@guardian journalists - this is seriously annoying. Did Diane Taylor speak to other former road protesters besides George and Dan in researching this article? Probably not.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/29/tipping-point-why-swampy-thinks-hs2-tunnel-protest-can-change-climate-fight

I knew Dan (Swampy) when he was a student and hunt sab at Exeter Uni (I was (1)

with Totnes and Torquay Hunt Sabs at the time). In 1994 I shifted from the animal rights movement to the environmental movement, notably by moving on to the Bailbrook Lane camp (which I helped to set up btw) at Solsbury Hill. I carried on there almost until that protests end (2)

alongside George Monbiot, Bel Mooney and Tracy Worcester among others. Following that, me and various others from South Somerset Earth First went down to Fairmile camp on the A30 protest campaign near Exeter to help build defences there. I was also at the Wells Relief Road (3)

protest and also at the Wyndham Hill protest camp in Yeovil, my home town, which we won (the council failed to get council funding and we had started building tunnels as well as tree houses and that forced South Somerset District Council to give it up and scrap the whole idea (4)

Skip forward to HS2, and you seem to think that all former road protesters from those days are anti-HS2 - nothing could be further from the truth. Those of us like myself who are seriously interested in sustainable transport and the role rail can play in this, definitely (5)

support HS2. But you, @guardian journalists, along with other mainstream media, see Swampy joining in - just because he's famous - and @GeorgeMonbiot writing against it as well, and you seem to think that all environmentalists and environmental activists (6)

are of like mind on this. We are most certainly not. There's even a Green Party profile on Twitter actively supporting and defending HS2.

Perhaps you'd like to talk to us for a change and present our side of the story?

The New Statesman has done so: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/environment/2020/10/why-everyone-and-especially-greens-should-still-support-hs2?fbclid=IwAR1i7aSx49C0cAgJn5uE8vbinFMVEJVaar_XF6_AOljdQZ0eJuGXG5BV-Tk (7)

Now it's your turn.

The mainstream media focusing on the HS2 activists is getting really annoying now. It's time to present the pro-environment case for HS2.