Can campaigns like Just Stop Oil achieve their real purpose if they fail to draw mass attention to it?

There’s certainly no way any country is going to ‘just stop oil’ as if flipping a switch. We saw what happened when COVID-19 ‘just stopped’ our lives virtually overnight. Sure, it seemed to make the birds, animals and insects very happy because there was no one around to interfere with their lives. (And we saw and heard them more, simply because we had the time and there was no traffic background noise). But it wasn’t good for us. If there was anything we could learn from it, it was that if we were less of a nuisance to other creatures, we could get along with them quite nicely. Elephants in some national parks in Africa walk right up to tourist vehicles without wanting to smash and overturn them, because they know no harm is going to come to them. In India, you see a wild elephant, say in Corbett National Park and you run – because the animal’s previous experience with human-beings has been unpleasant.

There’s no two ways about the fact that we’ll have to back-pedal regarding the use of fossil fuels, but it cannot be overnight, or we’ll somersault over the handlebars! We could argue about the pace – that it needs to be faster, more urgent and better funded — but the transition has begun, and we need to keep at it vigilantly, demanding accountability at every turn. Throwing spanner in the works and inconveniencing people is less likely to achieve that.

If there is any authority that will put ginger up our tails, it is Nature Ma’am. She’s already beginning to crack the whip – what with forest fires blazing across Europe and Canada, smothering cities with the kind of pollution only New Delhi was notorious for. In our part of the world (lest we get too smug) there have been cloudbursts, avalanches, landslides and, of course, the great flooding of Delhi. It was a shock to find how in a matter of hours your entire life could be turned upside down! Of course, a big deal was made of the fact that some of the majorly affected sections of the Capital were the ‘posh’ areas where government officials live, but then Nature Ma’am doesn’t give a rat’s arse about such things – she’s apolitical!

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Like us, it looks like the rich, developed countries are now facing a purgatory of their own making and will hasten to scramble out of it. We in India, unfortunately can’t seem to be in more of a hurry to jump into it!  So, we do need to make a noise about it: but not by super-gluing ourselves to roads and stopping the lives of people or destroying great pieces of art. That’s just pissing on the cause!