Hi
thanks to all of you who responded to my initial posting, I got a
couple of queries from people in the states who didnt know what i was
talking about when i questioned the possibilities of collecting
benders, twigloos, towers, tunnels & lock ons etc, so here are some
(hopefully explanatory) details.

Most of these thing are commonly used by anti-road protesters, now a
pretty common occurrence in the UK, though I don't know about
elsewhere - perhaps you do? The common tactic has been to occupy and
live on  the proposed routes of new roads, particularly through rural areas, but
also in towns, and obstruct the road building process by physically
getting in the way.

BENDER: a bit like a  do-it-yourself dome tent, you collect long
green branches, bend them over & stick the ends in the ground to make
a frame & then cover it with tarpaulin/plastic/ anything waterproof
you can find. They have a long history of use by people living at
fairly permanent sites, eg at the (US???) airbase at Greenham Common,
England, throughout the 1980s. They can be quite big and are cheaper
than tents. Now frequently seen at anti-road protests at Twyford
Down, Newbury, M11, M66, A38 etc etc

TWIGLOO: similar, but up a tree - like a glorified tree-house really.
Occupying individual trees is used after eviction proceedings have
begun against the groud campers, to stop the trees being cut down.
Often walkways and nets are also strung between trees so people can
get around. (I recently discovered that the climbers who were
employed by the sheriffs/bailiffs to get people down out of trees - a
difficult job as you can imagine - have been completely ostracised
from the climbing community in some places, to the point where their
photos have been stuck up in shops & cafes & people refure to talk to
them or even sell them stuff!)

TOWERS: mostly used in urgan sites, eg the M11 link road site in
North London. Towers were built on the roofs of the buildings which
were on the route & duer for demolition (&which had been squatted).
People attached themselves to the tops of the towers (pretty
precarious) so they were difficult to remove & stopped the building
being demolished.

TUNNELS: In addition to the camps & twigloos at rural sites,
particularly more recent ones where bailiffs got used to hiring
climbers to get people out of trees, protesters began to dig mazes of
tunnels under the site, partly so vehicles & machinery couldn't be
brought on site & partly to hide in to slow down the process even
more (at the current site at Fairmile in Devon, which has been under
eviction since last saturday, 5 people have been in tunnels, behind
steel plated doors for at least 5 days & the sheriffs have brought in
thermal imaging equipment to try and work out where they are to try &
get them out) - pretty impressive considering a building can be
evicted in less than half a day.

and finally...

LOCK-ONS: within the eco movements, particularly the more activist
ends (Earth First! etc) it has been common for people to lock
themselves onto things (D-shaped kryptonite bike locks are
popular,also hand & thumb cuffs) ; buildings, gates, diggers, trees etc, In more awkward situations, or
places where there is more time to prepare & the expectation of some
sort of conflict, lock-ons are made - simply a place/thing to which
something can be locked. Common ones are blocks of concrete with  a
metal loop inside which the cuffs lock on to - reached through a pipe
- so effectively you see a person with their arm stuck in a block of
concrete, making them pretty difficult to move.

The point is, how do you collect thing like this? -can you? is it
worth the bother?

hope this clarifies things,
Jane
Jane Sarre
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13a Biddulph St,
Highfields,
Leicester,
Britain, LE2 1BH
0116 255 8336