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Johann Hari: It's the protesters who offer the best hope for our planet
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
But in reality, there are two forms of vandalism about to happen in this city. There is the cutting of a few fences as part of an act of mass civil disobedience. It is an attempt to symbolically resist the much bigger act of vandalism – the trashing of our own habitat, by leaders too short-sighted and too money-addled to listen to the science.
Isn't it violent to knowingly condemn whole countries to drown? Isn't it vandalism to knowingly let the world's most crucial farming land crust over, its most precious rivers run dry, and its hurricanes become super-charged? Isn't that immeasurably worse than breaking a fence and cutting a cordon? Couldn't resistance to this destruction-machine justify this tiny act of destruction? The young protesters who will do this have proved themselves, so far, the sanest force in town. They have ensured that the corporate lobbyists punching holes in the deal are followed and shamed wherever they meet. They chant: "It's not your business – it's our climate."
When I hear the activists, I remember something Farley Mowat, the Canadian conservationist, wrote in the 1990s: "The last three decades of this century have witnessed the ignition of the most significant internal conflict ever to engage the human species. It is not the struggle between capitalism and communism or between any other set of 'isms'. It is the conflict between those who possess the means and will to exploit the living world to destruction, and those who are banding together in a desperate and last-ditch attempt to prevent the New Juggernaut from trashing our small planet."
This week, the small band of the sane got a little bit bigger and a lot more global. For today, it is vastly outgunned by the forces of ecological destruction, and it will certainly not be able to ensure a sane deal in Copenhagen. But think of all the other movements that were small at first and held up impossible dreams. They called him "Martin Loser King"; they said civil rights would never come; now everyone says he was right and there's a black President (although alas not a green one).
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