When Humans Burrow

Imagine spending weeks of your life inside a dark, underground tunnel. For sustenance you consume tinned beans with hot sauce, and to pass the time you read novels by candlelight. Limited ventilation allows for the occasional cigarette. For now, all is quiet, but you must be ready to dig at a moment’s notice. You are playing a dangerous game of fox and mole. Authorities excavate the underground, searching for you, and they could appear around any corner.

This is the murky realm of tunneling activism. 

Over the last century, environmental activists have invented and repurposed many creative tactics for nonviolent direct action (NVDA) campaigns. These tactics range from lower-risk actions like distributing flyers without permission, to higher-risk actions like roadblocks, sit-ins, banner drops, throwing soup at paintings, and sabotage. NVDA techniques play out differently depending on cultural and historical context. While some tactics have caught on and spread like wildfire, a few have remained localized to a specific time or place.

Tunneling is one of the least common and riskiest forms of NDVA. Tunneling emerged as a form of activism in England in the 1990s in reaction to unwanted development projects. The underlying strategy is similar to tree-sits or locking in to construction equipment: developers can’t start digging without hurting someone, so projects are delayed. However, extracting protesters from tunnels takes much longer than removing them from trees or unlocking them from machinery.

Activists construct complex tunnels outfitted with trapdoors, secret burrows, dead ends, and other stopgaps. Their goal is to make extraction as difficult as possible. Sometimes activists even tie ropes around their necks so that shafts can’t be opened from the other side without choking them. Developers are forced to bring in specially trained extraction teams (known as bailiffs) to get the activists out alive and unharmed. Meanwhile, the whole time they’re pursued, the activists keep digging, creating new sections of tunnel and blocking off the old, shifting the architecture to keep authorities guessing.

Over the past decades, tunneling protests have cost British developers millions of pounds and have made them think twice about construction projects that threaten wildlife, wilderness, and neighborhoods. This tactic has remained largely localized in England, with a few instances in other countries.

Why there and largely nowhere else? This short history unearths the geographic, political, and cultural conditions that allowed for the emergence and rise of tunneling activism in England.

The Underground

Humans aren’t the only burrowing animals in the British countryside—foxes, badgers, moles, voles, gophers, groundhogs, rabbits, raccoons, chipmunks, skunks, squirrels, mice, rats, and hedgehogs all share the underground. It’s no wonder that burrows made their way into British literature in books like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Peter Rabbit, Watership Down, The Wombles and The Hobbit. The garden gnomes in Harry Potter might even have something to say about this. British culture seems to harbor a longstanding affinity for burrows, perhaps thanks to its hospitable terrain and the more-than-human animal communities who thrive there.  

England’s topography and climate make it an especially suitable place for digging underground. The country is mostly lowlands—rolling hills, plains, lochs, and moors laced by patchwork rivers and streams. Soil types range from clay to silt to chalk, and the climate is temperate, so the ground is rarely frozen. There is plenty of rainfall all year to keep the soil soft for burrowing.

Another geographical reason that could explain tunneling activism’s popularity is that England is a small country by square miles—slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. This means there is limited land available for agriculture and even less for wilderness. The British countryside has been farmed and developed for thousands of years, and today only 2.5 percent of old growth forests remain. Perhaps this is why, when new development projects threaten the few old growth areas that are left, activists are willing to go to extremes to protect them.

Claremont Road Resistance

Politics also played a role in the emergence of tunneling activism. In 1989, the British government announced “the biggest road-building scheme since the Romans.” Building these new roads would mean evicting entire neighborhoods, destroying forests, and threatening wildlife, so the plans were met with serious opposition. Between 1993 and 1997, anti-road protests led to the first widespread use of tunneling as a form of NVDA.

In 1993, activists set up camp to prevent the construction of a new highway called the M11. Building the M11 would require removing the entire community of Claremont Road. Rather than give up their homes, community members constructed an elaborate protest camp and hunkered down. They cut a hole in every wall of a row of thirty attached houses to connect them via one long tunnel. Although the tunnel was conceived of as a strategy to escape authorities, it also became “a physical expression of community” because it allowed for easy traversal of the encampment.

The Claremont Road community held down the fort for two years before security forces moved in to evict them. The operation involved 500 protesters, 700 police, and 400 security guards. When the security forces arrived, protesters locked themselves into burrows in the road. They also sealed themselves into basements, hung from a system of netting that was draped over the entire street, and barricaded themselves into treehouses.

As the police approached, protesters played Music for the Jilted Generation by The Prodigy from a hundred-foot tower built on top of the houses. Police cut the power, which left the street in silence for a few minutes. Little did they know the protesters had another tunnel—code name “Vicky”—where backup electrical power could be transferred. The police were confused when the music came back on a few minutes later, and the protesters had a good laugh.

As the eviction went on, activists set up a cafe on the roof of one house to make beans on toast and tea. One campaigner stated, “Direct action is a theatre; the media like that. A mixture of symbols and decision making—wars and celebrities.” Although authorities eventually completed the eviction and built the M11, the Claremont Road campaign was a creative space for coalition building, experimentation, and the training of a new generation of activists.

From the scarce records available, activists who participated at Claremont Road seemed to be cracking up all the time. They thought what they were doing was hilarious. This “cheeky” attitude has been an important part of NVDA environmental activism in the UK at least since 1992, and probably long before that. And “cheekiness” continues to play a role in British activism. Just look at Extinction Rebellion (XR), who are known for passing out vegan biscuits to frustrated commuters during roadblocks.

This humor doesn’t necessarily translate to other cultural contexts. For example, when XR first launched in New York in 2019, they dropped a boat in the middle of Times Square to disrupt traffic and draw attention to rising sea levels. Both observers and participants appeared to be more stressed out than anything else, which makes sense—New York is a stressful place.

Another cultural element to consider is the relative homogeneity of British activists and their relationship with authorities. Unlike in the United States, where people might feel less safe around police and other officials due to historic police brutality and the prison-industrial complex, there was a kind of decorum between British bailiffs and activists. Perhaps this was because the bailiffs did not carry guns, and underground extractions were a dangerous situation for all the parties involved. It’s possible the shared cultural understanding between the activists and authorities granted them enough privilege to perform a risky action like tunneling. The tunnelers had to have some level of trust that the bailiffs would get them out safely.

Tunneling protests made policymakers think twice about future development projects. In a memo leaked from the UK Department of Transport, officials admitted that the anti-road protests had been effective. By the late 1990s the government had axed hundreds of new road plans.

After the events at Claremont Road, tunneling became so commonplace that a private company called the National Eviction Team was established to profit off protester extractions. The team was specially trained to infiltrate and map out activist tunnels. They created 3D models to study the tunnels’ architecture and strategize how to get in and out without suffocating or causing the structure to collapse. This proved extremely difficult. Activists took refuge in hidden dens or activated trapdoors so that the tunnel appeared empty by the time the bailiffs arrived.

The New Climate of Activism

Despite its relative popularity, researching tunneling activism feels like an excavation project of its own. There is an emergent quality to these protests that makes their history difficult to track. Tunneling is usually employed alongside other tactics. It is part of a wider campaign architecture that is difficult to untangle—just look at all the treehouses, towers, burrows, and nets involved in the Battle of Claremont Road!

Few photographs emerge from the tunnels. Apart from some oral histories, these underground protests went largely undocumented (although it seems fitting that tunnelers prefer to fly under the radar). Even after reading through activist blogs, interviews, and social media posts, the specific inspirations and influences remain hard to prove. But this also feels fitting: tunneling is an inherently dark, hidden, and speculative act.

A few prominent activists have worked to keep the tunneling tradition alive in England. Longtime activist Dan Hooper, otherwise known as Swampy, became a household name during the anti-road protests of the 1990s. The public loved him, and he was briefly considered the most famous environmental activist in the country. After a two-decade hiatus, Swampy reappeared in 2020 and has been tunneling ever since. There are others, too—code names Log, Satchel, and Digger Dan—who have contributed to the resurgence of tunneling in recent years.

Tunneling is the opposite of soup-throwing. It is not a fast and flashy form of activism. It is slow, uncomfortable, and dangerous. Tunneling is also less likely to garner media attention, especially since there’s no cell service down there.

Tunneling requires being with the land—literally inside the land. It is thus a physical manifestation of rootedness in place and an act of great commitment to the ecosystem they call home. Like the burrowing rabbits and badgers of the British countryside, and alongside the oaks and primroses who cast their roots into the soil, these activists inhabit their ecosystem in order to protect it.

The tunneling protests of the 1990s challenged the assumption that economic growth and progress were inherently good. They also brought up important questions: what is our relationship with the ground beneath our feet? What responsibility do we have to the lands where we live and to the lands where we are a visitor? These questions are no less pertinent today.

The future, though, is uncertain. Human rights watchdog groups warn of intensifying crackdowns on climate protesters across Europe. The UK, France, and Germany have unveiled new laws to criminalize climate activism, resulting in mass arrests and severe punishments. In response, Extinction Rebellion announced they will shift their tactics away from public disruption, and Climate Defiance has made it their mission to be more disruptive than ever. As the risks associated with protest continue to evolve, unexpected and creative modes of direct action like tunneling might be more important than ever.

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Featured image: Claremont Road protesters gather in one of the houses, lit by lamplight. Photo courtesy of Andrew Testa, 1994.

Sav is a writer and organizer from St. Petersburg, Florida. They write about ecocide, queerness, and disability. As a student in the Environmental Humanities program at the University of Utah, they are exploring the role of poetry and performance in the movement to save Great Salt Lake. You can read more of their work on Dark Mountain and Tilted House. Contact.