Extinction Rebellion activists staged a die-in at Leamington Town Hall on Saturday the 13th of November, highlighting our disappointment at the COP26 climate change summit, which came to an end in Glasgow on the same day.
The Impossible Rebellion has been happening in London since August 23rd and so far at least 12 local rebels have taken part.
Midway through the Rebellion, inspired by another rebel from home, I joined the chat group for arrestee support. It was the end of the day of ‘Imagine the Impossible’ at the Science Museum (where I’d spent the afternoon speaking to the public from my ‘Crisis Talks’ table and, as I’d left, a road blockade had been forming nearby) and the action during the evening service at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Following on from our success at Art in the Park we were out on the streets again outside Leamington Town Hall trying to engage the public in the Climate Emergency debate by highlighting the dire findings of the IPPC report. This action will be on the 2nd Saturday of each month, so the next one is on 11th September. All are welcome to take part.
For the first time since the lockdown ended, XRWD delivered an incredible event in a public space. The basic concept was to have a “Parade Against Extinction” around Jephson Gardens, with rebels carrying placards highlighting the plight of endangered species in the U.K. and the world, and accompanied by art work produced by adults and children.
On Saturday 1st May, members of XR Warwick District, along with people from a wide range of local organisations (including Keep Our NHS Public, Justice for Palestinians, Warwickshire National Education Union and Socialist Appeal), as well as youth climate strikers and others, formed a physically distanced protest of around 100 people to oppose the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill that has recently had its second reading in Parliament.
2021 is a critical year for our planet. Time is running out and we need to explode out of lockdown with renewed energy. We also need to respond to the ways in which the world around us has changed.
This new strategy, called 'Do or Die', is the result of a bold experiment.
We have understood the science of the climate crisis for over 30 years. The first IPCC report, where the world’s scientific community set out the scale of the problem, came out in 1990. But our governments chose not to act then, and still fail us today.
It is from that failure that protest movements like XR have sprung, and scientists have played a generous role in supporting our rebellion and offering us expertise. But, though integrated with our movement, they have tended to stay away from direct action.
Between November 2020 and February 2021, 30 local residents, selected by a process called sortition to give a group that was representative for the district, met to learn about the climate crisis from experts. After the 10 sessions, the participants decided which actions should be a priority in Warwick District and presented these as a recommendation to the District Council (which declared a climate emergency in 2019).
The UK Rebellion Of One team has taken the difficult decision to move our action date to 1st May.
While this may be disappointing and frustrating news to some, we are hearing many rebel voices across the UK who think a delay could make the action more powerful.
Back in the summer of 2019, a small group of UK rebels felt something was missing from the exciting wave of climate activism that XR had ushered into the world. Our first International Rebellion had pushed the climate emergency into popular culture, and we were busy linking the climate crisis with other systems of human oppression - the crises of Capitalism, and Colonialism, and the Patriarchy. But one oppressive ideology was not being mentioned. Speciesism - the belief that one species of animal can be morally superior to and so dominate another.
XR UK now has its own communications setup called The Hub bringing together all sorts of resources including Rebellion Academy, Rebel Toolkit, Forums and Mattermost.
Mattermost is XR's own chat platform with groups/channels at local, regional and national level. We have set up our own XRWD channel.