Invaluable reflections and next-step ideas right from the heart of arguably the most inspiring and important movement of the twenty-first century.
Mike Berners-Lee, author of There is No Planet B:
A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
Everyone should read this book. It is short, and impassioned, but full of important information: above all an honest and practical plea for us to seize the moment for change urgently. It is inspirational. Please, for all our sakes, read it, and take its timely words to heart.
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary:
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander take us deep inside the debates, tactics, and passion that have bound XR together from its founding days, bringing us radical reflections from the frontlines of rebellion. If you want to understand the movement that is finally waking us up, read this book.
Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics:
Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
The ecological emergency is the greatest challenge that humanity has ever faced, and Extinction Rebellion may be our last best chance to address it. Read this inside story of the most important social movement of our time.
David Loy, author of Ecodharma:
Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis
From the eruption of XR in our lives in late 2018, Rupert Read has been closely involved in the organisation as an advisor, influencer, spokesperson, and occasional critic. These fascinating essays read like dispatches from the front line, crackling with urgency, tempered by timely reflections, and reminding us of the scale of the challenge ahead as we rebuild our shattered, post-coronavirus economies.
Jonathon Porritt, former Director of the UK Sustainable
Development Commission and of Friends of the Earth
Activist-philosopher Rupert Read, a key thinker of Extinction Rebellion, has collected a treasure trove of foundational essays, documenting the transformational XR UK experience, that will be immensely valuable for activists around the world trying to replicate that achievement. Extinction Rebellion: Insights From the Inside is a keen look at what worked, and what didnt, in the UK, combining on-the-spot observations and public documents from the two years since XR was launched with fresh analysis of how the global movement for ecological sanity may respond in this new COVID-19 world. The book is incisive, pertinent, self-critical, well-written, and, in the XR way, occasionally cheeky. Anyone concerned with combating the broader wave of ecological collapse that led to the pandemic and that is rising behind it should read Read.
Ken Ward, protagonist in the documentary
The Reluctant Radical
Most of us like to watch movies about people saving the world but too rarely do we even try to do it ourselves. Despite the situation so obviously calling for it! This is a book about what might well turn out to be the most important social movement in history.
David Graeber, author of The Democracy Project:
A History, a Crisis, a Movement
In a world-changing movement that has been careful not to allow itself to get captured by any ego-driven individual leaders, there is a vital role to be played by those exercising wise thought-leadership in the service of the collective. One of those is Rupert Read. He believes that this civilisation is finished and that the only way that we can end it without violence and without collapse is through the kind of transformation that XR calls for and pre-figures. This eco-philosophy has been vital for XR 1.0. This book is a great document of that journey, and of how XR 2.0 will need to be if we are going to make it together to a better future. Can XR can we deliver on that promise? The human future may hang on the answer.
Carne Ross, author of The Leaderless Revolution
and former diplomat
EXTINCTION REBELLION
INSIGHTS FROM THE INSIDE
Published by the Simplicity Institute, 2020.
www.simplicityinstitute.org
Copyright 2020 Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander
Cover image based on work by Chaz Maviyane-Davies
Cover design by Andrew Doodson
Layout and typesetting by Sharon France (Looking Glass Press)
Typeset in Bebas and Gill Sans
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-6488405-1-0 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-6488405-2-7 (e-book)
Dedicated, with love and rage, to all the rebels, now and of the future.
PREFACE
ON EXTINCTION REBELLION 1.0
Extinction Rebellion (XR, for short) is an emergency response. Politics as usual, governments as usual, have let down the peoples of the world in an extreme way: we are on course for eco-driven societal collapse, and we are extinguishing other species very rapidly. We could even end up making ourselves extinct. XR suggests that when your government is driving you and your family over a cliff, it is no longer a legitimate government. Rebellion against it is permitted indeed, it is required. But XR is insistent that such rebellion must be nonviolent. Not only because hurting people isnt nice, but also because there is good reason to believe from the historical record that nonviolence is frequently more effective than violence in transforming society. XR asks people to be willing to be arrested, in unprecedented numbers, to leverage such deep, rapid change. Those of us willing to do this are called arrestables. The arrestables are then supported (whether in very practical ways legally, financially or simply with vital moral support etc.) by a much larger cohort of non-arrestable sympathisers.
We humans are vulnerable as never before to existential threats resulting from our way of life and in particular from how elites have structured that way of life. In this terrible context, XR has three demands. First, to tell the truth. The full truth needs to be told about the emergency that we have allowed to be created. Secondly, once that truth is told (by the media, by government, by us all) and understood, it will be possible, as it is necessary, to act now to remedy the situation. In concrete terms, this means rapid precautionary, mitigative, and restorative action in the next five years. Rich countries need to lead the way on this: for us to be globally safe, we in such countries need to aim to achieve zero-carbon and zero-biodiversity-destruction by 2025. That is, we need to be realistic, as the phrase goes, and demand the impossible. This can be made possible by our unprecedented change-making. Thirdly, how to achieve this eye-watering goal should be decided, not by a representative democracy (which has patently failed), but by citizens themselves: we need Citizens Assemblies. This emergency takes us into a place beyond party politics and beyond ideologies. It is now about survival, and to survive we are going to have to learn a new way of flourishing together. To construct and enact a new, regenerative vision. Assemblies of citizens, well-informed by the best experts, deliberating together, are the best bet for how we could agree to enact the second demand, of acting now, fast and deep enough to save the future.
Why did I choose to work with Samuel Alexander to bring together this material on XR? And why now? There are several reasons:
