[ad_1]
Howard Breen was in the 27th day on his hunger strike. Last Wednesday, I spent some time with him at his back-lot south Nanaimo log cabin. Three days before he had been in hospital with memory loss, dangerously low blood pressure and impending kidney damage — brought on when he also refused water for 51 hours. Breen seemed to be able to recover his strength after he compared his cause to the Second World War’s life and death battle on this unseasonably cold April day.
“I’m not prepared to abandon my children,” he said. “But I just see this: My relations didn’t take a pause from fighting fascism.”
Breen, a father to three children and six grandchildren, had given up eating on April 1, in an effort to raise awareness of the climate chaos that is affecting British Columbia. Six days later, he was in isolation in Victoria’s regional jail. He was being held for eight days without bail for blocking a Nanaimo branch Royal Bank to protest its heavy funding of fossil fuel projects. He is now under house arrest.
“I don’t fear prison,” Breen said. “I don’t fear what will ultimately happen with this hunger strike. What I fear is that I’m not doing enough, for my children and their children.”
Pinching his sides to show that he still had fat to burn nearly a month after his last meal — a vegan casserole — Breen vowed to forego sustenance well into May. He also said he was considering a second water fast: “I haven’t ruled that out myself to end that way — to take it to the limit again.”
However, he said it before he started to slur his speech, spouting gibberish & having dizzy spells on Saturday evening. That was it for his medical team — Breen’s daughter Sky, a cardiac nurse, and Vancouver-based family doctor Linda Thyer, a founding member of the activist group Doctors for Planetary Health.
He’d gone 31 days.
“With there [sic] clear perspective observing my decline, there is absolutely no point whatsoever in pressing further,” Breen wrote me that night. “31 days without food, I now have to closely follow re-feeding start-up instructions.”
Breen said he was convinced that he’d proven already that the B.C. government wasn’t going to meet the strike’s specific demand, which is for Premier John Horgan and B.C. Forests Minister Katrine Conroy to join a public meeting and explain how the province’s continued logging of old-growth forests can be justified given their potent capacity to strip climate-warping carbon dioxide out of Earth’s atmosphere.
“Conroy and the cabinet are prepared to let me die…to protect their own political agenda,” said Breen.
But the battle continues. Vic Brice (retired Nanaimo pharmacist), was held at the Royal Bank last Month with Breen. He launched his own hunger strike in solidarity 9 days ago.
A ‘continual upping of the ante’ by activists
Climate activism via self-sacrifice such as Breen and Brice’s is on the rise globally, as campaigners seek to arouse public attention and force government action.
A swarm of “direct action” activists in B.C. have ensnarled bridges and highways — acts that earned a fine in years past and are Now in prison. An increasing number of activists in the U.K. are considering seeking imprisonment. Climate-focused hunger strikes are now all over the place. Breen’s strike was inspired by Vancouver-based labour organizer and activist Brent Eichler, who It took 33 daysbefore Breen passed the baton to him last month.
Wynn Bruce, a Colorado activist made the ultimate sacrifice during a horrifying Earth Day last month self-immolationat the U.S. Supreme Court. Online video shows him being engulfed by flames and then burning in silence for 60 second, before he screams when police give him water. He was 50 years of age.
“We have been seeing over the last few years this continual upping of the ante because things lose their novelty value, and that’s critical for getting media attention,” said Colin Davis, chair in cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol. Davis, who studies how people interpret protest messages and is a climate activist through the U.K.-born direct actions movement Extinction Rebellion, studies this.
Non-violent sacrificial demonstration practitioners include universal moral icons such as Nelson Mandela, Alexei Navalny, and Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. The practice is still controversial, however, because it is coercive and emotionally entraps anyone with at most a sliver empathy.
Davis warns that there is a risk they could be counter-productive to climate protection.
“Sacrificial protest tends to be highly polarizing,” said Davis. “People who are not concerned about climate change may say, ‘Well, I always knew that these people were crazy and this just confirms it for me.”
Photo submitted.
Breen’s hunger strike was the culmination of a lifetime of overcoming adversity, and a long career of non-violent protest.
When we met last week he talked about spending his first two years in an orphanage, being drugged and assaulted by his elementary school religion teacher when he was 15, seeking his birth parents and overcoming alcoholism — topics he’s never before shared publicly. He explained that the outpouring of support he’s experienced during the hunger strike has been both loving and taxing. “It’s not my way to be that exposed,” he said.
Breen also recalled his early activism days that solidified his belief and helped him to become a direct-action and non-violent protester. Although he was originally from Ontario, he has been convicted in 14 cases involving environmental, human right, and peace protests.
He established a peace camp on the Iraqi-Saudi border during the Gulf War, was deported from Israel for co-organizing a peace walk in the occupied Palestinian Territories, shut down Canada’s National Department of Defense to protest NATO flights disrupting Inuit hunters, and more.
Breen put all that behind him when he moved to B.C. Breen settled down in 1991 to start a family and worked as a staff member at several environmental non profit organizations. But in the past five years he’s returned to non-violent protest.
After being arrested for closing down Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge, Breen co-founded the Vancouver Island branch of Extinction Rebellion in 2018. Breen’s arrest while literally glued to the door of the Nanaimo RBC Branch landed on April 7 — his birthday — and was the third such annual present to himself in a row.
That extensive record explains how Crown prosecutors managed to place him at Victoria’s Wilkinson Road prison, and since then under house arrest.
Whatever one might think about Breen’s life choices, it’s hard to impugn his concern for his childrens’ futures. While climate change has already begun, science has shown it will get worse if there is not immediate and decisive action. However, British Columbia has a tragically perfect record of failing its targets to reduce carbon emissions.
Analysis of government data throughout the year Regional reporting project to decarbonize CascadiaThis was how B.C. It was shown how B.C. Rising for a decade. The government’s own data also documents how clear cutting, infestations and fires have B.C.’s forests from absorbers to net producers of carbon — close to or larger than emissions from all of the province’s industries, vehicles and buildings combined, depending on the year.
The latest round of UN scientists’ reports states that drastic action must be taken by 2030 to stop the worst effects from climate change. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.”
Breen, Eichler and Brice now demand a public meeting of Horgan and Conroy in order to help B.C. citizens connect the dots, grasp the stakes and demand accelerated action to, as Breen put it, “protect the most critical forests that are saving our lives.”
Horgan and his government rejected the B.C. hunger strikers’ call for a public meeting while talking up the steps they have already taken to preserve more of B.C.’s old growth. And last week they went on the offensive against direct action protesters — a move that Conroy extended to the hunger strikers in A statement to The TyeeLast week. The minister accused the hunger strikers of being part of a “small group” whose tactics are “crossing the line” and “raising anger rather than awareness.”
The government also avoids tying the dots between climate and forests. Minister Conroy’s statement was provided in response to climate-related questions sent to Minister for Environment and Climate Change George Heyman, which his office said he wanted to answer. But Conroy’s statement did not mention climate change.
The government’s perceived indifference to his fate stung Breen, a lifelong NDP member-activist, as a deep and personal betrayal. He pointed to his long association with Sheila Malcolmson, Nanaimo’s MLA and B.C.’s minister of mental health and addictions, who has refused to meet him for a year and didn’t reached out during his hunger strike. “Not even a ‘How-you-doing Howard?’” said Breen, recounting his long association with Malcolmson during her career with the Islands Trust, which overlapped with Breen’s time on Gabriola Island, and how he backed her “underdog” run for the riding nomination.
He said he’s done with the BC NDP, and has been asking friends in the party: “What makes you think they wouldn’t do the same to you?”
Malcolmson’s constituency office told The Tyee last week she was unavailable.
How people see hunger strikers
Eichler, Breen, and Bric use the hunger strike tactic to put off the government. This poses risks for both the actor and the government.
They create a problem for authorities. As Davis put it: “On the one hand, they don’t want to be bossed around. On the other hand, it can reflect very badly on the government and policy makers if someone were to die.”
For hunger strikers, death is the most likely and greatest risk. Even those who survive can’t be counted among the few who do survive. You can be seriously hurt. Prolonged lack of nourishment also increases vulnerability to infection — a particular concern amidst COVID-19 — and can lead to organ failure.
Margaret Thatcher did not accept Bobby Sands’s demands for better prison conditions in 1981 during the hunger strike. This was even after Sands won a seat at the U.K. parliament in a snap-byelection. Ten prisoners, including Sands were starved to death.
Davis believes that if hunger strikes for climate continue their growth, someone will die.
What he can’t begin to predict, even in 2022, is how society will respond. Will the dead become martyrs like the IRA strikers? Their deaths The way was paved to Sinn Fein’s ascension to political power in Ireland and, ultimately, the withdrawal of British troops.
Or, asked Davis, “Will the people controlling the narrative say, ‘Well this is just another unfortunate manifestation of mental illness and let’s all just try and look the other way’?”
Only a handful of news outlets reported Wynn Bruce’s act of self-sacrifice last month, and Davis bets this is because many viewed his immolation as a suicide.
Davis views that dismissal as unfair, because research on survivors of self-immolation has shown that it’s not a manifestation of mental illness. “This is a public form of protest done to try to generate attention,” he said. He stated that silence is not an effective way to stop activists using extreme measures.
His research disproves another dismissal of protesting through selfless sacrifice. The argument is that onlookers will view the activist as immoral and reduce support for the cause.
Davis says he has done online survey experiments, as yet unpublished, that suggest that people who say they disapprove of a protest’s methods can nevertheless end up being swayed in favour of the cause. “They might shoot the messenger, but they’re still somewhat swayed towards the message,” said Davis.
Photo submitted.
For Breen, the takeaway lesson from Bobby Sands and the Irish Republicans’ hunger strike is that, “in order to succeed the world must hear about it. Otherwise, you will only die behind bars as a criminal not a political prisoner.”
Breen can start to imagine, again, his future on this planet after his brush with death was apparently avoided. His youngest child has the chance to represent Canada next year on the Olympic rugby pitch. As Breen said the day we met, he’d “really like to be around to encourage him.”
Vic Brice shared some views last week about the risks facing the hunger strikers and their cause when I found him locked into mock stocks in front of Minister Malcolmson’s downtown Nanaimo constituency office.
Was Brice prepared to risk his life or health? “Our lives are all in danger,” he replied.
Brice was concerned that the public might be numbened by more extreme climate protests?
“The public is numb already. I mean that the public was furious at us for blocking the road for a few minutes. Okay. I’m not bothering them. They might be able to give us some support. Call their MLA, contact the premier, and send an email to prime minister. Tell them to do their job.” ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
