Sometimes life smiles at you and the world creates the most wonderful of analogies. Yesterday as you may have read some Greenpeace protestors decide to climb the Shard. Which is a rather tall building and so presented something of a challenge. Fortunately they had mobile phones with them (presumably attached securely to them by lanyards to avoid endangering people below) and they tweeted about their expereince during the climb. The climb was apparently to protest against Shell drilling for oil in the arctic, not that Shell have offices in the shard, nor that the shard owners have anything to do with Shell. Apparently though Shell do have three offices near by so that’s good enough. Plus of course the Shard was designed to resemble a shard of ice according to Greenpeace, except of course it isn’t as a quick web search reveals it’s a a shard of glass – still no need to let facts trouble them. From their tweets we also know:
“It is very cold up here. We are hoping that it doesn’t get much colder because we didn’t bring many warm clothes to keep the weight down.”
and
“We are still figuring out how to get down.”
So obviously a well thought out and well prepared plan this, during the climb the Shard closed the viewing platforms – which even if that didn’t cost them money (and I suspect they probably did give refunds) it will have spoilt the day for quite a few people. The police cordoned off the area below the Shard which must have been terribly convenient given that that area is also well known for being London Bridge station. There were also ambulance staff stationed both at the top and bottom of the Shard in case these gallant climbers came to any harm.
Whilst they couldn’t carry enough clothes to cope with the conditions they did have a surprise for us, which would apparently be a huge art installation. I don’t know if they failed to deploy that but they did also have a flag which the BBC have a picture of flying at the top of the shard:
Isn’t that picture taken by a decent telephoto lense (or from a helicopter not sure which) just awe inspiring? But look at that flag again in comparison to the person. If you were on the ground how big do you think that would be? Sadly I don’t have pictures from the very top of the Shard to help with comparison, but I do have a picture taken from the viewing platform, looking down at the street and buses below. As a visual hint I’ve added an orange rectangle about the same size as that flag to the street, I’ve also added an arrow in case you couldn’t see it I’ve added an arrow.
If you look at the full size image that was taken with a telephoto lens a 70-300 so that small picture you can see in this post is much closer to the actual size that amazing flag would look to the naked eye from the street below. Impressive is it not? So quite a surprise for us really. Just to finish the tale of our gallant climbers when they got to the top the problem of how to get down was resovled by their being arrested for aggravated trespass.
So in summary these stalwarts of the green movement:
1) based a project on unchecked facts (Shard of ice)
2) Didn’t think through the entire plan (how do we get down?)
3) Didn’t have the resources needed (Didn’t pack many clothes)
4) Targeted people who had nothing to do with the problem they where concerned about
5) Inconvenienced and cost uninvolved parties time and money
6) Diverted scarce resources from being utilized for real problems endangering other peoples lives (police and ambulance)
7) All to make a barely perceptible gesture at a single company
All done with products made from products created by the industry they’re protesting against – look at the equipment they’re using that’s not corn starch plastics and hemp ropes. Greenpeace may get a lot of publicity and donations from this, which may or may not more than offset the costs for the stunt once the legal bill is in, but meantime they’ve really displayed how hypocritical and intellectually bankrupt they’ve become.
Really as an analogy for the modern green movement in general it doesn’t come much better than this.
