Saving Iceland

Join our resistance against the industrialization of Europe’s last remaining great wilderness and take direct action against heavy industry!

The Struggle So Far
The campaign to defend Europe’s greatest remaining wilderness continues. For the past five years summer direct action camps in Iceland have targeted aluminium smelters, mega-dams and geothermal power plants.

After the terrible destruction as a result of building Europe’s largest dam at Kárahnjúkar and massive geothermal plants at Hengill, there is still time to crush the ‘master plan’ that would have each major glacial river dammed, every substantial geothermal field exploited and the construction of aluminium smelters, an oil refinery, data farms and silicon factories. This would not only destroy unique landscapes and ecosystems but also lead to a massive increase in Iceland’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Political Landscape
Saving Iceland has reintroduced civil disobedience and anarchist ideas into Icelandic grassroots and demonstrated numerous methods of direct action, many of which were utilized in a highly successful manner in the ‘Kitchen Utensils Uprising´ of last year, where experienced Saving Iceland activists constantly stood in the forefront pushing boundaries. Saving Iceland and our work throughout the years was a major catalyst in toppling the corrupt pro-heavy industry ‘Alcoa government’. Read More

This video shows the founder of Saving Iceland at the London Anarchist Bookfair, which he attended in order to bring worldwide focus on the case of the Reykjavík Nine and call for international solidarity for them.

A brand new solidarity brochure about the case of the RVK-9 was distributed at the Bookfair as well.

Watch the video below and download the brochure here. Be sure to visit the support site of the Reykjavík Nine at rvk9.org.
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Supporters of the Reykjavík Nine have prepared a brochure in solidarity and support of the RVK-9, as the nine are often referred to.

The nine currently stand trial, accused of having attacked the parliament of Iceland on the 8th of December 2008 and threatened the independence of the parliament.

Read more about the case and the context around it in the brochure, which can be downloaded in PDF format here, or by clicking on the picture above.

Please mail, print and distribute as widely as possible.

Click here to visit the support site for the Reykjavík Nine.

Following is a short clip from the documentary ‘Dreamland’, made by Andri Snær Magnason and Þorfinnur Guðnason in 2009. Here you can see Friðrik Sóphusson, then head of Landsvirkjun (Icelandic Power Company), telling the American ambassador in Iceland how they are “bending all the rules, just for this” referring to the Alcoa project in Reyðarfjörður.

The following article by Nanna Árnadóttir originally appeared on Iceland Review‘s website on the 9th of Október 2010.

About week ago I was faffing about on a whale watching boat—ironically docked across from a whaling boat—for the premier of a short environmental film made by Icelandic legend Ómar Ragnarsson.

For those of you who don’t know who Ómar Ragnarsson is, he’s sort of been everything you can think of: writer, journalist, comedian, TV personality, politician and most importantly now, Iceland’s most prominent environmentalist.

This man is Icelandic nature’s greatest warrior. He has protested, spoken openly about the damage aluminum smelters have done to our countryside and is the most vocal person in Iceland right now about the future of geothermal energy.

I managed to have a conversation with him about it (a shining moment in my life, actually) and he blew my mind.

This is going to sound ignorant—I have mentioned I’m bad at being Icelandic, right?—but I was under the impression that geothermal energy was renewable, which isn’t exactly true because it isn’t endless.

Or so Ómar told me. It’s clean energy, yes. Geothermal power is a reliable, cost effective and environmentally friendly way to harness energy and it is sustainable—provided you actually make an effort to sustain it—but it isn’t endless. Read More

The residents described « a mini-tsunami ». A toxic one.

Last Monday, the red mud reservoir of an alumina plant ruptured in Hungary, near Ajka, 165km west of Budapest. As a result, 1.1 million cubic meters of red mud wiped out several villages through waves more than 2 meters high. It flooded 40 square kilometers of land, including affluents of the Danube, then reached one of Europe’s longest river on Thursday morning. So far, 7 people have been killed, 1 is still missing, and more than 150 have been injured, mostly by chemical burns. The death toll is still expected to rise.

As we write these lines, surrounding villages are being evacuated as the structure threatens to break in another point, which would result in another 500 000 cubic meters flooding the area.

The disastrous chemical accident has been declared Hungary’s largest and most dangerous environmental catastrophe, exceeding by far the 130000 cubic meters of cyanide-tainted water that spilled in 2000 in Baia Mare, Romania. Ten years later, traces of cyanide are still found in the area. It is worth noting that this cyanide was in a liquid form, therefore very quickly carried aways by the river whereas the thick red mud will sit there for years, sipping into the ground and reaching ground waters.
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By Samarendra Das & Felix Padel
(Article for ‘The Global Economic  History of Bauxite’, Canada 2010)

Most critiques of the aluminium industry focus on refineries and smelters, which are among the worst culprits of global heating. But bauxite mining excavates a huge surface area, and has caused environmental devastation in Jamaica, Guinea, Australia, India and recently also in Vietnam.

Perhaps no bauxite deposits are located in more sensitive areas than those in India, whose most significant deposits occur as cappings on the biggest mountains in south Orissa and north Andhra Pradesh. Tribal people live in hundreds of communities around these mountains, which they regard as sacred entities for the fertility they promote. Appropriately, the base rock of these mountains was named ‘Khondalite’ after the region’s predominant tribe, the Konds. Early geologists noticed the perennial streams flowing from these mountains, and modern evidence suggests that their water regime is severely damaged when the bauxite cappings are mined.

Bauxite has probably never been sold for a price commensurate with the damage done by mining it. For Konds and other small-scale farmers in East India, the aluminium industry brings a drastic disturbance to their way of life and standard of living that amounts to cultural genocide. If mainstream society sees these bauxite cappings of India’s Eastern Ghats as resources standing ‘unutilised’, Adivasi culture understands them as sources of life, and sees mining them as a sacrilege based on ignorance. Read More

On Magma, Björk, the separation of philosophy and reality, xenophobia, green industry, false solutions, borders, Earth conservation and liberation. By Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson and originally published in The Reykjavík Grapvine, August 13th 2010.

There are countless reasons for Magma Energy not being allowed to purchase HS Orka. Those who have no idea why should quit reading this and get their hands on books like Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and documentaries like ‘The Big Sellout’ by Florian Opitz. They show how the privatisation of natural resources brings about increased class division and poor people’s diminished access to essentials—without exception.

People could also study the history of Ross Beaty, the man that wants to build Magma Energy to being ‘the biggest and best geothermal energy enterprise in the world.’ Ross is the founder and chairman of Pan American Silver Corporation, which operates metal mines in Bolivia, Mexico and Peru, where mining is done by the book: environmental disasters, human rights violations, low paid labour and union restrictions, to mention but a few of the industry standards.

Even though such facts are evident to all, the acceptance of this kind of critique is rare in Iceland. Those who criticise privatisation and marketisation from a radical perspective, analysing the global economic and power structures we live within (as well as institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), are often dismissed and their words dismissed as only “one more argument against global capitalism”. Their pleading is thus supposedly belittled. The phenomenae ‘capitalism’ and ‘representative democracy’ have been normalised and recognised as ‘the only right way’ of social organisation; daring to criticise today’s ruling ideologies is seen as banal, uncool, even hysterical. After the collapse of Iceland’s bank casino and the nationalisation of private debts, it took months until the word “capitalism” appeared and was accepted in the critical debate of that winter’s resistance. Read More

Iceland, one year on
By Haukur Már Helgason

After Iceland’s three banks collapsed in October 2008 – a bankruptcy bigger than Lehmann Brothers’ in a republic of 300,000 inhabitants – the public overthrew a neoliberal government through mass protest, precipitating a general election. On election day, 25 April 2009, the conservative head of Iceland’s public radio newsroom sighed his relief: ‘Judging from the atmosphere this winter a revolution was foreseeable in spring, some sort of revolution – that something entirely different from what we are used to would take over. Now we know better.’(1)

We certainly do. Whenever someone mentions IceSave, an angel falls on an elf and they both die. That pretty much does justice to the tedium amassed as this single issue drags on: the debate about compensation for money lost by 300,000 British and Dutch depositors has stifled any more radical discourse about change in Iceland for almost a year. Totalling around 10 per cent of the debt accumulated through the ‘good years’, the IceSave saving accounts scheme was established by Landsbanki in 2007, four years after its privatization, in order to solve the bank’s liquidity problems, as investors had become sceptical about its foundations. As democracy had given way to finance, Iceland’s banks were at the time directly involved in every sphere of society. Construction of a music hall in Reykjavík city centre, the cost of which was estimated as around 2 per cent of the country’s GDP, had come to a standstill, but as soon as the IceSave accounts started luring in customers with their promise of high yields, construction began again, in full swing. (2) Read More

This Sunday, August 15th at 20:00, an open meeting with Indian author, filmmaker and activist Samarendra Das, will take place in the Akureyri Academia, Þórunnarstræti 99, Akureyri. The meeting is a part of Samarendra’s second visit to Iceland, now presenting his and Felix Padel’s recently published book, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel. For the last decade, Samarendra and Felix have been researching the global aluminium industry and working with the Dongria Kondh tribes of Odisha, India, who are struggling against the British mining company Vedanta, that wants to mine bauxite there for aluminium production.

Samarendra will be in Iceland from August 14th to 21st and will have more talks and presentations during his stay. This Wednesday, August 18th, he will have a talk in the Reykjavík Academia, Hringbraut 121 at 20:00. More talks will be announced soon.

Click here for a full-length press release about his visit and the book.

The Indian author, filmmaker and activist, Samarendra Das, will be in Iceland from August 14th to 21st. This is the second time that he comes here in collaboration with the environmental movement Saving Iceland. The occasion this time is the recent publishing of his and Felix Padel’s book, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, which is published by Orient Black Swan and could be refered to as the “black book” of the aluminium industry. Samarendra will have a talk and presentation on his book, in the Reykjavík Academia, Hringbraut 121, on Wednesday August 18th at 20:00. More talks will take place in other place around the country while Samarendra is here and will be advertised later.

For the last decade, Samarendra has been involved with the struggle of the Dongria Kondh tribe in Odisha, India, against the British mining enterprise Vedanta, which plans to mine bauxite for aluminium production on the tribes’ lands – the Niyamgiri hills. The struggle has gained strength lately and for example, many official parties have sold their shares in Vedanta on the grounds that the company does not live up to expected demands about respect to human rights and local communities. Samarendra’s part in this can not be undermined, but he has written hundreds of articles, published and edited books, and made documentaries about the struggle and related issues. The new book, Out of This Earth, can be called the “black book” of the aluminium industry, since it addresses all the dark sides of the industry. In a press release from the publisher, Orient Black Swan, this says e.g. about the book: Read More