Author Archives: Filiberto Heidenreich

Around The World With XR Ecological Breakdown and Response Toxic Media Climate

In Support of Life

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As we prepare to tackle the issue of global warming let us resolve to genuinely fix this problem.  The consequences of inaction or wrong action are dire.  Effective and prompt action is needed.  Towards this end, let us keep in mind that global warming is a symptom of our culture. Thus, if we want to effectively address the issue of global warming, we must address its root causes.

Global warming is not the first instance in which our culture has disregarded the needs of the natural world.  A cursory look at the state of the forests, oceans, prairies, rivers, and lakes will tell us that we have a history of being irresponsible and destructive citizens of the Earth.  Indeed, this history portrays us as a greedy, self-absorbed culture that cares little for life besides our own.  And even with our survival on the line, only time will tell whether we will act responsibly.

In any case, I propose that if we wish to adequately address the climate crisis then we need to examine the principles that drive our culture.  I will begin by proposing some principles that should be at the heart of a healthy culture.  I have five such principles.  To the extent that you agree with these principles, you might agree with my further analysis.

First, we should support life.  After all, we are nothing if not for life.  This is pretty simple.

Second, we should support Mother Nature.  Our lives are utterly dependent upon the ways of Mother Nature.  The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe are all circumstances that are intricately entwined in the ways of Mother Nature.

Third, we should support honesty and integrity.  Without integrity, the systems of life on Earth fall apart.  Without honesty, we are told by those who destroy the ecosystem that they are supporting the ecosystem.

Fourth, we should help each other out.  We are all alive today because of the help of others in our lives.  We would not survive our infant years but for the help we receive from our parents and caregivers.  Our communities sustain us.

Fifth, we should support dignity in life.  None of us wishes to live without dignity.  We should support life with dignity for all.

To the extent that we all support any one of these principles, we should ensure that the institutions and rules of our culture support that principle. And here is the rub.  Our culture, along with its rules and institutions, lays waste to each of these five principles.  Life is on its way out.  Mother Nature has been disregarded for millennia by western culture.  Honesty and integrity are but hollow promises in our halls of government and on our media airwaves.  The homelessness in our streets attests to the facts that neither do we help each other out, nor do we ensure the dignity of life for people in our culture.

Of all the people I know personally, I don’t know anyone who wishes to get rid of life on Earth.  I know no one who thinks that the ways of Mother Nature can be disregarded.  No one thinks I should lie to them, or refuse to help my fellow neighbor, or deny dignity to anyone.  We are a culture of well-intentioned people who have taken a wrong turn and are heading down the path of destruction.  Where have we gone astray?

I suggest that we are a culture preoccupied with the pursuit of power and wealth.  In fact, it is this pursuit of power and wealth that drives decisions that go against each of the five principles I have named.  It is this pursuit of power and wealth that is driving us into the climate crisis.

The pursuit of power and wealth is ingrained into the fabric of our culture to the extent that most of us equate the pursuit of power and wealth with the pursuit of life itself.  I think that it is time for this confusion to stop.  It is plain to see that when the wealthy among us are pursuing power and wealth they are no longer pursuing life.  Any multimillionaire alive today has all that they need in order to live in our culture.  It is deeply ironic that the rules and institutions of our culture are being used to increase the wealth and power of those who need no more wealth and power.  It is clear to see that for the wealthy; the pursuit of power and wealth should not be confused with the pursuit of life.

Furthermore, let us recognize that money has no intrinsic value.  You cannot eat money.  You do not build a house out of money.  Money does not warm you on a cold winter night or move you from home to work on Monday morning.  Money itself does not support life.  Money is a thing in our culture solely because we agree that it is a thing.

Because of this agreement, it is hard to live without earning money.  Food and housing and transportation have all been folded into our economy in such a way that those of us who are successful at the wealth and power game have an easy time getting needs met while those of us who are not successful suffer.  And thus, people who are not wealthy need to earn money in order to live.  We conflate the pursuit of money with the pursuit of life because the rules of our culture demand that we make money in order to eat and put a roof over our heads.

But is it not time to stop pretending that this economic system is helping us out.  Who among us really feels fulfilled in the work that they do to make money? Most of us work at jobs aimed first and foremost at lining the pockets of those who need no more money.  The success of every company and industry and corporation depends upon the profit that it brings its owners, not the benefit it brings to life on the Earth.

Our economy is designed to transfer power to those at the top of the economic pyramid.  It does this at the expense of people and life.  While we must acknowledge that most people must earn money in order to create “value” and thus live in our culture, we also should acknowledge that the system itself is destructive.  The “value” that we are creating is in many cases not valuable.  This system values consumption at the expense of life, profit at the expense of community.  This is the system that has ushered in global warming.

The people of America spoke at Standing Rock demanding that oil pipelines not be built from the fracking fields.  The pipelines were built anyway at the behest of the oil corporations looking for profit.  The people of the world have gathered in the streets at the climate talks calling for real solutions to global warming.  Meanwhile, the rich and powerful in control of the talks have ensured that corporate profits get priority over real solutions.

In western culture, we play the game of who can gain the most power and wealth.  In this game, the winners win because they cut costs and exploit resources.  If you try to run a business ethically, without cutting costs and exploiting resources, you lose out to those in the industry willing to cut costs and exploit resources.

In this game, the winners work on Wall Street while the losers lose their farms.  The winners sit in the boardrooms of corporations while the losers work overtime in order to afford food and housing and health care.  The winners decide monetary policy while the losers drown in debt.

Our economy, by the very nature of the rules of western society, will destroy life.  We are seeing this take place in front of our eyes.  Most of us are caught up in this system even though we disagree with the outcomes.  We are forced to chase wealth because those are the rules of our culture.  People who gain wealth, be it ethically or not, get to buy food.  People who don’t suffer.

It is time to do away with our allegiance to the principle that people should pursue power and wealth.  It is time to stop letting this corrupt principle drive decisions in our culture.

 

George Palen is an educator from California. 
Ecological Breakdown and Response School Strike for Climate

XR and School Strike for Climate

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By Henry Greenwood

My first wake up moment to the reality of climate change came in 2007 when watching Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. I don’t remember being particularly aware of the issue before, but after watching it I realised that I wanted to do something to play a part in tackling this massive issue facing us. Al Gore talked about it as a crisis then, but not many people were treating it like one.

Since then I always thought of climate change as something that could be prevented if we all worked hard enough to persuade people to change their behaviour and governments to change their policies. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, while being a long time coming seemed to be a big step forward to creating the consensus required for action. Three years after that, however, and with nowhere near enough having changed,2018 was the year that I accepted that climate change cannot be prevented. It’s too late for that. The climate has already changed, and the still increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that we are emitting make further climate breakdown inevitable with increasingly devastating consequences.

It feels staggering that it took until 2018 for climate change to become a mainstream concern, but at least it is now happening. It seemed to me as though it was the first year in the UK that people saw and felt it so clearly that it became impossible for anyone, other than hardened deniers, to attribute the extreme weather to repeated freak occurrences rather than a long term trend caused by us.

There was the Beast From the East in March, followed a month later by record high temperatures in April, and then the prolonged hot and dry summer which led to even the Sun declaring climate change to be the cause of the heatwave.

Then in October, the IPCC report came out stating in clear terms that we were way off track to avoid catastrophe, and that we have 12 years to drastically change the way we live. Not long after, WWF produced a heart breaking report stating that 60% of wildlife had been wiped out by human activity since 1970. To put all this into a UK political context, however, around the same time, Philip Hammond delivered the 2018 budget without a single mention of climate change.

Two stories also emerged towards the end of 2018, though, that genuinely have the potential to change the course that we are on.

In November, I was recommended by a colleague and friend to read Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation report. Later that week, I went to an event organised by the Climate Action Society at UCL at which leading academics spoke about the reality of climate change. This was my second wake up moment, and it was an even harder realisation than the first. This time, it was the realisation that things probably aren’t going to be OK, and we are facing something truly terrifying that may already be beyond our control. So the following day I decided to join Extinction Rebellion and go and sit on Waterloo Bridge and shut it down to traffic, alongside around 6,000 others across five bridges.

I was initially put off by the name ‘Extinction Rebellion’. Extinction is not a nice thought to contemplate, it makes me deeply sad to think of the animal species that have gone and are facing extinction, but in this context it makes us confront the possible extinction of humanity if we continue on our current path. I’ve never particularly been the rebellious type either, and to me the word conjures up images of violence and bloodshed. But this is a different kind of rebellion, and those harsh words are offset by the movement’s simple demands and a powerfully compelling and compassionate method, delivered by ordinary people who care about our living planet and our collective future.

Their demands are that the government tells the truth about climate change and acts as though it is the truth, that the UK reduces carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, and that we set up a citizens’ assembly to determine the policies needed and oversee the changes. These may sound radical, but on reflection, they are merely a sensible and rational response to the existential crisis that we face.

The method to achieve these aims is non-violent direct action. Inspiration is drawn from the civil rights movement, and the realisation that everything up to this point has failed to change our suicidal trajectory.

The other story that has the potential to inspire action is that of young people rising to the challenge to which adults have failed. Greta Thunberg started striking from school and sitting outside the Swedish Parliament in September and has been doing it every Friday since then. What started as a one person protest has now led to tens of thousands of students in Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and other countries to follow her lead, making the point that their futures are being compromised by the lack of action from older generations on climate change.

I went along to the first UK youth school climate strike in London in December which was arranged in a few days and attracted around 12 school students. Since then young people have been organising, inspired by Greta’s message and there will be strikes in cities and towns across the country on Friday February 15th.

Where does Green Schools Project fit into all this? I left my job as Head of Maths at a Hackney Secondary School in 2015 to start the organisation as my way of contributing to tackling climate change. In assemblies we tell students about the reality that they are facing and how they can play a part in addressing the greatest challenge we face. I’m not planning to encourage students in the schools that we are working with to go on strike, that’s entirely for them to decide, but we stand squarely in solidarity with the young people choosing to take this action and support their call for a planet that is still habitable by the time that they are adults.

One of our goals as an organisation this year is to amplify the voices of young people calling for change to a system that is causing the mass extinction of species and will lead to the end of our current way of life. I hope with all my heart that the young people that I see in schools will have the opportunities and freedoms to live and work, travel, and enjoy the natural world as much as I have, but I fear that this will not be the case. Maybe young people like Greta will be the ones that finally provide the wake up call that is needed to treat this crisis as the crisis it really is, and decisively change the course of events.

Uncategorized

Rainbow Grey

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Snow blind?

No, snow kind

snow softs

wafts gentle in overnight

transforms my world –

no, not with white

(too stark, too bright)

 

the landscape’s stilled by

innumerable flakes of small

an infinite, invisible fall

away from noise

from angry reds,

grassroot greens and rusty blues –

all turn to grey and yet retain

a trace of all these hues

 

my vision IS for system change

but how?

today it takes an awestruck bow

to nature

wonders if we could witness a gentle miracle –

immense but no less radical

can I relinquish all the safety of my past belief

allow snow melt to wipe out grief

and find a vision grey drawn from this sky

which blankets all the bleak of ‘’will we live or die’?

to find the colour in the snow

leave space for many miracles to land

in that expanse which lives in ‘I don’t know’

 

it may be a fairy tale at best

but grief responds to this immediate request

and effects an inner system change

gruesome future stories rearrange

themselves and drop into a humble silence

which allows for being at peace

as the metaphor of many flecks of grey

prompts release

of the thought that many tiny unseen actions hold the power to change the view

for some cold feathered one – for me or you:

 

receive this muff of grey which wraps itself around the sun

embracing system change which dignifies and includes every one.

Articles News

Scotland Needs System Change, Not Climate Change, by Ian Paterson

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We are a proud people, in Scotland. To what extend varies from person to person, but it’s a common Scottish characteristic and one that, at times, is a hindrance when addressing political issues.

There are sections of Scottish society who will not accept any criticism of the Scottish Government and this prevents a healthy level of scrutiny over much of its policy.

We have developed a narrative that plays into our desire to be seen as a modern and progressive nation, but we need comprehensive political system change badly in Scotland, of the type described by XR Founding member, Stuart Basden recently.

After staging our mock Citizens Assembly and occupying the Scottish Parliament, the BBC sought comment from a Scottish Government source and true to form the response came back that:

“The UN has praised the Scottish Government for our progress in dealing with Climate Change”.

Let’s just take an unbiased look at that record.

The fairest measurement is CO2 per capita – this way small countries can be compared to large ones, in a robust and fair way.

Scots output net 4.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person, per year, according to the cited data sheet (one page) from the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2016).

So, is Scotland in the top-ten least polluting countries per capita?

No.

Is it in the top 100?

No.

Scotland lies at 147th out of 217 bespoke countries or territories.

The UK as a whole is 170th…

If Scotland is in the worst third of countries for CO2 pollution, why does it get so much praise?

It is true that Scotland’s pollution levels used to be higher and it has reduced somewhat over the past two decades.

In doing so however, the Scottish Government have adopted an approach of providing much of our energy needs from green sources, whilst still supporting tax-subsidised North Sea oil drilling and sale of oil to foreign countries, so the pollution is attributed elsewhere, when the oil is burned.

We live in a relatively unpopulated country, meaning we have large swathes of natural land that contribute to CO2 mitigation and reduce our figures in a net carbon model.

In Scotland’s plan for Independence, prepared for the 2014 referendum, known as the ‘White Paper’, written by the Scottish Government, the document mentions oil 80 times. It was made clear that oil was central to any plan for Independence.

The plan was narrowly rejected 45% to 55% because it wasn’t comprehensively convincing, not because it was based on the destruction of our environment.

Whilst the SNP are the party of government in Scotland currently, it has to be said that if either of the two potential alternatives were in power – the Scottish Conservatives or Scottish Labour – that any deviation from a pro-oil stance would be highly unlikely.

The tone might differ, with the SNP claiming oil is vital to Scottish autonomy, the Tories voicing their support for oil business and Labour stating their support for oil-sector workers and jobs – but support would remain.

It is currently the policy of the Scottish Government to abolish Air Passenger Duty. This policy will make it cheaper for airlines to fly in and out of Scotland, and will reduce demand for greener forms of transport, along with reducing motivation for airlines to use less-polluting aircraft.

This is a clear statement of intent, to put the Scottish economy before environmental concerns.

It begs the question, does the Scottish Government value money above all else?

After reviewing how many lobbyist meetings have taken place in recent years, I would challenge every MSP to address their clear and obvious corruption.

Value does not come
from how we are viewed on the world stage or by others but how we
evaluate ourselves. For that reason, we cannot accept false praise,
generated because we are gaming the system. We must not defend our
government blindly, when it is not working in the interests of its
people, but for commerce.

This is why a Citizens Assembly in Scotland is an imperative, to discuss climate inaction (and indeed to fairly tackle lingering questions of Independence and devolution too).

Holyrood must become the people’s parliament, which it emphatically is not, right now.

We must challenge our rose-tinted view, for our own health as much as for the sake of others. We are already beginning to see huge devastation in Global South countries, which are less polluting but more vulnerable than we are.

That’s on us.

To deny it is to condemn huge swathes of the global population to perish, at our expense.

For more information on the latest published statistics (38 pages), from 2016, please see here.

Citizens' Assemblies Ecological Breakdown and Response News XR Glasgow

XR Glasgow Report

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By Ian Paterson

Extinction Rebellion Glasgow formed in November 2018, and took our first actions the following month, including disrupting Christmas shopping by swarming in Style Mile shopfronts, and forcing BBC Scotland to close their front doors due to our Reclaim the BBC demonstration.

 XR Glasgow aren’t where we want to be yet, but things are starting to come together and we are on track to deliver a strong contribution during the International Rebellion of 15th–19th April 2019. Affinity groups are forming, with XR Glasgow students organising a Youth Strike on Feb 15th, and XR Glasgow is staging a mass action on March 2nd. So far in 2019, a wide variety of activities have already taken place…

Ae Fond Rebellion.

You may have seen XR Scotland’s Rabbie Burns inspired action, in the news recently too, as XR members occupied the Scottish Parliament and conducted the UK’s first ever Citizens Assembly on Burns Day, the 25th of January, with crucial contributions from XR Glasgow members.

I don’t actually know any Burns poems to quote to you and find the language archaic but I’m quite a fan of social commentator and poet, Gil Scott-Heron. He famously said “the revolution will not be televised” but I’m beginning to wonder if he was right about that, as News outlets seemed quite keen to broadcast our recent action at the Scottish Parliament.

Fun Fact: Gil Scott-Heron’s dad played football for Celtic FC in Scotland and was the first person of colour to do so.

You may take our lives, but you’ll never take our treedom!

When faced with the destruction of trees and natural habitat, to make way for building developments on Otago Lane close to her home, XR Glasgow member Cheyenne was quick to react and form alliances with a local ‘Save Our Lane’ group.

“The main criticism involves the destruction of a vital green area that is home to native wildlife such as otters, kingfishers and bats. The area is part of Glasgow’s Green Corridor and hence should be considered a protected nature conservation area. The initial application stated that trees of a certain maturity and height will not be cut down. However, this was not adhered to”, Cheyenne told me.

Glasgow is known affectionately as ‘Dear Green Place’ and wider Scotland fondly referred to as ‘Caledonia’ – the name given to this area by the Romans, due to the vast expanse of woodlands in our region. Sadly we’ve seen our forestry systematically destroyed to a tiny fraction of the size it once was.

As the old song by Dougie MacLean goes: ‘Caledonia, you’re everything I’ve ever had’, yet still we destroy her namesake. Come to think of it, ‘Dear Concrete Jungle’ doesn’t have much of a ring to it either.

Rebel & Rejuvenate.

Of course, a hard day of action requires time to reflect and rejuvenate and with XR Glasgow’s new ‘Book/Craft’ gatherings, people are able to come together, talk, listen and conduct vitally important talking and making therapy with one another.

“We need to form bonds and care for each other as well as planning actions and creating resources”, group creator, Anna, reflects. “It might also be a focus for people who don’t feel any of the Working Groups are calling to them just now, or are trying to work out how they want to get involved”, she goes on to say, so this event provides a welcoming and inclusive outlet for further discussion.

Youth Strike 4 Climate.

It’s true also, that some of the younger members, along with their families, have found our way of working hard to fit in with the demands of daily life. XR Member Sapna has developed an inspiring initiative to combat this however, with ‘Wee Rebellion’, an event attended by 250 parents and young people.

“It’s really difficult for parents, teenagers and children to get to meetings in the evenings but because of the way most people’s work schedules function, it’s the obvious time to have meetings to talk about issues and plan actions. Wee Rebellion will attempt to be a space for parents, children and young people to talk to each other about how they can engage with XR and to generally raise awareness about climate change with the hope of finding shared vision for change. At our first event, among other activities, there will be a discussion space for adults asking what are the barriers to participation for caregivers and what strategies can we collectively come up with to overcome them”, Sapna tells me.

Less nuisance, more news sense.

Although there are challenges to overcome, fortunately it’s now fairly easy for me to keep abreast of environment news, thanks to the new ‘Glasgow St’ online briefing paper. The brainchild of XR member Thomas, ‘Glasgow St’ has clear principles, which set it apart.

Being over-reliant on traditional media for your climate news may not be the wisest decision. With climate lobbyists and business interests attempting to influence the agenda, we must analyse and scrutinise it ourselves. G-Street’s wiki approach allows for a collective learning experience, which I’m sure will prove valuable to the whole XR movement. Users of Medium – take a look and contribute.

To keep in touch with XR Glasgow, like us on Facebook, follow @ScotlandXr on Twitter, and @xrscotland on Instagram. Sign up for our mailing list by emailing xrglasgow@gmail.com. From February we will meet weekly on Tuesdays at 7pm at the Kinning Park Complex.

 

 

 

Archived XR Newsletters Uncategorized

Newsletter #12 – Spring is Coming!

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Web version here

Welcome to the 12th Extinction Rebellion newsletter!

January, and with it the process of root-growth and foundation-laying, is coming to an end. As we move into February we’re getting ready to start an exciting new chapter for XR which will see a return to high-profile public actions in the build-up to our International Rebellion in April.

The meta-strategy review process is set to conclude in the next few days and will inform plans for national weeks of action set to take place in late February and late March. In the meantime, rebels won’t be short of things to do. Street parties, event-swarming, and much more are coming up in February (see Upcoming Activity below), not to mention the many regional and solidarity actions which we haven’t even had the time to keep up with!

If you’d like to get involved with making it all happen please see our newly refurbished volunteers page for available roles or get in touch with your nearest XR group.

Check out what’s on near you with our full list of upcoming events, available to view on our website, rebellion.earth/events. If you’re new, or have not already seen it, remember to check out our Campaign Overview Document.

If you’d like to look back through the newsletter archive, you can find it here.

—

Contents

  • Recent Activity
  • Upcoming Activity
  • International Highlights
  • Announcements
  • Extreme Weather
  • Latest News and Data
  • Recommended Content
  • Regenerative Culture/ Good News Stories

 

Recent Activity

 

Strategy and Structure

After many meetings, a weekend-long feedback session in Stroud, more meetings, a national feedback-session in London, and plenty of online feedback, the Strategy Team is now just a few days away from announcing the overall XR Spring Strategy. Major action in April is guaranteed, but the final strategy document will address questions of what, how, when, and where, along with finer points of tone and nuance.

For more details on the strategy process please see the latest internal newsletter.

If you’re struggling to keep up with internal developments in XR you might be pleased to see that the Mandates Team has drawn a beautiful map of the various Working Groups and sub-groups.

 

Edinburgh Rebellion Day

XR Scotland kicked off the Rebellion with a creative action on January 25th, otherwise known as Burns Day. Forty Rebels posed as tourists taking a tour of Holyrood, the devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, before occupying the debating Chamber for over an hour. Holding a symbolic Citizens Assembly in the Chamber, the group discussed the climate and ecological emergency and drew attention to the urgent need for a response from the Scottish Government which would be commensurate with the scale of the problem.

No arrests were made, instead the Rebels were peacefully escorted from the Chamber by police through a side entrance to the building where they were greeted by hundreds of supporters cheering and applauding the action.

The Scottish Rebellion has now been organising for several weeks and the occupation of the chamber in Holyrood was an excellent kickoff to future peaceful and impactful action.

 

Earthstrike

On January 15th Extinction Rebellion joined fellow campaigners in Parliament Square for the launch of Earth Strike, a new movement aligned with XR’s motives and methods. Earth Strike is calling for a globally coordinated international general strike to protest against every national government’s criminal failure on climate action. This also happened to be the day that the Members of Parliament were voting on Theresa May’s Brexit deal, so the square was already crowded with Brexiters and pro-E.U. supporters.

Extinction Rebellion members led an impromptu march of civil disobedience around Parliament Square, marching past parliament and blocking traffic. They chanted the words: “No Brexit on a dead planet! No E.U. on a dead planet!”, underscoring the irrelevance of the media-consuming Brexit saga in the face of the global climate emergency.

Reactions ranged from the completely bewildered to the highly supportive and proceedings concluded with spontaneous singing and dancing in Parliament Square.

See here for footage.

 

NVDA Training of Trainers – Germany

Three XR UK NVDA Trainers recently instructed fourteen budding Rebels in Germany. Having only started at the end of November in the wake of the London actions, XR Germany already has an impressive twenty-one groups set up across the country.

The three-day training, co-hosted by Skills4Action, an organization which has trained activists in direct action for over ten years, hosted attendees from cities across Germany. Actions are already taking place on the February 3rd with plans being made for April 15th – International Rebellion Day.

 

We’re looking forward to working increasingly with XR groups in Germany and across the world. Sharing skills and building communities is how we will win.

 

Korean Coal Protest

On January 24th XR joined Korean civil society groups alongside other UK activists outside the Korean embassy in a show of solidarity against an expanding coal industry in East Asia.

The South Korean Government is one of the top coal power financiers in the world. Financial institutions controlled by the Korean Government are funding huge new coal plants in Vietnam and Indonesia. Despite the Paris Agreement, the objections made by local communities, and President Moon Jae-In’s promises, coal is thriving in Korea.

The protest lasted several hours, and gained coverage from various Korean news networks.

 

Other Actions:

Stroud:

A community group, including members from XR Stroud, are taking Gloucestershire County Council to court over the award of a £600m incinerator contract.

XR Rebels blocked access to the incinerator early in the morning on January 11th. They also recently spoke up in a Stroud District Council budget meeting.

Cambridge:

Extinction Rebellion Cambridge confronted Cambridge University stating that it is time the University stops investing in and working with fossil fuel companies as well as the banks that fund them.

XR Groups around the country are continuing to hold weekly meetings, climate cafés, and talks on such subjects as ‘Heading for Extinction and What To Do About It.’ Find your local group and see how you can get involved!

 

Upcoming Activity

 

First Saturday Street Party – London, February 9th

 

Saturday, February 9th 2019

Time 11: 30am – 2.30pm

Gather at Dalston Kingsland Station at 11:30am

Extinction Rebellion is throwing a street party in Hackney on Saturday, February 9th, and we would love any Londoners to join us. It will be the first in a series of Saturday Street Parties which will give a platform to local groups to discuss environmental causes that affect their area.

Extinction Rebellion exists to directly address the government’s inaction in the face of global climate and ecological collapse. The day will be centred around addressing local issues within this broader narrative.

The week after the action we will hold one of our ‘Heading for Extinction and What To Do About It’ talks (Monday February 11th, at SET, Dalston Lane, London E8 3DF, time TBD) and will discuss the realities of climate breakdown and the impending sixth mass extinction event.

The Street Party itself will serve as a community-building exercise. We want to bring people together in an act of lighthearted, low-level civil disobedience, with a variety of musical performances interspersed with brief discussion of environmental issues.

Building strong and sustainable community groups will be the basis of this movement. Reaching out to local London communities is the priority of the Street Party and we will emulate the positive change we want to see through our actions.

Come join us in Hackney and help inspire the area to stand up for the environment.

See event page for details.

 

Bristol Saturday Street Party – February 14th

 

The week after the first of these Saturday Street Parties is slated to get going in London, XR Bristol will be hosting their first event to reclaim the streets of Bristol in a family-friendly atmosphere. The event will take place on Saturday, February 14th, starting at 1pm, and will be part of a wider day of action.

See the event page for details.

These actions will help set the stage for our International Rebellion in April, where thousands will occupy the streets. We hope to see many more participants in the build-up to the big day!

 

Disrupting Fashion Week – February 17th

 

The fashion industry is one of the most culturally influential industries in the world. It is also one of the most polluting and is deeply reliant on agriculture and petrochemical products. It applauds our unsustainable lifestyles and the toxic pace of our waste culture; we should no longer be impressed or enthralled by this.

Is fashion out of fashion? This “business-as-usual” industry is stuck in a tired routine. Couldn’t it be done better, with something other than consumption at its heart?

All cultures need to collectively wrap their heads around the crisis we are in and end business-as-usual. It is time to use the public influence of the fashion industry to build momentum towards this movement of civil disobedience and our International Week of Rebellion in April.

With service and love in our hearts we will disrupt Fashion Week. We will swarm the streets, slow down those racing between shows, and spread the message of Extinction Rebellion. Join us.

 

Youth Strike for Climate – February 15th

 

Youth engagement with the climate and ecological emergency is taking off around the world. In the last week we’ve seen 30,000 students across Europe protest by skipping school following the lead set by Greta Thunberg. In Berlin alone, 35,000 took to the streets to demand agricultural revolution.

Children and parents from across the UK will be joining this wave of protest on the February 15th with fourteen locations listed so far and more still to come. This is not an official XR event but we encourage anyone who cares about the future of our children to participate.

International Week of Rebellion – April 15th

 

You know it’s coming – but do you know if you are? The International Rebellion beginning on April 15th has the potential to be a pivotal moment in world history – we’ll need as many people as possible to be present on the streets and helping to organise. Book time off work – ideally the whole week from the 15th – and share the event on Facebook to make sure that we can bring as many people as possible to participate in what could be humanity’s last and best chance to avert catastrophic damage to the planet.

 

International Highlights

Without a doubt one of the biggest highlights from around the world this week was the beginning of the Rebellion in the United States.

On Saturday, January 26th, a large black banner emblazoned with the words ‘Climate Change = Mass Murder, Rebel for Life’ was draped over the famous golden statue of Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink. As dozens of people held signs aloft the rink was taken over with several Rebels staging a die-in in the shape of the Extinction Rebellion symbol.

Police had followed hundreds of protesters as they marched from Columbus Circle in New York to Rockefeller Plaza where Fifth Avenue was shut down for a period of at least twenty minutes. Nine were arrested and released five hours later.

This was a critical day of civil disobedience for this movement held with the aim of changing United States government policy on climate change. Leah Francis, an XR organiser in Portland, Oregon, told Rolling Stone, “We are all going to die, and we need to shout it from the rooftops.”

The message was indeed shouted from the rooftops of many American cities on Saturday. A banner with the same message as that in Rockefeller Center was lowered from a bridge in Los Angeles and demonstrations also took place in Washington D.C., Seattle, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, the Twin Cities, Philadelphia, Austin, Kentucky, and Denver.

For further coverage of the action see the article inRolling Stone Magazine.

See more photos of actions across the USA here.

 

Announcements

 

Fundraising

The fundraising team is thrilled to present our new crowdfunder for the International Week of Rebellion commencing April 15th.

We would also like to share this introduction to fundraising as a local group.

The fundraising team has ambitious targets to support the forthcoming rebellious events and activities. We need any helpers who can seek out and contact potential donors and can manage our ongoing relationships and partnerships. Please contact xr.fundraising@gmail.com if you can spare some time and tenacity!

 

How to show your support for XR defendants at their trials

Central to XR non-violent direct action campaigns is the willingness shown by some of those involved to face arrest, criminal charges, court hearings, fines, and possible imprisonment.

The legal process is therefore very much a part of XR’s campaigning and many of our defendants are willing to use their hearings in court as a way of publicising the reasons why they decided to act as they did. They may, for instance, issue a ‘defence statement’ for publication, give interviews, etc.

Other XR activists can get involved. Court hearings often start at 9:30 am but may continue for the entirety of a day. One way of demonstrating support for our defendants on the day of their trial is to be outside of the courthouse together between 9:00 and 9:30 am. It is also sometimes possible for supporters to attend the public gallery during the trial proceedings.

We will soon be publishing lists of those trial dates and the times during which the defendants have given their consent for this to happen.

At present we have, that we know of, defendants in Bristol, London, and Manchester. Any defendants with trial dates in other parts of the country, please get in touch. If you are a defendant and would like us to help organise support and publicity on the day of your trial, please contact: xr-legal@riseup.net

 

XR Blog

XR Blog is always looking for more content. We would love to hear from you, including, but not limited to, diaries from XR actions, science-based pieces on ecological breakdown, political pieces on citizens’ assemblies, or analyses of the toxic mainstream media. XR Blog is a democratic platform for all ‘voices of the rebellion’ – and that means you! We are happy to receive submissions from experienced and inexperienced writers alike.

Additionally we are excited to announce some regular features, new for 2019. Firstly, we have ‘Affinity Group Stories‘ – we would like to hear about the journeys of affinity groups, beginning with their formation, through training and action, all the way to arrest, detention, and trial. We would love accounts from people of diverse backgrounds within AG’s. Please write in with your AG Stories.

Secondly, there is the ‘Children of XR‘ feature – we are already in touch with some great young people who have spoken at XR events and have engaged in campaigns related to XR. This feature will be a regular bundle of news from young people around the world who are based in XR and related movements, particularly the Strike on Fridays movement associated with Greta Thunberg.

Our third feature is ‘The Rise of the Right‘, tracking the relationship between ecological breakdown and resource scarcity with the rise of right-wing populist governments around the world.

Fourth, we are thrilled to announce our ‘XR Write-A-Long‘ feature, which will be an ongoing fiction piece written by all of you! Details to follow soon.

Finally, we have listened to many people in XR who would like to explore and strengthen the ten principles and values which have led us so well already. In response, we will soon be running a regular feature around the P&V, starting with Number One, which is: ‘We have a shared vision of change‘. Send all submissions and enquiries to xrblog@protonmail.com (mailto:xrblog@protonmail.com)

 

International support team – volunteers needed

The more localised the Rebellion is the more powerful it will become. In the International Support Team there is a focus on supporting national groups and their rebellious activities in order to be as effective as possible. At this stage of the Rebellion there is a lot of work to be done in assisting with the formation of new groups and supporting the national initiators as they recruit more group members and establish themselves as a viable national group. Please contact vejde@riseup.net if you think you can help.

 

XR Festivals


Thank you all so much for the enthusiastic response to our call for festival contacts. We requested these contacts to enable the XR Festivals Team to maximise our impact at festivals over the summer. We are still trying to open doors at a few key festivals and are again requesting your help. If any Rebel has contacts within the following festivals then we’d love to hear from you so that we can start the dialogue:

Wood, Love Saves the Day, Field Day, OceanFest, BeatHerder, Blue Dot, WOMAD, Boardmasters, Beautiful Days & Vegan Camp-out

Please email us at XR Festivals at xrfestivals@gmail.com – many thanks in advance.

A little further down the line we will also be looking for Rebels to help us deliver our movement-building work at these and several other festivals. More information to come soon.

 

Local declarations of climate emergency

Across the globe Extinction Rebellion groups are persuading civic authorities to declare a State of Climate Emergency. Visit to find resources which will inspire you to get your local town or county council involved in this action. A critical mass of declared councils will put irresistible pressure on central governments.

 

Extreme Weather

Extreme weather hit 60 million people in 2018, no part of the world spared (UN News).

Melting Arctic ice is now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the ocean, scientists find

Heavy snow brings chaos and death to Austria and Germany

Greenland’s ice melting faster than scientists previously thought – study

Cuba: Three dead, 174 injured in Havana tornado

It could be warmer above the Arctic Circle than in Chicago by Wednesday this week. [And: How frigid polar vortex blasts are connected to global warming.]

‘Code Red’ – Australia is experiencing such high temperatures that bats are dropping from the trees.

Menindee fish kill: another mass death on Darling River ‘worse than last time’: Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young calls for a Royal Commission over water management in the Murray-Darling basin, as the mass fish kills pile up (twitter: ). Hanson-Young claims that the mass deaths are the result of water mismanagement and global warming-induced drought.

2018 was ‘the 4th warmest year on record,’ according to the World Meteorological Office’s report, ‘State of the Global Climate in 2018’. Furthermore, ‘the past four years – 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 – are also the four warmest years in the series.’

 

Latest News and Data

 

Greenpeace and Amnesty International unite in push for greater civil disobedience. This is a landmark conference in which two of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations have joined together in the fight against climate and ecological collapse. Also significantly, Extinction Rebellion is cited as one of the motivators for these two organisations to call for an increase in civil disobedience to push for the systemic change we need.

Founders of plastic waste alliance ‘investing billions in new plants’

Nottingham aims to be first carbon neutral city in the UK

Scotland could be net-zero for greenhouse gas emissions by 2045, according to a new report.

Gina Hanrahan, of WWF Scotland said, “It’s crucial MSPs, who are about to start debating the new Climate Change Bill, confront the challenge head on and join the growing number of progressive nations by setting an iconic net-zero target and speeding up the policy action needed to end our climate change emissions once and for all.”

California’s most famous butterfly nearing death spiral

The debate is over: The oceans are in hot, hot water – ‘the oceans are warming 40 percent faster than many scientists had previously estimated.’

Is this a farewell for the Indus dolphin? – ‘The Sindh government [in Pakistan] is planning a pre-feasibility study regarding straightening 180km of the Indus riverbed, falling between Guddu barrage downstream and Sukkur barrage upstream.’

Dahr Jamail’s latest Climate Disruption Dispatch: ‘We Are Destroying Our Life Support System’ – all of the latest horror stories plus an unexpectedly beautiful correspondence with Stan Rushworth near the bottom.

 

Recommended content

 

The Transformative Power of Climate Truth: Ecological Awakening in the Trump Age, by Margaret Klein Salamon, Founder and Director of The Climate Mobilization.

“I’ve just read this essay and found it to be illuminating and inspirational in the face of so much depressing news. As a practising yogini I was interested to see that Salamon refers to Gandhi, who ‘pioneered the strategy called ‘Satyagraha’ or ‘truth force,’ which carries intimations of love and inner strength.’” – Marian

 

“This Could Be The Biggest Scandal Of The Climate Change Era” (article)

In this opinion piece in the Huffington Post, Sandrine Dixson-Declève and Anders Wijkman point the finger of blame at politicians and economists – the former for their delays and constant wrangling, and the latter for failing to acknowledge the severity of climate change – for the situation we now find ourselves in.

 

Redacted Tonight interview: ‘Rebelling Against Human Extinction’ (video) with Rory Varrato – lots of great analysis and discussion of the XR movement and the potential for bringing it to the US.

 

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve (article/chapter)

An excerpt from Dahr Jamail’s recent book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. A powerful urge to bear witness to the destruction of the planet as if we were attending to the deep sickness of a loved one; another writer giving up on hope and looking instead to grief and the necessity of action, regardless of the likelihood of success.

 

‘Climate Catastrophe: The Case for Societal Transformation, The Case for Rebellion‘ (Live lecture, Norwich)

Those who were moved or intrigued by last week’s recommendation of Rupert’s, ‘This civilisation is finished, so what is to be done?’ may be interested in a live lecture, in which Read presents a vision beyond the limited hopes of the Paris Agreement, presenting practical responses and inciting courage in us all. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.

 

Regenerative Culture/ Good News Stories

Bonding and bridging in London’s poorest borough – George Monbiot writes on how the foundation Every One Every Day has improved the social life for residents in Barking and Dagenham by opening shops on the high streets for people to use as social hubs and “maker spaces”. From working kitchens and sharing tools to creches and chicken schools these spaces give locals hope for future generations.

With the help of 200 volunteers St. Nick’s has been transformed from a landfill site into a nature reserve in the centre of York. The site is now used as a base from which projects and services are run to help the residents of York move towards a sustainable future. The project is now looking to recruit more volunteers.

A court in the Hague has upheld a historic ruling, ordering the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts. This ruling will “put the wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world.”

Above and below the Great Australian Bight – a photo essay

Stephen Moss writes in The Guardian about the organisation A Focus on Nature (AFoN), whose mission is: “to connect, support and inspire young people across the UK with an interest in nature and conservation, and provide a voice for the youth conservation movement.”

Investors urge KFC, McDonald’s and Burger King to cut emissionsGermany is set to close all 84 coal-fired power plants and will rely primarily on renewable energy! Coal plants account for 40% of Germany’s electricity; over the next 19 years, Germany will be switching to renewable energy, which will provide between 65% and 80% of the country’s power by 2040.

“Each of my 3 middle school years were the 3 hottest years ever recorded on our planet.” – Jeremy Clark

 

Thank you for reading this, our 12th newsletter. We’re super excited about the coming months and what they might hold. We’re also excited to welcome a whole host of new members into the newsletter team. We’re looking forward to our new writers bringing with them some fresh changes in style, tone and format – keep an eye out for changes and improvements in the coming issues!

That said, the team is still far from full-capacity – if you’d like to get involved in helping put together future editions, join the newsletter hivemind by emailing xr-newsletter@protonmail.com.

Get in touch with the same address if you have any questions or queries.

 

This newsletter was written collaboratively by a hivemind of 9 rebels.

As our eagle-eyed readers will have noticed in Announcements, we’re now raising funds with a brand new Fundrazr. The mechanism may be new but the facts remains the same; if we’re going to achieve our aims in April, we’ll need money to pay for arrestee support, transport and accommodation for protests, art materials, banners, fliers, personal expenses, etc. The scale of the Rebellion could be limited by the amount of money available.

If you would like to support the Rebellion though other channels, a regular standing order would be perfect (as would one off donations). Standing orders or money transfers should be made to our Triodos Bank Account (Sort code: 16-58-10 Account No: 20737912) in the name of Compassionate Revolution Ltd (the holding company for Rising Up!).

Alternatively, if you’re a PayPal user (or more comfortable with PayPal), PayPal payments can be made to info@risingup.org.uk.

Any queries contact Dave Nicks (dave.nicks@btinternet.com).

Diaries Ecological Breakdown and Response

Why I sleep on a hard floor

Published by:

By Matthew T-hanu

I can’t sleep, so I got up to write this. The possibilities of XR are on my mind. What will Brexit, or an absence of Brexit, throw up? Will the UK government be weakened to the point of collapse? Will an emergency general election be called, and if so, will that be the moment for XR to ramp up the civil disobedience to achieve the aim of a Citizen’s Assembly for the UK, decided by sortition?

Personally I am inspired by the historical example in this country of the monarchy gradually losing power as Parliament gained power, (aided by the beheading of a king, but we don’t need to go that far. Have mercy on Theresa May, please. It can’t be easy for her). Could the same happen again, with Parliament fading to play a role similar to that which the queen plays now? Could a Citizen’s Assembly usurp the majority of the current Parliament’s executive roles, and could the unfolding ecological catastrophe make that process swift -could it happen in 5-10 years?

I am inspired by the possibility of a fairly rapid, peaceful revolution. It may be unlikely. About as unlikely as someone like Trump becoming the president of America.

***

Whatever lies ahead, we can sure there will be some hardship to endure in this country in the coming decades. With increasingly erratic weather and potentially even temperature rises enough to stop wheat germination, food shortages are not unlikely to occur.

It’s time we toughened up, physically and mentally. We can do this by conditioning ourselves gradually, in a regenerative way. It is possible to be kind to ones-self whilst also experimenting with self-imposed hardship, or on a spiritual level it could be called renunciation. This is partly why I make a regular habit of fasting. It’s also why I sleep on a hard floor, with just one layer of duvet between me and the carpet. It has got to the point where the hard ground feels like a comfort, an anchor against the potentially overwhelming light-headed fear of an impending Dark Age. Sleeping on the floor also helps assuage my Global Northerner’s guilt and helps remind me of the enslaved people’s and species on which my privileged life depends.

More than anything it is a practice which helps me feel strong for whatever is coming. After a while it doesn’t feel hard at all. I hope you will try this out for one night -to make friends with what is most solid and real. In any case, where was your mattress made, and by whom? What materials went into it? How much of the Earth’s resources would we save if we all discarded the need to sleep on a mattress?

 

Archived XR Internal Communications Uncategorized

Internal Newsletter 2

Published by:

Inside XR #2

Hi all,

After a regenerative festive period, XR is getting back into gear!

For now the main emphasis throughout our movement, at all levels, is on strategy – from individual working groups to the immense meta-strategy process. This latter will culminate tomorrow, in the National Meetup, where people from all parts of the UK and XR will discuss the proposed strategy for April.

Concurrent with strategy, the progress of XR’s structural development has been beautifully illustrated, accompanied by an equally colorful spreadsheet listing email addresses and mandates, all of which should help both members of the public and XR alike to better understand how we organise.

In more material terms, XR members have been involved in a number of solidarity actions, including Earthstrike and the disruption of the Global Coal Resources general meeting, while our first major civil disobedience event for the year is due to take place on the roads of Hackney on February 9th.

Like many others, though, the actions team is waiting for the conclusion of tomorrow’s meta-strategy process before planning too far ahead. With this in place, it won’t be long at all before XR is back in the public eye – and hopefully it won’t be too long after that before the UK leads a radical shift in humanity’s relationship with the environment!

Strategy

After dozens of conference calls and hundreds of email exchanges, our strategy and stewardship groups were finally able to spend a weekend together in Stroud to discuss XR’s strategy for the coming months. Thanks again to Springhill Co-housing for allowing us to meet in their beautiful space! Not only were we able to discuss different aspects of the strategy in more detail but we also worked on redesigning our organisational structures and decision-making processes and connected with each other, living the regenerative culture that we now need more than ever.

The session in Stroud was followed by a smaller meeting on Wednesday which brought together all that had been learned hitherto, and where strategy representatives began to finalise the process into a document now available here, which will be presented and explained by the same representatives tomorrow. Following this presentation, all in attendance will be encouraged to give feedback; the strategy team will then meet the following Wednesday to discuss this feedback and make any necessary changes to the strategy outline before formally concluding the process.

Last weekend’s strategy meeting in Stroud. Photo credit: Maia Kenworthy

Internal news

Actions, Art and Logistics

The actions, arts, and logistics working group is currently re-forming. They are working on creating documents which will help us decentralise and integrate new members to build the teams that will work on actions over the coming months building toward April 15th and beyond. In terms of a realistic and regenerative approach we have decided all major XR actions will have at least a month lead-in. As well as eagerly awaiting the conclusion of the meta-strategy process which will guide the work of this working group going forward, we are gathering ideas for actions from a range of experienced and creative artists and activists, and being inspired by the local groups around the UK and the world who are taking creative XR actions almost every week. These will all feed into a creative visioning meeting amongst artists and activists within this working group to design the next phase of actions which will again inspire this movement through our collective power. Through our actions we will try to outreach to new groups, create mass economic disruption, and vision the future we want to see in the world. Some will be aimed at one of these, and some at all three.

M&M

Social media

Our Social Media team have been working flat out this week to scramble getting the word out for sudden events coming up, from solidarity protests for the Wet’suwet’en anti-frackers in Canada, to more protests against Jair Bolsonaro outside the Brazilian Embassy, to court solidarity support for Conscientious Protectors (arrested for blocking a London meeting to plan a new coal mine in Bangladesh). As new people hear about us our followings are continuing to grow by around 500-1000 every week or two. However, an even more interesting development is a whopping ONE HUNDRED new people signing up as “Going” to International Rebellion Week EVERY DAY, bringing the total to over 1,500 already. If this continues at the same rate we’ll be at over 10,000 by April – but with the actions coming up and more effort going into spreading the word, we know this will start to grow a lot faster… We’re excited to see how many we can get! We’ll see you on the streets in April, rebels. Tell all your friends!

Stat-lovers, see this week’s analytics report here.

Press

The press team, like many others, is looking to expand in response to increasing demands. Concurrent to this we’re continuing to handle inquiries and requests from news organisations of all shapes and sizes; we’re also working on proactive strategies for creating coverage in the coming months, such as getting XR-written articles into major newspapers, working with strategy teams to ensure rapid press reactivity, and building the informational infrastructure to be ready for April.

Spokes and Notables circle

We are gathering all the amazing work that has already been done and trying to bring some coordination to future work! We are responsible for preparing people within our movement to speak to media and at events on behalf of XR. We also reach out to people who we would love to speak on behalf of us – from social justice activists to climate professors to rock climbers to A-list celebrities. As and when we make contact with ‘notables’, we are responsible for integrating their involvement (through public support to donating to being arrested!) into XR. It’s going to be a BIG YEAR both for notables joining XR and also for us needing MANY XR people ready and trained to talk to press so – if you would like to join this team please email sam.j.knights@gmail.com

Regen

The Regenerative Culture UK National Working Group has now appointed several sub-group leads meaning that integration, conflict resilience and Action Regen are all maturing, thanks to Joanna, April and Jasmine!

Regen is bringing together Local Regen groups from across the world to begin having weekly introductions and trainings starting this week. As well as this, Regen is offering emotional debriefs and sharing spirals to those who were arrested and are facing court due to involvement with XR actions in London (the next debrief being on Monday Jan 21st at 7pm).

Furthermore, Regen is in contact with several groups who will be offering trainings in Privilege Awareness, Restorative Circles & Sustaining Groups – venues being booked and dates announced soon & publicised via social media.

If anyone is interested in feeding into Regenerative Culture, you’re most welcome: we are running intro to UK National online calls weekly for the next month or more – please email xr.regenerativeculture@gmail.com if you’re interested in attending.

Finally we want to give our huge gratitude to everyone for their continuing love of each other and the earth, standing bravely in the face of uncertainty.

Legal

The legal team is continuing to expand and develop as new volunteers join the group. We have now begun to support defendants through court trails and hearings. We are also working on improving our communication system in order to better support arrestees and defendants. At the same time, we are developing a legal strategy for XR and trainings for legal observers around the country.

We continue to seek contact with anyone who has been arrested at an XR action. If you haven’t been in touch with XR legal please send an email at xr-legal@riseup.net

Talks and Trainings

The latest version of the Heading for Extinction talk is out! If you’re one of our speakers and need the updated materials, please email xr.talks.trainings@gmail.com. Our NVDA training team went to Germany to learn from the champions about how to spice up our trainings. Speaker trainings on how to give the Heading for Extinction talk are now being organised around the country, with a focus on England and Wales, but online trainings are also being provided for rebels who live a bit further off so again, please get in touch if you would like to attend them. As a result, there are now more trained speakers around than ever before – so if you need one for a talk in your local area, or if you want to organise an NVDA training, please fill out this online form. Finally, a first series of meeting facilitation trainings has been set up in Manchester, Bristol, London and Exeter.

Communities

Along with all of the strategy processes, two wonderful feedback processes have been held: the external questionnaire, analysed here, finds a generally very positive perception of XR, with one of a few points for improvement being the information flow which this newsletter is hoping to help with. The internal questionnaire, summarised here, found some similar themes (e.g. “the overwhelming amount of information balanced with the lack of communication”), together with heart-warming positives. The overall feedback testifies to a willingness across XR as a whole to listen to itself and learn from its errors.

Integration

The integration team is currently developing regular online induction sessions, a Rebel Starter Pack, a phone banking system to enable us to reach out to our database to let them know about April 15th, and an automated email system to direct rebels to their local groups. We’ve also started posting volunteer roles on the website. More info about all of this here.

Newsletters

Readers may have noticed that the internal newsletter is back(!). We’re looking to regularise the output by getting a steady system so that all of our wonderful WG contributors can get into the groove of sending in their sections.

Meanwhile the external newsletter is working on expanding its team and formalising its roles. It would also like to announce a new Announcements section – if you’d like something publicised through this platform (such as a call for volunteers, or the revelation of a new initiative), please get in touch with xr-newsletter@protonmail.com. See here for our latest issues.

Tech

A UK tech team has been forming over the last month or so. Work is now starting in earnest to form teams focused on specific technological areas, such as External Communications (use of emails/etc), internal communications (use of Basecamp and other instant messaging tools), website (looking at major updates to the website and possible support to local groups), data and GDPR (making sure our data kept about individuals is clean, and that we always respect our responsibilities regarding data-protection law). We hope that, through this work, we can facilitate the other teams in XR to be more effective at their work.

Actions, events and gatherings strategy

The Action, Events and Gatherings group has recently been formed, following the disbanding of the coordinating group. This restructuring promises to be exciting, though there are challenges during the transition period.

We’ve been looking at ways to maintain forward momentum whilst continuing to further decentralise, which isn’t easy during an intense campaign. We’ve also been considering action proposals as well as strategy up to March 2019. Proposals so far have included fracking, aviation, coal etc: all issues close to our hearts. We hope to be able to support ongoing campaigns whilst also maintaining the momentum vital to carry us towards our goal. What’s also essential now is how we develop our feedback mechanisms, so that regional groups can input on that strategy rather than have it dictated to them top-down. We are all looking forward to seeing how 2019 unfolds as we continue to take action on a variety of fronts.

Finance and Fundraising

The finance and fundraising team have been on-boarding a whole host of new folks and, without listing them all here, it’s especially a great relief to have Rob Quinn coming on board to play a CFO type role, (but let’s call him the Big Cheese of Cheese), and Lorraine Langhard to bring in more cat-herding coordination energy as well as submitting applications for grant funding. We will be launching a new crowd-funder in the early new year and a number of us are talking to potential donors. Money is relatively low right now.

Political Strategy

Set up following a meeting on 2 December 2018, the Political WG has not yet agreed a mandate but the overarching themes it has been developing are: Building a “Political Taskforce” – to influence the political and NGO field in the UK and internationally, bringing in Global South voices, to enable a message to be communicated of deep collaboration for the XR Demands. To be done in liaison with Movement WG and Actions WG; Scrutiny of whether an effective Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Emergency (CACE) can be held before April 15th, commissioned to be carried out by Sortition Foundation (subject to funding); using contacts to get to the negotiating table with government officials on XR Demands; building a “psycho-spiritual” grouping that has the capacity for political manifestation; building a model of “democratic accountability” through sensing/understanding the emergence of XR Local Groups and their needs; creating an expert advisory board which includes Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics and colleagues of Jem Bendell who wrote the “Deep Adaptation” report; sub-groups are formed (CACE sub-group) and forming (Political Taskforce, Psycho-Spiritual, Advisory Board).

 

General Climate news

This week, as temperatures broke through existing records in multiple locations across Australia, on the other side of the world 1200+ Belgian students took part in school strikes to demand action on the climate crisis. Meanwhile, Hitachi became the second company in two months to cancel the construction of a nuclear power plant in the U.K., throwing the country’s energy strategy into crisis.

Briefing: Reaching Net Zero Emissions by 2025 — is it possible?

 

It’s a core part of our second demand, and we get asked it a lot; this week, Nuala Mai Gathercole Lam examines the possibility of a carbon-neutral 2025.

There’s a mainstream discourse about what it would take to go carbon neutral by 2050 or to halve emissions by 2030 — but XR’s target of net zero emissions by 2025 is markedly more ambitious. Is it possible?

The Received Wisdom on Political Will

When reports attempt to map out the road to zero emissions political will is factored in as a major obstacle to making the necessary changes quickly (for instance by 2025), as opposed to more gradually (like by 2050). Demanding zero emissions by 2025 means rejecting the received wisdom that only limited reductions are possible. Instead, the ambitious goal of 2025 must drive research and the adoption of technology.

Rapid shifts in the organisation of society are possible — the Second World War saw the repurposing of factories, retraining of large numbers of women to staff the factories, rationing of limited resources and a massive localisation of food production. What looks like a realistic time frame for going carbon neutral changes when we look at the scale of change that has taken place in the past.

Steps to Reach Net Zero Emissions

The Climate Mobilization are a U.S.- based organisation working to generate a rapid and wide- reaching response to climate change. They work with a time frame of reaching zero emissions within the next ten years. This is what they think it would take:

  1. Emergency economic planning measures to reach zero emissions
  2. A fair shares rationing programme as a means to improve energy efficiency in an equitable manner
  3. Investment in ‘negative-emissions’ technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere
  4. Comprehensive changes to our transport systems including increased public transport options and transition to electric public transport
  5. Replacing industrialised agriculture with localised farming with limits on livestock farming
  6. Restoration of ecosystems to halt mass extinctions and turn ecosystems into carbon sinks

The Technology

Many of the technologies referenced in less ambitious predictions are already in existence in some form. For instance, according to this article in Nature, the cost of producing solar energy has fallen by 80% in the last decade and Morocco, Mexico, Chile and Egypt are now able to produce solar power at a lower cost than natural gas. A reportco-authored by Future Earth and Sitra says that 50% of new capacity for generating electricity is renewable, with wind and solar capacity doubling every 4 years. Storage systems are needed in order to make a 100% renewable electricity grid a reality and the cost of these utility-scale lithium-ion batteries is falling rapidly as demand increases. Finally, hydroponic farming has the potential to reduce emissions through the efficient use of electricity and water resources as well as reducing the carbon intensive transport of food associated with centralised industrial farming.

Whether or not 2025 seems like a realistic goal depends largely on whether or not you factor in substantial political change. Extinction Rebellion exists to shift the Overton window and generate political will for addressing the climate crisis — this is a key part of the puzzle and we have the tools solve it!

Photo credit: Derek Langley/XR/Cambridge

Thanks for reading this week’s internal newsletter!

To see the previous issue, see the archive. If you have any queries or suggestions, please contact douglasrogers95@gmail.com.

Let’s get ready for a Green 2019!

Articles Diaries Ecological Breakdown and Response Regenerative Culture

Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate

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Originally posted by Stuart Basden on Stu’s Blog

 

Yes, yes, I know. The climate is breaking down. It’s urgent. An emergency. We’ve only got a few years left to ‘fix’ it.

Indeed, we won’t fix it. Weather patterns will become increasingly unstable and unpredictable, and the effects it will soon have on how humans around the world grow food will be devastating, likely causing harvests to fail across entire continents and food prices to sky-rocket. Millions have already suffered due to the amplified instability. We’re facing imminent societal collapse (whatever that means), both around the world and in the UK. All of our lives are soon going to radically change.

None of this is particularly controversial. When a bus is driving with a certain momentum towards a person, it gets clearer and clearer that it will hit the person. After a certain point, it’s inevitable. And that’s where we stand now, with regards to the momentum of climatic change. The bus is about to hit us. Our lives are about to change. It’s not clear whether or not we’ll survive (as a species). Many species have already been run over. Two hundred species each and every day go extinct.

I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start. I was one of the 15 people in April 2018 who came together and made the collective decision to try to create the conditions that would initiate a rebellion. I was a coordinator of one of the original five working groups, and I’ve been organising with XR day-and-night since then (frugally living off my savings so I don’t have to work, having quit an industry that paid me £1000/week). And I’ve been in RisingUp (the organisation from which XR has emerged) since the first RisingUp action in November 2016. I’m a RisingUp Holding Group member, and a member of the XR Guardianship Team.

And for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me ‘pulling rank’ — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say…

And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.

As Europeans spread their toxicity around the world, they brought torture, genocide, carnage and suffering to the ends of the earth. Their cultural myths justified the horrors, such as the idea that indigenous people were animals (not humans), and therefore God had given us dominion over them. This was used to justify a multi-continent-wide genocide of tens of millions of people. The coming of the scientific era saw this intensify, as the world around us was increasingly seen as ‘dead’ matter — just sitting there waiting for us to exploit it and use it up. We’re now using it up faster than ever.

Euro-Americans violently imposed and taught dangerous delusions that they used to justify the exploitation and reinforced our dominance, while silencing worldviews that differed or challenged them. The UK’s hand in this was enormous, as can be seen by the size of the former British empire, and the dominance of the English language around the world. There is stark evidence that everyday racial bias continues in Britain, now, today. It’s worth naming some of these constructed delusions that have been coded into societies and institutions around the world:

  • The delusion of white-supremacy centres whiteness and the experience of white people, constructing and perpetuating the myth that white people and their lives are somehow inherently better and more valuable than people of colour.
  • The delusion of patriarchy centres the male experience, and excludes/hinders female assigned people from public life (reducing them to a possession or object for ownership or consumption). Patriarchy teaches dominating and competitive behaviours, and emphasises the idea that the world is a place of scarcity, separation and powerlessness.
  • The delusions of Eurocentrism include the notion that Europeans know what is best for the world.
  • The delusions of hetero-sexism/heteronormativity propagate the idea that heterosexuality is ‘normal’ and that other expressions of sexuality are deviant.
  • The delusions of class hierarchy uphold the theory that the rich elite are better/smarter/nobler than the rest of us, and make therefore better decisions.

There are other delusions. These delusions have become ingrained in all of us, taught to us from a very young age.

None of these delusions have ended, although some of the arguments that supported them (e.g. phrenology) have been dispelled. They continue to play out through each of us, in our ways of relating, regardless of our identity. The current pride in the history of the British empire, or the idea that the USA is on the side of ‘good’, continues to enable neo-colonialism in 2019, taking the form of palm-oil plantations, resources wars, and the parasitical financial sector, to name but a few. The task of Extinction Rebellion is to dispel these delusions. We need to cure the causes of the infection, not just alleviate the symptoms. To focus on the climate’s breakdown (the symptom) without focusing attention on these toxic delusions (the causes) is a form a denialism. Worse, it’s a racist and sexist form of denialism, that takes away from the necessary focus of the need for all of us to de-colonise our selves.

My ancestors are European, some of whom claimed to ‘own’ people as slaves. There are black people with the name Basden in the Americas, and I have begun to mobilise my (white) family to make contact in order to seek to pay reparations.

However, my own accountability cannot be fully paid through this. The insanity* of the mind of the coloniser continues today. It continues in the extraction of fossil fuels, minerals and water from the earth. It continues in deforestation and industrial agriculture. It continues in a callous culture of consumption, which intensifies each Christmas. It continues in evictions and deportations. It continues in the ways of relating to those around us that perpetuate separation and division.

The result is isolation, pain and suffering. The result can be felt at the individual level — in the endemic levels of loneliness and mental-health illness. It can be felt at the community level — in the theft of land for plunder and profit by largely-European-and-US-based banks and corporations. And it can be felt at the global level — in the polluting of our air and oceans.

So Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about ‘climate justice’**, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.

This article is calling to all of those who are involved in XR who sometimes slip into saying it’s a climate movement. It’s a call to the American rebels who made a banner saying “CLIMATE extinction rebellion”. It’s a call to the XR Media & Messaging teams to never get sloppy with the messaging and ‘reduce’ it to climate issues. It’s a call to the XR community to never say we’re a climate movement. Because we’re not. We’re a Rebellion. And we’re rebelling to highlight and heal from the insanity that is leading to our extinction. Now tell the truth and act like it.

* I use the term ‘insanity’ carefully, with the intention of highlighting the need for healing. Indigenous First Nation people helpfully taught me to see the mindset of the coloniser as a sickness. In no way do I intend to marginalise or discredit the experience of people who have been labelled ‘insane’ by a normative system, nor who identify as being ‘insane’.
** Climate Justice refers to the injustice that those who are affected first and worst by extreme weather events (the people in the poorer countries, the majority of whom live in the Global South) are not likely to be the ones who caused the climate emissions (the people who consume the most, including the pathologically wasteful cultures of Europe and Turtle Island (aka North America), and the rich who live/travel around the world).
Articles Ecological Breakdown and Response

Focus SIDS – Island nations threatened by climate breakdown

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Farewell post from Kate Goldstone -thanks for all your help, Kate!

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You think you’ve got it bad living on the mainland, or inland, or in a country within a continent. But plenty of small island nations, known as SIDS or Small Island Developing States, are a whole lot more vulnerable to our fast-warming climate than most.

There are several reasons for this unusual level of vulnerability. According to Wikipedia (1), SIDS ‘tend to share similar sustainable development challenges, including small but growing populations, limited resources, remoteness, susceptibility to natural disasters, vulnerability to external shocks, excessive dependence on international trade, and fragile environments.’ And all that means a growing number of them are set to disappear completely as sea levels inexorably rise.

How would you feel if your homeland was about to disappear?

Imagine you’ve been born and bred in a small island state, nurtured by it all your life. Because you know the place so intimately it is deeply familiar. Because you eat local foods and drink local water the land is quite literally in your bones, in your teeth, and you feel a soul-deep love for your homeland. But your island is sinking beneath the waves, you’re powerless to change the inevitable, and you and your family are in a state of horrified, shocked mourning. There goes your culture, your history, your ancestors, everything familiar.

Can you imagine how dreadful that feels? Can you picture how frustrating it must be when nobody can really help? There’s nothing that any of you, the residents of your magical archipelago, can do to stop the waters rising. Would you blame the wealthy, greedy people, the people far away who warmed the earth in the first place? Probably.

Global warming and rising sea levels are threatening many SIDS, by their very nature first in the firing line, barely above sea level with little or no high ground. Most have fragile economies sustained by tourism and international trade. Many have under-developed infrastructures. And the people quite literally have nowhere else to go as the waters flow steadily higher. Here are just a few of the world’s many SIDS that are currently at risk of vanishing for good. (2)

The Republic of Maldives – Due to disappear under the waves

The Republic of Maldives covers an area of just under 300 square kilometres and lies to the south of India. Once colonised by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, now it’s an independent republic. Sea level rises are placing the nation, its people and economy at terrible risk, the islands being some of the lowest-lying on earth. At a maximum height above sea level of 2.3 metres, many of the 1200 tiny islands and atolls that make up this magical place are already going under.

The Solomon Islands – Under serous threat from the seas

Independent from Britain since 1978, the people of the Solomon Islands, in the Indian Ocean, have been warning us for several years that sea level rises will destroy their world, but the world hasn’t listened. Climate change is set to destroy this tiny yet precious place over the next couple of decades, sinking a total of just under 1000 islands across two unique archipelagos.

The Republic of Kiribati – First to see the sunrise… but not for much longer

The remote Republic of Kiribati covers an epic three million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean to the north east of Australia, the place where the New Year is celebrated first of all, before it reaches the rest of the world. Independent from Britain since 1979 it’s at special risk of sea level rise, being just 3m above sea level. The waters are currently rising by more than a centimetre a year, not a lot by some standards but four times faster than the global average. This means lovely Kiribati will probably completely disappear before too long, losing 33 precious coral atolls and one island forever.

Vanuatu and Tuvalu

The UN pinpoints the Republic of Vanuatu as the world’s most vulnerable island nation to every type of natural disaster. The nation covers just over 12,000 square kilometres and has been a new, independent state since 1980, now completely separate from Britain and France. Sea level rise here is already a problem, but the place is also especially vulnerable to increasing numbers of cyclones of increasing strengths. Take cyclone Pam, which trashed all but 10% of the buildings in the capital. 83 stunning volcanic islands make up the nation, and they are all at risk from sea level rise.

Tuvalu is another island nation already suffering more than average from the ravages of global warming. Tuvalu is the world’s least polluting country, but at the same time has an incredibly low average height above sea level. Independent from Britain since 1978 and close to Vanuatu, it was also severely damaged by cyclone Pam and is set to disappear thanks to global warming. That means four Pacific coral reefs, five atolls and three islands are set to vanish from the face of the Earth before long.

Is there any good news for SIDS?

We’re at crisis point, and no wonder so many SIDS are so keen to move towards low-carbon, climate resilient economies, as set out in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) implementation plan for climate change-resilient development.

On the other hand unless the rest of the world dramatically and quickly reduces its reliance on fossil fuels and slows climate change island nations, no matter how renewable their energy, will remain powerless to prevent the waves rising. In the same way that no man – or woman – is an island, island nations depend on the rest of the world for their survival and we can’t separate our fates.

While places like the Caribbean can go ahead and create renewable energy until they’re blue in the face, because the rest of the world is fiddling while Rome burns, they’re stuffed. And that’s everyone’s responsibility.

As always, the solution rides on the political will of the leaders of wealthier, more influential, larger countries and the larger economic groups they fall into, ‘organisations’ like Europe and OPEC.

Join the rebellion!

Join Extinction Rebellion! Using non-violent direct action and mass civil disobedience, we are pressuring governments to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025. Will you join us, in love and peace, to save the human race, give our children a future, and protect our fellow creatures?

Kate Goldstone BA Hons
Freelance Copywriter

www.helpinthecity.com
katien@helpinthecity.com
07976 737243
Twitter: @KatieGoldstone1