Check.

 

And mate*.

 

A group of green activists lead by Greenpeace just bought a small plot of land that would be needed for an expansion of London's Heathrow Airport. The piece of land, about half the size of a soccer pitch, is where the airports controversial third runway would be built. The group has vowed to never sell the land and to use every legal recourse available to prevent the runways construction.

 

I LOVE it when we win by playing the game. Protests and letter writing are awesome tools for change, but there's nothing like getting in there with the other side and just buying them out.

 

27 year old Tim DeChristopher ended up playing the game last month when he bid out mining companies in drilling rights auctions for more than 150,000 acres of land in the west. He entered into the auction as a gimmick, intending to only disrupt the legitimacy of the bidding, but after the auction word got out and donations started pouring in. DeChristopher has raised enough to cover the $45,000 deposit and is said to be on track to cover the entire $1.7M.

 

*- OK, so maybe it's not quite checkmate yet. There is still a lot of court time between now and the project being officially dead, but this make it very, very hard for airport developer BAA to proceed.