Coal and Kingsnorth: the story so far by Jim Footner, climate campaigner

After the best part of a decade with Greenpeace I am taking a short break to do something different for the first half of this year. For six months I am going to volunteer building sustainable low carbon housing in Burkina Faso and then on to help develop a decentralised energy campaign plan with Greenpeace India in Bangalore. As I was clearing my desk in readiness for this break I found myself rediscovering some of the old campaign plans and materials from the last few years. Intrigued to be reminded of how far we have come, I thought it would be useful to round-up everything that has happened on the coal campaign - my project - since it began.

This week I'm going to be on the phone a lot, doing follow-up calls to those who recently did the NVDA training in London and Manchester, to see if they've got any questions or concerns and to remind them about the important things.

I'm also working on a wondeful fluid matrix of workshops, places and times for the Forum at the end of the month. When I get tired of holding a phone to my ear I can have a quiet hour writing briefs for facilitators and moving workshops around, accompanied by the twittering of goldfinches on the feeders outside my office window!

What on earth do activists do? Well it's not all going on ships and climbing chimneys; those are the rare treats if you like that kind of sweet.

So I'm now back in the office, sitting in front of a computer feeling kind of weird to be constrained by different boundaries than the steel walls of the Rainbow Warrior. For the sake of completeness here's a few impressions of the last days of Copenhagen, the consequences of which I'm sure have yet to be unravelled.

We'd arrived in Copenhagen with a hopeful expectation that