A revolution’s evolution
THE HONEYMOON FOR EXTINCTION Rebellion, the hugely influential climate activist group, ended on Oct. 17, 2019.
From its launch, a year earlier, until that day, it seemed like the group might have cracked the formula for saving the planet: its strategy of shutting down city centers with disruptive, nonviolent civil disobedience had drawn ordinary people onto the streets to demand action on the climate crisis. It had also made the group, now present in 75 countries, the most radical of a wave of climate activist groups sweeping the world in recent years, including the youth-focused Sunrise Movement in the U.S. and the school strikers led by Greta Thunberg.
In the U.K., Extinction Rebellion (or XR) is a household name, able to generate enough pressure to reach milestones that traditional environmental campaigners spent decades chasing: within weeks of XR’s first two-week mass mobilization in London in April 2019, the U.K. government declared a climate emergency and announced a legally binding target for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, compares XR’s potential impact to that of groups like the suffragists and the civil rights movement. “When you’re talking about a large systemic transformation, history shows us that civil disobedience is a very important component,” she says.
But on Oct. 17, as XR began a second two-week mass mobilization in London, one local branch staged an action in Canning Town, a predominantly Black and Asian working-class neighborhood, in which several XR members clambered onto a subway car, preventing the train from leaving. Commuters dragged the protesters down onto the platform and beat them. Video of the incident prompted a massive backlash. “Upsetting the general public travelling to work in an environmentally sound way is plain stupid,” tweeted David Lammy, a prominent Black lawmaker for the left-wing Labour Party.
Daze Aghaji, 20, a member of XR and a student in London, shudders remembering the feeling of dread when she heard about the action. “It
