Extinction Rebellion has been making headlines around the world, including here in the centre of the universe (Brisbane, or course). Their campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience, aiming to create pressure to accelerate action on climate change, have disrupted daily life in major cities around the world. Here in Brisbane, as elsewhere, they have blocked roads and other transport routes, gluing themselves to roads and locking themselves on to pieces of infrastructure to ensure long delays. Plenty of people have been arrested, some multiple times, but this is part of their intention.
Like many people who feel strongly about the need for action on climate change, I am torn about Extinction Rebellion. Overall, I support them. I agree with their message - that we need to urgently decarbonise and that we are a long way from taking climate change seriously either in Australia or globally. I'm also not troubled by nonviolent civil disobedience, a time-honoured tool of activists protesting injustice. On the other hand, it sometimes seems that their actions are poorly targeted, disrupting ordinary people and alienating potential supporters, providing an easy target for a hostile media.
Queensland's Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, rules with a slim majority and is struggling to regain public confidence after the terrible Labor result federally. She has sniffed the wind and decided her interest lies in coming down hard on ER activists, that the annoyance of ordinary commuters at traffic delays can be parlayed into votes. She has initiated harsh anti-protest laws including banning lock-on devices, justified by unsubstantiated allegations that activists are booby-trapping them. Her rhetoric has been inflammatory, as has that of our Liberal Lord Mayor, our Opposition Leader and various Commonwealth ministers. And then there's talk-back radio...
When I hear this kind of outrage my first response is, 'Oh you poor dears, you were half an hour late to the office. Get over yourselves.'. We really are a bit precious about our own convenience. It's just like the drivers who feel outrage at the cyclists making them go a bit slower on the road for a little while. My feeling is well summed up in this cartoon by Mark David.
What I wonder is, why do we react this way? What makes us so absurdly angry about trivial inconvenience while we are sanguine about the staggering risks presented by climate change? It's a mystery which, of course, can be explained through a World Diagram.
Like the original World Diagram, this one attempts to delve below the surface question through successive layers of the pyramid to get some idea of what lies below. In this case, it is what lies below for us as individuals, but of course no man or woman is an island, so this can't help but bleed across into the collective ethos and be driven by it. And in this case, because the diagram is not the whole world, outside forces can crash into it and change everything.
At the top level is our Inflexibility and Intolerance. It takes the tiniest thing to set us off, to make us angry and hostile. A noisy neighbour, trees dropping leaves on our pristine lawn, a train that is five minutes late, a cyclist making us change lanes or apply the brakes, a person who we think might be sponging off us, even indirectly - or a protestor blocking our path or travel. All of these things can provoke anger out of proportion to the offence - bitter online trolling, personal abuse, denigration and calls for 'law and order' responses to the most trivial of offences. We see this type of response time and again. But why?
Sitting beneath this is a sense of Immediacy. What is going on right here and right now dominates our thinking, the future is unimaginable and distant places are invisible. This is kind of the shadow side to being 'in the moment', a spiritual practice that is supposed to help us reduce stress and make us more compassionate by focusing on our immediate surrounds and the person we are with right now. This is all very well if where we are, and what we are doing, is in some way pleasurable and if we ourselves are calm. If we are stressed or confronted by negatives we lose all sense of proportion. If we are in stationary traffic, or even slow traffic, it is easy for us to forget that the traffic will move soon and that everyone else is in the same traffic. If we have a noisy neighbour or a tree that drops mess on our yard we can forget how lucky we are to have a home with a yard where it is possible to have neighbours, or to forget that the tree also provides shade and a place for the birds to perch. In short, we focus on the negatives of the present, rather than putting them into perspective or seeking the positives.
Along with this, and reinforcing it, is a high degree of Individualism and Insularity. We see ourselves as isolated individuals, not part of a community with collective responsibilities. I commented on this in relation to gun control, where gun owners resist stricter firearms laws because they never killed anyone. In the case of climate change it's even harder, because the causes of it are so huge, a collective set of responsibilities that spans the globe, a confusing mix of electricity, transport, industry, agriculture. What does all that have to do with me and my family, here in Brisbane? What do you expect me to do about it? It's out of my hands. I'm just a single worker ant in a huge teeming nest, and much of this isn't even in my nest. So it's easy for me to resent being required to take some kind of responsibility for it, to maybe pay a bit more for my electricity, or take the train, not to mention being made late by protesters asking for action. It is hard for us to take collective responsibility, to support public action or public policy, because these things break down the bubble we place around ourselves.
But why do we need this bubble? Why is it so important to us? I think the answer is a deep-seated sense of Insecurity. We must get on with our lives and our work as a matter of urgency before it is taken from us. We fear, even if we know rationally that it is not true, that being late to our desks or missing the start of that meeting will have catastrophic consequences. The fury we feel as we sit in that stationary traffic or have to detour around noisy protestors is fed by this fear.
We have this fear stoked in us quite purposefully. It is stoked by politicians exploiting it for our vote, by companies seeking our money, by employers seeking our compliance, by special interests trying to silence protests. It is fed by floods of misleading or confusing information - on crime, on national security, on the economy and, yes, more than anything else on climate change. This confusion leaves us with a general sense of unease and anxiety, and of course it is not entirely unrealistic for us to be anxious about the future, not least about climate change. Yet when we try to focus on the source of the unease we can't see it clearly through the fog that surrounds us. We are bamboozled by so much noise and colour, so much misdirection, that we tend to give up and retreat into our insular worlds. This damps the fear, but doesn't remove it, so we walk around on a hair trigger, and the tiniest things poking through our bubble can set us off.
But of course this doesn't make them unbreakable, which is why this particular diagram has a bomb flying at it from outside, labelled Crisis/Tragedy. All of us have had the experience in our lives of things that break through this 'frozen I' - the death of a loved one, an injury or serious illness, a natural disaster. These are universal experiences. When my house was flooded in 2011 along with large parts of the city, our lives ground to a halt for a couple of weeks, as did those of thousands of other people. Normal business was put on hold. It was stressful and inconvenient, but it also showed us just how much people were able and willing to rise to the occasion, to step out of their Frozen I and help one another.
Earlier this year I experienced a different kind of interruption when I fell off my bike. Life around me went on as before, but I was forced to step out of the flow for a little while and take time to recover. It wasn't particularly enjoyable, but I coped.
These things take us out of our routine and we find that actually we can adapt and it's ok, even though painful, and that the pain also results in growth. We realise (although we may later lose sight of this learning) that not only can things change but they inevitably will, that we are not immortal. Nothing is more certain than that one day the things we are doing now will come to an end. They are not as essential, as important, as we think they are. Sometimes, in fact, we will be better off without them.
If we are wise, we can use this knowledge to make the changes that are needed, instead of letting the changes make us. This is true of us individually - let's leave our stressful jobs while we are healthy instead of waiting until they make us sick. Let's not wait until our parents are sick and need care to go and visit them. But it's also true collectively. Let's not wait until the changing climate forces us to change the way we live. Let's change it for ourselves, while we still have some control over the changes.
Extinction Rebellion represents an attempt to break through the Frozen I. They are trying to interrupt us for long enough to make us reconsider, to force us to see the change that is needed. They are activists who have reached the point of frustration with polite methods - with authorised protests, letters to politicians, reasoned debate, earnest conferences. They can see that none of that is breaking through, and have decided to escalate. Perhaps some of what they do is mistaken. Perhaps they are clumsy, and their own fear sometimes clouds their judgement. Perhaps the letter they are writing us is scrawled and difficult to read in places. None of us is perfect. But we would be better off listening to the message they deliver, than waiting until is is delivered more clearly, and more finally, by the Earth itself.
*Thanks to David Fittell for posting Mark David's cartoon and starting me thinking about this.
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