After a year of quiet preparation, Extinction Rebellion (XR) declared its existence on Wednesday, 31 October 2018. Practically overnight, the flame kindled in Parliament Square became a wildfire.
What followed was a textbook rollout of the momentum action cycle. Its culmination, in the occupation of five central London bridges, would further demonstrate the new movement’s distinctive, borderline-magical properties – together with their underlying tensions and contradictions.
THIS SERIES: LESSONS FROM EXTINCTION REBELLION
The XR founders’ reliance on the momentum model - referred to by Dr Gail Bradbrook as ‘the bible’ - was a crucial factor in the project’s early innovations and successes. But as the newly-constituted movement gathered pace, it encountered growing challenges which threatened to exceed its founders’ foresight.
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This article has been published through the Ecologist Writers' Fund. We ask readers for donations to pay some authors £200 for their work. Please make a donation now. You can learn more about the fund, and make an application, on our website.
Swirling
Before the dust had even settled outside Parliament, it became clear that XR was going places. In the next few days, dozens of meetings sprang up – disseminating quickly as events on the then-hegemonic Facebook. In a remarkable affirmation of XR’s carefully crafted invitationality, the large part of these gatherings were entirely spontaneous, arranged by fired-up groups or individuals who felt moved to support the sudden new phenomenon in its surge towards the ‘Rebellion Day’ fixed for Saturday, 17 November that year.
Official meetings literally overflowed from hastily-booked central London rooms into the streets, with newcomers like myself vying to understand how we could contribute to the apparent plan. It’s a point which bears its many repetitions that XR was not impressive just in quantity but composition: like myself, many of those heeding the call were a far cry from the usual activist bubble.
The handful of appointed organisers did their best to capture form details and field people for involvement, but the process was messy and rewarded self-direction.
One path to involvement was the various preliminary actions like hoisting the provocation “We’re F***ed” off Westminster Bridge, a queer party for the Amazon outside the Brazilian embassy – or, more seriously, blockading and defacing government departments DEFRA, BEIS and Downing Street.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
This steady stream of run-up work might not have dominated headlines, but it did sustain an almost visceral sense of momentum and escalation towards the 17th.
Real devotees could make it into the office – a small room near Lambeth Bridge which contained an ever-growing swirl of people, tasks and energy, all improvising towards the increasingly brilliant horizon.
Bridges
One of hindsight’s many distortions is the idea that it was even thinkable to simultaneously occupy London’s five central bridges. Indeed, present-day XR would never go near such a scheme. For all the many possible opinions on Roger Hallam, his tactical originality has had undeniable successes and this was one of them.
Bridges were allotted by region. The burgeoning London scene’s ‘affinity groups’ were allocated Blackfriars Bridge; but in a portent of XR’s unusual regional reach, the other four were to be taken by people pouring in that morning on buses from all over England and Wales – a spectacular payoff to the movement building, in the form of pledge-collecting work, done that summer.
Another tell of XR’s strength appeared on Waterloo Bridge: the blocking team from Manchester emerged from nervous waiting in a café, ready for the signal, only to find that an emergent crowd composed of total newcomers had moved onto the bridge spontaneously!
The day’s design was largely masterminded by festival producer Tiana Jacout, and on Blackfriars this was apparent: an excited crowd devoured a set from Pete the Temp (‘don’t watch the news, be the news’) only to, tellingly, founder on an attendee’s invitation to sing the Internationale. There were speeches from the usuals (Robin Boardman, George Monbiot), but also from an Amazonian indigenous leader.
There was a palpable sense of something new and exciting underway, and this development of shared identity found a string of euphoric high-points when crowds from the bridges converged: a newly minted political subject recognising and delighting in itself.
Purpose
The definitive snapshot of this early era was a mini-documentary from The Guardian (see below) which followed XR’s run-up to the Bridges. Specifically, it followed Roger. There was already a sense that such a framing could be dangerous: the widespread public fascination with ‘troublemakers’ (as a later doc would dub Roger) risks a myopia whereby the whole ecology enabling that troublemaking is not merely sidelined but erased while venerating the preferred subject. These dynamics would of course operate on XR at large in its movement context, and Just Stop Oil which would later follow.
Despite a mildly patronising burlesque tone, the documentary is prescient as it pursues Roger in his drive for arrests on Lambeth Bridge – Hallam notoriously complaining to a police liaison ‘the arrests aren’t happening quickly enough’ – only for him to learn with indignation that the other bridges have combined in Parliament Square to close the day, foreclosing further arrests.
XR’s media profile and messaging machinery were nascent at best, so for better or worse the day’s goals and reasoning were not spelled out in detail. For Roger, the main aim was to put pressure on elites – partly by disrupting London’s function, and particularly by filling police stations in conscious emulation of XR’s official civil resistance antecedents.
But other reasonings existed: Jacout, for example, represented more of a Reclaim the Streets tradition, with an interest in reappropriating public space to model more joyful social possibilities. Related but distinct was an interest in the crowd itself: the prospect of unifying it through narrative, materialities and tactics from a group of individuals into a collective agent. This strand’s most recent lineage might be seen as Occupy (veterans of which made up a substantial part of XR’s core players).
There was nothing necessarily contradictory about these different impulses, and indeed this trilemma would soon take official form, with a strategy forum proclaiming any action must work towards at least one objective out of visioning (a better world), movement-building, or disrupting. In some ways this held as a space of constructive strategic ambiguity; but its flipside was differences among XR’s founders which would prove damagingly irresolvable.
Portrait
The doc from The Guardian illustrated more than just strategic contradictions. Especially from the vantage of November 2024, it’s helpful to recognise how profoundly some things have changed.
The most striking detail is likely XR’s relationship with the police. This relationship’s development towards studied mutual acrimony was probably inevitable, and had as much to do with tabloid heat (culminating in the The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022) as left-influenced re-evaluations within XR.
But writing as someone who’s since experienced pain compliance along with the broader UK crackdown, it’s hard not to note that this ‘kill them with kindness’ era did have real upsides – including, ironically, some forms of accessibility. It’s also worth noting that this era was largely brought about by outrage at the policing of Camp for Climate Action, and the 2009 killing of Ian Tomlinson.
This airiness with officers was part of a wider affect which in hindsight we might call naivety or innocence – or, perhaps more usefully, merely a lack of guilt. Impossible as it seems, this was XR before the media pile-on and devourment in the culture war.
Activists on-screen are almost painfully earnest, radically unencumbered by neuroticism around optics or movement politics, and present as vastly more authentic. This is evident in individuals – even Roger himself – but especially in groups: it’s unsettlingly hard to imagine a present-day XR crowd singing ‘never doubt that a small group of people can change the world’, especially as part of a roadblock.
This affective dimension is especially salutary in 2024, where we’re haunted by a ghoulish official positivity. As Amy Westervelt recently observed of UN-affiliated New York Climate Week: “This insistence that everything is normal and fine when it is so clearly not is something of a hallmark of the climate movement in my experience, particularly amongst those with power and money”. Today it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than an alternative ‘structure of feeling’ about that prospect – but for a while XR really made it happen.
We might say they were more positive times. Just four days prior, the US Sunrise Movement – another paragon of the momentum model – had staged its breakout action in Nancy Pelosi’s office. The Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vests) were on the march. But whatever the context, it’s hard to overstate that this affective quality was one of XR’s greatest, and most elusive, strengths.
Continuation
As ‘Rebellion Day’ ended, the new movement continued to faithfully follow momentum contours. This was most obvious in its cadence: momentum charts a very clear cycle, from action to absorption, the sentiment of which was encoded in XR’s fifth principle: "We value reflecting and learning: Following a cycle of action, reflection, learning, and planning for more action. Learning from other movements and contexts as well as our own experiences."
Even now there was some contestation of exactly when and how to end the action cycle: Roger championed an attempt to escalate (a hallowed concept at the time) after the bridges with a bout of ‘swarming’. This experiment did not work – the hostility from drivers was withering, the coverage tepid – and the episode was quickly and amicably forgotten. It stands as an early testament that from the outset, XR was never comfortable with disruption for its own sake. But relatedly, the effort deserves remembering as the seed which would eventually grow out into JSO and the whole A22 Network.
The cycle found emphatic closure with a funeral procession into Parliament Square, where roughly 1,000 black-clad mourners blocked roads and witnessed an effort to inter a coffin marked ‘Our Future’.
A more obliquely relevant momentum tenet was its consideration for competing theories of change: not just the status quo’s ‘pillars of power’, but the existing mosaic of movement traditions which momentum distinguishes as either ‘structure-based’ or ‘mass protest’.
Unlike other momentum lessons, this sophisticated account of movement ecology was essentially absent from XR, whose many new members thus remained blissfully untroubled by omens like an early disavowal from Chis Saltmarsh at Novara Media, Reclaim the Power’s national forum refusing to give any endorsement, and only equivocal support from NGOs. These dynamics would dominate XR the following year, but for now the reality was simple: XR had differentiated itself from the established players and was reaping the rewards.
Hibernation
One of the many tensions animating XR was that between the mandated post-action ‘reflection and learning’, and the vaguely-defined but incandescently necessary task of movement building. In the run-up to Rebellion Day, the consensus timeline was for there to be a total lull in December: perhaps two or three administrative heroes keeping the lights on in the office, and the wider movement mostly going quiet in anticipation of re-mobilisation in spring.
The reality turned out to be very different: although the actions stopped, the action whirled along. Large numbers of those who’d taken part in London now came home energised to meet a rampant appetite for local groups, which started popping up all over the country – and beyond. The central office, meanwhile, acquired new rooms and then a whole new location as it hummed with efforts to channel the tide of energy and interest.
This frenzy of collaboration was only possible thanks to the pre-determined and clearly articulated near-term plan, the keystone of which was a next Rebellion Day, pre-ordained for Monday, 15 April 2019. This date was the vigorous answer to any external statement of interest, and it’s hard to overstate how far it enabled internal collaboration by precluding the need for strategic deliberation.
But as Paul Engler himself remarked to The Ecologist: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". What had just weeks before been essentially a group of friends with some plans and filled out forms was now suddenly a movement, and what had been an avowedly under-theorised set of intentions around vision-holding and culture was now a rapidly developing reality.
Like any nascent organism or polity, the three-week-old XR now underwent a ‘critical period’. Under-documented and under-studied, this passage of development preceding XR’s April breakthrough is crucial to forming XR as it came to be. By casting light on this process in the next part of this series, I hope to help inform the growing-pains of the future mass movements we need to build.
This Author
Douglas Rogers is a writer, activist, and editor of Raveller magazine. This article has been published through the Ecologist Writers' Fund. We ask readers for donations to pay some authors £200 for their work. Please make a donation now. You can learn more about the fund, and make an application, on our website.