[D66] Does Extinction Rebellion Have the Solution to the Climate Crisis?

[A.OUT]

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion

On 04-08-19 13:47, A.OUT wrote:
> Does Extinction Rebellion Have the Solution to the Climate Crisis?
> By
> Sam Knight
> newyorker.com
> 8 min
> View Original
> 
> Gail Bradbrook, a founder of Extinction Rebellion, speaks to protesters
> gathered to block roads near the BBC headquarters, during a recent
> demonstration in London.
> 
> The success of Extinction Rebellion, a British campaign of civil
> disobedience aimed at addressing the climate crisis, has been something
> to behold. In April, the group, which was formally launched only last
> October, blocked Waterloo Bridge, which spans the Thames, for more than
> a week. Across London, activists glued themselves to buildings, climbed
> on trains, chained themselves to company headquarters, and occupied key
> intersections, leading to some thousand arrests and messages of support
> from around the world. The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Cressida
> Dick, said that she had never encountered a protest like it. By the end
> of the month, Extinction Rebellion activists were meeting with Sadiq
> Khan, the mayor of London, and on May 1st, in accordance with one of
> their demands, Members of Parliament declared a climate and environment
> emergency, becoming the first national legislature to do so. In June,
> M.P.s agreed to another Extinction Rebellion request: to convene a
> citizens’ assembly, made up of a representative sample of the British
> population, to discuss the climate crisis. Although the assembly’s
> recommendations will not be legally binding, as the protesters wished,
> Extinction Rebellion’s language and its policy agenda have moved into
> the mainstream at remarkable speed.
> 
> On July 15th, the group began its next wave of protests: simultaneous
> week-long uprisings in Cardiff, Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol, and London.
> Each involves a sailboat parked on a busy street (“The Seas Are Rising
> and So Are We,” the slogan goes), along with a certain amount of
> annoyance and disruption. But, after the dramatic road-and-bridge
> seizures of the spring, the atmosphere of Extinction Rebellion’s summer
> demonstrations has been gentler and more celebratory. On a warm, sunny
> afternoon this past week, I visited a small park opposite the Old Vic
> Theatre, on the south bank of the Thames, that is serving as the base
> for the group’s current activities in the capital. Solar panels had been
> erected and a jazz band was playing on a stage lined with a pink banner
> that said, “Frugality, Humility, Empathy.” There were about sixty tents
> and a couple of hundred people resting and chatting, listening to the
> music. A young couple slept, entwined, next to a copy of “Jane Eyre”
> open in the grass. A box of food donations contained tangerines, oat
> cakes, and raspberries. Under some trees, a group was engaged in a “deep
> ecology” counselling session and a father was making a cardboard boat
> with his daughter, who seemed to be about five or six years old and was
> wearing her school uniform.
> 
> Signs of anarchy were polite in the extreme. “If your comrades wear
> masks or carry tools, don’t disrupt them,” read one rule, taped to a
> banner near the park gates. Under a white gazebo, a man in a red shirt
> was giving an introduction to a few dozen new Extinction Rebellion
> volunteers. The activists were advised not to give their names or any
> other information when challenged by the police, but the instructor
> suggested that replying “No comment” was a bit cold. “I couldn’t really
> say” was a better response, he told them, or “I don’t know.” Then walk away.
> 
> Extinction Rebellion claims to have affiliates in more than fifty
> countries. Last week, three American philanthropists—Trevor Neilson,
> Rory Kennedy, and Aileen Getty—set up the Climate Emergency Fund to
> support similar protest organizations, and pledged an initial five
> hundred thousand pounds to the group. (New York and Los Angeles both
> have branches of X.R., as it’s known, for short.) The campaign describes
> itself as a “self-organizing system,” but it is also the brainchild of a
> small group of experienced British radical activists. One of its
> founders is Roger Hallam, a fifty-three-year-old organic farmer from
> Wales, who is also a postgraduate student of theories of social change.
> Another is Gail Bradbrook, a longtime anti-fracking and tax-avoidance
> campaigner, who has a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics. Bradbrook and
> Hallam met in person for the first time in early 2017, not long after
> Bradbrook returned from a psychedelic retreat in Costa Rica, where she
> took ayahuasca, iboga, and kambo, in search of some clarity in her work.
> Bradbrook had been involved in the Occupy movement and campaigns around
> peak oil, but they failed to take off. “I was just sort of, like, fed up
> with failure,” she told me. “I was willing to just try anything,
> really.” Together, Bradbrook and Hallam sketched the outlines of
> Extinction Rebellion. In April, 2018, the strategy of conducting a
> peaceful, mass campaign of civil disobedience—Bradbrook and Hallam speak
> about converting a critical mass of 3.5 per cent of the British
> population, more than two million people—was formally approved at a
> meeting of about fifteen activists at Bradbrook’s house in Stroud, a
> market town in the Cotswolds with a strong ecological scene. Last
> summer, the first X.R. campaigners toured more than a hundred village
> halls and community centers, urging people to accept that the natural
> world is in a state of emergency. The group’s first demand—“Tell the
> truth”—is in many ways its greatest.
> 
> On Tuesday, Bradbrook, who is forty-seven, took the stage just after 5
> P.M., wearing a turquoise top, flared jeans, and a large earring
> fashioned from a sparrow’s wing. She is a slight, elfin figure, with a
> Yorkshire accent. She addressed the park for about forty minutes,
> darting from the alienating spirit of competition inherent in capitalism
> to the Shambhala warriors of Tibetan Buddhism to the question of
> disabled access at X.R. demonstrations. One of the group’s strategic
> successes has been to make protests safe and welcoming for families, by
> consulting with the police before carrying them out. (I took my two
> young daughters on an X.R. march for clean air in East London, where I
> live, last week.) Another aspect of the group’s appeal has been the way
> that it acknowledges the private, and often paralyzing, emotions that
> come from thinking about climate change and ecological destruction. “I
> absolutely fucking love sparrows,” Bradbrook said during her speech,
> explaining her earring. “House sparrows were in packs in my parents’
> garden.” Since the seventies, British house-sparrow populations have
> declined by half. “Every time I think about it, I want to cry. I miss
> them so deeply,” she said. Bradbrook likes to speak about the necessity
> of grieving for the elements of the natural world that have been lost.
> “It’s really unhinging and unsettling when you’re in the middle of it,”
> she told the crowd, to sporadic nods of recognition. “Love has a cost,
> and it’s grief. Because we will always be separated from things we love.
> That’s the nature and price of life, right? But, when you love something
> deeply, then you’re courageous.”
> 
> Earlier that day, six Extinction Rebellion protesters had been arrested
> after chaining themselves to the entrance of a cement factory in East
> London. Richard Walton, a former head of counterterrorism for the
> Metropolitan Police, has described the group as “anarchism with a
> smile,” whose underlying intention is to break up the state. (The X.R.
> protests in April are estimated to have cost around twenty-eight million
> pounds in lost earnings and extra policing.) It’s true that the founders
> of Extinction Rebellion have an extreme, anti-capitalist vision of what
> they want society to look like. “I want to live in a beautiful,
> nature-filled world, and, if we get shot on the streets fighting for it,
> so be it,” Bradbrook said in the park. “I’m willing to have that happen.
> I’m not calling for it to happen.”
> 
> The disconcerting thing about such radicalism, at this moment, is that
> it is the activists—rather than the state or law enforcement—who have
> the facts on their side. One of Extinction Rebellion’s favored tactics
> is to quote the first line of the executive summary of the 2018 report
> of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Limiting
> global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and
> unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” On the day I visited,
> a study commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
> Manufactures and Commerce, a research organization which dates back to
> 1754, set a deadline of 2030 to fundamentally redesign British
> agriculture to withstand the climate crisis and worrying trends in
> public health. “What we eat, and how we produce it, is damaging people
> and the planet,” the report said. “This is not some dystopian future;
> this is happening here and now, on our watch.”
> 
> After Bradbrook’s speech, I asked her why she thought Extinction
> Rebellion, which bears many resemblances to fringe campaigns that she
> has organized in the past, had caught the popular imagination. “I’m a
> bit, like, ‘We’re dreaming,’ a lot of the time,” she replied. “The
> movement wanted to come into existence. It wanted to exist. People were
> in this hideous feeling. I think that summer of really freaky weather,
> the I.P.C.C. report—there was a lot that was going, Something is not
> right here.” We were sitting in the shade in the corner of the park. A
> flamenco guitarist had taken Bradbrook’s place onstage. It was too soon
> to say whether X.R. was the start of something momentous. “I mean, we
> can’t be with this group,” Bradbrook said. She cast an appraising eye
> over the crowd, which looked like the kind of London crowd that would
> turn out for flamenco guitar. “There are clearly too many white people.
> There is nothing wrong with being white, but we are missing loads of our
> people.”
> 
> During her speech, Bradbrook had referred to the delicate work of making
> X.R. an international movement, especially in poorer countries already
> directly affected by the climate crisis. The group and its tactics can
> come across as a very British rebellion. “I just like swearing and being
> cheeky,” Bradbrook said at one point. “You don’t have to fit to this
> mold of straitjacketed, stick-up-your-arse Britishness.” Everything from
> X.R.’s branding to the—so far—tolerant police handling of its protests,
> from the group’s Cotswolds origins to the fraught, somewhat distracted
> context of British politics, have played a role in its indigenous
> success. “Now, is that going to work in America, or in France?”
> Bradbrook asked.
> 
> In the U.K., the next steps for X.R. are a proposed tax
> protest—activists are planning to withhold their taxes until the
> government enacts more urgent environmental policies—and what the group
> has called “high-risk, high-sacrifice” actions, which will probably
> include an attempt to shut down Heathrow Airport. “You have to keep
> building,” Bradbrook said. “Movements have to move forward.” The
> alternative, at this point, is returning to the despair of doing
> nothing. “Who wants to sit in that feeling?” Bradbrook asked. “That is
> not what your life is supposed to be about.”
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