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Lock Me up or Let Me Go: The Protests, Arrest and Trial of an Environmental Activist and Grandmother

by Betty Krawczyk

Lock Me Up or Let Me Go opens with “environmental activist and grandmother” Betty Krawczyk’s courtroom battle with Justice Parrett of the B.C. judicial system. Krawczyk’s initial arrest occurred at the Clayoquot Sound blockades in 1993, a protest the activist calls “the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.” She was later arrested for protesting the logging of old growth Douglas fir in the Elaho Valley in B.C.’s interior.

Throughout the memoir, Krawczyk argues that the judicial system safeguards the logging companies from any outside interference in their business practices. The courts function to enforce laws already on the books, not to consider the long-term effects of clear-cutting and other unsafe environmental practices, and protestors are often brought before the same judge who issued an injunction against the protest in the first place.

Krawczyk finds little mercy or justice in the courts, and a sense of injustice and personal hurt informs the best sections of the book. The workaday prose is written with great emotional candour, and Krawczyk has plenty of insider insights and anecdotes. Why she chose to devote almost half the book to an interwoven account of her formative years in Baton Rouge and Mississippi with her mother, Aunt Gladys, and Sweetie, her “rotten cat,” is a mystery, though. Her mother is portrayed as a woman of great emotional integrity who inspired the young Krawczyk, but these sections digress from the book’s central concerns and lack the passion of the protests and court battles.

And what battles they were. In one address to the court, Krawczyk delivered a moving paean to the ancient trees of the West Coast, quoting Hegel and de Beauvoir and pronouncing those who destroy the environment guilty of “defying fundamental truths about the universe.”

 

Reviewer: Doug Beardsley

Publisher: Raincoast Books

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55192-465-X

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 2002-2

Categories: Memoir & Biography