Just Do It

There is a strange incongruity at the heart of Emily James’s entertaining portrait of direct environmental activism in the UK. The American-born film-maker, who spent more than two years among such frontline collectives as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid, has created a portrait that bears little or no relationship to the “dangerous hooligans” we’re repeatedly warned about in news headlines.

Huh? Where are the dirty neo-hippies we've heard so much about? Where are the lunatic extremists? Just Do Itis mostly populated by well-brought-up young ladies and gentlemen with well-brought-up names such as Sophie and Lily and Rowan. Sally, a ringer for Keira Knightley who chains herself to Peter Mandelson's house, is a medical student who attended Cambridge. Are eco-warriors all like this?

Not necessarily: as this crowd-funded, genuinely democratic film introduces its colourful cast, neat demographics seem to disappear.

Meet Tracy Howard, a 35-year-old mother of two from the picturesque, rose-garden English village Sipson. An activist with Britain’s Plane Stupid, she campaigns against plans for the complete demolition of her pleasing little borough to make way for a third runway at Heathrow Airport.

Meet Marina Pepper, a guerrilla gardener and former Lib Dem councillor. A self-styled community tea lady, she’s happy to provide a cuppa for her fellow demonstrators and the police force that invariably arrive to charge various peaceful protests.

The British bobbies, however, have nothing on their Danish equivalents. As the 2009 UN climate negotiations get underway in Copenhagen, the film’s producer is arrested, bicycles are confiscated and attempts at reason are met with: “We have our orders: we don’t know what reasons but we have our orders.”

James’s thrilling film takes us through stirring actions and protester etiquette: how they organise themselves into bricks and affinity groups, how they evade detection and how they attempt to prevent incidents such as the unlawful killing of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 summit protests.

Far from being the naive, humourless cranks the mainstream media would have us believe, all the protesters interviewed are aware their efforts will most likely amount to nothing. But they’d still rather be doing something just the same.