Sixteen Metre Banner Dropped from Edinburgh Crags to Promote Heathrow Climate Camp

3rd August:
Dur­ing rush-hour this morn­ing, activists dropped a 16 metre long ban­ner from the Edin­burgh Crags to pro­mote Cli­mate Camp. The ban­ner read ‘This plan­et has no emer­gency exits’, and then gave the web­site for the cli­mate camp: www.climatecamp.org.uk.

After two hours of tan­gled ropes and wrestling with the wind, the ban­ner was final­ly hung. With­in ten min­utes of the suc­cess­ful drop, park rangers turned up and informed the activists that they would be arrest­ed for ‘breach of peace’ if the ban­ner was not imme­di­ate­ly removed. The ranger informed the ban­ner-hang­ers that they were on ‘the queen’s prop­er­ty’ and could also be fined. The activists man­aged to retain the ban­ner and have not been charged as yet.

Press spokesper­son for the Scot­tish Bar­rio of the camp, Katie Glass said, ‘We’re hop­ing as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble from Scot­land will make the trip to the camp, to rep­re­sent this coun­try in what we feel is an issue of nation­al and glob­al impor­tance. Clear­ly action needs to be tak­en now regard­ing cli­mate dam­age, espe­cial­ly in wake of the mas­sive flood­ing down south. We don’t feel the wel­fare of the nat­ur­al world can be left to Gov­ern­ments, Indus­try, or any­one who stands to prof­it from fur­ther­ing the dam­age already being done. It’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly urgent that we all take action to ensure the con­tin­ued via­bil­i­ty of life on this plan­et.’

Many peo­ple will be trav­el­ling from Edin­burgh and around Scot­land to the camp next week, along with an esti­mat­ed five thou­sand oth­ers from around Britain and Europe. The camp takes place between August 14th and 21st, on a site near Heathrow Air­port, whose plans for con­struc­tion of a third run­way have made it the pri­ma­ry focus for the protests.

A court deci­sion on the Air­port’s attempt­ed injunc­tion, which would make it ille­gal for any mem­bers of cer­tain char­i­ties and organ­i­sa­tion (poten­tial­ly affect­ing up to five mil­lion peo­ple, includ­ing the Roy­al Fam­i­ly) is expect­ed lat­er today. Ms Glass says ‘what­ev­er the court deci­sion, the Scot­tish Bar­rio will not be bul­lied into stay­ing away. We’ll see you down there.’

For more info on the scot­tish bar­rio con­tact scot­land (at) risingtide.org.uk
scot­tish­bar­rio (at) lists.riseup.net