amazing 3 hour occupation of Dutch airport runway

The report says:

"They [Earth Firsters] invaded Schipol Airport under the cover of darkness and blocked the taxiway for three hours by locking themselves on using a variety of instruments."

A bit of a pain for the passengers, then, but perhaps they're guilty as hell of geodestruction by choosing to fly so don't count. Quite a safety hazard too, I'll bet. Still, it made the activists feel good, and that's all that matters.

G

I travel between Holland and South England every month or so. I used to fly for journeys like that and now I go overland (/sea). I always wanted to change for environmental reasons, but the convenience of flying kept me hanging on.
Until I realised flying isn't convenient. It's stressful, it's not as comfortable as a train, the cheap flights leave at stupid times and land in stupid places. You have to wait in so many different queues, for check in, push your luggage about for miles. The security staff are ruder and more intrusive, not to mention the data based hassles over security.
So now I take the train. Or even hitch - believe it or not, it's more convenient than taking the plane!
Anyway, my point being: If those three hours on the runway are the straw that broke the convenience myth for even ten percent of the people waiting at Schipol that morning, that's about thirty tons less CO2 in the air.

So, the passengers do matter, Gerry.

What about the poor airline companies? Don't you care about their feelings? Those poor, poor corporations must have been really upset.

AND WHAT about the planes? How do you think they FEEL, with all that hatred directed at them - Just because they're metal doesn't mean they don't have feelings too.

Shame on you all, you naughty naughty people.

Enough said.

marm wrote: "So now I take the train. Or even hitch - believe it or not, it's more convenient than taking the plane! "

Which is fine, if you're travelling from the UK to Holland, which is just across the sea after all. And you're right - flying is a major PITA these days, particularly with all the security hassle. I avoid it as much as possible. Frankly, you could have more fun in a cat litter than in the super-surveilled corporate Spectacle that is your average airport.

But some folk have to fly. I'm not talking business Suits or holidaymakers or the idle rich, but ordinary stiffs like you and me. Ferries and trains are really not an option for those coming in from outside Europe, or for those moving hundreds of km within Europe. You could get a train from, say, Helsinki to Madrid, but it would take days and probably cost an arm, leg and internal organ. Plus Schipol is a major transit point, where international flights to/from all over the world change. The Earth Firsters certainly chose the right airport to disrupt to cause maximum aggro.

What gripes me is that air travel has suddenly become the new guilt trip for the moralistic right-on to bash ordinary stiffs around the head with. If you travel by air, you're guilty of environmental destruction and at best should be morally condemned, at worst deserve everything that's coming to you. This is the same old middle-class mentality that sneers at the lower orders, but this time from a right-on viewpoint. It misses two rather obvious points:

1. All public transport, other than rickshaws, is polluting, and contributes to global warming. That includes electric vehicles. The only issue is the degree of pollution. Earth Firsters should just as well blockade rail tracks to stop people travelling by trains.

2. The guilty parties are the States that provide subsidies and fuel discounts to airlines, and the airlines themselves. There's an assumption that low-cost air travel is consumer-driven (as the liberal middle classes assume every evil is), which in turn assumes a naive belief in the workings of capitalism, that there's a direct producer-consumer relationship mediated by the market. Even the capitalists don't believe that any more, so why are supposed 'radicals' making Adam Smith-like assumptions about market behaviour?

For a movement that's supposed to be anti-capitalist, you do an awful lot of working-class-bashing and just plain ignore the corporations and States. It's an awful lot easier, and leads to a smugger feeing of moral superiority, to club the lower orders around the bonce than to identify the real causes of environmental destruction. Which of course suits the powers that be right down to the ground. You can bet that gobshite Michael O'Leary is laughing his head off at 'radicals' beating up on Ryanair passengers and ignoring him.

Remember what the real enemies are - capitalism and the State. Quit giving ordinary folk grief. We're the ones who get it in the neck.

G

"You could get a train from, say, Helsinki to Madrid, but it would take days and probably cost an arm, leg and internal organ"

Or, you could decide not to go from Helsinki to Madrid, and to go somewhere else instead that you wouldn't have to fly to.

R wrote: "Or, you could decide not to go from Helsinki to Madrid, and to go somewhere else instead that you wouldn't have to fly to."

I thought some smartarse would come up with that smug line.Kinda tough if you're a Finn living in Madrid, or a Spanish person living in Helsinki, eh? A bit like folk I've heard who, when told that people in the Highlands of Scotland need cars to live there, have said that they should live elsewhere. Talk of the tail wagging the dog.

Taking your dismissive comment at face value, that would have knocked Genoa and Davos on the head for starters, not to mention all the alternative economic and political fora that have taken place since then. Without international travel the whole global anti-capitalist movement would have been stillborn. How do you think activists from far-flung parts of Europe got to Genoa? Hitch-hiking? Not to mention comrades from the Americas - should they have rowed across?

Travel builds international solidarity, and is a GOOD THING. Cheapo unregulated wasteful travel is not a good thing, but the responsibility for that lies squarely with the airlines and States. If that gobshite Micheal O'Leary wasn't able to depend on tax exemption for aviation fuel and tax breaks and subsidies from regional councils eager for Ryanair to operate out of their 'airports', he wouldn't be able to flog cheapo flights.

Instead of smugly looking down their moral noses at the poor sods who have to travel sardine class in polluting aircraft, 'radicals' should be pulling their finger out to propose sustainable versions of air transport. There will always be a need for air travel, even if only by blimp, so it's up to greenies to come up with ways of managing it effectively and non-destructively. Not just sneering at the lower orders and basking in their own sense of moral superiority because Mumsie and Dadsie will fund them to hitch-hike around the world ;-\

G

I shouldn't comment, 'cos it'll only encourage Gerry spreading his snide armchair griping all over Indymedia. However, he made a few general less ridiculous points I'd like to reply to:

some folks have to fly = some other folks the other side of the world have to die. I don't think so, but that's the result of people not taking responsibility for their own actions (never mind words, eh Gerry!).

capitalism is made of relationships. You can't blame 'capitalism' and get off scott free from your decisions (all this talk of ordinary people etc tis a tad patronising I find). It's an awful lot easier though - while people drown & have their lives torn apart by your consumerism (food flown here etc etc). Tell the people of Tuvalu (& elsewhere) that you're fed up with 'getting it in the neck', poor dear.

No-one's ignoring Ryanair in terms of actions, and there have been blockades of high-speed railways (not for the pollution nonsense above, but for the effect of Trans-European transport Networks in marginalising, pushing poor poorer, pushing business etc).

and a pedantic one:
they weren't EF!ers (at least they weren't wearing that hat that day, but who knows, as we weren't there), but people from Dutch Friends of the Earth.

PPS sorry I didn't resist my own snideness completely!

Springer wrote: "some folks have to fly = some other folks the other side of the world have to die. I don't think so, but that's the result of people not taking responsibility for their own actions (never mind words, eh Gerry!)."

So anyone who flies is directly responsible for someone else's death? Not a bad guilt trip to lay.

"capitalism is made of relationships. You can't blame 'capitalism' and get off scott free from your decisions (all this talk of ordinary people etc tis a tad patronising I find). It's an awful lot easier though - while people drown & have their lives torn apart by your consumerism (food flown here etc etc). Tell the people of Tuvalu (& elsewhere) that you're fed up with 'getting it in the neck', poor dear."

Global warming is caused by major capitalist industry, and the 'collateral' damage it causes. A single manufacturing plant puts out more pollutants in a day than a cityful of cars can put out in a month. Flying and car use are absolute fleabites compared with major industry, but 'radicals' concentrate on them because a) they're visible, and b) you can bash working-class people around the head with them. The real villains sit cosy and smug in their gated palaces and can't be touched, so you take it out on Joe and Jane Punter instead.

Should unnecessary flying be knocked on the head? Yes! Should unnecessary car use be knocked on the head? Yes! What, though, causes so many people to fly and drive? The requirements of their jobs, which are dictated by State and capitalist policies. When I was young most folk would walk or cycle to work for the simple reason that they lived near their workplaces, and this suited the manufacturing capitalists as they had a captive community from which to draw a steady supply of skilled and semi-skilled labour. Indeed, many communities were created by factories, mines and ports specifically to service those companies. Now, because capitalism has changed from manufacturing to services and finance, workers are forced to move to wherever they can find (increasingly casualised and downskilled) work. When your local ball-bearing plant or mine or factory or port has been closed down, either due to changes in global demand or, more likely, because the owners of capital can make more profit by shifting production overseas to cheapo labour countries, then you have to move to find work and/or end up commuting long distances to put food on the table. People don't spend hours a day in their cars for the sheer bloody joy of it, you know - they do it because they have to, because State and corporate actions have forced them into it. Yet it's those same workers that po-faced middle-class 'radicals' blame for global warming, when the real damage is done by major capitalist corporations.

But it's so much easier to blame the victims, not least because they're there in sight, unlike the real villains. So global warming, and the inestimable damage it's causing to the whole world, developing and developed, isn't down to the rapacious parasitic actions of corporations and States, but instead it's the fault of "Western consumerism", so that people conned by the Spectacle into buying playstations and wide-screen TVs and microwaves are directly responsible for ecological megadeath. As if there's some kind of direct link between consumer demand and corporate action that even Adam Smith wouldn't have dreamt of in his 'perfect market'. Well, I'll let you into a wee secret - even if we all became eco-monks tomorrow, bought only for our direct needs, didn't travel anywhere other than by bicycle (although that can be iffy, as bike manufacture generates CO2) or Shanks' Pony, and gave up any pollution-producing activity, it wouldn't slow global warming a jot because corporations would still continue over-producing and 'externalising' their wastes into the environment. We can turn off every bloody light in our houses and live by (vegetable fat, of course) candles, and still we wouldn't save a fraction of the daily CO2 output of your average chemicals plant.

I wish 'eco-radicals' would get it through your brains that IT'S NOT OUR BLOODY FAULT! Get your analysis right, and aim your actions at the right targets. Putting the boot into workers may make you feel good and morally superior to us riff-raff but will have zero effect on environmental destruction, and will seriously piss off ordinary people who, as those who suffer most through pollution (the more affluent can just move away from any 'unpleasantness'), have at least as much interest in saving the environment as middle class 'eco-radicals', and probably more. You do not get people onside by beating them around the head with guilt trips. There's a simple rule for activists: guilt is a poor motivator for action.

G