Abbie Jones
Road blocker
Small-town librarian is driven to protect natural beauty.
Photos by Nigel Dickinson
LONDON — Emma Must has hit the headlines as an environmental hero, a road warrior and a modern-day Maid Marion. Not bad for someone who worked as a children’s librarian just two years ago.
In that short span, Must, 29, has chained her neck to a bulldozer, defied a court injunction and gone to prison over one of Britain’s most contentious highway proposals. But rather than being dismissed as a raving eco-evangelist, Must is becoming a downright respectable voice of opposition to the country’s road-building program.
And the government is listening.
In April she was one of six people from around the world to be awarded the sixth annual Goldman Environmental Prize for grass-roots work in protecting natural resources. The recipients were nominated by a network of 19 internationally known environmental organizations and a panel of experts from 30 nations. The winners, who each received $75,000 from the San Francisco-based Goldman Foundation, were proclaimed “environmental heroes.”
At first glance Must looks like the classic hippie protester in green jeans, green shirt and Doc Martens. But her appeal has provided a bridge between the radical protesters who camp out on Britain’s targeted sites in cold and soggy defiance of the bulldozers and the more mainstream professionals equally frustrated by highway construction.
As a result of this coalition, the government of Prime Minister John Major has acknowledged that building roads increases traffic, a U-turn from the days of Margaret Thatcher’s “great car economy” politics, which encouraged highway building as a path to prosperity. With Must as a catalyst, the road program that was hailed as “the largest since the Romans” at its launch in 1989 has hit a cul-de-sac.
“We’ve seen over a third of the roads program scrapped,” Must says. “Sixty [proposals] are completely gone, but there are 70 more which have been indefinitely postponed. Politically, it’s become absolutely impossible to build a road in town anymore.”
Must’s conversion from a small-town librarian to an internationally recognized campaigner occurred, fittingly, on a train.
She was commuting to her job in the town of Winchester in the fall of 1992 when she saw that bulldozers had scraped the topsoil of Twyford Down, an ancient chalk grassland that formed the last link in a highway between Southampton and London. The spot where she had flown kites and picnicked as a child was transformed.
“Everybody thought the down was lost,” she says. “The bulldozers had come in. I had seen a couple newspaper cuttings, but I really didn’t know what it meant until I saw it. It was etched on my mind. This landscape was so familiar to me. Suddenly seeing it with a scar was awful. I couldn’t believe it.”
Must joined a group of opponents known as the Dongas tribe, a handful of young, radical protesters camped on the down who took their name from the medieval trackways that crisscrossed the hill. With her help, these New Agers began collaborating with a group of middle-class professionals who had fought the proposal unsuccessfully for 20 years through more conventional channels.
“The reason [the groups] started collaborating was that they were all passionate about trying to save the hill,” she says. “[They had] completely different lifestyles, completely different value systems, and they all went out the window because everyone was desperate to stop what was going on.”
Must organized large demonstrations and stunts, such as picketing the office of pro-road member of Parliment and handing out bags of chalk in attempt to save Twyford Down. What became known as the “classless protest” had begun.
In December of 1992 a court order evicted the Dongas tribe from its camp. Dozens of machines, workmen and security guards cordoned off the area to begin the work.
Scuffles broke out as security officers hauled away protesters, who had sprawled out in front of machines in desperation, Must says. The turf was stripped; the wood and hill bulldozed; trees were piled up and set on fire.
“It was a post-Holocaust scene,” Must says. “You had razor wire, you had arc lights, men walking around in bright [uniforms] and fires everywhere, no trees and bare soil. It was absolutely astonishing. This was an area of outstanding natural beauty, a unique medieval site, completely destroyed.”
With the tribe ejected and protesters defeated, Must and her friend Rebecca Lush vowed to keep fighting. The pair organized demonstrations throughout the winter, including a funeral march with coffins to mourn the loss of the medieval trackways. But by the spring of 1993, the heavy earth moving began.
“We timed it,” Must says. “The trucks were going at a rate of 17% tons a minute taking chalk from the hill and dumping it into the river. It was fleet load after fleet load of really huge dump trucks, tipping the chalk up and dropping it down so the water would splash up. The swans just scattered. It was awful. It was like watching an astonishing desecration of an extremely beautiful place.”
Must helped form a group called Twyford Down Alert! whose members renewed their “direct action” tactics of using their bodies to intervene. Among their stunts they formed human chains to stop the bulldozers and danced on machines. Britain has never seen anything like it over a road project, and the arrests mounted.
“One morning eight of us ran up the side of the hill and chained ourselves to a couple of machines and stopped work for about four hours,” she says. “By that time the bulldozers were digging the hill out so the only thing we had left was to actually try and stop them doing it. The most effective way is to chain yourself to it because it takes along time for them to cut you off.”
Must quit her job in June. In early July as part of a huge demonstration she and a group of friends defied an injunction to stay off the land by crossing a fence and walking on the down. Private detectives compiled viedo footage and other evidence of their guilt.
They were sentenced to 28 days in prison, which was reduced by half for good behavior. Although the judge took the hard line with the protesters, he referred to them as “fundamentally decent.”
“We had a choice about being” in prison, Must says. “At any point we could have said we were sorry, we wouldn’t protest again and we’d be let out. But there was no way we were going to do that. I’d do it again if I felt equally strong about something. We didn’t do it lightly then, I wouldn’t do it lightly again. You have to use it as a scalpel, not a cudgel, as a tactic.”
Intentionally going to prison was not a logical career move for the daughter of an engineering manager and a personnel manager.
“My mom was very worried about it but was very supportive,” Must says. “My dad is really placid man and was really angry with me and said, T just don’t need this right now.’ I thought, ‘Well, neither do I.’ But my dad came around, to his credit. Ever since then, my dad has accepted that what we did made a difference.”
Once out of prison, Must helped transform the group Twyford Down Alert! into Road Alert! that would advocate more radical forms of protest. She later joined Alarm UK, the umbrella group for 300 local campaigning groups set up before such tactics became popular.
“She is basically a classic example of somebody who has been radicalized by all the protest,” says Tim Allman, a spokesman for Road Alert! “She had a very staid, steady job in a very staid, steady city. For her to run off to the hillside and attach her neck to an earthmoving machine was symbolic of the way middle England has been outraged by the British government’s road-building program,”
Her commitment is driven by the love of the countryside, says John Stewart, chairman of Alarm UK. She lives modestly, works incessantly and thinks strategically, he says.
“Although road-building protest had been going on for some years before Twyford Down, it highlighted and dramatized it in a very theatrical way,” Stewart says. “Emma was really the moving force behind the campaign to continue this direct action, to escalate it, to make it [more than] just two dozen hippies sitting on hillside, to involve not only the people of Winchester but the nation.”
In the end the road was built through Twyford Down. The government argues the route was the least environmentally damaging and defends the measures it took to preserve the wildlife.
According to the Highways Agency, an arm of the Department of Transport, the government spent about $6.2 million on security to deal with the protesters and an additional $416,000 on private detectives to gather evidence for the legal cases.
Although the environmentalists lost that battle, the nation tuned in to the war. Protesters scored victories by stalling plans for a highway through an ancient woodland in southeast London known as Oxleas Wood and by scuppering a proposal to widen part of a main London highway to 14 lanes.
Last year a panel of scientists of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution urged the government to restrict road travel and improve public transportation. Then another leading advisory committee to the Department of Transport produced findings that new roads generate more traffic.
Today, protesters are camped 80 feet high in tree houses in the path of a proposed road extension in Lancashire. Must has initiated alliances of 30 to 40 anti-road groups that are opposing different stretches of proposed highways, and London is bracing itself for a summer of human roadblocks at the city’s traffic arteries to draw attention to rising levels of air pollution.
The Goldman prize threatens to make Must a media darling for the movement.
After one newspaper called her “Maid Marion to the tribe in the treetops,” a reference to the tree-house protest in Lancashire, she fired off a letter to the editor that the comparison was “many arrow lengths wide of the mark.”
“We’ve more or less won the argument now,” she says. “When we started off on this, we were having to shout to get our point across. The consensus of opinion wasn’t with us; it was with the pro-road lobby. Now it’s the other way around. The consensus of opinion is that what we are saying is actually right.”