Cover Images via AP Images
In November, Extinction Rebellion activists floated a ‘Sinking House’ down the River Thames in central London to highlight rising sea levels.
In college, Nathan Hopkins studied biology and chemistry. He learned about coral reefs and their importance to marine ecosystems and healthy oceans. He traveled to San Salvador in the Bahamas, where there are just a few hundred permanent residents. There he saw hundreds of coral reefs overgrown with seaweed and algae—with no sign of the polyps that keep reefs alive. At this stage, it is impossible for coral to recover. “It was a radicalizing moment for me,” he said in an interview. In short, coral reefs brought Hopkins to Extinction Rebellion, where he leads the Washington, D.C., chapter’s outreach and membership work.
I met Hopkins in October in Fairfax, Virginia, during a monthly onboarding meeting the group holds for new members. The meeting was supposed to be held in the public library, but the power was out. After several location changes communicated via Signal, an encrypted messaging app, Nathan confirmed the location at a Panera Bread down the block. With its warmly lit aura and faux-homey color scheme, the Panera is bustling when I find the table of new Extinction Rebellion members.
Ten people, nearly all white, are squeezed around the table. Most are young, but several look to be in their fifties or sixties. One young woman wearing a chenille sweater has blue hair, and several others boast tattoos. There’s even a guy I went to college with. Nathan goes over the group’s goals, its non-hierarchical organizational structure, its philosophy, the risks involved with arrest, the potential for government monitoring (they only communicate on encrypted platforms), and the dire science that motivates it all.
That much is true—the science is calamitous, showing that there’s no longer enough time to act incrementally. Coastal cities will drown under rising seas, more forest fires will incinerate towns, and some places will become just too hot to live in, displacing millions in the process. And so XR is pushing a sclerotic American political system for drastic steps right now.
Most environmental groups might find such insistence impractical. But most environmental groups aren’t Extinction Rebellion. Founded just over a year ago in the United Kingdom, XR’s governing philosophy goes beyond the green movement of the last 40 years. The group has three demands in the U.K. and four in the U.S., including demanding governments tell the truth and act immediately. But the guiding conviction of their demands is their belief that no matter who is in power, nothing has changed. So the answer to environmental devastation is a political restructuring of government. The problems of environmentalists are entirely political.
“Some of the big green groups have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal,” said Nick Brana, an XR spokesperson in D.C. “So why hasn’t it happened already? If there’s public support and there’s been an environmental movement … it’s because the analysis wasn’t going deep enough. It wasn’t going to the fact that we have a broken political system.”
XR’s alternative is called a citizens’ assembly. The idea stems from a system already codified in the United Kingdom, which has been used in Ireland to find solutions to particularly challenging issues such as gay marriage and abortion. Under these countries’ constitutions, a citizens’ assembly can be formed to draft policy solutions. Those chosen at random for selection to the jury-style assembly take advice from experts to create policy, allow for public input, and then present their findings to parliament. Members of parliament then use the policy findings to make laws.
Extinction Rebellion is an activist group that has repeatedly pulled off big, eye-popping acts of civil disobedience to showcase the desperate need for action on climate change.
For particularly gnarly or controversial issues, the assembly actually protects elected officials from backlash. “It actually grants the legislature the political freedom to do what the system does not,” Brana said. In fact, members of D.C.’s chapter told me, the current system of government isn’t truly democratic anyway. “We don’t have a representative government right now. We don’t have democracy. We have an auction basically,” Brana said. “The election goes to the highest bidder … Congress is way older and way whiter than the average American so it’s not representative as is.”
The assembly may seem like pie in the sky, but the group’s members see this alternative as the only option. The group’s D.C. spokesperson told me that they are trying to clarify exactly how an assembly would work in the U.S., where it’s not already codified in the system. “Governments are failing us. Leaders are failing us,” said the spokesperson. Decades of letter writing, lobby meetings, and petitioning have done nothing to change the situation. “Things are only getting worse and worse,” he said.
The group exhibits its radical nature through nonviolent direct action. This is their creed—and it’s reflective of how the group believes that routine channels used to pressure lawmakers to make change are dead. XR has repeatedly pulled off big, eye-popping acts of disobedience that showcase the desperate need for action. In November, activists in London sailed a model of a sinking house down the River Thames, to illustrate flood threats. In Washington this summer, 17 people were arrested in July for supergluing themselves inside Congress, delaying a vote on the House floor. A medic at the onboarding meeting in October explained how, as a safety precaution, he had tested the glue prior to the action by gluing his hand to his floor.
Sara Sokolinski, an “arrestable” for the group who glued herself to Congress this past July, told me that she got involved because of the organization’s reputation. “It’s kind of an act of desperation,” she told me. “We have nothing else because nothing else we’ve done has worked … What’s paved the way for Extinction Rebellion has been government inaction.”
Sokolinski, who also coordinates the D.C. chapter’s finances, said she’s aware of the complicated identity of being an arrestable. “Being an arrestable is a privilege, and so I personally am an arrestable because I work as an environmental researcher so my boss thinks it’s cool,” she said. She added that there are a lot of roles in the organization that don’t require risking arrest.
XR’s actions have received wide notice. Even some green philanthropists have identified XR and other direct-action organizations as critical to moving the political leadership to act, seeding them with millions of dollars in startup funding.
On November 12, XR announced an international hunger strike, with the D.C. chapter vowing to extend it “until Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi sits down to discuss the climate emergency.” In interviews, members of the group told me that they hoped it would have a big impact. “Why is she holding everything up?” they wondered. Not just the Green New Deal, but even refusing to bring a resolution determining a climate emergency to the floor, something XR members tell me is their simplest demand. In London, the group was able to force their government to declare a climate emergency only after shutting down city streets for 11 days. XR members launched a hunger strike, occupying Pelosi’s office in the Capitol on November 18.
With the Senate and the White House in Republican hands, pressuring Democrats like Pelosi may seem wrongheaded to casual observers, or access-hungry green groups. But that access has failed to deliver, and XR, reflective of the youth climate movement in general, refuses to trade good relationships for lip service.
In an informational flyer organizers distributed at the October meeting, the stated long-term goal was to shut down D.C., but they would need 500 people willing to risk arrest. This style—using “arrestables”—is controversial. As UK Youth Parliament member Athian Akec wrote in The Guardian, the “glamorisation of arrest” is off-putting to black and brown people who may want to be involved in the more radical side of the environmental movement but view this risk as too great, given well-documented evidence of police brutality. “The short, frank answer is that the tactics of Extinction Rebellion are designed by and for middle-class, white Britain. Their central rhetoric about a dystopian future fails to cut through for those of us already faced with a nightmarish present, surrounded by poverty and austerity.” Akec pointed out that the impacts of colonialism and neocolonialism remain main drivers of the climate crisis. His indictment: “The west may save itself at the cost of others.”
Perhaps because of the focus on arrestable actions, the group is largely white. The problem exists in the U.K. and the U.S., though both groups are attempting to address the issue. The fourth of XR’s demands in the U.S. is that “the transition to net-zero must be a just transition that benefits the most vulnerable people first and eliminates structural inequality.” XR’s goals are not just a radical restructuring of energy and humanity’s environmental impact on the world, but a restructuring of the social order through environmental justice.
“The government should be led on [the just transition] by a citizens’ assembly,” said the D.C. spokesperson in an interview. “This is really genuine democracy in action. It’s not the so-called democracy that led us into this crisis in the first place.” In short, the group doesn’t see the assembly as radical, but as a purely democratic and necessary change for government to take action.
Brana says that it’s important “to have the correct frame of reference” to understand Extinction Rebellion’s goals and urgent style. “Every big change in human history has been unprecedented,” Brana said. “Before democracy, there was no democracy. Before women’s suffrage, it didn’t exist. And so big changes have been made and they’re always thought of as impossible before they’re made.”
