Exposing the climate crime
OPINION: Religious groups are adding increasing support to the global movement from fossil fuels towards 100 per cent renewable energy.
At the annual Oil and Gas Industry Petroleum Summit, at the TSB Arena in Wellington this year, members of a number of Wellington churches joined a cacophony of disapproval with a blockade and protest march, led by pipe and drum circling the venue.
Meanwhile squads of police sought to obstruct and remove protesters as they linked arms and chanted, or beat their outrage on the building’s doors and loading bay. Others rallied to provide food and drink, offering it to police and conference delegates as well.
The number of protesters from overtly religious groups at rallies against climate-change is increasing; signalling perhaps that support for this cause has finally arrived – from more conservative quarters. This change was seen in 1981 when Prime Minister Robert Muldoon made a claim that sinister groups were responsible for protest numbers swelling against the Springbok Tour; yet those already marching week on week, replied it was hardly sinister when the only new groups appearing on the streets were church folk and clergy. It is not always the case that people of faith only join in protests once momentum is already building. In March last year a remarkably successful blockade was staged at the 2017 Oil Summit in New Plymouth, by a coalition of social justice and tangata whenua groups.
Next day a story of delegates having to climb fire escape-ladders to access the venue was frontpage news; and later an editorial asserted Taranaki’s oil and gas industry to be in decline.
Perhaps a provincial towns’ relative size means relationships between activists and media are better established than in the Capital; but there was more behind the blockade last year, than just good media contact.
All day the mood at New Plymouth had been remarkable, with waiata and karakia heard at each entrance to the TSB Showplace. Parihaka elders blessed the blockade with their presence and joined those with linked arms singing an environmental anthem: ‘‘People gonna rise like the water, gonna turn this crisis round. Hear the voice of my great-granddaughter: Take Climate Action Now.’’ While members of the Parihaka community came to this year’s Oil Summit in Wellington, their legacy of creative non-violence has still to be embraced by the police and media there.
Other Wellington venues such as the Westpac Stadium – with the Raukura emblem of Parihaka fixed above the main entrance – have seen repeated mistreatment of those protesting against the annual Weapons Expos. Unusually, after the latest intolerance erupted in Wellington, it was the police having to justify their response. Yet, experienced police and protesters know how vulnerable we all are to being labelled as violent; no matter which side of the barricade we may be standing.
As a faith-community, Parihaka is well acquainted with being misrepresented. Their consistently forbearing attitude is especially remarkable given their experiences of confiscation, exile and invasion, and more recently, a direct assault on land and ocean by oil companies gathering this time in the Capital, behind a police guard.
The huge patience and compassion of Parihaka has incited our most prophetic voices. On a short walk through Wellington, between the Westpac Stadium and TSB Arena an immense Colin McCahon painting hangs in the cafeteria at Victoria University’s Business School.
For those coming to this year’s Oil Summit from Taranaki, with its landscape of flaring oil and gas wells, McCahon’s words are apposite: ‘‘All ye who kindle a fire and gird yourself about with firebrands: walk ye in the flames of your fire and amongst the brands you have kindled…’’
That work, painted in the 1970s is said to have been an appeal by McCahon against those claiming that Nuclear Weapons deter war; yet it is also prescient now to be found appearing to point the world of commerce away from climate-changing emissions and towards renewable energy.