Yesterday, this was everywhere, an #iceclimb Twitter-and-news-storm as 6 volunteer climbers scaled the thousand-foot Shard at the heart of Shell's office-land in London. In was an astonishing physical feat of course - 15 hours or so of hot, hard and dangerous work to ensure Shell (and by extension Gazprom etc) can't pretend no-one's watching their dodgy Arctic-drilling plans. But more than that, it energised people in a way I haven't seen from an environmental action (Greenpeace or otherwise) for quite some time. Friends (and not just activists) were following the live feed avidly - work started to take a back seat as the climbers slowly edged their way up the skyscraper. Greenpeace volunteers have climbed buildings before of course, but there was something different about this. Was it because they were all young women? Well, partly - maybe that shouldn't make a difference, but it clearly did. I believe that part was more by accident than design - they were simply the best volunteers available, but however it happened, good choice! Then of course there's the straightforward audacity - dodging security by climbing across from an adjacent building and calmly continuing under the scrutiny of police helicopters and those inside the building until, after a long, tough ascent, the summit. Amazing, and their bravery put Shell's attitudes to shame when the company was too cowardly (yes, I do mean cowardly, not PR-savvy) to pick up the phone and talk to Greenpeace Radio on the day. Why? Presumably because Shell knows what it is doing is wrong, and knows that we know too.
All this, and something harder to define beyond the astonishing statistics (the heat, the height, the number of messages received, the fact that 200+ supporters signed up for every metre climbed), put being a local group volunteer in perspective and made all the much lower-key campaigning feel suddenly more valuable - of course, I know it is, but this really made me feel it. Well done, climbers!
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