The tropical highway in London, or M25, is a vast resonant road that works in a shaky circle around the external edges of the capital. If you live in the city, it is the way you may go to the airport, suburbs, or countryside, and provides a kind of informal border to the Greater London region. Also introduced: a lot of traffic. Every day, the road hosts about two hundred thousand cars. It is sometimes referred to as “the largest parking lot in the country.” If you were wandering along the M25 in mid -November, 2022, you might have faced a particularly stubborn delay. For four consecutive days, dozens of activists from the British Environmental Group stopped, took over the oil, occupied the gunter, or bridges, which overlook the highway, forcing the police to stop the traffic. Dorta!
Perhaps it is understood that people were upset. in Online mailAnd other places, they intensified. “Just stop from the Eco-Mob face, where 35 years are arrested to raise the drivers of car for five hours and” prevent an ambulance “on the M25,” read one of the main address. The government issued a statement condemning this measure as a “criminal activity”. In an emotional video clip filmed from one of the jacids, a young activist said they were calling for the UK to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. She said, “I am here because I have no future.” “And you hate me to do this, and you have the right to hate me, but I hope that you will direct all this anger and hatred against our government.” Under it, the past trucks guided. “How many people say” We do not have a suitable future for living if you continue to license oil and gas “to listen to it?
During the defendants – Roger Halim, Lucia Whitaker de Abero, Cretida Gyithin, Louise Lancaster, and Daniel Show – were not on the gun. Instead, they spoke in a call for an attempt to employ volunteers. During the trial, the judge, Christopher Hahir, was not very sympathetic. The jury was not allowed to consider evidence of climate collapse. Instead, the defendants described “a fanatic[s]And he said: “I have appointed yourselves as one unitary rulings of what should be done regarding climate change, and they do not link the principles of democracy or the rule of law.” After the jury reached a guilty rule, he issued some of the harshest sentences for the non -violent protest in the history of the United Kingdom: four years in The prison for most of the defendants, and five years of life. The United Nations human rights specialist, in a statement.
Halim recently told me: “You might say” the professional danger. “He was speaking on the phone from HMP Wayland, a men’s prison in Norfolk, northeast London, where he was serving his punishment. (I was calling from my son’s room, which is also my office. We were drinking beverages together, I had a mug of tea near. I mean, to cover me. Magnolia painted, has one bed, has a small desk, and has some shelves. There is a bathroom in the cell, a pelvis, and if you want to go to shower below the corridor. “Halham is fifty -eight. Many people were also on his path on the oldest side. He went to run once a day, and he collected his food in the morning and evenings. An exciting and consumer view. Mainly, he was reading and writing. He had just ended neuroscience from IEIN MCGICICIST, TOME, Tome,It is with thingsHe told me: “Be a little intellectual, because I actually spend a great time.” “Maybe it does not fit with the default story line on these types of things.”
Halham, who has a tall -tall look, with a long face and gray hair pulling it into a cake, skeptical of virtual story lines in general. He is skeptical in the media, government and companies. He believes that society, as we know, will collapse in the next decade, as the large areas of the planet become uninterrupted. Halim explains this to me with a feeling of urgency, which is punctuated by dark jokes, and the deception in which we all continue to live as we do. For many, this tone is external-its commercial mark of unpopular activity with the British audience-but for others, it is electric. Halam persuaded doctors, lawyers, teachers, grandparents, students and others to participate in the climatic protests of varying degrees of extremism. He encouraged many people to break the law. Under the slogan of the extinction rebellion, or XR, activists have presented an imaginary burial for the future and carried giant skeletons in the streets of London. They installed a pink party boat near the Oxford Circus, stopped trains, and presented their hands to the buildings. Activists in order to stop oil, which prefers more sabotage tactics designed for shock, soup in Van Gog’s paintings and Charles Darwin’s grave coated with spraying.
These procedures are not for everyone’s taste, but it can be said that they have affected. XR was founded in 2018, with three demands, the first of which is that the government “tells the truth” about the environment. In 2019, several days after XR protests, and more than a thousand arrests, the UK became the first country to officially announce the state of climate emergency. General support deterioration. Celebrities, including Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, spoke to the group. Then things began to decrease. Although Halim, although he is a co -co -co -founder, was now on the group’s radical edge, where he defends collective arrests as a way to show resistance. (“My point of view is if you are not in prison, you are not resistance.” He told a film crew about the documentary “The rebellion” weaken. ”He got a lot of integrity and charisma, but there are no many details,” said Farana Yamin, which is An environmental lawyer for a long time.
Halim activities took place against the background of tightening restrictions on climate activity throughout the United Kingdom in 2022, the conservative government then passed the police, the crime law, the ruling, and the courts, giving the police broader powers to close the protests. Last May, Lord Walni, the political violence advisor to the previous government, compared active groups, including the mere stopping of oil and Palestine, to terrorist organizations and suggested its ban. When I spoke to Oscar Bergelond, a senior lecturer studies climate activity at the University of Bristol, he told me that Halim’s punishment was unusually long. He said: “Before this year, there were no long penalties for civil student activists like this.” Perlund’s research has found evidence of a “global suppression campaign”. In the United Kingdom, the courts attempted to remove “the right of activists to talk about climate change in front of the jury.” (The jury is often sympathetic, as soon as they hear the activist.)HotHouse Earth: A guide to live“Brejlond said that the restrictions imposed on what can be said in defending the activist’s actions are an attempt to” cancel politics what political trials are. “
