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Hours After the Protesters Who Threw Soup at a van Gogh Were Sentenced, Three More Activists Repeated the Stunt

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Friday, September 27, 2024

Three activists threw soup on two more van Gogh paintings hours after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were sentenced to prison time. Just Stop Oil In late 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland entered London’s National Gallery and hurled tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The duo wore shirts displaying the logo for Just Stop Oil, a controversial environmental activism group known for its nonviolent demonstrations in protest of fossil fuels. “What is worth more—art or life?” Plummer asked museumgoers. “Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?” The soup didn’t harm the painting—which was protected behind glass—but it did cause an estimated $13,400 worth of damage to its 17th-century frame. When the two protesters were found guilty of criminal damage in July, Judge Christopher Hehir told them to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison.” Now, he has sentenced Plummer, 23, to two years behind bars. Holland, 22, received 20 months. In 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland glued their hands to the wall of the gallery after throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers. Just Stop Oil “The action you took was extreme, disproportionate and criminally idiotic,” Hehir said in court, per Politico’s Karl Mathiesen. “You came within the width of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or destroying the painting.” During the trial, the activists insisted that the sentence would not hinder their efforts to fight climate change, as the Washington Post’s Shannon Osaka reports. “I made my choices and I’m happy with them,” Plummer said at the sentencing on September 27. “I’ve found peace in acting on my conscience.” A few hours later, three more climate activists arrived at the National Gallery. They entered the museum’s new van Gogh exhibition—“Poets and Lovers”—and threw soup on two sunflower paintings by the Dutch Post-Impressionist. “There are people in prison for demanding an end to new oil and gas,” said one of the protesters in a video of the incident, adding: “Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.” After examining the two paintings, experts determined they had not been damaged, according to Hyperallergic’s Isa Farfan. The activists have been arrested, and the artworks are already back on display in the exhibition.  Just Stop Oil’s goal is to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal in the United Kingdom by 2030. In recent years, activists affiliated with the organization—and similar groups around the globe—have been staging climate protests at museums and cultural institutions, often targeting famous artworks and artifacts. The British government has responded with new laws that Human Rights Watch describes as “draconian.” According to Just Stop Oil, more than two dozen climate protesters are now behind bars in the U.K. Earlier this week, Greenpeace U.K. released an open letter signed by more than 100 artists, curators and art historians asking that Plummer and Holland be spared jail time. They argued that their stunt belongs to a long tradition of similar artistic acts. “Since at least 1900, avant-garde artists have called for or delivered iconoclasm as part of their artistic practice,” reads the letter. “These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon. … [The protest] will inevitably enrich the story and social meaning of Sunflowers; and will be remembered, discussed and valued in itself as a creative and incisive work.” During the sentencing, Plummer gave a 20-minute speech to the judge, per the Guardian’s Damien Gayle. “I believe that non-violent civil resistance is the best, if not the only, tool that people have in order to bring about the rapid change required to protect life from the accelerating climate emergency,” Plummer said, adding: “If you think that taking an authoritarian approach to sentencing today will somehow stop ordinary people standing up for justice, I believe you will be proved wrong.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Two members of Just Stop Oil staged the original demonstration in late 2022. Group members say the harsh penalties will not deter their efforts

Sunflowers with soup
Three activists threw soup on two more van Gogh paintings hours after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were sentenced to prison time. Just Stop Oil

In late 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland entered London’s National Gallery and hurled tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The duo wore shirts displaying the logo for Just Stop Oil, a controversial environmental activism group known for its nonviolent demonstrations in protest of fossil fuels.

“What is worth more—art or life?” Plummer asked museumgoers. “Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?”

The soup didn’t harm the painting—which was protected behind glass—but it did cause an estimated $13,400 worth of damage to its 17th-century frame. When the two protesters were found guilty of criminal damage in July, Judge Christopher Hehir told them to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison.” Now, he has sentenced Plummer, 23, to two years behind bars. Holland, 22, received 20 months.

soup
In 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland glued their hands to the wall of the gallery after throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers. Just Stop Oil

“The action you took was extreme, disproportionate and criminally idiotic,” Hehir said in court, per Politico’s Karl Mathiesen. “You came within the width of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or destroying the painting.”

During the trial, the activists insisted that the sentence would not hinder their efforts to fight climate change, as the Washington Post’s Shannon Osaka reports. “I made my choices and I’m happy with them,” Plummer said at the sentencing on September 27. “I’ve found peace in acting on my conscience.”

A few hours later, three more climate activists arrived at the National Gallery. They entered the museum’s new van Gogh exhibition—“Poets and Lovers”—and threw soup on two sunflower paintings by the Dutch Post-Impressionist.

“There are people in prison for demanding an end to new oil and gas,” said one of the protesters in a video of the incident, adding: “Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.”

After examining the two paintings, experts determined they had not been damaged, according to Hyperallergic’s Isa Farfan. The activists have been arrested, and the artworks are already back on display in the exhibition. 

Just Stop Oil’s goal is to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal in the United Kingdom by 2030. In recent years, activists affiliated with the organization—and similar groups around the globe—have been staging climate protests at museums and cultural institutions, often targeting famous artworks and artifacts.

The British government has responded with new laws that Human Rights Watch describes as “draconian.” According to Just Stop Oil, more than two dozen climate protesters are now behind bars in the U.K.

Earlier this week, Greenpeace U.K. released an open letter signed by more than 100 artists, curators and art historians asking that Plummer and Holland be spared jail time. They argued that their stunt belongs to a long tradition of similar artistic acts.

“Since at least 1900, avant-garde artists have called for or delivered iconoclasm as part of their artistic practice,” reads the letter. “These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon. … [The protest] will inevitably enrich the story and social meaning of Sunflowers; and will be remembered, discussed and valued in itself as a creative and incisive work.”

During the sentencing, Plummer gave a 20-minute speech to the judge, per the Guardian’s Damien Gayle.

“I believe that non-violent civil resistance is the best, if not the only, tool that people have in order to bring about the rapid change required to protect life from the accelerating climate emergency,” Plummer said, adding: “If you think that taking an authoritarian approach to sentencing today will somehow stop ordinary people standing up for justice, I believe you will be proved wrong.”

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Paradise lost? How cruise companies are ‘eating up’ the Bahamas

Another vast tourist resort project promising jobs and prosperity. But critics say such developments imperil the pristine environments they advertiseRead more in this seriesJoseph Darville has fond memories of swimming with his young son off the south coast of Grand Bahama island, and watching together as scores of dolphins frolicked offshore. A lifelong environmentalist now aged 82, Darville has always valued the rich marine habitat and turquoise blue seas of the Bahamas, which have lured locals and tourists alike for generations.The dolphins are now mostly gone, he says, as human encroachment proliferated and the environment deteriorated. “You don’t see them now; the jetskis go by and frighten them off.Joseph Darville is worried that the big cruise lines and developers will ‘come in and eat what’s left of our country’. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/the Guardian Continue reading...

Joseph Darville has fond memories of swimming with his young son off the south coast of Grand Bahama island, and watching together as scores of dolphins frolicked offshore. A lifelong environmentalist now aged 82, Darville has always valued the rich marine habitat and turquoise blue seas of the Bahamas, which have lured locals and tourists alike for generations.The dolphins are now mostly gone, he says, as human encroachment proliferated and the environment deteriorated. “You don’t see them now; the jetskis go by and frighten them off.“There’s a lot going on. It’s a tragedy – and continues to be a tragedy,” says Darville.Now, he fears further acceleration of the decline, with the scheduled opening next year of Carnival Cruise Line’s vast Celebration Key resort, now under construction on the island’s south coast.The sprawling entertainment complex across a mile-long beach, already stripped of its protective mangroves, will ultimately bring up to an additional 4 million people a year to the island, Carnival says, with four of its ships able to dock simultaneously.Concerns about giant cruise ships bringing multitudes of tourists, and pollution, to the ecologically fragile Bahamas are nothing new. Neither is the concept of foreign-owned cruise companies buying land to build private retreats exclusively for their passengers: Disney’s Castaway Cay, a private island near Great Abaco, last year celebrated its 25th birthday.But if only for their scale alone, Celebration Key and two other expansive developments just like it, either recently opened or being built elsewhere in the 700-island archipelago, represent a worrisome new threat, campaigners say.Cruise companies have spent at least $1.5bn (£1.1bn) since 2019 buying or leasing land in the Caribbean, according to a Bloomberg analysis in May, and Darville wonders what that means for the future of his beloved islands.As executive chair of the environmental group Save the Bays, he was part of an alliance that fought against the Grand Bahama development, as well as Disney’s Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point, which opened on Eleuthera island in June, and Royal Caribbean’s Royal Beach Club at Paradise Island, which broke ground in April.“It has to stop somewhere; we have to preserve something for our future generations, for our own native Bahamians,” Darville says. “We cannot always be seduced by these cruise lines and other developers who come in and eat what’s left of our country.”When Disney put out its proposal, no matter what they said or how they did it, there was going to be a catastrophic impactThe “seductions” he sees are the cruise lines touting the supposed economic advantages to the Bahamas of being allowed to buy and develop land, promoting what he claims are questionable environmental credentials, and pledging community investments for locals in terms of jobs and grants for small businesses and education.Such messaging has been well received in a country still struggling to recover from Hurricane Dorian in 2019, the worst natural disaster in its history, which prompted the near-collapse of the tourism industry.An unemployment rate that reached almost 20% after the storm and subsequent Covid-19 pandemic has finally dropped back into single figures, but a stroll around once-bustling Freeport, the largest town, cruise port and commercial hub of Grand Bahama, provides plenty of evidence of the island’s decline.The waterfront 542-room Grand Lucayan resort, formerly the grande dame of Grand Bahamian tourism, sits mostly empty, abandoned and awaiting a buyer, with only a small portion of the development still open.The adjacent straw market, once a thriving hub of souvenir stalls, entertainment and refreshment, is largely bereft of customers, even when a cruise ship is in town. And taxi drivers can spend a day or more waiting at the airport or cruise terminal without earning a fare.It is hardly surprising, then, that the cruise companies, amplified by the Bahamian government, honed their pitches for land deals to receptive ears, focused on the jobs they would create and the dollars they would bring in.Carnival, for example, says all but two of the 31 construction companies working on Celebration Key are owned by Bahamians. Job fairs over the summer, offering employment with perks including medical insurance and paid time-off, were swamped.Disney says it created more than 200 “high-quality” jobs for locals at Lookout Cay, has invested more than $1m into the local economy since it opened, and has promised almost as much again for playgrounds, sports fields and infrastructure for the island’s students.On Paradise Island, Royal Caribbean’s deal for the 7-hectare (17-acre) site included a promise that Bahamians “will be invited” to own up to 49% of the venture.The websites of all three projects are also heavy with words and phrases such as “environmental commitment”, “sustainability” and “responsibility”.Meanwhile, Isaac Chester Cooper, the Bahamas’ tourism minister, continues to cite a Tourism Economics study, prepared for Carnival in 2019, stating that the “development, construction and ongoing operation of Celebration Key” would create thousands of Bahamian jobs and generate a $1.5bn boost for the Bahama’s GDP.By contrast, Carnival Corporation recorded an all-time high $21.6bn annual revenue in 2023; Royal Caribbean’s revenue increased 57% year-on-year to $13.9bn; and that of Disney’s Magical Cruise Company, while smaller at $2.2bn, still represented a rise of almost 91%.Cooper did not return a request for comment from the Guardian.Darville concedes it is harder to push an environmental message in such circumstances. “Whenever there’s word there’s going to be cruise ship development coming to the Bahamas, the first thing the government looks at, and the people generally, is how many people will be employed, what economic benefits we’re going to derive,” he saysHe says that ignores the environmental impact and damage caused by developments on previously pristine Bahamas beaches. Mangrove destruction is a particular concern, given the protection the trees provide against storm surge from hurricanes.But campaigners say the projects are also significantly detrimental to wildlife, in water and on land, as well as precious coral reefs already imperilled by rising sea temperatures.At Lookout Cay, Disney built a half mile-long pier to allow cruise liners to dock, driving countless support posts deep into the seabed. The company insisted that “viable individual corals within the pier’s footprint were expertly relocated to improve the health of struggling coral reefs in the area”.Darville is sceptical and worries about the effect on coral reefs and fish populations of thousands of people in the water slathered in chemical-based sunscreens. “When Disney was putting out its proposal, no matter what they said or how they did it, there was going to be a catastrophic impact,” he says.Gail Woon, executive director of the educational non-profit group Earthcare, and partner of the Global Cruise Activist Network, an alliance of industry critics, says previous developments in the islands that were touted as environmentally friendly turned out to be anything but.She cites a private golf resort where residences can cost tens of millions of dollars, but construction and operations destroyed coral just offshore.“We had coral reef biologists testify that if you put a golf course on the beach and fertilise the grass, the run-off will go into the ocean and kill the coral because they can’t take large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus,” she says.“They went ahead and did it anyway, then where there should have been pristine sand and clear water they have these big clumps of green and brown macro-algae that smothers the corals. They were destroying the product they were trying to promote.”Through projects such as Earthcare’s EcoKids, Woon and others around the Bahamas are working to educate the next generation about environmental challenges facing the country and the world.It’s a message reinforced at Conservation Cove, a small but thriving living laboratory east of Freeport where cruise ship tourists and pupils on school field trips learn the importance of coral reefs and mangrove restoration.Javan Hunt, mangrove nursery coordinator at Conservation Cove, says: “If you make decisions based on ignorance you allow people to run over you, or sell you something that’s not in your best interest.“So for me the most important thing is to educate those coming up, so that in five years, 10 years and beyond, they can make informed decisions – and won’t just smile when someone is presenting shit to them and telling them it’s treasure.”

Activism
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Crews Remove Miles of Abandoned, Lead-Coated Telephone Cables From the Bottom of Lake Tahoe

The cables have been resting on the lake bed for decades, raising fears from environmentalists and residents about possible lead contamination

Lake Tahoe's Emerald Bay is one of the sites where telephone cables were recently removed from. Ken Lund via Flickr under CC BY-SA 2.0 Miles of defunct, lead-covered telephone cables have long sat abandoned beneath the cerulean waters of Lake Tahoe. Now, after years of legal back-and-forth, the cables have been removed. Scuba divers discovered the cables on the lake’s sandy, silty bottom in 2012. The cables consist of copper wires surrounded by a layer of lead sheathing. They were laid in Lake Tahoe decades ago—possibly as early as the 1920s—while telephone service was expanding across the United States. As technology advanced, telecom companies installed newer cables, but they left the old ones in place. Over time, the Lake Tahoe cables suffered damage from boat anchors and debris. Health and environmental activists and residents grew concerned that the torn cables were leaching lead into the lake, which is a popular swimming destination and provides drinking water for some nearby households. The cables’ origins are a little murky, but they are believed to have been originally installed by Bell Systems, which was later acquired by AT&T, as the San Francisco Chronicle’s Gregory Thomas reported in August. In 2021, the nonprofit California Sportfishing Protection Alliance filed a civil lawsuit against AT&T over the cables. A 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation subsequently found abandoned, lead-covered telecommunications cables across the nation. The publication hired an environmental consulting firm to take soil and water samples from areas near the cables. Testing near the cables in Lake Tahoe showed lead levels that, in one sample, were 2,533 times higher than those recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to the Wall Street Journal. AT&T disputed the claims that the cables had contaminated Lake Tahoe, and it commissioned its own lead tests that concluded the cables were “safe and pose no threat to public health nor the environment,” per its website. But the telecommunications company agreed to remove the cables anyway. Crews worked daily 12-hour shifts for more than two weeks to remove the cables. League to Save Lake Tahoe This fall, AT&T hired J.F. Brennan Co., a marine services contractor, to remove the cables. Crews worked daily 12-hour shifts for more than two weeks to extract the old infrastructure from the lakebed. They finished the work on November 17, reports SFGate’s Julie Brown Davis. Scuba divers and a remotely operated underwater vehicle worked in the water, while other crew members were stationed aboard a large barge and a smaller boat, per SFGate. The on-deck teams used a winch to hoist the heavy cables onto the barge, where they cut them into smaller pieces. Crews then ferried the cable pieces to Tahoe Keys Marina, loaded them onto trucks and drove them to a recycling facility. In total, teams removed nearly eight miles of cable from the southwestern part of the lake: One section was located in Emerald Bay, while the other stretched between Rubicon Point and Baldwin Beach. According to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance’s calculations, the effort was slated to remove roughly 107,000 pounds of lead from the lake. Researchers have not come to a consensus on whether the cables damaged the lake, reports USA Today’s Greta Cross. “In an abundance of caution and without real access to the full range of all the scientific studies, our priority was to remove the cables as quickly and as safely as possible, always with that environmental protection at the forefront,” Laura Patten, natural resource director for the nonprofit League to Save Lake Tahoe, tells the publication. Lead is a naturally occurring heavy metal. But when ingested, it can accumulate in the body and lead to health issues. Children ages 6 and younger are especially vulnerable to lead exposure, which can lead to issues like slow growth, hearing problems, anemia, behavior and learning problems, lower IQ and hyperactivity, according to the EPA. In some cases, lead ingestion can cause seizures, coma or death. The EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that no amount of lead is safe for kids. Pregnant women and some other adults can also suffer from health issues linked to lead, such as high blood pressure, decreased kidney function, reproductive problems, miscarriage and more. Lead is also fatally toxic to animals, including endangered California condors and bald eagles. Historically, lead was used in drinking water pipes, ammunition, gasoline and paint. But over the last six decades, those uses have been restricted or banned. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Activism
Animals
Health

How the battle of Claremont Road changed the world: ‘The whole of alternative London turned up’

Thirty years ago, more than 500 activists united to save a street – and their actions marked a major turning-point in the environmental movementWalking through Leyton, in east London, you could easily miss Claremont Road. It is hardly a road at all, but a stubby little side street between terrace houses that ends abruptly in a brick wall. But when it comes to the history of direct action, this could be one of the most significant sites in England. Thirty years ago, in November 1994, the scene here was very different: 700 police officers and bailiffs in riot gear marched into a significantly larger Claremont Road and waged battle against about 500 activists, who were dug in – some of them literally – against efforts to evict them.The activists occupied rooftop towers, treehouses, underground bunkers and even secret tunnels. It took three days to get them all out. In retrospect, the “Battle of Claremont Road”, as it came to be known, was an almost unbelievable event. “I talk about the three C’s that underpin this type of activism: creativity, courage and cheek,” says campaigner Camilla Berens, who was there. “It set the template for the next 20 or 30 years of how to do responsible disruption.” Continue reading...

Walking through Leyton, in east London, you could easily miss Claremont Road. It is hardly a road at all, but a stubby little side street between terrace houses that ends abruptly in a brick wall. But when it comes to the history of direct action, this could be one of the most significant sites in England. Thirty years ago, in November 1994, the scene here was very different: 700 police officers and bailiffs in riot gear marched into a significantly larger Claremont Road and waged battle against about 500 activists, who were dug in – some of them literally – against efforts to evict them.The activists occupied rooftop towers, treehouses, underground bunkers and even secret tunnels. It took three days to get them all out. In retrospect, the “Battle of Claremont Road”, as it came to be known, was an almost unbelievable event. “I talk about the three C’s that underpin this type of activism: creativity, courage and cheek,” says campaigner Camilla Berens, who was there. “It set the template for the next 20 or 30 years of how to do responsible disruption.”The reason for the battle, and the reason Claremont Road is now so short, lies behind that brick wall at its end: what is now the six-lane A12, also known as the M11 link road. The road had been planned since the 1960s, to connect east London to the north-east, but nothing happened for decades. In the interim, many of the condemned homes were vacated by residents and reoccupied by squatters and artists. (As a student, I squatted on Claremont Road for three years. I left in summer 1993.)Cars and shopping trolleys full of concrete were used to block the road. Photograph: Julia GuestBy the 1990s, the Conservative government was determined to make good on Margaret Thatcher’s promise to carry out “the biggest road-building programme since the Romans”. Resistance from locals and environmental groups was growing, though, against schemes such as the M3 extension at Twyford Down in Hampshire (which went ahead), and the proposed east London river crossing through Oxleas Wood, in south-east London (which did not).“The M11 link road was effectively the Cinderella of the three,” says veteran cycling campaigner Roger Geffen. Unlike Twyford Down and Oxleas Wood, the M11 scheme went through a poor urban neighbourhood, rather than an area of natural beauty, “but in a way, that’s what made it interesting,” he says. It was destroying the environment by uprooting trees and prioritising cars, but it was also destroying a community. This was the era of the Criminal Justice Act, targeting illegal raves, squatters and Travellers, which also passed in November 1994. The poll tax riots of 1990 had been another landmark. The Claremont Road protests were a “a joined-up mix of social and environmental motivations”.At the time, Geffen had just moved to London. “I didn’t have a green brain cell in my head,” he says, but he had just taken up cycling. Weaving through the traffic-clogged streets, he says, he realised: “What I was doing wasn’t crazy. I was overtaking a lot of people in little boxes, and that was far crazier than what I was doing.” He joined the London Cycling Campaign, which led him into anti-car activism.By the early 90s, the Department for Transport had begun repossessing and demolishing houses along the route of the M11 link road. In 1994, Claremont Road was the last street standing. “We realised that we needed to make a big focus of it,” says Geffen.Activists built webbing up on the rooftops to evade police. Photograph: Julia Guest“One of the first things we did was to barricade it and set up street furniture,” says John Drury, then a PhD student studying collective action. The street became something of a countercultural tourist attraction, with colourful murals and outdoor sculptures made of junk and a public cafe. Doug (not his real name), then an unemployed activist, says: “There was a real buzz, and it had a lot of energy, and everyone was really friendly, so I just started sticking around.”As the inevitable showdown approached, preparations became more rushed. “We had to just throw everything at it,” says Geffen. Some protesters built wooden observation towers on top of their houses. “So we thought, OK, what happens if we build an absolutely huge tower?” This became “Dolly”, a scaffolding structure 30 metres (100ft) high, rising out of the rooftops. It was named after Dolly Watson, a 92-year-old former actor who had lived on Claremont Road her entire life, and was among the last of the residents to leave. She once told a reporter: “They’re not dirty hippy squatters, they’re the grandchildren I never had.”Other ad-hoc battlements appeared: treehouses, connected to the houses across the street by webs of netting and walkways; roadblocks made out of cars and shopping trolleys filled with concrete. Some activists built underground bunkers in which to seal themselves – “very elaborate womb-like structures that involved lots of layers of mattresses, foam, metal and furniture,” Doug recalls. The idea was that whatever tool the police or bailiffs tried to use to get them out “would get gummed up”. The upper floors of several houses beneath the tower were knocked together to create a “rat run”, and the stairs up to them were removed, to make it harder for the police to reach the protesters.Volunteers had been monitoring police compounds for signs of activity. The callout came on 27 November. “‘It’s the one, it’s the big eviction. Claremont is going to be taken,’” recalls Berens, a journalist who reported on the events for the Guardian. “I think the whole of alternative London turned up. There was a massive party the night before.”The next morning, 28 November, an estimated 500 protesters were ready, remembers Neil Goodwin, a film-maker who recorded much of the siege: “The rooftops were packed; every bunker, every treehouse, on the nets, the landings, the walkways, up the tower – everyone was in situ.”“The police turned up in the early afternoon,” recalls Mark Green (not his real name), another participant. “There were hundreds of them and they swarmed into the street in stormtrooper gear with batons raised. They were expecting a full-on riot. Instead they just found a bunch of hippies and local residents sitting around.” A sound system on the tower cranked up the Prodigy album Music for the Jilted Generation.A 30ft tower was also built, with a sound system from which music blared out. Photograph: Julia GuestThings didn’t go as planned for the police. “They thought they were going to start by tackling the houses, and then they realised people had locked on to the road itself,” says Julia Guest, then an aspiring photographer. Activists had drilled holes into the asphalt, into which they had sunk lock-on bolts, which were covered over with sheets of metal with holes in them. The activists “lay down with their arms through the holes and locked their wrists on with handcuffs.”The police and bailiffs brought in mechanical diggers, cherrypickers, ladders, hammers and crowbars; and every occupant made themselves as difficult as possible to remove. “I was in the loft at number 42, which I’d covered in corrugated iron and filled with tyres,” says Goodwin. “They had to prise us open, like a sardine tin.”When the bailiffs eventually broke through that evening, Goodwin attached himself to part of the scaffolding tower with a bicycle D-lock, the keys of which he had chucked into a pile of tyres. “The bailiff pokes his head in, shines his torch around and goes: ‘OK, we’ll do this tomorrow.’ So they left, and I’m like: ‘I’m gonna be sitting here all night.’ So I said to people: ‘Could you see if you can find some D-lock keys?’” Luckily, they were just teetering over the edge of a gap in the floorboards.Everyone remembers being cold and hungry, especially the first night. Few people had warm clothes, let alone sleeping bags. “After it got dark, someone led me down through a loft to warm up a bit,” says Green. “We then went through a hole in a wall and exited through a wardrobe, which was surreal, into a room where people were watching themselves on the news on an old black-and-white portable TV.”By the second day, about half the protesters had been evicted. But, says Geffen: “The police were puzzled that people who they thought they’d evicted kept reappearing. Eventually, they got a metal detector out.” They discovered the activists had built a tunnel out of oil drums, running underneath the back gardens and into one of the houses on the next road. Supplies and people had been going back and forth the whole time. “When they found the tunnel, everyone on the tower and all the roofs just laughed at them.”The longer the protest went on, “the more brutal the police and bailiffs became”, says Berens. Green says he saw people shoved, grabbed and falling from heights (though no one was seriously injured). “It definitely felt like there was a political element to it.”The protesters “had a very strong commitment to non-violence”, says Geffen. “We needed to be acting in accordance with the values that we wanted to speak for. If we’re talking about environmental sustainability and sharing this Earth, and working in community, then violence doesn’t form part of that.”By the end of the second day, there was only one protester left: Doug. “I kept moving,” he says. “If you live on a scaffolding tower for a few days, you can get quite good at swinging around. And they didn’t really want to chase me around in a game of cat and mouse.” Doug’s persistence extended the protest by another full day. The police even brought in a “hostage negotiator” to try to coax him down. “He pretended he was my dad, and was just concerned for my welfare.” Doug was not swayed. “I grabbed some rope, a saw and a few planks of wood, and I used them to make myself what was basically a coffin, which I slept in.” The police finally got to him the next morning.A sign referring to Dolly Watson, a 92-year-old former actor who had lived on Claremont Road all her life. Photograph: Julia GuestIn the end, the police spent more than £1m evicting the protesters. The M11 link road still got built, of course. Nobody believed the campaign would stop it. “But what it did do,” says Drury, “was it turned the roads programme into a political thing. So, we won the moral argument, even if we didn’t win that battle.”When Labour came into power in 1997, it cut the major road schemes inherited from the Tories from 150 to 37, and pledged to focus on public transport. It felt like a victory for the anti-car campaigners, but it did not last. By 2000, New Labour was committing at least £30bn to building and improving roads, and forecasting that another 2,500 miles of road would need to be built.Several of the Claremont Road activists went straight on to form Reclaim the Streets in 1995, which performed guerrilla anti-car actions – such as blocking off public roads to hold impromptu “street parties” – across the UK and worldwide. It also paved the way for subsequent campaigns such as Plane Stupid, the Climate Action Camps, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.The protest changed the lives of many of those who took part. “That was the day that I crossed the line,” says Berens. “Before that, I was a journalist looking in and reporting on it, but because it was such an impressive campaign, and the people were so amazing, I became a committed activist.”“It impacted me quite profoundly,” says Guest. She became a documentary film-maker focusing on human rights in Israel, Palestine and Iraq.Paul Morozzo, one of the key organisers alongside Geffen, is now campaign director at Greenpeace. Drury is a professor of social psychology at Sussex university. Doug is a lawyer dealing with civic issues.Green went on to design the famous Extinction Symbol, as used by Extinction Rebellion. He is less nostalgic about the event: “I found the overall experience cold, dirty and depressing,” he says. He doesn’t like to describe it as a “battle”. “That suggests an exchange of violence, whereas it was just a group of people passively occupying an area, with the only violence coming from the police.”But like a battle, the event took its toll. As well as committed activists, the area and the protest attracted many people with drug and mental health problems, not to mention locals who were either uprooted or forced to live on the edge of a six-lane road. “I naively hoped it would be a spark for a wider and longer-lasting societal change,” says Green. “Instead, things have just got much worse since then than we could ever have imagined.”Geffen received an MBE for services to cycling in 2015, and now heads Low Traffic Future. “What I’m now doing is still basically the same cause,” he says. “In the 1990s, transport, roads, cars were the central issue for the environmental movement, then we lost a lot of that momentum. Environmental campaigners have gone on to do some great things on energy … but transport is now the biggest-emitting sector of the UK economy, as well as being problematic in terms of air pollution, road safety, children’s ability to play in the streets and all the waste products of car culture.” He thinks the movement needs to focus again on transport.Another action like Claremont Road is unthinkable now, given how far legislation has tightened against protest, public disorder and squatting.“It breaks my heart,” says Guest, “because actions like that created a generation of people that have become acutely aware, and prepared to act on strong beliefs. That is, after all, the only way that anything that’s unjust gets changed. And if people are prevented from being able to freely connect with that sort of experience, then what sort of world is going to come next?”

Activism
Climate
Energy

Revealed: how a San Francisco navy lab became a hub for human radiation experiments

Operations at a cold war lab exposed at least 1,073 people to radiation. Risks to the nearby communities persistExposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point is a special report by the San Francisco Public Press, an independent non-profit news organization focused on accountability, equity and the environment. In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt. Continue reading...

Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point is a special report by the San Francisco Public Press, an independent non-profit news organization focused on accountability, equity and the environment. In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the cold war, where the threats to his life were all American.The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of US troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout”, material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, California, was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point naval shipyard. A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with the Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top US civilian and military officials pre-approved all of this in writing, documents show.The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program, and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.Radioactive samples were placed on forearms, where beta radiation could cause burns. Photograph: American Industrial Hygiene Association JournalThe navy’s San Francisco lab was a major cold war research facility with a unique focus on “radiological defense”, techniques developed to help the public survive and armed forces fight back in case of an atomic attack. It was one node in a nationwide network that encompassed universities, hospitals and national labs that had permission to handle dangerous radioactive material. As one of the first such institutions under the control of the Pentagon, it was among the military’s largest and most important research hubs.In a sign of the era’s lax medical ethics and safety standards, lab directors advocated taking risks with human subjects without seeking informed consent or testing first on animals, according to the documents.These shortcuts appear to have contravened the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines established after the horrors of Nazi experiments in concentration camps. Top civilian and Pentagon officials debated these principles. While some at the Atomic Energy Commission advocated strict rules, they were not consistently applied.Scientists later acknowledged they were ignorant of the long-term effects of their work.“We were aware of the signs, the symptoms and the damage that would be caused” by high levels of radiation, William Siri, a prominent University of California, Berkeley, biophysicist who cooperated with the lab to set up at least one experiment involving human exposure, said in a 1980 oral history. “But down at the low end of the dose range, no one was sure, and unfortunately no one is sure even to this day as to whether there is a threshold and what the very low levels would do.”One scientist developed a keen interest in elite athletes, who he theorized would be most likely to survive a nuclear conflict. In 1955, he negotiated with the San Francisco 49ers to use football players as subjects in a medical study. Letters between the lab and the team show researchers had formulated a plan to study body composition by having the men drink water laced with tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, and receive injections of radioactive chromium-51. Many years later, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigators failed to find contemporaneous records confirming the experiment proceeded as planned, though a lab employee claimed he had witnessed it.‘Ethically fraught’The lab’s work and decades of warship repair left the shipyard, which the navy vacated in 1974, one of the most polluted sites in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed it a Superfund site in 1989.Today, the 450-acre (182-hectare) parcel anchors the biggest real estate construction project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. More than 10,000 housing units, hundreds of acres of parks and millions of square feet of commercial space are proposed.Critics say the navy has long downplayed a possible link between the pollution and poor health outcomes in the surrounding Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which became majority Black by the 1960s, a transformation powered by the lure of shipyard jobs. Critics say the failure of the military to make the area safe amounts to environmental racism.Eldridge Jones served in the army’s 50th chemical platoon, participating in exercises that exposed him to radiation. He says his health issues may be related to research organized by the navy’s San Francisco laboratory. Photograph: Sharon Wickham/San Francisco Public PressIn the Pentagon’s response to detailed questions about the radiation lab’s research program and human exposure toll, navy spokesperson Lt Cdr Courtney Callaghan acknowledged the experiments as “a matter of historical record”, but declined to address their scientific merit or ethical significance.“The navy follows strict Department of Defense policies and responsibilities for the protection of human participants in DoD-supported programs and any research involving human subjects for testing of chemical or biological warfare agents is generally prohibited,” she said via email. She added: “The navy cannot speculate on possible internal deliberations or motivations of medical researchers more than 50 years ago.”Despite enjoying access to vast resources, the lab produced little in the way of valuable research, according to scientists who worked there and outside scholars. “It was fantastic,” former lab researcher Stanton Cohn said in an oral history interview in 1982. “We could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it.” In the end, he noted: “We did a lot of field studies and got nothing to show for it.”While routinely exposing humans in these “ethically fraught activities”, the lab often behaved like an institution in search of a purpose, said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the shipyard in detail. Hirsch and other critics said the lab demonstrated a remarkable disregard for radiation’s hazards and a cavalier attitude toward human health, even by the permissive standards of the time.Thousands of servicemen participated in nuclear weapons tests, including Operation Teapot in Nevada in 1955. Photograph: National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada site officeThe 1955 opening of the lab’s “huge $8,000,000” bunkerlike headquarters building was front-page news that drew “some of the nation’s top civilian and military nuclear experts”, the San Francisco Examiner reported at the time. But today, the lab has been largely forgotten.In the early 2000s, journalist Lisa Davis revealed the enormous quantities of radioactive material the navy and scientists left at the shipyard and recklessly dumped at sea. This report expands on her brief mention of the lab’s medical and occupational experiments exposing people.While lab scientists did sometimes publish in scientific journals and lab imprints, the navy destroyed voluminous piles of original documents after the facility closed.Medical experiments on human subjectsRemaining files such as interagency memorandums, experiment proposals and technical papers indicate that human exposure was accepted up and down the chain of command, from Washington DC to the San Francisco docks, where as early as 1947 the navy knew that airborne plutonium was wafting off contaminated vessels.The ships had been battered by atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and then towed to San Francisco, where hundreds of civilian shipyard workers were exposed in a vain attempt to clean them.The agenda then expanded to medical experiments on human subjects. Lab officials told the Pentagon in 1959 that they employed “minimal quantities of radioactive tracer material” in clinical studies, implying their techniques were safe, even though no one knew if this was true.In the mid-1950s, the lab developed what it called synthetic fallout: dirt or mud laced with the highly radioactive but short-lived isotope lanthanum-140, meant to mimic the poisonous material that could drift over US communities after a nuclear explosion. The lab exposed hundreds of troops and civilian personnel to this hazard in field exercises at military bases on the east side of San Francisco Bay, in rural Alameda and Contra Costa counties.Men in minimal protective gear clean a roof at Camp Stoneman in Contra Costa county in 1956. Photograph: Naval Radiological Defense LaboratoryThe synthetic fallout’s radioactive ingredient could cause cell damage to internal organs if inhaled. Jones, the former army corporal, said troops in his unit sometimes worked without adequate protective equipment.“Nobody had to go up on to the roof, and nobody had to do all this stuff by hand,” he said. “There were better ways to have done it. These scientists, they want the result and they don’t care about the people who are doing it for them.”Some study participants had radioactive dirt rubbed on their forearms to test the effectiveness of cleaning methods. Others were ordered to crawl on their bellies through fields covered in it, to simulate the doses soldiers would absorb while fighting in a fallout zone. In 1962, lab officials acknowledged that wind and rain carried the pollution away, potentially exposing unsuspecting members of the public.After a team from the lab detonated bombs laced with isotopic tracer elements underwater in the summer of 1961 around San Clemente Island, near San Diego, state game wardens working with researchers caught a radioactive fish, indicating unintended and potentially widespread ecological consequences. They brushed aside the discovery by noting that fish are typically gutted and presumably made safe before being eaten.Across a wide array of activities, lab documents describe participants as volunteers. But Jones disputed this. “In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it,” he said, adding that if he declined or resisted, he risked discharge or imprisonment in the stockade.“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out,” said Ron Rossi, who served with Jones in the army’s 50th chemical platoon at the Nevada test site. “It never occurred to us to even ask – just did what we were told to do.” Rossi spoke with the San Francisco Public Press in 2021 and 2022; he died last year, at age 89.Studying responses to nuclear disasters was part of the mission of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. In 1955, navy hospital corpsman HN Stolan demonstrated protective equipment and Geiger counters. Photograph: San Francisco Examiner photograph archive at the Bancroft Library, University of California, BerkeleyLater Pentagon admissions support the veterans’ accounts. “There is little doubt that members of intact military units, which were sent to test sites to perform missions commensurate with their organizational purpose, were not given the opportunity to volunteer,” wrote navy V Adm Robert Monroe, a former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, one of the successors of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret second world war atomic bomb project, in 1979.Hundreds of thousands of so-called atomic veterans were ordered to participate in Pacific island or stateside above-ground bomb tests, or served in Japan near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The US government has, inconsistently, compensated many of them, as well as nuclear weapons workers. But many occupational or medical experiment participants have gone unrecognized despite clear signals they were in harm’s way.In correspondence with superiors at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon, as well as in a journal article, scientists described the amount of absorbed radiation as relatively low. But since their detection equipment was crude and unreliable, these could easily be underestimations. At other times, scientists acknowledged grave risks, while permitting participants to receive exposures past their own suggested limits.At least 33 times, the lab documented radiation doses “in excess of” evolving weekly, monthly or annual federal “maximum permissible exposure” limits, according to annual “radiological safety progress reports” from 1956, 1958, 1959 and 1960, obtained from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission through a Freedom of Information Act request and from the Department of Energy’s Las Vegas archive.No evidence could be found that federal civilian nuclear regulators or the lab’s military supervisors imposed any discipline for safety lapses that violated federal regulations.Hazards persistThe navy’s San Francisco lab was one of many research centers and hospitals across the country that exposed people to radiation and other hazards for scientific purposes. That makes it a demonstration of “the ways that people have been seen as disposable, to science or to the military”, said Lindsey Dillon, a University of California, Santa Cruz, assistant professor of sociology who is among a handful of academics familiar with the lab’s history.“I do think it should shock and anger people,” she added. “They knew that radiation was not healthy.”The navy has spent more than $1.3bn to remove toxic and radioactive material from the site. Cleanup is poised to stretch through the 2020s, thanks in part to a contractor fraud scandal: two supervisors at an environmental engineering firm hired by the navy to clean up the shipyard received prison sentences after pleading guilty in federal court to faking soil samples. Retesting and several lawsuits are ongoing. Illustration: Reid Brown/San Francisco Public PressMilitary officials say these problems are surmountable and their remediation efforts will pay off.“The navy’s work at the former Hunters Point naval shipyard has been and is focused on identifying contamination and ensuring public health is protected during cleanup and into the future,” a spokesperson for the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, the service’s office overseeing the shipyard cleanup, said in an email.The navy had been alerted to the radioactive pollution problem as early as 1984. Yet for decades, public health advocates and community activists said the navy misled neighbors about health risks, an assertion supported by a 2020 city-commissioned scientific panel from the University of California, San Francisco, and UC Berkeley.Beginning in 2019, an ongoing biomonitoring survey led by Dr Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician and neighborhood native whose father worked at the shipyard, has detected traces of radioactive elements and heavy metals in the urine of people who live and work nearby. Some of them are workers at a UCSF lab-animal complex on former navy property that once housed rats, mice and other creatures used in radiation experiments. They have filed workers’ compensation claims alleging that exposure to radioactive and toxic pollution from the shipyard made them sick.Several elected officials who have enthusiastically backed the housing development, including former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco in Congress, and outgoing mayor London Breed, expressed concern about environmental exposure without specifically addressing the lab’s history of human experimentation.In an email, Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager called the shipyard “a neglected and contaminated neighbor to the Bayview-Hunters Point Community” and noted that the federal government had invested heavily in the cleanup.The military built its leading radiation lab in Hunters Point after ships from Pacific atom bomb tests returned ‘hot’. Photograph: National Archives and Records AdministrationHe said Pelosi’s priorities were “fighting to ensure the health and safety of Bayview-Hunters Point residents; requiring a transparent cleanup process that involves the community; holding the fraudulent contractor accountable; and insisting the navy fulfill its responsibility to fully clean up the shipyard”.Shamann Walton, who represents the Bayview and adjacent neighborhoods on the city’s board of supervisors, has called for the city to halt the development until all the pollution is gone. “We do have a say in determining whether or not any land is transferred to the city and county of San Francisco,” he said at a city hall hearing in September 2022. “Without a 100% cleanup, that land transfer does not take place.”The mayor’s office echoed these sentiments, but has not advocated pausing development. “The health and safety of San Francisco residents remain our highest priority,” a Breed spokesperson told the Public Press. “To this end, we remain committed to ensuring the navy’s remediation of the Hunters Point shipyard is thorough and transparent to the community.”It may be impossible to know exactly what harm the radiation exposure caused. Many survivors believe it to be a slow killer. Arthur Ehrmantraut, who served with Jones in the 1950s, said many men in the 50th chemical platoon died young. Others developed illnesses long after leaving the service. “I know that many had severe health issues, that, as with myself, manifested after 50 years,” he said.Jones, now 89, said he did not regret his army service. But he suspected reckless radiation exposure caused the illnesses and premature deaths of others in his platoon, and his own impaired blood flow and partial blindness.Experts agree that during the cold war, safety was secondary to precious knowledge that might give the United States an advantage in a nuclear third world war.“The US government was very, very interested in information about how radiation affects the human body, internally and externally,” said Bo Jacobs, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan and co-founder of the Global Hibakusha Project, which studies people around the world affected by radiation from nuclear weapons. As for how that information was obtained, he added, they didn’t much care: “They want data.”Additional reporting by Rebecca Bowe. Listen to episode 1 and episode 2 of her Exposed documentary podcast.Funding for Exposed comes from the California Endowment, the Fund for Environmental Journalism, the Local Independent Online News Publishers Association and members of the San Francisco Public Press. Learn more at sfpublicpress.org/donate and sign up for email alerts from the San Francisco Public Press when new stories in this series are published in December

Activism
Animals
Chemicals

Green Activists in S. Korea Demand Tough Action on Plastic Waste at UN Talks

By Minwoo Park and Daewoung KimBUSAN, South Korea (Reuters) - Hundreds of environmental campaigners marched on Saturday in the South Korean city of...

By Minwoo Park and Daewoung KimBUSAN, South Korea (Reuters) - Hundreds of environmental campaigners marched on Saturday in the South Korean city of Busan to demand stronger global commitments to fight plastic waste at U.N. talks in the city next week.About a thousand people, including members of indigenous groups, young people and informal waste collectors, took part in the rally, the organiser said, with some carrying banners saying "Cut plastic production" and "Drastic plastic reduction now!".The activists marched around the Busan Exhibition and Convention Centre, where the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5) will take place from Monday to discuss a legally binding global agreement on plastic pollution.Debate is expected to focus on whether the deal should seek to slash production, while major producers such as Saudi Arabia and China have said in previous rounds that it should prioritise less contentious strategies, such as waste management."We are here with Greenpeace and our allies in the Break Free from Plastic movement to represent the millions of people around the world that are demanding that world leaders address plastic pollution by reducing the amount of plastic that we produce in the first place," said Graham Forbes, global plastic campaign lead at Greenpeace.People from different countries and of all ages took part in Saturday's rally and some wore elaborate, decorated hats made from discarded plastic items."It looks like the Earth, and a living creature, because I wanted to say our living creatures are being affected by plastic pollution," said Lee Kyoung-ah, 52, who was wearing a hat made of abandoned plastic buoy.Lee Min-sung, 26, said he also hoped to see changes in everyday consumer habits."I hope the culture of using 'reusables' becomes a cool, trendy movement, as that will reduce (waste) little by little," said Lee, who brought his lunch from home in a glass container."I will pick up trash more often, whenever I have time, and throw away less to save the Earth," said fourth-grader Kim Seo-yul, who flew from her home in Jeju Island to join the march.(Reporting by Minwoo Park and Daewoung Kim,; Writing by Jihoon Lee; Editing by Helen Popper)Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters.

Activism
Waste
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