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A match made in heaven
6th December 2009
The union of Christmas carollers and Climate Campers points to another conclusion: climate change affects everyone and concerns everyone
Wet, cold, and tired, the climate activists had seen through the night without a hitch. The police had been friendly, the public encouraging, and the British winter weather (uncharacteristically) forgiving. Things were going well.
But then came an unexpected snag: somebody else had booked the space first.
The Climate Camp, a British activist organisation that occupies high profile locations to move climate change issues into the media spotlight, had moved into London’s Trafalgar Square the previous evening. Planning to occupy the area until at least Monday afternoon – maybe all week – they had erected dozens of tents, strung up banners, and fashioned a vegan kitchen.
Those who had stayed through the night were identifiable by the bags under their eyes.
Intended to keep the talks at distant Copenhagen in the London eye throughout the negotiations, Trafalgar Square is their most publicly visible location yet (previous camps include the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport, and the Drax and Kingsnorth power stations).
A curious blend of political protest, carnival celebration and survivalist minimalism, the regular camps are meant both to raise awareness of key issues (at Heathrow, aviation; at Kingsnorth, coal), and to demonstrate the viability of sustainable alternatives – workshops in compost toilet construction and rainwater harvesting are standard.
Many debate whether or not the Camp offers a convincing alternative – sneering criticisms in the British press are not uncommon. Either way, “the camp has been very successful at pushing an issue up the national agenda,” points out regular camper Danny Chivers.
Key to the camp’s ethos is its collective ideal: there are no “leaders,” the organisation is “thoroughly decentralised and non-hierarchical,” and all decisions are made democratically. Sunday afternoon, at one of their many meetings, the campers needed to vote on a course of action: whether to share the square with the Christmas carollers who had already booked the space, or to maintain control over the space as they had initially planned.
A few insisted that they not share the square, in line with their original intent to claim the space as their own. But after the issue was put to a vote the campers, sitting in a circle on the cold concrete, voted to move aside some of their equipment and tarps for the carollers.
An hour later dozens of voices sang praise to the Lord, illuminated by the flood lights of Nelson’s column, underneath the camp’s flagship banner, ‘NATURE DOESN”T DO BAIL-OUTS.’ The combination of traditional church-going observation and 21st century climate activism made a novel juxtaposition to curious passers-by. But to some the combination would be unsurprising.
“We are here to care for god’s creation – we have done a lot of damage to our environment which includes climate change,” said Sir John Houghton by telephone, an atmospheric physicist and head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1988 to 2002 – and also a devout Anglican. “All Christians should see that there is a moral imperative to cut our emissions in the developed world.”
Pope Benedict XVI listed “polluting the environment” in a suite of social sins in 2007, and went on to advocate cutting carbon for lent, and attempted to turn the Vatican into the world’s very first carbon-neutral sovereign state. After installing 2,400 solar panels on the roof of the Nervi Hall, funding the construction of a solar thermal power plant, and planting a new forest of more than 100,000 trees in Hungary – the Vatican Climate Forest – to offset the rest of the city’s emissions, he earned himself the title of “green pope”.
Dozens of evangelical organisations in the US – famed for denying the veracity of climate change – joined in the formation of Care of Creation back in 2005 to support action on climate change, which they see as a moral issue: one created by the rich that will disproportionately affect the poor. Islamic, Jewish, Hindi and Buddhist organisations the world over have done the same.
The inclusion of the Christmas carollers in Trafalgar Square illustrates a point that many Climate Campers feel is often under-appreciated: the ‘everyone is welcome’ attitude.
“There is an amazing level of open-mindedness and a real desire to listen to each other, despite our individual differences,” says Isabelle Fremeaux. “This is what I’ve found the most inspiring about the Climate Camp, that it is not a question of ideology. There is a real willingness to figure out how we can work together.”
And the union of the carollers and the campers points to another conclusion: climate change affects everyone and concerns everyone. It is everybody’s issue.
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