Green Options

The G20 will meet next week in London, and while police are bracing for clamoring anti-globalization and climate change protests, organizers say all the planned events will be peaceful.

While the failures of the banking system will take the forefront (get used to hearing the phrase “Bankers are wankers”), organizers have also planned protests to the G20’s response to climate change.

Apparently Turkish police have a biting sense of irony: they’ve sprayed protesters at the World Water Forum with high-pressured water cannons.

The forum, which occurs every three years, is supposed to focus on ways to eliminate water poverty across the globe, but protesters believe the forum takes a heavy-handed approach and supports construction of dangerous and environmentally-disastrous large dams.

Two peaceful protestors with the environmental nonprofit International Rivers were deported from Turkey today after revealing a banner reading “No Risky Dams” just before the conference was set to begin.

The forum, held every three years, discusses global challenges and solutions to the water crisis. International Rivers advocates alternatives to large dams, which flood large areas, block the flow of rivers, and displace people and animals.

A well-respected Indian scientist nearly died after a 38-day hunger strike in protest of construction on a hydropower dam on a tributary of the Ganges river.

AD Agarwal, a 77-year-old former professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi at Kanpur, began his strike last month when the Indian government refused to study the impacts of the dam before beginning work. The Ganges river’s free-flowing abundance is sacred in Hindu culture.

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Will Potter, author of Green is the New Red.]

The FBI labels the environmental and animal rights movements the number one domestic terrorism threat. Those activists have never flown planes into buildings, taken hostages or sent anthrax through the mail. So how did they make it to the top of the government’s list?

Here are 10 ways you can be labeled an eco-terrorist:

Brandon Darby, co-founder of Common Grounds, has publicly admitted to working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and being responsible for the arrest of two activists from Austin, Texas. On Monday he wrote an open letter in explanation of his actions, though the letter does not disclose many details.

In the letter, Darby defends his choice to work for the FBI, admitting that he was not approached by them, but that he actually took the initiative himself when he began disagreeing with his affinity group’s tactics and increased militancy. He wrote that the government is not out to silence dissent or take down activists, but that they merely intend to stop crimes from taking place.

As part of the continuing protests in Australia opposing their government’s weak climate change policies, activists in the Adelaide, the South Australia capital, tossed shoes at a protester dressed as Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Friends of the Earth has planned an extensive day of protest against the Australian Prime Minister’s declaration that Australia will decrease its carbon emissions a mere 5 percent by 2020. To illustrate the problem, activists dressed in emergency gear will surround four separate government offices with sandbags today.

It seems that quite often small islands can provide a condensed view of world-wide problems: As long as it is cheap today it’s ok.

Residents of the small Honduran Isle of Roatan, situated in the Caribbean sea just south of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have recently taken to the streets in protest of the price increases imposed on them by the

island’s power company RECO. The protesters have on several occasions set up road blocks and picket lines all over the island, effectively bringing the island to a standstill for three days on one occasion and two on another. In fact, several cruise ships responsible for a major source of income to the island’s developing economy have been turned around and sent on their way costing the island an estimated $450,000 a day.

Thousands of protesters near the East German town of Gorleben chained themselves to railroad tracks, setup barricades and blocked roads in order to stop a shipment of approximately 123 tonnes of nuclear waste to a nearby waste storage facility. Sources say the protesters managed to delay the arrival of the waste by 12 to 14 hours.

The German government dispatched nearly 16,000 police, including riot police, in order to clear train tracks and roads and remove an estimated 15,000 protesters. Police worked through the night dispersing protesters with truncheons and quelling flaming barricades with fire hoses. One of the most formidable barricades to be cleared was a road block 2 km away from Gorleben, in which protesters parked 37 tractors and constructed two large cement pyramids, chaining four protesters to each pyramid.

The crown jewel of Greenpeace’s naval arm, the Rainbow Warrior, pulled in to the harbor alongside the Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant today before six activists stormed the facility to prepare to project video of impacts of global warming onto the plant’s giant smokestack.

The action comes mere months after a jury acquitted Greenpeace protesters who had vandalized the same smokestack. The court ruled that the activists were acting in the public’s interest because the power plant will cause property destruction in the future due to its release of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

So far, Greenpeace says there have been no arrests.