Environmental activists have climbed to new heights at COP17. Known for courting arrest by attempting to commandeer oil rigs and whaling ships to highlight their pro-environment protests, seven Greenpeace members were arrested at the UN climate change conference for trying to hang a banner demanding: "Listen to the People, not the Polluters".
The activists were described in their press release as "climbers", as some mountaineering skills were required to reach the spot where they aimed to hang the banner at the top of a beachfront high-rise hotel hosting a World Business Council conference. But the Durban municipality said the activists should have gotten permission and had four of the foreign activists deported - which only brought further publicity to their cause of combating climate change.
Climbing is nothing new to Greenpeace. Its executive director, Durban-born Kumi Naidoo, scaled an oilrig off the coast of Greenland earlier this year to protest drilling for fossil fuels in the Arctic.
African environmental groups GroundWork and Earthlife Africa joined their international counterparts Urgewald and BankTrack in another creative protest in the opening week of COP17, one that relied less on physical prowess than wit. In condemning banks for financing coal exploitation, their alleged crime was described as "bankrolling" climate change - pun definitely intended. Of the two African banks cited as the biggest "climate killers", South Africa's Standard Bank and Nedbank, the environmental NGOs were heartened that at least one bank took the accusations seriously enough to issue a formal response.
Nedbank countered the environmentalists' slogans with its own "Go Green!" approach, pointing to a set of standards for managing environmental risks in project financing. These voluntary guidelines were dismissed as more "greenwashing" by the accused financiers of dirty energy.
The battle of the slogans continues. Most ubiquitous, in conference banners and shouted at protests seems to be: "Keep the coal in the hole, keep the oil in the soil!" An add-on, referring to the Canadian tar sands controversy, is "Keep the tar sands in the land!"
GroundWork Director Bobby Peek says these publicity stunts are all part of the environmentalists' campaign to fight what he sees as the biggest problem with COP17: "the corporate capture of public spaces that stands in the way of good, people-based solutions". Peek took time out from the conference to take two of his group's international counterparts, Friends of the Earth International and Sierra Club, to witness South Africa's "dirty energy" for themselves.
Peek led a tour of coal mining areas and a coal-fired power plant in the neighbouring Gauteng province. His group's goal was to call attention to surrounding areas without electricity and demand investment in cleaner energy alternatives in place of foreign financing of African power.
GroundWork also conducted a "Toxic Tour of Durban", showing journalists the oil refineries and paper factories that it says are polluting Durban's South Basin and hurting the health of the people who live there.
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In another effort to humanize the often bureaucratic and scientific tone of climate change discourse, a spotlight was shone on the waste pickers who work in dumps and landfills. South African Waste Pickers Association members protested alongside their counterparts from Brazil, India and Senegal from the Global Alliance of Wastepickers and the Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives at the weekend protest march.
Among the most creative efforts at grabbing media attention around climate change is the Climate Action Network's Fossil of the Day Award to "the parties that obstruct the negotiations the most". A coalition of NOS sponsored a mock sports event, the Robin Hoods vs the 1% Bankers soccer match. And the global coalition, tcktcktck, sponsored a roar of courage for climate action in which some 2000 Durban school children created the world's largest human lion on the Indian Ocean beach.
