EARTH D AY SPECIAL
When Cressie Gethin went on trial for climbing a motorway gantry on the M25 in a Just Stop Oil protest, Chris Packham appeared as a witness. Now she faces ten years in jail, does she have any regrets?
CRESSIE GETHIN, AN ethereal, softly-spoken woman who looks younger than her 22 years, has always worried about the world. “Cressie asked a lot of questions,” her mother Cathy recalls. “It was as if she had the words ‘The world is not the place I thought it was’ written on her forehead.”
She had enjoyed an “idyllic” childhood with her two older brothers. “We moved to the beautiful countryside when I was four,” the former Cambridge University student says, speaking to me with her parents in a pub in rural Herefordshire. “But from the age of nine or ten I started to become aware that not everything was rosy in the world. Even back then I couldn’t brush that of. I had a strong sense of injustice for others who weren’t so lucky.
“I can remember glimpsing a headline about Madeleine McCann and thinking ‘Oh God, these things happen?’ Then there were PSHE [personal, social, health and economic] lessons at school talking about drugs, alcohol abuse and the need for online safety, and it made me realise the world could be this dark place.”
Cressie’s first step on the path that would ultimately lead to her scaling a gantry over the M25, demanding the Government halts all licensing and consents for new fossil fuel exploration and extraction, began with litter picking. “I look back and cringe a bit, but I got obsessed with litter picking and recycling,” she remembers. “I gave my parents hell about it, too. I remember going crazy at them for putting the wrong things in the compost heap.” Cathy recalls, “She’d make us take bags out with us whenever we went on a walk to pick up the rubbish we saw.”
