Two Coal Mines In North East England Shutdown By Protests

ACTIVISTS UNDER THE BANNER OF EARTH FIRST! TAKE ON COAL MINING IN THE NORTH EAST OF ENGLAND. TWO COAL MINES SHUT DOWN!

In the ear­ly hours of this morn­ing, activists from the North East,
around the UK and abroad entered and occu­pied machin­ery in Field House mine and block­ad­ed Schot­ton mine to stop them from con­tin­u­ing to dig up coal, destroy­ing the sur­round­ing envi­ron­ment and con­tribut­ing to the cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe.

Open­cast coal min­ing is strong­ly resist­ed in the “des­o­late North”, an
area that has become a sac­ri­fice zone for con­tin­ued eco­nom­ic growth at
the cost of the glob­al cli­mate, local envi­ron­ment and  com­mu­ni­ty health. It sup­plies the UK’s dirty pow­er sta­tions, lead­ing CO2 emit­ters, while peo­ple in the glob­al South are suf­fer­ing the con­se­quences. Even in the UK we are start­ing to see the impacts of cli­mate change such as flood­ing and the expect­ed sea lev­el rise will affect coastal areas around the coun­try.

Field House open­cast start­ed in 2018 and is oper­at­ed by Har­g­reaves. The
exact des­ti­na­tion or pow­er sta­tions that the coal is being trans­port­ed to is unknown. Machin­ery inside the mine is occu­pied.

Coal pro­vid­ed just 5.3% of the elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed in the UK in 2018.
Recent research by Friends of the Earth has shown that already, enough
coal is held in stock­piles in the UK to last until 2025, the date by which the UK gov­ern­ment has com­mit­ted to phas­ing out coal.

Yet, it allows for con­tin­ued extrac­tion, expan­sion and even pro­pos­als
for 2 new coal mines to go ahead.

Coal burn­ing is not only one of the main con­trib­u­tors to cli­mate change, but also destroys valu­able habi­tat and impacts air qual­i­ty where it is dug and where it is burnt. The Bradley mine in the Pont Val­ley, Durham for instance, vio­lat­ed Euro­pean and UK nature con­ser­va­tion leg­is­la­tion by destroy­ing Great Crest­ed Newt habi­tat.

We need to stop import­ing coal, and we need to stop dig­ging it up in the
UK now. Frack­ing, bio­mass, gas and nuclear are not solu­tions either.
Nei­ther do we want large-scale, cor­po­rate-con­trolled renew­able ener­gy
instal­la­tions that rely on the min­ing of rare met­als else­where to pow­er
indus­tri­al so-called “devel­op­ment”. Green cap­i­tal­ism is not the answer.

Instead, we have to work towards rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent, local­ly and
com­mu­nal­ly con­trolled, off-grid solu­tions that involve the use of DIY
tech­nolo­gies made with recy­cled mate­ri­als. These solu­tions need to be
cou­pled with a dras­tic reduc­tion in ener­gy con­sump­tion, and a wider,
rad­i­cal oppo­si­tion to our cap­i­tal­ist plu­toc­ra­cy. Such sys­tems can then
be embed­ded in non-hier­ar­chi­cal­ly organ­ised shar­ing economies that
oper­ate accord­ing to prin­ci­ples of mutu­al aid and sol­i­dar­i­ty.

Earth­First! is a plat­form for peo­ple to take direct action against the
destruc­tion of the earth. We adhere to prin­ci­ples of non-hier­ar­chi­cal
organ­i­sa­tion and the use of direct action to con­front, stop and reverse
the destruc­tion of the earth.

No com­pro­mise in defence of the earth!

@earthfirst_uk

Back­ground info

The Durham coal­field has been a work place and source of ener­gy since
Roman times. At its height, this coal­field employed almost 250,000
minework­ers and their union was the lifeblood of their com­mu­ni­ties.
Durham min­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the nation­al strike for a year from March
1984 resist­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s plan to close more than 70 under­ground
mines, (but only 20 clo­sures were acknowl­edged at the time) in an effort
to increase elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion from import­ed coal, nuclear and gas
and try to smash the pow­er of the unions. Min­ers came togeth­er to fight against the pit clo­sures and to sup­port the fam­i­lies left in pover­ty as wages stopped com­ing in.

The last under­ground mine in the Durham closed in 1993, but the
com­mu­ni­ty cul­ture born of the indus­try and col­lec­tive resilience car­ries
on. Now mem­bers of the same com­mu­ni­ties are fight­ing to stop the total
eco­log­i­cal oblit­er­a­tion, noise, dust, heavy traf­fic, denial of access to
nat­ur­al spaces and com­mu­ni­ty dis­em­pow­er­ment that are open­cast coal extrac­tion.

Also near­by lies a site of con­tin­ued strong oppo­si­tion to coal by the Cam­paign to Pro­tect Pont Val­ley who bat­tle against Banks Group in their
val­ley. Banks Group’s the only Eng­lish com­pa­ny sub­mit­ting plans to
expand its coal extrac­tion ven­ture, with appli­ca­tions await­ing deci­sions
to open­cast Dew­ley Hill (out­skirts of New­cas­tle) and at Druridge Bay (a
stun­ning beach north of New­cas­tle). Banks wants to extend the open­cast
in the Pont Val­ley and could put in fur­ther exten­sion appli­ca­tions at
its two exist­ing open­cast sites in Northum­ber­land.