UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Em Challinor, art by Caroline DaSilva.

St Fittick’s Park is a swathe of misty green separating the neighbourhood of Torry, Aberdeen, from the North Sea. Fields and forested areas stretch down to the shore, criss-crossed with paths and bisected by a railway line that carries freight between the port and Torry’s industrial estates. A foghorn — nicknamed the Torry Coo — used to bellow eerily on days like this, but now it is silent after being taken out of operation in 1987. The only cries are of gulls and some of the local kids shouting as they ride bikes through the park. The thin mist skims the bottom of white tents on one of the park’s largest fields, and activists swarm between them – Climate Camp Scotland has set up.  

Climate Camp is an autonomous group whose purpose is to ‘organise nationally against fossil fuels and for climate justice in Scotland’ In the past, they have occupied Grangemouth power station, Scotland’s largest polluter, and supported opposition to the Mossmorran Natural Gas Liquids and Ethene plants in Fife. The camp was set up in St Fittick’s park in July 2024 to protest a proposed ‘Energy Transition Zone’ (ETZ) that would destroy 20 hectares of the park, taking the community’s only green space and bringing another large industrial project to a community that has already become a ‘dumping ground’ for unwanted industry.   

St Fittick’s Park differs from the other sites that Climate Camp has occupied in that the ETZ is an ostensibly ‘green’ development. According to the Press and Journal, ‘early analysis suggests that capacity at the ETZ would cut 136.4 megatonnes of CO2 emissions, equivalent to 1-2% of the UK’s net-zero targets’. Nevertheless, local people have relentlessly fought against the plans. They point out that the ETZ’s owner, Ian Wood, is an oil billionaire who aims to preserve his profits in the wake of policy that favours renewables. The park would be taken for the sake of profit, not emissions reduction, and this would compound the inequalities in health and economic wellbeing that have already driven life expectancy in Torry 13 years lower than other areas of Aberdeen.  

The battle for the park illustrates the importance of a just transition – ensuring that a transition to renewables does not replicate the same structures of inequality that were fostered by the oil and gas industry. While much of climate activism focuses on changing policy at a large scale – pushing for commitment to net zero and lobbying for renewable energy infrastructure – the ETZ reveals that energy transition alone is not enough.  

By drawing a national group of activists together to support a local and specific campaign, Climate Camp’s strategy suggests a more general framework to fight for a just transition. I will explore this through reflections on the camp and its contributions to the campaign for St Fittick’s Park.  

Firstly, Climate Camp’s structure makes it easier for the actions of the camp to be guided by specific, local concerns. Torry locals were involved in Climate Camp as organisers. During meetings to decide the location of the camp, a decision was reached by consensus after organisers from a number of local groups shared potential protest targets. The participatory nature of this process meant that, as far as possible, the actions that the camp collectively took were guided by the concerns of people from the community we were protesting in. The camp aimed to provide support to local campaigns rather than coming from the outside to impose their agenda on local people. Working with local campaigns is especially important in just-transition-focused activism as climate activists sometimes clash with workers in polluting industries or locals who feel their lives are being disrupted by protests. An approach based on coalition organising could be a useful generalisable principle when it comes to bringing about a just transition. While activism concentrated on top-down change might work when it is general and detached from local specificities, focus on a just transition demands that activists consider the particular context of each protest site.  

This does not mean that we cannot draw from broader narratives and international connections, however. Camp workshops, discussions, and shared resources, activists made connections between their different local concerns, and a major purpose of the camp was activist community-building. Not only did this forge connections, but it was also a way for non-local and Torry activists to share resources. There was space to connect Torry’s specific struggle with global narratives of climate justice, and through skillshares, campers 

shared strategies for conflict de-escalation, direct action, and even herbalism as a comforting and healing tool. This sort of facilitated sharing and coming-together is another valuable strategy for just-transition activism, creating spaces to unite the global and the particular.  

A third contribution from Climate Camp was bringing media attention to the St Fittick’s Park campaign. The camp staged a direct action where activists blocked the entrance to the Torry waste incinerator, shutting it down for the day. The incinerator has come to symbolise the ‘dumping’ of polluting industry on Torry, treating the community as disposable. The action was intended to harness the specific resources the camp had to offer – many highly organised and motivated people in one place – for the maximum benefit of the local campaign.  

Overall, the kind of coalition organising demonstrated by Climate Camp could offer a useful strategy for just transition activism. The combination of global movements and local specificities is a key issue that climate activists face. Action that focuses on bringing people and resources to support local campaigns offers a promising way forward.