Thom Yorke backs a virtual climate march and Greenpeace's fish campaign

Thom Yorke wrote on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, on 20 November, during a week off from recording. Most of the post goes on two campaigns. He is sent requests like these a lot, he writes, but these two rang bells.

The first is the Stop Global Warming Virtual March on Washington, an online petition at StopGlobalWarming.org. He calls the idea of a virtual petition genius, and says the issue now seems to be everywhere in the US, as it is in Britain. He has just finished George Monbiot's book on global warming, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, out this year. even though he's a mate of mine i recommend it as the ideal christmas present.¹ Many of his friends went to hear Monbiot speak at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, and Yorke found that inspiring and a little terrifying.

The second is Greenpeace's oceans campaign. Supermarket demand for fish, he writes, is fishing species to extinction, and he singles out the huge nets that drag up everything. He wants the supermarkets made to source fish responsibly and governments to regulate for sustainable fishing. He eats neither fish nor meat and respects other people's right to, though whenever he watches the rest of the band eat fish he quietly wonders how it got there.

A month earlier, on 15 October, he had used the blog to back Friends of the Earth's Big Ask and to say the band had started the record properly. He had good news from the sessions. we had a good week in the studio last week. finally things are growing.¹