Urgency, part 2

Above, guerilla art that appeared during the XR actions in London, April 2019. Banksy? Not Banksy? Matters not, the message is clear.

Since crossing paths with Extinction Rebellion in London a couple of months ago, I have been raptly following and quietly funding those activists as they target one institutional enabler of environmental destruction after another. I have also been trying to join them but until recently have failed: they would call an event, I would mobilize my young troops, and we would arrive only to find the event over and the last of the rebels walking off. But our luck changed recently when, this past Father's Day, I and the family aboard a rented boat joined an XR parade. The experience was moving and uplifting, and more than that, it was seemingly effective:

**BREAKING** The city council of @AmsterdamNL is the first in The Netherlands to declare a climate and ecological crisis. A large majority of the Alderman voted for the motion. Great job @XR_Amsterdam and all Rebels. #ExtinctionRebellion #RebelForLife #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/aYla4fUcMM

— Extinction Rebellion Nederland (@NLRebellion) June 20, 2019

I was unable to attend the actual debate in the Amsterdam city hall--work commitments, don't you know--nor was I able to follow the activists to their next major action in this part of the world: the occupation of the RWE coal mine discussed in my previous post. Indeed, I was not even aware of this action until Twitter blossomed with reports of the multi-day occupation of this coal mine and of the technology feeding it, the same monstrous machine at the center of the small controversy I was then busy writing about. Let's be clear: I was thinking and writing while others were doing.

For me, this is an apt summary of the change I am witnessing: it is time for action. Where the climate is concerned people, and young people in particular, are done admiring the problem (a favorite Autodesk idiom), and certainly done bewailing the fact that we are failing notably to solve it. Where the climate is concerned the first and immediate order of business is to cease being destructive. The action of the tens of thousands of people--and certainly of the people in white suits storming the coal trains and the bagger supplying them--involved in the Extinction Rebellion and related movements is a reflection of this imperative. In this it reminds me of that most famous statement made by Mario Savio, a civil rights activist, at a protest in Berkeley in 1964:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

 Mario Savio, in a speech at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley, 12 February, 1964

Savio's words, spoken as metaphor, are now being taken literally by larger and larger groups of people in more and more places around the world. More and more of us are becoming sick at heart as we learn to connect our own experiences--heatwaves, springtime without butterflies, ridiculous avocado prices, what have you--with global environmental catastrophe. And more and more of us are going to put our bodies on and in front of the many, many machines that are driving that catastrophe.

To return to the topic of my last post: companies do not have hearts and cannot become sick at them therefore. But it is companies that make and it is companies that operate the machines that must be stopped. If you, too, are feeling sick at heart go place your body on a machine--you will feel better for having done so, I promise!--but go look at the company for which you work, too, and examine its role in enabling the machines. Then take action.