GRETA AND EXTINCTION REBELLION

Afterimage, 2020

A NEW CLIMATE MOVEMENT? Extinction Rebellion's Activists' In Profile, 2020

Extinction Rebellion set out to mobilise a new generation of activists. As our data shows, they have in part succeeded: participants in Extinction Rebellion’s two major actions in London in 2019 had notably little prior experience of protest action, and we encountered many first- time activists. At the same time, however, our socio-demographic profile of XR’s activists in the UK reveals a broadly familiar kind of environmentalist: XR’s activists are typically highly-educated and middle- class (and though our survey did not explicitly ask this, white); they identify politically on the Left; and they consciously adopt multiple pro- environmental behaviours in the course of their everyday lives. XR’s strength has been to create a new public agency amongst people who are not ‘natural’ protesters, and perhaps even less so natural law-breakers, but who were already persuaded of the rightness of the climate cause, and frustrated with the inability of both ‘politics as usual’ and lifestyle environmentalism to bring about the kind of transformative political change that the climate emergency demands. Mobilising this group enabled XR to significantly expand the numbers of people willing to engage in environmental direct action, broadening its age profile, and bringing non-violent direct action on climate change into the centre of political life in the UK. The report comes with an Afterword from Sian Vaughan, a first-time Extinction Rebellion activist.

Medium (also The Alternative UK), 2020

This paper looks at the key characteristics that set Extinction Rebellion UK apart from campaigns waged on behalf of the Earth in the US, from the perspective of a life-long wildlife and public lands advocate, attorney, and ecopsychologist who, though an outsider, has been actively conversing with XR UK insiders since it really took hold in the Summer of 2019. The author maintains that it is the religious fervor of XR UK that sets it apart from more traditional campaigns in the US, and encourages XR US to embrace religious sentiments towards Gaia, or Mother Earth.

Fabius Maximus journal, 2019

The Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal arouse fears of extinction for other species, and humanity. Only the complicit silence of climate scientists makes this possible. Compare the alarmists' claims with what scientists said in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Too bad that journalists don't.

Critical and Radical Social Work, 2019

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a novel environmental movement formed in 2018 which uses non-violent civil disobedience to communicate the catastrophic severity of anthropogenic climate change, protest for urgent action to be taken by governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025, and advocate for the establishment of a Citizens’ Assembly to lead government policy on climate justice. This dissertation serves as a general ethnographic account of the movement and specifically analyses the process by which activists construct, sustain and perform their subjectivities through the use of grief and work of mourning. By exploring this complex process and the New Age outlook which informs it, in both the setting of a retreat workshop and street protests, I argue that XR activists are doomsayers who express and authenticate the truth of climate catastrophe through the performance of their own grieving subjectivities. I suggest in turn that this approach constitutes a highly em...

2021

Greta Thunberg, an eighteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl, has emerged as the newest face of the five-decade-long environmental movement in the Global North.Her call to fight rampant human-induced climate change has especially resonated with the younger generation as the climate crisis has raised concerns over its future survival. The result has been widespread youth mobilization, global in scale, demanding immediate solutions from governments and businesses to resolve the crisis. Her significance to the movement is evident from the christening of the phenomenon as the “Greta Effect” (Nevett). However, it is necessary to contextualise Greta’s activism in the broader course of development of the movement. The Greta campaign exemplifies the “co-optation of revolutionary potential” (Gramsci), forming part of a decade-long social engineering project orchestrated by the leading environmental NGOs in the Global North, funded by the world’s largest corporations[1]. The “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” (Incite) seeks the acquiescence of the striking youth to venture into a new global economic system to financialize nature. Freire’s theory of oppressive action encapsulates young Greta’s role in the movement: “The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders. The latter course, by preserving a state of alienation, hinders the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in a total reality.” The “reality” comprises the transition to environmental markets, intended to achieve the strengthening and expansion of a faltering capitalist growth economy- one fundamentally at odds with the natural world as it contributes towards ecological devastation, resource depletion, and collapsing ecosystems. The mechanisms of imperialism and militarism in the Global South undergird the capitalist system, emerging as the primary drivers of our environmental crises. Yet, activists like Greta fail to address, let alone acknowledge, these mechanisms as part of the climate discourse. Corporate-backed environmentalism, therefore, serves the purpose of preserving the capitalist system and its inherent environmental destruction.