“Together we are working on our future”. The slogan of Shell’s latest greenwash campaign flaunts itself on every bus shelter and train station in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Shell is leaving the country to escape the verdict of the Urgenda climate case, and the fossil fuel company is irreparably disturbing marine life on the coast of South Africa in the hope of locating new drilling sites.
Searching for new drilling sites in 2022 while presenting yourself as a sustainable company is already hypocritical, but the way Shell goes about it is downright evil. The shocks that the Amazon Warrior, Shell’s exploration ship, is shooting into the South African coast are so gigantic that they threaten to permanently disrupt marine life. Yet, according to Shell, there is nothing to worry about: the company has obtained all the right permits, and marine life can really take a hit or two… or a million.
You don’t have to be a marine biologist or physicist to understand that Shell’s seismic shocks will be disastrous for marine life in South Africa. The coast is known as a transit location for many species, including whales: famously social animals that communicate and move through echolocation. Many studies have already shown that seismic shocks have a profound effect on the survival of these species. Some whale species fall silent, while others try to scream above the bangs. Mating rituals are disrupted by the constant blasting of the Amazone Warrior, and finding the way to the next resting place also proves to be a lot more difficult.
The way Shell operates is downright evil
Whales are by no means the only animals that can’t stand the seismic shocks. Fish and squid eggs from several species do not survive the bangs, putting pressure on the entire marine ecosystem. Some of these fish have long been endangered species, but Shell is blatantly flouting animal protection.
As if that weren’t enough, many fish species avoid the coast to stay away from the noise. David Russel, a Namibian-based fisheries consultant who has been following Shell’s operations for years, noted as early as 2012 how seismic shocks were driving fish away from the Namibian coast, causing serious economic damage to Namibia’s tuna fishery. Shell had not involved the fishermen in the decision-making process, just as the South African fishery did not learn of Shell’s plans until early November.
At the beginning of this month, a coalition of human rights and climate organizations therefore filed an emergency lawsuit against Shell in South Africa. However, the judge decided that the risk of permanent damage to the ecosystem was ‘at best speculative’, and that it would be especially harmful for Shell to suddenly have to cease its activities. A new hearing will take place on December 17, but given that the same judge will rule on the case, it looks like Shell will be able to continue undisturbed.
According to Shell, nothing is wrong: it has obtained all the right permits, and marine life should be able to withstand a bump or a million
In response to these unannounced shocks, Ocean Collective, in collaboration with Greenpeace, decided to give the Shell headquarters in The Hague a taste of their own medicine. With the help of Het Actiefonds, Ocean Collective blasted shock waves through the Shell headquarters in The Hague every ten seconds.
In addition, The Action Fund also supported the #MoveShell action of Shell Must Fall. This Dutch collective disrupted Shell’s last shareholders meeting in the Netherlands with a demonstration. Shell is in fact moving to Britain to avoid the Urgenda verdict, in order to continue destroying the planet without burden. But as Shell Must Fall’s banner puts it: “You can’t run and you can’t hide from climate justice”.
The Arabic Education Institute (AEI) organizes an urban exhibition in downtown Hebron, in order to let Palestinian women express the violence of the colonial Israeli occupation.
Since the 1970s, the Palestinian town of al-Khalil, known as Hebron, has become the blatant example of Israel’s colonization policy. A group of extremist Jews moved into the center of the city where they have since refused to leave. There are about 500 to 1000 settlers in the center, where about 40,000 Palestinians live. In addition, other Israeli settlements soon sprang up around the city, effectively sealing it off from the rest of the Jordan Bank.
What happened next, was the all too familiar cycle of dispossession. Under the pretext of protecting a few hundred civilians, the Israeli army sent thousands of soldiers to Hebron and divided the city into segregated zones. For Palestinians, this meant many checkpoints, random searches, detentions and arrests that continue to this day. To make matters worse, Israeli authorities responded to a series of attacks by Palestinians in 2015 with house evictions accompanied by construction projects, allowing more settlers to move to Hebron and slowly take over the city.
What happened next, was the all too familiar cycle of dispossession.
Since then, Hebron has been a symbol of the apartheid regime in the West Bank. Your ethnic background determines where, when and how much you can move around the city. There is no rule of law: as of 2015, the city has been declared a closed military zone. As a result, the army operates with impunity.
AEI, an NGO that accompanies Muslim and Christian pilgrims in al-Khalil, wants to draw attention to the colonial violence that Palestinian women have to endure under the occupation. With support from Het Actiefonds, the organization collects stories from women that they display on posters near checkpoints downtown. They take pictures of these stories and post them on social media, hoping that people around the world can read about what the women of al-Khalil are going through and thus put pressure on the Israeli government.
These women attest of the gender based violence committed under the name of security.
These women attest of the gender based violence committed under the name of security. Consider the humiliation they must endure at checkpoints, where they are scolded or forced to remove their clothes. In addition, about ten percent of Palestinian women give birth at checkpoints. Also, many pregnancies suffer from the inhalation of tear gas, which is regularly fired by the Israeli army.
With this project, AEI wants to give these women a chance to tell their own story, which is not obvious in this socially conservative zone of the West Bank. In this way, they hope to raise awareness among both residents of al-Khalil and the international community about the colonial and sexist violence of the Israeli occupation.
Image: ISM Palestine on Flickr.com
The acceptance and emancipation of everybody who considers themselves part of the LGBTQIA+ community has been declining in several countries in recent years, with frontrunners of this journey back in time the Eastern European countries Poland and Hungary. Poland, for example, has imposed LGBT-free zones in 2020, along with a new law that makes abortion virtually impossible. As a result, both countries have seen an increase in homophobic and gender identity-related violence. Time to fight back!
Make Poland Queer Again is an international action group that was created to fight back against this growing culture of homophobia and violence towards the LGBTQIA+ community in Eastern Europe. The group claims that a new, more radical protest culture is necessary with international, transborder solidarity, direct action, and civil disobedience, as we know for example within climate activism. Their goal is to break away from the well-known, peaceful protest march and create new, creative forms of direct action to destabilize the status quo and create a network of safe spaces for the queer community.
Their plan consists of creating a strong, internationally organized network of activists that together plan and execute direct actions. Part of this will be the solidarity bus from Berlin to several Polish pride marches, to mobilize activists at an international level and together take part in creating disruptive actions during the Polish prides. Next to that, they want to create workshops and toolkits around executing direct action to empower local communities and give them the tools to mobilize, organize and join the international movement.
Het Actiefonds is strongly against the repressive and fascist developments in Poland and therefore supports the group Make Poland Queer Again.
For months already there has been a dire humanitarian crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus. Thousands of migrants try to reach the EU via Poland in the hope of a better life. They are trapped in an improvised camp where men, women and children try to keep warm with campfires. Meanwhile, temperatures drop below freezing and there is hardly any food; the living conditions are inhumane.
Revenge of Lukashenko
The border is heavily guarded by about 15,000 military personnel. Poland and the European Union accuse Lukashenko of sending the migrants to Poland’s border areas in retaliation for Western sanctions against his bloodthirsty regime. A few months ago, Het Actiefonds spoke with an anonymous activist about life in a dictatorship.
Stop illegal pushbacks
A collective in the Czech Republic is taking action against the illegal pushbacks that continue to take place. Countless migrants are mistreated and forcibly sent back to other countries. With a confrontational performance, these Czech activists want to put political pressure on the Polish and Belarusian embassies. In the performance they play militias and a group of refugees; the ‘refugees’ try to come to the embassy to apply for asylum, but they are attacked by the ‘militias’.
Confrontational street theater
The scene will be repeated several times. The performance will take place in the public space between the two embassies and will therefore attract a lot of attention. The performance is recorded and also distributed via social media. The collective uses the subsidy of Het Actiefonds to buy fake blood, make-up, uniforms and (fake) batons. The aim of the group is to draw attention to the subject in Czech media discourse.
After het Woonprotest in Amsterdam and de Woonopstand in Rotterdam it is time for Woonverzet in The Hague this weekend! The third large, national demonstration against the failing housing policy of the Dutch government. Still very much needed, because until now, there still hasn’t been any movement in the right direction to execute any of the demands of the movement. Instead, the demonstrations have received a disproportional amount of state repression, but the fight continues!
The demands of het Woonverzet in The Hague are the same as the earlier compiled Housing manifest. A shared manifest, created by the organizations of het Woonprotest, de Woonopstand, and several action groups, to demand a radically different housing policy.
Het Actiefonds supported het Woonprotest and de Woonopstand and is happy to contribute again to the Dutch housing movement by supporting Woonverzet. We support the demands and call on everyone to come to The Hague and join the march on the 14th of November!
14/11, 14:00, Woonverzet, Koekamp Den Haag
Facebook event for more info
This horrific event sparked another nationwide wave of protests against the abortion law. In Poland abortion is only allowed in cases of rape or incest, or when the pregnancy is a danger to the mother. Het Actiefonds supports several Polish organizations in their fight against this law and for the right to contraception.
Stigmatization
The endlessly conservative Poland has been taking systematic steps to obsessively control women’s bodies for years. One of those steps – in addition to virtually banning abortion – was to make it impossible to get the morning-after pill without a doctor’s prescription. Doctors are now allowed to refuse the pill to women who request it, on the basis of their personal beliefs. This is just one example of the ongoing stigmatization of contraception.
Pills from abroad
The collective Dzién Po (‘the morning-after’) provides access to emergency contraception for everyone who needs it; regardless of their age, nationality or financial means. Thanks to international feminist friendships and support from other collectives, the activists manage to maintain a fairly steady flow of morning-after pills from abroad. Dzién Po has been doing this work for three years now, but this year the collective wanted to give more visibility to this important issue. Het Actiefonds was able to contribute to this.
International movement
With the help of Het Actiefonds, Dzién Po was able to create a zine about self-help, D.I.Y. resistance and bottom-up strategies to regain control of your own sexual health. These zines were distributed along with morning after pills. The purpose of the publication is to spread knowledge about the history of self-help in accessing contraception and abortion and to normalize contraception, emergency contraception and abortion. In addition, the zine contains a practical guide to the different types of morning-after pills and their prices and availability. During the research and creation of the publication, Dzién Po collaborated with members of Abortion Without Borders and Women Help Women. The magazine has become part of the international movement of autonomous feminist groups. Het Actiefonds is thankful to be able to help and continues to support the movement in Poland in their hugely important and urgent struggle.
Check out their zine here!
Oil and gas corporations consciously connect themselves to cultural institutions through sponsorship and partnerships to maintain the social license they need to continue operating in these critical times. This strategy is called artwashing, and that is what we are challenging. In the coming period, Fossil Free Culture NL, a group of artists and activists, will target the sponsorship of GasTerra (a company owned by Shell and ExxonMobil) to Groninger Museum in Groningen.
Humanity is facing the most pressing existential crisis of our time. We have less than one decade left to limit climate catastrophe. The Netherlands lags behind when it comes to climate leadership, enabling and promoting Shell’s business as a key player that keeps the Dutch economy up and running.
Fossil Free Culture NL already has a successful history of eradicating fossil fuel funding to
cultural institutions in The Netherlands. No less than the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw and NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam already cut their ties with fossil fuels after a targeted campaign by Fossil Free Culture NL.
This time around, the artists and activists will focus on the Groninger Museum, sponsored by the natural gas extraction company GasTerra that has terrorized the inhabitants of the region with its activities. The natural gas extraction has caused thousands of earthquakes since the mid-1980s, damaging houses and traumatizing residents in exchange of more pollution. Just to stuff the pockets of the company with some more money.
With this campaign, Fossil Fuel Culture NL aims to hold cultural institutions accountable for enabling these harms, and further erode the “gas as the transition fuel” narrative. For this, we will work with the Gastivist Network and local frontline groups resisting gas extraction.
The performances that they will execute will centre the voices of the most impacted and marginalized communities. They will connect local stories of gas resistance with stories of the communities resisting gas extraction in the so-called Global South, like Mozambique and Argentina. At the same time, it will show up artwashing as a dangerous and deceiving practice that upholds the fossil fuel industry’s power and legitimizes its immoral activities.
Het Actiefonds is proud to contribute to the campaign against Gasterra’s sponsorship of the Groninger Museum!
The Sápara nation are autonomous indigenous people native to the Amazon forest of Ecuador, with a rightful territory of 376.300 hectares. But as with many indigenous people and their communities, as the Amazon forest itself, their existence is threatened by capitalist and political interests of external parties. The Sápara nation takes action against these conflicting interests and is strictly against the natural exploitation of their territory, and with success!
The Sápara nation has been threatened for decades. Within one century, their population shrank from 20.000 to only 1500 because of the consequences of rubber plantations and the slavery that they involved. Because of the presence of several oil wells and the possible exploitation of wood, the nation has to defend the forest and its territory against companies and politicians with conflicting interests until this day. As earlier this year, when the ministry of agriculture decided to give away 70% of the nation’s territory to a group of people that don’t carry the Sápara nationality nor share the same interest to protect the forest against pollution, extraction, and destruction. The nation that had so far been successful at keeping out oil extractors, would lose control over a large part of their ancestral territory.
Nación Sapara Del Ecuador (NASE) took action to secure the survival of their culture and community. With the support of het Actiefonds the group has been mobilizing people and taking action between the decision of the ministry in May and the court ruling against it in October this year. With success, because on the 19th of October, the court ruled that the Sápara nation can keep control over their ancestral grounds and with that reverses the decision made by the Ministry of Agriculture. We congratulate the community on their victory and are happy to have contributed to their fight for their rightful territory.
Since 2013 it has been possible to hunt wild badgers in the UK during the months of September and October with a special license. In 2020, hunters killed the highest number of badgers since the start of the measure and killed in 8 weeks’ time a total of 38.642 badgers! That brings the total amount of killed badgers during the badger cull in seven years’ time to 140.991! And that’s a lot, especially for an animal that is protected under the ‘Protection of Badgers Act 1992’.
Action group ‘Avon Against the Badger Cull’ (AABC)‘ fights against the annual badger cull by blocking the hunters during their hunt through legal action. They do this by actively searching for badgers and badger hunters on public property at night. By staying close to wild badgers, their setts, and the hunters that hunt them, they are legally blocking the shooting of the animals by causing a possible safety issue. The volunteers of AABC monitor the badger population, map their setts, document any illicit activities such as tampering or destroying setts, and bring awareness to local farmers, landowners, and the government about the resistance against badger culling and their animal-friendly alternatives.
Het Actiefonds supports the AABC with the purchase of a new thermal imaging camera. With this camera, it becomes easier for them to search for badgers and the hunters that hunt them. The hunters themselves also have thermal imaging cameras, so it is of great importance for the group to have similar equipment in order to have a fair fight.
That countries are not living up to their promises in the Paris climate agreement should come as no surprise. But the brazen way in which Germany continues to expand its lignite mines is of a different order. Lignite is still the most important fuel for the German economy, even though it is 33 percent more polluting than black coal and three times as polluting as natural gas. Time and again the German government comes up with initiatives to reduce mining activities, but in reality the mines are only expanding.
If you travel by car through the German Rhineland, you can marvel at the enormous craters that dominate the landscape. The holes are so deep and large that for a moment you imagine you are on another planet. You see only dust and stone as far as the eye can see. The Garzweiler mine, for example, has an area of 48 square kilometers, twice the size of the city of Leiden. And that’s not even the largest. Right next door is the Hambach mine, with its 85 square kilometers one of the largest lignite mines in Europe.
Together these two mines are already responsible for 75 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. By comparison, that’s about half of the annual emissions of the Netherlands. Half. And if it’s up to the energy company RWE, that number won’t be going down anytime soon.
When Eckardt Heukamp walked out of his house this September, he was greeted by a ghost town. All the houses in his village of Lützerath are empty, bought up by RWE to wipe the village off the map in its quest for obsolete fossil fuels. The huge excavator gets closer every day. Six other villages preceded Lützerath. Where these villages once stood, the Garzweiler II mine is now to be built. Heukamp knows he won’t be able to stay in Lützerath for long. “They won’t dig around me” Heukamp tells the German magazine Taz: “the state has the power”.
In total, between 2015 and 2028, as many as 7618 residents of neighboring villages must make way for Garzweiler II. This is incompatible with Germany’s plans to permanently close its coal mines by 2045. Non-profit research firm DIW has already calculated that RWE can mine a maximum of 200 million tons of lignite in Hambach and Garzweiler II to stay within the Paris climate agreement, even though RWE plans to mine 780 million tons.
The emissions cannot be accounted for, let alone the eviction of residents. “It took me a lot of effort emotionally to leave Borschemich, fifteen years is quite something,” Heukamp says. Borschemich was one of the villages that had to make way for RWE. A video on Youtube shows how an excavator scraped the 400-year-old village church from the landscape. Heukamp moved to his native village, where the same fate now awaits him. “It’s even more intense here, because I grew up here too.”
As quiet as Lützerath was two months ago, that’s how booming it is now. Heukamp’s eviction was scheduled for this September, but he’s still there. With the help of activists from all over the world and people from the neighborhood, he is resisting the brutal expropriation policy of RWE and the German government. The activists have declared a ZAD (zone à défendre) on his land, an occupied area against development projects, from where they organize actions to occupy the mine, and create spaces for networking between activists and local residents.
For now, the authorities are not succeeding in clearing Lützerath. Het Actiefonds is proud to support the campaign to preserve Lützerath. With our help, the occupiers are building huts in the trees and on the ground so that the occupation can continue for as long as possible. Lützerath stays!
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