What’s your plan?

TWELVE. August 21st 2020

I sometimes think that the routine of the serious activist is comparable to that of a professional sprinter: time, effort and discipline is focused on a desired goal, but the amount of time devoted to preparation vastly outweighs the time spent actually performing. Alternatively we might think of a feature film; the two hours or so that you spend watching it is a tiny fraction of the time which was devoted to script-writing, casting, preparation, rehearsal and the diverse administrative and logistical arrangements which were necessary in order to produce it. Sometimes the film will be a wild success, sometimes a flop., Anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s hard to know in advance and that, with the film analogy in particular, there is no guarantee at all that the amount of energy expended on producing  the film will be in proportion to its eventual success. The1982 film  Fitzcarraldo is a case in point: the film had a star-studded cast of actors and Director and  production was very long, expensive, fraught with difficulty, delay and misfortune and re-started several times over; although critically acclaimed by some it wasn’t a money spinner at the box office and loads of people have never even heard of it. I learned about this when I stayed at a hotel in a Peruvian jungle town owned and run by a man called Walter who had been the film’s executive producer and who had ended up, essentially as a financial rescue strategy, turning the house he had purchased for the crew and cast to live in while the film was made into a hotel 

All this is food for thought for an environmental protest group which has devoted very serious time and energy over the past four months or so to careful strategic thought, planning, organisation  team-building, training  and other preparation for a mass campaign of civil disobedience to be coordinated across three major cities whilst maintaining a reasonable level of the absurdly named ‘social distancing’ and other health and safety protocols appropriate to a time of continuing pandemic. The plan to do this and to create significant impact and a favourable impression upon public opinion at a time when a lot of people are likely to feel preoccupied with coronavirus does of course present considerable logistical and psychological challenges. I remind myself that the plans for previous campaigns of rebellion by this and other organisations during history have achieved notable successes despite having been improbable and ambitious. I also remind myself that Fitzcarraldo involved a highly ambitious and improbable plan to move a 300 ton steamship from one river to another across a mountainous land peninsula covered in dense jungle vegetation with the help of a hostile group of native residents and a couple fo railway engineers; the difficulties of which led indirectly to the the film’silengthy production period and contributed significantly to the penury of the aforementioned executive director. Food for thought indeed.

The Fitzcarraldo plan seems absurd in hindsight but I had a couple of lengthy chats with Walter and he seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable and practical person. We never discussed whether the ship-on-rails plans was completely necessary or a piece of hubris but maybe there simply was no other way. Certainly that’s how it seems to me now with the climate emergency. By any standards, this is a very poor time to be asking people to devote significant chunks of time and energy to engaging in acts of collective civil disobedience and protest in order to draw attention to the need to act with urgency to do as much as possible to prevent a coming catastrophe which is going to make covid-19 seem like a walk in the park. But what’s the alternative? Sit quietly while the current excuse for a government continues on its path or reckless endangerment, prioritising its false nationalistic ideologies and shamelessly corrupt rewarding of its financial backers over any attempt to consider seriously a plan for avoiding the extinction of the human species.

I know this sort of language seems too extreme to some people but I feel like I have to keep saying things like that in order to draw attention to the awful realities. I appreciate that it’s very worrying that a lot of people might get very ill or die from coronavirus; and that a great deal more people have already lost or might lose their job, their business or even their home. People are rightly exercised about these things. .What I don’t really understand is that they are mostly not exercised about the impending climate emergency. There is really no dispute about the fact  that it’s happening and almost every piece of scientific evidence which emerges makes clear that in fact the situation is worse than was previously thought and that almost all of the plans which have been made to rectify or ameliorate it are both inadequate in original conception and way behind schedule in execution. 

Not to put too fine a point on it we have known about impending climate catastrophe for well over 30 years and have done more or less fuck-all about it. We are heading for 3 to 4 degrees of warming before the end of the century. There are tipping points which may already be unavoidable. The practical impact of this doesn’t bear thinking about. If we keep heading in this direction then the lives of the current generation of young adults are going to be ruined and those of their children unimaginably difficult and unpleasant. Now that the effects are beginning to impinge upon our lives (having long ago started to mess up the lives of people in poorer, distant countries) we still have no serious plan to do anything about it. If you question this, ask yourselves why the government has appointed Alok Sharma (who holds the title of Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – ‘climate change’ or ‘environment’ not even mentioned), a man who, according to the website They Work for You has “consistently voted against measures to prevent climate change”, to the task  of leading the next international COP conference . Imagine if Rishi Sunak was the Secretary of State for Paddle Boarding but was given the task of looking after the economy as well. This is how seriously these incompetent chancers are taking things.

One of the things which might reasonably prevent the average person from taking too alarmist a view of the future is the belief that political power is generally held by people who can be expected to  adhere to reasonable standards of honesty,  probity and competence and that if they don’t they will be swiftly replaced by some others who will. But all the available evidence of recent times points to the opposite. In such a situation, I honestly can’t understand why people are not generally alarmed and activated to do whatever they can to change things. Indeed, I’m also surprised that more people don’t have contingency plans in mind for when the shit properly hits the fan.

Given that this is being written on a day when storms and flooding in England are coming in on the back of a period of days on end with temperatures well into the thirties and given that such spells of extreme record-breaking weather are becoming routine, it does seem only a matter of time. I accept that the length of that actual time is a matter of doubt and debate and that my own rather pessimistic expectations might not turn out to be correct. Any optimism about the idea that we have time to turn around  the tanker which is steaming towards  its own destruction, however, surely rests upon the premise that there is someone at the tiller who not only can distinguish between his own delusions and interests and the collective welfare but also gives a shit. Clearly, there is not, either in this country or in many other powerful and influential countries. The trend towards government by corrupt narcissists  and charlatans is as inescapable as the obvious fact that to stop it we need to act collectively, with determination and solidarity, to ensure at the very least a return to decency, common sense and a modicum of honesty, 

I have to acknowledge, in order to avoid falling  into my own home-made denial trap, that the protest movement is not growing as fast as I think it needs to, which raises the question of what to do about that, besides trying harder to involve more people. What’s Plan B, in other words? I’ve come across quite a few people in the movement who are well on the road to very alternative lifestyles, not only as a statement of values and principles but as a preparation for what they believe is probably inevitable sooner than you would like to think. I still find it hard to go there in my imagination, although I believe I should. I’m not sure if it simply feels too hard to develop two plans simultaneously – on the one hand, fight the bastards, on the other head for the hills – or if I’m just avoiding what I believe is the truth and burying my head in the sands of activism.

In fact I’m just coming off of a few weeks holiday from the activist role. I find that holidays not infrequently provoke dreams of an alternative lifestyle. This time around the holiday mode combined with heightened awareness of the climate crisis and utter fury and despair at our ‘government’s criminal negligence of duty to produce the improbable fantasy of living in the Welsh mountains, where i was on holiday for a while, and where the heatwave was experienced as pleasant warmth and sunshine offset with cooling waterfalls rather than the unremitting,  blistering heat of the English home counties. I doubt this would be a real solution to a serious collision of shit and fan but it might be an amelioration; it would mean not having to continue suffering the indignity of being English and it’s more accessible without flying even than Scotland, which is my other fantasy.

My conviction that independence in both these places is on the cards, again quite a bit sooner than most of us imagined, was strengthened by a conversation with a very nice Welsh family around a campfire one night in the very  pretty valley where we were staying. Both generations, parents and offspring were confident that this would soon become the expressed desire of the majority of Welsh inhabitants. They were by no means people of a radical tendency and evidently shared an ordinary and well-functioning life of many joys and everyday concerns and, for the youngsters in particular, hopeful plans for the future. The eldest girl was studying geology at university (without, because this is Wales, having to rack up an unsustainable debt in the process) and clearly entranced by its possibilities for her future, including the opportunities for international work and travel.. The youngest had a passion for wildlife biology and foresaw a potential in that for her future life. They appeared as talented and creative people, well-balanced and thoughtful.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself having the thought that neither of their futures were likely to be as rosy as either of them imagined and that it is unquestionably odd, really, that neither of them expressed any provisionality about these plans; as in, “if it is still possible to travel around the world safely when I’m an adult” or “if there is any wildlife left to study”. It would have been cruel and stupid to mention this around the campfire on their holiday and of course how do I know that such thoughts don’t sometimes keep them awake at night like they do me. Nevertheless, the fact remains that people do now routinely contextualise their short and medium term future plans in relation to coronavirus: “if we are allowed to by then” or “if that’s possible then”. But they routinely don’t for climate breakdown. If we can see and plan for one sort of horrifying reality, why not another? Sadly, as I expected, the confident predictions of so many people back in the spring who intuitively perceived a link between the pandemic and the climate emergency, that ‘things are bound to change now’ and ‘we can’t go back to how it was before’ were mistaken. Nothing is bound to change unless we will it. Things can go back to how they were before, and worse. The disturbance of the pandemic creates an opportunity for change, but it won’t be realised unless we seize it. 

Even if  some more people are now more aware and concerned about climate breakdown, the awareness will probably fade and in any case the reality is still that most of  them are doing basically nothing about it. Confronting this – it is effectively complacency, however goodwilled –  only strengthens my resolve to be on the streets again in early September and doing whatever apparently daft and / or annoying things are necessary to try to demonstrate to the authorities that I am not willing quietly to go along with this and to try and draw the attention of the public, once again, to the fact that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. No doubt this will result, as it has before, in a mixture of indulgence, approval, condemnation and outright hostility. Many of those against will say “I agree with your cause but not your methods.” They mean, presumably, that I should vote for the Green party that hasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of achieving political power in our warped and decadent electoral system, or that I should sign petitions or give money to Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace or lobby my corrupt MP or my Councillor or seek election myself or do any of the  many worthy but ultimately useless things which so many of us have been doing for thrirty-odd years to no effect, and which I continue to do because I[‘m trying to do everything I possibly can. particlpating in what is essentially a socio-political game in which the awful status quo is inevitably maintained, 

When challenged in this way on the street my typical response is to ask, as calmly and politely as I can, however hostile the challenge, “Well. what’s your plan?” Honestly, if you have one and it’s plausible and feasible, I’d really like to hear about it. There are many things I enjoy about my life as an activist, including strong connections with a great many people I have grown to trust and like very much, including many who are quite different to me;  but I also enjoy Welsh mountains and waterfalls and the garden (when its under thirty degrees)  and the guitar and rest and relaxation and a hundred other things with which I could occupy my time. I should also, no doubt, and assuming that the world hasn’t been shifted on its axis by the end of September, direct the same question to myself and devote some serious time to Plan B.