“Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue so that it can no longer be ignored.”
Climate activists covered in fake blood staged a die-in this week at Wall Street’s famous charging bull statue. They were part of the week’s global #ExtinctionRebellion resistance protests demanding immediate action on climate change. The dye was cast.
True, the very name Extinction Rebellion sounds like an anachronism. If extinction is real — and few doubt that it is, given our present climate emergency and growing talk of a looming Sixth Mass Extinction — rebellion seems pointless.
Even now, though, there are those who refuse to believe, let alone take decisive action. The climate-denying group Climate Realists, for one. The human mind is capable of many things, and denial in the face of overwhelming evidence is one of them. Big Oil has much to lose if the industrialized world switches to green energy, and there’s evidence to suggest that Big Oil is spending big money to tar climate activists with the brush of extremism — snowflakes with radical ideas and a penchant for disruption and violence.
Where many might view this week’s Extinction protests as a legitimate expression of public concern, well-intended and backed up by the science, there are still those who insist recent climate events are part of a natural cycle that human actions have little or nothing to do with. Where you and I see people of conscience, they see anarchists — anarchists who would take down Big Oil, and take the global economy with it.
In the early moments of Monday’s first day of global protests, 30 climate activists were charged after hundreds blocked a road in Sydney, Australia; 100 more were arrested in Amsterdam.
Demonstrations took place in more than a dozen countries, including Spain, the UK, France, Austria, Germany, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. Nearly 150 people were arrested in London
More protests are expected in some 65 cities over the next two weeks. The protestors are demanding that governments take immediate, drastic action to address climate change.
The activists argue that petitions, lobbying and marches no longer work. More needs to be none, and direct action taken if necessary.
That doesn’t necessarily mean violence — taking direct action by means of violence, though some activists do see it that way. Martin Luther King viewed direct action in non-violent terms, arguing than nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people; that seeks to defeat injustice, not people; that believes suffering can educate and transform; and that believe the universe is on the side of justice.
Not everyone sees it that way, of course. According to BBC News, Australia’s minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, said the names and photos of Extinction Rebellion protesters should be “widely distributed” to “shame” them, not understanding that protesters, far from being shamed, would welcome the chance to sign their name to the protest movement. (Australia, one of the industrialized world’s most unapologetic consumers and distributors of coal, currently has one of the most aggressively conservative, recalcitrant governments on the planet, a political fact which seemingly conflicts with the evidence of terrible droughts and catastrophic bush fires, not to mention record high temperatures in all seasons, even the southern winter.)
As it is, the protesters have thrust the issue of climate activism to the top of the public debate: Climate change is now rated one of the five most important issues facing voters in industrialized democracies today, on an equal footing with the economy. Blockades of busy streets in major cities have been met with a surprising amount of support, though not so surprising perhaps to those who fervently believe in the cause.
As Leo Barasi, author of The Climate Majority: Apathy and Action in an Age of Nationalism, wrote this past weekend in an op-ed piece in the Guardian, Extinction Rebellion has won the first battle — now it must win the war.
The protesters, he concluded, might just be the people to do it.
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