Born in May 2018, Extinction Rebellion is a colourful and pacifist movement, but also an extremely organised one that uses mathematics as a tool for planning protests.
For eleven days thousands of people brought London to a standstill, without any violence, driven by a momentous idea: saving the dying planet. They formed human chains to block bridges and intersections, lay down in the streets, glued themselves to the entrance of the London Stock Exchange and to tube doors, and more than a thousand demonstrators were arrested. "All men recognise the right to revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable," wrote Henry David Thoreau in his essay Civil Disobedience. Civil disobedience is precisely the strategy adopted by Extinction Rebellion (XR), a climate disobedience movement born to demand urgent action to halt the climate and environmental crisis threatening the survival of our species and many others.
XR's manifesto, its Declaration of Rebellion, is unequivocal and highlights the absolute necessity of acting to avert catastrophe. "Humanity faces an event unprecedented in its history. Unless we take immediate action, we will be catapulted into the further destruction of everything we hold dear: this nation, the peoples who inhabit it, the ecosystems we live in, and the future of generations to come." The group appeals to the individual sense of responsibility of citizens, since institutions have largely failed in their duty. "We declare it our duty to act on behalf of the safety and wellbeing of our children, our communities, and the very future of the planet. In accordance with conscience and reason, we declare our rebellion against our government and the corrupt and inept institutions that threaten our future. Rebelling becomes not only a right, but also a sacred duty. We hereby declare null and void the social contract, which the government has invalidated through its prolonged failure to act. And we appeal to the conscience of every individual to rise up peacefully alongside us."
Extinction Rebellion is a radical non-violent socio-political movement aimed at preventing climate change, halting biodiversity loss, and minimising the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse. It was founded in May 2018 by Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook. The former, 52, has a background as an organic farmer and works as a researcher at King's College London, while the latter, 47, is a molecular biophysics researcher at the University of Manchester. Both have long had a keen interest in protest, as evidenced by a doctorate on the history of social protest from 1900 to the present day. It was through their academic studies — which allowed them to analyse the key factors that determined the success or failure of protest movements — that Hallam and Bradbrook developed the "perfect protest model", which was the first domino to fall leading to the creation of XR. Unlike the Fridays for Future movement, born from the solitary protest of Greta Thunberg and which within a year brought more than one and a half million people onto the streets around the world, the founders of XR are not students, and the generational gap is evident, even though the pool of supporters is entirely heterogeneous.
Despite their somewhat dishevelled, hippie-ish appearance, Hallam and Bradbrook's approach is decidedly scientific: mathematics is used as a tool for planning protests and every move is studied in detail. The number of demonstrators arrested during the London protests, for example, was not the result of chance but of precise planning — XR's objective was to reach a number of harmless people arrested large enough to be impossible to ignore. "At some point the head of the police will go to the prime minister and say: we can't make any more arrests, we can't arrest 84-year-old women and 10-year-old children. A political solution is needed," Hallam told the BBC.
The choice of non-violence, too, is not dictated solely by idealism but conceals a far more pragmatic purpose: thanks to their algorithm, the founders of XR established that a peaceful protest has a far greater chance of success than a violent one — 53 against 25 per cent. A study published in 2011 demonstrated, meanwhile, that just 3.5 per cent of the population can be enough to achieve significant social and political change. This figure, according to Hallam and Bradbrook, shows that a sustainable revolution is not a pipe dream but is within reach — they will just need to convince two and a half million people.
The group has made three fundamental demands:
XR has pressed the government to tell the truth about the scale of the ongoing ecological crisis by declaring a climate emergency. The movement starts from the premise that no political leader in any country is being honest with the public about the extent or severity of the threat, or about the countermeasures that will be taken to address it. For this reason, telling the truth would represent a radical act, from which real change could begin. Thanks in part to pressure exerted by XR, in recent months numerous local councils across Britain (around 60, including London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leeds, Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge) have declared a climate emergency and committed to adopting measures aimed at drastically reducing CO2 emissions. According to XR's founders, the declaration of a climate emergency would also carry strong symbolic weight and would change the way citizens perceive climate change.
The second demand calls for a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of reaching net zero by 2025. According to XR, it is no longer acceptable to be guided by what is considered politically possible; policy must now be guided by what is scientifically necessary.
Finally, the movement calls for greater importance to be given to the will of the people through the establishment of a citizens' assembly, which would oversee the changes required to achieve the stated objectives.
XR hopes to open negotiations with the British government; meetings with Environment Secretary Michael Gove and Energy Minister Claire Perry are scheduled for next week.
For eleven days, from 15 to 25 April, the streets of the English capital were the scene of peaceful and creative protests by XR demonstrators who, among other things, marched on Heathrow Airport and chained themselves to the home of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party. During this period the government deployed more than 10,000 police officers, who arrested around 1,130 people (including an 83-year-old man). On Earth Day, 22 April, Greta Thunberg was also present in London, expressing her support for XR. At the end of the occupation, XR's organisers declared that, despite having decided to withdraw, "the real action begins now — we need to create leaders and communities of protest across the world, to expand the Extinction Rebellion network. We will leave the physical locations, but a space for truth has been opened in the world." The protest organisers also thanked Londoners for opening their hearts: "We know we have made your lives difficult, but we do not do this lightly — we do it only because it is an emergency."
During the days of the protests, a new mural by the brilliant British street artist Banksy appeared in London; he is said to have taken part in the XR demonstrations. The mural was indeed created during the days of the protests on a street near Marble Arch, the site of one of the environmental movement's encampments. The image depicts a child, kneeling beside a freshly planted seedling, holding the movement's symbol in one hand, and bearing the words: "From this moment despair ends and tactics begin."
The London demonstration was undoubtedly the most effective and the best attended, but similar demonstrations took place in around 80 cities, including Milan, Turin and Rome, spread across 33 countries. "These are the first responses of international rebellion: civil disobedience works when it never stops — said Marco Bertaglia, 49, Italian coordinator of Extinction Rebellion. — We will see this in Italy too, where the movement is growing until it reaches a critical mass."
XR has already achieved a first, important milestone: on 1 May, the British House of Commons passed a motion tabled by the Labour opposition declaring a "climate emergency". Britain thus becomes the first nation in the world to take such a step — one with great symbolic value but which presupposes the adoption of concrete measures to tackle the emergency. "This could be the beginning of a series of actions," said Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. "We commit to working with other countries to avert climate catastrophe and to reminding Donald Trump that he cannot ignore international agreements."
It seemed unthinkable just a year ago, and yet the rebellion has begun — and it does not wear only the face of Greta, gentle and stern at the same time. All over the world, thousands of people, after decades of apathy, are making their voices heard, openly dissenting from the policies that have brought the Earth to the brink of ecological collapse and triggered the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history. Thanks to the protests and demonstrations of recent months, and to the media coverage they have received, the truth about the climate crisis and the threat it poses to humanity is now in the public domain and can no longer be ignored by those who hold power. The veil of Maya has finally been torn away, and the truth, with all its terrible consequences, is unfolding before our eyes. The words of the British philosopher John Locke, which appear at the top of XR's Declaration of Rebellion, underscore the need to usher in a new era of truth — without which no real change is possible. "The love of truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfe
