The bear necessities

What is it with bears? There have been a lot around recently. In Sudan there was the teddy bear teacher, while at the Tate Liverpool Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize by dressing up as a bear - though actually he won it for his installation Sleeper, a recreation of Brian Haw’s one man protest against the Iraq war in Parliament Square.

The normally sober George Monbiot received rather less attention when he put on a bear suit, earlier this week to protest against the creation of a massive open cast coal mine in Wales. He joined a group of protesters point out that sanctioning this massive coal mine not only wrecks a huge landscape, but it hardly squares with the government’s intention to cut carbon emissions in the near future.

As he wrote in his blog,

the developers here intend to extract 11m tonnes of coal. When that coal is burnt it will produce 30m tonnes of carbon dioxide. According to the latest science as explained in my last column that equates to the sustainable emissions of nearly 60 million people for one year.

(As a polar bear he was outnumbered at the demo by clowns clambering over the diggers. Clowns seem to be becoming a mainstay of protests here in the UK, thanks to the anti-globalisation pranksters, the Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.)

In other bear-protest news, thousands of Americans plunged into icy waters this week in 40 different protests across the country as a form of protest against global warming in the third annual Polar Bear Plunge. In the year that the North West Passage opened for the first time since humans have kept records, their slogan is “Keep Winter Cold”.

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This entry was written by Nigel and posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 8:29 am and filed under Laughing in the face of climate change, Eco products, Green energy, Eco politics. Bookmark the permalink. You can follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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