TimeToRise is Phoenix Media Co-op’s regular newsletter about what’s new in the struggle for a better world, from the UK and beyond.
Climate Crisis
The first edition of TimeToRise comes in the same week as a damning report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). UN chief António Guterres summed it up as a “code red for humanity”. The extensive document shows how humanity urgently needs to change course to avoid even greater suffering. In particular, we need to revolutionise the way we treat our planet by transforming our economic and political systems.
The IPCC report should ring loud and clear for everyone who wants to end human suffering and radically change our relationship to the Earth. And people in the UK have a key role to play, as in just a couple of months the COP26 climate conference will arrive in Glasgow. COP26 is the UN’s latest annual summit focusing on the world’s climate crisis, but these summits have so far failed to foster the change the planet needs.
This year, around 10,000 police officers from around the UK are preparing to hit the streets of Glasgow every day of the summit, in one of the country’s biggest ever ‘operations’. So it will take massive numbers of ordinary people to show the powers-that-be what they’ll be up against if they continue to prioritise corporate profits over the vast majority of the planet’s population. As the leader of the World Meteorological Organisation says, COP26 “will be a critical milestone”.
Global resistance to environmental destruction
- In the UK, the struggle against high-speed rail line HS2 continues. There’ll be a cycle tour along the Manchester-to-Birmingham part of the HS2 route in the coming days. And there’s ongoing camp resistance to HS2 too.
- In the US, trade unionists and Native American people in Arizona keep campaigning to stop a mega-mine destroying an area of great cultural and spiritual importance.
- Lawyer Steven Donziger, meanwhile, has now spent two years under house arrest because he sued oil giant Chevron over spills in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And there are ongoing protests calling for his release.
- In Mexico, this year’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples came in the same week as the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish colonial invasion of the land. And a group of Indigenous Zapatistas celebrated “500 years of indigenous resistance” over in Spain. Their journey, according to Mexican academic Sylvia Marcos, is “building connections with other places where people are also fighting to defend their land, to defend nature. Where people are fighting against extractivism and mega-projects, fighting for the survival of the planet.” Another prominent organisation representing Indigenous Mexicans, meanwhile, insisted that they would keep resisting until the liberation of Mother Earth “from the capitalist lie, which today threatens life as a whole”.
Other UK action on our radar
- Phoenix Media Co-op has been following the action of animal-rights campaigners at the MBR Acres beagle breeding facility near Huntingdon. And after 40 days of ordinary people blocking ‘normal business’ at the site, this week saw large numbers of police officers step in to enable the transportation of dogs away from the site. Camp Beagle continues to resist, though, and there’ll be protests on 15 August in both Huntingdon and Hull.
- On the opening day of 2021’s grouse-shooting season, meanwhile, dozens of hunt saboteurs disrupted a number of shoots up in the Yorkshire Dales.
- Palestine Action continues to target the UK operations of Israeli arms company Elbit.
- As controversial deportations continued in the UK, the NO Eviction Network announced a September protest to push for Scotland to have its own immigration system.
- There were also protests against the political persecution of journalist Julian Assange as the US continues to push for his extradition.
- Meanwhile, years of resistance finally paid off as local people rescued a Latin Village market in London from property developers. The community itself will now be in charge.
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Please get in contact with us if there are actions and/or events you’d like us to include in future TimeToRise newsletters.