35 Greenpeace Activists Handcuff Themselves to Range Rovers

[chlamor]

'You can do the right thing'

It's been just another week for Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tindale, arrested after chaining himself to a 4x4 production line in Solihull. He tells Aida Edemariam how he did it and why cheap air travel is the next target in the battle for the environment

Thursday May 19, 2005
The Guardian

It's not as if it was a particularly covert operation. There was no sneaking round high walls, no whistling an all-clear, no dramatic dodging of armed guards. Yet no one noticed 35 people driving up to Range Rover's plant in Solihull in a hired coach. No one spotted them walking in - even though every one of them had orange trousers. In fact, perhaps because it was 7am on a bleary Monday morning, and hundreds were arriving to work on the assembly lines, no one noticed at all, until Stephen Tindale and his comrades stationed themselves at intervals along the snaking line, removed their jackets, and revealed they were wearing orange all over, except for the Greenpeace logo emblazoned on their backs

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The protesters' reception in Solihull is to some extent a case in point. After they had stripped down to the orange boiler suits, each activist handcuffed themselves to a Range Rover Sport. (They chose the Sport rather than the Defender, also produced at Solihull, because it is an SUV marketed for urban use, as a lifestyle choice. Defenders are mostly used, legitimately, as Greenpeace see it, in the countryside.) Tindale attached himself to a bare chassis; others acquired "more luxury accommodation further up the line." Confusion reigned. The line couldn't be started, so workers milled about for hours. They were discouraged from talking to the activists, but some sidled up to ask, glancing nervously over their shoulders, what was going on.

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That's next, says Tindale, now playing with a red, orange and yellow stress ball. "It's tough. January in England is not fun and if you're saying to people you can fly to the Caribbean for a not unextortionate amount of money ..." For some years he and his family have not taken one flight for leisure (he still has to fly, ironically, for Greenpeace). They holiday in England, taking the train, indulging his great passion, hillwalking. Next week he will climb to the top of Sugarloaf mountain near Aber-gavenny with his five-year-old. "Basically the equation should be that people who are taking environmentally damaging forms of transport ie air travel and road travel should be paying the full costs and people who are taking environmentally pretty benign forms of travel, like rail, should be paying less. We've got to find ways of making that transfer work."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1487038,00.html