A bit of news from the home front here at Small Farm Future, and a few reflections based around it. Today, my wife received a suspended prison sentence for disrupting a court as an act of protest against government inaction on climate change. Here is a short video she made explaining her behaviour and making the case for radical action beyond business as usual, with her own vision focused around small-scale farming. Please share it with your networks if you’re minded to – pebbles, ripples and all that.
At an earlier court appearance, she was troubled to be told by a magistrate that her right to protest climate policy had to be balanced against the right of people such as car drivers to go about their business. In her view, this encapsulated the distorted priorities of our decisionmakers in effectively trading off present niceties with the very stability of Earth systems that enable human and other lives.
Here’s an excerpt from the livestream of the court disruption, and here she is talking outside the court after her sentence with Shel, her partner in non-crime, with some good points well made by both of them, in my opinion.
I don’t know if her course of action today was the right one. She and I have discussed many times the choices to be made in the face of the world’s present looming crises and the limited powers of individuals, including the individuals in government, to effect change. I don’t think there can ever be clear answers to the question of what is to be done. But I’m pretty sure that we do need to do something orders of magnitude faster and deeper than current climate policies if we’re to meet the challenge. So why not glue yourself to a courtroom? It’s not as if anything else is working much better.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
