Ben Stewart is a former Guardian Student Journalist of the Year. He was one of the six protesters cleared of criminal damage in a groundbreaking trial after climbing the chimney at Kingsnorth power station. In its Year in Ideas issue the New York Times magazine described the verdict as one of the defining moments of 2008. In 2010 he led the first Greenpeace expedition to challenge Arctic oil drilling off the coast of Greenland. In 2013 he was a leading figure in the campaign to free the Arctic 30. He lives in London.
DONT TRUST
DONT FEAR
DONT BEG
2015 by Ben Stewart
Foreword 2015 by Paul McCartney
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Map Guardian Graphic
Images from the Gulag Chronicle Anthony Perrett, with thanks to Mannes Ubels Drawings of Murmansk SIZO-1 prison cell Phil Ball Message sent by Dima Litvinov on the road Dima Litvinov
PLATE SECTION PICTURE CREDITS
Page 1: all photos Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace. Page 2: top and bottom Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace. Page 3: top Greenpeace; middle Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace; bottom Greenpeace. Page 4: top and middle Dmitri Sharomov / Greenpeace; bottom, copyright reserved. Page 5: top and bottom Greenpeace. Page 6: top Uffe Weng / Greenpeace; bottom Patrik Rastenberger / Greenpeace. Page 7: top Igor Podgorny / Greenpeace; middle Greenpeace; bottom Dmitri Sharomov / Greenpeace. Page 8 top and bottom Dmitri Sharomov / Greenpeace.
Just Cant Get Enough Words and Music by Vince Clarke 1981, reproduced by permission of Musical Moments Ltd/SM Publishing UK Limited, London W1F 9LD.
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First published in Great Britain by Guardian Books and Faber & Faber Ltd, London, 2015 Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015
Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution
ISBN 978-1-62097-110-9 (e-book)
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Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut
The authors royalties from sales of this book are being donated to groups that fight for environmental protection and the rights of political prisoners: SaveTheArctic.org; 350.org; PlatformLondon.org; Agora-Sofia (www.openform.ru) and Human Corpus (www.corpus.media.org).
For the families of the Arctic 30, and for my own
Hi, Paul McCartney here.
1968. That was quite a year. The people were on the streets, revolution was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William Anders. It was Christmas Eve. Anders, his navigator Jim Lovell and their mission commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft, their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility. Oh my God, Anders cried. Look at that picture over there! Theres the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!
You got a colour film? he asked the others. Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you For a minute or so, three human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometres from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of film into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that its credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement with changing the very way we think about ourselves. That was nearly half a century ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but something quite remarkable has happened since then. For as long as humans have inhabited the Earth, the Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites have been measuring a steady melting of that white blanket. Much of it has now gone, and it seems possible that for future generations the North Pole will be open water. Think about it. Since Earthrise was taken weve been so busy warming our world that it now looks different from space. By digging up fossil fuels and burning our ancient forests weve put so much carbon into the atmosphere that todays astronauts are looking at a different planet. And heres something that just baffles me. As the ice retreats, the oil giants are moving in. Instead of seeing the melting as a grave warning to humanity, they are eyeing the previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed at the top of the world. Theyre exploiting the disappearance of the ice to drill for the very same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. Thats why, in summer 2013, thirty men and women from eighteen countries sailed for a Russian Arctic oil platform, determined to focus global attention on the new Arctic oil rush. They saw how fossil fuels have come to dominate our lives on Earth, how the energy giants bestride our planet unchecked. They knew that at some time and in some place somebody had to say, No more. For those activists that time was now and that place was the Arctic. Their ship was seized, they were thrown in jail and faced fifteen years in prison. Millions of people from across the world raised their voices in support of the stand they took, including many from the great nation of Russia. The tale you are about to read is extraordinary. It is one of fear, hope, despair and humanity. But we still dont know how it ends. That is up to all of us. Including you. Please encourage your friends to help bring a hopeful conclusion to this moving story.
Paul McCartney, December 2014
Frank Hewetson is lying on the upper bunk of a prison cell in the Russian Arctic, waiting impatiently for the effects of a Valium tablet to kick in. Hes wearing woollen tights, two pairs of socks, three T-shirts, a pullover, a skull-gripping hat and earplugs. The hot incandescent bulb dangling from a wire above his head has just been switched off by the guards, and Murmansk SIZO-1 isolation jail is stirring.
He can hear boots stomping on the floor above his head, prisoners thumping the walls in cells down the corridor, the distant sound of screaming. Across the prison, windows are swinging open and ropes are being fed through bars, then lowered down the outside walls or swung from cell to cell.
