Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This Is Not A Drill has been written to clarify, inform, inspire and equip the people who are undecided yet interested in moving deeper into the climate action zeitgeist XR has ingeniously catalysed.
Movement organizers must help people anticipate, adapt to, and survive these hardships—but social movements cannot stop there. They must help people mount the kind of political resistance that can strip the fossil fuel industry of its power and leverage their own growing influence to demand that society’s remaining resources be re-directed toward a Green transition.
Now we were planting the seeds of a different kind of trade. A different kind of economy. One built on the mutual trust of nature and human. An interdependent relationship woven with seeds and soil, water and sweat. One founded on the ecological processes of life, not the profit margins of an economic system of death. We built gardens and we healed the land that week. We sang and linked arms and we shut down empire together. We cried, we planted, and we stood our ground for a thriving world; and the seeds of change took root.
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.
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.
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.
Corporate media often depicts major social upheavals as single-issue affairs — to see how movements and struggles connect we need to look beyond the headlines.
If we are moving away from this old form of political education – filling empty containers with the ‘right’ knowledge or ideology and policing those ‘right answers’ – what then are we actually trying to do?
In recent years there’s been a global awakening to the momentous choice humanity now faces: do we cling to the old system and choose extinction, or create a new system that grants us a future worth living?
As a parish priest and Christian Climate Action member put it to me, the ecological crisis is also a “spiritual crisis.” Certainly it seems to be a crisis that requires and justifies spiritual responses and resources – a coalition of religion, ritual and rebellion.
In this post, I’m going to run through some of the key things that make this moment in history so unique when it comes to young people and climate change.
Would it be ridiculous to believe that not only the third runway will never get built but that one day our children will be able to hear a nightingale in Harmondsworth again because we had learnt to fall in love with the world, in love with life rather than money.
