Why I’ll be giving poems as presents this Christmas
By Rupert Read, Resilience.org
Progress is entirely incommensurable with precaution, with a ‘No’ to recklessness. It’s time to say enough to progress and begin to reorient our political narratives around a precautionary logic.
Parents for a future!: Excerpt
By Rupert Read, Resilience.org
What is the nub of my case for how we can tackle this? We need to become parents of the future. How do we do that? By taking the metaphor literally.
A letter to real power: a letter to us
By Rupert Read, Resilience.org
I started to re-assess my assumption about who this letter would be directed to. When I looked up the dictionary definition - “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” – and I recalled the way the world has changed since 2018, it became clearer where the power really is. With us, the people.
Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside
By Rupert Read, Samuel Alexander, Resilience.org
If there is one thing a virus cannot kill, it is a rebellion. Nevertheless, there is no way to begin this collection of essays on Extinction Rebellion, at this time, other than by acknowledging the remarkable, mind-bending moment at which these words are written.
Why I Say that this Civilisation is Finished
By Rupert Read, Extinction Rebellion
The stakes of course are very, very high, here, because the climate crisis and the broader ecological emergency of which it is only the most urgent part puts the whole of what we know as civilisation at risk. By ‘this civilisation’ I mean the hegemonic civilisation of globalised industrial growth capitalism— sometimes called ‘Empire’—which today governs the vast majority of human life on Earth.
How a Movement of Movements can Win: Taking XR to the Next Level
By Rupert Read, Medium
We have a plan: a movement of movements. We want contingents of new rebels from movements ‘allied’ to XR. The peace movement. The animals movement. The social justice movement. And several more. Call it the rebel alliance…
This Civilisation is Finished: Excerpt
By Samuel Alexander, Rupert Read, The Simplicity Collective
When I look at the world today, I see the vast majority of academics, scientists, activists, and politicians ‘self-censoring’ their own work and ideas, in order to share views that are socially, politically, or even personally palatable.
School Climate Strikes: Why Adults no Longer Have the Right to Object to their Children Taking Radical Action
By Rupert Read, The Conversation
A worldwide wave of school climate strikes, begun by the remarkable Greta Thunberg, has reached the UK. Some critics claim these activist-pupils are simply playing truant, but I disagree. Speaking as both a climate campaigner and an academic philosopher, I believe school walkouts are morally and politically justifiable.