Extinction Rebellion’s Urgent Environmental Protest Breaks New Ground While Drawing on the Occupy, Anti-Globalisation and Road Protest Movements

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Well, this is getting interesting. On Monday, when the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion began its occupation of five sites in central London — Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus and Marble Arch — I wasn’t sure that the ongoing intention of crashing the system through mass arrests, and waking people up to the need for change by disrupting their lives was going to work. 

I’d taken an interest when Extinction Rebellion started in October — although I was still largely preoccupied by the occupation (and subsequent eviction) of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford — but I’d ended up thinking that, although they had secured significant media coverage, which was very helpful, and their ‘branding’ was extremely striking, this wasn’t going to be enough. 

I was somewhat heartened when, in related actions, school kids — inspired by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg — got involved in climate strikes, and I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more on that front, but on Monday I couldn’t see how Extinction Rebellion’s latest coordinated protests were going to work. The police seemed, for the most part, to be trying not to give the protestors what they wanted — mass arrests — and although the crowds I encountered at Parliament Square and Oxford Circus reminded me of aspects of social movements of the past — Reclaim the Streets and the road protest movement from the ’90s, the anti-globalisation movement of the late ’90s and early 2000s, and 2011’s Occupy movement — I couldn’t see how the movement was going to be able to take the next step, and to build the momentum necessary for significant change.

That may still be the case, but I saw something yesterday and today that gave me hope that a genuine disruption to the system is possible. 

It was stunningly hot yesterday, and to get to the Waterloo Bridge occupation, which I wanted to witness, I had cycled through a smog-shrouded London, making my way from my home in Lewisham, in south east London, over Southwark Bridge, through the City with its absurd and endlessly greedy building projects, and passing through Temple, where, with a few noble exceptions, lawyers have spent centuries protecting the wealthy, and no one has given a damn about the environment.

All this changed as I reached Waterloo Bridge, normally hideously choked with heavy traffic, which was empty of all but cyclists and relieved pedestrians. As I approached the Waterloo end, there was a stage, various stalls providing food and information, people happily lounging around, and trees brought to the bridge by campaigners — and it wasn’t lost on anyone that, with no expenditure whatsoever, we now had a garden bridge without the insane amounts of money squandered on the ludicrous garden bridge vanity project that Boris Johnson had thrown his weight behind during his eight execrable years as London’s Mayor.

On Waterloo Bridge, everyone realised how pleasant London would be if there was, suddenly and permanently, signficantly less traffic. And it has been the same elsewhere in London as so many major roads have been shut down: most of Regent Street, much of Oxford Street, Marble Arch, Parliament Square.

I hope you have the time to check out this little video I took, of the amazing vibe on the bridge. I don’t know who these women performers were, but they had great spirit and passion, and the dancers’ joy was indicative of the spirit of resistance that is building up.

Noticeably, the police have been unable to stop the protests. They tried and failed on Monday night, arresting many people, but didn’t manage to clear the bridge, and yesterday afternoon, when I was there, their efforts were noticeably half-hearted, as they arrested no more than around ten people, a token gesture rather than anything more significant. 

Ironies abound. Here is a protest movement whose members want to be arrested, but, in response, find the police refusing to give them what they want, meaning that their protest sites have actually become full-blown occupation sites instead. Then, it transpires, the police, short of resources, can’t deal with the numbers involved in the occupations, and, even if they had the resources, couldn’t really justify mass arrests of people who are pretty scrupulously well-behaved, include a wide cross-section of society, and do not involve alcohol or drug use, historically an easy way for situations involving potential conflict to get out of hand.

Even if the bridge is cleared, however, I can’t see Extinction Rebellion fading away. The demand for an urgent and immediate end to the ruinous status quo of the arrogant, amnesiac and thoroughly self-centred culture of the countries of the West, and their capitals, including, of course, London, remains as pertinent as it was last October, when Extinction Rebellion launched, with three demands: for the government to “tell the truth about the climate and wider ecological emergency, reverse inconsistent policies and work alongside the media to communicate with citizens”, for the government to “enact legally binding policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 and to reduce consumption levels”, and for a “national Citizens’ assembly to oversee the changes, as part of creating a democracy fit for purpose.”

After my skepticism on Monday about the possibility of success for the campaign via its aims of mass arrest and disruption, yesterday, and again today, I felt genuine people power, and change in the air — and I do hope you’ll also consider getting involved.

If you’re in London, or can get to London, I urge you to come on down. The authorities don’t know what to do with such a large and peaceful gathering, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to meet like-minded people from all walks of life, who all share a huge concern for the environment, and with changing the way our broken, greed-driven materialistic society currently operates. This is, as everyone involved keeps explaining, a climate emergency that won’t go away, and that requires as many of us as possible to get involved.

How did we get here?

To put things in perspective, this has been a long time coming. In just four days’ time (on April 22), it will be 49 years since the first Earth Day, which “brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favour of environmental reform.” 

By the time I reached adolescence, green activism led to extraordinary protests; primarily, the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common in Berkshire, a permanent camp opposed to proposals to host US-controlled Cruise missiles on UK soil, which also provided an opportunity for a radical women’s movement to begin to be heard.

Another source of dissent was the pro-green, anti-nuclear activities of the free festival movement, a collection of green activists, anarchists and travellers who had taken to the road to escape the grinding poverty and unemployment of Thatcher’s Britain in old coaches and trucks, and who held protests/free festivals at green targets like power stations, and who also set up another permanent protest camp against a second proposed Cruise missile base at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire.

Molesworth was evicted on February 6, 1985 by 1,500 troops, the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, symbolically led by the defense secretary Michael Heseltine. The travellers were subsequently harried from site to site across southern England until a final showdown took place on June 1, 1985, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when 1,300 police from six counties and the MOD violently decommissioned the convoy, a story explained in detail in my book The Battle of the Beanfield. The convoy was en route to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic jamboree, which, in its later years, became the size of a town, and occupied the fields opposite Stonehenge for the whole of June.

After the Beanfield, Thatcher’s hopes that she had crushed counter-cultural dissent were revealed as unfounded when two new and unexpected developments took place: the Ecstasy-fuelled rave scene, and the road protest movement, a direct response to the clampdown on travellers, which located direct action not through travel and guerrilla-style occupations of land, but through protestors rooting themselves to one spot, defending landscapes threatened by unnecessary road developments.  

The road protest movement, which was extraordinary in its scope, in turn spawned Reclaim the Streets, which was clearly a big influence on Extinction Rebellion, beginning with the occupation of Camden High Street, via two cars symbolically crashing into one another, and spreading around the world, along the way involving other significant occupations like the takeover of the M41 link road by Shepherd’s Bush, which was also another big influence on Extinction Rebellion.

The road protests then fed into the anti-globalisation movement, which started on June 18, 1999, with the Carnival Against Capital (J18) in various locations, including the City of London, and was timed to coincide with the 25th G8 Summit in Cologne. 

Huge anti-globalisation protests continued, but 2001 was a bleak year. In July, in Genoa, Italy, police killed an anti-globalisation protestor, and in September, America was attacked. In the “war on terror” that has followed, Islamophobia has increased, and civil liberties curtailed. In 2003, the largest protests the world has ever seen — against the illegal invasion of Iraq — took place, but millions who objected were brushed aside like a single fly.

Then came the banker-led global economic crash of 2008, followed, particularly in the UK, by a cynical “age of austerity” designed to cut the state provision of all services, with savage outcomes for the poor. Student protests followed, and in September 2011 the Occupy movement began on Wall Street, the financial centre of New York, which spread around the world, and also clearly provided inspiration for Extinction Rebellion.

St. Paul’s Cathedral was the venue in London where a tent city took root, lasting for several months. Occupy set up non-hierarchical decision-making, and took protest into new territory. Because getting together and marching and then going home wasn’t enough (perhaps demonstrated most vividly following the Iraq war protests), the new movement realised that taking root in the landscape, asking questions and refusing to go home was a good start for a new call for radical change.

It’s taken until now for the next stage in this long story to begin, and it has taken an impending catastrophe to bring it about — the already-unfolding environmental collapse of life on earth, the sixth great Extinction in the planet’s history. 

While previous movements have often found their message diluted, both by internal difficulties and by blanket mainstream media antipathy, Extinction Rebellion seems to have great power through being highly focused — on crashing the existing system, because it is incapable of stopping itself, and because we have run out of time. I do hope you can get involved.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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