CLIMATE CRISIS
O
NE MONDAY MORNING last April, an
Englishman named Simon Bram-
well glued himself to a glass door at
Shell’s London headquarters and re-
fused to leave.
Bramwell, 47, is a co-founder of Ex-
tinction Rebellion, a two-year-old cli-
mate-activist group dedicated to the
belief that real change will only come through
mass civil disobedience. For the next 10 days,
XR, as the group is known for short, launched
a series of coordinated actions targeting several
sites throughout London — blocking traffic out-
side the stock exchange, interrupting train ser-
vice at Canary Wharf, and generally bringing the
city’s business to a snarling standstill.
The atmosphere was more jovial street fair
than window-smashing anarchist mob. Activistsbrought potted trees to the middle of Waterloo
Bridge and danced to a samba band while shut-
ting down Parliament Square. More than 1,000
people ended up being arrested — teenage stu-
dents, octogenarian retirees, teachers, construc-
tion workers, doctors and nurses, and a 41-year-
old marine biologist who was seven-months
pregnant — many of them for the first time.
Extinction Rebellion is part of a new gener-
ation of activists treating global warming not
simply as an environmental problem, but an
existential one — and amplifying their tactics ac-
cordingly. With the science growing increasing-
ly dire, and the world’s governments still refus-
ing to act (or worse, denying there’s a problem),
marches and calls to Congress, these groups say,
aren’t enough. “Unfortunately, people just don’t
pay attention to petitions,” says Liam GearyBaulch, 26, an action coordinator with XR.
“Movements win by causing disruption.”
Or as another activist put it: “You can have a
million people marching each week and no one
cares. But you block a road, people take notice.”
XR has positioned itself in explicit opposition
to older, more established groups like Green-
peace and the Sierra Club, whom XR views as
insufficiently confrontational for the crisis at
hand. One of XR’s very first actions was to oc-
cupy Greenpeace’s office in London, where pro-
testers delivered cake and flowers to the staff
while simultaneously imploring them to up their
game. “Failure to do things differently, when ev-
erything is failing,” an XR statement said, “can
only be described as complicity.”
Greenpeace, of course, is no slouch in the
law-breaking department, with a long history58 ROLLING STONE
CLIMATE CRISIS
THE NEW ECO-RADICALS
The fiery activists of Extinction Rebellion reject the environmental protests
of old for campaigns of mass civil disobedience and disruption BY JOSH EELLSXR in the
Netherlands
last DecemberANA FERNANDEZ/ECHOES WIRE/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES