Green Options

While I’ve noticed this phenomenon quite a few times before, yesterday’s sentencing of three Earth First! activists in Maine reminded me of the amazing backwards-notion that forcing activists into community service somehow amounts to a punishment.

Activists who engage in civil disobedience aren’t hoodlums running around the streets or menaces to society — these are people who risk arrest and jail time to make a difference in their communities. A judge need-not assign community service because it’s almost guaranteed that these people already do more than most.

The bodies of two well-known social activists were found Guerrero, Mexico showing clear signs of torture.

Raul Lucas and Manuel Ponce were captured on February 13th by three people claiming to be police in Ayutla de los Libres, according to relatives. The men were attending a meeting regarding plans to open several new schools in the area.

We covered the exciting news earlier that Greenpeace has purchased a $30,000 plot of land in the middle of the area that had been earmarked to become a third runway for England’s Heathrow Airport. Since Greenpeace announced the plan yesterday, publish support has been astounding.

Over 5,000 people have already bought parcels of Greenpeace’s plot. The idea is that the more people who own the land, the harder it will be for the airport’s owners to buy the land later — which hopefully will never happen. The owner of the company has already called Greenpeace’s plan “clever.”

Well, I’m going to assume that most of our readers here on Planetsave wouldn’t mind getting in on the action. Greenpeace has made that quite easy:

Three tankers containing crude palm oil were halted by Greenpeace when they attempted to leave an Indonesian port for China and Europe. Activists wanted to highlight the rapidly expanding palm oil industry currently destroying rainforests, harming wildlife, and emitting greenhouse gases.

In an attempt to chain themselves to a conveyor-belt and ratchet up pressure on the coal industry, activists disrupted production and forced evacuation at the state-owned Tarong power station in northern Queensland, Australia.

News broke this week that 53 people were listed in a Maryland State Police database as “suspected terrorists.” The listing was the result of an extensive surveillance program that infiltrated several activist organizations and gathered intelligence about the individuals and activities in them.

It’s been an intriguing week for British environmental activists, with the discovery of a spy in the camp at UK aviation protest group Plane Stupid.

Ultimately the spy, an employee of C2i International who specialize in ’special risk management’ (otherwise known as industrial espionage) was little match for Plane Stupid, who described him as “more Austin Powers than James Bond”.

Accounts of the episode reveal that Ken Tobias (real name Tobias Kendall), made a number of basic errors, including:

• • Wearing expensive designer clothes (which he attempted to disguise by wearing a Palestinian scarf to give some environmental credibility)
  • Turning up to meetings consistently early
  • Demonstrating an unusual eagerness to reap mayhem on British airport infrastructure by suggesting the grandest and most aggressive schemes
  • Allowing information on planned activities to be published almost immediately in the press