Zion Lights

Recorded 08.05.2019 by Carmen Talbot.

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

It was kind of a few days before London I just thought I’ve gotta go, this is really important and it’s gonna be big and I knew, you know, there’s a risk of arrest and things like that so I’d kind of been umming and ahhing and I just thought now… now’s the time to act on this, which I think a lot of people are thinking right now. Um, so I just got in touch with Exeter XR and they said there’s space in this affinity group. The Southwest contingent took the bridge so it was all regional and there was like… I think the Northeast took um (inaudible) or was it Parliament Square… everywhere had a region so there were five different locations and ours was Waterloo bridge so it was mostly people from Exeter, Totness, surrounding areas, and um… we all just gathered outside this old church for a kind of… you know… a strategy talk, how we gonna do this, what’s gonna happen. So, the kind of other organiser had already arranged for… you know the way that the bridge was going to be shut, but it needed people power to make sure that it stayed shut, so it was kind of coordinating waiting for them, cos they had basicall just had a van which they parked out sideways blocking… it stopped cars going down it so that part of the bridge was closed. And so we were waiting on the corner… we were kind of waiting on the corner… we were just waiting around the corner from the bridge obviously at the church, and then um… and then someone kind of came running by and said ‘it’s time, we need people now – it’s time’ and we just marched on. And it was amazing cos um, so the whole idea was… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the garden bridge idea – an actually really great idea of lets plant trees along there… and its… I don’t know if you’ve seen Waterloo bridge but it’s a really dire part of London, like there is no green. There is no green, it’s just buildings, it’s smoggy and it’s a massive road with like three lanes – its horrible. It’s really polluted, you know, there’s no birds round there, there’s no trees. So we… so we brought our own trees! So a load of people had chipped in and brought up a load of massive trees from Devon and plant… and then everyone else kind of brought plants and so there was a big load of them, so we all just carried them, and we just marched on and got the banner out. The activists did this when I was there as well – when the police were kind of… when there were a lot of police that moved in they started shouting ‘I love you!’ and like chanting it and there’s a video of the police joining in. Uh, about ten years ago I was involved in the camp for climate action. When we camped in uh… in Scotland we did it during the fringe, the Edinburgh Fringe cos it was very busy, we had a series… and one of our main focuses was tar sands at the time, and RBS was like a big investor in tar sands – I don’t know what you know about tar sands but really awful um damaging for the environment, displacing indigenous communities in Alberta in you know in Canada, and um, so this was a really important issue. So, my affinity group was just four of us, we were all like ‘look this is a cause we’re willing to be arrested for… we’re happy to be a group that goes down and… and goes out during the fringe and shuts down one of the RBS banks’, and so there were different people at different banks shutting them down. And… and RBS knew we were there camping, and they knew we were targeting them with this message, so they had extra security on the doors and all sorts. But you know, we turned… we turned up at the door and the security said ‘where are your cards?’ cos they’d been told to check for cards to make sure we were customers, obviously we didn’t have cards. But they obviously just thought look at these you know, well off student type people and they just let us in when we said ‘oh we’ve forgotten our cards’. And we went in and then we took off our clothes and we had binbags underneath and we were dressed as tar sands monsters and we did like a little theatre where we like (laughs) we got these molasses out of our bags and started pouring them on each other like ‘mmmm tar sands!’ releasing this many emissions into the atmosphere – and people… it was actually… people were really interested and they were coming over and asking ‘what… what are you doing… what is this?’ but um, the po… the police, again the police that moved in were just… the… just the idea of them going ‘I love you!’ just… just… no… no way… ecoterrorists what are you doing… environment… they just didn’t… and you couldn’t get through to them, where as I saw… I saw at Waterloo when um, when there… when they were kind of moving in and people started chanting and things, one… one of the chants was ‘we are doing this for your children, we are doing this for your children’ – it was actually really powerful and you could see that some of the police were quite hesitant because the message was getting through, which ten years ago it wouldn’t have.

Notes

Guardian Article from 2010 – Activists set up Climate Camp at Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/19/climate-camp-royal-bank-of-scotland