A new film by documentary maker Nick Broomfield, A Time Comes is now available to view on youtube. It tells the story of the "Kingsnorth Six," Greenpeace activists who attempted to close the coal fired power station at Kingsnorth in 2007 as a protest against government plans to allow a second plant at the site, due for completion in 2012. The protesters were famously acquitted of an alleged £30,000 worth of damage to the station in May 2009. They had argued that the coal fired power industry's contribution to climate change constituted legitimate grounds for protest. Michael Wolkind QC, acting for the six, laid out the consequences of a reliance on coal, citing inevitable damage to:
"the Siberian permafrost and tundra regions, especially the Kola peninsula; the continental ice sheets; the Tibetan peninsula; the Yellow river in China, its banks and connected waterways; public and private property in Bangladesh; property belonging to or cultivated by subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Senegal, Namibia and Mozambique; private and public property in coastal regions and inland waterways of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, including farm land producing crops; property belonging to the Inuit people of the Arctic, northern Alaska, eastern Greenland and Canada." (See his report here).
The case was considered a landmark one, essentially legitimating direct action which seeks to mitigate climate change, or promote further action in the interests of its mitigation.
Broomfield's film is named after a fragment of the line "A time comes when silence is betrayal," which it attributes to Martin Luther King. In fact, King was himself quoting a report from the executive committee of the organisation Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, at whose meeting he was speaking (1967). After making the foregoing statement, he goes on to say:
"The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy [...]. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do [...] we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on."
This inspirational advice applies as much to the Kingsnorth Six, and to today's activist / lobbyist community, as to King's '67 audience of the concerned.
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