Extinction Rebellion and “Outreach”

I was sadly disappointed with XR’s newly unveiled 2022 Strategy. At a time when support for XR appears to be waning from its pre-pandemic peak, mass involvement has fallen, momentum has been lost but the need is as crucial as ever, I was hoping for some new and galvanising direction from the strategy team. Something that acknowledged the criticisms of XR that it lacks a sense of the need to pay attention to social justice and inclusion, to reach out to make the movement more relevant to all, and how to do this, at a time when we desperately need all citizens everywhere to be involved in the fight against climate change.

Instead, what was unveiled was a plan to go “back to basics”. To remember the original strategies and how well they worked three years ago, so do the same again but bigger. And I just can’t see it working as they hope (although I do, obviously, still hope it will.)

That pink boat moored at Oxford Circus for 10 days surrounded by dancing protestors, that was a truly iconic moment, a high point of success where we were getting our message out, crowds flocked to join us, the sun shone, we succeeded. We took the police by surprise and they reacted largely sympathetically. But we’ve not reached those heights since. Numbers have been down, police response has been swifter and more brutal. And now we have a government whose reaction to protest is to repress and ridicule it, to legislate against it rather than to listen to it. And a public who have had two years of pandemic, of anxiety and fear and stress, of job losses and rising prices, many of whose tolerance is already stretched to breaking point.

So, do I think more disruptive mass action is the answer at this present moment? No. I hope I’m wrong, I hope that when people gather in April there will be new and stunning plans unveiled and the whole world will mobilise in support. But I just can’t see it right now.

And what I also see as a major emerging threat is that sense of inchoate public anger, that expressed itself as a cry for Brexit, then morphed into anti-mask, anti-vaxx protests, and is now morphing again into anti-net zero anger. Not that it’s really been about any of those things, it’s been about unhappiness with the status quo, with the elite, with lives that used to feel secure and comfortable and now feel insecure and impoverished and more of an all round struggle. Not that people don’t believe that climate change is happening, they just need something to lash out at, and net-zero policies seem, unfortunately, likely to be their new target, on spurious grounds of “we just can’t afford it”. Let us not provoke that backlash if we can avoid it. Let’s not get trapped in their new culture war front.

So, what do I see as the way forward right now, not just for XR but in the general fight to contain climate change? I think change happens when governments, corporations and civil society institutions take action, and that they only do that when they feel enough pressure to; when enough of the general populace (and the powers of their collective purses) are demanding change. I don’t believe this 3.5% figure – it may work in some situations, but right now what we have is a population the majority of whom say they believe that climate change is real and scary and here now, so scary they mostly try not to think about it. But this majority also say they’re not prepared to make sacrifices in their own way of life in order to tackle it. So, is a populist and less than competent government about to impose further restrictive measures (green taxes, green austerity, cutting down on flying and driving and imported products and single use plastics and all those things that are part of many people’s daily comforts) if there’s not general support for them? No. Not in this current climate of opinion.

So that’s what we need, urgently, to change. The climate of opinion. The will of the populace, without whose overarching consent change doesn’t happen. That’s who we need to be galvanising, and not pissing off or shutting down. That who we need to to be joining us on the streets to demand change. We need a hugely broader base of support. We need everyone. But how?

XR, despite its many virtues, has often seemed to me to lack an understanding of how issues of social difference, and therefore of social justice, need to run all the way through change movements. How it’s not about just making alliances with social justice campaigns like BLM and marching together, on occasion, as part of a “movement of movements”. It’s not about “outreach” to draw more people into our way of working. It’s also about looking at our own ways of working to see if there are ways it, we, could change in order to be more accessible to a broader spectrum of people, not just “the usual suspects”. And I’m not just talking wheelchair access here.

One of my particular disappointments at the zoom I went to for the unveiling of the 2022 strategy was a rallying call from one speaker (young, male, white, middle class accent, apparently able-bodied) that “there is no excuse this year for anyone not to get involved”. That what we must all do is to commit to reaching out to drawing more and more people in, to get everyone on board.

Well, haven’t we all been trying that anyhow? So why hasn’t it worked? Maybe precisely because of that attitude. That “we”, coming so many of us from a place of social privilege, don’t have enough of a grasp of what it’s like to be poor, to be struggling with unsatisfying work and family care responsibilities, with disabilities seen and unseen, with the micro-aggressions of racism and alienation. All the barriers that might, extremely reasonably, stop someone from spending their Saturday afternoon sitting in the road instead, risking a police record that would make an already difficult life even more difficult.

Yes, there are XR activists from across the social spectrum. But the vast majority, as far as I can see, come from some place of some privilege, of choices, of having some slack in their lives. And not everyone in this country is like us – it’s middle class privilege not to see that many people are too tired, too poor, too lacking in support and resources to get involved with something relatively distant and hypothetical, rather than improving the visible here and now.

So there’s the rub. Believing you can make a difference to the wider world is a very middle class trait. Working class people have often spent their whole lives being told they can’t have what they want, to shut up and do as they’re told, that they don’t matter, becoming inured to grinding powerlessness. So why would they join a movement for change unless they are first persuaded that their voices can in fact make a difference? That seems to me to be the very, very basic place to start. To persuade enough people that yes, you, we, all of us as individuals, our individual acts, on the streets, with our purchasing power, with our votes, we can make change happen.

How can this be done? Not by just shouting louder, setting up more creatively confrontational actions against the inevitable police push-back. Not by making the climate crisis seem ever more scary (people are scared enough, more fear just shuts them down). But by going out and talking, one to one, to the people who are “not like us” (forgive this terminology, but it’s the best I can come up with to explain what I’m trying to say). Not by trying to get more of “them” to come to “us”, but by thinking about what us going to them might look like. What local issues might XR find common cause with and use our voices to amplify? How do we best get our message across to people of all sorts of different demographic backgrounds and affiliations? How do we build bridges that all can cross, in both directions? (These are not new ideas here – I’m summarising years of research into cross-class organising).

And if people do come to join XR, are we working in ways that are actually accessible, psychologically as well as physically, for as many people as possible? Or is there too much of a leftie, middle class vibe that just makes a lot of people feel, no, that’s just not for me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable there?

I went to a Transition Towns talk once which started as usual with an invitation to spend two minutes talking to the person next to you about why they were there. Personally, I love this bit. But the (fairly elderly) man I talked to spent his time saying how outraged he was by this, how he came to listen not to talk to people, and how he’d never be coming to any further Transition talks, interesting as he found some of the subject matter.

And “twinkles” or “jazz hands”. If you’re used to using them in meetings they’re really helpful. But I’ve one friend who after her first XR induction meeting declined to go to anything else, because she just wasn’t going to do the silly hand movements. Just not her kind of thing. Too off-putting, too weird for her.

It’s in the language that we use. Some of the XR documents are written in language so dense with concepts and jargon that even I, who likes reading complicated stuff, sometimes have to read it a couple of times to make sense of it, and even then it can sounds just like managerial bollocks, some corporate value statement. (Not all, some of it is lovely). The Daily Mirror, a paper with broad appeal, aims for its writing to be at a standard reading age of 12. There’s a reason for this. So let’s try for simple, readable, elegant prose. It takes longer to write, but it can be done.
Or an XR meeting in Surrey whose speaker was trying to persuade her audience that XR is for everyone: “you could be anyone and join us. You could be a doctor, a teacher, a solicitor, we’re open to everyone…”. Like no-one exists in Surrey apart from highly qualified professionals.

Locally, a group was trying to get started somewhere new, with an open space session where people could drop into different tables each labelled with a topic for discussion. The “regen” table, apparently, spent half an hour talking at total cross purposes before someone was sent for to clarify whether they were supposed to be talking regenerative cultures and regenerative agriculture. Jargon!

And songs! Yes, some people love singing four part harmonies with subtle minor-key tunes. I don’t. They do my head in, the feeling of singing against each other not with each other. That’s a personal preference. But I also (in another guise as a pagan ritual leader) have spent enough years teaching chants to know that for some people four lines and a simple, predictable tune is as much as they can easily memorise. And they still bear the weight of having been told at school that they “can’t sing”. So we stick with the simple, uplifting stuff.

Is music a social class signifier? I’ve never seen it described as such, but I suspect it is. Consciously or not, I’m sure many people hear “choir” type singing as not their thing, not their sort of people. They might sit and listen for a bit (and many of the performances of XR songs are very beautiful), but are they also moved to join in, to join us?

And the red (and green, and blue) rebels. When I first saw them, truly I just thought to myself – wtf? I had no idea what they meant, and was not about to say so when everyone else was raving about how great they were. Maybe I just don’t get art very well. So I just kept quiet until I’d made sense of it a bit more, picked up enough on what they were supposed to be about, and now I find them very moving. But what I found more immediately moving, and comprehensible, was the Cornish group of penitents, in sackcloth and ashes, with signs round their necks saying “I am guilty of… climate crime”. That, you could immediately identify with. I didn’t need inside knowledge to know what they were supposed to represent. It’s so easy when you’re on the inside of something to forget how it might look from the outside, the uninitiated view.

All groups are like this, we know. All groups develop their own language, their own rituals, their own comfort zones. But we are XR and this is an emergency and we need to be as relevant to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Now.

So we need a strong sense of outreach, of how to get our message out to as many diverse groups as possible. We need to invite ourselves to talk to WI groups, faith groups, community groups, to look for where we connect, where we find common ground. Making ourselves seem relevant not flaky. Making our uprisings seem like something they might want to join too. (I think it’s well established by now that the primary draw for anyone to go on a march or whatever is that they already know someone else who is going. Most people just don’t like turning up amongst a bunch of strangers they’ve never met before.) So not just them joining us, but us joining them. It has to be a two-way process.

So it’s not just about outreach as an add-on, to be outsourced to the Outreach group, brilliant and crucial as they are. It needs also to be a thread running all the way through all our work, in making everything we do as accessible – in all senses of the word – as possible to people who are not just the ones who are “like us”, who don’t challenge our comfort zones.
And of course, of knowing that change starts with modelling the world we want to see, including thoughtful inclusivity. Not just “everyone is welcome” but a model of radical inclusion that also includes a sense of what barriers might there be to people wanting to join us, and can we tackle these, without diluting our essential purposes and ways of working? Sometimes we can’t. But sometime we can. Sometimes we can sing simple catchy tunes. Sometimes we can write core documents with words with fewer syllables.

Equality, diversity and inclusion – to use the current standard “managerial bollocks” way of putting it – starts with knowing ourselves. How our own status – as white, as university educated, as incomers not locals, as economically privileged, whatever of these applies to us ourselves (and I’m not saying they all do, but this is the general reputation of XR members), how all these things might appear to other people who don’t share these privileges as us not understanding how their lives, equally threatened by climate change but with less room to manoeuvre, don’t work like ours. How we need to reach out to them, not just expect them to come to us and act more like us.

If we’ve grown up in a racist, classist, ableist etc culture, we can’t help but have some of those ideas, those prejudices and misapprehensions and sometimes just awkwardnesses and embarrassments, in our heads. We didn’t ask for them, we didn’t give our consent for them to be put there, but there they are, until and unless we actively work to get past them. For some years I was with a boyfriend with extremely dark skin. The racism I personally experienced over those years was shocking and horrible and embarrassing, from friends, family, social work colleagues, all people I wouldn’t have expected it of. Not usually in outright racist remarks, but in the silences, the long looks at us both together, the lacunae of what wasn’t said, all mostly unconsciously. Microaggressions. Did I let them know I thought they’d been racist? Not always. So let none of us think we don’t have the potential to seriously but unwittingly offend people from disadvantaged or minority groups. We all do, and it takes work to deal with it all, both separately and together.

This isn’t just a question of radical flank v moderate flank, some people doing the sitting in the road stuff, some people doing the regen stuff. It’s thinking about what strategies and tactics are going to achieve our aims as fast and as effectively as possible. We all have different skills and interests, and some people’s skills are in taking direct action, and others may be more in talking and listening and making connections. But inclusivity, and all the principles and skills that go along with it, is something we all need to do our very best at, if XR is going to grow, to work, to have the effect we all need it to have in tackling our climate and ecological emergency while there is still time. Like the letters running through a stick of seaside rock, it needs to be running through everything XR does, and how it goes about doing it.

Activism of any sort, at its core, is about disrupting social norms. About being the change we want to see, in all our actions and ways of working. And one of these needs to be our sense of social justice for all, about recognising social needs, social differences, social disadvantages, as all part of our struggle for a better world for all. And that change starts at home, with knowing ourselves, our inevitable unconscious biases and assumptions, and seeing ourselves as others might see us, too.

For further information (and to back up my argument here) you might like to also read this very useful piece of research published in The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13549839.2021.1970728?fbclid=IwAR28meY1UIKLhIdb31ayQU0sjR0gGfuP9G13zXKu5QUZzgBNHe_uGmK2qQk