I’m writing this from a train as I zoom through the countryside towards Cologne and the Ende Gelände mass action. I wanted to share with you some personal reflections (and, of course, a final reminder of practical details you’ll need to join in person).
Cologne is a place I normally associate with holiday time and family. My auntie lives there and I’ve spent many a December by her fire, replenishing my energy after the depressing outcomes of previous UN climate talks in Europe. It’s also where I spent a year at the age of 14, immersing myself in school to learn most of the German I know now.
But since September last year it’s a place that started to mean more to me than ‘home’ and overlap with my every day fight on climate change. As I came out of a European grassroots climate meeting thinking about mobilisations in the context of the UN Paris negotiations, an idea called “Ende Gelände!” – otherwise known as “Here and No Further!” – was born.
It was a collective decision to mobilise and organise a mass act of civil disobedience to keep dirty fossil fuels in the ground. The target? Europe’s biggest source of CO2 emissions: the Rhineland coalfields owned by utility company (in the top 200) RWE. The goal? To mobilise as many people to the Rhineland, from across the region in the summer to blockade the world’s biggest digging machinery.
And suddenly, I found myself traveling to Germany not just for my holidays but also for planning meetings with the growing coalition of organisations supporting the action.
Together, we were aiming to get a 1000+ people to the action but until this week, despite the tireless organising, I was unsure we’d meet our target. I needn’t have worried. More and more people have been turning up to the pre-action Klimacamp all week. Yesterday we heard there were already over 1000 people here from 45 countries, making it the biggest one yet in Germany.
And from today onwards both our 350 Europe team and many of you will be descending on the camp. I get excited about these moments because for all of our online organising and communications, there’s nothing quite like seeing each other for real and getting directly stuck into concrete action. I’m hopeful that this action will send a powerful message worldwide and will also stand us in good stead for what is to come in Paris and beyond.
We’ll be updating a liveblog on our Ende Gelände site throughout the weekend, and you can follow all the action on Twitter with the hashtags #endcoal and #stopdigging or by following our @350Europe account and the @Ende__Gelaende handle.
Looking forward to saying “Ende Gelände!” with you all, be it in person or in spirit.