Extinction Rebellion’s latest poster is a classic of the genre: a skeletal figure sits on a tree stump, holding a distortion of the group’s trademark hourglass logo. The text at the bottom is a variation on a slogan I have come to know very well: “Act Now, Before Because It’s Too Late”.
Like countless other precocious teenagers before me, I waited until university to rebel against “the system”. Then, for about two years, I dedicated every Saturday and dozens of other evenings to sitting, cross-legged, in a circle in the centre of Cambridge, discussing the end of the world. Climate change, after all, was the issue of our time. Forget the petty squabbles and internecine conflicts of the Left — the revolution would be green, not red.
While I jumped from one political identity to the next — Social Democrat, Corbyn loyalist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Bookchinite Social Ecologist, Trotskyist — there was a single constant: to defeat the forces of capital, Leftism needed to be centred around sustainability. Climate change was one crisis capitalism couldn’t overcome: it had an extinction date.
It is difficult for me to separate how much of my political certainty was a product of the Left-wing populism that electrified campus politics, and how much was born from youthful arrogance. Either way, I was convinced we were the only ones left to protect the working classes against the forces of reaction. So it stung to have them reject us for what we were: jumped-up students looking out for our own interests.
Still, I enjoyed being a “radical”. I would walk around campus brandishing my own Little Green Book. Entitled Make Rojava Great Again, it was a hilariously delusional manifesto influenced by Murray Bookchin, and attempted to explain how a small, anarchist-in-name-only Kurdish commune was the future for global Leftism. The irony that Rojava was only able to exist thanks to the imperialist interventionism of the Global American Empire in Syria was, of course, lost on me and my comrades.
It was amid this revolutionary fervour that I was introduced to Extinction Rebellion (XR). They were, at the time, a relatively unknown collection of old-school conservationists, ageing animal rights campaigners and credentialed academics who seemed utterly clueless in comparison with our own more militant group, Zero Carbon. Before one meeting between our two respective groups — we had planned to discuss the importance of racial justice — several XR members started shouting at us for failing to have brought chairs. They were, it quickly transpired, simply too old to sit crossed-legged in a circle like us students.
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