John Curran volunteered to be arrested at an Extinction Rebellion protest because he fears what the future might be like for his three-year-old daughter.
Former police officers in the United Kingdom have joined climate protests organized by a group with a deliberate mission of getting arrested.
Among them is John Curran, who was actually arrested at another Extinction Rebellion protest earlier this year.
The decentralized international activist group employs peaceful civil disobedience and endorses mass arrests to force governments to take the climate crisis seriously.
Rob Cooper, the former chief superintendent of Devon and Cornwall police, is another former officer who’s joined the Extinction Rebellion protests.
You can hear the former officers’ stories in the video below.
Cops cuffed 27 people Monday as environmental activists covered the iconic statue with fake blood and blocked traffic on Broadway.
Activists spashed fake blood on the “Charging Bull” statue during a Monday protest demaning action to address climate change. Photo courtesy of @Postcards4USA/twitter
FINANCIAL DISTRICT, NY — Dozens of protesters were arrested after activists splashed fake blood on the Financial District’s “Charging Bull” sculpture during a Monday morning protest demanding action to combat climate change.
Cops cuffed 27 people during the demonstration in front of the Wall Street icon, which started about 11 a.m., the NYPD said. They will likely be charged with disorderly conduct, a police spokesperson said.
Dozens of protesters — some of them also covered with red paint — also blocked traffic farther up Broadway near Pine Street after splattering the statue in their bold effort to draw attention to the climate crisis.
“Denying it is — I’m not religious — but it’s sinful,” said Ben Watts, a protester from Brooklyn. “It’s totally immoral. I have a kid. The way it’s going, she may have no real future.”
The activist group Extinction Rebellion took credit for the protest, which drew more than 100 people to the Financial District. A video posted to Twitter shows an activist holding a flag emblazoned with the organization’s logo standing atop the bloodied bull.
Climate change activists Extinction Rebellion have organized a series of protests to block busy bridges to traffic across Canada.
The environmental campaigners, known as XR, seek to draw attention to the “climate emergency” and want to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2025.
It plans to shut down some of Canada’s busiest bridges on Monday, in line with protests around the world; including the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge over Halifax Harbour, the Burrard Street bridge in Vancouver and the Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto, by having protesters lie down or sit in traffic lanes, according to The Canadian Press.
Halifax’s Macdonald Bridge was closed to vehicle, pedestrian and bike traffic for much of Monday morning as fewer than 100 XR members gathered for a protest, CTV News Atlantic reports.
The demonstration forced many commuters to take alternate routes to work and fueled congestion on main arteries throughout Halifax and Dartmouth.
CTV News Atlantic reporter Amy Stoodley, who was at the protest, said around 15 protesters had been arrested and released without charge by around 11.30 a.m. ET.
The bridge was closed to traffic just before the protesters arrived on scene and police blocked their access to the bridge.
About 40,000 vehicles use the Macdonald bridge daily along with about 1,200 people who bike or walk across the span.
In Toronto, dozens of protestors shut the Prince Edward Viaduct connecting a main road in the east of the city to downtown Toronto. The demonstration, which was due to finish at 10 a.m. ET, still had protesters in place by 11.30 a.m.
On the other side of the country police in Victoria, B.C., say they are prepared for another XR protest at the Johnson Street Bridge, CTV Vancouver Island reports.
Organizers said the action will close the Johnson Street Bridge to traffic from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.
“This escalation of tactics is the minimum of what’s necessary to give young people a fighting chance at a decent future. We regret that ordinary people will be frustrated by the commute disruption, but the collapse of human society would be a much bigger inconvenience.”
And in Edmonton, a handful of XR protesters linked arms to block the Walterdale Bridge Monday morning to demand action on climate change.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, criticizing the action on Twitter, noted that traffic backups meant hundreds of cars were idling for no good reason.
The Edmonton protest is one of 60 happening around the world on Monday under the umbrella #BridgeOut, according to CTV News Edmonton.
Meanwhile in London, England, police arrested 21 climate change activists on Saturday and Sunday on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. Further protests took place in London on Monday.
The arrests come as protesters in Berlin and Amsterdam blocked roads ahead of what is being described as widespread demonstrations.
Last week, XR attempted to spray fake blood on a British government building in London, using an out-of-commission fire engine to drench the front of the Treasury building. SOURCE
XR says it is the fastest growing direct action climate movement in history. And it has the fashion business in its sights.
Extinction Rebellion protesters carrying a casket during the mock funeral for fashion last month. Credit: Alexander Coggin for The New York Times
LONDON — Last month, on the final day of London Fashion Week, hundreds of black-clad demonstrators gathered in Trafalgar Square to embark on what they called “a funeral march for fashion.”
Gathering behind a band and giant painted coffin, they slowly processed en masse down the Strand, shutting down traffic on the busy thoroughfare as they chanted and handed out leaflets, leaving gridlock and chaos in their wake.
It was just the latest in a series of efforts designed by Extinction Rebellion, or XR, to disrupt the most visible British fashion event of the year. First, protesters covered in fake blood performed a die-in and demanded fashion week be canceled on opening day. Then, outside the Victoria Beckham show, activists had lined up, brandishing posters emblazoned with statements like “R.I.P. LFW 1983-2019” and “Fashion = Ecocide.”
Sustainability is at the forefront of the fashion conversation today in a way it has never been before, and the emergence of XR — which 18 months ago consisted of just 10 people in Britain and has since swelled to millions of followers across 72 countries — has stoked the increasingly heated discussion.
Extinction Rebellion activists with BoycottFashion posters outside of the Victoria Beckham show during London Fashion Week.CreditAlexander Coggin for The New York Times
Although the movement targets numerous industries and governments worldwide, a recent focus on fashion has been particularly high profile.
Extinction Rebellion, which held demonstrations outside the Manhattan headquarters of The New York Times earlier this year demanding the newspaper increase its focus on climate change, has a distinctive hourglass logo, viral social media campaigns and creatively packaged demands for drastic action. It calls itself the fastest-growing climate and ecology direct action movement in history.
Come Monday, the most ambitious protest effort by the group yet will get underway, with tens of thousands of protesters planning to bring roads around Westminster to gridlock; there will also be a sit-in at London City Airport. This is the beginning of two weeks of environmental demonstrations that will also include repair stations where people can bring their old or damaged clothes.
So how does it all work?
Extinction Rebellion, which originally grew out of the activist group Rising Up! and relies solely on crowdfunding and donations, has three key goals: that governments are transparent about the impact of climate change; that they reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025; and that governments worldwide create citizens’ assemblies to set climate priorities.
Posters at the demonstration outside the Victoria Beckham show.CreditAlexander Coggin for The New York Times
The group has been deliberately conceived as a self-organizing, non-hierarchical holacracy. There is no single leader or group steering its strategy, tactics and goals. Instead, it is a loose alliance of 150 groups across Britain alone, with volunteers organized into working subgroups, and support teams and responsibilities distributed among chapters.
Meetings and planning sessions tend to take place in online forums and on messaging apps, with meetings offline used for training and creating a sense of community.
Extinction Rebellion is not the first modern protest movement to organize in such a way (there are parallels in particular with the Occupy movement), though the setup can foster a general sense of confusion and disarray.
Volunteers cheerfully describe planning meetings as “pretty crazy and disorganized.” A news conference last week ahead of the latest mass protests involved a fair amount of shouting and technical difficulties, and at London Fashion Week, certain planned protests failed to materialize. With the exception of the funeral march, turnouts were generally lower than anticipated.
Indeed, the success, and confusion, around the XR approach to fashion — a sector responsible for about 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations — is fairly representative of the state of the group at large.
From left: Bel Jacobs, Sara Arnold and Alice Wilby, who are the coordinators of the BoycottFashion movement and part of Extinction Rebellion. CreditAlexander Coggin for The New York Times
“It’s always somewhat chaotic and messy, but I suppose that’s part of the beauty of Extinction Rebellion,” said Sara Arnold, a coordinator of Boycott Fashion, an XR subgroup that has made headlines by urging people to buy no new clothes for a year. “You learn to just run with it and hope for the best.”
The group is calling for this year’s fashion week to be the last, after demanding its cancellation in an open letter to the British Fashion Council earlier this year.
The march began at Trafalgar Square before progressing along the Strand, a major road in the center of London, to London Fashion Week’s central venue at 180 The Strand. Protesters were dressed in black, wearing veils and carrying white roses.
Pallbearers carried black coffins, one bearing the slogan “OUR FUTURE,” while other activists banged drums and waved flags featuring the hourglass-shaped Extinction symbol. Banners and placards carried by protesters read “LIFE OR DEATH” and “R.I.P. LFW.”
Protesters cloaked in red gathered for an Extinction Rebellion demonstration on Tuesday in London. Credit: Isabel Infantes/PA Wire/AP
Members of the Red Brigade, a protest and performance group that has participated in previous Extinction Rebellion events, wore vibrant red robes, headdresses and veils, their faces painted stark white and their eyes outlined in black.
In the open letter delivered to the British Fashion Council in July, Extinction Rebellion accused London Fashion Week of setting a “global precedent” that encouraged the demand for fast fashion, resulting in increased pollution and the exploitation of workers by the fashion industry.
Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, said in response that London Fashion Week was a “platform to discuss societal issues from access to education to diversity and inclusion, and in this case, climate change.”
Extinction Rebellion activists protested outside Victoria Beckham’s London Fashion Week Show Sunday. Credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images
Bel Jacobs, a former fashion editor who now belongs to Extinction Rebellion’s Boycott Fashion group, told CNN that Tuesday’s protest was organized to “mark a hopeful end to London Fashion Week,” as well as to “lay to rest the toxic system that is destroying us all, and to mourn those who have already lost their lives and those still to lose their lives to the effects of climate change.”
“The fact is that we have already produced enough clothing to last us all for the next 40 years and beyond — at considerable cost to our planet. We are hoping that people will look at what they already own and use it in new imaginative, creative and joyful ways.”
The funeral was the final event in a series of protests staged by Extinction Rebellion throughout London Fashion Week.
Creator of the ‘ecological footprint’ on life and death in a world 4 C hotter.
UBC professor emeritus William Rees provides the grim calculations for humanity if climate change and growth in population and consumption fueled by cheap energy goes unchecked. Photo by Nick Wiebe, Wikimedia.
Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t.” — Chris Hedges
One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political status, primitive instinct and raw emotion tend to take the upper hand.
This is not a good thing if the fate of society is at stake. Take “hope” for example. For good evolutionary reasons, humans naturally tend to be hopeful in times of stress. So gently comforting is this word, that some even endow their daughters with its name. But hope can be enervating, flat out debilitating, when it merges with mere wishful thinking — when we hope, for example, that technology alone can save us from climate change.
As novelist Jonathan Franzen asks: “If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do 10 years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory?”
We needn’t bother Roger Hallam with this question. He can scarcely be held up as a “messiah of hope.” Quite the contrary. Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, has been desperately warning of societal collapse for years.
But on Aug. 15, in a memorable session of the BBC’s HardTalk, Hallam irritated multiple cultural nerves by claiming, on the basis of “hard science,” that six billion people will die as a result of climate change in coming decades.
More specifically, our ruling elites’ inaction and lies on climate change will lead to climate turmoil, mass starvation and general societal collapse in this century. Normally unflappable HardTalk host, Stephen Sackur, just couldn’t wrap his mind around Hallam’s unyielding assertions. MORE
Climate activist Roger Hallam sought to shut down Heathrow Airport on Friday
Heathrow Pause activists with the drones they plan to fly. Reuters
A co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion activist group has been arrested a day before he planned to shut down London’s Heathrow Airport.
Roger Hallam and another four people were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance. Climate change activists intend to ground flights at Heathrow on Friday morning by flying toy drones in its exclusion area, in protest at global warming and plans to build a third runway at the airport.
Roger Hallam, Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion, was just arrested in front of my eyes. From what I understand because of the planned „Heathrow Pause“-Action. More soon @SPIEGELONLINE@extinctionr
“Our policing plan is aimed at preventing criminal activity which poses a significant safety and security risk to the airport, and the thousands of passengers that will be using it,” said Laurence Taylor of London’s Metropolitan Police.
Police had already warned the Heathrow Pause, a group of individual activists with close links to Extinction Rebellion, they faced arrest if they went ahead with their plans.
“In these circumstances, we believe these arrests to be a proportionate response to preventing criminal activity that could significantly impact on a major piece of national infrastructure,” said Mr Taylor, a Deputy Assistant Commissioner.
“We remain fully prepared for the planned protest tomorrow, and will work quickly to identify criminal activity and arrest anyone committing offences.”
Members of the Pause had already said they expected to be detained but would continue with their plans regardless. It is unclear how many of them are. MORE
Extinction Rebellion is calling for the approach that ended Ireland’s abortion deadlock to be used in the UK
‘Extinction Rebellion is merely asking that the government agrees to establish a citizens’ assembly and give it the task of bringing forward proposals.’ Photograph: James Liu/Guardian Community
The climate crisis demands an urgent, realistic and sustained response from governments around the world: such a response will inevitably require sacrifices from all of us. And there lies the rub for our systems of representative democracy.
How can politicians facing short-term constraints (particularly the need to be re-elected every few years) be expected to take the necessary decisions that require long-term and, probably, quite painful change on the part of the citizens who get to vote for them?
This is where a citizens’ assembly could help, as the experience in Ireland shows. The country’s ban on abortion was an intractable problem that generation after generation of political leaders had failed to resolve. In 2016, under intense domestic and international pressure, the Irish government established a citizens’ assembly and tasked it with coming up with recommendations. It met over the course of five long weekends spread across five months. The 99 citizen members heard from expert witnesses, advocates and women who had been affected by Ireland’s abortion ban. In carefully facilitated roundtable discussions the members deliberated on the subject, producing a series of recommendations that were then sent back to parliament. A special all-party committee of parliament spent a number of months debating the recommendations. The result of this was the decision to have a referendum, which passed by a two-thirds majority in the summer of 2018.
In Britain, the Extinction Rebellion group believes that a citizens’ assembly could play a similarly important role in addressing the climate emergency. At the heart of a citizens’ assembly is random selection: in much the same way as for jury duty, regular citizens are selected at random. They have not run for office; they are not there to represent special interests. The citizen members are there to represent themselves, and thereby the greater population, of which they are a representative sample.
This is bringing “disorganised society” into the room – giving regular citizens a voice in helping to drive debates on important public policy. These citizens, in turn, are put in the special position of informing and educating the political classes – helping our political leaders to work through the complexities of a difficult issue; informing them of aspects they might not have considered before; giving them a sense of where citizens might be prepared to go; even providing some degree of political cover.
What is laudable about the Extinction Rebellion agenda is that the activists are not pushing for particular policy decisions on the climate emergency: they are merely asking that their government agrees to establish a citizens’ assembly and give it the task of bringing forward proposals. MORE
Amid mass die-ins, no-fly movements and Greta Thunberg sailing the climate emergency message across the Atlantic, there’s one route for tackling climate change we haven’t pursued, writes Jane Fae: through the courts
An iceberg floats by in Greenland, where the rate of glacier retreat has accelerated over the past several decades ( Getty )
When we think about climate change, the headlines are all about the damage hurtling down the track towards us: the consequences and, sometimes, the difficulties of putting a solution in place. Technical difficulties. Financial difficulties. Political difficulties.
We treat these last as though they are as much a fact of nature as the damage wrought by a warming climate. Increasingly, though, serious jurists and campaigners are beginning to ask whether those who stand in the way of reform, of repairing our climate, should be considered culpable for their actions – and criminally culpable at that.
In short, is the time coming for coordinated international action against those who, for all sorts of reasons, do not just stand in the way of measures to mitigate damage, but actively promote damaging policies? How should we treat those who benefit the climate apathy of their leaders while simultaneously decrying the systems that keep returning them to power?
“Not OUR fault!” proclaim some of the nicest of nice people – ourselves included. But, as Extinction Rebellion and David Attenborough tell us, this is an emergency, so aren’t legal repercussions inevitable?
Is it so eccentric or extreme? From where we stand today, perhaps. From banning smoking in public to exiting the EU without a deal, how quickly yesterday’s outlandish becomes the commonplace of today.
Extinction Rebellion’s ‘die-ins’ have brought the climate emergency to the top of the news agenda (Getty)
In fact, the idea of taking action against climate change deniers is not new. One of the first to do so was climate scientist James Hansen, who argued powerfully in 2008 for fossil fuel CEOs to be tried for “high crimes against humanity”.
Meanwhile, the Association of Small Island States pluckily stood firm against global incompetence. They highlighted that those who refused to adhere to calls for action benefited the most from climate degradation, while many small island states face near-certain destruction.
Still, this can feel a bit detached from everyday reality: a theoretical future most of us won’t be around for, discussed in technocratic terms by academics and experts. A mere decade ago, concerns fell on deaf ears. (Now, Extinction Rebellion could not be more loud and clear.)
Climate activists staging a ‘die-in’ under the Natural History Museum’s blue whale in April, as part of a mass protest that brought parts of London to a standstill (AFP/Getty)
Back then the issues were too big, too frightening. The detail just too much for ordinary people – and many politicians – to grasp. Sure, the forecasts were clear enough. If we continue to pump greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere, humanity faces a series of disasters of ever-more-biblical proportions, from fire, floods and droughts to the ultimate rendering uninhabitable of large portions of the planet. We needed mitigation to address the causes of climate change (reduce emissions and remove them from the atmosphere) as well as adaptation to address the impacts of change.
...One significant intervention in this area comes from Netherlands-based Stop Ecocide, a law-based group working to make ecocide a crime under international law.
In the end, though, the letter of the law may count for less than the mood of the people. If Britain – or any other nation or organisation – were to invade another country and evict the local population, that would be an act of war, whether it was treated as one by international courts or not.
Last week a huge fire blazed through central Evia in Greece (AFP/Getty)
We are in the process of doing just that to millions of people across the world and, once those people join up the dots, from Trump walking out of the Paris agreement to Bolsonaro pushing ahead with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest to oil companies continuing business as usual, the resulting anger will be a wonder to behold.
How culpable are they? Does it matter whether this is ignorance or greed? Perhaps we do need to start being beastly to those being beastly to the planet. Americans, Brazilians… and maybe, before we get too smug, some Brits as well. MORE
“state-sanctioned human rights abuses and ecocide”
An activist splashes red paint over the embassy’s facade during Extinction Rebellion climate change protest in front of Brazilian Embassy in London
LONDON (Reuters) – Climate-change protesters threw red paint at the Brazilian embassy in London on Tuesday to demonstrate against damage to the Amazon rainforest and what they described as violence against indigenous tribes living there.
Police arrested six activists from the Extinction Rebellion group after they glued themselves to the embassy windows and climbed onto a glass awning above the entrance.
The protesters had splattered red paint and sprayed red handprints over the facade, along with slogans such as “No More Indigenous Blood” and “For The Wild”.
Extinction Rebellion, which disrupted traffic in central London for several weeks earlier this year, said Tuesday’s protest aimed to challenge the Brazilian government over “state-sanctioned human rights abuses and ecocide”.
Brazil contains about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, a bulwark against global warming thanks to the vast amounts of carbon dioxide it soaks up and recycles into oxygen.
Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in January, has long been sceptical about environmental concerns. He argues that the Amazon is a resource that belongs to Brazil and should be economically developed. He also criticizes the existence of protected lands.
Critics say his rhetoric has emboldened loggers, ranchers and informal miners, resulting in a dramatic acceleration of deforestation and in violence against the rainforest’s indigenous inhabitants.
Last week, data from Brazil’s own space research agency showed that deforestation on Brazilian territory had jumped around 67 percent in the first seven months of the year. Bolsonaro has rejected the agency’s data and fired its chief. MORE
Activists spashed fake blood on the “Charging Bull” statue during a Monday protest demaning action to address climate change. Photo courtesy of @Postcards4USA/twitter
County Sustainability Group 