Climate Camp Scotland
In the first of a series in the run up to COP26 in November we speak to key activists from the environmental justice movement in Scotland. Here Mike Small interviews Bryce Goodall – Organiser, Campaigner, Activist @brycejustweeted – Actions Speak Louder Than Words Twitter: @ASLTWScot and Quan Nguyen – Organiser, Camp Scotland twitter: @ScotClimateCamp Instagram here.
For more details about Climate Camp (31 July-1 August) a weekend of workshops, protest and action for climate justice go to: www.climatecampscotland.com
These people are not merely immature. They do not understand the basics of science or climate. Their proposals are not thought through, and the proposals offer no prospect of any good outcome at any time. Nor do they understand the numbers.
What do you mean?
Linkee not workee.
Here’s one that does:
https://actionnetwork.org/events/mossmorran-action-weekend-31st-july-1st-august
Mind you, it starts tomorrow and they don’t seem to know where they will camp. Perhaps no-one is brave enough to investigate the environs of Cowdenbeath. If so, I can’t blame them.
Systems like political-economies are designed to support certain behaviours and outcomes by default. For example, company law may exclusively mandate profit-making and ban any consideration of the environment. If this legal framework was simply reversed, the system would work differently, with different defaults (so the instead of the environmentalists working hard and the profitarians having it easy, the reverse may apply). Status quo supporters may tend to obscure the extent to which alternatives are actively shut out or dissent silenced. Our systems more complicated than that, but that also shows how much is baked into a politcal-legal system that delivers vast inequalities, injustices and environment degradation and destruction. And illustrates how much could be done to make the outcomes radically different, and more beneficial for the planet. Some changes will, like the climate itself, lead to tipping points to phase changes, and that is where revolutions begin.
I would avoid the tired trope of ‘hard-working’. Margaret Thatcher was famously hard-working. Oskar Schindler’s workers were shirkers, at least according to Steven Spielberg. I would cast this issue in terms of useful and beneficial employment with fair recompense and living wages. I would also prefer less human-centred framing of solutions, as the problem is essentially that major human organizations are making decisions on the basis of benefits to (a few) humans, while the best solution is not to change that to ‘benefiting more (all) humans’, but to give political weight to non-human life.
I am not sure this interview format really worked all that well. There was a tendency for important points to float detached amongst the chat, and a loss of the sense of a mass movement behind it. So the follow-ups should be more interesting.