Solarpunk lawbreakers? 🌿

When does breaking the rules become the right thing to do?

IMAGE: Paul Powlesland and Jenny taken by The Lost Byway

Does this sound solarpunk to you? Blade-wielding men are climbing walls and busting through fences and to illegally enter private property so that they can… do some hardcore weeding and river cleaning!

Environmental lawyer and barrister Paul Powlesland and his volunteer “SWAT team of extreme litter pickers”, were recently featured by Channel 4 News. This is because of their extra-legal attempts to revive one of London’s most neglected rivers, the Roding.

Frustrated at years of inaction by the official authorities to clean up the heavily polluted and congested waterway, Powlesland set up the River Roding Trust. This organises bold volunteers to enter the sewage and rubbish filled waters of the Roding to restore its flow and health. When they have to enter private property to clean the up the river and its banks they do so. As Powlesland puts it, “We’ve had to break the rules to save the third biggest river in London from dying.”

IMAGE: River Roding Trust rubbish clean up

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Powlesland who is also a co-founder of Lawyers for Nature has not been afraid to take the law into his own hands in the form of a hammer. In an interview with The Guardian the barrister described what he did when he found a property developer had blocked a public footpath to use as a materials storage site. He got a sledgehammer and smashed it open. Powlesland told Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham;

“I’m legally entitled to do it because they are blocking a public highway,” he explains. “Knowing the law helped me do the direct action because I wasn’t committing an offence -they were, and I was just correcting it on the ground.”

The developer rebuilt the hoardings. Powlesland demolished them again. “Eventually they rebuilt it so strong that I couldn’t smash it any more so then I had to start local campaigning. If Just Stop Oil block a public highway, the police are there in an hour. The path here was shut for a year and a half. And this route allows the ordinary people of Barking, quite a poor borough, to access Tesco from the town centre without walking along really busy roads.” After Powlesland campaigned via the River Roding Trust, the developer eventually reopened the path.

As well as combatting pollution the River Roding Trust has been restoring nature. Powlesland and other volunteers have planted willow trees and built benches along the Roding’s banks. They even have a very solarpunk vision of turning waterside waste ground into a lovely public park called Edgelands (see image below). Their aim is to preserve industrial heritage, restore wetlands create ‘tree corridors’ between communities.

IMAGE: River Roding Trust Edgelands Park vision

So what do you think fellow solarpunks? Is this the kind of law-breaking you can get behind? Or do you think these activist have gone too far? Answer our poll below.

Do you know of other examples, in your part of the world, of people bending or breaking the rules to restore ecosystems or protect the commons?

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See you in the sunshine,

Alex Holland

Founder, SolarPunk Stories