Planning for Rebellion Part One

As I headed down to Cusop Hall last night I saw a heron fishing in the Dulas Brook, just below the bridge.
It seemed appropriate - that's the sort of thing that Extinction Rebellion are trying to save. I'd been looking at videos of huge protest marches around the world on my Twitter feed earlier in the day.
I was greeted with tea and fruit cake - and the lone man in the room asking plaintively: "Is it only women who want to save the world?"
A couple more men did turn up later, but the meeting was mostly female.

After a fairly general session last week, this meeting was more focussed on the up-coming climate action on October 7th and the weeks following that.
The chairs were arranged in a circle, and the meeting started with everyone introducing themselves and saying a few words about why they were there. The structure of the meetings is important to Extinction Rebellion as part of what they call Regenerative Culture. It's also why the organisation is as non-hierarchical as they can manage to make it. We were also introduced to the idea of hand signals to make communications easier - from a simple raising a finger if we want to speak next to "jazz hands" when we agree with something another person has said.
About half of the group said they wanted to go to the protest in London at least for one day. One lady commented: "I'm taking rubber gloves in case I do some washing up."
There was some talk about Affinity Groups - where a group of people who know each other stick together, and have different roles to play within the group. One lady said she'd gone down to Abergavenny last week for the protest there, because it was the only one locally she could get to, and it was more difficult for her because she didn't know anyone there. So when the group blocked a road, she had no idea how long the action was going to last, or what the group had planned beforehand.

A part of the meeting I found very useful was the (no longer lone) man in the group going through the printed handout about the aims and objectives of Extinction Rebellion.
He started by saying: "The world is burning." Since the big climate summit of 1992 50% more CO2 has been added to the world's atmosphere - after a meeting where everyone knew that CO2 had to be reduced. So something drastic has to happen, and the action that Extinction Rebellion has decided to take is Non-Violent Direct Action. One early example of this method working to change government policy is the Salt March in India led by Ghandi, where they were protesting about taxation of salt.
Protest marches are all very well - one of the ladies at the meeting had been on the march against the Iraq war, but of course, the UK still went to war against Iraq. So members of Extinction Rebellion are committed to disrupting normal daily life, like blocking the bridges in London at Easter and occupying Oxford Circus, and sacrifice - being prepared to be arrested for what they believe in.
We're in the middle of the sixth Mass Extinction of species on this planet, and summit meetings aren't enough - we need our governments to mobilise against this threat to life on earth in the same way that they did during World War Two. Trying to change the world by consumer choices just isn't enough - and has been tried over the last forty years, to very little effect. It's no use saying things are happening behind the scenes, either - let's see it happening in public.

So Extinction Rebellion wants governments, and corporations like the fossil fuel giants who have been lying about the problem for forty years, to Tell the Truth about the scale of the problem, and what they intend to do about it.
They also want to go Beyond Politics, and have a People's Assembly. This was done successfully in the Republic of Ireland over the issue of abortion, and was followed by a referendum in which the ban on abortion was overturned.

We're heading for a 2 degree rise in global temperature, which will have serious consequences - and is already having serious consequences for the world's weather. If we want to keep the Earth to a limit of a 2 degree rise, the UN will have to triple the efforts it is currently making. If we want to keep to a limit of 1.5 degrees, we will need to make five times the effort we're currently making. This is not something individuals can do on their own.

Extinction Rebellion have estimated that, for real change to happen, 3.5% of the world's population needs to be engaged in actively wanting it. Someone asked what that meant for Hay, and a quick calculation revealed that something like 70 people were needed - "We've got that many on our Facebook page!"