 'Copse:
the cartoon book of tree protesting' by Kate Evans
A couple of extracts from this book
Look at me
I'm happy
sitting in my square box home
watching my square box T.V.
eating my square box T.V. dinner
Which I brought home
from the box shaped supermarket
In a square box
On a square bus.
I only like flowers
that come in square boxes,
I only like vegetables
packaged and cubed.
I have white formica
wipe clean
wet dreams
About square boxes
fucking in the prison cell
of my home.
What does it mean?
by Hattie
IT MAKES ME LAUGH WHEN PEOPLE
CALL US TERRORISTS, BECAUSE
RADICAL CHANGE IS GOING TO BE
THE ONLY PEACEFUL WAY.
What sort of change do you see happening in your lifetime?
OLI: The breakdown of the global market? I mean this is what
I hope for, it isn't necessarily what will happen. The re-emergence
of strong, small communities of people in society. The emergence
of art as part of everyday life, something that everybody does,
and not locked up in museums and art galleries. The greening of
the cities. The doing down of the big corporations and companies.
People not having to work for a wage to buy food. That's quite
a lot of what I hope.
Alternatively we could carry on the way we are, refusing to face
the fact that the people who are entrusted with power and influence
in our world are the ones who are making a profit out of its destruction.
We are sold out to the blindest form of short-termism, and one
of the biggest changes that my generation will see is the mass
realisation of that fact.
But what will be left? How much has to be destroyed first?
OLI: Even though people don't have any faith in the political
process, and they know how corrupt big business is, they don't
see any way around this. This is the biggest triumph that the
people who keep us in check have got over us. That most people
don't think that they can change their world.
Thinking outside the system, this book describes a succession
of acts of faith and imagination that became a reality, a victory.
OLI: It's something like 600 roads schemes that haven't gone
through. That's hundreds and hundreds of places saved... But then
again, that's just a little bit of reform in a world of shit.
The government may have accepted the one about no more roads,
but it doesn't seem to have grasped the idea of fewer cars. And
what's with all these new housing estates on green belt land?
And what about genetic manipulation of our food? And the insidious
moves of corporations more powerful than nations to consolidate
their rights? And? And? You still can't vote to save the planet.
You have to act.
This is a new thing. As a race, a species, an entity, we've
never faced the situation before where collectively we are engineering
our own destruction. And so opposition to the State, the Status
quo, is fuelled by an entirely new drive. All previous grass roots
movements for social change have been motivated by moral concerns,
by a sense of the injustice of exploiting our fellow creatures,
human and animal.
But now we are fighting for survival; a selfish call for altruism.
OLI: The alternative to changing this society is even more ridiculous,
because we're on the road to ruin. Something's got to give, and
occasionally it does.
British Road protesting started at Twyford Down in 1992,
which is not where this book begins. Twyford deserves its own
book, and is getting it: "Twyford Rising", available
from Friends of Twyford Down. The first sustained British tree
protest was not at Solsbury Hill either; the Flowerpot Tribe at
Jesmond Dene occupied trees to try and stop the Cradlewell Bypass
in 1993, and nobody knows about that because it was in Newcastle
and too far away from London for the national media to find out
about.
This book is partial, incomplete and not entirely chronological.
I haven't included Leadenham, the Pollok Free State in Glasgow,
Patterton Woods (twinned with Paeschendele), Thanet Way, the Wells
Relief Road, M66 Daisy Nook, and the Swamp things of Allercombe,
in the few years that this book covers. And those are just the
ones I can remember. There have been many different protest sites
in Britain. There will be many more. |