Dateline: Court #1, Supreme Court, Parliament Square, London, UK, 09:00-18:00, Fri 30 Sep 11 – In a high profile exploration of an alternate history, in the UK's highest court in the land, two high-flying oil corporation CEOs face trial on three counts of Ecocide – the environmental equivalent of genocide – centred around a months-long deep water oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and the on-going Canadian tar sands climate crime atrocity.  Although the jury’s verdicts could have gone either way (and on one count of the indictment, one of the defendants was found not guilty), nevertheless both ecocriminals were laid low by two unanimous “Guilty of Ecocide” verdicts – encouraging the organisers to redouble their efforts to win recognition for Ecocide as a 5th Crime Against Peace with the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and national legislatures. 

Vidz at YouTube

• Ecocide vs. Living Planet – A (Mock)Trial

» LINKs to follow shortly once editing and uploading is complete

What If... ?

Borrowing from the literary and dramatic genre of alternative history, this campaigning event is predicated upon the fictional acceptance by the United Nations in 2010 of a 5th Crime Against Peace, namely Ecocide (alongside Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Crimes of Agression, and War Crimes); and its ratification in law as an international criminal offence by the UK government. In this alternate timeline, the first prosecution of Big Oil bosses under the UK’s new Ecocide Act 2010 occurs on Friday 30 September 2011, when (fictional) CEOs Mr. Bannerman of Global Petroleum Company and Mr. Tench of Glamis Group (played by actors Nicholas Deal and Robert Hider respectively) face three indictments between them. But true to the genre’s recent UK TV incarnations, the trial judge, the prosecuting and defending barristers (three-per-side), the expert witnesses, and most importantly the jury are all the genuine article, volunteering their time, attention and expertise for free. And the lead silk prosecuting the ecocriminals is no less than radical lawyer Michael Mansfield QC, whose prior record includes representing The Angry Brigade, the Orgreave miners, the Bloody Sunday families, and the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, among many others too numerous to mention.

“There is a growing legal norm against the destruction of the environment, but a lack of formal mechanisms to enforce this. The mock trial is a vital step in building political momentum and legal mechanisms to protect the environment now and into the future.”

~ Alyn Ware, Councillor of the World Future Council

» from ‘A Law to Stop the Destruction of Nature’

Polly Put The Kettle On – Now The Pressure Is Rising

The imaginative progenitors of this excellent example of 'fake it till you make it' campaigning are Polly Higgins and Simon Hamilton.

Polly is a barrister (who has dedicated her life to one client – the Earth), and an international environmental lawyer/campaigner, who may be familiar to some from her previous initiatives Trees Have Rights Too, The Lazy Environmentalist blog and ‘Eradicating Ecocide’ (winner of the non-fiction ‘The People’s Book Prize’ for Spring 2011). In April 2010, in our actual real world timeline, Polly proposed to the UN that a law on Ecocide be classed as an international law alongside Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Crimes of Aggression and War Crimes, as a 5th Crime Against Peace. Ecocide is defined in a nutshell as:

“The mass damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.”

See also:

• Ecocide Is A Crime — Proposal to the United Nations to make Ecocide a crime

» video playlist, 29:36 – http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6634274AAB95C3DD

Simon is founder of The Hamilton Group, a not-for-profit meshwork encouraging businesses, organisations and communities to bring responsibility for the Earth to the forefront of their decision-making. The Hamilton Group provided the organisational infrastructure to mount such a high profile campaigning event in Court #1 of the UK’s Supreme Court building, opened in 2009 in a refurbishment of Scottish architect James Gibson’s art nouveau gothic Middlesex Guildhall on the west side of Parliament Square. The Hamilton Group lined up multiple event sponsors through crowdfunding on teh intertubz, and recruited the legal professionals – a judge and six barristers – plus twelve jurors and three expert witnesses, all contributing to the event pro bono publico.

“The ideal of limitless growth is leading to limitless violations of the rights of the Earth and of the rights of nature. This is Ecocide. We need to stop the destruction of the very basis of life on Earth and of human survival. The Trial on Ecocide is a very important step in waking us up to the violence which is the foundation of the current economy. We need another model that is non-violent, a model which makes peace with the Earth. Ecocide must stop.”

~ Vandana Shiva, philosopher, environmental activist, and ecofeminist

» from ‘A Law to Stop the Destruction of Nature’

Let Battle Commence

As far as we know, this may well be the first time that an alternate history legal trial of global significance has been staged as a political campaigning action, with the express purpose of galvanising people in our timeline to ensure it converges with the alternate history revealed in the trial. Of course, in reality the prosecution of ecocriminal CEOs of Big Oil corporations – such as BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe, or Syncrude/ConocoPhillips/BP/Shell/RBS for the Canadian tar sands atrocity – would take months, with complex indictments and detailed testimony from scores of expert witnesses. But for dramatic impact and political concision, a one-day trial-in-miniature was designed to test the feasibility of a British jury convicting Big Oil bosses of crimes against our home world’s ecosystems.

Structured in accordance with UK Crown Court jury trial protocols, staffed by legal professionals, with a jury chosen to represent a typical UK demographic, and set in motion as an unscripted alt.history experiment, this could have backfired big time: the jury could have found the pair of Big Oil CEOs not guilty on all charges. The three-barrister team defending the oil-stained filthy ecocriminals...

• Christopher Parker QC, 3PB Chambers

• Adam Hiddleston, 3PB Chambers

• Noa Tu

...really did do their damnedest to get the scum off scot free, using the just the kind of despicable, weasel-worded, trickster-like, lawyer machinations that got me thoroughly despising the roles they were playing, while at the same time admiring their willingness to help advance the cause by advocating so astutely for the devils in the dock. And very persuasive they turned out to be: on Count #1 of the indictment (see picture C4 above), the jury found Bannerman to be not guilty, by a majority verdict of nine to three. Given that Bannerman an alt.history analogue of BP’s Tony “I'd Like My Life Back” Hayward, world-class pond scum of that ilk, I very much doubt that a real world jury in either the UK or the USA would be quite so lenient.

But when it came to the Canadian tar sands climate crime atrocity, it was the three-barrister prosecution team...

• Michael Mansfield QC, Tooks Chambers

• Steven Powles, Doughty Street Chambers

• Jane Russell, Tooks Chambers

...that secured a complete victory for people and planet: on Counts #2 and #3 of the indictment (see picture C4 above), Bannerman and Tench were found to be Guilty of Ecocide by the UNANIMOUS verdict of the jury. This came as great news to supporters of the UK Tar Sands Network (including myself), who are campaigning to expose the complicity of British banks like RBS and oil companies like BP and Shell in the biggest industrial climate crime on Earth – and one which is also having devastatingly catastrophic, local, detrimental environmental and health effects on the flora and fauna, and on our First Nations sisters and brothers, throughout the affected ecosystems of Alberta, Canada.

What is the Meaning of an Alt.History Victory?

No doubt this initiative will come in for criticism from both the left and the right. Pro-capitalist business-as-usual propagandists may well try to dismiss The Ecocide Trial as a fantasy cooked up by salaried environmentalists and champagne socialist lawyers for their own conscience-salving amusement, and point out that it has no effect whatsoever back in the real world. But it is precisely capitalist business-as-usual which is primarily responsible for the anthropogenic sixth great mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth – the Pleistocene-Holocene extinction, through which we are now living, and which our generation MUST take responsibility for ending as quickly as is humanly possible.

Anti-state direct action activists may well criticise The Ecocide Trial as petit-bourgeois nonsense, on the grounds that merely tinkering with the legalistic superstructure of capitalism is a pointless approach, since only by consigning the whole of capitalism to the dustbin of history can we hope to achieve a lasting, sustainable, and ecologically harmonious global human community. I posed this question in the press conference which followed the trial, and you can see and hear the answers given by Polly Higgins and Michael Mansfield in the accompanying video (once editing and uploading is complete), and read them below.

Law Reform or Revolution?

“I’m going to take a long geological view, and a devil’s advocate position. There have been five major mass extinction events in the history of life on Earth that were natural, the last one wiping out the dinosaurs, the flying reptiles and the marine reptiles. We are living through the sixth major mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth, and humanity’s impact on our biosphere is what’s causing it. 

Will a simple change in law, merely tweaking the capitalist system, really stop that happening? Or is it going to take a much more major shift in humanity evolving into a better future?”

~ Tim Dalinian Jones

“This isn’t just about putting in a little bit of legislation, this is about changing the rules of the game. When we do that with legislation, what we do is we also shift consciousness and understanding, and that’s very important. We really do close the door to something, from being the norm, to becoming the exception, overnight. Now that’s not to say that damage and destruction will stop automatically, but it will actually vastly change the landscape, and the understanding, and what investment goes into the projects and the businesses that we need to see evolving in the opposite direction.

 It is hugely, hugely important here that WE govern banks, investments, and finance. Finance and investment IS flowing into damaging structural activity – it IS actually acceptable to do that, because it ISN’T a crime. Make it a crime, and what you’ll find is that the insurance industry just won’t touch anything that’s criminal activity. But also what you do is you shift civilisation’s understanding of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. This is a law that really is a big game-changer right across the world, not just in a legal context, but also within people’s minds and attitudes as well.”

~ Polly Higgins

“I am a firm believer that you can make a difference, that you can change. There may be forces over which we have little or no control, but actually every incremental inch of our activity has an impact somewhere else. And therefore, as a trustee – we’re all trustees in a sense, of the planet, while we’re here – by the time we leave it, you want to be able to look back and say, “Well, I have played a part in maintaining the trust. If there are greater forces over which in the end I have little or no control, then at least I have played out my own responsibility.” Unless we all play out our responsibilities collectively, then the cataclysmic events that you’re talking about will undoubtedly be accelerated. 

It is the desire of communities to ensure that exploitation, in all its forms, actually comes to an end. I know the Arab Spring is employed all the time, but actually that’s what that’s about: it’s about ending exploitation, ending oppression. It would be easy for them to say, “Oh, well, there’ll be another massacre here...” – no, no, they have taken their own future, some of them successfully, some not so successfully yet, but the struggle goes on. And that’s how I see this, as a struggle that goes on.”

~ Michael Mansfield

Many Paths to Utopia

“A Map of the World that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

~ Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891

There are many possible paths we can plan out for our future trajectories on Oscar’s Map of the World, all bound toward our collective goal of a sustainable, biodiverse and ecologically harmonious post-capitalist future for human civilisation and our biosphere. While many of us will justifiably stick to profoundly anti-capitalist routes, in the transition from decadent, decomposing and destructive capitalism to the form of civilisation which will transcend it, many major shifts in our civilisation’s understanding of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable needs must occur. One of those major shifts is necessarily adopting Ecocide as as grave an International Crime Against Peace as Genocide. It’s Polly’s path to ensure that humankind makes this shift as soon as possible – and if you are inspired by her infectious, enlightening and visionary enthusiasm to make Ecocide a world-round crime ASAP, you’ll be a welcome participant in helping to make our belovéd home planet a way safer place for non-human life forms on which to thrive.

Whatever Next?

I’d suggest we might like to find out more about Ecocide, and how we can help to make it the 5th International Crime Against Peace.

• Eradicating Ecocide — An Evocative Video Introduction, by Joe Hall

» video, 3:18 – http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=sY9VDotmQT4

• Ecocide Is A Crime — Proposal to the United Nations to make Ecocide a crime

» video playlist, 29:36 – http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6634274AAB95C3DD

• Eradicating Ecocide — Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet

» website – http://www.thisisecocide.com

» book – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eradicating-Ecocide-Polly-Higgins/dp/0856832758/

“Product Description

In Eradicating Ecocide, international environment lawyer and activist Polly Higgins sets out to demonstrate in no uncertain terms how our planet is fast being destroyed by the activities of corporations and governments, facilitated by 'compromise' laws that offer insufficient deterrence. She offers a solution that is radical but, as she explains with great competence and experience, absolutely necessary. The recent Mexican Gulf oil spill is a compelling reminder of the consequences of un-checked ecocide. Higgins advocates the introduction of a new international law against Ecocide. It would become the 5th Crime Against Peace and would hold to account heads of corporate bodies that are found guilty of perpetrating ecocide.

The opportunity to implement this law represents a crossroads in the fate of humanity; we can accept this one change and in doing so save our ecosystem for future generations, or we can continue to destroy it, risking future brutal war over disappearing natural resources. This is the first book to explain that we all have a commanding voice and the power to call upon all our governments to change the existing rules of the game. Higgins presents examples of laws in other countries which have succeeded in curtailing the power of governments, corporations and banks and made a sudden and effective change, demonstrating that her proposal is not impossible. Eradicating Ecocide is a crash course on what laws work, what doesn't and what else is needed to prevent the imminent disaster of global collapse. Eradicating Ecocide provides a comprehensive overview of what needs to be done in order to prevent ecocide. It is a book providing a template of a body of laws for all governments to implement, which applies equally to smaller communities and anyone who is involved in decision-making.

About the Author

Polly Higgins is a barrister, international environmental lawyer and activist whose exhaustive research lays bare why peace is unachievable whilst we have laws that protect the rights of corporations to destroy the planet. Advocating a new crime of Ecocide: 'to cause damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems' she launched a campaign in April 2010, thisisecocide.com. The Ecologist Magazine voted her one of the "Worlds Top 10 Visionary Thinkers," and she has been nominated "The Lawyer for Planet Earth" by the 2010 Performance Awards.”

~ from ‘Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Stop the Destruction of the Planet: Amazon.co.uk’

History In The Making? Let’s Hope So!

“Was Yesterday the first chirping sounds of the future – springing forth again? (After Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ – published 49 years ago – 27 Sept 1962!) Huge immeasurable thanks to you Polly and the team you unite for Earth victory.”

~ Dave Hampton, on ‘The Ecocide Trial’, Facebook, Sat 01 Oct 11

“Well said, Dave, and what an astute analogy – I bet when 'Silent Spring' was published back in 1962, Rachel had little to no conception of just how remarkable a positive contribution she was making to human history, in igniting the struggle for environmental justice. Here's hoping that 'The Ecocide Trial' will be held in equal or greater esteem by those alive in 2060, as the turning point where the environmental justice movement grew strong lupine teeth, all the better to chew up and devour filthy ecocriminals, while rewarding ecological restitution and ecosphere harmonising initiatives. So here's a toast to the night, three cheers and a grunt, Hey! Hey! Hey! Oink! – for Rachel and Polly! (borrowed from David Rovics, 'Song For The ELF' – http://bit.ly/Song4ELF)”

~ Tim Dalinian Jones, on ‘The Ecocide Trial’, Facebook, Sun 02 Oct 11

Up the Revolution,

Tim Dalinian Jones

Footnotes

All these photos and video clips are 'CopyLeft'

This means you are free to copy and distribute any of my photos and videos you find here, under the following license:

• Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

» Human-readable summary – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

» Attribution: tim.dalinian.jones@gmail.com

NB: The pix above are auto-downsized versions for onscreen webpage display. If you would like the free, edited, full-sized versions (up to 3072x2304px, 7.1Mpx, typically 1-2 MB) just click on an image: bingo! You can also right-click on an image and choose ‘Open Link in New Tab’ (or similar) to open a full-sized version alongside the report webpage. If you'd like to take a copy of the full-sized image version, right-click on it and choose ‘Save Image As...’ (or similar). Share and Enjoy!