Rebel County protest to draw attention to biodiversity decline
April 18th, 2019
Extinction Rebellion campaigners in Cork have vowed to demonstrate the urgency of climate action through a symbolic “die-in” in the city on Saturday.
Cork activists say that they want to convey the possibility of a lifeless future for our planet in the absence of meaningful climate action. The protest is set to begin at 12pm on North Main Street in the city centre.
A similar protest is slated to take place in Dublin on Friday to disrupt the “business as usual” routine of the city as part of the Week of International Rebellion taking place in over 40 countries.
Calling on the public to join the protest in Cork, environmental campaigner Wren Alice Ind told The Green News that the rebellion will be a “funeral type enactment”.
“If you join on Saturday you will be making a mark, a statement that could help change minds, even if we are just a small drop in a huge ocean,” she said.
“If we all, across the world, continue and don’t back down, eventually there will be a wave,” Ms Ind continued.
Ms Ind said that history has proved that peaceful demonstrations and acts of rebellions are effective vehicles for change.
For our species future
“It has been proven through centuries of peaceful protests that people have succeeded. It is not all for nothing. It is a huge help, to change the minds of the power at the top,” she said.
“This is not a positive future for our Planet as it stands at the moment. She needs your help. It’s not just the Planet. It’s our species future.”
The Extinction Rebellion is a civil disobedience environmental movement whose focal aim is to draw the public and Government’s attention to climate change and biodiversity decline.
Members of the environmental movement in London, for example, blocked access to several London landmarks, vandalising oil company Shell’s headquarters on Monday.
Some English activists glued themselves to windows of the Shell headquarters near Waterloo Bridge while a number of protestors smashed glass revolving doors and marked its building with graffiti.
Two weeks ago, Extinction Rebellion protesters made waves in the media when members stripped to their undergarments in the public gallery of the British Parliament, disrupting a Brexit debate.
Biodiversity Decline
Biodiversity is declining in every region of the world, impacting nature’s capacity to provide food, water, and safety to people, according to a recent analysis from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
The study released last March is the result of three years of work carried out by more than 550 experts from over 100 countries.
The study found that 66 per cent of European habitats now have “unfavourable conservation status” and may become worse under a “business as usual scenario”.
One in every four of the 3,000 species that have undergone a red-list conservation assessment is threatened with extinction in Ireland.
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