Rethinking sacrifice: a climate camp in Aberdeen

The leading climate action group in Scotland concluded its fourth action camp in July, this year at Torry, Aberdeen. Climate Camp Scotland (CCS) made less of a press splash than the year before, when it was held in Grangemouth.

But this belies a maturing strategy which might offer some important lessons for the climate movement, in a context of disturbing UK-wide repression.

The general feeling from the camp’s four days was of understated success. The attendance of about 200 people, camped out in a threatened park in one of Scotland’s poorest areas, was around the same as 2023. This lack of growth was put down in part to the three-hour distance from the Scottish Central Belt. It may have reduced the press interest.

Dumped

But for those who made it, the camp was a hit. There was palpably high morale, immaculate logistics, and a warm sense of community. This marks a meaningful improvement on the year before at Grangemouth, and much of this can be understood by looking at the weekend’s pivotal direct action.

The direct action on the Saturday targeted the ‘great cockroach’ - the Aberdeen waste incinerator. 

Incineration is a major, under-covered issue in its own right: the growing use of this process undermines recycling efforts, locks in avoidable CO2 emissions, and brings adverse health and social consequences to what are invariably disadvantaged communities.

In this case, the choice of target had more specific relevance. Since its previous stint in Aberdeen in 2022, CCS has offered vigorous support to the Save St Fittick’s Park campaign. This is a local effort to preserve the Torry community’s last patch of green space from a bogus ‘energy transition’ championed by oil billionaire Ian Wood.

Torry is one of the most economically deprived places in Scotland, with a life expectancy at least a decade lower than other parts of Aberdeen. One resident told The Ecologist: “Torry gets dumped on. We get what others in Aberdeen don’t want."

Exhilarating

This has already included sewage works, a landfill site, a swathe of RAAC-afflicted housing, and the replacement of a beach with an industrial harbour. 

The incinerator, just across from the local school, fired up in 2023 despite a local opposition and a Scottish government moratorium on all incinerators the previous year.

CCS’s strategy of forging solidarity with communities in fossil capital’s ‘sacrifice zones’ is already documented. What stood out on Saturday was not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’.

This writer has been on a lot of actions and has never witnessed one so carefully considered as Saturday’s. So much so that this action itself felt like a sort of manifesto.

The development of an action consensus and wider process of consideration was a result of lessons from an exhilarating but messy forerunner in Grangemouth in which activists broke through two police lines - and saw retribution with a two-hour kettle.

Trespasses

The core organisers describe a much deeper ambition of challenging the ‘martyrdom model’ championed by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.

The most striking form this took was a dress-code: the distribution of white dust-suits and facemasks was a big symbolic move, clearly drawing inspiration from German movement Ende Gelande. But this wasn’t mere aesthetic-snatching. 

The central thrust of CCS’s action philosophy is that it’s better not to get arrested. This is in direct contradiction with XR and JSO’s ‘mass arrest’ strategy. The anonymity provided by uniform clothing is a calculated means to these ends.

Nevertheless, where Ende Gelande is renowned for using this anonymity to enable daring trespasses and dramatic showdowns with police, in Aberdeen it was more about buttressing an already risk-averse plan. 

There were briefings and trainings that had prepared participants for all kinds of exotic opposition. Previous camps have used trespasses and occupations. Yet, in the end, the objective itself turned out to be pretty modest: a blockade.

Communities

The camp’s contingents arrived at the incinerator’s gates under the shadow of a tense police presence. It slowly dawned on participants that no further escalation was planned, provoking feelings of first anticlimax, then relief, then a kind of delight at the realisation that decent direct action doesn’t need to be traumatic. 

Across four hours people played games and sang and chatted and, with the plant’s deliveries diverted, returned to camp by way of pavements in a subtle but significant gesture of minimising disruption to the local community.

This description might read as less exciting than you might expect from mass direct action: that is in some sense the point. There were no arrests, no moments of heroism, no premeditated provocations, no boundary-pushing beyond the concrete objective. 

This calculated quietness represents a conscious response to the martyrdom model of JSO and the first phase of XR. This recent development is a response which has found some urgency from both the authoritarian crackdown and, distinct but related, the undeniable trail of burn out activists and legal consequences left by these groups.

The martyrdom model has also been criticised as making activism an exclusive preserve of all-or-nothing heroes, creating and exacerbating system-level difficulties in connecting with communities. 

Demographics

One CCS organiser, speaking anonymously to The Ecologist: “Taking action fully anonymously, practicing autonomous and flat decision structures, prioritising group safety and wellbeing: all of this will enable our movement to grow over time, it will keep people in our movement to develop skills, learning and commitment.

"We need more people able to take direct action. If the only thing on offer is direct action followed by arrest, we will not grow to the numbers we need. The only way to grow is to protect each other, make sure after an action we can come back for the next one without conditions and repercussions.”

This philosophy of direct action – sometimes pointedly referred to as ‘non accountable’ – holds an equivocal relationship to CCS’s other core aim of supporting community-level resistance. 

In some ways anonymity and moving en-masse makes action more accessible to those with more to fear from police contact. On the other hand, it can be harder to relate to people wearing masks and introducing themselves with fake names.

And in broader organising terms, security culture carries the ironic risk of excluding the very demographics excluded by martyrdom model, with deliberately murky processes potentially combining with technical hoops and a culture of reticence to create subtle access barriers. Most action participants had no idea what the plan was before is execution.

Defining

Another question posed by the Aberdeen action is the relationship with the mainstream media. It’s easy to criticise the ‘made for media’ approach which JSO and XR came to use, but both groups had reasons to take this path. 

Minimising risks of arrest might be more sustainable, but it might require conceptions of impact which are less reliant on gaining news coverage.

In any case, it might not be a question of preference. It is more a question of how rather than if the climate movement’s direct action wing goes underground.

This is the conclusion from JSO’s ‘Whole Truth Five’ group of activists receiving a history-defining combined sentence of 21 years on the basis of a secretly recorded Zoom call, and police pre-emptively arresting 27 JSO supporters in their homes last month.

Intrigued

This wing of activists who continue to risk arrest but try to remain anonymous will need to stay in contact with those campaigners who remain 'on the surface'. 

This duality was on full display in Torry. Masked-up campers spending time before and after Saturday’s action chatting to local dog-walkers, running workshops and going litter-picking. 

The camp did have some real outreach success, receiving warm thanks from the Friends of St Fittick’s along with local pillars like the Aberdeen Social Centre, and a range of participation from intrigued residents. But it remains to be seen how far masked activists can reach beyond their natural base.

Climate Change Scotland are not the only ones looking to bridge the deepening divide between radical action and community approachability. 

Rooted

This is Rigged, also based in Scotland, have made magnificent efforts in this direction, while south of the border XR alums in Cooperation Hull are working from the other end. 

Most notable of all is the pivot from none other than Roger Hallam: if he wasn’t now serving a record-breaking jail sentence, he’d be working on Assemble – a local democracy project.

In this, Hallam and Climate Change Scotland are not so different. Outside of camps, the latter group has been active in supporting local organising efforts, the latest culmination of which was a people’s assembly – precisely the prescription of Assemble, Cooperation Hull, and XR.

During the incinerator blockade, a spokesperson stood forward to read a formal declaration from the Torry Assembly. These words cast a transformative effect on the scene, elevating it from standard semi-abstract protest into something much more rooted and potent. 

Dumping

The community’s voice declared:

"We need control over our lives, so we can value our community, welcome newcomers, value our heritage, and look after each other. We need no more than any other community needs.

"We need clean air, clean streets, good housing, affordable transport, healthy affordable food, local jobs, community ownership, safe places to play, good health, and a healthy environment…

"Nature should be valued more than corporate profit. The community should be valued more than corporate profit. Our land and our community belong to us, and we belong to it.

"We need community health. We do not need land grabbing, dumping and pollution.

Justice

After this came words from specific assembly members, including the lapidary line “An Energy Transition Zone should not start by concreting over a wetland ecosystem.”

Organisers promised to return as the camp packed up on the Monday. Climate Camp Scotland has already signalled it’s considering another spell in Torry for its next annual camp.

This could happen even sooner if Sir Ian Wood sends diggers into the park he dubbed “shovel-ready” back in 2021. The potential showdown largely hinges on a judicial review, which will be heard later this week in Edinburgh’s Court of Session.

When Climate Camp Scotland does come back to Torry it won’t have all the answers. But it’s likely to remain one of the UK’s leading efforts in fighting for climate justice in the face of darkening repression.

This Author

Douglas Rogers is a writer, activist, and editor of Raveller magazine.