Category: Political Issues

I decided not to go to Copenhagen and join the many protesters and press there. I don’t like travelling and have things I want to do in London, and enough of my photographer friends were going for me to feel my input on the spot wasn’t that vital.

I should really have gone, after all I’ve been an environmental campaigner – if not always a very active one – for more than 40 years, since the late 1960s, when frankly few people realised there was an environment and we had to take some responsibility for it. I think it was 1966 or 7 that I got rid of the only car I’ve ever owned,  and a couple of years later, much as I dislike speaking in public, was talking about cutting energy use,  shifting from private to public transport, cutting down on meat and moving towards a sustainable future.

In the last ten or fifteen years, as someone who I think has considerably more to offer behind a camera than in front of a microphone I’ve tried to tackle some issues related to cities and in particular to photograph and publicise environmental protest.

So really I should have gone to Copenhagen, but I couldn’t work up a great deal of enthusiasm about it, not least because I think it is almost certainly going to fail. For one very simple reason, which this Climate Rush banner brings up:

‘Equity’ on the Climate Rush procession to Heathrow

It isn’t easy to read the text on the small version on the blog, so here it is:

EQUITY: Emission quotas must be per capita; the rich have no more right to pollute than the poor.

[You can read what is on the other two Climate Rush banners, Truth and Justice here, as well as many more pictures from that Heathrow protest.]

It’s a tough message for those us in the rich world, but one that needs to be at the base of any just settlement.  But impossible to see it passing the US Senate – or for that matter some other governments.

You’ll know the UK government is taking the environment seriously if they announce an end to airport expansion, cancelling the third runway at Heathrow, banning domestic flights,  ending the road programme, lowering all speed limits, abandoning plans for coal-fired power stations and a huge investment in green jobs to make drastic cuts in energy use and a massive shift to renewables.  Until then, whatever government is in power is just indulging in greenwash.

But although Copenhagen was from the start doomed to fail to reach the radical agreement that is needed, there is still a possibility it could lead to some minor steps in the right direction. So I’ve just become number 11,103,301 to sign the ‘Save Copenhagen: Real Deal Now!’ petition being organised by global web organisation  Avaaz.org  and invite you to consider doing the same if you haven’t already.

They are hoping to make it the “largest petition in history in the next 72 hours!” Here’s some more from their site:

“An Avaaz team is meeting daily with negotiators inside the summit who will organize a spectacular petition delivery to world leaders as they arrive, building a giant wall of boxes of names and reading out the names of every person who signs. With the largest petition in history, leaders will have no doubt that the whole world is watching.

Millions watched the Avaaz vigil inside the summit on TV yesterday, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu told hundreds of delegates and assembled children:

“We marched in Berlin, and the wall fell.
“We marched for South Africa, and apartheid fell.
“We marched at Copenhagen — and we WILL get a Real Deal.”

Copenhagen is seeking the biggest mandate in history to stop the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. History will be made in the next few days. How will our children remember this moment? Let’s tell them we did all we could.”

No, I haven’t done all I could have done, but despite my reservations I think it is worth trying to put a little pressure on in this simple way which might just get a little more progress. Even if it only makes a very small step for mankind it is after all better than throwing money away into space.

Another rare bit of humour in Saturday’s Climate march, with a banner from the “Polartariat”:

Along with a rather nice polar bear.

The anti-capitalist block joined the march at Berkeley Square and for a hundred yards or two this banner was at the head of the march, until stewards and police managed to persuade them to roll it up and go back and join in further back.

Although the block apparently had three banners, I only saw one other, with around twenty or thirty people, including both anarchists and a few Stalinists carrying flags with the message ‘For Bolshevism. The group left the climate demonstration before ‘The Wave’ around the Houses of Parliament.

More comment and pictures on My London Diary.

Saturday was a big day for climate protests in London, with the COP-15 Climate talks about to begin in Copenhagen, around 50,000 took to the streets to emphasize their view that all governments – including our own – should be doing more.

Of course some people and organisations have been doing that for years – notably the Campaign Against Climate Change, (CCC)  whose demonstrations I’ve been photographing for years – here’s one with a rather youthful looking George W Bush from the days when photography was on film and mainly black and white – March 2002:

Campaign against Climate Change. George Bush – the ‘Toxic Texan’  had rejected the Kyoto Treaty. March 2002

The ‘tiger’ in the picture wasn’t in anyone’s tank but was in bed with George Bush and being pushed to the Houses of Parliament, but unfortunately the wheels fell off before we got there!

Actually I was I think mainly photographing in colour at the time – still on film, but the library where I put most of my pictures at the time only really wanted black and white, and colour needed to be on transparency while I was more sensibly shooting colour negative. Of course I had a scanner, but they wouldn’t have known what to do with a digital file – it’s easy to forget how quickly things changed.

Since then I’ve photographed quite a few more events organised by the CCC, both the series of annual National Climate Marches and smaller events in London – including recently those against dirty coal, airport expansion and the closure of one of our few green industries, Vestas Blades  (and here and here.)  So as well as the bike ride I’ve already posted about, I was determined to photograph their rally in Hyde Park on Saturday even though it was rather overshadowed by the much larger event organised by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, which brings together a wide range of well over a hundred varied worthy organisations with a concern over the climate, including various overseas aid charities, the RSPB, the Women’s Institute, trade unions and more – including the CCC.

At their ‘Alternative Parliament‘ at Westminster in July, CCC had made their demands on the UK Government clear – as their banner shows.

CCC Alternative Parliament, July 2009

These two were the key demands of the Hyde Park rally:

• Declaration of a Climate Emergency
• 10% cuts by end 2010
• A million green jobs by end 2010
• Ban domestic flights
• 55 mph speed limit – scrap the roads program
• End Agrofuel use

If like me you missed most of the speeches at the rally, addressed the crowd of several thousand, you can listen to them, along with five songs that ‘Seize the Day‘ performed live there on YouTube. I always find it very useful when videos from events I’ve photographed are posted like this. When taking pictures I’m concentrating on finding visual solutions to show the event, and often miss much of the speeches, and its good to be able to come and watch them – when I have the time. And just occasionally its good to be able to fast forward or even skip the odd one. Although it wasn’t the case on Saturday I have photographed many political events were the ability to do this would have been incredibly welcome.

As usual you can read more about the actual event and see more pictures – including my favourite mermaid with a fish – on My London Diary.

Twenty-five years ago people living close to the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India woke up in the middle of the night coughing and vomiting and began to flee for their lives. Around 3000 died that day and perhaps 8000 in the next 3 days, a death toll that has now reached around 20,000. Probably half a million were exposed to the deadly cloud of gases from the factory, and as it hugged the ground, children were at even greater risk. Twenty five years on, there is still around a death a day directly attributable to the leak,  and pollution leaking from the plant continues to pollute drinking water, leading to around ten times as many birth defects in the area as would normally be expected.

Bhopal was not an accident.   Although it’s exact time and scale could not have been predicted, the disaster was the inevitable consequence of cost-cutting decisions made by Union Carbide management. It was cheaper to cut the plant maintenance so that the safety systems no longer worked, cheaper to leave the toxic material (it was no longer being used)  in a site surrounded by half a million people than to dispose of it safely, cheaper not to train staff properly or inform them of the risks, cheaper to cut corners.

Wet pavements give a more interesting foreground

You can read a little more about Bhopal in my feature on Demotix, which reports a memorial service held on December 2, 2009 in a rather damp Trafalgar Square, organised by the Bhopal Medical Appeal.

Photographically the main problem yesterday was the weather. It was raining as I left home for the run to the station (that’s run using feet, not as in school run – and only necessary because I never quite get organised in time for the five minutes or so walk) and about 50 yards down the road I remembered I hadn’t put my umbrella back in my camera bag – it’s generally a fairly vital accessory in London, but there was no time to go back.

Fortunately the downpour only really got fully into gear as I came down the footbridge and into the ticket office, but as I sat on the train and it battered against the windows I wondered if the event might be rained off and my journey wasted.  It cleared to just a little light rain  more or less as I arrived at the square, and although the light was pretty low and there were plenty of puddles the umbrellas and the reflections on the wet paving stones perhaps improved some of the pictures.

And I didn’t get too wet, although one or two pictures were lost due to raindrops on the UV filter which protects my lens. As usual I kept a decent-size microfibre cloth in a plastic bag in a pocket and wiped the front of the filter fairly obsessively to try and keep it clear.  Probably I should have resisted the urge to economise and gone for a more expensive chamois leather, but at least with the microfibre I don’t have to worry about producing it while photographing animal rights activists.

Umbrellas may keep people dry, but they also put their faces into deep shade, especially if the umbrella is dark.  So flash became pretty essential on many of the pictures to put some light under them.  I still can’t quite work out how the camera and flash modes interact with the Nikon D700and SB800, and I think there is a little bug in my camera (perhaps that same one that occasionally produces random heavy underexposure and thinks I have that elusive f0.0 lens.)  And I forget to wait long enough for the flash to recharge far too often – as always. Sometimes of course it helps to have this kind of unintentional flash bracketing.

The wet pavements did mean that the idea of people getting down on the ground draped in white sheets to represent shrouded bodies wasn’t practical – but perhaps they were easier to photograph standing up.

The idea that we are all equal under the law is a vital part of our understanding of human rights and equality, but it hasn’t always been like that (and still isn’t in some respects.) At least until relatively recently in the UK, some of the medieval privileges of the church still gave clergy (or at least Church of England clergy) some special protection, and institutionally the Christian churches are still protected by laws such as our blasphemy laws.

On Saturday, Peter Tatchell reminded us that the church still enjoys some extra protection, and that he had been convicted under the 1860 Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act after his Easter demonstration in Canterbury Cathedral – and he was fortunate to be up before a  judge with a sense of humour, who fined him £18.60 for the offence. And at the same event, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris told us of the need to repeal the Blasphemy laws (and he’s tried.)

But although ‘One Law For All’ is against all religion-based law, it’s main focus is on Sharia law, because of the special position it has in many majority-Muslim countries around the world, but also because of attempts to introduce it – if only on a voluntary basis – into the legal framework of countries including the UK.

The problem with Sharia – as with our largely vestigial religious laws – is that it was conceived in a very different society to that we live in. At the time it represented a radical and forward-thinking approach to issues of justice and the rights and responsibilities of men and women compared with the then current practice. But times and societies have changed dramatically since then so that the views codified then no longer represent the kind of spirit and way of thinking that they then did. Laws need to evolve as society evolves or they become ossified into reactionary and outdated practices.

The idea that disputes in 21st century Britain should be settled by rules fixed absolutely more than a thousand years ago in a very different feudal society is untenable.They conflict with the ideas that have developed since about human rights in general and about the equality of women in particular.

The use of Sharia law is no more acceptable than would be tribunals based on fundamentalist Christian precepts or indeed those already existing of the Beth Din, although I think it is beyond dispute that our ideas about human rights and the value of human life have been very much influenced over the centuries by the insights of all three religions.  And while I found myself very much in agreement with the aims of the ‘One Law For All’ campaign there was a kind of sectarian anti-religious fervour from some of its supporters that I found both a distraction and a detraction from its purpose.

Photographically there were few problems with what was a relatively small event – a couple of hundred people, including a very large number of speakers. It was perhaps difficult to know how to make use of the row of small coffins in front of the main banner and hard to incorporate them with the speakers; shooting wide enough to get them in made the speakers on a small podium a few metres further behind rather small, and moving further back to cut down the effect of the different distances wasn’t possible as the audience was in the way.

I did try to use just the words ‘NO SHARIA’ from the banner with some of the speakers, but it wasn’t very exciting. But there was considerable freedom to photograph them from different angles and distances and I felt I did get at least one decent picture of almost all those who spoke.

One Law For All does have some graphically very strong placards, but it was perhaps a pity that there were not rather more of these.  They worked rather better in the demonstration in Trafalgar Square last year where they formed a good background to many of the speakers. But I did get a few pictures I liked of the audience.

Partly because I was still feeling a little drained after the flu, I’d lightened my camera bag by taking only the D700 body and a few lenses – the 24-70mm, 10.5mm fisheye, 20mm and a 55-210mm.  I took a few pictures on the 20mm, but nearly all on the 24-70 and 55-210, and kept finding myself wanting to change between these two. It would have been a lot easier with two bodies.

Part of the reason for the frequent changes was simply the very large number of speakers – and I’d decided I would photograph each of them. In most cases I took both full length pictures with the wider zoom and also fairly tight head shots with the longer lens.

I haven’t cropped or corrected the vignetting on this image

The 55-200 Sigma is a  ‘DX’  format lens, but certainly at the longer end seems to cover the double size FX frame with decent corner to corner sharpness, certainly good for portraits. At the wider end it does vignette slightly (and I had to saw a little off the lens hood which vignetted even more than the lens) and at 55mm I have to crop the frame by a couple of millimetres, but it still gives a reasonably sized file. Its big advantage so far as I’m concerned is its weight – a ridiculously featherweight 335 g.

There is a little more about the event and a few more pictures in my account on Demotix, more to follow on My London Diary