I'm a Canadian who in 1998-99 was in Australia working for Greenpeace from which I got fired for organizing their fundraisers into anti-uranium mining, which was a huge issue with dozens of mines opening up around Australia to make it the main supplier of uranium to the world. Getting fired propelled me into RTS (Reclaim The Streets) and EarthFirst!, both of which have a huge historic grounding in Australia.

RTS Sydney was massive and well organized in accord with the close ties Sydney has with London. RTS Sydney was very distributed with a kind of DAN (Direct Action Network) centre on King St. in Newtown. We were kicking ass without having to take names, whether it was the occupation protests outside the ERA office, Timbarra cyanide leach minning, or the RTS parties shutting down swaths of Sydney for the original N30 or J18. It all came together spontaneously and it was soo fun... People (by-and-large) spontaneously showed up and threw down.

London RTS really exemplified and anchored the spirit of the Zapatista resistance in the imperial, western world and took it global, and we in Sydney were in lock step. J18 (Russia's induction to the G7 finance ministers) was massive - well over 100 cities around the globe attempting to shut down their CBDs (Central Business Districts) !! But other than the Eugene anarchists, bArberiKa was basically silent.
Organizing and promoting for J18 in Sydney, we were wondering if the Yanks were going to pull their weight even for the WTO on U.S. turf. We were building the opening salvo in a global anti-capitalist rebellion (J18 was dubbed a Carnival Against Capital) and there was no U.S. movement to be seen.

I decided I'd give up my awesome job and go home to Vancouver to organize a last minute J18 there. So I got a plane ticket and made sure it had a stop over in Seattle. I flew into Seattle June 5th as a blockade tactician to analyse the site. We were organizing big time on the internet in the IDAs and some in the North West were thankfully plugged in. So I hopped out from SeaTac and was met overlooking the Conference Center by Kerry (all last names of other actors will be with held until they approve their full names in this account). Kerry was just my age at the time; I believe 19 (i'd turned 20) and had cancer but was still throwing down. No one said it but we all new that a world where a 19 year old gets cancer is a world that deserves to be torn down, and she did so with us. Having run with the EarthFirst! crowd in Australia, including Ian Cohen, who is one of the originators of EarthFirst! tactics; I was looking at Seattle from a pure blockade perspective... Although it felt a lot like whimsey to me at the time.

I remember Kerry not being able to fathom it, but, being the 'tactician' who'd flown in, I feigned a little more belief for the both of us. I went home and got to organizing for J18 to rile up the spirit we had in Vancouver for the APEC conference so we could get a good 10,000 down from Vancouver (although at the time I was probably only hoping a few solid sized crews would go - with 1500 - 3000 being my outside-dare-to-dream number).

I plastered Vancouver with these catchy hot pink J18 stickers, stencils, posters, etc., and made a trip down to Seattle to meet with Kerry, Roger, and Simon who were putting together Seattle Anarchist Response (SAR) as something of a hosting and collaboration 'committee'. We spent an afternoon wagging our tongues on how to build momentum, and licking envelopes & stamps to well over 200 organizations and 'radicals' (as though survival and a sane socio-economy is radical) around the U.S. that June. SAR put out a great little package of situationlist art. SAR also did a couple of solid Benefit Shows to get people excited. I remember the Pete Krebs, Casey Neil and Jim Page show at the Odd Fellows Hall on the first weekend of September.

Simon and I went to the Ruckus training and planning camp the next weekend and Ruckus was impressive, but what I hold onto most from that summer of organizing was the relatively few of us over the summer, doing our own guerilla organizing, spray painting, postering, flyering, traveling, etc. I went to the Rainbow gathering in Pensylvannia that year as it was still the major underground, national event of the summer and distributed handbills which I"d made at a kinkos in Toronto before hitch-hiking down to the gathering. Friends in the Radical Faeries (RF) camp (Dave from San Fransisco) gave me pastels to colour the handbills. It was calling out for a caravan from the East Coast to Seattle, which, via one-way or another did happen. Then to Montréal, London, Paris, N. Italy, European Rainbow in Hungary, etc. Roger went down to Eugene and Portland when he could.This was the way we hyped up the distributed anarchist call out and is probably why it ended up being such a success - no one centralized group or cadre of leaders put it together... It was to be a peoples' carnival.

Vancouver was absolutely abuzz from unions to film makers, writers and academics, anarchists to elders,,, all talking about the WTO, holding symposiums, rallies, book launches, you name it. I was even dressed up in a banana costume made by Stephanie to film a skit for Mark Achbars' The Corporation that was to be about the WTO banana conflict that was shafting Caribbean farmers (got left on the cutting room floor). At least 15 buses were chartered from Vancouver and packed down for the historic journey to Seattle.

During my many crossings over the border I remember it finally getting to the point where, on my 2nd to last trip, the customs guy had to click his mouse to scroll while reading my file at least 4 times. That was one of the longest 5-10 minutes of my young life. On the 3rd and 4th scroll clicks I knew I was done. He did send me away that time, but when my legendary Grandma (having lived through the McCarthy era in a very real way) and I went down together a few days ahead of N30, the customs lady let me through to my elated relief - with whack loads of radical propaganda in the back of the car. That customs agent believed in the democratic spirit for sure.

It all led to some gas forcing us into nooks and crannies with delegates, trying to breathe in the stairwell of the IMC on 3rd St. and winning! I'll leave my days-of account for another writing but one of my greatest moments ever was at the end, on 3rd St., with the USA Today box carrying only the news of WE WIN!