Ukraine. (He’s joked that he has a Ph.D. “in how
to cause trouble effectively.”) “We have to be
clear,” Hallam has written. “Conventional cam-
paigning does not work. Sending emails, giving
money, going on A-to-B marches. Many wonder-
ful people have dedicated years of their lives to
all this, but it’s time to be honest... You cannot
overcome entrenched power by persuasion and
information. You can only do it by disruption.”
“We need to get arrested,” Hallam writes in
his book. “Tens of thousands of us. No more pro-
tests or petitions. Instead, nonviolent disobedi-
ence, lots of it and on a large scale. Close down
cities until the politicians take action.”
XR’s public debut came in October 2018, when
a few dozen activists, including Greta Thunberg,
gathered in front of a crowd of 2,000 at the U.K.’s
Parliament and issued a “Declaration of Rebel-
lion.” They had three demands: First, that we
as a society collectively tell the truth about how
fucked we are. Second, that the government
commit to reducing greenhouse emissions to
net-zero by 2025. And third, that Britain estab-
lish a democratic Citizens’ Assembly — free from
corruption and special interests — to best decide
how to deal with the threat of climate change.
Baulch was one of a
dozen XR activists arrest-
ed that day. “It was really
important that we showed
our strategy from the begin-
ning,” he says. But it was six
months later that XR truly
entered the mainstream,
with its massive protests
in April 2019. Tens of thou-
sands of regular people,
from elementary school-
ers to nonagenarians,
helped lock down locations
throughout London. “To be
honest, I didn’t think we’d
be able to occupy any of the
sites for more than a day,”
Baulch says. “And some-
how we managed to occu-
py all of them for at least
a week.”
The campaign cost Lon-
don more than $20 mil-
lion in police overtime,
plus untold millions more
in lost productivity. The ac-
tion won huge attention for
XR and, more important,
widespread public support.
Within a month, Parliament had given into their
first demand and declared a climate emergency.
There are three key things to note about the civ-
il-resistance model as practiced by XR. First,
it isn’t all doom and gloom. Theof provocative actions and hard-won victories.
But even some leaders acknowledge that their
more targeted, small-scale approach — while ef-
fective — has been outpaced and dwarfed by the
sheer enormity of the problem. “The movement
has evolved because it wasn’t working,” Annie
Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA,
has said. “The science is stronger than ever, and
we’re still losing.” Now, even Greenpeace is start-
ing to take a page from XR’s civil-disobedience
book, co-organizing Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Fri-
days, in which the actress and her supporters get
arrested the first Friday of each month.
At first blush, the concept of a “rebellion” to
combat climate change might sound extreme.
But given both the incomprehensible scale of the
catastrophe and the inertia we must overcome,
it also seems almost comically pointless to, for
example, stand outside a grocery store holding
a clipboard, asking people if they have a minute
for the environment. If society is going to change
as drastically and urgently as we need it to, some
level of painful disruption seems necessary.
But how much? At one end of the spectrum,
emails and petitions seem too easy to ignore. But
disrupt too much — start getting people fired be-
cause they can’t make it to work on time, or pre-
vent an ambulance from reaching a hospital —
and you risk turning off the exact people whose
support you need. What, then, is the proper de-
gree of nuisance for a climate activist? How far is
too far — and how far is not nearly far enough?
In some ways, this new breed of aggressive cli-
mate activists hearkens back to the earliest en-
vironmental radicals who broke the law in de-
fense of the planet. Although groups like Earth
First! and the Earth Liberation Front had much
narrower goals (wildlife conservation, stopping
animal testing) and much more destructive tac-
tics (vandalism, firebombing), the challenge
they faced was more or less the same. “It is not
enough to write letters to congressmen, deliver
sermons, make speeches, or write books,” au-
thor and activist Edward Abbey wrote way back
in 1983. “The Earth that sustains us is being de-
stroyed.... We need more heroes and heroines —
about a million of them.”
“Yes... we must continue to take part in po-
litical action,” Abbey added. “But at some point
we must also be prepared to put our bodies on
the line.”E
XTINCTION REBELLION was started in
Stroud, a quaint, bohemian town (pop-
ulation 30,000) in the rolling hills of
southern England. Several members had
roots in the Occupy movement; others
were vets of anti-fracking and air-pollu-
tion campaigns. But they all agreed that
what they’d been doing wasn’t working. They
devised a name for their group that would bealarming on purpose, to jar people out of com-
placency. For a logo, they chose the extinction
symbol: an hourglass — as in, time is running out.
“I think [XR] really came out of a sense of frus-
tration and a deep grief that so many different
environmental groups had tried so many things,
and it’s still getting worse,” Baulch says. “Maybe
it’s time to take bigger risks.”
From the start, the group set out to adopt the
so-called civil-resistance model — forcing change
by peacefully breaking the law. According to its
research, history’s most successful mass upris-
ings — from the American civil rights movement
to the British suffragettes to the Arab Spring —
had some key things in common. First, they
were absolutely nonviolent. Second, they in-
volved a critical mass of people gathering in a
capital city, where the media and power reside.
And third, they broke the law and got arrested.
“Politicians seem to be much more afraid of
large numbers of people getting arrested than
a small number of people doing a higher-risk
thing,” says Baulch. “The idea was, how can we
get people to move from being concerned, to
saying, ‘I’m going to make a sacrifice. I’m going
to risk legal action and sit down in the road.’
In a way, we were lowering
the bar for entry by saying
you don’t need special skills
like driving a boat. So rath-
er than have people saying,
‘Oh, those environmen-
talists over there, they’re
really brave, they’re doing
it for us,’ this was about
‘How do we make this ev-
eryone’s concern? How do
we make it so everyone is
implicated.’ ”
“There’s something ma-
terially different about
going on a march on a Sat-
urday morning versus going
out and getting arrested,”
says Clare Farrell, 37, an-
other XR co-founder. “It’s
about calling out the gov-
ernment — saying the social
contract is broken, and this
is a dereliction of your pri-
mary duty to protect your
citizens.”
XR’s strategy is most fully
laid out in a manifesto by
co-founder Roger Hallam,
called Common Sense for
the 21st Century. Hallam, a 53-year-old organic-
farmer- turned-academic, did his doctoral work
on the history of civil disobedience and radi-
cal movements — from Gandhi and the strug-
gle for Indian independence to the revolution inROLLING STONE 59GET INVOLVED
Extinction
Rebellion
rebellion.global
Find a schedule of
XR events, local
groups, and where
to join a protest.Sunrise
Movement
sunrisemovement.org
Sunrise ranks the
presidential candi-
dates’ environmental
records. They also
list local politicians
who back the Green
New Deal, and you
can find opportuni-
ties to volunteer.[Cont. on 97]