At 8:30 a.m. today, a quartet of activists tugged a semi-inflated, 30-foot-long blimp out of a U-Haul truck parked next to the US Coast Guard facility on the downtown waterfront and floated it up 200 feet.
The blimp had one message: “Join the Flotilla!”
One thought kept cycling through my brain as I watched the activists fill up the small vessel with helium: What have I done? The “flotilla” refers to the “flotilla of kayaks” port commissioner Bill Bryant mentioned during a talk he gave to the Evergreen Republican Women’s Club in March. A couple of weeks ago, audio leaked to The Stranger captured Bryant mocking Seattle’s vocal environmentalist population, specifically the suggestion that they might bring out kayaks to stop Shell’s Arctic drilling fleet at the port, where the vessels will be staying in the exploratory drilling off-season.
“We were already thinking about a water action, but when we heard him talk about kayaks and make fun of it, it was like, now we have to do it!” Bill Moyer, cofounder and executive director of the Backbone Campaign, told me.
There’s precedent for the flotilla idea. In 2009, Backbone helped organize a flotilla of kayaks that disrupted a sand and gravel mine site on Maury Island when protesters said expansion of the site would have threatened salmon habitat and drinking water. Moyer said that he had 40 kayaks on call within an hour’s notice, 24 hours a day. Eventually, the movement won.
Four years after the Maury Island flotilla, environmental activists used a lobster boat to block a coal shipment to a Massachusetts power plant. The two activists faced charges that could have landed them two years in jail, but Bristol district attorney C. Samuel Sutter ended up dropping the charges after sympathizing with the activists’ climate change crisis defense.
Backbone and a coalition of environmental groups will host their first “family-friendly” kayak training session this Saturday at 10 a.m. at Alki Kayak Tours in West Seattle.
