Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing.
The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all.
In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent.
Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.”
Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration.
“I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry.
“It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.”
Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”.
“But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington..
After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job.
“It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?”
It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending.
He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society.
“It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.”
The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books.
“And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.”
But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.”
He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said.
“What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said.
“And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing.
“And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.”
“I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.”
As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home with my partner and cat, and it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.”
