Environmentalists don't get a very good press in general. They are often portrayed as being dull, a bit too earnest and too busy hugging trees to form proper relationships with other humans. More recently they've been likened to pseudo-religious fundamentalists who refuse to discuss their dogmatic beliefs. It's a shame one of these journalists hasn't come down to a meeting of local Greenpeace activists at the Labour Club in Northampton or, even better, joined us on a protest. They'd find that environmental activism is alive and well, and lots of laughs........
Seeing 2009 out with a Wave and a Bang
On a dull Saturday in early December, about ten of us set off by train for London to join the sizeable Greenpeace contingent and approximately fifty thousand others for The Wave. The event has been described by organisers Stop Climate Chaos Coalition as the biggest climate change march in the world ever. The marchers were heard by Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and 24 Wave supporters were invited to 10 Downing Street to meet Gordon Brown and to voice their demands.
Our group ranged in age from 18 to almost 50 and included old hands and new members. We were accosted at the bottom of South Molton Street by a gang of crazed face painters and succumbed to their appliance of some very blue face paints. Ellie went for the spotty isolation ward look, Billy chose a fetching curly moustache and Nick went for the full Captain Bluebeard option. Suitably adorned, we set off to meet other Greenpeace activists who were gathering from across the country.
The event took place on the last Saturday before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and was staged to press the government to settle for nothing less than a just and legally-binding deal on climate change. Although we did not get the result we wanted in Copenhagen, the march sent a clear message to our politicians that a huge number of us are prepared to get out onto the streets to demand real action on the environment.
Some of us stayed with the main group behind the Greenpeace banner and others met up with like-minded friends from other parts of the country. All of us assembled in a pub near Victoria after the march. We were very tired and some of our make-up had run but it felt great to have taken part in such a momentous occasion. Obviously we enjoyed a well-deserved drink or two before heading home......
Two sleeps later and we were together again, joining mates from the Green Party and Friends of the Earth in a local curry house for a seasonal celebration. The jokes about the resulting environmental damage are obvious so we'll leave them to you, dear readers, but suffice to say that we saw the year out with more of a bang than a whimper.
Seeing 2010 in with Food, Film and Friday at Five
In case anyone thought that we'd been slacking as we wait for news of the official 2010 campaigns, please rest assured that we have been as active as ever, beyond our regular monthly planning meetings. On 14 January we ran a stall at the Big Food Fight, a ‘love food hate waste' event hosted by Northampton University, where we heard speakers from FareShare (a UK-based community food network) and Food Not Bombs (the radical US-based group committed to fighting poverty and homelessness).
This month we've been organising two special nights at our usual haunt. Greenpeace is avowedly non-political, so we have no direct link to the Labour Club but it's near the town centre, we're made very welcome there, the beer is good and reasonably priced, and Adam does some delicious, low cost vegetarian and vegan food. What's not to like about our local Greenpeace meetings?
In a couple of weeks we are having a fair trade food and music night with local band Friday at Five where we will be showing a brief clip of a relevant film (the Age of Stupid or The Cove) to promote our film night the following week. Just in case there was a danger of boredom or inactivity setting in, we have some street campaign training on the cards as well.
In between all this earnest activism we managed to slip in a Random Hand gig at the salubrious Sawyer's in Kettering where certain members of our group showed that they can skank and mosh just as hard as they protest. It was the perfect exercise for all the campaigning to be done in the year ahead. Still think local activism is dull? Well, as that very annoying man in the advert would say - go compare.
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