Here we are Jan. 1, 2020
The next 10 years will shape the world more dramatically than any other decade before it. How will history look back at us? Today I’m afraid, but I have hope too. The last decade was a decade of critical movements emerging and changing the world (Occupy, NoDAPL, Black Lives Matter, Women’s March, Never Again, Me Too, Swing Left, Fridays for Future & Climate Strike), and now we have arrived at a time where there is no place to hide from our bleak future. As Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) wrote, in response to a question of whether we are actually in an environmental emergency, “Human beings have never found themselves in an emergency of this scale. Indeed, you have to go back many tens of millions of years to find an extinction crisis of the same scale. We know of five other periods like this over the last 400 million years, and all of them are connected with the same gas, carbon dioxide, that lies at the center of our current woes.” One million species are threatened with extinction.
This is bigger than Brexit
I visited England last spring. On the flight there I started to learn about the organized actions taking over the streets of London. Something called Extinction Rebellion. 1000 activists had already been arrested in a week. My first day in London, shortly after arriving from the airport, without a sense of bearing in London, I walked from my hotel near the western part of Hyde park due east. I was not aware I was going to the heart of the protests located in Marble Arch (built-in 1827 as a state entrance to the cour d’honneur of Buckingham Palace), and serendipitously spent the first hours of my trip abroad in solidarity with XR. I had missed Greta Thunberg and other climate activists speak by a couple of hours and the large crowd had already dispersed. What was left was the village of tents and the signs of protesters, I was witnessing the quiet hours of the peaceful occupation and I admired what I saw. This was just a glimpse of something building, soon the global climate strikes would pervade and demand the attention of the world. Extinction Rebellion is an international movement utilizing non-violent civil disobedience to fight for radical change. With the goals of “minimizing the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.”
Demands
That the Government must tell the truth about the climate and wider ecological emergency, it must reverse all policies not in alignment with that position and must work alongside the media to communicate the urgency for change including what individuals, communities and businesses need to do.
The Government must enact legally-binding policies to reduce carbon emissions to net-zero by 2025 and take further action to remove the excess of atmospheric greenhouse gases. It must cooperate internationally so that the global economy runs on no more than half a planet’s worth of resources per year.
We do not trust our Government to make the bold, swift and long-term changes necessary to achieve these changes and we do not intend to hand further power to our politicians. Instead, we demand a Citizens’ Assembly to oversee the changes, as we rise from the wreckage, creating a democracy fit for purpose.
We demand a just transition that prioritizes the most vulnerable people and Indigenous sovereignty; establishes reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and poor communities for years of environmental injustice, establishes legal rights for ecosystems to thrive and regenerate in perpetuity and repairs the effects of ongoing ecocide to prevent extinction of human and all species, in order to maintain a livable, just planet for all.
The Rebellion Recorder (Fall 2019, Vol I, No.2)
The first California-wide edition of Extinction Rebellion’s The Rebellion Recorder was released in October and features my color photographs (using a 35mm Leica mini-lux zoom) from Marble Arch. Over 10,000 issues were printed and distributed in the state. Here is a selection of photographs from April 2019. The underlined text above will take you to the fall issue.
