The activists have won. For now. UK based energy firm Cuadrilla announced last night it is to withdraw from its oil exploration in the village of Balcome in West Sussex.
The firm said that the move is based on police advice due to fears that the protesters would soon embark on a campaign of mass civil disobedience at the heavily fortified site.
Cuadrilla has been drilling for oil in the village but has yet to use the controversial fracking technique the No Dash for Gas group are fighting against.
The move to pull out of the site follows a piece by David Cameron in the Telegraph this week urging the country to get behind fracking operations in the UK not just in the desolate north as Tory peer Lord Howell claimed last month.
In the piece, Cameron talks of the cost of bills, the creation of jobs, the money the work will bring to the local neighbourhoods and finally the minimum damage to our countryside, not once mentioning the larger effects the work will have on the environment, outside that which directly affects the human population and over what timescale.
Though the firm has decided to suspend operations for the time being it will has said it will begin drilling for oil as soon as it is safe to do so, betting that protesters will quickly loose interest while there is no work going on.
But while the protesters have managed to get operations suspended for now, is the way they’ve gone about it helping their cause?
When a firm cites reasons of safety for the temporary end to operations in an industry which, more often than not, works in conditions far less safe than the English countryside you do have to wonder whether the campaigner’s means are justifying the end.
It is headline grabbing, sure, and it is entirely possible that people (especially the papers) would not have the same reaction to the issue without the civil disobedience that so often comes with a large scale protest. But on issues which are far less than black and white, such as that of renewable energy and climate change, should we allow protesters to intimidate and restrict legal operations when the far less harmful and threatening channels of protest remain open to them?
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