I just returned from my very first ‘civil disobedience activist training camp’ weekend just outside Vancouver, Canada.  About 50 of us stayed out in summer camp style facility where we were trained for 3 days by seasoned activists from Greenpeace.  The idea was to empower people and give us the tools to be the activists that dwelt inside us.

We worked on ways to get the word out and make it difficult for the polluters. The training included everything from planning an action, the legals, messaging, media management, scouting a location, executing the action (including diversions, ways to chain ourselves to equipment/buildings/trees, obstructing roads and making an overall nuisance of ourselves)… all the way to getting arrested and getting out later… or not.

My facebook friends were mostly supportive when I told them about it and tried to awaken some about the urgency of controlling climate change… some were outright hostile to this and called me a dupe of the bitchers and whiners who know about as much of the science of climate change as the cow that farts the methane.  One posted a Youtube video of a 2003 episode of a Penn & Teller Show (they had a show?!?) calling environmentalism total hysteria and that the dirty hippies are so ignorant that they’d believe anything the green radicals made up and told them.  As though every young person who ‘cares’ and calls for caution is going to be up on all the science involved.

I sent these friends this short speech from the the IPCC (nobel prize winning scientific authority on climate change) to the UN in September 09:  http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/rkp-statement-unccs-09.pdf

If you don’t have time at the moment to read those 2 pages about the state of the world, here’s the gist in the last paragraph: Avoiding the impacts of climate change through mitigation of emissions would provide incalculable benefits including economic expansion and employment. If those in this August gathering do not act on time, all of us would become leaders and citizens of failed states, because we would be failing in our sacred duty to protect this planet on which we all live. Science leaves us with no choice for inaction now.

It’s hard to believe that in 2009 some people are still resistant to mitigating the risks of climate change, but prefer to barrel through resources comfortable that there’s no problem at all or that we’ve got it well in hand… as though the world has ever been in this spot and they know what they’re talking about when they say we’re all safe and sound.

I’m more motivated than ever to fuck up the machine.  No revolution for the better came without some struggle.  I challenge you to come up with one, but I’m thinking the emancipation of slaves and an end to legal slavery, the women’s suffrage movement, legal acceptance of homosexuality, etc… And regular folk at the time, many good folk, could not see the wrong that was right before their eyes!  Someone needed to fight against these good people to bring the change about.  People are still fighting those causes even after the law has come round to protect the objects of those discriminations!  I learned this weekend that Rosa Parks wasn’t just a nice old lady that wouldn’t move on the bus - she was an activist, that activity was highly organized and that was her 5th attempt to bring things to a head on the bus!

Bring on the Tar Sands!  If you aren’t yet familiar with that, watch my main trainer from this past weekend in this Greenpeace action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFOnW51IM24