Four years after the disruptive entry that made it famous, the climate movement Extinction Rebellion returns to the streets from 21 April with the explicit aim of bringing 100,000 people in front of the headquarters of British institutions.
Extinction Rebellion (XR), unlike Fridays For Future and the majority of recent street movements, was not born spontaneously. It is the passage into practice of a precise theory of scientists, sociologists, change creation experts, which starts from the assumption that, despite alarming reports such as that of the Club of Rome already in ’72, global emissions have grown year after year and that the conferences, meetings, international agreements and traditional forms of protest have not been able to generate sufficient pressure for institutional politics to decide to act.
In 2018, faced with the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction of animal species, 15 people in a small English town decide to found a movement to achieve radical social change with the last card left to play: rebellion.
Hence the name Extinction Rebellion and one of its most important mottos: “Respect existence or expect resistance” – “respect existence or expect resistance.”
A resistance in the form of non-violent civil disobedience, inspired by Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Emmeline Pankhurst and based on the book “Why civil resistance works” (Chenoweth, Stephan, 2011) which, in the 353 conflicts analysed, demonstrates how nonviolence is more effectiveness of violence, and how the goal has almost always been reached whenever it has been possible to involve 3.5% of the population.
On 31 October 2018, Extinction Rebellion declares itself in open rebellion against the UK government.
In April of the following year, thousands of people blocked day and night five fundamental junctions in the heart of London: Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge, Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square. The capital remains paralysed. Activists manned the sites for two weeks holding a series of speeches, debates, public assemblies, flash mobs and other events of all kinds aimed at involving citizens. Many others, including Greta Thunberg, travel from all over Europe to join them and support the protest.
XR militants are perfectly aware of the current crisis and of what they are doing: in order to highlight the problem, they are willing to remain seated or stretched out like sacks of potatoes, block roads, bridges and polluting plants, be taken away by the forces of order and spend one or more nights in the cool. To those who accuse them of disturbing social peace, they reply that they really want to denounce a lack of peace: allowing multinationals to destroy life on Earth, for example, is not peace.
On the other hand, in the tradition of the suffragettes and the civil rights movement, seeking arrest means transforming from spectators to protagonists, to defenders of something greater.
Activists force branches of fossil fuel producers to temporarily close, block roads around the Treasury and “freeze” the London Stock Exchange. In the meantime there is no small involvement of society, with exciting scenes such as striking workers taking part in protests, or elderly ladies with tea and biscuits to refresh the protesters. In those days more than a thousand people are arrested.
The police are shocked by the size of the protest and after ten days of paralysis in the city, the mayor Sediq Khan, with an official note, begs the coordinators of the movement to stop the actions.
The first phase of rebellion is only interrupted when the London City Council in extraordinary session makes ambitious environmental commitments and the UK Parliament declares a state of climate and ecological emergency, becoming the first state in a long list to do so.
At the same time, in the following months, the British government pushed for the approval of a law which, with explicit references to the Extinction Rebellion and its symbols, tightened the sanctions and aimed at criminalizing climate activism.
On the last day of 2022, the movement’s press office released a statement entitled “We Quit”. In a time segment in which the radical nature of activism and the conflictual nature of actions are increasing, such as those of the Last Generation which the Italian government also wanted to oppose in the last Council of Ministers while refusing to increase the ambition of climate policies, XR seems give up.
But it’s not like that. The last line of the press release reads: “Choose Your Future – 21st April and beyond – The Big One – Houses of Parliament – 100,000 people”.
Extinction Rebellion, thanks to the support of 70 other organizations, this time only with authorizing actions, returns to challenge the most deaf and repressive government among the great European countries, in the hope of rallying 100,000 people in front of Westminster.
Less than a week until “The Big One” and today as in April 2019, thousands of people are leaving for London. The journey continues.
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