Falmouth Week wakes up to a call for Climate Change as 200 Pink Flags are placed on boats overnight

  • Pirate Rebels brave Friday night’s wild weather warnings to board boats under cover of darkness and install 200 flags across Falmouth Harbour in Cornwall.
  • Falmouth town awakens on Saturday to a harbour covered in pink flags for the opening of Falmouth Week, a regatta and carnival attracting thousands to the town.
  • The midnight raid was carried out as part of Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent citizen uprising with three demands*.
  • Flags bear icons and slogans demanding action is taken on the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity: ACT NOW, YOUR PLANET NEEDS YOU.

Thousands of visitors to the Cornish town of Falmouth for Falmouth Week were greeted with a flotilla of 200 pink flags flying on boats across the harbour on Saturday morning.  The flags bear slogans and images inspired by the non-violent uprising Extinction Rebellion and include the call, YOUR PLANET NEEDS YOU and a nod to the impacts on climate change locally with some that read RIP FLUSHING, a harbour town that will be flooded when sea levels rise.

The flags are made and distributed by the hands of a group of concerned Falmouth citizens, motivated to take direct action by the scale of the climate emergency facing our planet. The pirate rebels worked through the night boarding 200 vessels across the harbour and raising flags up each boat’s courtesy line. Polite pirates, they left a letter addressed to every boat owner apologizing for boarding their vessels, and inviting them to continue to fly their flags for the whole of Falmouth week in solidarity with the urgency of our situation.  

David Attenborough famously stated in 2018: “We are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years. If we don’t take action on climate change, the collapse of our civilisation and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” The Duke of Cornwall announced in July ‘’the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival’’. No immediate action on climate change means dangerous shortages of food and water in the UK and beyond, hazardous weather events, mounting numbers of climate refugees escaping unbearable temperatures and drought, at worst, human extinction.

Spokespeople for the rebels said: “We’re showing locals and tourists alike that Falmouth cares about the climate catastrophe our generation faces. The flags are to inspire folk to make changes to reduce their impact on the planet, or indeed get involved with their local Extinction Rebellion group.

“If we want our children and grandchildren to have a chance at civilized life with enough food to eat, now is the time for us all to stop in our tracks and dedicate time and energy to solving this problem. With all eyes on the water for the races this week, it seemed like an ideal place for a call to action”.

*Extinction rebellion’s three demands are:  1) That the government and media TELL THE TRUTH about how deadly our situation is.  The government must reverse all policies that are not in line with an emergency response to this disaster. 2) That the government enact legally binding policies that REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS TO NET ZERO BY 2025.  3) That overcoming these challenges  can not be done by politicians alone, but by a wide-reaching CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLY made up of a broad spectrum of every-day citizens.

In early 2019 Cornwall Council declared a climate emergency.  Local community members of Extinction Rebellion have been working closely with the council to support concrete action on the declarations. Following a wave of climate emergency declarations by councils across the country, regional councils have a growing mandate from their electorate to call on the Government to redirect all policy decisions toward addressing the climate catastophe. But action must be swift and broad-reaching to turn the juggernaut of destruction around.
Find your local Extinction Rebellion group and get involved.

© AFP Tolga Akmen

In April green activists brought Central London traffic to a standstill for five days when they gathered around a small pink yacht called Bertha Cáceres  (in memory of a murdered Honduran activist) at Oxford Circus. The actress Emma Thompson attracted contraversy over her personal carbon footprint when she flew in from Los Angeles to show her support for the group, which was founded with the support of around 100 academics in the UK in October 2018.

See more:  rebellion.earth   ER’s case for The Emergency

Article from Rob Higgs & Belle Benfield/Extinction Rebellion