In June, climate group 350.org noticed that oil and gas company Shell had recognised ‘…
In June, protesters in County Durham prevented construction of an access road to a planned opencast coal mine near Dipton. The Campaign to Protect Pont Valley argued that this meant the Bradley mine could not go ahead. The council said the access road was not a condition of planning permission, but a separate agreement.
Despite huge efforts, including lock-on blockades in Newcastle and Bradley, campaigners did not succeed in preventing contractor Banks Mining from breaking ground…
In June, protesters in County Durham prevented construction of an access road to a planned opencast coal mine near Dipton. The Campaign to Protect Pont Valley argued that this meant the Bradley mine could not go ahead. The council said the access road was not a condition of planning permission, but a separate agreement.
Despite huge efforts, including lock-on blockades in Newcastle and Bradley, campaigners did not succeed in preventing contractor Banks Mining from breaking ground…
Sun hangs over London, as if she’s stalking me. The lawn
has burnt patches, like a blister which won’t heal. The weather
forecasters are excited. The weather forecasters are lying.
In the arctic, a mammoth iceberg hunches its shoulders, splits,
topples over. The cast-off, a small country, floats towards
the warmth, its watery cargo melting.…
Candidates will step off the campaign trail; sports stars off the pitch; celebrities will scrub off makeup and teachers will lay down chalk; cooks will close restaurants and bring meals to protests; pensioners too will break daily routines and join together in an unprecedented historical moment.
As we deal with devastating climate impacts and hurtle towards dangerous climate tipping…
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https://peacenews.info/node/9413/ten-ways-join-climate-strikeEurope’s largest single-issue peace group, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is joining Ethical Consumer magazine, Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham, 10:10 Climate Action and Freedom Bookshop in London, Peace News and many others in the Global Climate Strike.
Here…
At the end of June, hundreds of people joined a mass action camp blockading energy company Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road (PNR) fracking site in Lancashire, three years after Lancashire county council rejected the company’s application to drill for shale gas.
Anti-fracking network Reclaim the Power organised ‘Block Around the Clock’ as a 48-hour non-stop non-arrestable festival of resistance…
At the end of March, I travelled to Stafford to attend the second Fossil Free UK national gathering as a representative of Divest East Sussex – one of scores of local groups campaigning to get universities and local councils to ditch their investments in the fossil fuel industries (coal, oil and gas).
I’d arrived insanely early. Rapidly exhausting the delights of the town centre, I retreated to a bench in Victoria Park, beside the river Sow, where a young man with a guitar…
According to longtime activist and author Jeremy Brecher, ‘we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency’ to prevent catastrophic climate change. In this short and timely book he attempts to explain how and why this insurgency has emerged and seeks to ‘[lay] out a strategy for climate insurgents in the US’.
The ‘why’ of the insurgency is a relatively straightforward matter. PR aside, governments and corporations have thus far failed to take…
There can be few more dogged campaigners than David Polden.
When I arrived at the Jobs and Climate conference on 10 March at 10am, the start of the 45-minute registration period, the seasoned 77-year-old peace campaigner was already there, distributing flyers to the general public. Believing that the event would start at 10am, David had been there since 9.15am. Given that no one else had arrived during the intervening period, it was a miracle that he hadn’t given up.
…
The two-week COP23 climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in November were met with a 25,000-strong march; a 4,500-strong mine invasion (above right); the occupation of a nearby coal-fired power station; a banner-hang on a coal ship in Bonn itself;…
On 3 November, 10 Greenpeace anti-fracking activists were acquitted of highway obstruction by Blackpool magistrates court. The 10 had locked themselves together for eight hours, blockading the entrance to the Cuadrilla shale gas exploration site at Preston New Road near Blackpool in May.
In his judgement, the district judge said: ‘I have to consider location, duration, interference with the rights of others and overall reasonableness. If the crown cannot show that these defendants…
In JG Ballard’s classic novel, The Drowned World, people are struggling for survival on a post-apocalyptic, overheating planet. A ‘sudden instability in the sun’ has unleashed increased solar radiation, melting the polar ice caps and causing global temperatures to rise by a few degrees each year. Once-temperate areas, such as Europe and North America, have become flooded…
At the end of August, 800 people were arrested as over 6,000 climate justice activists gathered in western Germany for the Rhineland Climate Camp, taking part in different protests against brown coal mining in the area. The arrests came during the Ende Gelände (‘Here and No Further’) weekend of mass civil disobedience involving 3,000 people. Affinity groups crossed fields (see above) to enter the Tagebau Garzweiler lignite coal mine or to block coal trains to the…