Extinction Rebellion Quotes

Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind. That continent has been rediscovered in a time of great peril for ourselves and our world. Is this coincidence, synchronicity, or a cruelly meaningless juxtaposition of hope and ruin?

The floods, the fires, the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the droughts, the water shortages, the earthquakes. [...] Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we’d been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you

It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life...It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.

It is my streak of craziness that has saved me from extinction

If you care about our living planet, it's time to take part in bringing awareness to our climate and extinction crisis.

Another piece of Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 ended up landing in a grape vineyard on planet Pinot. The Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 was quickly absorbed into the soil and was subsequently soaked up into the grapes. These grapes, which had until recently been harvested almost to extinction, suddenly became self-aware and super intelligent. They banded together in bunches and rose up to defeat their oppressors. The battle lasted one whole night, but sadly, it ended the next morning when the sun came up. The rebellion shriveled when the poor grapes ran out of juice. Apparently there’s a raisin for everything.

What has been Extinction Rebellion’s magic? It boils down to values, processes, role modelling, positivity and fast learning. Most importantly for me, XR has been a loud advocate of the three core values I call for in this book. In the London protests of April 2019, you could hear the tannoys reminding supporters to respect everyone: the authorities; the government; the public; each other; the oil companies; EVERYONE. In surreal scenes on Waterloo Bridge, the police were caught visibly off balance by the tide chanting: ‘To the police, we love you. We’re doing this for your children’, as the police carried people away to their vans. Of course, as XR’s name suggests, they stand overtly for the preservation of all species. And they made a very strong call for truth. At its best, XR gave us a taste of a better world. They

The first distinction that we make is between public and private anger. Much research treats the two as equivalent, but in fact they are opposites. Public anger is often worn like a badge of honour. Icelanders protesting against a corrupt political class are emboldened by virtue. They railed against corruption and sought moral redress. Extinction Rebellion is fueled by the anger of righteousness. When people are publicly angry, because they are wronged, or they witness wrong-doing, they want it to be recognized and addressed. This is moral outrage. Private anger resembles its opposite. It is often characterized by shame. People who are angry in their private lives, often seek counseling, rather than retribution. An angry colleague, a stressed parent, or an enraged driver – these are people in need of help, not deserving of redress. But public anger itself is also two-sided.

As the movement’s co-founder Stuart Basden wrote in a recent article, Extinction Rebellion is also about defeating white supremacy, the patriarchy, Eurocentrism, heteronormativity and class hierarchy. So if your parents claim that they find it too difficult to be green, tell them that they can still show their support by having gay sex with a few African peasants.

I keep crying with laughter and swallowing my hair in the wind and I'm worried about climate change but right now I'm not anxious coz I'm here with you all in my favourite place in the world, but please don't mention the one billion native wildlife dead coz I just want to forget about it all for a few hours or half a day maybe and yeah, we're a world embarrassment coz we've voted in climate change deniers who will do nothing about our horrible rate of carbon emissions even though we are gonna be one of the first countries directly impacted by climate change and I even feel conflicted about having children when the world will probably end but also isn't having children an act of hope and surely if all the people who care about the world stop having kids out of conscience it's just gonna mean the next generation is even less populated with people raised to fight for this earth...

We see the same dynamic in climate discussions – the outsourcing to the individual to solve systemic problems, the familiar clichés that this will all be solved by individuals recycling, buying reusable coffee cups and possibly downloading an app. Personal ethical choice is undeniably important, for both the drugs trade and the environment. But as thinkers and campaigners, we cannot let these discussions be weaponized to derail the push for systemic change. Those who created these problems will try and make them yours to solve – don’t let them.

Do we need protest? After decades of asking politely and getting nowhere, we have a full-scale emergency on our hands. We have to have change. And it must be now. If the right kind of protest is what it takes, then that’s what we must have. I do not write this as someone who feels instinctive joy at the thought of taking to the streets, but these are serious times. There is compelling evidence that the right kind of protest clearly works. When, in 2019, the UK tightened its carbon targets to ‘net zero by 2050’, it wasn’t far enough, but it was a big step in the right direction. And it looks pretty clear that the political space to make that possible was opened up in no small part by protesters; by Greta Thunberg, by armies of school kids, and by Extinction Rebellion (XR). My work with tech giants, investment bankers, energy companies, an airline and many other corporations tells me that these straight-talking, non-violent direct actions made possible conversations in boardrooms that seemed unthinkable just 18 months before.

We might want to consider instead the new opportunities and affinities that are opened up through coming together to fight the environmental crisis. Ecological justice groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for citizens’ assemblies—innovative institutions that can allow people, communities, even entire countries, to make important decisions in ways that may be more just and fairer than party politics. Similar to jury service, members are randomly selected from across the country. The process is designed to ensure that assemblies reflect the population in regard to characteristics like gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and geography. Assembly members hear from experts and those most affected by an issue. Members then come together in small groups with professional facilitators and together work through their differences and draft and vote on recommendations.69

Like many readers, I had assumed the authority on climate was the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – but it turns out they’ve been consistently underestimating the changes. In 2007 they said an ice-free Arctic was a possibility by 2100. That sounds far enough away to calm the nerves. But real-time measurements are documenting such rapid loss of ice that some of the world’s top climate scientists are saying it could be ice free in the next few years.

rewilding landscapes so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play and increasing community-level productivity and support.

The Cleveland Model, Co-operation Jackson, the shack-dwellers movement, renters’ unions, housing cooperatives, open-source digital manufacture and crowd-sourced city plans are all showing how to reverse-engineer city communities and democracies