Stupid rides the Coal Caravan

Stupid has been travelling with a band of cycling climate activists across the North of England, all aboard the Coal Caravan.

The Coal Caravan is a project of the Camp for Climate Action, a grassroots movement of people who believe if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. Every Camp for Climate Action event weaves four key themes: education, direct action, sustainable living, and building a movement to effectively tackle climate change, both resisting climate crimes and developing sustainable solutions.

Wending its wheely way from Nottingham to Newcastle, the Caravan cycled around proposed and active open-cast coal mining sites, learning from local residents along the way about the history of coal in Britain, and about some of the struggles to protect the countryside from the rapacious coal industry - not to mention screening Stupid in the communities they passed through on the way.

The Coal Caravan left the Sumac Centre in Nottingham on Saturday the 25th April, travelling through the wind and rain to finally came to a stop last week in the little industrial village of Cambois. En route they held dozens of workshops on everything from energy efficiency to wild food, and fixed a lot of bicycles to boot. You can find out more about the Coal Caravan's journeys at their blog, here: http://coalcaravan.wordpress.com.

Coal Caravaners at an opencast mining site

Opencast coal mining is the cheapest, dirtiest way to get coal in Britain - it's the equivalent of mountaintop removal over in the states: it destroys massive areas of countryside and releases vast quantities of methane as the coal is exposed - and that's to say nothing of the fact that we really shouldn't be burning coal any more at all. 

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