Other sections:
Part 1
Part 3 (Notes)


Part II


Hunting the Machines

Every month brought news of an increase in sabotage
despite minimal coverage in either mainstream or radical press, not least because
communiqués were rarely sent. Sabotage largely centred around projects
where ongoing daytime campaigns were underway, but some was done in solidarity
with campaigns further afield. With so many groups fighting multiple schemes
by the same companies actions often ended fulfilling both roles. ARC, for instance,
had supplied roadstone to Twyford Down and was trying to expand quarries in
North Wales and Somerset.

"After forcing their way into the control room [of ARC Penmaemawr quarry]
the intruders smashed a glass partition and then caused £10,000 worth
of damage to computer equipment."[31]

The scale of sabotage carried out during the '90s land struggles is often
forgotten. Altogether the direct costs of replacement and repair at construction
sites must have easily run into the tens of millions. Fantasists may dream
that this was the work of highly organised anonymous cells, striking and then
disappearing[32], but in truth most trashings were carried out by those camping
onsite; either subtley during digger diving, raucously as a mob, or covertly
after heavy drinking sessions around the campfire. Basically, whenever it was
possible, people fucked shit up. The sensible and commendable desire not to
boast has left these actions hidden behind newspaper images of smiling 'tree-people'.
The grins though were often those of mischievous machine wreckers; near campfires
no yellow monster was safe from the hunt.

Some celebrity liberals[33] argued 'criminal damage' should not have a place
in campaigns as it would put off 'normal everyday people'. This ridiculous
idea was even stupider considering one of the main groups consistently carrying
out sabotage were those locals with jobs and families who didn't have available
(day)time to live on site, and for whom arrests for minor digger-diving could
lead to unemployment and family problems. For many 'normal everyday people'
covert sabotage was less risky than overt 'civil disobedience'. Another group
of locals that always took to 'environmental vandalism' like ducks to water
were kids, nearly always the most rebellious section of any community, often
with the most intimate relationship to the local environment.

Of course despite what I say above, some ecotage was carried out entirely
covertly with modus operandi borrowed from the Animal Liberation Front.

"Police believe a £2 million blaze at an Essex construction site could
be the work of Green Activists. The fire swept through Cory Environment's aggregates
and waste disposal site at Barling, near Southend, ruining four bulldozers,
two diggers, and a fleet of six trucks owned by the main contractor. The police
say that forensic evidence confirms arson."[34]
There is no Justice, Just Us!

It was becoming obvious that the ecological land
struggles were really getting in the way of 'progress'.

The government (correctly) saw the movement as part of a social fabric (travelling
culture, festivals, squatting, hunt sabbing) born of the '60s/'70s upsurge.
With the Criminal Justice Bill it sought to tear this fabric apart. No more
toleration, the government announced; it was giving itself new powers to close
free parties, ban demonstrations, create huge exclusion zones, evict squats
and jail persistent road-protest 'trespassers'. Unsurprisingly this challenge
was met with a sudden flurry of activity. High street squat info centres around
the country; local and national demos. Thousands turned up for marches in London.
Rather than deterring people the new laws brought people together - 'Unity
in Diversity' the call of the day.

On October the 9th a demo of 75,000 ended in Hyde Park for the normal ritual
of platform speakers. When a sound-system tried to get in at Speakers Corner
to turn it into an illegal 'party in the park', it was attacked by police.
In turn people fought back. The call went out across the Park - Defend the
System; thousands ran from the speeches to the action - the Hyde Park Riot
had begun.

"Although some people faced up to the police in Park Lane itself, most of
the crowd ended up inside the park separated by the metal railings from the
riot cops. This made it difficult for the police to launch baton charges or
send in the horses, and when they tried to force their way through the small
gates in the railings they were repelled with sticks, bottles and whatever
was to hand."

"There were some very surreal touches while all this was going on: people
dancing not far from the police lines, a unicyclist weaving his way through
the riot cops, a man fire-breathing. Some people have argued that the police
deliberately provoked a riot to make sure the Criminal Justice Bill was passed,
but this ignores the fact that there was never any danger of the CJB not being
passed, as there had never been any serious opposition within parliament."[35]

Hyde Park - like the eviction of the Dongas - was a landmark confrontation.
At Twyford the movement was forced to face up to the reality of state violence.
At Hyde Park it was forced to face the reality of movement violence, the reality
being simple - when faced with riot cops many saw nothing wrong with fighting
back to defend temporarily liberated space. At the beginning of the march 'Keep
it Fluffy' stickers had been handed out liberally. Later as the helicopter
floodlights shone down on a riot, the sight of a crusty with a rainbow jumper
emblazoned with one of the stickers - throwing a bit of paving slab at the
cops - showed how moments of collective power can change people. The following
months would see an intensification of 'violence/nonviolence' discussions around
the country.

When the Bill became an Act in November everyone understood that the only
way to defeat a possible 'crackdown' was by defying it. As the EF! Action
Update put it: "As far as it affects Earth First!ers... its purpose is
not so much to imprison us as to intimidate us - and we mustn't let that work."[36]
The day the Act went through on November 4th, activists from No M11 climbed
onto the roof of Parliament and unfurled a banner - Defy The Act. Hunt sabs
went out in bigger numbers, more road protest camps were established, free
parties flourished. By the end of the month a big confrontation came that would
test whether the government had succeeded in intimidating the resistance.

IMAGE: Police advances were defeated time after time at Hyde Park. In a sign
of mass defiance the planned rally of the bored was abandoned in favour of
a festive insurrectionary battle.
A Street Reclaimed

Throughout the Summer, evictions and resistance on
the M11 had continued and most of the route was rubble. One major obstacle
lay in the path of the bulldozers - Claremont Road, an entire squatted street
had been transformed into a surreal otherworld. Turned inside-out, the road
itself became the collective living room, the remaining cars flowerbeds. Above
the sofa, huge chess board and open fire a vast scaffolding tower reached daily
further up to the sky. This 'state of the art' reclaimed street was not going
to take eviction easy. When it did come, it became the longest and most expensive
in English history - 5 days, 700 police, 200 bailiffs and 400 security guards,
costing £2 million.

"When the bailiffs arrived they were met by 500 people using every delay tactic
possible. A concrete filled car with protruding scaffold poles stopping the
cherry pickers moving in. People locked on to the road. Others hung in nets
strung across the street. People in bunkers, others huddled on rooftops and
in treehouses. Lastly, 12 people scrambled up the 100ft scaffold tower painted
with grease and tied with pink ribbons."[17]

One by one, minute by costly minute, the state forces removed the 500 - taking
the best part of a week. The sheer ingenuity of the tactics, the resolve of
the people involved and the incredible barricading techniques made this an
amazing moment. Like the Chestnut Tree, Solsbury Hill and a dozen other evictions,
the state won the battle - but they were losing the war. With every hugely
expensive eviction, every trashed machine, every delayed contract, every citizen
turned subversive, every tree occupied - the social and economic cost of pushing
through the roads programme was becoming unbearable.

Yet Claremont - like all anti-roads sites - wasn't simply a reaction to destruction,
it was also a reaffirmation of life, of autonomy. It was an experience that
changed hundreds of people; its memory would remain precious and propel a whole
new wave of streets to be reclaimed. Reclaim the Streets had been formed by
EF!ers in '92 to combat the car culture on the city streets. With the expansion
of anti-road resistance the idea had gone into hibernation, but many who had
seen the topsy-turvey, inside-out world of Claremont Road wanted to feel the
like again. After the end of the M11 campaign, RTS was reformed. The state
had foolishly thought Claremont Road lay in rubble; in fact it haunted those
who'd been there and its festive rebel spectre would reappear on streets across
the country.

It started with a reclamation of that bastion of consumption, Camden High
Street.

"Two cars entered the high street and to the astonishment of passing shoppers
ceremoniously piled into each other - crash! Thirty radical pedestrians jumped
on top and started trashing them - soon joined by kids. An instant café was
set up distributing free food to all and sundry, rainbow carpets unrolled,
smothering the tarmac, and a host of alternative street décor... A plethora
of entertainment followed including live music, fire-breathing... and the Rinky-Dink
bike powered sound system."[38]

A month later and the action was much bigger; word had got around - 1,500
met at the meet-up point, jumped the Tube and arrived at Islington High Street.

"They swarmed across the dual carriageway as five 25ft tripods were erected
blocking all the access roads. Half a ton of sand was dumped on the tarmac
for kids of all ages to build sand castles with. An armoured personnel carrier
blasting out rave set up, fire hydrants were opened up - spraying the ravers
dancing in the sunshine. All the cops could do was stand to the side and sweat."[39]

While the Claremont eviction was the first major sign of the failure of the
CJA, street parties spreading across the country were basically dancing on
its grave. With the Act's implementation resistance became a bit more difficult,
but its deterrent effect was dead in the water. The rebellion against the CJA
had brought together different alternative culture currents and coalesced them
into a serious counter-culture; now RTS was making more connections. Above
the wonderful spectacle of the Islington Street Party flew a banner declaring
solidarity with the Tubeworkers.

IMAGE: Like most materials on road protests, these scaffold poles were all
nicked. What a world we could build with shopping trolleys, polyprop, pallets
and cement!
Back on the Farm

While London events got the lion's share of media
coverage, people were defying the CJA all over, most by simply carrying on
with actions - 'business as usual'. The eviction of urban camps at Pollock
in Glasgow against the M77 involved hundreds - 250 kids even broke out of school
to help stop one eviction. The act had been meant to neuter direct action.
Instead in the climate of opposition, whole new struggles opened up, such as
those against the live export of sheep and calves, involving thousands more
in direct action.

In the Southwest the one year anniversary gathering at Solsbury Hill went
off with a bang. An Anti-CJA event on the hill ended with lots of fencing pulled
down, trashed machinery and security thugs in hospital. As one woman from the
local Avon Gorge EF! group put it: "I guess people had had enough of being
used as punch bags."[40] This was followed by a day of action with 200 people
- stopping most of the work along the route.

Up North the campaign against the M65 saw a major shift in tactics by both
those in the trees and those who'd taken the job of getting them out. Three
camps had already been evicted, but the crescendo came at Stanworth Valley,
an amazing network of walkways, platforms, nets and over 40 treehouses. Through
the valley surged the River Ribblesworth. It was truly a village in the sky,
which was lucky as the ground was pure quagmire half the time. You've never
seen such mud!

As well as new people and local activists there was now a dedicated nomadic
tribe, seasoned at many previous evictions. After over a year of life in the
branches, some were agile and confident at height - at home in the trees. The
state realised that it needed a new force that was as confident on the ropes
- Stanworth became the first place where members of the climbing community
took sides against nature.

"Upon entering the treetops they were quite shocked to find the people were
not just passive spectators to their own removal. A gentle but firm push with
the foot often kept them out of a treehouse. Two climbers tried to manhandle
an activist out of the trees, mistakenly thinking they were alone. The calls
for help were quickly answered and to the climbers' astonishment out of the
thick shroud of leaves above, activists abseiled down, others painered up from
below and yet more appeared from both sides running along the walkways and
branches. The climbers could be forgiven for thinking they were caught in a
spiders web."[41]

Eventually after five days, all 120 people had been ripped from the trees
- bringing the total contract cost increased by the No M65 campaign to £12.2
million. The climbers had found new lucrative employment but they would do
their best to avoid ever repeating an eviction under leaf cover. From now on
most evictions would be when the leaves were off the trees; the combined factor
of nature's abundance and activist up-for-it attitude a severe deterrent.

The spread of anti-road camps was by now incredible with '95 probably the
highpoint in terms of national spread. On top of the established camps, new
areas were occupied in Berkshire, Kent, Devon and Somerset. Over the next year
the struggle moved well beyond just fighting roads. Camps were set up to protect
land from open-cast mining in South Wales, leisure development in Kent and
quarrying in the South West. No surprise then that one of the major voices
spurring on this 'culture of resistance' got some special attention from some
special people.

Green Anarchist magazine in the mid '90s was a meeting point of movements.
Its readership included significant numbers of travellers, hunt sabs, class
struggle anarchos, Green Party members, 'eco-warriors', and animal liberationists.
It was an obvious target for the secret state. A set of 17 raids aimed at Green
Anarchist and the ALF resulted in the jailing of a number of its editors.
This repression, like the CJA, backfired. Instead of marginalising GA it
actually made them far more well known; an alliance of largely liberal publications
swung behind them, motions of support were even brought up at the Green Party
and FoE annual conferences. This increased exposure, combined with M15 fears
about court documents released in appeal hearings compromising their agents,
secured their release. A major aim of the repression against GA had
been to deter sabotage, while large parts of the CJA were aimed at stopping
'Aggravated Trespass'. Their absolute failure to deter the radical ecological
direct action movement was shown clearly one morning in Somerset.

IMAGE: The involvement of well-known climbers in state evictions inspired
a major reaction in the climbing community: they were seen for what they were
- scabs. As a result, many climbers joined the protests at Newbury. Leading
climbing writer Jim Perrin wrote: "The collaborator's traditional fate awaits
you: rigorous denunciation, vehement haranguing, exclusion from social venues,
arctic contempt. I want to ask this, of you who have betrayed your community,
friends and fellow human beings: how long will your money last? And when it's
gone, remember when he faced what he'd done, Judas had a rope too..." (Climber
magazine, May 1996) True to the threat, the state climbers were ostracised
and even forced off rock faces.

IMAGE: Fearing a similar reaction, state tunnellers
made sure to hide their identities.
Whatley Quarry - Yee Ha!

"The 'national' EF! action to shut down Whatley Quarry
was an even greater success than expected. A week later the owners hadn't managed
to restart work. At 5.30am, 400 activists descended on the quarry. Small teams
ensured gates were blockaded and all plant and machinery occupied... Detailed
maps and a predetermined plan ensured police and security were out manoeuvred.
Tripods were carried 9 miles over-night and set up on the quarry's rail line
whilst lorries were turned away. Press reports state that £250,000 worth
of damage was caused - not counting the cost of a week's lost production, for
a quarry normally selling 11,000 tonnes per day! Twenty metres of railway track
leading out of the quarry 'disappeared'; the control panel for video monitoring
of the plant fell apart; a two storey crane pulled itself to bits; three control
rooms dismantled themselves; and several diggers and conveyor belts broke down."[42]

The police managed to arrest 64 people, mostly under the CJA for aggravated
trespass. In time, most of the cases were dropped. All through the land struggle
period EF! had been organising national actions - this was by far the most
effective. It had come on the back of four years of concerted actions at Whatley
and showed what can be achieved by good organisation and the element of surprise.
While the cops had prepared in their hundreds, they simply hadn't factored
in that 'hippies' could get up at 4am. This action really set the mood for
the next year.
"An Adrenaline Junkie's Idea of Heaven"

"Police on the Newbury Bypass site today condemned
the tactics of those who last night took a heavy tractor from road-works and
drove to a construction area, where they damaged compound fencing, lighting
equipment and a portacabin building. Police were called but the offenders ran
away before they arrived at the scene."[43]

The Newbury bypass was the big battle. The scale was immense. Nine miles long,
over 30 camps, ten thousand trees, over a thousand arrests. A daily struggle
with up to 1,600 security guards[44], hundreds of police, private detectives,
and state climbers lined up against tribes of hundreds of committed, mud-living
activists. Day after relentless day, evictions and resistance. "Every morning,
cider and flies".

I don't have space to cover all the campaigns across the country, so I am
focusing on those which saw important changes. Equally, I can't hope to give
a true impression of what it was like to be living on site, at Newbury least
of all. Crazy and medieval - in both good ways and bad - is all I'll say. (The
book Copse captures the spirit of those times best, with a mix of photos,
interviews and cartoons. VERY highly recommended!)

The state had by this time learnt from some of its previous mistakes; no longer
would it try to clear the road in stages at the same time as building works
progressed. In the past this allowed a healthy mix of offensive action against
construction as well as defensive action against clearance. At Newbury the
chainsaws were given five months to clear the site. Initially when protests
had started the massive increased cost of clearence had pushed up costs - billed
straight to the corporations, destroying any profits. Now when the contracts
were tendered these millions were factored in - billed straight to the state.
This made the campaigns of this period increasingly defensive in nature. Though
there were attempts to move beyond this, to a certain extent it was an inevitable
result of a change in 'terrain'. Yet the costs of keeping a force capable of
clearing a route dotted with camps, with highly evolved defence techniques,
needing highly paid specialist climbers to evict, was now immense.

Newbury, more than any other, was a national campaign in one locale. Practically
everyone who had been heavily involved in radical eco stuff over the preceding
five years bumped into each other in the wasteland. This was no accident -
everyone knew that at Newbury the state wanted to break the movement. In reply
people were determined to break the state's resolve to build roads beyond Newbury.
Glorious defeats for us meant economic defeat for the Department of Transport.
This war of attrition had been rolling now for years but at Newbury both sides
wanted to put in the death blow. After over a year of building defences, five
months of fighting evictions, night after night of sabotage and a lifetime
of manic moments, the clearance was finished; but in the aftermath so was the
roads programme. Of course it took a while to die. Some projects were still
in the pipeline and others were continuing, but after Newbury the conclusion
was not in doubt.

A year after the clearance work had started, hundreds arrived at Newbury for
the anniversary, now known as the Reunion Rampage. After minor scuffles and
tedious speeches from the likes of FoE leadership, fencing surrounding a major
construction compound was cut, and the crowd surged in.

"So we put sand in the fuel tanks of generators, took spanners to the motor
of the crane. As we were leaving the site, a tipper truck on fire to my left
and the crane on fire down to my right, there was one man standing straight
in front of me, silhouetted against the bright billowing flames rolling up
out of the portacabin. He stood in an X shape, his hands in victory V signs,
shouting 'YES! YES! YES!' It wasn't chaotic, there was a sense of purpose,
of collective will, of carnival, celebration, strong magic, triumph of people
power, of a small but very real piece of justice being done."[45]

IMAGE: Fort Trollheim on the A30. Temporary Autonomous Zones don't get more
autonomous than this. Where the barricades rise, the state ends.

IMAGE: After a hard day digging tunnels at Fairmile there's nothing quite
like a perfect cuppa and a subterranean knitting session

After Defeats, Victories!

If this kind of disorder freaked the nation state,
local government was terrified. At Guildford, Surrey Council cancelled a scheme
where five camps had been set up - it simply couldn't afford the economic and
social costs of taking on the movement. Opencast mines were shelved in South
Wales thanks to the sterling resistance at the evictions of the Selar and Brynhennlys
camps. Camps saved nature reserves from destruction by agribusiness in Sussex.
Camps stopped supermarket developments. Camps stopped leisure developments
in Kent, and quarries were put on hold in the Southwest after costly evictions
at Dead Woman's Bottom.

If Newbury put the final nail in the coffin of the 'Roads to Prosperity' building
programme, the A30 camps were shovelling in the soil. Put into full use for
the first time, tunnels became another tactic of delay. Tree defence and complex
subterranean networks made the eviction at Fairmile last longer than every
previous eviction - with the tunnels staying occupied six days in. While the
resistance to the A30 was amazing it was also a waymarker. Following the evictions
there was NO daytime offensive action against the construction contract, though
a one day camp and some impressive 'night-work' did get done. The amazing community
had evolved over two and half years of occupation - its effect would last far
longer.

By mid 1997 Road Alert! could happily report the demise of the national roads
programme.

"It has been sliced from about £23 billion to a few £billion since
1992; nearly 500 out of the 600 road schemes have been scrapped; that's 500
places untrashed, saved - for now. These are massive cuts; Construction
News wrote '...the major road-building programme has virtually been destroyed'...
It seems fair to link the rise of direct action with the diminishing budget,
down every year since 1993, the year of the big Twyford actions."[46]

On TV even the ex-Transport Minister Stephen Norris, of all people, presented
a documentary on how 'the protesters were right' and he was wrong. Contractor
newspapers sounded more and more like obituary columns every week.

The unlikely had happened, the movement's main immediate objective had been
largely attained, and the 'threat capacity' generated by the struggle now deterred
developments in other fields. More sites were still being set up - now against
disparate targets; logging in Caledonia, housing in Essex, an airport extension
at Manchester.
Fly, Fly into the Streets!

While most camps were in the countryside, contestation
was also spreading in the streets. After the success of the London '95 street
parties, RTS followed up with an 8,000 strong take over of the M41; across
the country RTSs were held in dozens of towns often more than once. Some were
amazing revelatory moments - windows into future worlds - others were just
crap. In '96/'97 RTS London had mobilised the alternative culture ghetto -
now it was organising a break out, first making connections with the striking
tube-workers, then with the locked-out Liverpool Dockers. In an inspiring act
of solidarity radical eco-types climbed cranes, blockaded entrances and occupied
roofs at the Docks. Around 800 protestors and dockers mingled on the action
and a strong feeling of connection was born.

Following on the back of this action came a massive mobilisation just before
the May election, around 20,000 marched and partied with the Dockers at the
'March for Social Justice.' The plan had been to occupy the then empty Department
of Environment building in Whitehall. Though the police succeeded in stopping
this happening, the march ended in a huge party/riot at Trafalgar Square, above
the crowd a massive banner - 'Never Mind the Ballots, Reclaim the Streets'.
More and more street parties were continuing around the country.

IMAGE: As the AU reports, 8,000 take over the M41. A giant pantomime dame
promenades. Under her skirt, a pneumatic drill digs up the road to the rhythm
of the soundsystems' beat.
National Actions

After Whatley had been such a success, people wanted
more. Unfortunately, the police were once bitten, twice shy. Any whiff of an
EF! national mobilisation resulted in massive policing that made most actions
just impossible. While the cops were still often outfoxed, mostly by moving
location (an action in North Wales moved to Manchester, an action at an oil
refinery moved to an open-cast site), it was largely making the best of a bad
situation.

Yet it wasn't just the state that caused problems here. The big Whatley action
had come out of discussion at an EF! national gathering, with groups all over
committing themselves to both turning up and organising it. Other 'national
actions' that followed were often organised by local groups who wanted an injection
of collective power into their campaign. This meant that effectively they were
local campaigns calling on the national movement for support - very different
from the national movement organising to support a local campaign.

One of the biggest failures came when a local group - Cardigan Bay EF! - declared
a national day of action on the anniversary of the Milford Haven oil spill.
This was to be followed by actions against opencast in the Welsh valleys.

Vans arrived from around the country to find little local work had been done
by CBEF! (not even accommodation had been sorted) and no decent plans were
in place, the 'organising group' not even turning up to sort out the mess.
Meanwhile hundreds of cops waited at the port. Thankfully, the wonderful Reclaim
the Valleys stepped in days before they were due to and sorted a squat and
a few decent actions. Nevertheless, it was a disempowering experience to say
the least.

It was followed by an action at Shoreham Docks that drew 60 people... and
800 cops. Like at Milford Haven where the refinery had been closed despite
no action, all work at Shoreham stopped for the day. On one level these actions
were successful, in that they stopped work comprehensively, but disempowerment
meant they stifled any chance of long term organising around the issue.

Public defeats also resulted in a loss to the movement 'threat capacity' -
something which had the power to stall developments before they started. Though
even successful national actions (such as that at Doe Hill opencast in Yorkshire,
which turned into a smorgasbord of criminal damage) did not result in local
campaign numbers swelling, the threat capacity factor meant that local groups
looked a whole lot scarier to the target involved. This fear was a factor in
many developments not going ahead.

Attempts to go beyond individual land struggles to get 'at the root of the
problem' usually meant taking a step backwards to occasional, media-centric
events with no easily winnable immediate objectives. National direct action
campaigns against the oil industry and ruling class land ownership both died
early on.
A Shift from the Local to the Global

In 1997 a major shift of emphasis happened in the
movement. At the time it wasn't so obvious, but after a while it would become
seismic. The last massive eviction-based land struggle with multiple camps
was the resistance at Manchester airport. This was near Newbury in scale and
saw weeks of sieges and evictions, scraps in the trees, night-time fence pulling
and underground tunnel occupations: "What Newbury did for the South, Manchester
Airport did for the North in terms of attracting thousands of new people and
cementing the network"[47]

Both sides of the conflict were now highly evolved, with complex delay tactics
and well-trained state tunnel and tree specialists; on one level it became
a clash of professionals. Manchester probably continues to have an impact on
the speed at which the government is prepared to build new airports, but the
campaign - unlike that against roads or quarries - was not easily reproducible.
After all, there wasn't any major expansions elsewhere happening at the time.

Once the evictions had finished, some moved onto smaller camps around the
country - but many of those who remained active moved off site and onto new
terrains of struggle. Britain's higgeldy-piggeldy mix of land occupations,
office invasions and national actions were happening in a global context, and
that context was changing. In 1997 two landmark events happened, one in Cambridgeshire
and one in Southern Spain; both would shape the next period.

The Mexican Zapatista rebels had inspired strugglers around the world and
in 1996 held an encuentro of movements for 'land, liberty and democracy'
in their Lacandon rainforest home. A diverse mix of 6,000 turned up. The following
year in 1997 a second global encuentro was held in Spain. Attended by
many from Britain, this proposed the formation of the Peoples' Global Action
(PGA). It seemed a new global movement was being born and EF!ers wanted in.
At the same time it turned out that the 'globe' was soon coming to Britain.

"In the Autumn of 1997 a handful of activists started to talk about the May
1998 G8 summit. It seemed an opportunity not to be missed - world leaders meeting
in the UK and the chance to kick-start the debate on globalisation."[48]

On the continent there was increasing resistance to genetic engineering; but
in Britain, none. In the summer of '97 in a potato field somewhere in Cambridgeshire
activists carried out the first sabotage of a GM test site in Britain. It was
the first of hundreds to come.

Land Struggles - though still useful and active - would soon no longer be
the main 'hook' the movement hung on. Camps would continue to be set up and
many victories (and some defeats) were yet to come but the radical ecological
movement was definitely now going in a new direction. The Land Struggle Period
had inspired, involved and trained thousands. Let's make no mistake - it played
the major role in the cancellation of 500 new roads, numerous quarry/open cast
expansions, and many house building projects. An amazing coming together of
rebel subcultures (travellers, animal liberationists, EF!ers, city squatters,
Welsh ex-miners, ravers, local FoE activists and the mad) forged the biggest
wave of struggle for the land Industrial Britain had ever seen.
Consolidation and Global Resistance Period (1998 - 2002)

The spectacular growth of our action through much
of the '90s was in part thanks to the clear ecological priority of the moment
- stop roads. While many camps continued after Newbury against other developments,
without the obvious and nationally unifying factor of major road-building
the movement was a bit lost. We had never had to really think about what
to defend before; the Department of Transport did that job for us. By moving
into a period of Consolidation and Global Resistance we could pretty much
sidestep this question - for a time anyway.
Tribal Gatherings

Throughout the '90s EF! gatherings were the main
place that activists from all over got together to discuss and organise. While
most that attended felt some allegiance to the EF! banner, many were not active
in listed EF! groups and would not consider themselves 'EF!ers'. More, the
gatherings were/are a place:

"...where people involved in radical ecological direct action - or those who
want to be - get together for four days of time and space to talk, walk, share
skills, learn, play, rant, find out what's on, find out what's next, live outside,
strategise, hang out, incite, laugh and conspire."[49]

At the 1997 gathering near Glasgow, attended by around 400 people in total,
it was obvious that with the roads programme massively scaled down, some major
things were going to change. While there were many discussions throughout the
week, these were some of the key points:

• The national roads programme would continue to create individual
  aberrations (such as Birmingham Northern Relief Road) but it would
  not provide so many
  sites for resistance nation-wide.
• The road campaigns had been very successful as struggles, but had
  largely failed to leave solid groups or communities of activists behind
  after the 'direct action camp roadshow' moved on.
• Most of those present saw the radical ecological movement (and
  EF! in particular) as a network of revolutionaries, part of a global libertarian,
  ecological movement of movements.

Of course these things converged. Given that revolution wasn't looking immediate
that week, as revolutionaries we had to be in it for 'the long haul'. The '90s
had seen rapid growth, thousands had taken action but the movement, being relatively
new, didn't have the infrastructure to support long term participation. With
less major land struggles, less people would get involved in direct action.
There was a high risk that established groups might entropy when activists
got disillusioned. 'Non-aligned' individuals who had been active against roads,
yet who hadn't become part of any network, might simply drift into reformist
politics/work/drugs/mental asylums.[50]

Unsurprisingly the gathering didn't cook up any magical formulae, but it did
throw together something passable. To tackle a drop in 'recruitment' concerted
outreach would be done and to keep what activists the movement did have, local
groups would consolidate. The fight against GM test sites was enthusiastically
accepted as a new terrain of action.[51] The keynote evening talk on the weekend
was done by a woman recently returned from the Zapatista autonomous territories.
With the first congress of Peoples Global Action (PGA) coming up the following
Spring it looked like despite the drop in sizeable confrontations on
the land, we were in for an exciting few years...
Local Consolidation and Outreach

Squat cafés were nothing new, but 1998 saw
a sudden proliferation around the country, as groups took over buildings in
highly prominent locations, creating autonomous spaces where people interested
in direct action could mix and conspire. In January, Manchester EF! opened
up the first of many OKasional Cafés: "The squats were intended mainly
to get political ideas across through socialising, as political groups in Manchester
were quite inaccessible."[52] Similar projects were carried out in Brighton,
London, North Wales, Leeds, Worthing and Nottingham. In Norwich a squat café was
opened because the local group "thought it would be a good idea to do a squat
centre as a form of outreach and as a group building exercise."[53] In this
period 'direct action forums' sprung up all over - regular town meetings for
mischief making miscreants. Both the forums and the centres were essentially
attempts to bring together the diverse scenes of animal liberationists, class
struggle anarchists, forest gardeners, EF!ers and the like.

In parallel with this outreach, many radical eco circles were working to give
themselves permanent bases and support mechanisms - needed for the long haul.[54]
The number of towns with activist housing co-ops would increase substantially
over the next four years. In the countryside quite a few communities of ex-road
protesters would consolidate in bought or occupied land/housing from the Scottish
Highlands, to Yorkshire and through to Devon. Others went onto the water in
narrow boats. Following the last evictions at Manchester airport dozens moved
into the Hulme redbricks in inner-city Manchester. Other needed 'supports'
such as vans, printing machines, a mobile action kitchen, prisoner support
groups and propaganda distribution were slowly built up. This process of consolidating
local direct action communities has paid a large part in making sure that the
radical ecological movement hasn't been a one hit wonder: dying off after the
victory against the roads programme. At its centre was the obvious truth; what's
the point in trying to get more people involved if you can't keep those who
already are?

IMAGE: High street squat centres spread across the country, helping group
outreach and consolidation. Open and accessible political spaces challenged
popular perceptions: "ooh, I didn't know anarchists cleaned windows" said one
little old lady to a sponge-wielding squatter.
On the Streets, In the Fields

This period saw an escalation of crowd action on
the streets and covert sabotage in the fields: both types of action increasingly seen as
part of a global struggle.

In February '98 the first ever meeting of the PGA was held in Geneva, home
of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The congress, despite in-built problems,
was an amazing coming together of over 300 people from movements across the
globe:

"There's a woman from the Peruvian guerrilla group Tupac Amaru chatting to
an Russian environmentalist. Nearby, activists from the Brazilian land squatters
movement are doing some funky moves on the dancefloor with a guy from the Filipino
seafarers union. Then some Brits brashly challenge a bunch of Maori indigenous
activists to a drinking contest."[55]

Needless to say, the Brits lost. Ideas were swapped, arguments had and plans
were laid to take action around two events coming up in May - the annual G8
meeting and the second ministerial of the WTO a day later. Back in Britain
Reclaim the Streets parties were continuing around the country - Leeds' fourth
RTS was typical:

"West Yorkshire coppers threatened to ruin the party before it had started,
petulantly waving around side handled batons and vigorously wrestling the not-yet-inflated
bouncy castle from the vigorously bouncy crowd. But after half an hour of unrest
the police suddenly withdrew. Then a full on 600-strong party: bouncy castle,
billowing banners, free food and techno... At the end of the afternoon everyone
escorted the system safely away, whilst the police sent a few cheeky snatch
squads into the crowd's dwindling remainder; one person was run down and then
beaten with truncheons. 22 arrests."[56]

Meanwhile sabotage of GM sites was on the up. The first action against a test
site may have been in '97, but by the end of '98, thirty-six had been done
over. Most were destroyed by small groups acting at night - covert, anonymous,
prepared and loving every minute. Others were carried out by hundreds in festive
daytime trashings. GM sabotage by this time was becoming an international pursuit
with actions throughout the 'Global South' and trashings in four other European
countries. One of the best aspects of test-site sabotage is that it has been
a lot less intimidating for people to do if they have had no experience of
sabotage. After all, you don't need to know your way around a JCB engine (or
an incendiary device) to work out how to dig up sugar beet. Alongside sabotage,
other actions against GM proliferated, ranging from office occupations to the
squatting of a (recently trashed) test site.

Activists were getting more sorted, as Police Review attested: "The
protesters are ingenious, organised, articulate... They use inventive tactics
to achieve their aims. Forces are having to deploy increasingly sophisticated
techniques in the policing of environmental protests."[57] These 'sophisticated
techniques' were often quite comical: "Undercover cops who'd set up a secret
camera in a Tayside farmer's barn and parked up in their unmarked car, hoping
to catch some of the Scottish folk who are decontaminating their country by
removing genetic test crops, had to run for their lives when the car exhaust
set the barn on fire. Both the barn and the car were destroyed."[58]

On May 16th the annual G8 meeting came to Britain. The last time it had been
here in 1991, half a dozen EF!ers had caused trouble. In 1998 things were a
bit different - 5,000 people paralysed central Birmingham in Britain's contribution
to the Global Street Party. Tripods, sound-systems and banners were all smuggled
into the area.

"There were some great comic scenes of police incompetence, including them
surrounding the small soundsystem (disguised as a family car) and escorting
it into the middle of the party. They never once asked why the 'frightened
family' inside wanted to escape by deliberately driving the wrong way around
the roundabout towards the crowd. By the time they realised their mistake it
was all too late... the decks were under the travel blankets, boys. What
threw you off the scent? The baby seat, or the toys?"[59]

The party, populated by ranks of scary clowns and gurning ravers, lasted for
hours, the normal strange combination of ruck and rave. Unamused, the leaders
of the most powerful nations on earth fled the city for the day to a country
manor. This being their showpiece, the day was a major victory.

Simultaneously other PGA affiliates were on the streets in the first International
Day of Action. In India 200,000 peasant farmers called for the death of the
WTO, in Brasilia, landless peasants and unemployed workers joined forces and
50,000 took to the streets. Across the world over 30 Reclaim the Streets parties
took place, from Finland to Sydney, San Francisco to Toronto, Lyon to Berlin.

The world leaders flew off our island, no doubt with TV images of dancing
rioters on their minds, thinking 'Ah now to genteel Geneva and wine by the
lake at the WTO'. On arrival a huge (molotov) cocktail party welcomed them,
the car of the WTO Director General was turned over and three days of heavy
rioting followed. While the movement against power was always global, now it
was networking and co-ordinating at a speed and depth rarely seen before.

Street parties and GM sabotage continued throughout the Summer. No longer
content with holding one massive street party, RTS London organised two on
the same day - in both North and South London. By now state counter-action
was a real problem; following the M41 action, the RTS office had been raided
and activists arrested for conspiracy. Despite the surveillance, the parties
were both pulled off beautifully, with 4,000 in Tottenham and a similar number
in Brixton.

"I remember two of us standing at Tottenham in the hot sun, getting drenched
by a hose directed at us by a laughing local in a flat above. North London
RTS had entirely outfoxed the cops and we knew so had South London. Three sound-systems,
thousands of people - all blocking some of London's main arteries. It felt
wonderful.

"A couple of nights before, seven oil seed rape test sites had been destroyed
across the country on one night. I mean, both of us were usually pretty positive
about the movement, yet if a couple of years before someone had predicted that
one night multiple affinity groups would covertly hit seven different targets
and that that would be almost immediately followed by the simultaneous take-over
of two main streets in the capital; well both of us would have thought they
were a nutter. Thinking about those actions and looking around us at the smiling
crowd we both cracked up, our dreams were becoming reality, we were getting
stronger, the music was thumping and the party even had tented pissoirs over
the drains!"[60]

Part 1

Part 2


Part 3 (Notes)