Action:Other actions

At the end of May, Bristol Rising Tiders joined others from around the UK and the Republic of Ireland for a weekend gathering at the Rossport Solidarity Camp at Glengad in County Mayo. The gathering had been called to support the local community in their fight to stop Shell and Statoil from wrecking their environment and destroying their livelihoods of farming and fishing. Shell and Statoil (the Norwegian State oil and gas company) are extracting gas off the coast of Co. Mayo and are now planning to lay a gas pipeline to connect the drilling rig to the gas refinery they are building on seized land at nearby Ballanaboy. The 150 people who came to the gathering took part in direct action workshops led by the Tripod collective from Scotland and learnt from local activists about the massive oil and gas developments planned for the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland. A workshop run by an activist from Platform also showed that the struggle at Rossport was just one of many being waged by small communities around the world against Shell - the multinational oil company. The hallmarks of Shell’s operations are disregard for the environment, destruction of livelihoods, coercion and violence against local activists and gaining favourable terms by giving backhanders to politicians.

We are a bunch of local activists that believe that there are people here, in Plymouth, who are concerned, willing to understand and to take action about the Climate Emergency we are living in.

Like the rest of the Rising Tide network, we work voluntarily by creating direct action against the root causes of Climate Change and providing popular education on this matter.

We also organize actions as a local ART NOT OIL group www.artnotoil.org.uk.

Rising Tide NA, with a lot of support from other groups, have just set up a new website with information from the grassroots, for the grassroots radical and progressive response to Hurricane Gustav and those that have followed. They are currently receiving and collating information from a dozen or so groups in the area.

Today, on one of the busiest shopping days of the year, activists in both London and Norwich dressed up as Santas Against Excessive Consumption and hit the high streets to sing a different tune to the usual buy, buy, buy madness of the holiday season.

In Norwich, bearing a festive banner reading Lapland is Melting and singing subverted Christmas carols (Welcome to Consumer Wonderland, Oh Little Town of Chapelfield, etc.), the Santas set up outside the temple to consumption that is Chapelfield Mall.

To mark Buy Nothing Day, 12 people from Norwich Rising Tide held a Rat Race in the city centre.

Activists created a mobile rat race that stopped off at the city’s busiest malls and high streets.

People in rat costumes hurried hither and thither between the edges of the rat race maze, built out of placards reading Work Harder, Earn More Money, Buy More Things, Keep Going, while Fat Cats advised that happiness was just around the corner if the rats would only keep shopping!

Santas Against Excessive Consumption (SAEC) went out to play for the second year running on Saturday December 16th 2006, dropping in on the Shell-sponsored Natural History Museum (NHM) on the way to the consumer hell that is Oxford Street.

'On 26th July 2006 I set off from the end of the M27 at the edge of Southampton en route to Glastonbury. I sat on my bike loaded up with panniers and pulling a bike trailer full of tent and bedding stuff. I was allowing 5 days to get there, which I realise was not particularly challenging by professional cyclists standards. However, I am by no definition a ‘professional’ or even an experienced cyclist. I’d only made my decision a couple of weeks beforehand and had done little preparation. I’ve got 2 arthritic knees and was still aching from a minor back injury a few days before. Storms were forecast ahead. Accusations of ‘foolhardiness’ seemed to just fuel the compelling determination I had developed for the journey!

Activists from Reading Rising Tide protested the absence of Climate Changes from the election agenda. A Banner was held up and flyers distributed at the entrance to the Rivermead leisure centre where the count for the Reading East and West seats where held.

Climate Change featured very little in the any of the campaigns by major poltical parties who preferred to concentrate on issues such as Refugees, the Ongoing War in Iraq and the Health service. Climate Change affects many of these issues (i.e. the recent heat wave in 'France resulted in an additional $748 million pledged to adapt failing hospital emergency services' and '25 million people world-wide were uprooted for environmental reasons' and that 'by the year 2050, there could be 150 million' environmental refugees. Many people believe Iraq was attacked and occupied to control oil resources a major contributor to climate change)