Environmental direct action in the United Kingdom

The Earth First! (EF) movement in the United Kingdom started in 1991 with a protest at Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent. From its inception, Earth First! was committed to direct action techniques from the group's inception, with support for only nonviolent ecotage.[1]

Earth First! consisted of a loose collection of groups and activists with no central organisation. After two years, there were fifty such groups, protesting in numbers not seen since the 1980s peace movement. The The first Earth First! action focused around the importation of tropical hardwoods, with a protest at Liverpool docks in 1992. This action coincided with the Earth First! roadshow, in which a group of activists toured the country.[1]

Most actions were organised by individual groups and attended by people from other groups in the movement, some of them wore distinctive colours. Co-ordination happened through various publications including Do or Die, the Earth First! Action Update and later SchNEWS. Activist met at regular Earth First gatherings.[2]

Eviction of a treehouse at a camp resisting the Newbury Bypass.

Earth First! groups, together with many other groups, then became involved in the road protest movement, as an attempt to reverse the Government's road-building programme. The first major road protest happened at Twyford Down where a permanent protest camp was set up in late 1992 to oppose the construction of a new section of the M3 motorway. The Dongas tribe arose from this camp.[1]

The first tree-sits (occupations of trees) happened at Jesmond Dene in Newcastle in 1993, organised by the Flowerpot Tribe.[3]

Other early protests included Pollok Country Park in Glasgow, River Roddlesworth and Stanworth Valley near Preston, and at Solsbury Hill near Bath and the M11 link road protest in London, where an entire street was squatted.[4] After the eviction of Claremont Road in 1994, protesters from the Flowerpot and Dongas tribes joined the protest at Stanworth valley to build an "Ewok village" of the tree houses.

There were many subsequent road protests including Newbury bypass, the A30, Swampy became well known during the eviction at the A30 camp, although there were many other smaller road protest camps. Some camps did actually result in roads being cancelled, the first such cancellation occurring in London. The government slashed the roads programme 3 times, each by a third, in response to direct action techniques and associated public opinion.

By 1997, the Government had shrunk the road-building programme to a third of its original size. Alongside the need to save money and several reports criticising the original plans, the environmental direct action movement could claim a large role in this reduction.[5] Another sign of its effectiveness had already been seen in 1994, when the Government had passed the Criminal Justice Act. Among other things it created a series of new offences which criminalised many forms of protest.[6]

The focus of Earth First! broadened over time to include protesting against the Manchester Airport second runway and fighting the use of genetically modified organisms. At the Nine Ladies stone circle in the Peak District, a camp successfully helped prevent a new quarry.[7]

The movement can be said to have given rise to a number of other groups, notably Reclaim the Streets and Rising Tide. The Land is Ours set up the Pure Genius camp on 13 acres (53,000 m²) of derelict land which had previously housed a brewery owned by Guinness company. The squatters, including George Monbiot, stated they had occupied the land fifty years after the successes of the post World War II squatting movement.[8]

Camp for Climate Action with Drax power station in background

Direct action techniques have also been applied to climate-related issues. On 31 August 2006, 600 people attended a protest called Reclaim Power against carbon emissions at the coal-fired Drax power station in Yorkshire.[9] The protests were coordinated by the Camp for Climate Action, a ten-day camp held near the power station.[10] The campers had also a blockaded a nuclear power station in Hartlepool, Teesside.[11]

At a later climate camp, undercover police officer Mark Kennedy encouraged activists to commit aggravated trespass at Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station and the trial of six people subsequently collapsed when this was revealed.[12]

Actions carried out by the Plane Stupid group include the grounding of planes through the establishment of a climate camp on an airport taxiway and occupations of offices belonging to airport operator BAA and short-haul airline, EasyJet. On 8 December 2008, the group breached the perimeter of London Stansted Airport, causing a runway to be closed for three hours and the cancellation of 56 Ryanair flights. The protest was in response to the announcement that a second runway would be built at Stansted and there were 57 arrests.[13]

Grow Heathrow is a land squat in Sipson, west London, on a site which might be demolished to build a new runway at Heathrow Airport.[14] It was occupied in 2010 and partially evicted in 2019.[15] Frack Off was set up in 2011, one of a number of groups set up in response to concerns about the safety of fracking and other forms of shale gas extraction.[16] Following on from these groups, Extinction Rebellion was set up on 31 October 2018, after a letter was published in The Guardian voicing concerns about the ecological crisis which was signed by 94 scientists.[17]

The High Speed 2 is a planned High-speed railway network which would link London, Birmingham, Leeds, London and Manchester. According to the Woodland Trust, 108 sites of ancient woodland are under threat. The decision of the Department for Transport was that phase one, construction of a rail link from London to Birmingham, could begin on 15 April 2020. Four woodlands in Warwickshire were immediately destroyed, despite the recommended advice being to only carry out felling in autumn to minimise damage to flora and fauna.[18] Environmental campaigners had already set up occupations along the route of the proposed train line. In January 2020, HS2 Limited began evicting a series of camps in the Colne Valley Regional Park which had been occupied since October 2017. Activists, including some connected to Extinction Rebellion and the Green Party had been monitoring the work on HS2 and contested the evictions, claiming that HS2 did not own the land.[19] In May 2020, a squat in Harefield, west London was evicted.[20]

• Frack Off

• Routledge, Paul (1997). "The Imagineering of Resistance: Pollok Free State and the Practice of Postmodern Politics". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 22 (3): 359–376. ISSN 0020-2754. Retrieved 25 June 2020.
• Schlembach, Raphael; Lear, Ben; Bowman, Andrew (September 2012). "Science and ethics in the post-political era: strategies within the Camp for Climate Action" (PDF). Environmental Politics. 21 (5): 811–828. doi:10.1080/09644016.2012.692938. ISSN 0964-4016. Retrieved 25 June 2020.
• Peter Styles (2012) Birds, Booze & Bulldozers ISBN 9780955463433

• EF! Action Reports
• Rising Tide