The Massive But Largely Ignored ‘Restore Nature Now’ March in London, June 22, 2024 | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

The ‘Restore Nature Now’ march on Piccadilly in London on June 22, 2024, with Chris Packham on the edge of the photo. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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They came in their tens of thousands, on Saturday June 22, to send a message to an uncaring government and a largely indifferent mainstream media: ‘Restore Nature Now.’

The march and rally, attended by at least 60,000 people, was, essentially, a follow-up to ‘The Big One’, last year’s massive, family-friendly, non-confrontational three-day event in central London, which I wrote about here (with numerous photos), and which mixed targeted environmental protest (outside government departments and the far-right think-tanks in Tufton Street) with education and celebration.

For ‘The Big One’, for the first time, Extinction Rebellion, which had renounced “public disruption as a primary tactic”, at least temporarily, at the start of 2023, created an extraordinary alliance of over 200 organisations, under the slogan ’Unite to Survive’, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Avaaz, Earthday, the influential youth movement Green New Deal Rising, the environmentally conscious clothing firm Patagonia, the Fairtrade Foundation, the PCS union, Don’t Pay UK, DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts), CND, Global Justice Now, NHS workers, War on Want, Stop Ecocide and CAFOD.

For ‘Restore Nature Now’, conceived of by the beloved environmentalist Chris Packham, over 350 organisations — mostly focused on the threat posed to nature by climate collapse rather than its impact on human viability — took part, with Packham’s organisation Love & Rage, Friends of the Earth and Extinction Rebellion joined by an array of organisations who are not fundamentally known for their involvement in protest, including the National Trust, the RSPB, the WWF, the Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust and the Wildfowl Wetlands Trust, as well as smaller organisations covering pretty much every aspect of threatened bio-diversity in the UK and elsewhere.

In a stirring statement of intent on their website, Love & Rage declares that it “has a vision of a world where we don’t just survive, we thrive. A world where our climate is stable, biodiversity is flourishing, animal suffering and wildlife persecution have ended and humans are healthy and happy.” As they add, “We can only tackle the urgency of biodiversity loss and climate breakdown if we collectively shout above the noise. A noise of inaction, misinformation, corruption and illegality from government departments and powerful industries, to the polluting elite and billionaire press.”

The collapse of nature is a huge but generally ignored aspect of climate collapse — even though, in October 2022, the WWF/ZSL’s biennial Living Planet Report established that, as the Guardian described it, “Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years … as humans continue to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet and pollute on an industrial scale.”

The lack of attention given to bio-diversity loss is especially alarming because it is not as though politicians and the mainstream media devote anything like the amount of time and energy they should to even the most evident examples of catastrophic climate collapse, which those of us who are not brainwashed by the huge and influential climate change denial industry can see with our own eyes — unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, floods and droughts that, as predicted, are all increasing in their savagery, and are all taking place for one reason and one reason alone: our collective refusal to stop burning fossil fuels and pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with such reckless and unbridled enthusiasm that we are permanently destroying the conditions to support human life that have existed for the last 10-12,000 years, encompassing the whole of human civilisation.

There were numerous clever handmade placards on the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march in London in June 22, 2024, like this one, contrasting endangered swifts with Taylor Swift, the single individual most responsible for the threat they face through the pollution caused by her use of private jets. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

The ‘Restore Nature Now’ march

A week last Saturday, I cycled into central London and encountered the march as it was making its way down Piccadilly, from its starting point on Park Lane, and it was genuinely inspiring to see so many groups highlighting their many concerns.

Because of the deliberate focus on making the event family-friendly and non-confrontational, it was reasonable to assume that some of those on the march had never been on a protest march before, and this was clearly commendable, because anything that gets people out on the streets in vast numbers is a riposte to the carefully managed mainstream insistence that, although peaceful protest is to be tolerated, the only truly credible means of expressing discontent is through the ballot box, dutifully voting every five years.

Perhaps because of the demographic, what struck me about the march was how polite and often quiet it was, how white and middle class it was, and how most of those attending were either elderly, or parents with young children. It also struck me that many of those attending were not from London, and were representing the rural world that is often so fundamentally alien to city-dwellers, who are frequently so cut off from nature that it means nothing to them.

While the average city dweller can enjoy parks and street trees, most of the built environment is conspicuously nature-free, there is almost no urban agriculture to speak of, and the only wild animals that anyone sees on a daily basis are birds and foxes.

This, of course, is profoundly alarming, because, as the event made clear, we are intrinsically part of nature, and not separate from it, and whatever we do to the natural world, as we’ve been doing with increasing savagery, particularly over the last 40 years, has profound impacts that are not lessened by our indifference.

In many ways, the relative absence of a key demographic — let’s say, generally those in their 20s to 50s — is because of the success, over the last 40 years, of the capitalist system — the one that is entirely responsible for killing us — in persuading us that environmental concerns are a kind of fringe nonsense that undermines our alleged “right” to be the most recklessly materialistic society in human history.

A powerful complaint against the disastrous effects of water privatisation in England and Wales, undertaken by Margaret Thatcher in 1989, on the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march in London on June 22, 2024. Over 35 years, the almost entirely unregulated private water monopolies have accrued £64 billion of debt, while paying £78 billions to shareholders, all while presiding over such neglect of the water and sewage systems that our rivers are full of sewage, and in some places even the drinking water in unsafe. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

In contrast, those attending the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march all had compelling reasons to be there, from the parents of small children, who fear from their future, and whose children are often, as small children are wont to do, immersed in and fascinated by the natural world, to those my age (61) and above, whose coming of age either preceded or ran counter to the almost entirely all-consuming propaganda of the last 40 years, which has relentlessly hammered home the false message that we are cleverer than ever before, that we deserve more than ever before, and that we should drive as much as we want, fly as much as we want, and consume as much as we want without thinking for a moment about the environmental impact of our consumption.

For those my age and above, crucially, the world of our youth was startlingly different to the world of today. As a teenager in the ‘70s, most of the food we ate was locally produced, almost no one flew, the roads were not choked with cars and lorries, and throwaway culture and the domination of plastic in all walks of life had not yet become dominant.

At its most dispiriting, the march made me think how nothing substantial has changed throughout the last 40 years of environmental protest. It reminded me of the kinds of colourful environmental events that took place in the early ‘80s, which have, over the years, persisted through a variety of means, involving both creative protest and, on occasion, direct action.

And the blunt truth from all these years? Fundamentally, although colourful processions can sometimes awaken debate, direct action is by far the best way to get noticed — and also, historically, to effect change.

A poignant message on the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march in London on June 22, 2024. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Protest from the 1990s to the 2010s

In the early ‘90s, a massive road protest movement gripped the UK, as campaigners who saw the earth as sacred disrupted numerous road expansion projects, beginning in 1992 at Twyford Down, where an extension to the M3 was planned, and continuing until 1996, with the opposition to the Newbury bypass in Berkshire.

Campaigners undertook site invasions, locking on to diggers and other industrial equipment, dug and lived in tunnels, and also took to the trees, building and living in extraordinary treehouses. With one exception, at Oxleas Wood in south London, all these protests failed to prevent the roads being built, but the cumulative effects was to persuade the government to put the brakes on further reckless road expansion plans.

In the cities, meanwhile, concerted action against another road expansion plan, the M11 Link Road in east London, which had involved streets of condemned buildings being occupied in 1993, led to the emergence in 1995 of Reclaim the Streets, another challenge to the dominance of car culture, which began when two cars were crashed together on Camden High Street and a huge street party took over the main road, and which, in 1996, memorably involved the occupation of the M41 motorway in Shepherds Bush.

Much of the energy of these movements fed into the anti-globalisation movement, which emerged in 1999 and involved huge protests in the City of London and 40 other cities worldwide in June 1999 and in Seattle (against the WTO) in November 1999, Prague in September 2000 (against the IMF and the World Bank) and Genoa in July 2001 (against the G8). Although not specifically addressing environmental issues, the campaigners’ focus on the unregulated transnational power of corporations clearly involved an environmental component.

These were huge events. At least 40,000 people gathered in Seattle, and by the time of the Genoa protest 200,000 people came together to try to disrupt the neoliberal consensus. Alarmingly, the police responded with extreme violence, which, eventually, led to one protestor being shot dead by a policeman.

The violence in Genoa obviously had a chilling impact on the globalisation movement, although arguably it was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that was the biggest dampener on further direct action throughout the rest of the decade. However, efforts to revive mass protest continued, flaring up most noticeably in 2009, when the G20 Summit was held in London, and massive protests (at which a passing newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, was killed by a blow to the head by a policeman) included a climate camp on Bishopsgate, which was shut down by police violently kettling the 1,000 or more peaceful protestors.

In September 2011, another bold protest movement began in New York, when Occupy Wall Street changed the rules by reclaiming public space — in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district — and, unlike most protests to date, refusing to go home again. The movement spread like wildfire globally, with an encampment in London springing to life outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, and, although all the camps were eventually shut down, the notion of occupation eventually fed into the thinking behind Extinction Rebellion’s protests in 2018 (when seven bridges in central London were simultaneously occupied) and 2019 (when five locations were occupied, including, most notably, Waterloo Bridge, which was closed to traffic for several days, becoming a vibrant focus for activists from across the country), and Oxford Circus, where a pink yacht emblazoned with the message ‘Tell the Truth’, aimed at politicians and the media, was parked up at London’s busiest shopping interchange.

The emergence of Extinction Rebellion (XR) — as well as the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s influential School Strike for Climate project (also known as Fridays For Future) — coincided with a warning by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we had just 12 years left to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% (by 2030) to stand a chance of maintaining a liveable planet.

That was a wake-up call for many, myself included, even though I was already well aware of the severity of climate change, but, although the protest movements succeeded in driving climate change up the political agenda, leading to numerous governments declaring climate emergencies, it was, sadly, mostly hot air that was not followed by any meaningful action.

Since the IPCC first began reporting in 1992 — its sober, understated reporting nevertheless becoming more and more urgent about the need for action, and accompanied by various agreements (at Kyoto in 1999 and Paris in 2015) that were meant to involve meaningful commitments on the part of governments to tackle climate change — governments had been promising action but failing to deliver it.

In the last few years, the inevitable outcome of these persistent, decades-long failures to cut greenhouse gas emissions has been truly alarming. Catastrophic climate collapse, involving unprecedented heatwaves and accompanied by ferocious droughts, flooding caused by unprecedented rainfall, and perilous increases in melting ice and the temperatures of the oceans threaten our food and water supplies globally, and are showing us a reality of an increasingly unliveable earth right now, and not, as it seemed just six years ago in 2018, in a future that still seemed remote — in the 2030s or the 2040s.

And yet, even as the crisis becomes ever more severe, politicians and the media, and far too many of the earth’s inhabitants, particularly in the Global North, have retreated into silence or denial. The promises we all made to cut emissions by 45% by 2030 now seem to have been forgotten, as we continue to pump more, not less CO2 into an already choked atmosphere, and, instead of tolerating dissent, politicians have specifically introduced draconian anti-protest laws that deliberately target climate protestors.

An uncompromising message on the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march in London on June 22, 2024. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

The 2020s: government clampdowns, even as the climate emergency intensifies

In 2020, as campaigners were trying to work out how to capitalise on the successes of 2019, the arrival of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns effectively suspended mass protests, and while the empty streets and skies provided us with a collective opportunity to reflect on the many benefits offered by this sudden pause in our hectic and destructive materialism, it was all forgotten as soon as it was regarded as “safe” to resume “business as usual.”

In the spring of 2022, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, stepped up protest in response, taking direct action to the heart of the murderous fossil fuel regime by blockading ten oil facilities in April. This was direct action taken to the heart of the problem, although the response was harsh and unambiguous — sweeping civil injunctions imposed by the oil companies, promising punitive prison sentences for anyone who refused to comply.

In response, JSO largely began focusing on interventions at sporting events, and, most memorably, via protests in art galleries, of which the most notorious example involved two young activists throwing soup at Van Gogh’s ’Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery. The protest met with an extraordinarily vituperative response, even though the painting was protected by glass and was completely undamaged, but it gained global coverage that no climate protest had ever managed before, and was followed by numerous other protests in galleries, as well as further interventions at sporting events and disruption to the M25, when two supporters scaled and occupied the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, part of the Dartford Crossing.

While the antipathy towards these protests was shockingly disproportionate, given the urgency of the climate crisis, it has persisted in demonstrating the vast gulf that exists between those who feel compelled to take direct action and those who simply will not tolerate it — either because they are climate change deniers (preyed upon by the fossil fuel companies via the deliberate pumping out of misinformation on social media and in the right-wing mainstream media), or because they find that disruption to everyday life, and attacks on “culture” are crimes of such magnitude that they overwhelm the message.

Shamefully, the government’s response, as noted above, was to implement a series of punitive anti-protest laws aimed specifically at climate protestors, which are so draconian that JSO protestors, who had undertaken numerous successful actions aimed at blocking traffic, by slow marching on busy roads, can now be arrested the moment they step off a kerb, as has happened on numerous occasions, while the latest legislation, an updating of the Public Order Act, led, just days ago, to police pre-emptively arresting campaigners at a public meeting, and at their homes, on suspicion of “conspiring to disrupt national infrastructure”, through an alleged plot to cause disruption at airports.

This is a clear demonstration, it must be said, of an emerging police state, based on the absurd rationale of seeking to portray, as terrorists, people whose disruptive tactics are not aimed at doing anything more than getting the government to fulfil promises it has already made, and is supposedly committed to, regarding a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but this is the absurd world in which we now find ourselves.

A powerful, undiluted message on the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march on June 22, 2024. (photo: Andy Worthington).

For Chris Packham and the organisers of ‘Restore Nature Now’, their hope, 12 days before the General Election, had been to highlight the shameful political indifference towards the desecration of nature in the UK, but the response, from both politicians and the mainstream media, seems only to have confirmed the painful limits on the power of peaceful dissent. Politicians from the two major parties are still conducting their campaigns as though the climate crisis doesn’t exist, while the media largely ignored the protest, because there is, apparently, nothing newsworthy about a family-friendly, non-confrontational protest march.

Instead, the media and politicians confirmed that only direct action is newsworthy, when two Just Stop Oil protestors sprayed Stonehenge with harmless cornstarch-based orange paint on the day before the summer solstice, and gained phenomenal global coverage.

The problem, however, was that much of the coverage was hysterically negative, with Shelagh Fogarty, a radio presenter on LBC, exemplifying the truly absurd world of hyperbolic outrage in which we currently live, when she wrote on X, “Just Stop Oil just stopped millions listening to their arguments because they stopped arguing and became ISIS thugs destroying our Palmyra. Idiots. Brutes.”

As I explained in response, “This is a radio presenter on LBC, comparing Just Stop Oil to ISIS’s actions at Palmyra, where 400 people were murdered and the chief archaeologist beheaded, because, at Stonehenge, two activists threw some cornstarch on the stones, which will wash away in the rain. Humanity is lost.”

If peaceful protest is ignored, and direct action is vilified and subject to prison sentences, it’s genuinely difficult to see a way forward that fulfils the obligation of all decent people with functioning brains to persuade our political leaders and our media to recognise not only that catastrophic climate collapse is already happening, but also that we need to take unprecedented action now, immediately curtailing fossil fuel use worldwide.

This is, uniquely, a problem that we cannot duck, or hide from. Every day of inaction makes the future worse, and yet here we are, stuck with punitive politicians, sick fossil fuel company executives and shareholders, blind climate change deniers, and a sea of homicidal outrage at even the mildest of efforts to disrupt our globally suicidal “business as usual.”

Another powerful message on the ‘Restore Nature Now’ march on June 22, 2024. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Obviously, protest won’t stop, and in fact new groups continue to arise that are even more uncompromising. In the UK, Youth Demand (who are also focused on Israel’s genocide in Gaza) are worth looking at, although the most powerful group currently operating appears to be Climate Defiance in the US, who are fearless and ferocious in their pursuit of corrupt fossil fuel company executives, their vile lobbyists and their prostituted supporters in Congress.

Check out this video of protestors confronting Senator Joe Manchin, the most environmentally corrupt of all of Congress’s easily corruptible lawmakers, for a sign of how, I suspect, direct action needs to evolve to increase pressure on the climate criminals who, for decades, have suppressed research findings about the damage their products cause, and who, one day, presumably as the earth becomes uninhabitable, will be recognized as the most genocidal monsters who ever lived.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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