August 11 Richmond, VA Despite a massive police presence throughout the city and our major action plan derailed by law enforcement harassment, 50 activists snaked their way through Richmond today in an un-permitted march, paying visits to several climate criminals. Carrying banners reading, “No Nukes, No Coal, No Kidding” and “Social Change not Climate Change,” people marched to the headquarters of Massey Energy, Dominion, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, and Bank of America.
At Massey Energy, a notorious coal company involved in mountaintop removal coal mining, activists surrounded the entrance and yelled, “Hands off our mountains!.” The group then moved on to the Department of Environmental Quality which recently rubber stamped Dominion’s dirty coal plant in Wise County, VA. Next the group brought the party to Dominion, who is building the aforementioned coal plant as well as proposing a new nuke plant in Louisa County, VA. Chanting “No coal, no nukes, we won’t stop until you do!” the activists attempted to take over Dominion’s plaza but were repelled by police on horses. In a show of interspecies solidarity one horse bucked a cop off its back.
To wrap things up for the day, the crowd moved on to the the towering Bank of America building, one of the largest funders of the coal industry. In impressive feat of stealth
two activists manage to infiltrate the beefed up security at the building and locked to a sign outside of the customer entrance. Marchers supported the lockdown with a die in on the sidewalk. Police eventually cut free the two that were locked down and charged them with trespassing.
All in all it was a great day. While the police may have foiled our original plans they couldn’t stop us altogether. Pretty much every building in Richmond connected to a climate criminal had cops staked out at it and several activists cars were followed anywhere they went. Despite this we had a successful march and lockdown. Lets continue the struggle for climate justice in the southeast!
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Three demonstrations and a lockdown in one day! The Convergence has really evolved since last year’s action against Bank of America. I’m confident that this summer has permanently changed Dominion’s public image, and just in time for election season!
I’ve been checking the commercial media, and they seem to be having trouble coming up with the language to sum up all these protests:
50 protesters urge energy regulation
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-08-11-0215.html
The Richmond Times-Dispatch described the protesters as “a small crowd, armed with megaphones” and “advocating response to climate change and more control over energy producers.” How vague could they get?
This also raises the larger question of the youth climate movement’s relationship to the rule of law and the authority of government. Does the youth climate movement trust the State? We practice nonviolent civil disobedience, usually in the form of criminal trespassing, so there’s a clear tendency within the movement to break property laws. We also stop traffic, raid shipments, and generally create problems for local, state, and federal law enforcement. I remember the SECC2008 getting harassment from everyone from the county law to the FBI. Furthermore, Al Gore, a former Vice President, is calling on young people to get themselves arrested for the planet.
So it seems like the rule of law has become a chesspiece in the battle between climate criminals and climate activists. They break innumerable environmental and public health regulations with their waste and exploitation, and aside from being illegal, these business-as-usual practices have a severe human cost and put the entire planet in the crosshairs of environmental catastrophes. We’re guilty of misdemeanors, they’re guilty of crimes against humanity.
If we want the policymaking elite to listen to us, we don’t want to appear lawless. If we want to accurately represent the values and interests of the frontline communities who bear the most environmental burdens and risks, however, we don’t want to appear pro-government. In addition to how we “appear” to the burdened, exploited, and at-risk communities, we as young people want to reduce our own future risks as much as possible. The Climate Crisis is clear evidence that both the Market and the State have never cared about Our Future, but the Rule of Law is still to the strategic advantage of a Nonviolent Environmental Justice Movement. Otherwise, things could go Lord of the Flies real quick.
Three demonstrations and a lockdown in one day! The Convergence has really evolved since last year’s action against Bank of America. I’m confident that this summer has permanently changed Dominion’s public image, and just in time for election season!
I’ve been checking the commercial media, and they seem to be having trouble coming up with the language to sum up all these protests:
50 protesters urge energy regulation
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-08-11-0215.html
The Richmond Times-Dispatch described the protesters as “a small crowd, armed with megaphones” and “advocating response to climate change and more control over energy producers.” How vague could they get?
This also raises the larger question of the youth climate movement’s relationship to the rule of law and the authority of government. Does the youth climate movement trust the State? We practice nonviolent civil disobedience, usually in the form of criminal trespassing, so there’s a clear tendency within the movement to break property laws. We also stop traffic, raid shipments, and generally create problems for local, state, and federal law enforcement. I remember the SECC2008 getting harassment from everyone from the county law to the FBI. Furthermore, Al Gore, a former Vice President, is calling on young people to get themselves arrested for the planet.
So it seems like the rule of law has become a chesspiece in the battle between climate criminals and climate activists. They break innumerable environmental and public health regulations with their waste and exploitation, and aside from being illegal, these business-as-usual practices have a severe human cost and put the entire planet in the crosshairs of environmental catastrophes. We’re guilty of misdemeanors, they’re guilty of crimes against humanity.
If we want the policymaking elite to listen to us, we don’t want to appear lawless. If we want to accurately represent the values and interests of the frontline communities who bear the most environmental burdens and risks, however, we don’t want to appear pro-government. Southerners tend to have what we call an “independent streak” that Yankee liberals and West Coast socialists don’t seem to understand. In addition to how we “appear” to the burdened, exploited, and at-risk communities, we as young people want to reduce our own future risks as much as possible, regardless of how we “appear” to pollution victims and energy lawmakers. The Climate Crisis is clear evidence that both the Market and the State have never cared about Our Future as the Youth, but the Rule of Law is still to the strategic advantage of a Nonviolent Environmental Justice Movement. Otherwise, things could go Lord of the Flies real quick.
Great action everyone. The actions and organizing over the past couple of years have definitely put thuggish corporations like Dominion and Massey on the defensive.
Keep in mind, the more we escalate with people powered direct action, the more they will escalate with private and police surveillance and intimidation. We’re in a long struggle for environmental justice and clean energy [amongst other things].
More mainstream press. It’s important to study how we look from the outside:
Activists Converge for Climate Convention
http://www.nbc29.com/Global/story.asp?S=8816015&nav=menu496_10
This one says “150 environmentalists” are “fighting for climate justice” and “seeking solutions—-from food preservation to government regulation–for what they call a climate crisis.”
I’ve yet to see an article in the US commercial press that acknowledges the existence of a nationwide youth climate movement. Individual conferences, protests, and camps get isolated coverage, but nobody in the big leagues is presenting the narrative that all of these are connected. When we speak to journalists, we have to emphasize that the event we’re at comes in the context of thousands of other related youth climate events that have been happening all over the country. The press has also yet to represent the dirty energy industries as a single unit, instead of showing us isolated energy companies and regulatory agencies.
But I guess you can’t expect that kind of metanarrative (the youth climate movement versus the dirty energy complex, or YCM vs. DEC) in evidence-based, same-day reporting. It’s not like the DEC has a central building we can all lock down to. Unless the next PowerShift is going to involve trespassing federal property under a YCM banner. That would, however, separate us from the non-US Convergences; and their seems to be a bit of tension between the Climate Convergence strategy and the Energy Action strategy, and EAC is more closely associated with the YCM concept. These news reports haven’t even mentioned that there were 6 other Climate Camps this summer–Newcastle, Hamburg, Eugene, High Falls, Kingsnorth, and Quebec.
Can anybody name me the seven cities and the seven companies that the seven camps slammed?
In response to sparki,
“Keep in mind, the more we escalate with people powered direct action, the more they will escalate with private and police surveillance and intimidation.”
I think sparki’s exactly right. We have to remember that the Civil Rights Movement didn’t win the Civil Rights Act without a number of Civil Rights Leaders giving their lives. There are deep differences between our organizing context and that of the CRM, but the history of the CRM demonstrates what it takes to produce social change on that scale. In some ways, our agenda is profoundly more ambitious than the progressive movements of the 60s. If we want to avoid that kind of security issue, in terms of spies and assassins from the other side, we have to stay committed to nonviolence and, considering the controversy of the UK Camp and the Rebel Raft Regatta, we may want to rethink our commitment to the rule of law. I think there’s a strong case to be made for the youth climate movement associating itself in the press with nonviolent civil disobedience events, but our direct action media teams can win points with newspapers if they contrast our “disturbance of the peace” with the dirty energy complex’s disturbance of the planet.
“If we want to avoid that kind of security issue, in terms of spies and assassins from the other side, we have to stay committed to nonviolence”
Sorry, but nonviolence has never functioned to protect people from COINTELPRO-style actions of the US or other countries’ secret police — as evidenced by the targeting of the nonviolent Latin America solidarity groups of the 80s and the French government’s murder of Fernando Perieira when they bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Take a quick read through Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” or Churchill and Vander Wall’s “Agents of Repression” for lots more examples.
The only way to totally avoid state violence is to not pose any threat to the current way of doing business — in other words, to be ineffective.
Since that’s not an option, we need to get ready for repression, accept that it will come, and prepare ourselves to deal with it as effectively as possible.