We are in day 18 of the occupation of the disused Shell oil installation the "Brent Spar". This message appeals for your interest and support, and tries to give an idea of what this campaign involves. Thanks for taking the time to read it.
The sense of weirdness is all pervasive. Outside the Spar is a massive painted rusting superstructure, with huge fire hoses, waist-wide nylon ropes used to secure visiting tankers still in place, aerial walkways around every exterior surface, tools, safety equipment, lifting and electrical machinery everywhere, and pipes rising from the tanks beneath. Most of all there is the huge steel cylinder which descends into the sucking waves of the North Sea hundreds of feet below.
After they prised open the heavy steel doors inside, the first climbers found a Marie Celeste style scene of discarded coffee cups still on tables, full safety manuals and office files, blueprints, furniture, a working video, a fully equipped workshop, an empty gym, accommodation rooms with beds very damp but still made up, and one or two decks down, a control room with lights, hundreds of feet above the sea and lighting clouds as they pass over. Beneath each rig sits a safety or support vessel. At night the rigs are a block of bright sparkling lights like a space station or a chunk of a skyscraper lying above the sea. The support ships are powerful, manoeuvrable vessels - most painted bright red. One, the Norwegian flagged Rembas, comes to harass any visiting inflatables reaching the Brent Spar. Most of the time Shell's ships and helicopters buzz the platform and we are watched through binoculars.
Right now there is a race against time to stop the dumping. If we fail, governments and multinationals will see it as a signal that environmental principles and practice can be junked for a cheap waste option on a massive scale.
The Brent Spar is integral to the present effort to protect fisheries and stop marine pollution through the North Sea and Atlantic. We use the North Sea to wash in as we have little freshwater - but we know that there are huge quantities of oil and biocide residues in the sea from the rigs around us.
The Moby crew reported a pod of Orcas off the Spar today. We see seabirds such as bonxies (great skuas) and gannets. The fundamentals represented in the sea, in wilderness, and never echoed in the technical reasoning of Shell or any of the other representatives of our modern western military industrial consumer culture. They, the rapists of Nature, are in the ascendant, the fundamentals are getting shaky. We may well win the "Brent Spar" dump conflict but the general outlook is bleak: it's hard to see the blue sky beyond the destructive storm we are in. That makes it all the more certain that there's only one side to be on.
This campaign is so clear, and we are on the right side, the side of nature, of the wilderness, our brother and sister species, the children of future generations, all the little people who have no voice to fight the Shells of this world. So we here are fortunate to be called to represent all these, our own lovely planet.
Tension mounts a little, plans are tightened, defences reinforced. The group is strong, has a good spirit. Time for environmentalists to unite, to breathe in solidarity. This is our position, here we stay - Save The Seas.
Good wishes to all environmentalists, and many thanks for your support.