Extinction Rebellion says ‘we

quit’ – why radical eco-

activism has a short shelf life
Published: January 6, 2023 6.07am GMT

https://theconversation.com/extinction-rebellion-says-we-quit-
why-radical-eco-activism-has-a-short-shelf-life-197261

By Marc Hudson

The protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has released a

statement with the clickbait headline “We Quit”. Dashing the
hopes of climate denialists everywhere, the group is not shutting
up shop (yet), it is merely changing tactics. XR is keeping its
options open, saying there is “a controversial resolution to
temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary
tactic”.

The statement comes at a time when activists from affiliated

groups Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil are still serving jail
terms.

As someone who has been involved in these sorts of movements

for 20 years, both as an activist and through my All Our
Yesterdays climate history project, XR’s move doesn’t really
surprise me. The truth is that such movements rarely last more
than a few years, even if their cause remains just as urgent. It’s
simply too hard to retain committed activists.

Extinction Rebellion itself nicely highlights the cyclical nature of

radical environment action.
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Protests and occupations

In the summer of 2018, the UK baked in a heatwave as the IPCC
was putting the finishing touches to a report about what would
happen if global warming exceeded 1.5℃ (short version: buckle
up). Meanwhile, stickers with the now familiar stylised hourglass
began to appear on lampposts, and news trickled out of a new
group called “Extinction Rebellion”.

XR in Westminster, November 2018. Joe Kuis / shutterstock

Over the following year, XR staged protests in Westminster, and
occupied bridges and other key sites across London for days on
end. Greta Thunberg, by now a sensation for her school strikes,
addressed the crowds, and the actress Emma Thompson flew in
from Los Angeles.

But an October 2019 “rebellion” was markedly less successful

than the first ones. The Metropolitan Police had learned. It
raided logistics hubs and issued preemptive banning orders (later
successfully legally challenged). But the most damaging moment
came as an own goal, when a splinter group undertook
a notorious blocking-a-commuter train action, generating lots of
media criticism and internal soul-searching about the pros and
cons of “decentralised” movement activity.

Then came the pandemic and XR’s favoured tactics of mass

mobilisation were rendered impossible – though attempts were
made. Meanwhile, somebody put out fake leaflets linking the
group to eco-fascist arguments.

This history – a sudden flourishing, followed by gradual fizzling

out – is sadly fairly typical.

Direct action in the UK

In the early 1990s, people in the UK began taking environmental
action. These actions can be seen as a continuation of the 1980s
peace movement, of which the women’s camp at Greenham
Common had been an inspiration and focal point.

Three decades ago this month a “Wake up the world is

dying” protest took place in London to highlight rainforest
deforestation and the importation of mahogany. There were
many protests against new roads through woodlands. By the late
1990s, with international climate negotiations proving
inadequate, the Rising Tide network sprang up, taking direct
action across the country.

Activists dig tunnels to protest Manchester Airport expansion in 1997. Gary Roberts / Alamy
Activists from Rising Tide were then part of the Camp for
Climate Action group in the 2000s, which emerged after the G8
protests in Scotland as some thought that groups were stuck in a
rut of “summit hopping” and wanted to be more radical.

Climate Camp ran from 2006 to 2010, with protests at Drax and
Kingsnorth power stations, Heathrow Airport, London and then
Edinburgh. In 2011, after what was by accounts a gloomy but
determined meeting, those present released a statement called
“Metamorphosis”, which has language eerily similar to XR’s We
Quit statement. It said its closure was “intended to allow new
tactics, organising methods and processes to emerge in this time
of whirlwind change”.

Through the 2010s groups such as No Dash for Gas and Reclaim
the Power kept doing nonviolent direct action, joined by the
ultimately successful anti-fracking movement. In the midst of
this, attempts to use the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 as a
way of kickstarting renewed activity were not successful.

Up like a rocket, down like a stick

Why does the pattern, what I call the “emotacycle” keep
happening? One factor is how hard it is to retain committed
activists. To quote myself from a December 2019 debate in New
Internationalist about whether XR had the right tactics:

the emotional dynamics seem unchanged to me – a hardcore of “heroic

types”, and a worried but unempowered wider community that can
never see themselves doing yoga in a prison cell, [who] come to one
meeting, feel alienated and don’t come back.
I went on to say that “previous cycles of climate protest tended to
last three years or so”. Three years on, it seems XR has indeed
followed this pattern.
A 2022 protest by spin-off group Ocean Rebellion. Eleventh Hour Photography / Alamy
XR’s “We Quit” statement also contains a teaser and an invitation
to gather back at Parliament Square in Westminster, four and a
half years on from the initial “Declaration of Rebellion”. A year
ago the group was saying it would bring “millions” onto the
streets in September. Now the number it is hoping for is
100,000.

Those predictions are still optimistic, shall we say. But other

predictions made by those working on climate change – of
increased emissions and an ever thicker blanket of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, trapping heat and causing floods and
fires to be more intense and more frequent – are safer. Whether,
in light of that, our civilisation is safe is another question.