By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Nah, there’s nothing deathly or millenarian about the XR activists I know. They’re just ‘ordinary’, flawed, caring (middle-class) people like me, full of love and zest for life, and really, really scared about the deathly devastation that climate change threatens to wreak upon the world and the life they hold dear, unless governments act radically and immediately.
By Naresh Giangrande, Resilience.org
And what I say to those who choose to criticise XR is please by all means criticise us, and come up swiftly and proactively with something better we can do to meet the challenges of imminent climate catastrophe and ecological disaster. I would be the first to be behind you. But if you cannot then I would think very carefully about what you are going to say to the present generation, Greta’s generation, today’s children and grandchildren when they ask, ‘What did you do when we had our last chance to avoid catastrophe?’ Think very hard about that question.
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
Given that XR’s recent Autumn action did not produce the same level of success and change as the previous actions, we now have fairly clear empirical evidence that XR’s present strategy may be reaching its ‘peak’. If it is to continue to scale as a movement, this needs to be confronted head-on. XR now has the opportunity to review and enhance its strategy, and I offer this critical appraisal in that spirit as a humble contribution to augment such efforts.
By Sam J. Knights, Medium.com
This is a love letter to Extinction Rebellion. It is also a letter addressed to those who have criticised us. An apology. A response. And, ultimately, an invitation.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So below I bring you a sceptic’s guide to XR scepticism, in a two-part post that’ll be continued next time. In this first one I focus on issues that strike me as requiring a genuine, substantive response and/or that I wrestled with myself in embracing the movement.
By Aranyo Aarjan, Red Pepper
As two weeks of International Rebellion get underway, including protests around Westminster and across the UK, it is time to be honest about climate emergency in the Global South and to take an explicitly anti-capitalist stance.
By Stan Cox, Shaun Chamberlin, Green Social Thought
At the urging of Fleming and Chamberlin, TEQs were introduced, studied, and debated in the U.K. Parliament a decade ago but were judged by the government to be ahead of their time. Now, with a global climate emergency widely acknowledged, systems like TEQs warrant further serious consideration.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
What would It feel like to live through an era-defining, seismic social, cultural and economic transition? A tipping point beyond which nothing felt the same and everything felt possible? Clearly such things don’t come along very often, indeed they are pretty rare. So rare in fact that we usually don’t allow ourselves to believe that they are possible. But they are. And we are in one right now. And it’s amazing. Let me explain.
By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective
The main argument of this essay is that XR and rebellions like it are almost certainly going to grow in coming months and years as more people around the world become politically frustrated, angry, scared, and directly impacted by inaction in the face of today’s overlapping ecological and humanitarian crises.
By Paul Arbair, Paul Arbair blog
The rise of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ signals that climate activism is moving up a gear. Further radicalisation is probably inevitable.