Ocean Rebellion protesters en route to the Marine Stewardship Council’s annual awards dinner at Fishmongers’ Hall by the Thames, London, 2023. Photo by Crispin Hughes/Panos Pictures
Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?
Rupert Read is emeritus associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and a former political liaison, strategist and spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. He is now co-director of the Climate Majority Project, which he co-founded, and the co-editor of The Climate Majority Project (2024). He lives in Norfolk, UK.
One fine day in 2015, near where I lived in Norwich, I was delivering leaflets for the Green Party, noticing on my way the deathly state of the gardens in the area – this one, scattered with rubbish; this one, manicured to death with weedkiller; this one, and the next, paved over for cars; this one, with a dead fridge standing forlorn on the grass – when these words flashed into my head, unbidden:
‘This civilisation is finished.’
For some time afterwards, I was in a state of shock. But, being a wannabe public intellectual, after a few weeks, I did what any half-decent intellectual would… I started writing about it. The piece I wrote, I considered at first too incendiary to publish. When friends and colleagues persuaded me to go ahead, saying that this was the kind of authentic writing they’d never encountered from me before, I was unwilling to do so under my own name. At length, for the first time ever, I published under a pseudonym. After remarkably supportive feedback, I started giving talks with the title ‘This Civilisation Is Finished’. It seemed that people loved the breath of fresh air: someone was calling it.
But there was still something missing. I didn’t have a plan. I could see no way for humanity to avoid collapse without rapidly transforming this civilisation into something very different. So what do you actually do about that?
During the three years after my epiphany, I had found that my words on the topic were achieving some resonance. Yet, lacking anything much like a plan, I still felt directionless, unsatisfied, even at times nearly hopeless. That all changed when I heard about an embryonic organisation that was seeking to gear up to launch: Extinction Rebellion (XR). Their analysis was similar to mine; some of their leaders had heard or read some of my stuff. But there was one big difference: they had a plan.
I threw myself into XR. Helped them launch. Became a strategist and spokesperson, as well as running their political liaison efforts. After the successful April 2019 rebellion forced a national conversation, I was part of the team that met with Michael Gove, then environment secretary, and other members of the UK’s Conservative government. Through May 2019, the plan had worked.
XR accomplished something extraordinary, unprecedented. I’ll never regret being part of that. Finding XR, after finding my own voice, was finding a life’s purpose.
The Canning Town debacle planted the seed in my mind and that of a number of others that perhaps XR was not capable of being the vehicle for mass-participatory change. It started a process of reassessment. By September 2020, like a number of others who had played significant roles in XR, I felt it was time to move on. It seemed that XR had likely achieved most of what it was capable of: a major uptick in climate consciousness; finally cutting through climate denial in the name of a renewed moral seriousness. Over the next year, I entered a new phase of thought. Asking how to name the emergence, already underway, of a much wider and larger, more ‘moderate’ more-than-movement, to rise to the challenge of the escalating more-than-emergency.
Participation in and positive impact of XR reached a ceiling in October 2019. This was partly because XR hit a self-imposed landmine in the infamous Canning Town action, which involved a small, extreme group of activists making the incomprehensible choice to target an underground commuter train in a low-income area of London for nonviolent direct action. XR had transformed climate consciousness in the UK and, with the aid of the school climate strikers, in much of the world. But it had not succeeded in changing policy. And now perhaps it never would.
Malm holds that the gravity of the situation requires property damage, such as severing oil pipelines
So the question re-arose: what would, what should be the plan, under these circumstances? Throughout the period of and in which I am writing, the level of peril the world faces has steadily risen. When XR launched, we called for rich countries like the UK to go carbon zero in an emergency programme of change by 2025. On such a short timeline, every passing year is a big increment, putting such goals ever further out of reach. Now in 2024, recordbreaking escalation in temperature places us firmly outside our self-declared ‘safe’ zone; and, obviously, achieving carbon zero by 2025 is completely impossible. And I argue that staying below 1.5°C of global over-heat is plainly impossible too. Until that awareness sinks in and rocket-fuels us, we’ll never stop the rot…
more…
https://aeon.co/essays/is-civil-disobedience-a-moral-obligation-in-a-time-of-climate-crisis
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