DON’T FRACK WITH SUSSEX
Creative activism
DON’T FRACK WITH SUSSEX
I'm a founder member of ‘Don't Frack With Sussex’, a group of Hastings activists from across the political divide.
Our most well known action was an ambitious creative protest at ancient Sussex landmark, ‘The Long Man of Wilmington’, to challenge the then-Energy and Climate Change Minster, Amber Rudd's, short-term policies which included earmarking fracking sites in Sussex and National Parks.
We delivered a response to this in the early hours to catch commuter traffic, using the action to point people towards our anti-fracking petition.
Temporary lines and 11m high letters were created using white tarp and added to the iconic site in Sussex’s South Downs National Park, turning the Long Man into a fracking protestor.
Our message to Amber Rudd, our then-local MP, was 'stop backing fracking, start being green'. Like a lot of other people in the area we could see that the idea of tackling climate change by cutting renewable energy and dragging more fossil fuel out of the ground was a short-sighted strategy – the Long Man has been there for time immemorial and he agreed!
We also pulled off a cake-themed protest at Amber Rudd's final surgery in her then-Hastings and Rye constituency before the UN climate change talks in Paris. Dressed as tea ladies we presented Rudd with huge cakes bearing the messages ‘STOP BACKING FRACKING’ and ‘START BEING GREEN’.
We descended upon the Minister's office surgery to deliver our appropriately gaged 1,066 signatures petition - also piped onto a cake - signed by local people demanding that Rudd halt plans to frack in the UK and start supporting renewable energy instead. Rudd refused to pose for photographs but spent 30 minutes with us.
We also dished out spoof recipe cards depicting Rudd’s recipe for disaster in a series of 'simple steps'. Her policies were half-baked. She cut solar energy subsidies by a staggering 87%. We wanted to turn up the heat on her and demand a more sustainable policy - renewable energy needed a bigger slice of the pie. Why are we investing in dirty, unsafe energy when there is free, abundant energy we could be putting into the mix….?
