Some of the furious reactions here surprise me. The whataboutery in some of the criticisms is a little crude (no pun intended).
You can't unwork what oil has brought us particularly easily. We need to travel, we need to eat, we need to take medicines. We can absolutely make better informed decisions about how we do those things, but it's naive to think we
personally have the apparatus to remove it from our lives in its entirety. There's an uncomfortable class distinction in this too - some aspects of ethical living come at a price. Your local farmers' market isn't going to feed your family on a budget; an electric car isn't an option when all you can afford is a 15 year old run around; those Allbirds Tree Dashers are great but the 20 quid no brand means I get to eat for a couple of weeks. Personally, I'm fucking privileged in that I
can afford to pay more for things that are generally less of a burden on the planet, but plenty aren't.
For the most part, JSO have engaged in non-destructive actions. Paints have been non-toxic, road blockages have merely been inconvenient. These things pale in comparison to the
inconvenience of a rapidly deteriorating climate. We're seeing the effects of that right now, and our anger is being manipulated against entirely the wrong set of people. The 'theatrics' are central to the protests - collective complacency is marching us towards an inexorable future, so the kind of sanitised protest our governments would like us to engage in are futile. When you watch archive footage of white folk being asked about the direct action that came with the civil rights movement, it's interesting to hear similar counter-arguments:
yeah, I don't got no problem with negroes but why do they have to block our businesses and block our roads? Protest isn't meant to be pretty.
The UK has seen some horrific actions by the state to delegitimise environmental organisations. They put agents deep inside activist organisations, some of whom sired children with unsuspecting partners, for decades. They've fed into a manufactured narrative about these organisations as being 'loony' and a threat to civil order. The UK has enacted some of the most draconian laws the country has ever seen to outlaw protest in recent years.
The Public Order Act 2023 has effectively made
criminals of dozens of protestors, with a number of them receiving custodial sentences. This should fucking terrify us all.
The government's behaviour is manifestly shortsighted. Crop failure, the increase in uninhabitable swathes of the planet, scarcity of natural resource, all of these things are likely to lead to unimaginable civil disorder as we fight for what's left. We're kicking the can down the road because we don't actually want to think about what we leave behind.
I support JSO. History will show that they were on the right side.
