I died last Saturday. With 16 other people. In the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Five of us from BANZAI joined an XR Die-In on the morning of 27th August 2022. Deliberately theatrical, and scheduled to coincide with the last week of the Fringe, the action drew attention to the continuing failure of the government to urgently address climate and ecological breakdown.
“Will clearly carry the memory of the last thing I see: a bright blue sky, J’s smiling face and a white sheet fluttering over my head.”
None of us in the BANZAI group had been rebels in one of XR’s Non-Violent Direct Action events before. We were impressed by how well organised the Die-In was, and by the level of care and mutual support that was manifested by the participants. We gathered 30 minutes in advance of the Die-In for a group briefing and were reminded that even though global warming was still lower than 1.5 C, the people of Pakistan had lived through extreme heat this summer, followed by devastating floods.
It’s hard to know how much impact such actions have. The Die-In attracted lots of attention from Festival goers and press photographers, and was sympathetically reported on by Reporting Scotland, Yahoo News, STV News and The National. All this helps, in a small way, to bring the climate emergency to public consciousness. And, as one of our group said, “doing something must be better than doing nothing!”
It’s a sunny Saturday morning in Edinburgh, the weekend of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But the residents of Leamington Terrace aren’t in the street celebrating her majesty’s 70 year reign. Instead, ten or so residents of Leamington Terrace are out with brushes and dustpans cleaning up the pavements. I ask around for Ewan Klein a founding member of the Bruntsfield Area Net Zero Action Initiative, BANZAI.
“We already are experiencing climate change, it’s just affecting people in the developing world more” Ewan says. But having lived on the street for decades he is beginning to notice signs of the climate crisis arriving on his doorstep too. “We have had instances of bad flooding” he tells me, which affected the new builds at the end of the street last summer. Mick Patrick, another founding member, is noticing these things too. The damp and drainage issues in his flat are a result of guttering designed for a climate that’s already in the past, he was told by conservation architects. “We get heavier bursts of more intense rain now” he tells me. The guttering, designed a hundred years ago for the B-listed tenements that make up much of Bruntsfield, is “being overwhelmed more often”. According to Scottish Government annual average rainfall figures, Scotland has become 9% wetter in the last decade alone, with winters 19% wetter than the 1961–1990 average.
As I’m talking to Ewan, Mick is speed-walking away with a bag full of placards. It’s almost 11 am, time to #SitForClimate. For the second week in a row a handful of BANZAI members and Tara the dog head to Bruntsfield Links and sit on a bench for 10 minutes holding #SitForClimate placards. Mick discovered Sit For Climate on Twitter. “The idea is just to do something which is very simple, very non-confrontational, very un-stressful,” he explains. Friends and family members stop by to sit or chat for a couple of minutes and a passer-by asks about what they’re doing.
Sitting for Climate. From left Ewan Klein, Mick Patrick, a friend on her way to work, Mimo Caenepeel and Tara the dog. Photo: Abby Crichton.
“I feel like I’ve got to do something,” Mick tells me. He’s “surrounded by all these nice people in a nice street but why aren’t we talking about climate stuff and why aren’t we changing things? If we just wait for the council to change things for us we’ll probably wait too long”. Ewan points out that “there may be some areas where the council’s ahead of public opinion and we need to be part of talking in support of some of those measures”. Mick agrees, he’s been following the City of Edinburgh Council’s Net Zero action plans closely. He hopes BANZAI could become one of the Council’s proposed Net Zero Neighbourhoods, pioneering the changes needed to reach the Scottish Government’s Net Zero target. “I’m quite distressed about the way the world is going, life kind of goes on nicely but things are pretty bad,” Mick tells me.
He’s not alone in his distress. This week the World Health Organisation published a new policy brief with five recommendations urging countries to rapidly integrate mental health support with action on the Climate Crisis. “A lot of people take action in a slightly disconnected way or lots of people find it difficult to take action because the feelings that are associated with climate change are so overwhelming,” says Mimo Caenepeel, she’s also sitting for climate. A trained psychotherapist, she’s been co-facilitating a Climate Cafe at the Eric Liddell Centre around the corner — a safe place for people to bring their feelings about the Climate Emergency. “It’s not easy,” she says “they are very big feelings”. “It’s not about reaching as many people as possible but about building a strong core where we kind of approach it in some ways more holistically”, she says. It’s not quite group therapy, once people start to talk about their feelings “it naturally does start to connect with what is out there, what can we do, so we have a bit of a hybrid format,” she explains.
“We’re just trying to do something in this big soup of stuff that’s going on, and hopefully we’ll gel together in the right way and the most effective way in the next year or so, but nobody feels like there’s time to just kind of hang around and wait for the structure to exist,” says Mick. “Everybody feels the need to do something now”.
So what is BANZAI doing now? Mick has set up a hyperlocal closed loop car sharing group with HiyaCar, which takes care of insurance. He’s listed his own family’s car, and 40 people have expressed interest in being part of the scheme already. Mick hopes “more people will share cars if it’s just amongst their friends and neighbours” and that the scheme could help reduce the number of cars on the street. The group is also lobbying the council for more bike parking and access to electric vehicle charging points. The BANZAI website is full of residents’ garden rewilding efforts and there’s an information evening about home retrofitting planned for the 20th of June.
Left: Leamington Terrace residents have installed their own noticeboard.
For now the group is trying to care for their immediate environment and build strong community links to improve resilience “if things do get harder” as Ewan fears. Leamington Terrace has its own annual street party, closing off the street every August. BANZAI began as a street swap stall at the street party cohosted by Ewan and Mick. The stall brought more people together, enough to form a group. They put on a film at the local church in the run-up to COP26. “We’ve tried to align the group with existing networks in the street,” says Ewan.
The Leamington Terrace area has an active mailing list, a Facebook group and a WhatsApp group started during Covid which “grew arms and legs” and now has close to 120 members. “Once that communication channel is there it does help people think, oh I can do stuff I can suggest things,” says Tai Kedzierski who maintains the email list. On Fridays residents leave donations for the local food bank on their doorsteps, to be collected by wheelbarrow, and roughly once a month there’s a street clean. They have even installed their own noticeboard, “it was trickier than you’d think” says Ewan. It’s a tight-knit community.
Has forming BANZAI made Ewan feel more hopeful? “I think we probably need to completely transform our dependence on carbon in the next five years, and I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he says. But forming the group has been “encouraging, there is an immediate kind of buzz and a sense of community”, it’s just “not on the timescale we need”.
I’m a very recent and ephemeral resident, who reached Scotland thanks to the hospitality of Mimo & Ewan and Mick & family. My journey had its target in Glasgow, where the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (COP26) is taking place. As a recently retired climatologist from South America, I felt that I could accomplish a role accompanying the youngsters.
Doubts, regrets, issues around the pandemic, and relatively high expenses related to the stay vanished when the magic of goodwill of Bruntsfielders came to convince to me that things could be properly resolved. Then I set sail to Scotland from Uruguay. And here I am Bruntsfield, but attending COP26 in Glasgow.
My activism at COP26 is linked to my membership of the international Climate Action Network (CAN), acting at the Latin American node, and trying to put on track Humanity against dangerous, worldwide climate change — dangerous for human beings and their current biospheric environment. The functioning of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is very complex and is becoming more and more complex, because so many human activities are pushing the world climate evolution off track.
Indeed, mankind has always changed climatic conditions: from the local climate when constructing a home, to the world climate by increasing the greenhouse effect and changing the reflectance of the surfaces reached by the sunbeam (the main input of energy for all atmospheric, oceanic and biological processes).
The task of impeding human actions warming the world on a planetary scale hurts the short-term interests of big fossil fuel companies, transport corporations, huge real estate companies, and the geopolitical game of powerful nations. Nevertheless, Science explains that we are on the way to far too much warming, and the point where that warming becomes uncontrollable is getting closer and closer.
Since human behaviour and political issues mostly focus on other short-term priorities, then each group of countries, each country and even each personal leader tries, in each COP and in each inter-sessional meeting, to put its priorities first — this week, for instance, is the week when countries (“Parties”) vote on the general decisions and pledges. Our task as observers is to take note of possible deviations in the pathways, stigmatising inequities, setbacks in progress already made, and to denounce them publicly. Our goal is also to help push forward towards a cleaner and safer world. Our advocacy is expressed by bilateral discussions with delegates, by press releases, by articles in ECO (a CAN newsletter edited since the Stockholm Conference in 1972) — or by giving out a Fossil of the Day, a symbolic “award” that some countries deserve for proposing fake solutions that would put the world in an even worse situation, or for making unethical statements.
Fossil of the Day award, COP25, photo by Connal Hughes
The ambiance in Glasgow is far from favourable to our commitment: under the pretext of the pandemic, ECO is not allowed to be distributed on paper, the ceremony of the “Fossil of the Day” is forbidden for the first time, and most of the time observers are not allowed to enter the so-called “open meetings”. Even when our voices are occasionally authorized, the times allotted are absolutely minimal.
But the warm friendship of our hosts in Bruntsfield, together with our stubbornness, are enough to keep trying.
