Kumi Naidoo was back in jail. The former anti-apartheid activist, now international director of Greenpeace, was back in the same cells he was thrown in back in the 1980s in Durban, South Africa. His crime? A sit-in protest at a business meeting in the Durban conference center Dec. 5. He had returned to the city for the UN COP 17 climate talks. If there was good news for Naidoo, it was that he was quickly released.
Naidoo is an ethnic Indian born and raised in South Africa under the repression of apartheid. The activist remembers the picture of Gandhi on the wall in his family home, the 1976 Soweto uprising, and the 1979 student uprising, and was thrown out of school twice for organizing protests against apartheid. But he kept challenging the system.
Gandhi and his non-violent activism was an inspiration to him.
Naidoo sees a parallel between the anti-apartheid movement that he was part of in his youth and the environmental movement. Poverty, social injustice and war are linked to care of the environment, and tied in to climatic change.
The activist sees civil disobedience as the key method to protest against the environmental destruction of our planet. In a recent action in June 2011, he and fellow Greenpeace activists breached a security zone near Greenland, boarded a deep water drilling rig, and sought to present sign petitions for a halt to drilling. He was arrested and jailed, but eventually released.
As he said to the film crew following his action, “For me this is one of the defining environmental battles of our age, it’s a fight for sanity against the madness of a mindset that sees the melting of the Arctic sea ice as a good thing. As the ice retreats the oil companies want to send the rigs in and drill for the fossil fuels that got us into this mess in the first place. We have to stop them. It goes right to the heart of the kind of world we want and the one which we want to pass onto our children.”
As he said in an interview with One World: “Mahatma Gandhi, when he was leading the freedom struggle here, was labeled an extremist. Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist. Martin Luther king was dumped in jail several times. But today we revere them as the most forward thinkers of their time, the most courageous leaders of history and so on. History is already judging Greenpeace as we reach our 40th year anniversary. The issues that the world is talking about today, Greenpeace was talking about 20 years ago. No one was speaking about climate change but Greenpeace put it on the table way back.”
From the blogger who thinks Naidoo’s actions were stupid, to the environmentalists who feel sit-ins, the boarding of oil rigs and petitions are not enough, there is a vast range of views on environmentalism today and its effectiveness. Jailed activist Tim DeChristopher has said the “environmental movement has failed” because it has not been anywhere near as strident or aggressive in fighting for the planet. DeChristopher was jailed in 2011 for disrupting an auction of public lands in Utah, United States, by illegally bidding. He’s serving two years for confronting an entrenched system that favors big companies and governments over the environment and desires of the people.
The winds of change are blowing with the actions of environmentalists and also the Occupy Movement that seeks to challenge the grip big business has on governments and the people. But people like Naidoo and DeChristopher are still viewed by many people as the lunatic fringe. So deeply entrenched are the systems and lifestyles focused on endless growth and consumerism that it is hard to relate to the person who risks jail or even his or her life to protect the earth.
This needs to change. And there are signs of change in the support shown for the activists and campaigns underway to protect the environment and support social justice programs.
Naidoo is not Gandhi. But one advantage he has over Gandhi is that his message can now be instantly passed around the world, thanks to the Internet and media.
One person can bring change. It depends on whether people are receptive to the message.
Greenpeace video
