In the storms of the world: building communities to assist social and ecological justice

walking exploration. An exploration in which they visit the offices of banks and advertising agencies, government ministries and law firms, and other actors in the Carbon Web; at each stop they hear fables and between stops listen to a soundtrack on headphones. An exploration which enables them to experience the physical presence of the Web in their city - normally so hidden - and to do so in the real time of a key event in the corporation`s life cycle. For BP and Shell, like all large companies, present their financial performance every three months, on Quarterly Results days, when the whole community of the Web listens intently for signals of future direction. The Gog & Magog events take place on these Quarterly days, four for BP and four for Shell, and the participants experience the great machinery of the corporations churning in the immediate moment. The second half of each day is spent by participants reflecting and discussing what they have seen coming to hear each other`s views and building up some kind of camaraderie.

Slowly but surely we have built up our presence in this community - presence as a respected source of advice to oil analysts, investment managers and journalists. Presence as those who create unique and safe spaces in which big questions can be asked by those in the Carbon Web who have doubts. Presence as those who provide critics of the corporations with information and inspiration. Now we find ourselves known in this community with perhaps 200 or 300 individuals interested in our work or actively seeking our engagement.

And we find ourselves with a series of challenges : how are we to deal with this interest ? How are we to cater for those requests for engagement ? What is the right form, or forms, to maintain this community of interest ? To help shift it into a community built around the intent of questioning the corporations.

Difficult though it is to maintain working in a community of place over the long term, this work suggests some fairly standard forms : most clearly represented by the Wandle Delta Network with its monthly meetings, its newsletter, and so on. Are such things really appropriate as forms around which to gather individuals from this disparate `community` of The City and its corporations ? A community made up of people who are fundamentally `busy`, who constitute a community in their workplaces rather than in their leisure time.

Perhaps we need to explore new forms - such as web-based chat rooms, or web sites that use open-source Wiki software. Or does this take us away from the concrete nature of community and into the standardised format of the IT world ?

Perhaps a way forward is to be found through the creation of events that bring wider groupings of that community together ? The quarterly cycles of Gog & Magog are intended to culminate in large annual events an Annual General Meeting - at which all the attendees will be brought together.

On November 10th 1995 the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was murdered by the Nigerian government on account of his long running protest against Shell, and other oil companies, who were (and are) engaged in the ecological and social devastation of the Niger Delta and his homeland, Ogoniland. November 2005 sees the 10th anniversary of this event, and PLATFORM has initiated and co-ordinated a coalition to create a living memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Remember Saro Wiwa project will in many senses tie together the different strands of PLATFORM`s recent work - it will address front-on the position of the corporations and the Carbon Web in our city, it will explore London`s ecological footprint and each citizens responsibility in that, and it will be an intervention in the social and ethical debate of our metropolis.

The precise form of it is yet to be finalised, but perhaps it is in the creation of such events such as these that a community can define itself ? And through the creation of such a memorial we can alter the physical fabric of our city - a city littered with monuments to imperial heroes. Here might come a memorial to one who was in a tradition of those that struggled against our imperial city - joining the existing statue of Gandhi and the planned statue of Mandela. Here might be a location on future guided walks in the Gog & Magog quarterly events. * A text of seminal importance on the thinking of PLATFORM, is the essay by John Berger, the `Historical Afterword` in `Pig Earth`. Berger writes ; `Modern history begins - at different moments in different places - with the principle of progress as both the aim and motor of history. This principle was born with the bourgeoisie as an ascendant class, and has been taken over by all modern theories of revolution. The twentieth-century struggle between capitalism and socialism, is, at an ideological level, a fight about the content of progress... Cultures of progress envisage future expansion. They are forward-looking because the future offers ever larger hopes... A culture of survival (a peasant culture) envisages the future as a sequence of repeated acts for survival. Each act pushes a thread through the eye of a needle and the thread is tradition. No overall increase is envisaged.` The ship has its direction. Parties of Vikings - who were in the main peasants turned temporary warriors and