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EXTINCTION Credit © DF photography / Danny Fitzpatrick

REBELLION BY MARK DAVIS R
"THIS IS NOT A PROTEST"

When your 11-year-old daughter bursts into tears that Most importantly she knows that in any debate, you are not
the grown-ups aren’t doing anything close to enough to entitled to your opinion, only what you can argue for. Not
protect the world from a mass extinction, you’ve a parental all opinions are equal. Some are backed by data showing
instinct to comfort them. You might want to say that it’s all 2018 had the highest global emissions ever recorded,
overblown fearmongering, that technology will prevail and the effects of which have put us in the midst of a mass
we will all live happily ever after. extinction event of our making.

But she knows you can’t assure her of that. She knows And so, she wins her argument. A bleak debate, over
Nasa publicly announced irrefutable evidence of man- before it began. The only comfort I can give her is to get
made climate change in 1988. She knows you did film my lazy, apathetic, overworked self, involved.
work for BP in 2001 that admitted to shareholders that their
business model had to refocus beyond petroleum, because So, I check out the snappy XR (Extinction Rebellion) with
climate change was going to wipe out their business. She their cool brutalist logo, effective design style, and stripped
knows that if a big oil company was admitting it at the turn back message: The time for denial is over. It’s time to act.
of the millennium, six years before An Inconvenient Truth Government must - sort it out!
stormed the box office with a $50M worldwide haul and an
Oscar for Best Documentary, then this wasn’t a movie of I speak to Rupert Read about the group’s emergency
the week fad - it was real. action on the Climate and Ecological crisis. He’s clear -
this is not a protest. This is not just stating objection. This is
And as she and her mates protests against Government’s action against those in authority. Against the normal ways
inaction, in solidarity with child prodigy activist Greta of behaving. The very definition of a rebellion.
Thunberg - in the face of doomed Prime Minister Theresa
May’s criticism that they are wasting their time - she knows The April campaign of Non-Violent Disruption put into
there is not much time left to waste. She knows that Phillip practice the very heart of what writer George Monbiot
Hammond’s claim that £1tn is too high to save the future of hailed in XR’s Declaration of Rebellion: “The only time that
life on Earth, is paradoxically absurd. people know it is serious, is when people are prepared to
sacrifice their liberty in defence of their beliefs”.

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