This is a blog about Global Divestment Day, which was a success in Stockholm and other cities around Europe, and tells the story of its personal impact on Eva Lenke‘s own climate engagement. Eva is a member of the Fossil Free Stockholm group.
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Stockholm – Global Divestment Day, 2015-02-14
Since February 1985 there has not been one single month where the temperatures has been below average for the 20th century, I was in high school, about to turn 16.
My environmentalism has always been anchored in science, so I naturally belonged to the part of the movement convinced that science and technology would save the day, that we would learn from our mistakes, take the right road and solve the energy crisis and the food situation without risking the biosphere, there was time, plenty of it, back then….
To some extent I was right, the solar panels back then were a joke compared to what we have today, the same goes for wind, wave and other renewables. There is lots of excellent science on how to build up and maintain a good wholesome soil, we have come such a long way, and gained so much knowledge, in so many ways, this is all truly amazing..
In other ways, I’ve never been more wrong.
Instead of using what we’ve learned on the dangers of mono-cultures, artificial fertilizers and pesticides we now have crops that cannot function other than in toxic big Agro production. We keep using more and more pesticides, herbicides and fungicides as well as phosphorus and nitrogen to compensate for the death of the soil that is the result of so called conventional farming.
Rather than closing down our power plants after Harrisburg, or even Chernobyl, they build more, even after Fukushima. In spite of the fact that it is neither economically sound, nor safe, nor environmentally friendly.
And perhaps the worst of all;
we could have been working on ways to get out of carbon for a long time now, instead we keep burning it, and looking for more, with ever more filthy and dangerous methods.
Today, our reality is that the future is unavoidably worse than anything I or my parents have had to deal with. The science is clear, we have already locked in a lot of misery into the system, and it can still get a whole lot worse if we keep going down the fossil road.
The choice is quite simple, we either have a future that is beyond imagining, with unstoppable climate change on an ever increasing feedback loop. Or we can together create a future that will still have a lot of with weird weather, sea level rise, impediments to our way of life and high costs for mitigation and adaptation, but a future that could lead to a more just and healthy world.
We still have a fairly good chance to implement the latter, let’s not miss that!
I felt right at home in the divestment movement as soon as I tripped over it, being old enough to remember how effective this tactic was against Apartheid, finally something that you can DO. That’s why I’m now involved in the Fossil Free Stockholm campaign to see Sweden’s capital city divest from coal, oil and gas companies.
Global Divestment Day was my second event where I participated also in the planning. Working with so many positive forces and being a part of creating something that turned out so great is fantastic.
The Stockholm event started at 11 AM for those of us in the action group. We met up at City Hall with a school class from the international school that were there to help us with the performance and also to hand out flyers. Their teacher was wondering how come they were the only school involved, I think this is a good point to remember for next time, I’m sure there are more environmentally interested teachers out there.
We got the stage and started building it, the performance group rehearsed and the rest of us set up sound and video for the event. Lots of things to do, and lots of people cooperating, which went famously, everyone pitched in wherever a hand was needed.
A clear February day in Stockholm is not exactly balmy, to be sure, but we were still lucky, no snow, nor sludge, no icy rain, just sun and a slight wind. When everything was set up we had time to get a delicious vegetarian wrap.
At 1 PM a haunting joik started inside the courtyard of City Hall. Lots of curious tourists mixed in with our activists and our invited audience. Several black clad figures encroach on the one white figure at the centre of the courtyard. Then we all picked up glass water bottles and blew, making them whistle. At this signal the “carbons” changed into a white wind turbine, the blades turning at the sound of wind. Check out our flashmob video!
After the performance we left the courtyard for our stage outside the city hall courtyard, another joik summoning us.
Júhan then gave us his reasons for participating before
Olivia from 350 introduced our speakers.
Josephine from Tibble Gymnasium
Annika from Greenpeace
and
Samuel from Klimataktion
Marie from the performance group also spoke briefly and then we took some photos of the crowd.
Gathering this many on a cold Valentines day in Stockholm felt great.
The Stockholm based band ”Gullmarsplan” closed the event by playing some nice tunes.
The core of the action group stayed behind to do the necessary clean up, we also had a bit of a photo shoot with our big letters on the lake-side of City Hall. Not until 3PM did the last of us leave, tired, cold and very happy.
Swedish main media is not usually very interested in anything ”environment based” for instance they only reported on the New York march in September, not the ones all over the world or even the one in Stockholm, in spite of the absolutely gruesome weather we had.
Because of this I was truly tickled pink when I learned that our main news program had interviewed Olivia covering the topic of Global Divestment Day.
We have a window of opportunity right now to dismantle the fossil fuel industry, lets take full advantage of it.
Eva Lenke, Fossil Free Stockholm