Why direct action?

Everyone is talking about climate change. People on the street, political parties, businesses, even coal and oil corporations have taken up the mantra – something must be done about climate change. The problem is, it's all just talk. Governments and corporations around the world are digging up more and more fossil fuels every year. Consumption of energy and resources is skyrocketing everywhere. Greenhouse pollution is intensifying, and global temperatures are surging even faster than the most pessimistic scientists were predicting just a few years ago. We don't have time to waste. Climate change is a genuine emergency, and the root cause is fossil fuels. Every new coal mine, every new oil and gas well is pushing us closer and closer to the tipping point of unstoppable catastrophic climate change.

If we leave solving climate change to business and government, they will fail. Writing letters, lobbying, and changing our light bulbs is not working. We need to take action ourselves, engage in civil disobedience and non-violent direct action to prevent the expansion of the fossil fuel industries that are endangering life on earth. When laws are unjust or are destroying our future, people of conscience have a responsibility to act. It’s just as true now as it was in the 1700’s when Irish politician Edmund Burke said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

Peaceful direct action and civil disobedience are a fundamental part of our democracy. The reason we have weekends is because of labour movement protests. Women have the vote because the Suffragettes took to the streets. The anti-slavery movement, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement all used civil disobedience to win fundamental freedoms that we now take for granted. It is now clear that people power will be the only effective counterbalance to the vested interests of the coal and fossil fuel industry who are effectively writing climate change policy and who are threatening our future. After twenty years of inaction, non-violent direct action increasingly becomes a moral duty.

The camp for climate action will be an inspiring 5 days of workshops and grassroots direct action aimed at stopping the expansion of the world’s biggest coal port in Newcastle. The camp will be a participatory, sustainable space, where people are invited to share, learn and take action. We'll draw from the experience of the anti-uranium campaign that successfully stopped the proposed Jabiluka mine. People will share their experiences of protecting old growth forests in Tasmania, Victoria, NSW and WA. We'll learn from all this and more. And we'll invent whole new ways of taking peaceful direct action to bring a halt to the coal juggernaut. The camp will be guided by the principle of non-violence, and by a strong belief in the power of collective action. We encourage you to get together with friends and family to form "action teams" before you come to the camp, so you can learn together, and explore possibilities for action before, during and after the camp.

For a surprising list of what makes a good direct action activist, visit the coal hole.

For more information about action teams, click here.

For other tools for direct action organising (including non-violence philosophy, workshops, case studies and 'how to' manuals), click here.

If you'd like to discuss and debate questions surrounding 'direct action' and 'nonviolence', check out the discussion forums.