The news pops up unmissable, if it weren’t for every other scrap of news also popping at the same time, along with reports of Ann Widdecombe being transported by a showbiz wire above the heads of an incredulous or simple nervous audience on the now worryingly ubiquitous Strictly. So, this particular bit of news says ‘anger was justified’; and this from the former NASA scientist talking about the invasion last year of a coal powered power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near Nottingham by a troupe of activists aiming to shut it down for a week.
The bravery of those involved, risking incarceration besides vilification is as obvious as their being treated with the full heavy handedness of the law is predictable. The action is also a clear case in point of a host of wider issues; the right to protest, how this may somehow impinge on wider rights if it means it interfers with the public’s ability to watch Ann Widdecombe - and many more besides - sailing literally or metaphorically with apparent tranquility above the host of disbelieving heads. These millions of mesmerized, vaguely despairing or just bored - a number I could be in on another night - caught in the glare of a mass media that has become both slicker and strangely more popular as it gets ever more debased, suggest we will not think again about our actions even as the savage weather of a dawning century paws with renewed ferocity at the door of our collective consciousness.
And that of course is why those protests took place, why one hundred and fourteen people felt inclined to brave the vagaries of trespass and the response that was bound to come with it. We’re all of us only too aware of the wolf down the road, of the carbon ratcheting up as we hurtle down the motorway of ambivalence towards a fate we all try not to think about. Really, it is not indifference but a kind of collective terror at the situation that we’re in that makes the retreat to the semi fantasy of Saturday night TV seem all the more appealing.
So many now will not join up the dots. The more pronounced the arguments become, the greater the need to take stock of our situation then the greater the temptation not to engage, to turn the other cheek, to ignore the growing feeling that one day soon we will not be able to ignore the rising tides or signs of climatic instability. It is here now, with us, this is the perfect storm, Northern Europe freezes while in Canada and elsewhere the temperature is well above the norm.
But somehow, for the most part, it does not seem so bad. So long as we are warm and have enough to eat we discover our capacity to be content. Sitting virtually incarcerated in cars on the immobilised motorways a thousand motorists turn up the radio and keep their fingers crossed. The more fortunate of us curl up in our living rooms as ice locks us all in and scour our DVD’s and anything else that will help to pass the time and really all of this is only natural; to make the best of any situation. But we seem at times strangely reluctant to not let ourselves really appreciate the nature of our situation, we do not feel inclined to count the cruel tally of the coal as the carbon stacks up from the stacks that churn it out. And partly this is understandable as to do so is to walk along the edge of a kind of precipice looking out over our future, one that does not reassure, an apparently perilous path that could lead us all too easily down a scree or more sudden slope towards despair.
The actions of those at Nottingham in 2009 were of those who chose not to look away, who sought to raise awareness that here, in Britain in the twentyfirst century we are rolling on quite happily with the burning of a fuel that is the major cause, besides the oil we use in cars, of anthropocentric driven climate change. Whether we continue to use coal in anything like historic quantities sets up the expectancy or otherwise for any other country in the world to follow in our wake, or set off on another, far more hopeful path.
Of course, it is not enough to beat our chests and sing out; “let there be no more burning of coal.” We have to take stock of the truly huge scale of the problem, of how much we are reliant of this source of fuel, of how comparably unreliable alternatives sources of energy can be when providing the necessary base load capacity to enable sixty one million viewers to turn on their kettles in the breaks between Ann’s airbourne debuts on the box. The answers are there but they require both political will and appropriate investment.
In the recent court case, it was argued that seeking to engage the public by encouraging the use of less power on certain days would have been a more constructive response. But, as James Hansen argued, we need to leave the stuff in the ground, not merely moderate our use of it. In that sense taking on a government policy where coal is all but mandatory looks alot more credulous.
Speaking on a debate on Radio Four recently, George Monbiot defined a crucial element of justification of any protest as one of accountability, of surrendering yourself to the full force of the law if you are to break it, in the belief that your actions will be tried in a court, that the rightness of your cause will meet the rigors of the legal system and have the chance to be vindicated in the process. As I understand it, the protestors at Ratcliffe were planning to lock on en masse; in this, they had made the decision to have their beliefs put to just such a test and in the process to present themselves as accountable for their deeds.
However much such protests may make us uncomfortable, they remain, at their best, a simple articulation of an article of a clarified awareness. Whether or not shutting down power stations is the best way to go about it, even an action like this can serve to remind us that things are wrong, that we cannot afford to sit by in denial or complacency while we betray the future through the failure to acknowledge that there must be change, that whatever the complexity, whatever psychological mires we may face, we are at a turning point and must look for and continue to express our expectations that we can moderate our impact on this earth, that we remain - to a possibly still crucial degree - the masters of our destiny if we can only see it.
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