Respect existence or expect resistance!
Site phone is live! If you need help getting on site give us a call or message us at 07949490913 – preferably by Signal!
We’re now 24 hours into our Summer Gathering and our schedule of workshops is beginning this morning. If you want to come and take part, all site and access information is available at earthfirst.uk
Hope to see you here. Love and rage!
Come one! Come all! Bring your friends!
EF!ers have secured the squatted site for this year’s Summer Gathering which is (drum roll please)… on Moscar Moor in the Peak District!
Grid ref: 53.382678,-1.680292
What3Words: blotches.weep.glass
EF!ers have been beavering away since the early hours to set up some basic infrastructure and now require all hands on deck to get Big Top up!
For those of ya coming from Sheffield, the site is accessible by a half hour direct bus ride from the city centre, on the 257 bus to Cutthroat Bridge. The bus runs from about 8am until 6pm (except on Sundays) – any gaps in the service should be filled by a shuttle. It will then be a 5 minute walk on a slightly bumpy, narrow track next to the road, and then up a track with a steep section.
Or for those of ya rolling in from the west you can take the Hope Valley line to Bamford, from there the site will be a ten minute bus journey, also on the 257.
There is no on-site parking, and hardly any nearby. There is a layby at Cutthroat Bridge, however this should be prioritised for site vehicles, people with access needs, shuttle run vehicles, and people who aren’t us who want to go on a walk. So if you’re not in that category, please find a place to park elsewhere and take the bus or walk. You are very welcome to do drop offs at the gate.
Please bring some water and a packed lunch if you’re arriving today, as the first scheduled meal won’t be until the evening, assuming the rest of set up goes to plan! If you can bring food to share – all the better 😋
Check in with each other during set up, and take regular breaks for hydration and sun block! There’s a role for everyone and no one should feel like they’re being forced to do tasks they don’t feel 100% safe doing!!
The gathering will last until Monday 17th, which is the pack down day. On Monday we ask folks to help pack down the site or go home so we don’t have to source food for an excess number of people. On Monday there will be breakfast, but no lunch or dinner.
Hope to see you soon on this beautiful space we’ve reclaimed!
Love and rage!
Why here?
This year’s Earth First! Summer Gathering is on a part of the Moscar Estate. But why did we decide to squat some land here and not somewhere else?
Moscar is a 6000-acre grouse shooting estate in the Peak District which is owned by the Duke of Rutland, a rightSite announced! wing aristocrat who lives in a fancy castle in Leicestershire. He is a fox hunter who also owns the Belvoir Estate, just to help paint the picture. His sole interest in this land is to use it for the blood sport of shooting grouse – and it is ruthlessly managed to achieve this.
Grouse moorland management is devastating for animal welfare, ecology and the climate. The Hunt Investigation Team surveyed Moscar between 2017 and 2022, and found that the gamekeepers systematically use guns and traps to murder all potential predators of grouse, such as foxes and birds of prey. Other animals end up in the firing line too, with 71% of snare catches belonging to species they weren’t targeting as grouse predators, such as badgers and lambs.
Part of grouse moor management is the regular setting of so-called ‘controlled’ fires, in order to remove areas of heather, as grouse eat the green shoots of heather regrowing. These fires often run out of control and burn for days, creating wildfires which kill wildlife and destroying the vital peat carbon sink, all while accelerating the climate crisis. In 2023, Moscar Estate deliberately set fire to large areas of its land, blanketing Sheffield in smoke and causing a public outcry.
We’re here in part to support a local campaign called Reclaim our Moors. They are demanding that the Duke of Rutland sell the estate back to the public for a token sum of £1, so it can return to being used for the good of all life – not just the rich, murdering landowners. You can find out more and participate at these events:
Saturday 15th: Introduction to the Reclaim Our Moors campaign
Sunday 16th: Join the annual ROM protest against grouse shooting. This will involve a ~5km hike out to the ROM rally spot, where there will be speeches and music from 12pm. Come to the workshop on Saturday to find out more!
We have some workshops lined up for the summer gathering! Some titles include…
International Solidarity Movement in Palestine, Access to Land for Disabled Folks, Biocentrism 101 , EF! goes prepping, First Aid, Reclaim Our Moors, Organisation against G7, Action Climbing, AI, History of the Luddites, Eugenics & GM food, Reclaiming Birth, Tech security, Kurdish freedom movement, Electrics, Green Anarchism 101, Consent*, Visible mending* Reclaiming Play*, Foraged Sculptures**, Forest School activities**
*all ages
**for kids
and much much more!
Plans just announced by EWR to build a 24 hour train maintenance depot and train sidings in the village of Fulbourn, as it has not been well advertised and the consultation closes on 9th June.
It will involve a compulsory purchase of Green Belt land and will be constructed adjacent to the Fulbourn chalk springs (the ‘Poor Well’) and streams and adjacent to 3 sites of Special Scientific Interest.
6 trains will be cleaned overnight between 10.30pm-3.30am 7 days a week. Mostly internal cleaning but some external cleaning. There is no plan for where the water will come from for the external cleaning. The area is severely water depleted with the village chalk streams drying up for the last 3 summers.
Each train will have 5 toilets which will be emptied into septic tanks and the effluent collected by sludge trucks once a week. These sludge trucks will come via the Wilbrahams (as will all the construction traffic).
The chalk springs and streams that border the planned Fulbourn site risk being polluted by leaks from the depot. The Environmental Agency has documented many leaks from so-called ‘sealed’ cleaning and toilet management systems.
Fulbourn is also one of the only locations in the UK where swifts (a Red List species) nest) and the village has put huge efforts into putting up boxes and annual monitoring. They are likely to be disrupted by this development as it will be operational 10.30pm- 3.30pm and will have permanent night lighting. The sidings will be raised to the lighting will be very visible for a wide distance.
The site also borders a designated ancient monument and the village sits at the intersection of Fleam Dyke and the Icknield Way meaning there are likely to be other heritage assets as yet undocumented eg When the railway was built in mid-1840s a Roman villa was found but remains unexcavated.
The online website from EWR and the recent consultation indicate that an alternate site outside Foxton was also considered and was acknowledged by EWR to be a less sensitive site from a natural/heritage and social (fewer houses directly affected) perspective. It is also adjacent to a sewage works which would mean no need for storage and transportation of sewage.
The reason this alternative site was turned down was it would be further to roll empty trains to and from Cambridge station.
Once Green Belt and chalk streams are gone, they can never be restored. It’s time to mobilize our networks and fight this!
See more info about EWR’s plans, and respond to the consultation here: https://eastwestrail.co.uk/consultation/consultation2026
Sign the petition and get involved with the local campaign here https://save-fulbourn.netlify.app
Drop an email to earthfirst.uk@proton.me to link up with EF!ers who care deeply about this issue and want to take at a stand against it!!
Hello EF!ers, just a quick one to say you can no longer reach us at earthfirstuk@riseup.net! If you need to get in touch with us, whether its to chat about access, propose a workshop or recommend a site for a gathering, please use our new email: earthfirst.uk@proton.me
Dope magazine has published this lovely new article about ecological direct action and the history of Earth First! – it’s well worth a read 🙂
Here’s the PDFs for the most recent version of Return Fire, vol.4, of autumn 2016 – additionally with the supplement that accompanies it. Once again, 100 pages of passion, commentary, proposals and interview material.
Here’s the PDFs for the most recent version of Return Fire, vol.4, of autumn 2016 – additionally with the supplement that accompanies it. Once again, 100 pages of passion, commentary, proposals and interview material. The supplement, Caught in the Net, is a survey of critical perspectives on what information age technology is doing to our cognitive abilities, our health more generally, and our capacity to rebel. It comes as a separate document, of another 28 pages. Both colour and greyscale cover options are available, for further reproduction and distribution.
http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/return-fire-vol4-covers-COLOUR.pdf
http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/return-fire-vol4-covers-BW.pdf
http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/return-fire-vol4-contents.compressed.pdf
To give you an idea, a few of the featured pieces are the Institute for the Study of Insurgent Warfare’s essay Panopticons Then & Now, arguing for a more sophisticated understanding of the surveillance State; On the Catastrophe of the Salmon Farms and Martime Devastation in the Patagonian Sea as recounted by members of Colectivo Critica y Accion following the events of 2016; words on avoiding needlessly repetitious deeds and indeed aiming to ‘hit where it hurts’ as highlighted in Dissonanz #34 by Taking Apart Authority; and Sold Out to the Industry tells of U.K. unionism cosying up to the fracking prospectors, from The Acorn.
Other articles we have condensed or synthesised are those such as the ‘Antagonistic Margins’ of seduction, contagion and queering the ‘terrortory’, by The Experimentation Committee; the presentation of “Another Figure of the Migrant” as theorised by Thomas Nail in conversation with the Hostis journal; or Ed Lord’s discussion of modernity and questions of psychological ‘disorders’, ‘A Profound Dis-ease’.
Plenty of direct attacks on structures of our enemies found their way into our Global Flash-Points listing, as usual, as did the lowdown on various trials and kidnappings of those we feel an affinity to in Rebels Behind Bars. Our review for the issue is a reappraisal of the John Zerzan essay, Animal Dreams, by Bellamy Fitzpatrick, as To Love the Inhuman, mindful of the recurrent pitfalls of certain aspects of anti-civilisation analysis. Verses of Hunter Hall, Gabriel Pombo da Silva, Robert Hass and more made it into this round of Poems for Love, Loss & War.
Delving back to grasp Memory as a Weapon, in this section we’ve got stuff from “An Outragous Spirit of Tumult & Riot” during the Luddite rebellions against assimilation into the factory system of booming British industrialism (resurrected from the archives of Do or Die magazine) to A Shorter History of a Northwest E.L.F. Cell (sometimes exhilarating, sometimes dismaying) which was serialised in Tides of Flame, charting the rise and fall of one particular environmental guerrilla faction leading into the ‘Green Scare’ of a decade gone by; and that’s just a part of it…
As for the rest, grab a copy and see what moves you.
Comments, suggestions and submissions: returnfire@riseup.net
More soon.
R.F.
Afterword: The timestamp on this volume means that some developments are not up to date in the online release. We’d encourage readers to research cases that interest them for updates, but for now we wanted to at least publicise the prison address for one anarchist who has since been sentenced to 7 years and 6 months for the Aachen case outlined in vol.4 (the second defendant, also arrested in Barcelona, was acquitted). She welcomes correspondence in English, Spanish, Italian or German; let’s not leave her alone. Inform yourself, arm yourself, reach out, make a fist.
Post to:
Lisa
Buchnummer: 2893/16/7
Justizvollzuganstanlt (JVA) Köln
Rochusstrasse 350
50827 Köln – Germany
Return Fire vol 1: http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=14689
Return Fire vol.2: http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=18655
Return Fire vol.3: http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=23837
Whirlwind, Voices of Resistance and Ecological Direct Action from Earth First! A5 zine. The first issue!
Avaialble from your local radical bookshop, ecological direct action group or http://www.activedistributionshop.org/shop/zines/4209-whirlwind-earth-first-zine-winter-201617.html
We want your writing!
We want your writing!
For a semi-regular zine of activist reflections and actions.
This is an invitation for articles offering a critical analysis and reflections on Earth First! and related environmental and social justice direct action movements, how we organise and the actions we take. Contributions can be about actions in the UK or international. We also welcome book reviews, activist resources, short rants, illustrations, cartoons, poems and photographs. We suggest 500 – 2000 words for articles, but contact us if you want to do something longer.
We aim to have a zine in print and online by the Earth First! winter moot 2017. All articles will be copyleft and you can choose whether to write anonymously. Deadline November 30 2016.
Also contact us if you want to join our editorial collective or offer us funding.
zine@earthfirst.org.uk or contact us if you want to send an article by snail mail.
