But in this country, with the current mainstream relationship with the police, non-violence is strategically essential for our movement. It is, in fact, the very driver of our existence. It will probably require letting go of our vision of “the individual”. In many people’s minds, the belief that the struggle for social and economic justice does not go well with ecological consciousness, and that “the end of the month” and “the end of the world” work against each other, is still legitimate. The five real conspiracies you need to know about, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. It denounces the political inertia and obfuscation of “truth” that permeate climate change debates. Today we talk with Rebecca Orrison, Climate Science PhD student and Extinction Rebellion (XR) activist. Les affects de la politique. Today, inaction in the face of climate change has become an explicit matter of indignation for millions worldwide, as the latest international protests have shown. XR is no exception to this tradition and in its discourse affect is everywhere. After all, civil disobedience and many of XR’s rhetoric and tactics can be traced back to earlier social movements. But what exactly happened that might explain this recent “affective” bifurcation? Copyright © 2020 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Please check individual images for licensing details. The next step is to populate this journey with concrete stories and actions, to go beyond our fear of extinction. Obstinate after losing the bridge and our bamboo tripod, a team of our builders worked tirelessly to make another one. Humans have always raised existential questions about human life, existence, and its place among other creatures. To find a contemporary example of this reality, one just need look to the streets: the gilets jaunes do not protest on the same days as the climate activists, with the same people, under the same banners. After weeks of building, I was more than just physically attached. 6 million people took to the streets in September 2019. I couldn’t know then that this was the start of a fortnight of the same emotional journey, repeated many times over: loss, grief, defiance, joy, loss. I couldn’t help but think of symmetry with the ZAD movement in France, since I’d recently discovered that their lighthouse had inspired ours. Love and rage in Extinction Rebellion Recent actions have put the XR movement on a steep learning curve. [6] There is no overwhelming feeling that “we are all in this together”. Quite the contrary. Love And Rage In Extinction Rebellion. Oxford Circus, the heart of the UK’s consumer capital, was our new target. Police cordon rebels on Oxford Circus, October 18th 2019. After expanding our group even more, we made a new plan for the Thursday afternoon, but the now infamous London Underground action when two rebels were dragged off of a tube by an angry mob, overshadowed our plans. After much deliberation, our group gradually absorbed and trained enough eager people, and by Tuesday evening we were ready to go. But by Thursday evening we still needed to find another 50 rebels willing to block the Circus. [3] In the 1970s, Arne Naess developed the distinction between shallow and “deep” ecology, a movement that has been summed up as a non-anthropocentric philosophy of care and compassion. Meanwhile, a plain-clothes sergeant screamed assault, and an innocent man was tackled by two other policemen. It would be much smaller, but they had it finished by the first weekend. Stories of “worlding” (Donna Haraway) that would replace the ideals of “globalising”. It does so by appealing to people’s affective side, by speaking and performing “love and rage”. If nothing else, it has put the movement on a steep learning curve. It was going to be a long night of phone calls. It was to be both a warning light and a guide. Has it been the simultaneous occurrence of different climate-change related disasters across the world, from heatwaves and floods to droughts and fires? In many people’s minds, the belief that “the end of the month” and “the end of the world” work against each other is still legitimate. After April’s rebellion, the UK Parliament had declared a climate and ecological emergency, and suddenly, millions more people across the country cared. Nevertheless, XR has the merit of doing at least that: inviting people to connect with the idea of human life, human extinction, to better understand it, and ultimately move beyond it. Watching the police destroy nearly all of our other occupations, seizing tents at random, and displacing thousands of rebels across London, taking another site felt as much an act of care as of defiance. Political ecology has always been pervaded with affect. Together with other movements such as Fridays for Future, it has helped turn climate change into an unescapable issue. In a time of rapidly escalating climate and ecological breakdown, when so much depends on winning, the urge to hold desperately tight, to control, to take comforting power is strong. We're releasing this interview with Dr. Elizabeth Sawin now as she shares a hopeful and constructive message for how to approach tackling the climate and ecological emergency. That the world, for example, operates in neat categories: that humans and nature are separate, that the “objective” is more valuable than the “subjective”, or that rationality is always preferable to affectivity, to name just a few. Extinction Rebellion (XR) erupted in 2018 in the UK. There may be people who, dismayed by the perceived chaos of the last few weeks, want to take control and steer the XR movement from the top. Lastly, by celebrating both the power of sciences and the power of love, it suggests that these two repertoires might not compete, but rather complement each other.