Lessons from Extinction Rebellion: origins

“By using modern scientific methods of comparison of alternative actions it is possible to make solid progress on which policies, procedures, tactics and strategies best further radical aims. Radical campaigns will continue to fail to the extent that they do not adopt and appropriate this knowledge.”

The following year, Hallam joined a small group of people mostly around Totnes in Devon, UK, and began several attempts to put a specific set of policies, procedures, tactics and strategies into action.

The protest movement that would become XR was conceived over the course of six weekend gatherings, spanning two years from early 2016. These gatherings mostly took place in activists’ homes. The group itself was an amorphous collection of people involved in England’s environmentalist, transition town and anti-roads scenes. 

Stu Basden, another co-founder, told The Ecologist: “There would probably be about twenty people at each gathering, about ten of whom were consistent and others drifting in and out”.

Outlandish

Dr Gail Bradbrook was one such consistent attendee. Bradbrook had visited Costa Rica in March 2016 where she experienced an intense psychedelic journey by taking Ayahuasca and other substances. She performed a prayer asking for “the codes for social change”. Just a few weeks after arriving back in the UK, she met Hallam for the first time and he declared unprompted that he had the codes of change. This tale plays a central and suggestive role in XR’s founding mythos.

Bradbrook, her partner Simon Bramwell, and Hallam provided continuity and momentum for the group, which started calling itself Rising Up. The name, aptly, was recycled after being coined by a failed anti-road protest in Bristol. This new group staged what Hallam describes as “various little prototypical campaigns which no-one knows about now, which were really rubbish, because you’ve got to learn through failure”. 

The small group was not afraid of failure and would take the time to draw lessons from each event and inform an evolving theory of change. This theory was captured in a string of documents as it developed. The trio spent hours together drafting a 50-page strategy summary document, which they then boiled down into a seven-page briefing document. It took another year and a half to evolve. The seminal Rising Up Overview was finally complete in March 2018. 

In a portentous pattern, it was at this point that Hallam proposed rolling out the strategy into a national campaign; Bradbrook and Basden objected, demanding another month to further refine the ten all-important principles and values. 

In April 2018, the group agreed to “go for broke” with the newly-christened ‘Extinction Rebellion’ campaign. It was a pattern that would repeat over the coming years. But what was so special about this Rising Up Overview, a GoogleDoc shared among a few climate activists? 

Prominence

Oscar Berglund and Daniel Schmidt published Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism: Breaking the Law to Change the World in 2020, providing an important contribution to climate mobilisation literature. “The most striking aspect of XR’s theory of change is really that it exists at all”, they argue. It is therefore worth stressing just how rare this kind of blueprint effort was – and is.

The writers weren’t just riffing. They were drawing on blueprints from the movement – sometimes quite literally. It’s crucial to understand how XR sat within a specific tradition of movement organising.

Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller in 2015 published the Blueprint for a Revolution: How to use rice pudding, lego men, and other non-violent techniques to galvanize communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world setting out their learning from working with Otpor! in overthrowing the dictator Slobodan Milošević. Hallam says the book was “the key text”. 

The Otpor! protest movement, and how it was codified in a text, was also influential on Paul Engler and Carlos Saavedra of the Ayni Institute. They in turn drew on decades of activist experience to propose a ‘movement method’ of organisaing taking the best from the structure and momentum traditions which had evolved (and diverged) over the proceeding decades. Paul and his brother Mark also published This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century. 

Engler and Saavedra proved even more influential on the founders of XR. These thinkers largely pioneered a particular application of the social sciences to social movements. Their prominence in the Overview’s citations is not an accident. Indeed, it can be traced to Bradbrook attending a training run by Saavedra in 2017.

Disruptive

Engler and Saavedra’s work is acknowledged in the second of XR’s ten core principles: “We set our mission on what is necessary: mobilising 3.5 per cent of the population to achieve system change – using ideas such as ‘momentum-driven organising” to achieve this”. The Ayni Institute approach is explored thoroughly in the Movement Power series from The Ecologist. 

Momentum’s influence on XR’s genesis is hard to overstate. It permeates the Overview’s content which retains the emphasis on the need to target the pillars of support for the status quo, the need to polarise and the need for distributed organising. The Overview also reproduced the Momentum-prescribed set-pieces on context, values, story and tactics.

This influence is further evident in the movement’s conceptual horizons: XR, like Momentum, operates within a tradition descending from Gene Sharp, who is also featured in the Overview citations. This in turn explains the centrality of the work of Erica Chenoweth – originator of the famous (or indeed infamous claim that 3.5 per cent of the population can if organised create fundamental social change.

The XR approach and its reliance on a specific stream of ideas has been critiqued. Berglund and Schmidt have said: “Contrary to XR’s claims, their theory of change is not substantiated by social science. XR’s theory of change comes from a small subset of scholarship often called the civil resistance literature. This is largely separate from the vast literatures on social movements or critical political economy… Beyond the disruptive polarisation, the lessons that XR take from the civil resistance literature are as limiting as they are enabling.

It must also be said that XR was not just an expression of Momentum. One of the driving tensions within XR has always been the contrast – contradiction even – between the scientistic language used of ‘codes for social change’ alongside the mysticism and eclecticism also present from the very beginning. 

Elusiveness

Indeed, Bradbrook is scientifically trained in the field of biomolecular physics and also attributes much of the success of XR to her hallucinogenic prayer in Costa Rica. She also refers to Tom Nixon’s concept of source field. “It’s how you lay out where you’re really coming from. I would call it a ‘spiritual container’: there’s a feeling of togetherness, of vision, and of wisdom, and it’s where you set intentions. I feel that as a very feminine thing that’s needed as part of social change. The mobilisation, organisational part, is more left hemispheric.”

She added: “We were definitely drawing on existing movement theory, but some of the things that we brought in were the grief, the emotionality. It needs the vision – that’s what draws people in, and I really think that’s not understood. And I didn’t really understand it either. 

“There was a lot of prayer work and conscious work around intention and values and how you bring regenerative culture into a movement. And it may have been written about, it’s not like there’s nothing there, but quite a lot of that was sensed into and not necessarily based in deep theories. Although maybe that would have helped.”

One striking example of this sensibility was the sacred intention statement written by Skeena Rathor. This was often read out before or during actions during XR’s early days. A more enduring, if less colourful, counterpart might be seen in the regen reminder text which is often read out to open rebels’ meetings to this day.

The regenerative element might well be XR’s deepest mystery. This is partly inherent to the ideas themselves: spirituality is hard to measure. It’s elusiveness is reflected in the comparative lack of theoretical anchors and marginal position in the Overview document. Another reason for the mystery, though, is that the history of XR itself is in no small part a story of the movement losing touch with its initial magic.

It is easy to forget how strange, sensational and successful the XR movement was during its first year. I hope to recapture much of what took place in those early years in a series of articles published by The Ecologist in the coming weeks. This will critically examine the breakthrough strengths and subtle limitations which the Momentum tradition bestowed on XR. These articles will form the next phase of the Movement Power project.

This Author

Douglas Rogers is a writer, activist, and editor of Raveller magazine.