Anti-Quarrying

in words and pictures

"We all need quarries don’t we?" After all, quarrying has been going on for centuries, providing building materials for roads, houses, the sometimes incredible architecture of our cities and so on, providing local employment and, in many cases, leaving behind a place of extraordinary beauty once the pits were abandoned and nature returned.

Unfortunately, the industry no longer operates on this human scale. Largely robotised, quarrying provides very few and relatively short term jobs and the enormous craters left when pits are exhausted are more often turned into landfill tips than returned to nature. In any case "reclamation" is little more than planting trees on slag heaps. Equally, the supply of aggregate (building material), as with so much in modern society, serves more the demands of multinational companies and global capital than of local people.

We have put this compilation together to try to explain the issues with, and the argument against, quarrying, to demonstrate what is being lost and to explain what people can do. We wanted to use poems and photographs because they seemed like the best way to express the unnecessary loss of our beautiful places. They were all written and taken by people closely involved with campaigns against quarrying and damage to our planet for profit - road building, greenfield "development", genetic engineering of food, pollution of many kinds, the relentless advance of global capitalism and its absolute lack of social conscience and so on and so forth.

To quote from Robert M. Pirsig’s "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance",

"The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay."

"You should do it anyway," Gennie says, "Without trying to get it perfect."
So here it is

To begin, a few statistics: 111 square miles of England are currently being quarried and building material sells for £3 or 4 per ton. 30% of UK waste is rubble, yet only 4% is recycled. The construction industry wastes around a third of all that it consumes, meaning that demand exceeds actual use by approximately 50% and a sizeable proportion of the national rubbish pile is unused building materials.

Elsewhere in Europe there is evidence that recycling of demolition waste can be profitable and effective in reducing landfill and destruction. In the Netherlands - too low lying to have any indigenous quarrying or landfill tipping - most waste building materials are recycled, this being cheaper than importing new stone or exporting waste. Germany and Denmark, among others, also have high rates of aggregate recycling.

In Britain, with newly mined, or primary, aggregate selling so cheaply, the inspection levies on recycled materials make them unprofitable. Advocates of quarrying claim that, to make recycling profitable, manipulation of the market would have to occur. Such statements are misleading, suggesting that markets are somehow organic, that market forces can exist independently of manipulation. In fact there are two main reasons why aggregate recycling is financially inviable in this country, namely the planning system and the taxation system.
The Taxation System

A tax has been introduced on the quarrying of new material in the last few years, though the levy is low, allowing it to continue being sold cheaply and used wastefully. The taxation system also actively encourages use of aggregate. For example, there is no tax on new-build housing, making it more profitable to expand into open space (using new building materials) than to restore or convert existing buildings. Because the cheap housing is out of town, more people live there, often driving to work and services in town.

A demand is created - both for new roads (to the new developments) and for increased space on the existing roads because people live further from services and centres of employment - which requires the use of building material. Meanwhile the increased pollution and congestion within towns, caused by people driving in for work and services, combined with rambling dereliction, caused by the financial disincentives to restore existing buildings, push more and more people out of towns. Bearing in mind that a third of what is consumed by the construction industry is wasted, this spiral of urban decay and sprawl results in an endless and immense use of newly quarried stone.

Though an aggregates tax has the direct effect of raising the selling price of primary aggregate and knock-on effects on other market commodities, it remains much more profitable to build from scratch out of town. The increased costs are, of course, passed on to the consumer - business very rarely actually absorbs the cost of anything.

Aggregate recycling would create 4000 new jobs, over and above those currently provided by quarrying. These jobs, furthermore, would be unlimited by time because people will always need building materials and a recycling plant is not exhausted as a quarry is. There is evidence from the rest of Europe that recycling is at least as profitable as quarrying, though inevitably the move into recycling demands investment in new technology.
The Planning System

The planning system, being heavily weighted in favour of profit, serves to exacerbate the manipulations created by the taxation system. Both the "predict and provide" method of planning and the actual process of considering applications perpetuate the oversupply of, and increasing demand for, building materials, as well as disempowering those who oppose environmentally destructive, but profitable, applications.

Predict and Provide is a planning method whereby future demand is projected according to current usage plus a growth estimate. Planning provision is made for that level of demand to be met (note - demand is not the same as need). On one hand, this method of planning can actively create trends, in that whatever is provided in most plentiful supply becomes cheapest and most readily available and, therefore, in greatest demand. On the other hand, it ensures that the whole system follows its nose blindly into every conceivable worst-case scenario.

For example, the demand for roadspace may be projected to far outstretch the capacity for carriage by a given year. Under the predict and provide system, the solution would be to cater for that level of demand - to vastly increase the capacity for private car use, regardless of the implications for the health of people living near the areas of increased traffic, for communities disrupted or ecosystems destroyed by the new roads.

A more ecologically sound approach would be to address the problem of increasing demand for cars: to improve public transport and make it more accessible, convenient and attractive, to look into provision of employment and services and their distance from residential areas, and so on. Once an alternative was in place, disincentives to car use could be introduced - "push" and "pull" factors towards a more sustainable practice. In other words, planners could either address the need for, and mode of, transport or they could - and do - simply meet demand, as if in a consequence-vacuum. Better still, we could reorganise society around human beings instead of corporations, stop confining everyone to crap jobs and eradicate the need for a lot of the blue-arsed fly behaviour that enables the ruling classes to get away with this shit.

In fact there are direct consequences of this increased capacity, in the form of "induced demand". Reports by the government’s own advisory committees have consistently found that increasing road capacity increases traffic, through the use of private cars and of road-freight rather than rail (SACTRA, 1998). Thus we face the paradoxical situation whereby a system which is supposed to plan is in fact following, but nonetheless perpetuating, socially and environmentally damaging trends.

In the case of quarrying, provision is planned according to predictions from ten to fifteen years previous. Councils have "landbanks", which are areas set aside for quarrying or possible quarrying. Landbanks are measured in years, so that a council may have a landbank of twenty or thirty years. This is the number of years that building material could be provided for - at the projected level of demand - from the land currently set aside for quarrying.

Because of the high rate of wastage and the inflated demand caused by factors already discussed, the current level of usage at any given time is exaggerated. The proportional growth estimate, which is essential in an economy based on annual expansion, is thus also exaggerated. This ensures a constant oversupply of material, which drives down prices still further, which increases demand and so on ad infinitum. We have muddy tractor paths being covered with chemical grade limestone, while demolition rubble is thrown into landfill and valuable habitats are blasted out of existence. In fact, even your toothpaste probably contains limestone.

The supposedly democratic process of planning consultation does little to rectify the situation. Landbanks are set aside without public consultation, many years before any application to quarry actually becomes public. Public consultation does not begin until a planning application has been submitted so, often, agreements to lease land may have already been made between companies and councils before local people are even aware that there is a possibility of quarrying on a given piece of land. In some cases, such as at Ashton Court, near Bristol, along with this agreement to let land may have come an undertaking to "use best endeavours" to ensure planning permission is granted for quarrying.

Developers submit planning applications to councils, which will normally have an Aggregates Plan containing guidelines to structure their consideration of the proposals. For example, the South West Regional Planning Conference (SWRPC, 1998) stated that, with regard to the environmental impact of primary aggregate use:

"There is widespread concern throughout the region that the levels of production that will result from the apportioned figures for the 1992-2006 period will not be acceptable beyond that date because of the continued use of high quality valuable resources and the expansion of extraction into areas of national protective designations (eg. AONBs and Heritage Coast). In parts of the Region concerns will begin to arise much earlier and it is likely that extraction at the apportioned rate will be unacceptable after the turn of the century." (4.5.12)
On the need to replace primary aggregate use with secondary materials:

"In Conference’s view a greater contribution to the supply of aggregates to the Region must be met from secondary and recycled sources (eg. china clay, construction and demolition waste) and that the Government must commit itself to positive economic instruments, including regulatory and financial, to encourage their use." (4.5..14)

In theory, then, a presumption against granting new quarrying permissions might be expected. However, as George Monbiot (1997) writes:

"Developers in this country have the most extraordinary legal powers to subvert the democratic process and impose their projects on the most reluctant population." Firstly, if planning permission is refused, the developer can appeal to the Secretary of State for the Environment - a right which is not available to an objector if the permission is granted. Fighting an appeal costs councils hundreds of thousands of pounds and this threat creates a powerful presumption in favour of granting permission.

"If the council has enough money to fight an appeal, however, and if at appeal the Secretary of State rejects the developer’s plans, all they need do is submit an almost identical planning application and the whole process starts again. This can go on until both the money and the willpower of the council and local people are exhausted and the developers get what they want. If the blackmail and extortion still don’t work, however, the developers have yet another weapon in their armoury. Planners call it "offsite planning gain". You and I would recognise it as bribery. Developers can offer as much money as they like to a local authority, to persuade it to accept their plans. You don’t like my high-rise multiplex hypermarket ziggurat? Here’s a million quid. What do you think of it now?

"The results of this democratic deficit are visible all over our cities."

(Monbiot, 1997, p182-3)

Councils set the ground rules for hearings - they determine how long each objector may speak for and what topics may be covered. In some cases, objectors are not even permitted to mention the actual application, but may only talk about environmental damage or noise or dust or whatever grounds their objection is based on. A committee thus gets no clear picture of the consequences of, or alternatives to, the proposed quarry and can more easily disregard the (by now almost incoherent) objections. Planning hearings, as a result, are often little more than a farcical traipse through the motions.

Lacking the right to appeal, an objector’s only recourses are to public inquiry or judicial review. Public inquiries are called by the deputy prime-minister as he (/she?) sees fit; judicial reviews depend on an objector having what lawyers call locus standi, or a sufficient "standing" in relation to the threatened development. In practice this means that what the person stands to lose or gain from the development must be quantifiable and that, in effect, means financial.

The problem is compounded by patterns of land ownership in this country. Almost all land is privately owned and has been since the enclosures, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the commons. Land is seen as exclusively the business of those who "own" it, who may do with it - and profit from it - as they wish. It is common for agents to manage large holdings such as those of the Crown and the Dukes of Cornwall (Prince Charles), of Westminster and of Northumberland.

These agents’ remits are simply to maximise profit from the holdings and mineral extraction is lucrative. Marion Shoard writes that companies prefer to pay royalties rather than to pay large lump sums for mineral rights and that "the post-tax takings to the owners of the rights to work Derbyshire’s minerals - foremost among whom is the Duke of Devonshire - is probably in the region of £1.8million every year" (written in 1987).

Clearly, the reason why the rest of us are losing so much of the open space and beautiful scenery of the land in which we were born - our birthright - is because there are a few very rich people who can become richer still by its destruction. Democracy? Representation of the people? Maybe not.

Environmental Impact

Your objection on environmental grounds may be edited out of the cost-benefit equation entirely by what industries call "environmental mitigation" plans. These have included the diversion of the course of two rivers - the Teign and the Bovey, at Teigngrace, in Devon - a plan whose planning permission was overturned at public inquiry when it was found that their estimates of the effects of the diversions were grossly miscalculated.

"Translocation", or the moving of the surface and topsoil, has been accepted by planners as mitigation for habitat loss, though it has never yet succeeded.

Reclamation, after quarrying has ended, consists of planting a few trees and making the deep, barren pit available for public use - as opposed to turning it into a landfill tip - and this, too, is accepted by planners as mitigation for what has been lost.

Quarries may interfere with water tables, as at Whatley Quarry in the Mendips, threatening both the Mendip aquifer, which supplies thousands of people, and the flow of Bath spa.

At the simplest level, the people of this country are losing beautiful, open places: Sherwood Forest, Dartmoor, Longstone Edge, the Nine Ladies in the Peak District, the Mendip Hills, Ashton Court, and the places destroyed for access roads, like Dead Womans Bottom in the Mendips. It may not seem as desperate as the situations in countries where oil and gold and diamonds are being extracted in other countries, but the principle is precisely the same: multinational companies, with the complicity of politicians, trampling on the rights of people and the planet, lying about the need for the extraction and about the jobs it provides.
High Hills Lament

High Hills Lament

And I dreamed I was going

where tall trees are growing

where nine rivers flowing

roll down to the sea

when I woke to hear crying

lamenting and sighing

men in yellow arriving

to fell the last tree.

High hills of our fathers

round hills of our mothers

green hills of my people

that used to be free

scraped away to make room for

some global consumer

whose growth like a tumour

eats England and me.

I’m a lover of England,

her wildlife and wisdom.

I have walked the land o’er

and I’ve seen what’s been done.

On those roads I have followed

through a land that’s been swallowed,

land tortured and hollowed

for three pounds a ton.

And I’ll hear no excuses

for those whose abuses

have put to such uses

the land of their birth

till there’s nothing grows off it

but slag heaps of profit

for some high flyer not fit

to live on this earth.

Let their slaves justify it

they cannot deny it

though nightly they try it

and seem to succeed

that our world has been wasted,

skinned, skewered and basted

for a dream which once tasted

consumed us with greed.

Are my people half dead then

from a lie that’s been fed them?

Those bribes which have bled them

of courage and power

And our last open spaces

those sweet special places

forgotten like faces

that used to be ours.

And I dreamed I was going

where tall trees are growing

where nine rivers flowing

roll down to the sea.

‘Tis the isle of the blessed there

but I’ll never rest there

till there’s no life oppressed there

and my land is free.

by Theo
Why Shouldn’t We? - A rant for planet Earth

"Why shouldn’t we?" demanded the man in the suit at the end of the row. Why shouldn’t people own huge houses or second homes so that they privately own far more space than they need, which is empty most of the time?

"Why shouldn’t we, if we can afford it?"

And that was familiar - the ‘Me’ argument.

It could just as well have been about driving everywhere, taking up lots of roadspace whether moving or stopped, pumping out pollution on tarmac roads where trees used to be, using oil which was mined and transported from some distant tribe’s ancestral lands. Why shouldn’t we, if we can afford it?

Or travelling by air from city to city in vessels which pump out as much ‘greenhouse gas’ as if every single passenger drove to the destination in a separate car, taking off and landing on runways where woodland once stood.

Or buying more than you need - more food than you can eat, with all its packaging, and throwing it away when it goes off; more paper, and binning it after using one side; throwing out envelopes that have been used once; maybe reasoning that it’s OK because that’s separated for recycling - but that uses more energy than reusing - or because it’s biodegradable, so it won’t be lying in the landfill tip forever. Buying disposable thisses and thats, never anything that’s made to last.
Why shouldn’t we, if we can afford it?

And why shouldn’t the quarry companies destroy our countryside to make building material for the big new houses on greenbelt land and the roads for the cars and the oil tankers and the lorries which bring the food and the paper and the disposables and take it all away again in bin bags to dump as landfill in the disused quarries?

Why shouldn’t they, if people can afford it; if they can profit from it? And why does nobody ever ask if the Earth can afford it (It is our life support system, after all).

by Marie
Mechanimal

Sleek white body, sharp bared teeth

Ripping up the habitat to reach the wealth beneath

And this unnatural animal obscures, with metal scraping,

The screams of Mother Earth for the child of hers it’s raping

And, as the seasons change, the earth and I will mourn

The endless sleep of winter and joyful spring stillborn.

by Jo
Words About England

Lois Whitney is a native American woman of the Western Shoshone nation (now Nevada, USA). She left behind a life in mainstream American culture to rejoin her own people in the struggle against gold mining on their land. She came to England to speak to executives and shareholders of Rio Tinto - one of the major culprits - at their annual conference. She also visited the quarry protest camp at Ashton Court, near Bristol, where she talked about her people’s struggles and drew parallels between the two situations. These are some of the things she said.

We forget how small it is, how beautiful. I cast that aside because I thought progress was important.

But there is never enough money to satisfy them.They give a little and most people don’t get any of it.

There are a lot of people who don’t realise they’re oppressed. People are wasteful, consuming too much, throwing too much away.

This is ours. We protect it. The land is ours to take care of, not to own.
Tunnelling

Curled, like a foetus, in the belly of the earth

Not in blissful ignorance of my impending birth

But in the painful certainty of death and grief and sorrow

When I’m torn out from the mother and there’s no more time to borrow,

When the wildness and the beauty and the skylarks and their song

Have been taken from the earth above me where they still belong,

Have been bought and sold and leased by the ones who could have saved them,

Who never knew their life and who took it and enslaved them

And the earth lies bare and hollow where the children used to play

And the sun sets over nothing at the end of every day

And here lie ghosts of many things and Death, I know thy sting,

For now the sky is empty where the skylarks used to sing.

by Jo
Park Visitors’ Guide

On the map, Durnford Quarry,

Laid out flat by two dimensions,

Excavations, depths are hidden,

On the map, needle lines,

Around its rim are gouged cliffs,

In the mind, symbolise teeth,

Questing sharp, acres of prey,

In the flesh, incisor fence

Surrounds the flowers, set to drag

The meadow down its hollowed maw.

On the map, cosy symbols,

In the mind, just images,

In the flesh, wild treachery.

by Wizard

Pioneer Aggregates is the Australian multinational company which extended its limestone quarry near Bristol into a wildflower meadow in public parkland. The wildflower meadow was "translocated" - ie. scraped up and moved - to another site in what was the largest ever attempt at using a technique which has never succeeded.
To Pioneer

Don’t kill the wild orchids with the salt of our tears

For the life that we lost for a few profit years.

"It’s not a true meadow" you said, as if that

Were justification for rolling it flat

And blasting a hole to the bowels of the earth

For the few pounds a ton that the stone there was worth.

To us it’s an orchid, a skylark, a fern,

To the shareholder, nothing but money to burn.

We drown in the colour, we fly on the sounds,

We bathe in the scents and we sense the surrounds.

We move in the freedom, we breathe in the space

That no quantification could ever replace.

You don’t see the value of that which you’ve stolen

As long as your faraway bankbooks are swollen.

To you it’s a bland and unused piece of land,

Of no status compared to your money in hand.

By way of appeasement, you said "Translocate it",

As if the destruction could so be abated,

Told us the damage and loss would be minimal,

Played on an order corrupt and subliminal

That places the aggregates that could be mined

Over the surface that nature designed;

Placing material wealth you could leach

Ahead of the colour and life that you’d bleach.

It’s still an experiment - nobody’s proved

That habitats heal themselves after they’re moved

And yet to the planners you said "Translocation"

As if, in your wisdom, your own invocation

Could simply create in a place of your choosing

An image incarnate of what we were losing;

As if, in your wisdom, you far better knew

The place the wild orchids should go when they grew.

You can’t move the spirit by shifting the ground

Nor make good our loss with this word that you’ve found

And after a decade you’ll leave us to ponder

The hole in the heart of the magic you’ll squander;

The deep hundred metres, a scar everlasting

Obscuring the ghost that we lost to your blasting;

Lying a symbol to corporate waste

Of stone used once and discarded in haste

As rubble which mounts in a pile, redundant,

Never recycled, seeming abundant.

Funny how money men don’t count the cost

Of the wonder that faraway people have lost.

Don’t kill the wild orchids with the salt of our tears:

Recycle the stone and be true Pioneers.

by Jo
Campaigning Against Quarrying - What You Can Do

"Not to resist is to collaborate"

Western Shoshone Defence Project

Anti-quarrying means fighting for an industry in building materials which is both ecologically and economically sound - which creates employment and minimises waste and destruction. But, in effect, because there is so much material already in use, we don’t need new quarries.

Action against quarries needs to start when – or even before – the planning application is submitted. Get on the case of the quarry company, the planning authority, council, landowner – these last three may well be one and the same. The bigger the local opposition the better, so think about organising talks and engaging with the media, to make sure people are well informed, but beware the media’s tendency to trivialise protest by focussing on individuals instead of issues.

Beware also those who advocate compromising the message and the demands in exchange for respectability. Not everyone will approve – who cares? The assumption that people will come round to your argument if you just show them how nice you are is incredibly disempowering and enables the eco-arsehole companies and people without vision to control your campaign and get away with unsound exploitation of natural resources.

Make up your own mind. An organisation is only as strong as the people who believe in it and work for it. Just be sure to keep your ideals at the forefront of your mind when planning your actions and be true to them, even when it isn’t the easiest way. Otherwise we’d be no better than the industry we’re trying to change.

Direct Action

Direct action, by definition, cuts out the "middle man". Activism is about empowering ourselves to change things, to make a better society or to protect the planet. When the demands of globalised capitalism dominate politics, as George Monbiot writes, "Only deeds could fill the democratic void".

A few examples: in 1997 in Teigngrace, in Devon, activists and local residents joined forces to occupy the site of a proposed quarry, forcing a public inquiry into the granting of planning permission, which included the diversion of two rivers - the Teign and the Bovey. The public inquiry overturned the permission.

At Merehead Quarry in the Mendips, a group of people strolled in and occupied the weigh bridge over which all arriving and departing lorries had to go, effectively blockading the quarry. Others walked around the plant chatting amiably with drivers and quarry workers and switching off all the machinery so that no work could be done at all.

At nearby Whatley Quarry, in protest at plans to expand the pit to twice the size of Shepton Mallet, a massive action resulted in many thousands of pounds worth of damage as almost every single piece of machinery was sabotaged.

At Ashton Court, a public park on the edge of Bristol, weekend camps and protests at the planning hearings saved 14 out of 35 acres of a wildflower meadow from the extension of a limestone quarry by an Australian multinational company. Judicial review was refused and a permanent camp was set up to protest against the quarrying of the other 21 acres. The company spent millions of pounds on security, fencing, legal, PR and maintenance costs in response, while the existence of the camp, as well as creating a new community, provided a focal point for many more local people to learn about the issues surrounding quarrying.

Actions which cost developers money serve to make the destructive activity less profitable. They strike at the heart of the motivation for the destruction - they are related to an end goal and are, as such, legitimate actions. Legitimate is not necessarily the same as legal and sometimes direct action involves breaking laws, when they are unjustly protecting property and companies which trample on everyone else’s rights - consider, for example, Gandhi and the Suffragettes

Having said that, many activists never get arrested. Despite the drafting and passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) which effectively criminalised peaceful protest, being arrested is still a matter for personal choice.

The media stereotype should at all times be determinedly ignored. There is no such thing as the mighty, fearless ecowarrior. A cartoon by Kate Evans depicts "an ecowarrior displaying incredible bravery and daring" by drinking tea, eating "veggie slop", avoiding midges, drinking cider and sleeping.

She writes that her intention was "to show that the Brave Ecowarrior is a sad media stereotype invented to prevent the news consumers from identifying with on-the -case individuals." Do or Die #6 called it "Swampification" - trivialising the issues behind the spectacle, superimposing the cult of personality over a whole movement, focusing on lifestyle rather than reasons.

The media - with its corporate agenda and owners - has also often attempted to present activists as violent. Many actions involve "locking-on" to vehicles and machinery by the neck or arm, hanging banners, sitting on weighbridges, street theatre, sit-down occupations, and sabotaging machinery. Machinery is merely capital and capital is just money. Money can’t feel hurt or upset, so you can’t be violent towards it.

Skylarks, however, are another matter. Threatened with extinction by 2009, a quarry extension which destroys the habitat of 2 nesting pairs for 9 years of profit causes considerable violence towards skylarks. Horseshoe bats, also protected, are so profoundly disturbed by the loss of their habitat that they do not breed, so that the whole colony dies out within a short time.

An ecosystem is a living, organic whole, made up of many thousands and millions of parts, each with its own individual life and all mutually dependent: food chains, ecosystems, etc. Destroying a part or the whole of an ecosystem wreaks violence upon habitats, resulting in distress and death to many individual creatures.

To turn another assumption on its head - who commits criminal damage? The activist who sabotages a machine which is used to destroy habitats or the corporate owner of that vehicle, who blasts holes in the countryside, eradicating habitats and creatures and depriving people - present and future - of open space all for his or her own profit.

Everyone brings their own skills and energies to things – no one should be under any pressure to do stuff they don’t want to. Personally I’m crap at sneaking about in the dark, but I’m alright at other stuff. Nobody has to sabotage anything or get arrested; everyone can. The point of direct action is that it’s up to you. And it works.
Useful Contacts and Groups

Aggregates Advisory Service

Set up by the DETR to help reduce primary aggregate use and increase reuse and recycling. Publishes "Digests" of current research - in-depth, but the most up to date info.

Symonds Travers Morgan, Symonds House, Wood Street, East Grinstead, West Sussex RH19 1UU; 0800 374 279, fax 01342 313500;

e-mail: AAS (at) STMGROUP.MHSCOMPUSERVE.COM;

website: http://www.planning.detr.gov.uk/aas/index.htm

Alarm UK

anti road building

13 Stockwell Rd, London SW9 9AU, tel 0171 5882 9279

AQUA (Anti-Quarry Action)

Group formed to oppose plans to quarry in Teigngrace, Devon

Kimberley Mill Park, Kingsteignton, Devon TQ12 3NR; 01626 363844

Campaign Legal Group

legal self-training for campaigns

43 Swan Meadow Rd, Poolstock, Wigan WN3 5BJ; 01942 513792

Centre for Alternative Technology

Machynlleth, Powys, Wales

Info (at) cat.org.uk | www.cat.org.uk

Conscious Cinema

(regular direct action/environmental/social justice video - loaned on condition that it’s publicly shown)

PO Box 2679, Brighton BN2 1UJ, tel 01273 278018

Inbox (at) consciouscinema.co.uk | www.consciouscinema.co.uk

Corporate Watch

Keeps an eye on earth-raping, people exploiting, generally nasty companies

Box CW, 111 Magdalen Rd, Oxford OX4 1RQ, tel 01865 791 391

Earth First! (EF!)

a network of affiliations of local activists. Has 2 national gatherings a year, winter and summer, and produces the monthly Action Update.

16 Sholebroke Ave, Leeds LS7 3HB actionupdate (at) gn.apc.org

Earth Rights

Advice on environmental law and the right to protest

Little Orchard, School Lane, Molehill Green, Takely, Essex CM22 6PS; 01279 870391; earthrights (at) gn.apc.org | www.earthrights.org.uk

Media – Activists’ Guide by George Monbiot

www.monbiot.com

Mines and Communities

Info (at) minesandcommunities.org | www.minesandcommunities.org

Nine Ladies Anti Quarry Campaign

Brmable Dene, Stanton Lane, Matlock, Derbyshire DE4 2LQ

All (at) nineladies.uklinux.net | www.nineladies.uklinux.net

No Opencast

against all mining from big holes in the countryside

190 Shepherds Bush Rd, London W6 7NL; 0171 603 1831

Peat Alert

Info (at) peatalert.org.uk www.peatalert.org.uk

People Against Rio Tinto and Subsidiaries (Partizans)

www.minesandcommunities.org/Aboutus/partizans.htm

Scottish Opencast Action Group

soag.info (at) virgin.net

Undercurrents

compilations of short films made by activists, available on video for £12.95/ £9.95 unwaged, from 16b Cherwell St, Oxford OX4 1BG, tel (production) 01865 203661/ 662 underc (at) gn.apc.org | www.undercurrents.org

Women’s Environmental Network (WEN)

environmental and educational charity

87 Worship St, London EC2A 2BE, tel 0171 247 3327, fax 0171 247 4770 info (at) wen.org.uk | www.gn.apc.org/wen





References and Recommended Reading

Copse: the Cartoon Book of Tree Protesting

208 page A4 book of smashingness by Kate Evans, ISBN 0-9532674-0-7

Do or Die - Voices From Earth First!

from South Downs EF!, PO Box 2971, Brighton BN2 2TT

articles, rants, analysis, letters on direct action and Earth First.

How to Build a Protest Tunnel

www.discodavestunnelguide.co.uk

I-Contact Video Network

For the Ashton Court Quarry Campaign film and loads of other stuff

i-contact (at) videonetwork.org | www.videonetwork.org

Merrick, "Battle For The Trees"

132pg book about being at Newbury bypass campaign; also zines, pamphlets, guides.

Godhaven Ink Rooted Media, 145-149 Cardigan Rd, Leeds LS6 1LJ 0113 278 8617; merrick (at) stones.com | www.godhaven.org.uk

Anarchy: A journal of desire armed

Jmcquinn (at) coin.org | www.anarchymag.org

SchNEWS

A weekly alternative news and rant sheet from "Justice?", c/o. On the Fiddle, PO Box 2600, Brighton BN2 2DX, tel 01273 685 913 www.schnews.org.uk

Shoard, Marion, 1997, "This Land is Our Land" London: Gaia books; ISBN 1-8566-750644-7; £10.99

Excellent book about land issues in this country - in depth but easy to read.

Squall

PO Box 8959, London N19 5HW, tel 0171 561 1204; www.squall.co.uk; e-mail: mail (at) squall.co.uk | www.squall.co.uk

zine for squatters, anti CJA, activists etc.

Video Activists Handbook

248pg book, £12 + £1.50 p&p, ISBN 0 74531 1695