Newsletter February 2024
On February 19th, we launched our new demand for a constitutional right to climate protection in front of lots of journalists who communicated our words to the country. Then we got started with action…
First, we brought a band onto the highway during a roadblock and played a live concert there. People who got out of their cars started dancing instead of shouting, hitting or honking. It was great!
Then we started our current protest wave, beginning with massive disruption on the highway in the capital, Vienna. We needed to make sure we would not be arrested for actual crimes because we are under investigation for being a criminal organisation. So instead of gluing ourselves to the road with sand, we locked ourselves to cars with finger and arm locks. We held the spot for three and a half hours – a new record!
Then we dumped a pile of horse shit on a very pretty crossing right next to Schönbrunn and titled it as the Chancellor’s climate policies. The media loved it and copied the message we wanted to send very well.
The next day, we sat in front of the Parliament, which made conservative politicians act like we were storming the building. Even the police felt the need to clarify that we were nonviolent and did not storm anything.
Before ending with our biggest protest in central Vienna, we annoyed the Chancellor’s office with counless phone calls, mails, faxes, social media comments and letters. We asked him about the climate protection policies he is failing to implement, and we requested his opinion on our new demand. He should like it because it was actually a demand of his own political party in 2019!
In February, Nødbremsen (the Emergency Brake) organised its first simultaneous protests, with three road blockades happening at the same time on the E47 highway and in central Copenhagen, uniting 18 people – the biggest number we’ve had so far – to demand that the Emergency Brake is pulled to avoid climate catastrophe.
We also organised a cultural protest and interrupted the Danish Melodi Grand Prix, the annual Danish music competition that selects the country’s artists for Eurovision. Two supporters jumped on stage with banners to ask a simple question: “Who Votes for a Future?”
The Melodi Grand Prix is a cultural event which joins over a million Danes together in song and dance, but the song contest has always been about more than just music. It is about bringing the people of Europe together through a language which we all share – music – in solidarity, diversity, justice and respect.
Climate collapse is putting all these values at risk, and the Danish government is actively escalating this collapse. Let the song we sing to our European neighbours be one of solidarity and climate justice.
This month, our group got involved with the farmers’ protest. At the beginning we were really unsure which position to take, but we quickly decided to take the farmers’ side.
Why? Since the beginning, politicians have tried to use this protest to push their anti green deal agenda, but they don’t have the right to become the farmers’ spokespeople.
We spoke to some committed farmers and even attended one of their protests. On TV, we said that we understood the root causes of the protest: huge inequalities, the need for fair compensation and the uncertainty brought by the climate crisis.
Yes, the farmers’ movement is heterogeneous and at points contradictory, as some of their demands are incompatible with sustainability. Nevertheless, taking their side was the right thing to do. We shouldn’t let politicians turn citizens against each other: we are all only asking them to protect our future.
It’s only February, and Canada’s news agencies are warning us that “low snowpack and high temperatures forecast [are] already raising wildfire concerns,” with even right-wing newspapers warning of extreme danger come spring 2024.
We demand that the Canadian government creates a national firefighting agency that trains and employs 50,000 people to help us fight wildfires, and you would imagine that the government would agree given the context. However, every single politician in this fossil-fuel-addicted extractivist nation is keeping their head in the sand, so it’s up to young people to take action.
This month Last Generation Canada swung back into action in Ottawa and received a lot of media attention as Gillian set a stroller on fire on Parliament Hill and Etienne splattered pink paint on dinosaurs in the Nature Museum in Ottawa. Amy, Ben, Xavier, and others were arrested for peacefully sitting on the road. We also welcomed back Dan from prison – you can listen to his story here.
On Valentine’s Day, two Declare Emergency supporters, Kroeger and Jackson, covered the case protecting the US Constitution with red powder in the National Archives. This was a hugely successful action in getting the media’s attention as dozens reported on us, including the Washington Post, Forbes, and the Huffington Post.
Kroeger, was put in jail for this and two other actions, where he remains until his next hearing in March.
This February, we have been taking over the public space with a new poster campaign.We included two posters with quotes from politicians: the climate minister stating that she’s the “world best at environmental politics”, set over an image of a community in Sweden that has been flooded since last year, and a quote from the prime minister saying “climate activists pretend to care about the climate”.
The third poster was made by a famous Swedish satirist, Max Gustafson, who made an original comic for us that pokes fun at Återställ Våtmarker and highlights the absurdity of complaining about peaceful disruptive climate activists while living in a highly destructive system.
The campaign has been a huge success, with more than 100 people signing up all over the country in just one and a half months. Our aim was to mobilise people and to cause disruption in response to current events and it’s working! We’ve already created breaking news in Karlstad, where 100 posters were put up in one hour on Tuesday night last week.
Not all the successes of our resistance are immediately clear. Sometimes, a huge victory doesn’t happen during an action but outside of it.
This is what happened in February. The supreme court of the state of Bavaria ruled that a lower court had unjustly imposed a two month prison sentence on four supporters of the Last Generation. Maja, Christoph, Karl and Max, for blocking a road once.
They had all taken part in other Last Generation protests, but had not yet been convicted for them. A lower court judge ruled that they must be imprisoned for two months as political offenders, but a higher court ruled overruled the previous sentence, giving us faith that the courts can still act responsibly when they look carefully at the facts.
You can read Maja’s words here…
“For months, I have been waiting for a letter telling me to immediately go to the nearest prison to serve two months’ imprisonment. I adjusted my plans for the whole year. I started meditating again and asked friends for support during my incarceration. I felt prepared and ready. But every time I talked to my co-defendants about the preparation, my chest tightened, and fear and anger rose inside me.
When I received the news that our appeal had been successful against all expectations, I felt an enormous weight fall from my shoulders. What it meant for us was clear: it was confirmation that peaceful protest, even if it can be annoying, should not simply be put behind bars. The psychological pressure and threats that the court wanted to use to break us don’t work. We know what is at stake.
Nothing can stop us from doing the right and least we can in the face of the climate catastrophe. We have learnt once again that it is worth continuing our resistance even in court.”
On Thursday 8 February, Eric splashed the Federal Palace (seat of the Swiss government and Parliament) with orange paint to make their responsibility in the unfolding climate catastrophe visible.
At the time, Nikoko was still in prison in Vaud for filming an action in 2021, and we organised more than 20 actions in support of his innocence. He was released on Saturday 10 February after almost three months, and went straight back to sticking posters on the walls of Vaud’s High Council only eight hours after he had been freed.
This month, undercover journalists pretended to expose our (already public) plans to hold politicians to account at their workplaces, in the street or at their homes. The plan to take power back from our “leaders” wasn’t a secret, but the outrage about our strategy brought us back into the national conversation.
Politics is broken, the British people know that. So we used the attention to announce our plans to support ordinary people in this year’s election, as well as the creation of citizens assemblies to give the public a voice to demand real action on the emergencies facing humanity.
Apart from our plans for the UK’s democracy, we’re preparing our biggest action plans yet. This summer, when the heat is unbearable, the grass is dry and water is rationed, we’ll be taking action at airports to shine a bright light on the biggest consumers of oil and gas and bring the people into resistance with us. More details are coming soon…