Well it’s been one hell of an Arctic related week! As a fundraiser for Greenpeace I spend 8 and a half hours a day, 5 days a week talking about the present threat that the high arctic faces and this week that time has most certainly increased. Shell intend on drilling the arctic, one of our last unspoiled ecosystems for oil. In a nut shell this is a terrible idea as there’s only 3 years worth of oil up there, a high risk of a spill and no known technology to recover oil from ice, so this week the global Greenpeace community have been taking action and running a live feed on their website of all the activity.
It’s not often that such a huge global community get together to fight for something they believe in and it has been extremely exciting, with Greenpeace activists shutting down shell petrol stations across the globe, polar bears being arrested and peaceful protestors being charged with ‘malicious mischief’ amongst other ridiculous convictions. Thousands of people have also been ringing up shells headquarters and speaking to their quite frankly incompetent staff, who seemed to know nothing about the malevolent company they worked and answered every question with the insightful response that ‘everything you need to know is on the website’ (this is however solely based on my experience I sincerely hope that not every member of shells staff are quite as ignorant) And last Saturday myself amongst many others headed to one of their local shell garages to let the public know what was going on.
The troops met up at half 10 at the shell garage in Swansea- I however was late as usual and arrived at 11. Once the flyers and placards had been distributed between the group we began our protest, informing shells customers and passers by of shells plans to drill for oil in the Arctic and letting them know the dangers of this quite frankly irresponsible decision. Some people cared and thanked us for informing them, turned their cars around and headed to a slightly more ethical petrol station; some people where less concerned about the planet that they live on and continued to fill up their tanks. We received a lot of support from passing cars tooting their horns in appreciation which was fantastic for moral ,however we also got flipped the bird a couple of times as well which wasn’t so great, but that was of course expected as such a vast majority of the population are ignorant of the issues therefore don’t care where their petrol comes from as long as it’s cheap. If something is cheap that normally means a lot of people have been exploited in the process, so surely it’s worth paying a bit extra? The police came down to give us a bit of a telling off as well we were told we had been obstructing people as they entered the petrol station and due to shells recent injunction they have taken out against Greenpeace- we complied, as we are extremely peaceful folk you know!
Overall the day was a success lets just hope the whole campaign is! We’ve only got one planet it’s about time we started taking care of it. If you haven’t already please sign the online petition to help save the Arctic on www.greanpeace.org.uk
Maisie Burrows
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