Former member of the Norwich group David Blake gives some thoughts on his visit to the fracking protest at Balcombe and a coal mining site in Germany.
I was born just a few miles up the road from Balcombe, went to primary school there and have lived nearby for 20 years, so know the area intimately and still appreciate the twisty lanes, trout-filled streams, beech woods and mysterious hollows that can be found near the village. Hence, I find it incredible that anyone should want to frack this land and put the environment at risk.
Thus I returned to my roots to get a first-hand impression of the anti-fracking protest camp that has sprung up outside the Cuadrilla site, about half a mile south of the village. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon, after the main protest and arrests had been made on Monday, when Green Party MP Caroline Lucas was arrested amongst 30 others detained. The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of tents and protesters gathered at the site. Their visibility alongside the road was matched by a heavy police presence, which seemed to be disproportionate in numbers, vehicles and equipment (dressed for a riot) to the peaceful nature of the protesters. The protest camp was also friendly (free cups of tea on offer) and well organised, with plenty of information on fracking available to the curious. As cars drove by, many hooted their horns to show support for the camp, which was an encouraging sign of local opposition. Indeed, 82 % of Balcombe residents have expressed their opposition to fracking, which makes it all the more surprising that this government should be giving Cuadrilla the green light to frack in this Tory heartland. If there was anything more likely to turn off the voters to the "greenest government ever", it was this deluded technology coming to ones doorstep.
Anyway, my overriding impression was that fracking is becoming a hugely divisive technology that is almost guaranteed to be politically toxic, judging by the impressive opposition seen at Balcombe, as well as bad for the environment, and it seems almost incredible that the Con-Dems should be pursuing it as part of the "answer" to this country's energy problem. I'd urge anyone who is down in that area of the Southeast in the coming months to go and take a look at the camp and talk with the protesters, as it looks like they are as determined to stay as Cuadrilla is to Drill, Baby Drill and Frack the Countryside."
By total coincidence, two weeks after visiting the Balcombe anti-fracking camp, I found myself at another significant environmental protest camp, this time at a lignite mine near the small German town of Buir in the countryside to the west of Cologne. I had been in Bonn on other business and a friend invited me along to the camp one scorching hot day in early September. We arrived by train and bike (incidentally, German trains are far more bike-friendly than the ones here in UK) to find the camp well settled in and a number of parallel workshops going on about everything from organising local activist groups to building solar energy systems and wooden stages. Several hundred people must have been camped out on farmland near a village. Apart from building general awareness about climate change issues and the renewable energy imperative for activists from across Europe, the ostensible purpose of the "Klimacamp" was to protest the expansion of an opencast lignite mine about a mile away by the giant German energy corporation RWE, which carts away the dirty fuel in trucks and trains to nearby power stations. According to RWE's website, they claim that it "mines just under 100 million tons a year, lignite being Germany's most important energy source, and always with the aspiration of working with max. efficiency and min. environmental impact." Well, if efficiency can be measured by the size of its mines and machinery, then they may be achieving the first goal, but it would be difficult to agree with the second claim, given lignite's high carbon (25-35 %) and the inherent costs of transporting and burning this low energy density fuel on the global climate. This is irrespective of the local social and environmental costs of opencast mining.
Nothing had quite prepared me, however, for the sight of the opencast mine itself, which was quite literally the largest hole I'd ever seen in my life and stretched for miles into the distance. Giant mechanical scoops gathered up the spoil and lignite and dumped it in tiny trucks with 8 foot high wheels driven by matchstick men in the foot of the abyss. A new concrete viewing platform with wooden deckchairs and umbrellas provided a surreal contrast to the gaping mine below, reminding me instantly of the cover of Supertramp's album "Crisis what crisis?". The prescience of the Climate Camp's activities and resistance to this mind-numbingly idiotic from of energy development was brought home by these stark images. It also blew away any preconceptions of Germany's "clean and green" image as a nation, as the government seems quite happy for opencast lignite mining to continue into the foreseeable future. Indeed, they were preparing to move a road, a railway and the whole village where the camp was located, that stood in the way of the mine's massive expansion plans in the next few years.
A few days before my visit, quite a few activists at the camp had been arrested for blocking a lignite-laden train from leaving the mine. As with Balcombe, the police in Germany also seemed to be working more for the benefit of RWE's profits than the greater benefit of society, and it reminded me once more that these seemingly distant protests against lignite or fracking are joined by so much more than climate change concerns, but about much larger questions concerning the prevailing system of politics and economic governance.
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