1/26/2024 0 Comments Rebel inc escalation review![]() ![]() “‘Evil’ is not a word I use often or lightly,” Zadie Smith told an enthusiastic crowd, “but I believe the kind of pragmatism practiced on this street falls within that category.”įive years ago this month Extinction Rebellion was founded in Stroud, a town nestled in a bucolic corner of southern England. ![]() Many of these were pickets of government ministries outside the newly formed Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, for example, protesters demanded a halt to a new oil-field project in the North Sea and took part in an act of “discobedience” dancing to “Stayin’ Alive.” On Tufton Street, authors and poets affiliated with the group Writers Rebel gave readings and speeches from a pulpit erected by the steps of a right-wing think tank that has opposed climate-mitigation policies. Yet as I walked the tight streets of Westminster I came across knots of activity, which seemed to grow in size and volume as the day went on. As I waited for the opening ceremony to start from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck, one attendee described the scene to me as “pretty pathetic.” The weather was drizzly and cold, and while people toting climate placards were visible around the square next to Parliament, they seemed outnumbered by stewards wearing bright pink vests. With its “WE QUIT” statement, Paffard added, Extinction Rebellion showed “humility” and “amazing growth” in “stepping towards the rest of the movement.”ĭespite all the people who had signed up, when I arrived on Friday morning for the first of what would be four days of actions, I wondered whether the quitting message had been taken too literally. “Previously, other groups hadn’t really engaged with XR as strongly and as actively as they should have done,” in part because “people had their feathers ruffled,” Danni Paffard, the deputy director of logistics at Greenpeace, told me (using a common shorthand for Extinction Rebellion). In one of their first-ever actions, in 2018, activists from Extinction Rebellion had occupied the London offices of Greenpeace, bringing cake and flowers but also charges of “complicity.” Earlier this year, Greenpeace signed on to the Big One. They included Friends of the Earth, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, Britain’s Public and Commercial Services Union, and the global online activist network Avaaz. In the end, well over a hundred and fifty groups-some of which might not have touched Extinction Rebellion previously-signed up to support the Big One. They worked to develop ties with more well-established groups both within the environmental movement and across civil society, hoping in part to ride a broader wave of public fury at the depleted state of Britain’s political institutions and public services while linking those failures back to the climate crisis. At the same time, organizers embarked on a coordinated effort, inspired in part by the Bernie Sanders campaigns, of doorstep conversations and community meetings. In the weeks that followed, targeted disruptions continued all over the UK: activists dressed as canaries and let off smoke bombs outside a government building in protest of a new coal mine others spray-painted the offices of right-wing newspapers. “This year,” the statement read, “we prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.” The new strategy would culminate in April with “The Big One,” an open-ended mass demonstration in the streets around Britain’s Parliament that its organizers placed in the tradition of the protests that precipitated Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall.Įxtinction Rebellion pledged to “temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic”-a departure from prior actions that had seen activists block roads and glue themselves to bridges, which had garnered the group a reputation among many Brits as a nuisance-but made no such promise to those in positions of power. On New Year’s Eve, the British arm of Extinction Rebellion posted a statement to its website: “WE QUIT.” The headline was a provocation more than a promise, but it did herald a change in emphasis from the tactics that made the movement for direct climate action famous.
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