Thursday this week seems to have been a key day for environmental protest.

Chinese pollution protest

In Fujian Province, eastern China, villagers blockaded a road to protest against high levels of lead in the blood of their children. Local residents are convinced that the children’s excessive lead levels are the result of pollution from the  Huaqiang Battery Factory. Authorities have ordered China’s environmental protection bureau to increase oversight of the plant. The protest comes in the wake of several similar protests against industrial plants that have succeeded in getting polluting factories closed down.

Manure message

And in the UK, journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson found his own bit of global warming, on his doorstep! Seven members of group Climate Rush visited his home and left steaming piles of horse manure on his drive, along with a message reading ‘This is what you’re landing us in’. The protestors, all women, chose Clarkson because he has a sceptical attitude to climate change. Clarkson is the presenter of Top Gear, a car programme, and has recently driven to the Arctic. In the past he has made inflammatory remarks about the effects of climate change, describing walkers who demand access to land as ‘urban communists’ and cyclists as ‘Lycra Nazis’.

New Zealand animal foods protest

And finally on the same day, 17 September, a New Zealand protest against palm kernel imports ended inconclusively.  The company, Fonterra, is a dairy supplies specialist and also a cooperative with over 11,000 dairy farming members in New Zealand.  Greenpeace claims there is both local and international concern about the nature of the palm oil industry globally and protestors chained themselves to the cranes of the ship delivering the imports.  Feed imports for livestock are an increasing contentious issue – Greenpeace says that corn and grain farmers in New Zealand have supported their action because their own products have been outpriced by cheap imported livestock foods and that endangered species are being further threatened by land clearance fuelled by the palm oil export industry. 14 protesters, charged with unlawful boarding of a ship, will be appearing in court next week.
New Zealand sheep courtesy of PhillipC at Flickr under a creative commons licence

This week’s protestors all have similar objectives – they want better local land use, and more consideration for the needs and behaviours of many different forms of land user.

Utahns want their recreational space back

Around 3,000 Utahns marched on their state Capitol last weekend, to protest federal control of their open spaces. Their complaint is that forests and other lands are increasing being closed or having only restricted access and their protest is staged both against the federal government and environmental protestors who ask for areas of land to be turned into reserves.  The protest attracted a wide range of people from farmers and hunters through to walkers and those who enjoy off-road riding: many protestors rode motorcycles, four-wheelers or other forms of all-terrain vehicle.  The local Representative Mike Noel, said, ‘If you want to see what it’s like to live in a socialist regime, go to southern Utah.’

French beach users want less green slime

In Brittany, France, environmental groups have launched a range of protests from petitions, to placards, to demand for new legislation to remove algae from local beaches. The problem is not just unsightliness or odour – the concentration of the algae caused a horse to die, and its rider to collapse, after they both fell victim to fumes given off by the rotting material.  An autopsy confirmed that the fumes killed the horse, and the rider’s owner has started legal action against ‘person unknown’ – but the assumption is that if the case gets to court, it will be local farmers who will be the subject of the action.  A local environmental activist says that intensive farming practises cause chemicals from animal feed to enter local water supplies and that these chemicals cause the toxic gases in the rotting algae. Local authorities say they have made efforts to reduce the quantity of farm effluent that is released into the sea. Some towns have spent a lot of municipal money on algae reduction schemes because they fear it puts off tourists. However, scientists say it isn’t a systemic problem and there is no widespread danger to beach users.

Puget Sound won’t have another pier

In Puget Sound, a dock isn’t being built. The water reserve on Maury Island has been a battleground for years – Glacier Northwest wanted to build a pier which would support pipelines carrying fine sand out onto the water to load barges. Local protestors were ready to chain themselves to the construction cranes or form a barrage of kayaks to block access to the pier, but a federal judge made it unnecessary – ruling that such projects needed stricter environmental review. It wasn’t enough, ruled Judge Martinez, to consider the individual impact of a building or development, the cumulative effect of all built and planned building had to be factored into the equation. He went on to say, ‘No single project or human activity has caused depletion of the salmon runs or the near-extinction of the … orca, or the general degradation of the marine environment of Puget Sound. Yet every project has the potential to incrementally increase the burden upon the species and the Sound.’ Local residents, who’ve been fighting the development, were jubilant, but Glacier Northwest feel the judgement is unsound because it means they must remove the sand with trucks which means more environmental impact on roads and use of fossil fuels.

Puget Sound courtesy of Brian Teutsch at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Trouble in various kinds of paradise is the theme of this week’s environmental protest round up. Often, this kind of protest seems to happen in areas where low rates of employment and lack of other natural resources means that local residents are ‘forced’ to accept environmental projects that might be unacceptable in richer regions. But this week there is evidence that even Edens have their devils.

Thermal Power a non-goer in Goa?

A procession of thousands, including fishermen, political activists and local residents marched through local villages to complain about the proposed establishment of a thermal power project in the village of Hankon, Goa. Local fishermen object to the plan as it will be built on a riverbank known for its abundant marine life, and that the plant could damage the ecosystem in Goa Wildlife Sanctuary which was only 5 kilometres away.  Also the nearby Anashi National Park could be affected and the Indian Forest Conservation Act forbids the establishment of this kind of project so close to ecologically sensitive areas. People also fear that eco-tourism in Goa could be affected.

In addition, the Hankon Panchayat (village council) hasn’t given permission for construction activities and has launched an action against the company planning to build the plant. Local activists said that if the illegal construction wasn’t stopped in a fortnight, the action of the protestors would be ‘intensified’

Hippos, drugs and the protection of large estates

Pablo Escobar was one of Colombia’s biggest drug dealers. It’s claimed he was the originator of half the cocaine smuggled to the USA and when he died in a gun battle in 1993 he left behind a huge estate – literally. His Hacienda Napoles sits between Bogota and Medellin and is stocked with a bizarre range of creatures including elephants, zebra, giraffe and ostrich – and some hippopotami. Escobar apparently used them as giant bodyguards, confident that people would not break into the estate while he had such huge and aggressive wildlife roaming free. There were four hippos originally, but conditions suited them and they bred, so that now there are at least twenty, maybe nearly thirty: it’s hard to tell because the state, which seized the Hacienda Napoles as part of the proceeds of the drug trade, has let the place fall into disrepair after relocating many animals to zoos around the world.

Not the hippos though. Two of them broke out in 2006 and have been rampaging around the Bogota region ever since. But last week one was shot by professional hunters operating under a licence from the Environment Department.

Protestors, led by animal rights activists, mounted a demonstration outside the Environment Ministry, saying that it was unacceptable that Colombia, which allows bullfighting and cockfighting, could also allow hippopotami to be killed at will. The remaining escapee has had a calf since she got out of the estate and now a brewing company has said it will hire wildlife experts to capture them both and return them to the estate.  The Environment Ministry in Bogota was unrepentant although it agreed to work with the experts, claiming the animals were dangerous (they have killed calves) and could be harbouring diseases that threatened the Colombian eco-system. They appear to have no plans to use the estate either as a tourist resource or a wildlife reserve, instead they are happy for it to become a ruin, including the full size airship that sits on a purpose-built plantform outside the hacienda itself.

Hippo courtesy of wwarby at Flickr under a creative commons licence

This week’s environmental protests are all focused around a key theme that leads to public protest: political failure. Often this is because of competing interests like the Indonesian example, but in the Spanish case it seems to be a deeply rooted political antipathy that’s putting the ocean at risk, while in Canada, the problem is that local people want to preserve an ancient resource against potential, rather than actual, harm while political powers want jobs and income for the immediate future.

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What makes a protest worthwhile? Does it have to change policy, or achieve the reversal of a specific decision? Recent protests in the environmental arena seem to have educative as well as practical purposes. 

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Environmental protest takes many forms and is as often defined by local culture as by the nature of the problem. This week’s round-up looks at how three different locations have been involved in very different forms of protest.

In County Mayo, Ireland, between 12 and 15 masked men used iron bars and a digger to damage a Royal Dutch Shell installation. The Corrib Natural Gas Field is the focus of environmental protests because the pipeline being laid between the offshore gas field and the mainland is considered a pollution risk by the local, predominantly agricultural, community.

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The man in question is Daniel Andreas San Diego who’s 31 years old and describes himself as an animal rights extremist. The crime that got him onto the list is the planting of nail bombs in San Francisco in 2003. It’s alleged that San Diego was involved in the campaign that targeted researchers involved in animal testing.

San Diego also has links to SHAC: Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, and in January, in the UK, lengthy prison sentences were given to seven members of the organisation after an investigation over several years by Kent police.

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One of the biggest stories in the UK at present is the relationship between democracy and the police – or as it has been expressed several times by Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission - the police needed to remember that they were “servants, not masters” of the public.

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Following the G20 media-fest last week, several protestors commented on British national radio on the nature of media attention. They pointed out that the violent protests against the G20 had obtained massive international coverage, but that peaceful protests on the same subject got only local attention or no awareness at all.

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Back on August 2, 2007, I did a podcast featuring three women — two Chileans and a Canadian — who had run afoul of the law in their respective countries. The Canadian is Betty Krawczyk, and I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing her by phone from her prison cell.

She’s intelligent, charming, and an outspoken proponent for environmental and civil rights issues. Our interview touches on Betty’s evaluation of the Canadian court system, her first eyewitness account of discrimination and cruelty, and the events that led to leaving her native Louisiana with a husband and six children to settle in Canada.

Links:

Betty’s Early Edition

Books of Betty K.