In Love and Rage
On 17 November 2018, my life changed.
Until then, for most of it, I’d felt like a spy abandoned behind enemy lines. The organisation I worked for had long collapsed and my contacts had vanished but I was still out there, living in a world that didn’t apply to me, from which I was exempt, still soaking up the information, waiting for the call when I could tell all and be understood.
My biggest problem was that while this organisation was dead, its ideology was still programmed into my brain, dictating how I saw the world.
You’re programmed too, by the way, but your programming is better aligned to the external operating system and you don’t notice.
For example, unlike you, I don’t have a smartphone.
‘Why not?’ you say when you notice this.
‘Because I don’t want one.’
‘Why don’t you want one?’
‘Why don’t you want an emu on a piece of string?’ I want to answer but don’t. ‘Same question.’
A lot of it, I feel, has to with wanting things, or in my case, not wanting them. I don’t want a smartphone; I don’t want new clothes; I don’t want a watch that tracks my location and communicates with my central heating to turn it on when I’m five minutes away from my flat.
I’ve read about the French social theorist René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire; everybody else wants these things so I should want them too. But I don’t. Why not? Because of the programming.
You probably think that I’m a deeply weird person by now and I don’t blame you, but what you’ve got to remember is that I was a spy for 20 years, and I’ve avoided detection. I look and act very much as someone like me—a white, middle-aged, middle-class man who lives in the London suburbs —should do. There are undoubtedly quirks, like not having a smartphone, but nothing outrageous. I’m normal. You wouldn’t spot me.
But on 17 November 2018, my life changed. I learnt that my organisation wasn’t dead and I began my journey back in from the cold.
1.
It had been billed as ‘Rebellion Day’ by the organisers, a group called Extinction Rebellion that no-one I knew had heard of. Now, after blocking off roads in four major locations in London for over a week, racking up over 1,000 arrests in the process, lots of people have heard of them and call them, rather snazzily, ‘XR’. Back then, though, it was the full ‘Extinction Rebellion’—six or seven ill-fitted syllables making quite a mouthful.
At 9:45 that Saturday morning I walked onto Westminster Bridge from the southern side, just up from Waterloo station. It was quiet; a fine, chilly but clear November morning. I stepped past a couple of policemen in yellow vests who, happily, didn’t register me. I was walking across the bridge quite normally, as if I wanted to get to the other side, , with the three-point instructions I’d read on Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Rebellion Day’ Facebook page playing in my head.
Having got onto the bridge, I was up to point two: ‘Wander innocently up and down the bridge on the pedestrian walkways. Take selfies, admire the view. Don’t congregate in large groups. Wait for the signal...’
I’d come across Extinction Rebellion—how else?—on the Internet. I think it was a Tweet from a Quaker account that first tipped me off. I wasn’t a Quaker but I’d gone to a Quaker secondary school and had an abiding fondness for this tiny Christian movement best known for its unyielding pacifism. Every couple of years, my fondness would bloom into an appearance at a Quaker meeting where some Quaker would stand up and talk about ‘God’ and I’d decide this really wasn’t for me and not come back. Twitter was safe, though.
I tell people now: ‘I’d always been concerned about the environment,’ but that isn’t quite right. I’d always despaired about the environment. As I saw it, mankind had unleashed this great destructive machine over the Earth gobbling up forests and animals and sea-life, pumping it all back out as toxic clouds of black smoke, that no-one wanted to stop. This was the machine that made aeroplanes and crisp packets; tennis balls and tins of tuna; lollipops and laptop computers and everything else that we live on, everything that spells progress. What could I—one in seven-and-a-half billion—do about that?
Even the supposed environmental movement was fuelling the great machine. I remember a music festival where Greenpeace had a stand. They had some fancy set-up with virtual reality headsets and a mini-cinema and you could buy t-shirts and get a tote bag. That kind of needless consumption was OK, yeah?
What wasn’t part of the great machine? Extinction Rebellion, apparently. I couldn’t believe it at first. I headed to their website expecting to see logos of NGOs or charities planted in the navigation bar at the bottom, but there were none.
At the centre of Extinction Rebellion, I discovered, is Roger Hallam, a PhD student at King’s College London and in his early fifties. He’d been researching what kind of protest movement would have the greatest chance of success against the odds. The answer, he discovered, lay in mass-participation and non-violent civil disobedience, with each of the two being equally critical. Mass participation: 3.5 per cent of the population needs to join up (this statistic is actually from historical research by Harvard political scientist to Erica Chenoweth). Non-violent civil disobedience: disruption, mass arrests and incarcerations are essential, for without them power will not budge, but participants must stay entirely peaceful or risk losing wider public support.
Together with a rag-tag bunch of activists, Hallam is putting his research into practice in order to achieve three goals. First: get the UK government to tell the truth on the state of the climate and ecological emergency. Second: commit to the UK being carbon-neutral (that is, the UK would produce no net carbon dioxide) by 2025 and halt biodiversity decline. Third: the transition to a carbon-neutral economy should not be overseen by the government but instead by citizens’ councils—randomly selected people from all over the country meeting to decide how to proceed.
Clicking about online, I found an article Hallam had written for The Guardian back in June 2018, berating the government over its decision to build a third runway at Heathrow airport . ‘CO2 emissions are altering our planet,’ Hallam wrote, ‘and it will lead to humanity’s destruction unless we do something about it’. Limiting global warming to below two degrees above pre-industrial levels is a central goal of the 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement on climate change, but look at the science, said Hallam—two degrees of global warming is already locked into the system. ‘As we pass [two degrees], it is no longer possible to grow grains at scale in the centre of Russia and North America, where temperatures will increase twice as fast as the global average. Millions will starve, tens of millions of climate refugees will be heading in our direction, and the world economic system will collapse. We are hurtling towards this moment of truth.’
I’d rarely read anything as stark. I knew that Hallam’s prediction of grain crop failures the moment we passed two degrees was too precise to be the whole truth as climate scenarios always have error bars attached. But I also knew that he had outlined just one of the many scenarios leading inextricably to irreversible misery for millions in the coming decades and annihilation by the end of the century. Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, rising sea-levels, salination and desertification of farmland and lethal weather events had all entered my peripheral vision but I hadn’t managed to derive the equation of ‘CLIMATE CHANGE = MASS MURDER’ (an Extinction Rebellion slogan), much less apply it to those I loved. Now I had.
Back on Westminster Bridge I was still waiting for ‘the signal’, whatever that was. People were arriving—some singly, some in small groups—and loitering on the walkways either side of the road. I’d made my way three-quarters of the way across, towards the Houses of Parliament. Next to me three mild-mannered middle-class women, two in their twenties, one in her fifties, chatted about how low-level but wanton lawbreaking wasn’t normally their thing.
‘Me neither. I mean, I’ve just come on my own. Do you mind if I join you?’ I didn’t say,but wanted to.
We waited. Traffic on the bridge became patchy. Then it stopped. Ten, fifteen minutes passed. Just when I was starting to wonder if the whole thing was off, a woman in a yellow steward’s vest strode out into the road, swung her arm up over her head and whistled impressively. We all clambered over. People cheered and hugged. By now one of the few, if not the only, person not in a group, I whooped and clapped by myself, self-consciously.
We gathered and sat down on the cold tarmac for the speeches, delivered from a small platform with the help of a single loudspeaker balanced precariously on top of a stand. After about 20 minutes four police officers picked their way through the huddled mass, doing their best police officer impressions: ‘OK, we need to clear the bridge now. You all need to move on.’ Nobody moved. Soon after we were told that Extinction Rebellion had blocked all five bridges as planned. Another hour went by and the police concentrated their arrests on London’s other, less populated, bridges. That meant we were able to stay on Westminster Bridge for the afternoon.
I was silent the whole time I was on the bridge. I’d dropped into a mood of attentive detachment, in a reverie that somehow did not shut out what was going on. There was a queue to speak on the platform, and anyone could join it. Someone read out their own Kipling-esque poem lamenting the destruction of nature. Another talked about alternatives to gas boilers. Several people did little more than express their sadness at the endless abuse of the living planet.
The speech I can’t erase from memory was from an old man, not so steady on his feet. This was Mayer Hillman, whose name I recognised as one of climate science’s elders. ‘I’m here to give my support for what you’re doing,’ he said croakily but confidently. ‘But I’m asking you to be realistic.’ By which he meant accept defeat. India and China are developing and carbonising, he said, and there was nothing to do about that. Try and minimise your carbon footprint, he advised, but don’t imagine you can buy the Earth much extra time. The game is up.
After two or three hours of sitting in the cold I decided to stretch my legs. There were about three or four hundred of us on the bridge and it was largely empty. Once out of earshot of the speeches, all was calm but for the tourists streaming down the pedestrian walkways on either side. I joined them, bobbing along like a cork in a river of humanity towards London’s Southbank, where I joined thousands more people, all oblivious to what was happening on the bridges, all buying and buying and buying from the shops, bijou market stalls, chain restaurants, fuelling the great machine.
An obscure record I’d come to know during the time I’d spent in Paris in my twenties started playing in my head. Over a snaking double-bass figure tracked by a hoarse saxophone, with African percussion clattering all around, the French-Togolese actor Alfred Panou was explaining where he was at with French society.
‘Je n’ai plus le moral nécessaire de tendre ma joue pour recevoir la claque de la justice.’ (I no longer have the moral fibre to turn my cheek to get a slap from the law.)
I headed back to Westminster Bridge, having lost the moral fibre to stay undercover.
2.
The next morning, I felt an overwhelming desire to go to a Quaker meeting. It had been three years since my last visit. I felt this desire at a purely emotional level, as a force acting somewhere in my chest. I rationalised it. It would be good, I reasoned, to reconnect with the movement that had shaped me so that, 22 years after I’d left school, I ended up among the few hundred on the bridge and not the many thousands at the Southbank.
I’d spent the night at my in-laws and, as it happened, they lived five minutes from a Quaker meeting house. Yet instead I followed a magnetic pull towards central London and Friends House, the Quakers’ imposing administrative centre in Euston, 45 minutes away.
If people know one more thing about the Quakers, other than the pacifism, it’s normally about their famously silent meetings. But meeting for worship isn’t just about sitting in silence. When someone, anyone, feels strongly moved to speak, they can, and on any subject whatsoever. This spoken ministry tends to be brief, and it’s rare that more than a handful of people will minister during a meeting.
That morning, the first speaker was on their feet after five minutes, also a rarity. She spoke about Extinction Rebellion. The time for signing petitions, for going on marches, for concentrating purely on your own individual lifestyle choices had passed, she reckoned. The world that sustains us is on the verge of collapse. It is time for more direct action. She hoped that Extinction Rebellion would ‘continue to be Spirit-led’ and could deliver the action needed. She sat down.
Wow, I thought. Whenever I’d brought up Extinction Rebellion with people I knew, they’d never heard of it. The previous night on the TV news, the bridges protest was given 30 seconds. Would anyone else who wasn’t on a bridge yesterday be talking about it right now?
A man stood up minutes later, reminiscing about walking through the woods with his mother who told him that the world was God and, in a way, he had never left that view. And then every five minutes or so, people stood and talked about the desecration of the living world and their hopes for Extinction Rebellion. I was astonished.
It was the most vocal meeting I have ever attended, by far. In the gaps between the ministry I wondered if I was willing to be arrested for this movement, face time in jail even. The criminal justice system was utterly unknown to me and I feared it.
With the meeting nearing its end someone stood up and began reading from their phone:
‘Corder Catchpool served in the Friends Ambulance Unit during the First World War, but on the introduction of conscription he returned to England to give his witness as a conscientious objector and was imprisoned for more than two years…’
We heard Catchpool’s statement from his trial. He longed to return to the ambulance unit.
‘By the feverish activity of my hands, I might help to save a fraction of the present human wreckage. That would be for me no sacrifice. It costs far more to spend mind and spirit, if need be, in the silence of a prison cell, in passionate witness for the great truths of peace. That is the call I hear.’
He honoured, he said, those who followed their conscience and had gone to fight.
‘In a crisis like the present it would be unbecoming to elaborate the reasons which have led me to a course so different. Today a man must act. I believe, with the strength of my whole being, that standing here I am enlisted in active service as a soldier of Jesus Christ, who bids every man be true to the sense of duty that is laid upon his soul.’
Wow again. Normally when I’m reading or listening to someone speak, I have my guard up against anything that even comes close to referencing a higher power, let alone a specific deity or son thereof. Any mention of such things and I can safely knock the whole argument down. The deities were man’s attempt to make sense of the world before science came along and showed, definitively, that there was no sense to the world, that everything was just stuff. I didn’t do God.
But my guard was down and these words had hit me hard. They had somehow answered my questions without addressing them directly. They had, to use a Quaker expression, spoken to my condition.
On my way out I was asked if I’d like to stay for tea. I gave some dry-mouthed, garbled reply about having to be somewhere and left. What had just happened?
I still don’t quite know. I have learnt, though, that the support for Extinction Rebellion given voice at that meeting was no fluke. It’s not just that lots of Quakers cottoned on to Extinction Rebellion in the early days. XR is, I’d argue, the latest in a line of secular campaigning organisations including Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Oxfam in which the formative impact of Quakerism was essential.
Both of the ideological architects of XR—Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook—have been strongly influenced by Quakerism: Hallam via an engagement with the peace movement in the 1980s and Bradbrook as someone who first attended Quaker meetings as a child and remained a Quaker well into adulthood. Rupert Read, the University of East Anglia philosophy professor and XR spokesperson, is a Quaker. So too is Molly Scott Cato, the Green MEP who was one of XR’s earliest political supporters.
And unlike its Quaker-driven forebears, which are mostly conventional organisations acting on matters of Quaker concern, XR has Quaker precepts baked into its operational DNA. They’re everywhere from the non-negotiable commitment to non-violent activism to the non-hierarchical structure and collective, consensual decision-making.
Back in November, walking shell-shocked out of the meeting, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew that I’d had what could best be described, even by a person as irreligious as I, as a religious experience.
I returned the following Sunday. Soon afterwards I started attending meetings closer to home and now I’m part of that small community. In the months leading up to the April 2019 protests, my local meeting was the one place I could go and talk about the climate crisis and XR and be immediately understood. I could also voice my willingness to be arrested and for that not to elicit looks of incomprehension and mild horror. Non-violent civil disobedience is an accepted way for Quakers to live their faith.
What has provoked more curiosity among Quakers, bizarrely, is my status as a former pupil of a Quaker school. ‘Quakerism must be at the core of who you are, then,’ a Quaker friend suggested one morning before meeting for worship. At the time, I rubbished the idea. My parents weren’t Quakers and didn’t know much about Quakerism when they sent me to the school. My school wasn’t even that different from any other, most of the time; we sat in class, we did homework, we messed around when we could. I wasn’t spending my free time poring over Quaker Faith and Practice (the movement’s defining text). I was listening to rock and rap music on the radio, vegging out in front of the TV, chatting teenage inanities with my friends. Those were my formative influences.
But, no, this wasn’t right. I was one of the many young people who, as the fog of childhood clears, start to apprehend adult society as a vast morass of cruelty, injustice and hypocrisy. I lived in a country permanently at war while proclaiming peace, driven by greed while vaunting charity, avoiding all existential reflection while self-congratulating on its intellectual advancement.
Having held fast to its central commitments to peace, equality, simplicity and integrity for 350 years, Quakerism resonated deeply with me. I knew, though, that if I hadn’t gone to a Quaker school then some other dissident worldview would have captured me. Marxism and far-left politics might have appealed. Or, if I’d been born about 20 years later, I could see myself going from YouTube sermon to fundamentalist chatroom, along the path of radicalisation to who knows where?
My Quaker friend made her comment about Quakerism being at my core in February, when Shamima Begum, the young British woman who left the UK at age 15 to join ISIS, was back in the news asking to be allowed to come home.
The following week in meeting for worship I wanted to stand up and say: ‘I am Shamima Begum.’
3.
On 16 April 2019, I stepped once again onto a London bridge occupied by Extinction Rebellion and into a very different experience. It wasn’t the same bridge—Waterloo Bridge this time—and I wasn’t the same man but it was other factors that made the difference.
In November when I returned to Westminster Bridge after my trip along the Southbank I had the sense of rejoining a sideshow, the kind of minor protest rally you might come across in London on a weekend, look at for a few minutes and then move on. This time I was joining London’s main event.
It was the second day of the protests, a Tuesday. I’d spent the morning at the Marble Arch roundabout, normally a choking sink-hole of traffic fumes, but now occupied by XR and entirely traffic free. My XR ‘affinity group’ (a team of around 10 people who undertake civil disobedience actions together, with each person fulfilling a different role) had been assigned to the triumphalist monument called Marble Arch before the week began.
According to the affinity group rota we were supposed to be on shift, manning the roadblocks, but weren’t really needed. ‘Section 14’ orders had been issued for the three other sites—Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Oxford Circus—meaning that protesting at those places was an immediate arrestable offense. Marble Arch was not under Section 14 and was therefore relatively safe. Groups of protesters still blocked the roads branching off from the roundabout but only enough were needed to ensure the police didn’t try to push us back and shrink our territory.
I’d come to Waterloo Bridge with Rob, a Quaker who I’d first met at Westminster Meeting House, not far from Trafalgar Square, which I’d also started visiting. Rob was the only member of my affinity group to have turned up on shift that morning. The others had mostly taken up other jobs within XR: one as a driver, another on first aid, and one person had joined the Samba band. As someone willing to be arrested, I hadn’t volunteered for any extra jobs. I saw my job as blocking roads and getting arrested at Marble Arch. The idea of walking into the arms of the police wherever the need was greatest didn’t appeal.
I’d started the day in a sour mood. XR’s efforts the day before, which included blocking off the terminally congested crossroads at Oxford Circus by planting a bright pink boat complete with DJ booth in the middle of it, had garnered relatively meagre coverage, including another 30-second slot on the night’s BBC News bulletin. What would it take to get the greatest threat to human existence ever encountered a little higher up the news agenda?
The high spirits at Marble Arch were infectious, though, and my mood soon lifted. The previous night XR had held on to Waterloo Bridge despite a concerted effort by the police to clear it. The police had run out of holding cells after having made their 122 arrests and were shipping arrestees as far afield as Brighton to be booked. A conversation with a police officer that morning was being relayed around the site. ‘You broke us last night,’ the police officer had apparently said. Ha! We broke the police!
Really though? As Rob and I stepped onto Waterloo Bridge, my mood suffered a sharp reversal. A row of police vans was lined up along one side of the bridge attended by a sizeable pack of police officers. After a chilly morning Waterloo Bridge was now roasting under an unseasonably intense sun and the police officers’ yellow vests appeared oddly, painfully garish, like a detail from a nightmare.
There were cheers and whooping from the crowd further up on the bridge and four police officers came into view carrying a young man by his arms and legs, his face red from the heat. He was dumped down on the pavement by the side of the bridge, looking distraught. The police officers regrouped. They chatted and then another pack strode up the bridge, their faces hardened against us, to where about 40 XR protesters sat in the full glare of the sun.
Hundreds of other people were gathered nearby on the south side of the bridge, many of them around a lorry trailer that was doubling as a stage for impromptu performances and speeches. These people—Rob and I would join them—were all breaking the law, but the police returned time and time again, always moving in packs, to fish someone out at random from the area in front of the lorry.
For the last month I’d been signed up to a range of online updates from environmental campaign groups and news services. I’d had all the gruesome details of environmental collapse drip-fed into my consciousness and now, watching these arrests, they started overflowing: the studies on Arctic ice melt (14,000 tonnes per second), the mass extinctions of wildlife (60 per cent drop in wild vertebrate populations in my lifetime), desertification (12 million hectares of arable land lost annually); the absolute certainty of human suffering and death on a scale never before witnessed.
What did the police think they were doing, exactly? Was a liveable future an unreasonable demand? Was there any other way to achieve it? Didn’t the police wonder if they might be in the wrong, arresting that young man barely in his twenties for whom a criminal record would be a longstanding blight, but was still sitting there patiently? How about when they helped that grandmother to her feet and carted her off to the police van? Aren’t these the people they are paid to protect?
A sense of injustice overwhelmed me and I wasn’t keen to stick around. Rob and I returned to the underground station and said goodbye. He went home to nurse a throat infection and I headed to Oxford Circus.
The party was in full swing. House music thumped out of the pink boat that XR had parked at the intersection of one of London’s busiest shopping streets. All around people threw up their arms and danced in the sunshine like revellers at an all-day rave in a remote field in Gloucestershire. Except this was Oxford Circus and tourists were streaming in and out of NikeTown, H&M, TopShop carrying plastic bags shining slick and oily in the sun, staying on the pavement even though the road was clear, hitting the shops like normal, as if a bright pink yacht with ‘TELL THE TRUTH’ written on the side and a 40-foot mast was something you saw every day in Oxford Circus, maybe part of some megabucks promotional event and we were all happy to party it up with our favourite brand.
A man in his twenties stood up next to the boat DJ, fiddled with his mic and the music came down a notch. I can’t remember the exact words, but they went something like this: ‘We need to remember why we’re here. We’re here out of love for the living world. Which is being destroyed. We act in solidary with those peoples all around the world who are already suffering and dying because of this. We are now in open rebellion [cheers from the crowd] against governments around the world, and our government, for failing to protect us, the people, from this catastrophe…’
In the shade, under the hull, sat the ‘barnacles’—people who were joined to each other via ‘lock-on’ tubes or stuck to the boat, or the trailer it sat on, with glue.
I’d arrived during a lull in arrests and only a few police were present. Had it not been for their hi-vis vests and flak-jackets, they could have been mistaken for bystanders, looking on and wondering what all the fuss was about.
With no-one to talk to, I sent a text to see if any of my affinity group were around and headed down to Marble Arch. Once there, I met up with Laura, the group’s Samba band member. Both abuzz with what we’d witnessed over the last two days, we sat and talked a-mile-a-minute while a folk band played on the lorry-trailer stage. Her phone pinged with a message from the site chatgroup. The police had increased their presence at the roadblock on Edgware Road and reinforcements were needed. We headed over.
A crowd of 20 or so XR protesters were blocking the right-hand lane of the road while four or five officers stood around a police car immediately to our left watching us. I recognised a couple of people I’d met that morning holding up a long vinyl banner carrying the slogan ‘LIFE OR DEATH’ in fat white letters on a black background. I joined them and we started chatting like work colleagues catching up after a long weekend.
More reinforcements arrived. We chanted some slogans and tried to learn some XR songs. At some point someone brought over a Bluetooth speaker and we sang along with Bohemian Rhapsody instead. As it turned dark, one of the site coordinators doled out hummus sandwiches to the banner-holders. People introduced themselves and struck up conversations without awkwardness, as if in an American movie-fantasy London. Many of us had never been part of any movement or political party or activist group before. All of us, I think, had stared into the abyss that was claiming lives all across the equator and would claim ours, too, or our children’s. We’d not really spoken of this to many people before; it had been our secret shame. But now, incredibly, we’d found each other. We hugged when we said goodbye.
I divided my time over the next two days between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus, which also became a site for mass arrests. A pack of police would walk up from the vans parked on the north side of Regent Street, move through the crowd, who may be dancing, standing or sitting, and surround someone at random.
‘Can you hear me? Do you speak English? OK. There is a Section 14 order served on this site meaning that if you stay here you will be arrested. If you want to protest go to Marble Arch, but you will be arrested if you stay here. Do you understand?’
Fear tightened my throat each time they approached. Would I be next? Would I keep my cool if I was? Would I fold and head down to Marble Arch? Or would I draw on my bubbling reserves of anger and resentment and start getting testy, aggressive even, as all the arrestees before me hadn’t done?
I never found out. I didn’t stay at Oxford Circus for more than an hour at a stretch. I wasn’t arrested.
My ‘Rebellion Week’, as it had originally been billed, ended early on Friday afternoon as family commitments called. I returned to Central London on Sunday for meeting for worship at Westminster Meeting House.
I smiled as I sat down in the large wood-panelled meeting room, as if it were a concert and I was waiting for a favourite singer to come onstage, hoping for renditions of the hits that had wowed me back in November. They never came, but over half-way through one of the meeting’s regulars rose to voice their support for XR. This was hesitant, careful ministry, and all the more affecting for that.
It was followed by ministry from a Quaker visiting from Italy, who was similarly enthused by XR’s actions and, after that, from an XR activist attending his first Quaker meeting. Five minutes later a rangy man with close-cropped hair and a Northern accent stood up and observed how the injunction ‘attend to what love requires of you’, a phrase much beloved by Quakers, had been at the heart of everything he’d witnessed during the XR protests. He had seen XR protesters acting out of love for the police and their families, even as they were arrested. Thanks to this, he said, had come to a deeper appreciation of non-violence. It meant more than ‘just not hitting the police’. Acting non-violently, with love, allowed for much greater possibilities than that.
We got chatting over tea after the meeting. Over the previous week, coverage of the XR protests had grown steadily so that climate change and ecological collapse were finally being discussed in honest terms in the mass media. This was an incredible feat in such a short space of time, I said. XR had exceeded his expectations too and he almost felt overtaken by events, he said. How long had he been involved, I asked. ‘I’m one of the co-founders,’ he replied cheerfully.
His name was Ian Bray, a Quaker from Huddersfield. He had met Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam in one of the activist groups that preceded XR when Bradbrook and Hallam were in the early planning stages for the movement. ‘I didn’t have to try and import Quaker values into XR,’ he told me. ‘They were already there.’
I’d found myself, quite unexpectedly, at the centre of something very big. For the last 20 years I would mention the Quakers and elicit only vague recognition or jokey references to porridge. For the last six months I would drop Extinction Rebellion into conversations and draw a blank. Now these two groups’ values and ideals, which are so closely linked, were setting the agenda.
I left the meeting house carrying the intoxicating feeling I was riding a great wave which would build and build until it carried the whole world along with it.
4.
The following week, it broke. By Monday all of XR’s sites apart from Marble Arch had been cleared of protesters. On Tuesday, I returned to my computer at work and heard again the steady drip, drip, drip of dismal environmental news as it landed in my inbox or on my Twitter feed.
On Thursday, the day after the last protester had been cleared from the roadblocks at Marble Arch, I left work to join the closing ceremony, which was quickly rebranded a ‘pausing ceremony’, for the Rebellion Week, which had lasted 11 days.
It was a beautifully clear and slightly chilly evening. Several hundred XR supporters sat on the grass by Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, just across from the Marble Arch roundabout. I arrived late and joined the line of people stood around the edge of the seated crowd.
The powerful solar-powered PA rig that XR had used at Marble Arch had vanished and, in an echo of the Westminster Bridge protest, had been replaced by a single speaker, which three people held above their heads. A woman spoke in a calm voice about feeling grateful for everyone who had joined in the XR protests, for the police, for the patience of the Londoners who’d had their lives disrupted. She spoke of her love for the world and how we had to rebel to protect it and just as it all became a bit New Agey for me, the woman next to me pointed up at the sky and a plane on its descent into Heathrow with another behind it visible in the distance.
‘Every three minutes,’ she said sadly. ‘Every three minutes.’
A young Muslim woman led the crowd in a trance-like repetition of two elements of the Adhan, the call to prayer, before Helen Burnett, a Church of England Deacon who I’d met at Marble Arch on Tuesday morning, delivered a sermon, and a Rabbi gave a short speech.
Rebellion Week had begun with a multi-faith service—led by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, outside St Paul’s Cathedral—and now it was ending with one. This seemed right, considering the crucial role that religious groups had played throughout the protests. Churches and meeting houses and temples (and doubtless other places of worship I was unaware of) had hosted XR protesters from outside London and many kept their doors open to activists in need of a rest throughout the day.
After the religious speeches, things turned vague and New-Agey again and I decided to head off, feeling intensely sad. Above me the planes continued their descents, pumping untold tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air. Every three minutes, like my neighbour said, every three minutes.
Had XR made any difference? Would people stop buying all the mountains of crap they didn’t need now? Ditch their cars and business trips and smartphones? Will they stop wanting these things? Will the rainforests no longer be burnt to make way for oil palms? Gas pipelines be turned off? Plastics factories shuttered?
I reached the pedestrian crossing leading to the Marble Arch traffic island and my sadness gave way to anger. A week ago, I’d stood here when it was traffic-free and the air was clear. Now it was thick with fumes. There are up to 60,000 premature deaths a year in the UK due to air pollution, one recent study estimated. Sixty thousand people, each year!
I crossed the road and felt the rage welling up inside me and wondered if I could contain it. This sometimes happens as I walk up the long main road leading to my flat on my way home from work. I think about these public health and environmental studies and the human misery they express in cold data, and yearn to get even, to commit some outrage.
The main road is always chock-a-block. Always. And there’s normally just one person in each car. Maybe they make the same journey every day, and don’t care that they are contributing to 60,000 early deaths a year, or 14,000 tonnes of Arctic water per second flowing into the sea, or carbon dioxide concentrations reaching levels not seen since the Pliocene era when forests grew at the North pole and sea levels were 20 metres higher than today.
How do these lone daily drivers think all this will pan out? How will we escape the catastrophes: the heatwaves, the floods, the starvations? Do we expect the laws of nature will bend to accommodate us? That we can throw our children off a cliff and they will not hit the ground?
What? Were you expecting a happy ending?
Citations
Rebellion Day Facebook page is at: https://www.facebook.com/events/bridges-in-london/rebellion-day/1758991460816073/
Roger Hallam’s Guardian article, ‘Wake up, Britain. We’ve been betrayed over Heathrow’ can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/27/britain-betrayed-heathrow-humanity-survival
You can listen to ‘Je Suis un Sauvage’ by Alfred Panou and The Art Ensamble of Chicago, (1969) on YouTube.
Corder Catchpool, Quaker Faith and Practice (5th Edition) is published by Quaker Books (Morley, 2013).