Update 25/4/21:the ‘Shell 7’ have been acquitted by jury, despite the judge stating ‘they have no defense in law’. This is a huge vindication of the strategy of the Shell 7 actions, which has resulted in significant press coverage and a proof of public support for activists who challenge governments’ and corporations’ inaction on the climate crisis-even to the extent of careful property damage.
Simon, along with six other committed activists, including Ian Bray, another XR co-founder, intended to cause at least £6000 worth of damage in order to get their case heard -and then hopefully acquitted, at the Crown Court in London. The first stage of their plan has worked -from tomorrow, April 12th 2021, the ‘Shell 7’ will appear at the Crown Court to start their ten day trial. If this trial gets enough media attention, and especially if the Shell 7 are acquitted, this could be a key nail amongst many in the coffin of this multinational which has willful deceit and complicity in murder, at the core of its policy and practice.
I watched the window smashing action on some news channel or other. I was involved in the initial Extinction Rebellion (XR) bridge blocks of November 2018 but for mental health reasons was not involved in the big London shutdown of April 2019. The destruction of property caused by the Shell 7 at such a symbolic location at the start of two weeks of peaceful Rebellion in London (resulting in over 1000 arrests) was a demonstration of tactical (although risky) brilliance. I reasoned that the wider more peaceful approach of XR -which had not generally so far involved smashing windows- would cushion with a halo this one more ‘aggressive’ action at Shell’s London HQ, giving a particular moral pertinence to it. In other words, the effectiveness of the Shell 7 action was co-creative with and relied upon the discipline of non-violence and even peacefulness displayed by thousands of XR activists during their taking of the London streets (as it turned out, on several occasions)…mass actions which involved no destruction of property. The recent smashing of a window of a branch of Barclay’s Bank by Gail Bradbrook, as part of the launch of XR’s Money Rebellion is a different tactical turn, in a different time and strategic context to the early days of XR, and much called for.
Recently I have been discussing with an American friend the difference between strategic and moral non-violence in mass social and political movements for change. My friend prefers the latter approach, from a Gandhian perspective. However with an action like that of the Shell 7, I would argue that moral and strategic non-violence are synthesised. The Shell action’s timing to kick off the April 2019 Rebellion in a passionate way, with that isolated display of ‘destruction’, was both strategically and symbolically appropriate (risking media and public backlash which turned out to be relatively minor). It was not completely non-violent by the Gandhian moral standard, but nevertheless it drew attention to the moral acceptability of the more peaceful two week rebellion that followed. The wish to cause £6000 plus worth of damage was an added tactical intent within the internal logic of the action itself, the tactical result of which is about to unfold.
Had the Shell action been performed in the middle or even at the end of the XR April 2019 Rebellion, I believe the impact in terms of media and public opinion could have been disastrous. To kick the Rebellion off, it turned out to be perfect. It is no accident that one of the Shell 7, Simon, was a key co-ordinator in the Actions and Logistics team of XR for the first mass actions in the UK.
One of my most pleasurable interviews, despite the poor internet connection, was with Lubem Gena, the media person for Extinction Rebellion Nigeria (yes, XR moves in Nigeria too).
The video below is Lubem observing one minute of silence for Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other eight members of the ‘Ogoni Nine’ who were executed by the Nigerian government with the complicity of the Shell Corporation.
For the sake of the Ogoni Nine and a habitable planet for human beings and a continued diversity of other species, please, support the Shell Seven and follow their trial which begins tomorrow. Write about it, shout about it, do arrestable actions in support of it…please do whatever you can.
Lubem Gena remembers the Ogoni Nine -and so should we.
End the #MilitaryCoupInMyanmar, because the persecuted Rohingya are likely to suffer even more under the junta than they did under the National League for Democracy (NLD). My interview with Yasmin Ullah, a Canadian Rohingya exile, goes into more depth (full interview linked underneath the clip below):
Yasmin Ullah fled Myanmar with her parents when she was three years old
End the military coup, because over 200 protestors have been shot dead and over 1000 detained to date (unconfirmed). End the coup because my new friend Nway, a medical student from near Mandalay, fears for her own life and the lives of her family, and because many young people like her are without a future as long as the junta remain in power (full interview linked underneath the highlight clip):
I began to interview Myanmese people of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) against the coup that began in February 2021, not just to do my tiny part to raise awareness but to develop my broader service to global activism and post-capitalism. I strongly hold the view that ever peaceful movement for social change -including civil disobedience against military dictatorships- has lessons to teach us for the advancement of the strategy of every movement for global systems change. By ‘global systems change’, I mean a transition, broadly, to localised and internationalist post-capitalist societies.
The work of learning from movements of civil disobedience cannot only be done on an objective level, for instance reasoning out what may or may not be working for the CDM in Myanmar. The only way forward is to engage emotionally with the Myanmese people, offering what limited support we can from outside the country, to their urgent practical situation. Fighting the corner of historically oppressed ethnic minorities in Myanmar is especially important.
I hope it will be possible for us in the global north and west, as well as around the world, to help the Myanmese advance strategically as well as learn from any strategy they may be deploying. This recent article by two Myanmese journalists seems to give a good strategic overview.
It is difficult to get information from Myanmar since the junta repeatedly cut off access to the internet and have recently revoked the licenses of five indie media outlets in the country.
However via Twitter and other platforms I will continue to reach out, to support and to learn. I personally believe there is hope and strategic insight to be gained from focusing on the border zones of Myanmar with neighbouring countries such as Thailand.
While I have a vision of a post-capitalist future, meanwhile I realise that every struggle against military patriarchy and towards at least some form of democracy must be supported. People are dying right now.
Moreover, it is more than conceivable that with the worsening climate crisis, formerly democratic but increasingly autocratic and eco-fascistic governments will take to the use of military force against their own peoples, imposing extreme austerity the likes of which most of us have never seen or experienced, rather than make the difficult structural and cultural changes needed to variously transform and put to rest the corporate-capitalist forces which are destroying a habitable Earth.
We don’t just have a duty to raise awareness of injustices around the world, with a view to ending them; our greater duty could be to learn from them, for the liberation of all of us.
Vanessa Nakate, graduate from the Makerere University Business School in Kampala, Uganda, made the BBC’s ‘Top 100 women’ list of 2020 and perhaps more prestigiously, Time magazine’s ‘Next 100’ most influential people of 2021 (linked article written by Greta Thunberg).
Vanessa is a prominent climate and climate justice activist, and her younger sisters Joan & Clare are proving to become just as active on feminist issues. Their love for their sister clearly came through in this interview I did for Epic Tomorrows on YouTube, part of a weekly series I am recording on an ongoing basis with Joan & Clare:
Joan & Clare’s ambition for the Rise Up Movement which Vanessa started, comes through clearly in this 50 second teaser clip of a longer interview yet to be released by Epic Tomorrows. Joan and Clare now have official roles in the Rise Up Movement of International Co-ordinator and Evaluation Officer respectively.
Listening to Vanessa’s contribution to a recent WIRED UK debate -about the climate injustice faced both by people living on the African continent and more specifically, African girls and women, I was both inspired and surprised. I was inspired, because clearly the forceful and insightful leadership of women like Vanessa is much needed in these times of Transition to post-capitalism (or if you don’t agree with that, to something other than the horrific neo-liberal capitalism which perpetuates and magnifies all social and ecological injustice).
I was surprised, because I didn’t expect to hear Vanessa talking about reducing population growth on the African continent as a response to the climate crisis. As a middle-class white guy from the affluent UK, I understand that for me to talk about population reduction globally could be easily interpreted as eco-fascism, as often those who do advocate population reduction measures have an agenda of protecting their own wasteful (including in terms of C02 emissions) lifestyles at the expense of poorer nations. Halving consumption in the richest nations would do more to curb carbon emissions, afterall, than halving the population of the African continent over the coming few decades, even accounting for the economic growth of ‘developing’ nations. More information here.
I am sensitive to the the issues of climate injustice faced by girls and women in Uganda and in Africa more generally. Joan and Clare, and now Vanessa, have drawn my attention to these, including:
Agriculture forms a significant part of most African economies, including Uganda. Increased water and food instability across the continent due to climate change (including both longer droughts and heavier rainfall), results in women and girls in the rural areas having to strive harder. Women and girls are responsible for much of the water and food provision as well as agricultural work for profit. Effects on their work and well-being include having to walk longer distances to collect water, thus being at greater risk of gender-based violence i.e. opportunistic attacks, including from impoverished armed groups who are also made more desperate by the worsening climate crisis.
Girls being sold off to much older husbands i.e. child marriage, because it is the only way that some impoverished families feel they can survive, after repeated crop failures and food instability due to climate change.
More pressure on girls to help at home due to water and food instability means that they drop out of school, or never go to school in the first place. This has a detrimental effect on their future career prospects and the general empowerment of girls and women in a capitalist society.
Below is a short highlight clip of Clare explaining some of these issues and more:
It is sometimes hard for me to reconcile climate justice activism and feminist activism from the global south with my own perspective on global justice, when the empowerment of girls and women seems often to be advocated through capitalist mechanisms. It is arguable that these mechanisms were instrumental in climate injustice and patriarchy in the first place.
I am fundamentally anti-capitalist or more pragmatically you could say ‘post-capitalist’ as I understand that, short of a sudden global and bloody revolution (which is the last thing I want) capitalism has to be Transitioned away from, progressively over the coming decades. Localised markets could still exist in my best-case scenario for the future, but not the overarching ‘global free market’ which currently governs human culture at the expense of life and well-being.
Mass civil disobedience in the global north will have to be one of the driving factors of the Transition.
So in the meantime, I support every effort by climate justice and feminist activists from Uganda, the African continent and indeed the entire ‘global south’, if it means that those in the industrialised north are increasingly forced to face the consequences of their turning poorer nations -and women and girls in particular from those nations- into ecological and human sacrificial zones.
Just as I came towards the end of writing this post I heard via Twitter that Vanessa Nakate bravely went off script at an international event where she was invited to speak:
They screened my speech, cut my time repeatedly and said I couldn’t call out leaders. They censored my voice, so I went off script. pic.twitter.com/0YWWPBncDi
I feel passionately about every video in my YouTube channel highlights playlist:
My partner Daphnee Azoulay told me I wouldn’t get any dinner if I didn’t go through with this. She wasn’t able to join me as she was banned from the council chambers.
The first video in the playlist (above) is a rare occasion when I showed anger against ‘the authorities.’ This is footage of me disrupting a council meeting in Charlottetown, PEI, Canada, when I visited in November 2019. In a sense this was a kind of anniversary of me taking part in the disruption of London, when as part of the first mass actions of Extinction Rebellion, I did my small part to help block the city’s bridges (see header image above).
A few days previous to the Charlottetown City Hall action above, I attended the Remembrance Day ceremonies with my partner Daphnee Azoulay. I hate war and the deceitful, colonialist pomp that recalls the dead. Nevertheless on that day of remembrance I observed and took upon myself a vast lake of human feeling which I unleashed during the council meeting disruption. The theatrical action was successful in drawing attention to the climate and ecological emergency on PEI in that it made the front page of The Guardian -one of the island’s most-read newspapers. This impact wasn’t dependent on me getting arrested, which I stopped short of.
Daphnee had given me some emotional and practical coaching for the occasion which was advertised on Facebook as a ‘laugh in’. In the event I felt unable to laugh at the ridiculousness of the proceedings. Instead I burst into tears and anger.
I urge you, if you are feeling overwhelmed, upset or disrupted by the climate and ecological crisis, then break through your paralysis and do something expressive and disruptive to draw attention to it.
Sensitive strategy tip:
Well calculated disruptive actions can stop short of arrestable behaviour, and still make newspaper headlines. In Canada or the UK, you will usually get a warning before arrest. Play with the boundary between non-arrestable and arrestable behaviour and only get arrested if you think it’s truly useful to your cause, or as part of a concerted mass movement to fill jails. Play the long and epic game.
I am now talking to Stu Basden who is one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the UK. They have been involved from the very beginning in all kinds of capacities. I first met them at their house in Bristol when I saw an advert for a free vegan curry with some kind of chat about activism, which led to my brief involvement with the Bristol branch of the Rising Up! (RU!) group. RU! Members went on to found XR. First of all, Stu, could you explain how you got involved with XR, what your role was first of all, and what your journey has been from the beginning up until the present day, including different roles you may have taken since the start?
Stu:
Sure…I am now sat in my caravan, which is parked outside the house that I used to live in, where we met. The same street where the cafe was [Cafe Connect] that the first XR meeting took place, before it was called XR…there were fifteen of us and we thought, ‘Okay, we’ve got a group here -let’s go big…’ So yeah…it is just down the road that history was made…
But maybe I’ll jump back a little bit to talk about my own journey. In 2006-7 I was studying philosophy and theology and saw all the problems in the world; justice issues etc and ‘liberation theology’ was something I was really taken by. It took me several years to find a path until 2012 when I got involved with the climate movement 350.org. I was living in Toronto at the time. We set up a local group and that became the next few years of my life, until 2015. I was very involved and became the president of the group. That was divestment fights and pipelines and all of that. Towards the end of my time there I thought, ‘There’s something missing; we need to do something bigger than this’. 350 was the big name on the block at the time. I just saw today that Bill McKibben is stepping back from his role at 350…
So I came to Europe, and travelled around Europe looking at different social movements, doing research into housing struggles in Spain, refugee struggles in Greece, anti-coal struggles in Germany and land defenses in France. Then I came across Rising Up! -this new group that was going to do an action to shut down Heathrow airport in London. I signed up for that, which was the first Rising Up! action. Then I signed up for a RU! intro training. That was Roger (Hallam), Simon (Bramwell), and Gail (Bradbrook), the three founders of Rising Up! that gave that training. Within a couple of days I was like, ‘I think I’m in. This is it! So I’ll move back to the UK… (where I’m from). Let’s do this. I like this vision. I like this strategy…a lot has been researched and laid out, so let’s see what happens’.
So I moved to Bristol and got the RU! group set up here. We spent a couple of years developing infrastructure, like the tech, but more importantly the principles and values, strategy and vision that were behind XR (XR was born from RU!). Something that really attracted me was the concept of iterations: that we’re not going to get anything right the first time, in fact we may never get it right, but we can try things, experiment, and then learn from it and do things slightly differently…pushing the boundaries of acceptable activism…to normalise non-violent civil disobedience, which is something we have had clear success with.
Me:
Great. Do you want to say more about the different roles you have taken within XR, including training roles?
Stu:
Okay, so when we started XR we had 15 people, and we decided on the initial working groups (WG’s). I was initially one of the co-ordinators of the tech and infrastructure WG. I was also involved from the start in the Regenerative CulturesWG. At another point it was more or less me and Gail running the Media WG, which I wasn’t the most skilled at, so I was relieved when others took over. I also helped run lots of NVDA trainings, which partly became embedded in the ‘Heading For Extinction’ talk as well as in the XR ‘DNA’ trainings. I also ran some facilitation training. Last summer as XR was really growing around Europe I travelled around giving training. We gave trainings in 10 different countries including weekend-long trainings. We involved the whole kit: NVDA, XR DNA, facilitation instruction and some conflict resolution tips.
Early on I remember Simon Bramwell saying to me, we need more facilitators in our activism. So that was something I already enjoyed doing -running workshops and facilitating spaces…then I discovered a group facilitation leadership course, which was a year long course in Process Work. This has now led to a five year long intensive study programme on Process Work, looking at group facilitation and ‘how can we deal with these difficult dynamics that sometimes come in, and what actually is the process, in each moment? How can we really find the conversation that’s wanting to happen?’ We’ve got so many ways of avoiding and talking around, so let’s find ways to allow the difficult stuff to happen. That’s something that really excites me now.
Me:
From a personal perspective I’ve always seen you as a facilitator. I was impressed by your facilitation of one of the XR gatherings in London a few weeks previous to one of the big XR actions….I also know you’ve been an ‘actions’ person as well. Wasn’t it with RU!, previous to XR, when you were involved in an action that resulted in you being in prison for a week?
Stu:
That’s right. That was a campaign about air pollution. [Stop Killing Londoners]. We went down to City Hall in London. We started off the week sitting in the street but the police weren’t arresting us, so we took to using chalk spray on London City Hall, graffiti-ing ‘Stop air pollution!’ and after about the third time of doing that, and going to the court and saying, ‘If you release us, we’re just going to do it again’ they said they had no choice but to send us to prison ‘on remand’ for a week. [My note: In the UK, being held ‘on remand’ refers to a temporary holding of ‘offenders’ – to prevent them getting into further mischief- until they are taken directly to court to deal with charges against them].
May your lungs be clear this Christmas
Me:
Did you do much reflecting during that time of how the prison experience might be different for people from different backgrounds? Were you all white middle class activists taking part in the action?
Stu:
Yeah…maybe a few working class but most of us were middle class. Certainly the four of us who ended up in prison were all white, and it shocked me to see how much of the prison population was black -probably 80%. This was in HMP Thameside in East London. I was like, ‘This is incredible. How on Earth is this the case, that there is this much racial injustice going on?’ We stood out there. We were ‘strange people’. There were some really friendly people there, but we didn’t have much time. I was in a cell with another activist, Ian Bray. The people were like ‘Dude, you’re crazy, why didn’t you just run away?’ We said we wanted to get arrested and taken to prison and they were like, ‘Why would you want to get in here?!’ We replied, ‘We’re experimenting with this injustice system…trying to find out what would be the effect of us going to prison…will the media pick it up etc’
Me:
I’m not sure if many people realise that many of the tactics of civil disobedience used by XR were discovered during the experimentation of Rising Up! actions…So I was wondering if you could now explain how the 10 Principles and Values of XR came about?
Stu:
So that was largely the work of Gail Bradbrook, as well as myself and one or two other people. There was another organisation that we pulled from, then we developed the P&V collaboratively, which is always a hard thing to do. I was responsible for the final wording of the P&V, including the ‘mitigating for power’ bit which has caused issues for being grammatically incorrect! But these are really Gail’s work. I was more of a wordsmith, to get the P&V together in a more coherent way. It took us years to work on them. There were several iterations. When we had that meeting with the 15 of us and said ‘okay yes, let’s go for it’ that was in April 2018, but 3 months earlier in January we had had another meeting where Roger Hallam had proposed, ‘Okay we’re ready, let’s go for it’ and I think at that point as a collective we said, ‘We’re not ready!’ and it was in those next 3 months that we really got those values down as we knew they were really important. That was a big part of my work for those 3 months, fine-tuning the wording and doing the longer write-ups of them. I think the longer write-ups are really important and they’re often skipped over. For instance, what it is to ‘mitigate for power’ and what it is to ‘welcome everyone and every part of everyone’; does that mean we welcome people who are intentionally disrupting the movement? Let’s get into the intracacies and not have these as blanket terms or even used sometimes to push people out or to wield power over other people. So we did our best at the time, and there’s all kinds of ripples that have come about due to things we skipped over, thinking, ‘Let’s just get something out’, you know, and there are other bits that I think have been upheld magnificently -because we put the work in initially.
Me:
I and many people appreciate the work you’ve done, but I also wonder how the P&V can be developed in the future, without damaging the work that’s been done and the coherency that they provide…can there be an ongoing collaborative evolution of the P&V? I guess different countries apply them in different ways already? I’m wary of anything becoming too set in stone.
Stu:
They’re not the ten commandments, right? Anything that gets calcified or stuck will become unhealthy. That’s the nature of the changing reality that we live in. I guess one of the problems that we’ve encountered in XR is that there is no-one who has the mandate to change the P&V, and there are entangled issues around that, such as ‘What about the translation into other languages? Who are going to be the people to do this?’ I’m not sure how it’s possible [to change them now] as in many ways they are the glue that’s held the movement together so far. And you will always have people who are attached to the original. I’m not particularly attached to them but I think that they are good and serve a really good purpose.
Me:
Okay so rather than change the P&V maybe we need to encourage people to go more deeply into them, for instance having study groups on the P&V.
Stu:
There have been public discussion sessions in the last few months, one on each P&V. They are about to start up again, exploring them week by week, a different one each week.
Me:
Okay great. Now I wonder if you could say something in general terms, about the way that the XR strategy has panned out? Do you think demanding the creation of citizens’ assemblies by the government to deal with the ecological and climate crisis, should still be the main strategic aim of XR?
Stu:
Okay. The strategic aim of normalising civil disobedience has been central and successful. That was a really important aim in which we’ve succeeded. When it comes to XR’s demands there’s always the question of, should we have demands at all? Demands create some incoherence -to make a demand of somebody, in some sense, is a violent act. You’re demanding rather than asking or inviting. There’s an incongruence in the meaning around that. There’s also the problem of, when you make a demand, who are you making the demand of? If you say ‘We demand system change’, that’s a big enough thing that nobody can do it, whereas to demand something specific, can be too small to be big enough to change the world in the way we need. I think citizens’ assemblies are a great idea but they’re not the only political idea out there to improve democracy. Of course, we don’t live in a democracy now -we live in the shadow of a democracy. Electoral politics has been beaten by Cambridge Analytica and other ways of manipulating people on a mass scale. We know that psychological warfare and advertising are really effective at getting people to change their beliefs and behaviour. That’s being done at a manufactured scale now, so we can’t say that electoral politics is democracy even though those who are elected would love to say, ‘the only way to do democracy is through elections’. So what do we go to beyond that, is the question, and citizens’ assemblies are one possible way of doing that. I don’t know what else is out there but I believe there are other ways of doing it. It’s just not an area of XR that I’ve been involved with, discussing these things.
Pink boats are extremely dangerous
Me:
That’s a great response. I wonder if you could now respond to problems of leadership culture in our society which are bound to become issues in any social movement as well, as social movements are always in part a reflection of the surrounding culture, and how the media manufactures leaders, to an extent, and how XR has really fallen victim to that at points – perhaps certain people have been too prominent and perhaps still are too prominent- I wonder if you have anything to say about that and whether that’s getting better…is this issue more about efforts to decentralise within the movement, which I know are ongoing, or the tactic of the media to always go back to the same people to represent a movement? I admire and respect leading figures within XR but I would hope to see a more decentralised movement with more diverse voices platformed.
Stu:
So…there’s probably many answers to that, and let me just try one…to talk about the high dream for humanity -the far reaching vision of where we could be, and we’re not there yet by any means, is to say that our lives are so meaningful, and so full, that we don’t need celebrities or leaders to project ourselves onto. When humanity is bored of projecting everything onto leaders and celebrities and politicians -then these people will be done away with. But until we get to that point, ‘leadership’ will be part of the reality we live in, that continues to cycle. It will change and it’s always changing. Since we are in this moment now where people feel like the meaning has been stripped away from their lives, and they’re feeling disempowered,and in many ways are disempowered, they’re going to look for other people to express things and do things which they don’t dare to do or which they don’t think they can do. So let me just pause and think about your question…
I’m not the biggest face of XR in any way. In fact I was intending to be a bit more of a public face. As we were preparing for the Rebellion last year, I thought ‘Oooh, a great way to be visually captivating, would be to dye my beard in all kinds of funky rainbow colours’ thinking that the media team would love it. I showed up in London with this bright beard, and the media team took a look at me, whispered a little bit and were like ‘Stu, you’re far too “hippie” to be in front of a camera. Don’t do a big spokesperson role this time’. So my life took a different direction because of a decision to dye my beard….
We’re always going to have these ‘leaders’ and leaders at this point in human history are important. We don’t want to be in a place where there is no leadership or a movement where there is no influence; when we talk about leadership we’re talking about influence and as a movement we want to influence the world. I think the struggles come when a person speaks for a larger group, who doesn’t contain all the voices of that group, therefore they’re marginalising part of the group and that part of the group is going to feel excluded and hurt and they’re going to be angry about it. We’re in this imperfect process called ‘life’ and that’s part of the nature of things. Can we do better…? Possibly, but then we need to do a lot of work around what it means to have and to access power and have influence. There has been a move to decentralise, but when Occupy! for instance, decentralised they did so too quickly and gave away the power of the movement, and got into endless general assemblies which never got anywhere and petered out in a few months. I think XR has done well as a social movement to hold things together this far. When someone comes along with the energy to make things decentralise, they get into a powerful position, as maybe they haven’t done years of work around ‘whiteness’ and anti-oppression and racism, so now they bring this other problem in of colonialism and reinforcing hierarchy. Whereas many of us who were in RU! from the start; we’ve done years of work on this. Gail Bradbrook is a good example of this. She has travelled around and learnt from many social justice movements. So do we want to take her voice away and accidentally give it away to someone who doesn’t understand whiteness and racism? Well I’m not sure.
A lady in a woolly hat who I have a soft spot for
There is a move to decentralise which is important, and to do it carefully, by people who can speak to diverse voices and be held accountable when they don’t. Some people with big positions in XR are doing that speaking, and some people aren’t doing it as well. There’s never going to be a clear answer on this. It’s always going to be something to ponder, work through and discuss. And do the work. To read the books around racism, and around strategy and tactics, and the psychology of media and messaging, whatever it is…we need people who are skilled up. I think a really important part of these times now, if you’re feeling disempowered, then find ways to skill up. If you’re in lockdown and you’re unable to go out and do the things and organise in the way that you want to, there’s loads of stuff online to read or watch….Certainly Black Lives Matter are calling for white people now, to do that more and more. I hope that white ears are hearing those voices. I’ve been telling people about this book, ‘Why I am no longer talking to white people about race’. I was doing this for a year and a half before I realised, ‘Ah, I should probably read the book myself’ -There are no shortcuts here. We all need to do this work.
Me:
Thanks so much Stu, that was such an in-depth and broad answer to the question. I think I’ve got quite a superficial idea of decentralisation and why leadership issues arise, so I’ll be doing some more study.
Stu:
Something to add is that when Standing Rock was happening and we had tens of thousands of people going to the camps and setting them up…I wasn’t there but I heard these stories of, you know, ‘So and so, the elder, has said…what we must do’, but then the question became, ‘Which elder? Under what authority are they an elder? Are they a hereditary chief? Or have they been installed by the Indian Actor some other thing? Whose community are they trusted by to say that they are an elder?’ One of the contradictions of white people doing anti-racism is that, yes we want to look first to those BIPOC voices, but ‘BIPOC’ is not one homogenous group that has one voice, so over time we have to develop our own analysis and our own understanding and have our own opinions which might at times disagree with people from those groups, or in those racial identities. How do we hold that? Saying, ‘I want to listen to you and really hear you, but I have developed my own analysis over time…I’m doing the work, but I hear your voice and don’t want to marginalise your voice.’
Me:
That’s a really important point. Otherwise, white people saying they want to centralise marginalised voices, without having a complex analysis of who they are to be saying that, becomes a patronising exercise. So moving on, I would like to talk about the article you wrote on Medium in January of 2019, ‘Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate’, the blog article which received tens of thousands of views, and which I was impressed by, at its accessibility despite its treatment of complex issues. I remember critics of XR using it as fodder on Facebook etc, saying ‘Look, see, they’re not all about the climate, they want to bring the whole system down!’ and some from XR responding with, ‘No, no, we are just a climate movement!’ -realising that those XR folk didn’t have a very deep analysis, basically.
Stu:
One of the big regrets that I had about the article is that I didn’t explain its origins: it was in a group facilitation process about climate change, racism and colonialism, that I heard from a Black African woman, ‘Why would I want to get involved in the climate movement? When I’m being told that the climate movement is going to make solar panels for white people to be able to continue their exploitation, and that my continent, my land, my people have been exploited for the last 500 years. It’s built into my genetics that I’ve been fighting for the last 500 years’. I haven’t given credit to the way that this woman inspired me. She deserves the credit. She’s done a lot of emotional labour, to be able to say those things in that group, so one of my regrets was not to have centred her in my article, and to say that I feel such gratitude towards her, as so many people around the world have gained through my article, the clarity of analysis with which she spoke. That was the source that allowed this article to be written.
The other part was, after the bridges a lot of people were coming onboard to XR who hadn’t done the work around race and whiteness and were saying ‘this is a climate movement’ and of course we had intentionally talked about climate change and biodiversity loss, but then we didn’t anticipate that XR would get so big so quickly, it blew our minds (and bodies in many ways) and we didn’t have the trainings in place to talk about these larger underlying issues of anti-oppression and liberation and then I was seeing these people coming on board and saying these things, as if speaking for the movement; some decentralisation was great but people weren’t necessarily staying with the P&V of XR; a huge amount of energy was unleashed with an influx of new Rebels organising in a more decentralised way, but people were saying things which I judged to be racist. For instance ‘over-population is a problem. Look at all the brown people around the world. We need to stop birth rates in those countries’. Ouch! -you know? You get all these people talking about the climate and forgetting about the larger system that we’re involved in. So I’m glad that article did get written and did get picked up. I’m still getting weekly reports saying, ‘another 200 people this week have read the article all the way through’. At times that was thousands of people a week. I’ve not really written anything since, because it’s created such a big thing…maybe the next thing I write will be really big, but maybe it won’t be. I’ve been scared to write anything…but now I’m finally venturing out of my little cave of not writing.
Me:
I look forward to seeing what you will next make public.
Stu:
It’s about the Amazon, and the Amazon being the lungs of the planet that are in danger and are very much being assaulted, and the indigenous peoples there are falling out of the global community. We need to step up and be alongside them and stop the onslaught that’s coming at them, and allow them to bring forth their wisdom about how do they look after this absolutely vital piece of the planet…It’s not just about preserving trees, it’s about preserving the tree keepers, who have patterns and knowledge about how the rest of us can also do restoration work around the world. It’s so vital and yet so threatened in this time.
Me:
What’s your perspective on XR’s ‘4th demand’ and how that’s coming about? Personally I think it’s very necessary movement building work. Maybe some people in XR have relied on the idea of mobilising without movement building first? Maybe if the language of the 4th demand, regarding climate justice and platforming historically oppressed groups, had been included from the start within the 3 demands, a highly signalled 4th demand wouldn’t now be necessary? Some people’s response to the whole 4th demand idea is that ‘we don’t need one because citizens’ assemblies are democratic and that’s what we’re arguing for’ but obviously that’s quite superficial.
Stu:
Okay. I do think it is important to say that citizens’ assemblies are a way to bring in marginalised voices and give them a space. Behind that is the idea of deep democracy, valuing all voices. I am neither for nor against the 4th demand in any strong way -parts of me are going to be for it and parts against it. It’s complex. I don’t have a clear answer to it. I do have a concern that people might see it as ‘If we get a 4th demand that talks about justice, we can say, look at us, we are good white people. We’ve covered over our white guilt and we’re white saviours.’ That is a dynamic that’s present. It’s probably not present for everybody. Even if it is present it doesn’t mean that the 4th demand isn’t a good thing. Looking at what’s happening, it looks like the 4th demand is probably going to come into being in XR UK. There’s enough momentum behind it and it’s already there in several countries. Will it be adopted everywhere or will there be fights about it for years to come, I just don’t know. Like you said, if we had the language right in the first three demands and been more explicit about climate justice, that could have been better. I’ve found myself in a place where I just don’t know. I trust that those who are bringing this thing with such passion and momentum will be able to reflect on themselves and their own motivations, whether that includes ‘white guilt’ or other psychological complexes around being white.
Me:
Thanks for your openness and honesty about that. I haven’t done enough work around race and my own potential ‘white guilt’ and so on, and the concerns you’ve raised do resonate with me. Also I contacted my friend Chit Dubey, a co-founder of XR in India, assuming he would be for the 4th demand because he’s not white, forcing me to examine my unconscious racism. He is against the 4th demand, saying that XR are losing their focus and that ‘white people are obsessed with race’. I don’t quite know where that came from so I need to talk to him further.
Stu:
My hope is that the people who are really trying to bring the 4th demand are not going to bring it and then stop there -they’ll take all of the energy, passion and drive, and do the work in groups together as white people -if they are white, and there are probably BIPOC people working on this as well- to go to the diasporic neighbourhoods of folk from diverse backgrounds and get into communication, have the conversations, build the trust across racial lines that have separated us for so long. It’s really comfortable in lots of ways to talk about a document and send lots of emails and have people’s assemblies but to actually get into groups where you don’t have the same accent or culture, and to get to know each other just as human beings -that is the work that I see as being really important. I also want to say, none of us have done enough work, right? It’s about keeping ourselves in a place of discomfort around this stuff, always looking for ways in which we can do more. Even that sentence, ‘looking for ways to do more’ doesn’t quite work for me! Sometimes it’s doing less but listening more…
You have to love XR Scotland…
Me:
Finally, what is exciting you now in your life? Perhaps you could talk more about the Process Work you have been engaged with and how that relates to your plans for the coming months?
Stu:
Okay. I have been studying this stuff for three years and I still don’t quite know how to explain it. I think part of the issue there is that we have a language that is based on things in space, rather than processes. Everything is always in flow. I could describe a water bottle more accurately as something in the process of water bottling. It’s an active agent in this ONE process that is happening: the process that contains all the relationships between everything in the universe…Process Work is really exciting me. It’s based on Taoism; it draws from Jungian psychotherapy and core process oriented psychotherapy, it’s also called Process Science, and it’s based on quantum physics and some of the cosmology that is pushing the bounds of physicists who often retreat into equations because they haven’t got ways of talking about these things, when you can actually more accurately talk about myths to describe what happens in quantum physics, rather than normal scientific language. Process Work is drawing all of these things together -spirituality too- and asking, ‘What is the process that is happening?’ Something I’ve been playing with in my own thoughts recently is, one of the early discoveries of Process Work; things that happen in our dreams when we’re sleeping, also manifest in our bodies as bodily symptoms. So that it could be that you have a pain in your stomach and that you’ll be dreaming about fireworks. Then when you talk about your stomach you’ll get an image of explosions and you’ll go ‘Ah, this is the same process that’s happening; it’s just happening in different channels which are both the symptoms of a core process that’s trying to happen.
I was listening to Alan Watts the other day and he was talking about how the Earth is not just some rock that’s infested with humans and with life; the Earth is a geological entity that grows life. So life, and humans, are symptoms of the universe. Whatever this strange awareness process is, we are symptomatic of it. And just as a symptom in the body can also manifest as dreams or synchronicities in events around us or elements of relationships, the symptom that is ‘Stuart Basden’ is almost going to be teleporting around in various different ways -or the things that we commonly describe as Stuart Basden aren’t me in my body, but parts of something else jump into me to express themselves for a time, seconds or years, then they move on. I am in the living stage of life, but when I’m in the death stage of life, the information will still be there -nothing is ever lost. Information in the universe is never lost, as Stephen Hawkings has shown. ‘I’ will always continue…so let’s pay attention more to the process that’s happening in the moment, than the specifics of a conversation or social movement or whatever it is. There is always a dreaming reality behind what is going on. It’s invisible to us. Our eyes and ears can’t tell us directly but can pick up signals, but somehow these processes are happening.
What is exciting is doing a training, that allows me to get more in tune and to pick up the signals of the process of what is happening or is trying to happen even though what is manifest is sometimes trying to prevent it…if we can attune ourselves to what is trying to happen it will allow flow and allow us to enter into a flow of existence which will free up energy and possibilities that at the moment we can’t imagine, and we definitely need to get to places that we can’t imagine right now, to prevent human extinction within the next few decades…but maybe that extinction is what is meant to happen, but then we can trust that no information will be lost…in some ways it doesn’t really matter but in other ways it matters so much…there is something so miraculous about these bodies and about the world around us that is manifest, that putting all our intention and care into this world is a way of paying homage to it. I am deeply in love with life…It blows me away.
Me:
Really amazing…so when you talk about the essence of the Process Work being, getting in touch with the Core Process of what wants to happen, is that seen as a selfless thing that is trying to happen, or is it both selfless and of a self? Is it a combination of our personal unconsciouses, and also a universal unconscious? What is the concept of ‘God’ in Process Work or is there a kind of an agnostic perspective?
Stu:
There’s a concept of the oneness, of the interconnectedness of everything which is the essence of everything, where there are no polarisations or dualisms, only relationship within a system in process. Then there is the ‘dreaming reality’ where there are the polarisations, and that’s where we have dream figures, or roles, or archetypes, we might say they are collective unconscious, or they are just in this ‘group’ or moment, while these figures inhabit us, and then there’s consensus reality -that’s the stuff that we agree on. Maybe a way to talk about this would be to say, ‘Here’s this plant: in consensus reality this plant is sorrel, a woodland plant. But then I could also talk about this plant as comforting. That’s not consensus reality, that’s the plant as it relates to me. Further from that, what is in the plant that is also in me, and in the entire universe? It’s up to us to investigate in each moment, what that is. I don’t know if there is God, or many gods. In some respects Process Work is a Nature religion. We talk about the Process having some kind of sentient essence.
Me:
Why aren’t we already naturally in touch with the maximum potential of each unfolding moment? What’s gone wrong?
Stu:
I wouldn’t say anything’s gone wrong. This is the nature of the Process. Certainly we have all sorts of stories that come up that prevent us from being present in every moment and seeing what is happening in the process. That could be survival stories that we’ve had as children. It could be trauma, individual or intergenerational or collective, or species-wide, or even mammal trauma. How far does this go back? Life is trying to survive in a world where it always dies. So what are the things we’ve done to help us survive that were true in some circumstances which aren’t relevant now? It’s not just about survival but wholeness, seeing ourselves as the universe and including all parts.
Me:
Great, so how is Process Work informing your work with XR?
Stu:
When coronavirus lockdown happened, everything I was organising was big summer gatherings for Rebels to come together and learn to be together…maybe have some conflict resolution processes and relationship processes…learning how to love and trust each other on a deeper level so that our work is more fluid and beautiful and enriching -that all stopped. So I thought this was a fantastic opportunity to not go deeper into XR but to skill up and go deeper into my private studies. I will probably come back into XR or another movement that has come by the time that I am ready to bring myself fully in….As for this summer and autumn, I’ve realised I’m more burnt out than I realised or have been admitting. Maybe I’ll turn up to the next Rebellion as a good soldier and get arrested a few times, I’m not sure. But the work of relating is always important and we’re always going to get into conflict. We’ll always have things that will jarr us as a movement or have tendencies to become rigid or calcified…or make us take sides and become polarised and fight things out. I’m not against this but if we stay there too long we’ll become divided and crumble, so we need ways to see the other side, not to oppress or marginalise any voice. The work I’m doing now is to facilitate and have those conversations, to create movements that are deeper and more trustful and stronger, and flow more easily…I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to bring myself fully back in, or even if I will…if I do it will probably be in a completely different way. My energy source for activism is close to depleted, so I have to find a new energy source and come in a new way. I’m not sure what that is yet. It’s important to say ‘I don’t know’.
A special place on the Iberian peninsula where Stu has spent some time…
And so ended the interview.This is me, Matthew, again. As an extra for YouTube, I did a little intro video to this interview. I’m reading from a script in the video, and it’s a bit messy, but I think I make some valuable points, so if you think you might like it, click here. (On my channel there’s also interviews with XR ‘founders’ in various countries around the world).
excerpt: ‘…to sustain human civilisation, it is essential to build a zero emissions industrial system very quickly. This requires the global mobilisation of resources on an emergency basis, akin to a wartime level of response.’
Epic Tomorrows’ review: Includes a forward by Admiral Chris Barrie, a member of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change and Chief of the Australian Defence Force from 1998 to 2002. This report is concise, very readable and relatively free from jargon. The gist of it is that IPCC projections (key data for the Climate COPs, the latest being COP25 in Madrid) are way too conservative, excluding or downplaying extreme scenarios for the sake of political consensus on action.
When the end of civilisation is at stake, Dunlop and Spratt argue that conventional risk management as done by organisations etc, becomes irrelevant. Risk management by responding to possibilities (by scenario planning) rather than high probabilities, could be the best way forward.
A 2050 scenario is then sketched. Based on scientific data the report argues that we could be looking at the collapse of global civilisation by 2050, due to ‘high-impact low probability warming’ of 3 degrees by this date, with 2 more degrees of warming locked in. This is the projected scenario if global emissions don’t peak until 2030 (which by my reckoning doesn’t seem that unlikely, looking at the latest Climate COP in Madrid, and with one of the worst global emitters, the USA, poised to leave the Paris Agreement. Even the Paris Agreement relies on unproven technologies!). The 2050 scenario ultimate result…’a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end.’
In summary the report emphasises that security bodies (armies etc) are uniquely placed to mobilise and order the WWII level global infrastructure transformation that is needed to transition rapidly away from fossil fuel economies…Let us make sure that any military-led transformation of global energy infrastructures is decided democratically, with full co-operation of citizens globally, or what freedoms might be curtailed, and what human rights abuses may result?
activist strategy notes: Military and security force collaboration is key to the success of any revolutionary social movement, such as the one needed to force governments into WWII level mobilisation on the ecological and climate emergency. This could be a key text to persuade military personnel of the need for immediate action.
tactics: Try printing off this report and handing it to soldiers. I once trespassed into an army barracks with a megaphone to proclaim the climate emergency, but I didn’t have copies of this on me, unfortunately. Also try emailing this report to all military institutions in your country.
vegan dynamics: Consider what an urgent security forces-led mass transformation of agricultural systems from meat-based to plant-based would look like. Can you educate security forces now on plant-based agriculture as well as the ‘Existential….’ report?
life strategy notes: Bring a bit of ‘military organisation’ and toughness into your own life. Remain non-violent towards all life. (The window of a fossil-fuelled bank isn’t alive).
excerpt: ‘Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn’t what happens with climate change denial.Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?’
Epic Tomorrows’ review: The point is made on this site that genuine scientific skepticism is a good thing, and essential for the development of scientific understanding. However, man-made climate change denialism is not healthy skepticism. ‘Skepticism is a process, denial is a position’.
The Skeptical Science site is based on peer-reviewed science, and although started as a blog is highly professional and has won awards for communication in climate science. A year or so ago, I would occasionally have severe doubts about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) after reading a particularly clever climate denialist paper. Returning to this site would always set me straight again.
The site is colourful, user-friendly and as light-hearted as possible whilst explaining serious science. It includes some graphics and pages that young adults may find fun (see the Best Sites for Young Adults list further down the page).
There is a regular feed of peer reviewed science articles on the front-page. The main climate myths (arguments used by AGW denialists) are listed conveniently down the left hand side of the front-page. There are ‘basic’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced’ explanations of all myths.
activist strategy notes:It’s obvious that any social movement that is attempting to transform government and public opinion, must be based on the soundest science and must be able to communicate this effectively i.e. must have an excellent media & messaging strategy. Messy communication will lead to a messy understanding and thus diluted support for a movement. As an activist I would advise getting your main climate science information from just a few high quality, regularly updated peer-reviewed websites. Less is more.
tactics: Throughout this directory there will be many references to Extinction Rebellion (XR) -the only social movement I have had extensive experience of so far. XR is a useful reference point for movements attempting to respond to the global climate (and general ecological) crisis. As with any movement, there’s good and there’s stuff to improve on. Regarding climate science communication, I was dismayed to see XR jump on the IPCC Paris Narrative (!) bandwagon of saying ‘We have 12 (now 11) years to turn things around’. This vague rhetoric is a sloppy departure from the original hard-hitting talk of XRand a massive dilution of XR’s message and therefore call for support. It leads the public to believe that we will all be okay if we follow the IPCC’s recommendations, which is not actually XR’s position at all. Poor tactic!
?You Gather? -Vegan and Climate Activism (for Heroines and Heroes) #13
Pre-ramble:
Hello heroines. Heroes, how are you doing?Are you keeping a lid on the patriarchy? I hope so.
Woohoo it’s kicking off in London! Look at this video! Especially the kids having fun! Bring your kids to London to rebel!
Believe it or not, my heart has been very heavy today. Heavy with planetary grief and personal loneliness. And heavy because I couldn’t find the inspiration to write this post -that is, until I visited my friend the River Taw.
The River Taw -‘upstream’
Until a few weeks ago I had been heavily involved with the internationalExtinction Rebellion (XR) but right now I have taken a step back. I am still fully supportive of XR. I need a rest, I need to play it cool with the Law to get a visiting visa to Canada, and I need to focus on Epic Tomorrows. We do have to be strategic as front-line activists as to how and when we get arrested (if at all), and as to how we manage our time and lives in general.
I will admit I am finding the gathering, listing and curating of websites into spreadsheets for my Well Gathered workbook terminally boring at times. But I also have intense flashes of vision as to how this gathering is leading towards a truly valuable service that could help speed up activism the world over. That may sound bold, but if you are as obsessive as I am about the truth, and how to present the truth to make positive change, you will understand my claim!
Gathering information this past week about farms and slaughterhouses in the UK, particularly as regards farm animal welfare, it occurred to me how vast a spell society is under when it comes to where and how our food is produced. Spell is surely the right word. We do not live in a scientific society or a rational society, let alone a humane one.
One of the interesting resources I found this week is a map of all the dairy farms in England and Wales, compiled by Project Calf, here.(More resources are listed in Well Gathered).
I have often heard the ills of the modern world blamed on positivist and Enlightenment thinking -specifically that the only valid knowledge is that which is scientifically verified. Yet when it comes to modern industrialised farming, especially animal agriculture, no amount of scientific verification that the industry is wrecking biodiversity, the atmosphere, animal welfare and human health, seems to affect its continuance.
The media has a lot to answer for, of course. I look back incredulously at my childhood and the flood of tv adverts that I must have absorbed, telling me that pasteurised, homogenised cow’s milk is the best source of calcium. (I have now researched this to be a ridiculous claim. I will write a post on this within the next fortnight).
It is only by gathering enough information, misinformation and disinformation on an issue that we can learn the truth enough to communicate it to make change.Once we have learnt that truth, we must be as strategic as possible in how we apply that truth to our activism -including in the messaging that we convey to prospective supporters.
Well Gathered is my attempt to provide a tool which helps you gather the truth and then employ it in activist strategy.
The River Taw -‘midstream’
Back to XR -daily my heart is both lifted and torn to see the various extensive news items about the Rebels in London. Torn because part of me wishes I was there. They are holding down at least four different locations, including Waterloo Bridge where hundreds of arrests have taken place since the beginning of the Rebellion on the 15th. Here’s Caspar of the Climate Media Coalition in a photo of the bridge he uploaded to Facebook this evening. (I will get to those ‘5 reasons…’ of the post title, just bear with me!)
I have been smiling at the scenes on Waterloo and at Oxford Circus which can be described as more of a party than a protest. So far I have witnessed (remotely) the transforming of Waterloo Bridge into an urban garden, a classical violin concerto at the same location, a massive pink boat bolted into the ground in the middle of Oxford Circus (illegally of course) and dozens of Rebels being carried off by police amongst cheering crowds.
Then I read critical comments of XR from folk on Facebook who just don’t seem to get it -and by ‘it’ I mean the severity of the ecological crisis we are in. Yes it would be better if XR had more of a diverse ethnic and class representation, but it doesn’t. We are still trying. You won’t beat us with whining criticisms or even intelligent (but still whingey) online articles, so please join us and help us improve in those areas where we obviously need improvement.
God knows I realise that in XR we need to appeal to so many more people and types of people than we are currently doing. I thought this Guardian video was really excellent in its inclusion of the two young women who made the point that if it was a group of mainly black people sitting down in the road, they would have been arrested much sooner (most probably).
Personally I am wondering about the builders working on a new block of flats right opposite the block I’m in. How could they be persuaded to the XR cause? How can I teach them about the severity of the ecological crisis? In a way that they will listen?
Being quite alone in my flat, everything I feel as I engage with folk online (even if it is only one-way engagement) seems to be magnified -drawn in sharp relief against the emotionally uneventful -and not a little stressed- background of my day to day life right now. It seems as if the stress and the uniformity (dullness?) I am currently experiencing are pre-requisites to the business launch of Epic Tomorrows, but actually I know it doesn’t have to be like that.
Indeed I have had moments this week of relaxing -relinquishing personal rules that aren’t serving me and taking on new guidelines of efficiency, as well as allowing a little spontaneity here and there.
One such spontaneous moment was this morning. I couldn’t face beginning this post. (Yes I know, I know, and now it’s too long). I felt so lonely. I have begun a relationship with a woman in Canada -the plan is that she will move here to live with me. We’ve been getting on extraordinarily well, but not being physically in each other’s presence is of course frustrating and can make the loneliness in-between our communications more acute.
With it being a nice sunny day, I decided to get down to the Taw for a little relaxation and refreshment. I found my regular sitting spot with the intention of finding some inspiration for today’s post.
The River Taw -‘downstream’
Realising that I was dehydrated and hadn’t brought water, and not trusting that the river Taw doesn’t have toxic agricultural run-off in it, I stayed only long enough to read the first story in the gathering of tales that is ‘Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters’ by Kathleen Ragan. (The featured image at the top of this post is the front cover.)
I was indeed inspired by ‘The Stolen Bairn and the Sidh’, a folk tale from Scotland. To cut a short story even shorter, a human woman leaves her baby (bairn) on a cliff path to go in search of water (not advisable at the best of times). Of course the Sidh (big fairy type beings) make off with the bairn and take it to their kingdom.
Our heroine can only enter the kingdom to retrieve the baby if she presents two objects of uncommon beauty and value to the Sidh, which she does by crafting original objects with her own hands. The first object is a gown made from downy feathers that she collects from the cliff-side, shed from eider ducks, with her own golden hair sown in which she cuts off for the purpose. The second object is a harp made from a whale bone washed up on the beach, strung with some more of her hair.
After reading the story it struck me how the climate and ecological catastrophe that is unfolding around us can be likened to the kingdom of the mean Sidh. The fairies are not evil but presented as mischievous and thoroughly misguided, in the same way that our fossil fuel CEOs are. The bairn is all our children, our nephews and nieces who are currently held hostage by a future that we have as yet failed to avert.
In order to get our bairn back, we must use two unusual and rare forces. The first is mass civil disobedience. The second, put in motion by the first, is participatory democracy.There will be no quick techo-fixes, which is why our own hands, our own hard work are implicated in both of these forces.
We must cut off our hair -in other words our vanity and consumerist egos– in order to employ these forces effectively. Moreover, movements like XR for me can only be the very beginning of a long journey to respond effectively to The Evidence of the declining efficiency and growing evils of neoliberal capitalist economics.
So now I will get round to the original point of this post, which was intended to catch any straggling vegan activists who for some reason haven’t made it to London to join XR (maybe it’s a good reason, like mine is).
6 reasons for all hardcore vegan activists to get to London RIGHT NOW!
1)XR needs your energy! Some vegans have been amongst the highest energy, most focused people I have met, and game for a fight, metaphorically speaking. For some vegans it may be something to do with the discipline of keeping a vegan diet, in the beginning, which is hard if you are not used to it. I know this discipline has given me a feeling of focus and sharpness, which is akin to how I have felt in the austere environments of Theravadin Buddhist monasteries. As long as it is peaceful, can you bring this energy to London right now please? Folk are being arrested on Waterloo Bridge and at other locations all the time, with a constant need for reinforcements. It’s fine to bring your kids and you don’t have to be ‘an arrestable’.
2) There are already lots of vegans involved in XR. I know them personally. XR naturally attracts vegans because it is a peaceful, compassionate, heartfelt movement for ecological justice. Listen to this Talk Radio segment to hear about how the police are baffled at how happy the XR activists are, even as they are getting arrested.
3)Living vegan alone is nowhere near enough to save the planet / save our civilisation from collapse. I expand on this a little in point 1) of the most popular post I have ever written here.
4) We need to get more strategic about our activism and the way that issues intersect. Any serious vegan, I would suggest, should also be campaigning on the addressing of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, as the meat industry is heavily implicated in both. If XR achieves its aims of the creation of a national citizens’ assembly to oversee reduction to carbon zero by 2025, then naturally a drastic reduction of large-scale industrialised meat farming in the UK will occur. But first we need to achieve our aims. Bake some vegan cakes and get to London!!
5) It could be good PR for veganism as a stand-alone issue, if you get to London now. There have been unlimited news reports on the XR actions in London and internationally in the past few days, including some sympathetic Financial Times and Sky News coverage. Make your vegan signs, be creative and gentle and suggestive with them! Mingle into the general XR signage. You may even be able to gather enough vegans together in London to do a separate vegan action at a well-known meat establishment. How about a sign that reads:
‘Vegan for XR’ ??? or even just ‘XR Vegan’ (XRV) ???
6) It’s fun! There are all kinds of civilly disobedient shenanigans going on.Watch wonderful example:
Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, share or slam!Additionally, feel free to drop me a line at epictomorrows@gmail.com to help me evolve in my service to you, (or just give me a load of abuse if that’s your thing). Subscribe to blog posts by email at the top of the sidebar. Click here to buy the WELL GATHERED Workbook.Heroic!
Here’s the Facebook version of this post (click on the little blue ‘f’ to go there!):
Featured image: a lane on the outskirts of North Tawton, amongst the gorgeous countryside, where I sometimes remember to walk, to relax.
?You Gather? – Vegan and Climate Activism (for Heroines and Heroes) #12
Heroines, heroes, it’s almost time for the international Extinction Rebellion (XR). The Rebellion that will go down in history as the most fun and festive Rebellion ever!
Checkherefor a whole bunch of crazy, fun and half-illegal stuff happening in the middle of London and around the world from 15th April.
In this post, I want to share some information specifically useful to vegan activists –whether you support XR or not. My next post will be ‘5 reasons why vegans should support the international Extinction Rebellion’, so look out for it! On a side note, a couple of days ago I finally retrieved the XR jacket I wore for this action in January, from Exeter police station. In the background here you can see the map with pins in that Devon and Cornwall Counter-Terrorism questioned me about, and probably got the wrong idea about, when they visited me earlier this year (for being a dangerous window-painting activist!)
If you read my last post, the most popular I have ever written, you may be forgiven for thinking that I want to create arguments with vegans -but the opposite is true. I am interested in the truth above everything. Only the truth will purify our activism and set it free. Especially for you hardcore vegan activists who are prepared to get arrested for your actions (non-violent please), I’m sure you appreciate you need to be operating from a sound information base to maximise your effectiveness. With all uncertainty cleared from your hearts, you can strike like fire.
As part of my product building for the Well Gathered workbook for vegan and climate activists -to be released in three weeks- I have been specifically researching, over the past few days, online articles supporting veganism from a general sustainability and land use point of view. These are listed in my ‘Vegan Science & News’ spreadsheet, which is one of the spreadsheets of a dozen included in Well Gathered. Other sheets include Climate Science / News, Climate & ‘Eco’ Activist groups -with preference given to NVDA- and Vegan & Animal Rights Activist groups. Here’s a screenshot of the (incomplete) Climate Science spreadsheet, to give you an idea of where I’m going with this whole thing:
I will be cross-referencing all sites and I am providing notes to help guide users with how to use the information.
Within the Vegan Science & News spreadsheet, there will also be sections looking at veganism from animal rights and human nutritional and well-being perspectives. But for now I would like to share these 5 articles with you which look at veganism purely from a general sustainability perspective. Even if you are not a vegan activist -even if you are not vegan!- looking for a solid science base to your activism, you may still find these useful-
5 online articles for a solid sustainability science base for vegan activism:
The Vegan Book of Permacultureby Graham Burnett. Writing about this in the linked article, the co-founder of Permaculture Magazine and Permanent Publications Maddy Harland writes:
What we at Permanent Publications really respect and love about Graham Burnett, the author of the Vegan Book of Permaculture, is his enabling approach. He inspires people in a positive way to eat more vegan and vegetarian dishes rather than shaking angry sticks at them. Let’s encourage people to question where their food is coming from and to save lots of money by following Graham’s suggestions: Eating more vegan food, growing our own, community gardening, buying from wholefood co-ops, shopping locally, sharing the harvest and generally taking positive and pro-active steps towards living more lightly on our planet.
However be warned that the majority of the article defends Regenerative Agriculture and certain biodiversity conservation practices, including grazing animals and hunting wild squirrel, rabbit and deer to keep populations down (to allow diversity of fauna growth -because we don’t have lynx and wolves any more). I’m not commenting on whether Maddy Harland is right or wrong here as a whole, but if you are a hardcore vegan you need to be aware of these sophisticated arguments for eating omnivorously. For success in activism you must ‘know your enemy’ inside out.
This article is a must for hardcore vegans looking to convince hardcore economists / capitalists, from the very respectable and progressive (within the limits of capitalism) World Economic Forum. Ultimately we need to dismantle capitalism, but meanwhile this article could win you some battles. As well as the sustainability and economics of veganism and vegetarianism this article includes neat sections on animal welfare and human nutrition. This from the section on sustainability:
According to the World Health Organization, every year over 20 million people will die as a result of malnutrition, and approximately one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. Most of the food that is currently fed to animals could instead be used to directly feed the world’s hungry. What we often fail to realize is that the crops required to sustain livestock are fuel for a project that creates food to supplement the creation of more food. Instead of supplying the grains yielded from the crops to human beings in desperate need of it and those affected by the world food crisis, those crops are fed to livestock, exacerbating the pace of the current climate change crisis.
3) This Vegan Brand Just Proved That Plant-Based Burgers Are More Sustainable Than Those Made Of Beef
This may seem like a relatively trivial matter in the global picture of sustainable food production, climate breakdown, animal welfare and nutrition. However we need more mainstream sites printing mainstream articles like this. America and Australia are two of the world’s highest per capita carbon dioxide emitters. As we know, the global industrialised meat industry is a high emitter of greenhouse gases, even compared to plant-based industrial agriculture (although plant-based is still pretty terrible). America and Australia are also two nations where burgers are a large part of the national diet, so this article is useful ammunition for vegan activists. From the article:
Beyond Burger generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less non-renewable energy, has more than 99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a quarter pound of US beef. To give you an idea of the real-life impact, according to a spokesperson for Beyond Meat: “On average, Americans eat three burgers a week. If they switched just one of these beef burgers to a Beyond Burger for a year, it would be like taking 12 million cars off the road and saving enough energy to power 2.3 million homes.”
4) Environmental impact of omnivorous, ovo-lacto-vegetarian and vegan diet
This is an important scientific report, taking into account cultural considerations as well as inter-individual variability in diet. For any vegan activist looking for a nuanced hard science support of veganism from a sustainability perspective. The abstract in full:
Food and beverage consumption has a great impact on the environment, although there is a lack of information concerning the whole diet. The environmental impact of 153 Italian adults (51 omnivores, 51 ovo-lacto-vegetarians, 51 vegans) and the inter-individual variability within dietary groups were assessed in a real-life context. Food intake was monitored with a 7-d dietary record to calculate nutritional values and environmental impacts (carbon, water, and ecological footprints). The Italian Mediterranean Index was used to evaluate the nutritional quality of each diet. The omnivorous choice generated worse carbon, water and ecological footprints than other diets. No differences were found for the environmental impacts of ovo-lacto-vegetarians and vegans, which also had diets more adherent to the Mediterranean pattern. A high inter-individual variability was observed through principal component analysis, showing that some vegetarians and vegans have higher environmental impacts than those of some omnivores. Thus, regardless of the environmental benefits of plant-based diets, there is a need for thinking in terms of individual dietary habits. To our knowledge, this is the first time environmental impacts of three dietary regimens are evaluated using individual recorded dietary intakes rather than hypothetical diet or diets averaged over a population.
5) Vegan Dogs: How Does it Work, and Are They Healthy?
Okay this one is ever-so-slightly off-topic, but bear with me. Your meat-eating friends might try to label you a hypocrite if you keep dogs that eat meat, even just in terms of the global environmental impact and biodiversity loss implicated in dog-food production. However your dog may be able to go vegan. This article is a great introduction to the subject of veganism in dogs, including links to four popular vegan dog food companies. Here’s an extract:
In an interview with CNN, Dr. Fox says that some adult dogs do adapt and even thrive on well-balanced vegan diets, but most do best with a variety of foods that include some animals fats and protein. Still, Fox notes, “Dogs could benefit from a vegan meal at least once a week to detox.”
Okay! I hope the above was useful to you in some way.
Before I go, I want share a dance music mix that has really been helping me work recently. It’s nothing new, but it’s nice: Sima Deep, ‘Make Me Flow’.
If you want to put in a pre-order for theWell Gathered workbook or if you want to contact me for any other reason, email me (Matthew) at epictomorrows@gmail.com
Otherwise, feel free to like, comment, share or slam!
Here’s this post on Facebook in case you want to share from there (although that’s probably where you came from) Click on the small ‘f’ icon below.
?You Gather? Vegan and Climate Activism (for Heroines and Heroes) #11
Hello climate heroines. Vegan heroes, what’s up?
This post is directed at some, not all of my vegan activist friends…
Okay, so I have previously classed myself as vegan. At the moment I eat 95% plant-based, with a little honey and very occasional eggs and even more occasional meat, usually in the form of fish. So right now you could call me ‘flexitarian’. I have had diverse conversations about veganism and plant-based diets with 100% hardcore vegan friends, as well as flexitarians, vegetarian and meat-eating friends. I have observed, often with horror, the kind of ‘discussions’ that go on in an often uncivilised and polarised way between vegans and non-vegans online. Particularly on Facebook, which, although many of us find it useful, is not designed to be a platform suited to diplomacy, consciousness raising and conflict resolution.
I am a climate breakdown and sixth mass extinction activist. This is why I organise with Extinction Rebellion. This is the starting place for my activism. This naturally takes me to the conclusion of eating predominantly plant-based for global sustainability reasons. Naturally I also come to the conclusion of being fundamentally against the neoliberal globalised capitalist paradigm we still inhabit, and which inhibits us.
In my view we should be aiming towards relocalised decentralised economies, tied to the land and localbiocultural diversity, the true source of regenerative i.e. sustainable culture. The backbone of relocalised economies should be a predominantly de-industrialised, plant-based diet. I think this does mean more people will have to involve themselves in growing or producing food, even if just for a few hours per week. (It will be fun, you’ll get used to it). It is becoming well-known that vegan diets typically have a massively smaller carbon footprint than vegetarian and especially omnivorous diets, (the exception being fruit-only diets). Vegan diets also use significantly less land and water than meat diets, on average. (Different sources give different numbers, but at least ten times less land per pound of protein). Thus to address climate breakdown, cutting out 90% or more of meat and dairy (for most of us) is a no-brainer.
Eating predominantly plant-based for global sustainability reasons does not mean that I am immune to the suffering of animals. I very much want to end industrialised animal agriculture, including for the well-being of the animals involved. I support and empathise with direct actions performed by vegan groups at farms and slaughter-houses. They are at least alerting farmers to how times are changing, and must continue to change.
However, when considering global land use patterns, it is the destruction of entire species of wildlife that pulls at my heart-strings the most, caused by the deforestation and pesticide use associated with all industrial agriculture, not just animal agriculture. The extinction of an entire species might not get you crying like a video of mis-treated farm animals can, but I can assure you that many animals go through physical tortureduring the process of their entire habitat being wiped out. Not to mention the air miles involved in transporting many of our current staple and favourite foods to the UK…whether they be meat or avocadoes. Aviation drives further exploration for oil and gas, which in turn causes more destruction of habitat and deaths of animals. For instance, see this report from the WWF: https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/oil-and-gas-development
I know there are a lot of very sensitive people amongst vegans. I have met many of them, indeed to an extent I am one of them.Sensitivity is a good thing.I understand why this sensitivity is expressed as anger towards meat-eaters, by some vegans. And I am not someone who takes the suffering of animals lightly. When I discover a fly trapped in my home, I am anxious for its release, and I have previously risked being stung by hornets in order to carefully guide them to freedom. Choosing not to own a motor vehicle is partly motivated by my desire to minimise my impact upon the planet’s wildlife.
My business Epic Tomorrows is motivated fundamentally by compassion.For human beings and towards all life on Earth, from the bacteria which live in my gut, to the whales which swim in the ocean. My current commitment within Epic Tomorrows, as a climate and mass extinction activist, and a flexitarian (at the moment) is to commit to collating, curating and cross-referencing useful web addresses for activists. I’m listing them in a suite of spreadsheets which I’m calling the Well Gathered Workbook.
I have put countless hours into building this product already. I will put in many more ahead of the launch on 24th April. I will be selling only 30 copies at the introductory price of six squids (hopefully six squid or other life forms are not implicated i.e. killed every time a monetary transaction is made somewhere on Earth). After the first 30 copies I will take it off the shelf for a little while. I want to engage with the first 30 (could that be you?) on a deep level to get feedback and find out if there are other ways I can help you individually, (at no charge).
But before I continue to build this product, I just need to get the following out of my system, hopefully in a sensitive way which could trigger bridge-building debate, rather than Facebook point-scoring and Twitter slanging matches. I will admit, the title of this post is deliberately provocative, to alert more people to my post -a marketing tactic, although I did tone ‘annoying’ down to ‘irritating’. On the other hand I have been put out and frustrated by some, not all, of my vegan activist friends who have been subject to some of the attitudes listed below:
10 most irritating attitudes amongst my vegan activist friends, (okay, so I call these ‘attitides’ but some of them are beliefs, assumptions or areas of ignorance):
1)‘Going vegan will save the planet’. This belief is complacent and wrong, and in my experience seems to come from a place of narcissism amongst some vegan activists, rather than genuine concern about, or research into, sustainable global land use and C02 emissions. See this article from New Internationalist for more details https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2018/06/06/vegan-climate-carbon
Going vegan will certainly HELP save the planet -it’s a big part of why I’m mostly plant-based myself. Yet, if we all went vegan tomorrow -which would be disastrous in terms of the multi-species deaths that are associated with too sudden a system change- C02 emissions in other industries could still easily take us beyond climate tipping points within a couple of decades. (This is related to my point above about food air miles and new fossil fuel exploration). Direct action (non-violent) against governments, and possibly corporations, is the only response to this. So, cut out meat and dairy consumption, sure, but that’s not good enough.
2)‘Animal farmers are all evil / bad / insensitive people.’ This is a ridiculous assertion to make. For those of you who have seen Cowspiracy (despite its factual inaccuracies), do you remember the former rancher -turned activist Howard Lyman? A truly inspirational figure, to be sure, but do you think he is in isolation? What do you know about where farmers are in their personal journeys and livelihoods? Have you thought that some farmers may not be happy in their jobs, that they were born into farming families, and find it very difficult to find other suitable employment options in rural areas? As most vegans live in urban areas, this is something you may not have considered. Even the ones who are happy in their jobs are, believe it or not, capable of compassion towards their animals, even within what could be called, the culturally accepted context of genocide and betrayal that is industrialised agriculture.
There are other contexts which could qualify as culturally accepted genocide / ecocide,such as abortion and levelling land to build houses, but I certainly wouldn’t label these pregnant mothers and builders as ‘bad’. Yes, I’m being controversial -a woman’s body should not be directly equated with a farm, but do you see what I’m getting at? Black and white thinking is just not good enough when it comes to global climate justice.
3) ‘Eating plant-based works for everyone’. It doesn’t. A small minority of peoplehave health conditions which have been cured by eating a meat-based diet. Best leave them be.
4) ‘My vegan dietary and lifestyle choices can be exported to any part of the world / my vegan dietary and lifestyle choices do not have an impact on the dietary and lifestyle choices of people in other parts of the world’. In my experience, this isn’t a consciously held belief of many vegan activists -it’s just an area of ignorance that they haven’t dealt with, because ‘they don’t know they don’t know’. This article from ‘NOW’ magazine (Toronto) does a good job explaining, although perhaps in a more spiky and confrontational way than I would choose: https://nowtoronto.com/news/vegans-climate-change/
However I would also make the additional more subtle point that modern affluent lifestyles in the global north reduce dietary and lifestyle options for the poor in the global south, and that includes specifically vegan consumption patterns in northern countries which perpetuate oppressive global infrastructures, including fossil-fuel-based, just as much as meat-based consumption patterns do. Only a ‘systems thinking’ approach to Earth and human society can save us now. We must not be isolationist in our thinking, which brings me to my next point…
5) ‘Permaculture? What’s that?’ Permaculture recognises the integrated role that sensitive animal husbandry can play in Regenerative Agriculture and rewilding (bringing back many species from the brink of extinction) -true for modern as well as pre-industrial societies. This doesn’t mean that these practices have to be used, but it is important to be aware of them (before wading into discussions wearing potentially oil-derived sized nines). The most excellent and revolutionary Maddy Harland explains things well here in this article from way back in 2014, which champions veganism in Permaculture: https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/veganism-and-permaculture
6) ‘My nine cats are not having an impact on the planet’ (substitute with preferred pets). This doesn’t actually apply to anyone I know, but I have encountered some vegans on the dreaded (but currently necessary) Facebook who seem to take the simplistic view that it doesn’t matter how many pets are propagated on the planet, as long as they are being cuddled and cared for and posted on Insta. I have known dogs weaned onto vegetarian diets, and I understand that veganism can work for some dogs too, but that’s not true of cats.
Additionally, whatever the pet, please consider that there is already an unsustainable number of humans on the planet, without any of those humans having pets too, with all the land use implicated in keeping those pets, even on vegan and vegetarian diets. It all adds up. Could we just stick to rescue pets, otherwise an absolute maximum of two large pets per household (cats, dogs, giraffes etc)? That would really help improve the greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Below is some information on the C02 impact of keeping pets in America from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The study is two years old but I doubt things have changed much in Trump’s America. Most of these pet owners won’t be vegan but they will nevertheless be contributing to a culture of excessive pet-keeping which vegans are not immune to: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-dogs-environmental-impact
7) ‘Some lives are more important than others’. Again, this doesn’t seem to be a conscious attitude amongst any vegan activists that I know of, but an unconscious one, or a type of ignorance. It’s not helped by the media and marketing industries which have tended to use pictures of cuddly animals to signal content about veganism and / or attract people to the vegan cause. It’s the same easy option that conservation organisations use to encourage protection of (some) endangered species. I am not wholesale against ALL such marketing techniques, but when they contribute to a culture of ignorance about the importance of biodiversity and ALL life-forms in maintaining the complex inter-connected web of life which supports us and makes for the Earth’s rich tapestry, then, well…
Ironically some vegans may have fallen prey here to the farming industry’s portrayal of cartoon and cuddly farm animalsover the years, at the expense of native British wildlife. This is not to ignore the great efforts of my vegan activist friends on badger culling sabs and hunt sabs, which I fully support.
‘Cuddly speciesism’ can compound and be compounded by attitudes 6) above and 8) below in particular. Have you ever found buzzards poisoned and dumped by the side of the road? I have. It makes me cry.
8) ‘If my food and clothes and other products I use are plant-based, I’m having a benign effect on the planet’. It is complacent and dangerous to think like this. This is an extension of points I have already made above, especially 1) but let me summarise it like this: If we drive motor vehicles, we are implicit in ecocide. As long as our food is flown to us, we are implicit in ecocide. As long as we propagate the neoliberal capitalist ‘paradigm’, ‘Business As Usual’, (or as I call it ‘Same Old Story’ inThe Evidence), we are implicit in ecocide. Make ecocide law.
9) ‘I shouldn’t / won’t be friends with meat eaters, at least not on Facebook’. It’s up to you, but this attitude frustrates me because it is clearly unstrategic. If you want to convert the world to veganism, surely you can’t take an isolationist stance? If you want a compassionate world, should you not demonstrate compassion, even to those who don’t, even to your ‘enemies’? If you are genuinely so sensitive that talking to meat-eaters upsets you, then cool, but if you are coming from a place of hatred -not so cool.
10) ‘Vegans are the best’. You’re alright, okay? And so am I, when I’m vegan and when I’m not.
Now, after all that, I hope you will all come and give me a plant-based hug. I mean it, no hard feelings. I’m trying to build a stronger movement here, against climate breakdown and the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth.
Hereis my Rebel listening track for this week (a bit different from last time’s Bach). This is the kind of music I use to wake me up in the morning, before I get to work. When I listen to the lyrics, ‘I follow you, deep sea baby’ it conjures an image of a blue whale.
!The Epic Tomorrows of Earth 