Joe's blog

As a community activist, informed by her reading of popular education, community activism and radical politics, Cathy McCormack has – for over quarter of a century – witnessed each and every day a ‘war without bullets’ being waged remorselessly against herself and other structurally oppressed people: the poor, the ill, the unemployed, the disabled, the stigmatised, the marginalised and the simply different.

The War Without Bullets project is aimed at tackling this war.

Cathy, from Easterhouse Glasgow and author of ‘The Wee Yellow Butterfly’ exposes the war against the poor in Britain and of how poverty and inequality are linked to climate-change during a series of conversations with other activist and academic experts that are fighting back in the front line of this war and trying to save our planet and its people. One of the conversations here follows a few years of part of Plane Stupid's journey in tackling the war from the runways to the streets to the courts......

First Conversation: http://www.mixcloud.com/CathyMcCormack/

Cathy’s first guest is Dan Glass a young anti-climate change activist who was nominated as one of Britain’s most effective green activist and notoriously famous for gluing himself to Gordon Brown. Dan was involved in ‘Plane Stupid’ and So We Stand. Dan exposes the links between poverty and inequalities and talks about the direct action which he and his buddies took to stop co2 emissions at their source which resulted in them being arrested twice and put on trial. He also reveals of how the under-cover policecop Mark Kennedy who infiltrated their organisation resulted in their second conviction being rendered un- safe.………..

Follow the rest of the series here (www.sowestand.com)

On Wednesday 30th June, 15 activists launched Plane Stupid Germany in style as they dropped banners from the town hall of Munich in an act of peaceful civil disobedience. The action appealed to the state capital to stop the planned Munich third runway by a referendum.

The Munich airport is the biggest single threat to the climate in Bavaria. One of the activists involved said:

"In deep concern of what we have built in our lives and in deep concern of the world we will leave to future generations, we have decided to follow the way of civil disobedience. Its not acceptable that the protection of property, health and climate-protection written in the Bavarian constitution, is not valid in Bavaria and it's capital when it comes to a third runway."

Recently leaked news showed that the airport has majorly influenced the referendum with one million euros.

There is a demo planned this Friday outside City Hall from 9.30am to protest Boris Johnson's silly airport idea.

Boris Johnson’s plans for an airport in the Thames Estuary spell disaster for our climate. 150 million passengers per year would use the airport, increasing our emissions at alarming rate - we are struggling as it is to meet the weak climate target of reducing our emissions by 80% by 2050, the introduction of new airport will only further hinder our attempts to achieve it.

As if the climate implications are not enough the location of his proposed airport and its cost, £50 billion, are mind boggling. The location would mean the disruption of a fragile ecosystem, that exists in the estuary, including endangering protected species of birds. As well as being in the heart of the convergence of four existing major flight paths used for arrivals and departures, leading to even more congestion in the skies and higher CO2 emissions as planes spend more time circling in the air waiting to land.

Also the proposed site is very near to the sunken SS Richard Montgomery, a munitions ship which contains enough unexploded material to send a metre-high tidal wave hurtling towards the banks of the River Thames.

We cannot allow Boris to proceed with this hugely damaging vanity project - the cost of Boris Island is just too great.

So come and join us to tell the newly re-elected mayor that just because he’s back in office does not mean we’ll let him slip this past us!

Speakers are to be confirmed and will be listed at http://on.fb.me/KIb1eV in the near future.

This event is supported by: No Estuary Airport, AirportWatch, and Campaign against Climate Change.

Contact number & E-mail: 07580 414 173, no.boris.island@gmail.com

“The Saturday Congress, run by JBN (Young Bavarian Friends of the Earth) was sensational. It filled all who attended it, from Munich, Freising and Attaching, with a new courage and confidence. We now all believe that Munich can and will be the German Heathrow. It is now clear: we can stop the third runway at Munich.” Report by a German activist who caught up with activists from Plane Stupid this week in Germany who are there visiting to build networks with those involved in stopping a 3^rd runway at Munich Airport.

Perhaps it is best to report chronologically everything that happened at the initiative of the JBN in recent days: press conference on Friday, climate conference on Saturday, meetings with local residents in Freising on Sunday followed by a candle-lit march and short church service, attended by hundreds of people, and on Monday a meeting with the key councilors in Freising.

But more than that – and critical to the success of the visit – were the evenings socializing between the resistance in Bavaria and our visitors from London: Dan Glass (Plane Stupid), Tamsin Omond (Climate Rush) and John Stewart, who chaired the coalition which stopped the third runway at London Heathrow. It has created friendships that go far beyond national borders. None of us who saw 62 year-old John Stewart dance the night away with our young JBN volunteers will ever forget how beautiful and how true it is that we all fight together with a lot of fun and commitment to combat climate change - worldwide! 

On Friday morning our London guests met Dr. Christian Magerl (Chairman of the BN KG Freising - the local group opposed to the runway - a Green Party member of the Bavarian Parliament and an early opponent of the third runway) and Martin Geilhufe (who chairs Young Bavarian Friends of the Earth). They also met with the press on the site of the proposed new runway on land the local group has acquired and on which it has built a cross. By now it was clear the situation in London in 2002 and the present situation in Bavaria are absolutely comparable: a new runway which would devastate the local community, increased noise and climate emissions and a runway for which there was no economic justification.

The JBN Climate Congress on Saturday became a great success thanks to the papers by Christine Margraf (BN Reginalreferentin and runway expert) and John Stewart; the workshops by Dan Glass, Tamsin Omond and Helga Stiegl Meier (representative of the residents’ umbrella organisation). All participants were excellent. The conference ended with videos of the 3^rd runway campaign at Heathrow.

After a hard Saturday, a quiet Sunday was planned. But it turned out to be as busy as Saturday’s climate convention. The site visit to Attaching, the community where homes will be demolished and which will find itself on the edge of the new runway, was something else again. We had lunch with the local residents who told us horror stories of the measures that would need to be taken to secure the tiles on the roofs if the new runway was built and of how regulations would prevent children from the local kindergarten playing outside because the noise from the planes will be so harmful.

In the afternoon we returned to nearby Freising to have tea with some more residents before going to a local, packed Protestant church where our guests were welcomed by thunderous applause which lasted for several minutes. Our guests then joined 400 citizens of this small town on a candle-lit march to protest against the third runway (the residents do this every week!). The local people felt that the three people from London had brought them hope. We all then marched with torches and candles to Marienplatz, the main square of Freising where a short service was held. John, Dan and Tamsin then brought greetings from London and sang along with everyone: It was the most spine-tingling moment of the entire weekend.

Wednesdays announcement that the government will consider building a new airport in the Thames Estuary, dubbed 'Boris Island' sparked a long day of media hysteria.

Boris Johnson's voice echoed out over our TVs, Radios and newspapers the next day and Plane Stupid came under pressure to get a representative to appear on Sky News and Newsnight in response. 

We are totally baffled by it all. 'Boris Island' airport is to be built on an artificial island and would result in 150 million more passengers a year which is serious bad news for the climate. We can't allow airport expansion on this scale and meet our climate change reduction targets at the same time – the two government policies are mutually incompatible and cannot both succeed.

The other little problem is the fact that the Thames Estuary is basically a bird sanctuary. Birds and planes don't match – simple as that.

Here are some other useful facts that need to be included in the debate:

• The UK fly on average twice as much than any other country in the world already.
• The most popular destination out of Heathrow is Paris and 3^rd is Manchester. If we reduced these unnecessary flights there would be plenty of capacity at Heathrow Airport  
• Aviation is the fasting growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.
• If aviation grows at its projected annual rates then aviation will take up 100% or more of our national carbon budget some time between 2030 and 2050.
• Between Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, London City and Luton; London already has 6 runways and 10 terminals.

Only Boris could come up with an idea as daft as this, building an airport in a tidal estuary when we are facing a future of rising sea levels due in part to emissions from aviation.

For now we will just be keeping a close eye on it but if given the go ahead the Thames Estuary Airport could represent an activists dream. Building an airport on an artificial island is such an enormous logistical project that it would be child's play to disrupt it!

This brings back some warm memories. This five minute film, produced by the Media Trust for UK-based charity the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK), aims to inspire people to get involved in campaigning.

Every day, ordinary people campaign to right wrongs. Anyone can campaign.

A fine example of people Power against economic polluting giants. The video includes old footage of Plane Stupid, NOTRAG, HACAN, Transition Heathrow and all who organised the ceilidh (2nd half of the video).

SMK is the only registered charity in the UK dedicated to connecting, informing and supporting campaigners. For more information visit smk.org.uk.

How is it that after 17 years of negotiations the UN climate change conferences have utterly failed to adequately address the issues at hand and have instead overseen decades of rising carbon emissions and worsening climate injustice?

Most people are now well aware of the vested financial interests that have engineered and perpetuated a global system that’s predicated on widening social injustice, impoverishment and indebtedness of the masses. The same financial, corporate and government bodies responsible for the global financial crisis have also seized control of the environment, commodifying the atmosphere, land and waterways to trade and profit from. It’s no surprise that emissions continue to rise when you know that carbon is a commodity with a tradable value, with dedicated carbon markets and accompanying corrupt schemes such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Without climate change continuing to worsen the markets created around it wouldn’t exist, hence nothing proactive is done by the architects and gatekeepers of the system who have taken power. Realising this, people all over the world are claiming back the legitimate and urgent concerns around climate change from the corporate clowns and Occupy COP17 was part of that reclamation of power.

Although small in number, we were strong in spirit. Every day during the conference we sat and talked under the trees, the way millions of people meet and work out problems all over the world. We had no air conditioned conference halls or PA systems, instead we had the hum of traffic going round our small island of grass (directly outside the fortified UN compound) and the human microphone to amplify our voices. Our rallying cry was Climate Justice, Not Carbon Markets. We had poetry from Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey. Live art from South African performer Ewok (who also provided us with a soundtrack). Guerrilla gardening from AmBush. Actions to get the World Bank out of climate finance and Canada out of the tar sands. Five hundred women from throughout Africa forming the Rural Women’s Assembly joined with us and hundreds of civil society delegates from the Democratic Left for a spirited march which was full of song and dance, power and passion, things that were curiously curtailed in the officially designed march the next day.

There were many who came out of the conference to join and speak with us, including Bolivian activist Pablo Salon, South African Commissioner for Gender Equality Yvette Abrahams and the UN Ambassadors from the small island states of Seychelles, Grenada and Nauru. Our aim was to create a safe space where everyone could come and speak, using non-hierarchical organising and consensus decision-making. Most of those who came were not invited to attend COP17, yet they were the people who needed to be heard most, those who are at the front line of climate change and crying out for Climate Justice.

We connected with a group of people who had faced repeated evictions from their dwellings in nearby KwaMashu, deemed unsightly reminders of the government’s failure to meet the needs of ordinary people. They had been evicted ahead of the World Cup a few years previously, and now had been evicted ahead of COP17. This time not only were their shacks demolished but, to make sure they stayed away, all their belongings, including food and clothes, were taken from them. Still they fought back, taking over a community hall and becoming Occupy KwaMashu. Their plight exemplified the enormous gulf between what many of the insulated negotiators on the inside were discussing and the real problems that were being laid bare by those outside.

So what are the solutions? As with many problems of this nature they are not easy to summarise or solve. But we do have a roadmap to work with and a popular mandate from the people, and that is the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba. It lays out a just and fair plan to avert catastrophic climate change and create a more equitable and harmonious world. It’s our job to make sure this is the route followed, rather than the suicidal path that is currently being pursued by those calling themselves leaders.

It was the tour the authorities tried to stop. Dan Glass, the Plane Stupid activist who had superglued himself to Gordon Brown in protest against a third runway at Heathrow, never got a visa to visit America. His fellow speaker, John Stewart, who had chaired the coalition against the third runway, was sent packing back to London when he landed at JFK Airport.

Dan and John had been asked by American campaigners to come to the US to talk about the successful third runway campaign. The Aviation Justice Express tour had been months in the planning. Dan and John were to spend a month visiting climate activists and local airport campaign groups across the US.

The American authorities, possibly prompted by the UK aviation industry, were determined it was never going to happen. But it did – thanks to the new media. John, from his modest office in South London and Dan, from Canada, were skyped into all the events. And new events were added when the campaigners realized that the barrier of physical travel had been removed – courtesy of the American authorities. As John put it: “We left the students of Harvard in Boston at midnight and five minutes later we were talking with activists in Pittsburgh.”

And that wasn’t the only favour the American authorities did. The banning of Dan and John generated more media on both sides of the Atlantic than the tour on its own would ever have got. From reports in the London Evening Standard to in-depth interviews on the Canadian-based Radio Eco-Shock. And it enabled Dan to do a parallel tour of Canada meeting with climate activists and airport communities.

The outcome of the skype tour was just the one the American authorities didn’t want. A new network has been set up bringing together climate activists and local airport campaigners committed to stopping new runways, cutting short-distance flights and promoting rail using conventional and direct action tactics. Bringing the American aviation industry down to earth!