The means necessary — climate change in the dock

• Published date: 28 September 2024
• Author: Tom McKinlay
• Publication title: Otago Daily Times: Web Edition Articles (New Zealand)

Away from the tourists' cameras, on the further side of Dunedin's ornate railway station, another long, heavy line of carriages clanks north. It has skirted the low-lying South Dunedin suburbs and will now travel north past a roll call of coastal villages and riverine towns

There's an anonymous uniformity about the wagons; in a world of brand ubiquity these grimed capsules give nothing away. Their veiled payload is an unreconstructed legacy from an earlier time, difficult to polish with a slogan for the 21st century.

But questions are now being asked about those wagons and their right to roll on unchallenged, day after day through the oblivious city, through the unsuspecting countryside.

This past week those questions were addressed again in the Dunedin District Court, where six defendants faced a reckoning for their actions several years ago — on the further side of Dunedin Railway Station.

On that warm December morning in 2021, a group of climate protesters quite literally put their bodies on the line to first stop a coal train as it passed through the rail yards then hold it there for several hours. For that frozen time, the stalled train stretched from just north of St Andrews St back to the railway station — an unanticipated extra attraction for the curious at the Otago Farmers Market.

Two of the protesters' number, grandmothers Fay Brorens and Anne Smith, lay on the tracks in front of the train, each with an arm in a metal pipe secured to the track.

Others of the group climbed into a wagon, atop the Bathurst Resources coal from the Takitimu mine, near Nightcaps, or moved behind the last wagon, so the train could not reverse away.

There was nothing else for it, they said, all other avenues to address the climate risk the coal represented had been tried and failed. This is the creed of Extinction Rebellion, from which the protesters were drawn, a "direct action" group terrified by the snail's pace of global action to rein in planetary-heating gases.

As they saw it, here was a state-owned enterprise, KiwiRail, hauling coal to Fonterra's Clandeboye furnaces, despite the government having declared a climate emergency. The time for burning coal was long past, they said, as the lethal costs of climate change mounted and the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5°C of warming drew nearer.

The quotidian outcome of it all, in Dunedin's courtroom one on Monday, was that charges of trespass were found to be proven against all six defendants, while two charges of obstruction were also upheld — one proven, one admitted. Just two of the six — who are weighted towards older, greying members of the citizenry — stood in the court to hear the judgement, others streamed in from other parts of the country.

All were remanded for sentence in December, when it is anticipated there will be arguments for discharge without conviction.

The issue of reparations also remains an open question...