roger hallam education

Roger Hallam

Julian Roger Hallam (born 4 May 1966) [1] is a British environmental activist, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion , [2] [3] cooperative federation organisation Radical Routes [4] and the political party Burning Pink . [5]

Biography #

Hallam was raised by a Methodist family. [6] He was previously an organic farmer on a 10-acre (4-hectare) smallholding near Llandeilo in South Wales ; he attributes the destruction of his business to a series of extreme weather events. [7] [8]

Between at least 2017 and early 2019 he was studying for a PhD at King's College London , [9] researching how to achieve social change through civil disobedience and radical movements. [10]

In January 2017, in an action to urge King's College London to divest from fossil fuels , Hallam and another person, David Durant, using water-soluble chalk-based spray paint, [8] painted "Divest from oil and gas", "Now!" and "Out of time" on the university's Strand campus entrance. [11] [9] and were fined £500. [12] In February they again spray painted the university's Great Hall causing a claimed £7,000 worth of damage and were arrested. [11]

In May 2019, after a three-day trial at Southwark Crown Court for criminal damage, they were cleared by a jury of all charges, having argued in their defence that their actions were a proportionate response to the climate crisis , with Hallam arguing his actions were lawful under an exemption in the Criminal Damage Act that permits damage if it protects another's property. [9] [13] In March 2017, Hallam went on hunger strike to demand the university divest from fossil fuels—the institution had millions of pounds invested in fossil fuels but no investment in renewable energy . [12] Five weeks after the first protest, the university removed £14m worth of investments from fossil fuel companies and pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025. [8] [14]

Later in 2017, Hallam was a leading member of activist group Stop Killing Londoners, [15] an anti-pollution campaign [16] of mass civil disobedience that they hoped would result in the arrest and imprisonment of activists. [17] Hallam with Stuart Basden and two others were prosecuted and some pledged to go on hunger strike if imprisoned. [18]

Hallam is a co-founder of environmental pressure group Extinction Rebellion , with Gail Bradbrook and Simon Bramwell. [2] [10] [19] [20] He stood unsuccessfully in the 2019 European Parliament election in the London constituency as an independent, winning 924 of the 2,241,681 votes cast (0.04%). [21]

Hallam was interviewed by Stephen Sackur on BBC HARDtalk on 15 August 2019. [22]

Hallam and four other activists were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance on 12 September 2019, the day before a planned action to pilot drones in the exclusion zone around Heathrow Airport in order to disrupt flights. [23] Three days later, in an action organised by Heathrow Pause, Hallam was arrested in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport apparently in breach of bail conditions from the previous arrest requiring him to not to be within 5 miles (8 kilometres) of any airport or possess drone equipment. [24] He was remanded in custody until 14 October. [25]

In an interview with Die Zeit on 20 November 2019, Hallam said genocides are "like a regular event" in history and called the Holocaust "just another fuckery in human history". [26] [27] This comment was made in the context of a broader discussion on genocides throughout human history, where Hallam compared the Nazi Holocaust to the Congo genocide ; as he stated the "fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history" adding that the Belgians "went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it." [28] Hallam's controversial comparison has drawn support from African activists the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/ Ecocide ! Campaign, who, while critical of the tone of his language, have lauded his honesty and willingness to highlight crimes committed by colonial powers in Africa. [29]

In a self-published pamphlet written in prison, Hallam wrote that the climate crisis would lead to mass rape, and featured a story in which the reader's female family members are gang raped and the reader forced to watch. The pamphlet was condemned by Farah Nazeer, CEO of Women's Aid . [30] When Der Spiegel replied to Hallam that "You can't blame the climate change for the rape of women during war", Hallam's response was "No, climate change is just the tubes that the gas comes down in the gas chamber. It's just a mechanism through which one generation kills the next generation". [31]

Publications #

Publications by hallam #.

Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse. Self-published, 2019. ISBN   978-1527246744 . [n 1] [32]

Podcast: Designing the Revolution

Publications with contributions by Hallam #

• Roger Hallam (2019). "Chapter 14: The civil resistance model". In Extinction Rebellion (ed.). This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook . Penguin Books. pp. 99–105. ISBN   9780141991443 .

Environmental law

Fossil fuels lobby

• ^ An early draft of the book is available here Archived 28 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine within Hallam's site.

References #

^ "Roger HALLAM – Personal Appointments (free information from Companies House)" . beta.companieshouse.gov.uk . Retrieved 25 March 2019.

^ Jump up to: a b Leake, Jonathan (25 November 2018). "Meet Dr Demo, the activist behind the road-block radicals" . The Sunday Times . ISSN   0956-1382 . Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Knight, Sam (21 July 2019). "Does Extinction Rebellion Have the Solution to the Climate Crisis?" . The New Yorker . ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved 22 September 2019.

^ Albery, Nicholas (1992). The Book of Visions: An Encyclopaedia of Social Innovations . Virgin. ISBN   9780863696015 . Retrieved 25 March 2019.

^ Taylor, Diane (25 June 2020). "Extinction Rebellion activists launch UK Beyond Politics party by stealing food" . the Guardian . Retrieved 27 August 2020.

^ "An interview with Roger Hallam — on radical politics, youth mobilization, Extinction Rebellion, and much more - mέta" . metacpc.org . 1 October 2021.

^ Lewis, Anna (25 September 2019). "The Welsh farmer who became the mastermind of Extinction Rebellion" . WalesOnline . Retrieved 28 September 2019.

^ Jump up to: a b c "Extinction Rebellion founder cleared of vandalism by jury after arguing climate change justification" . The Independent . 10 May 2019. Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Jump up to: a b c Laville, Sandra; agencies (9 May 2019). "Extinction Rebellion founder cleared over King's College protest" . The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Jump up to: a b Nye, Catrin (10 April 2019). "The climate protesters who want to get arrested" . BBC . Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Jump up to: a b Humphries, Will (8 May 2019). "Eco protesters 'caused £7,000 damage to walls at King's College London'" . The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Jump up to: a b "A university student is on hunger strike to force action on climate change – and it's working" . The Independent . 5 March 2017. Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Buus, Kristian (7 October 2019). "Extinction Rebellion: the arrestables – a photo essay" . The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 17 October 2019.

^ Humphries, Will (10 May 2019). "Jury clears spray-paint activists from Extinction Rebellion" . The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Taylor, Matthew (27 December 2017). "'We don't have time to wait and see': air pollution protesters resort to direct action" . The Guardian . Retrieved 27 August 2019.

^ "Anti-Pollution Activists Shut Down Busy London Road During Rush Hour" . HuffPost UK . 1 November 2017. Retrieved 27 August 2019.

^ Whipple, Tom (1 January 2018). "Clean-air activists hope to be jailed for protests" . The Times . Retrieved 27 August 2019.

^ Carrington, Damian; Taylor, Matthew (7 November 2017). "UK government sued for third time over deadly air pollution" . The Guardian .

^ Taylor, Matthew (26 October 2018). "'We have a duty to act': hundreds ready to go to jail over climate crisis" . The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 30 June 2019.

^ Goddard, Emily; Clifton, Jamie; Sturrock, Alex (20 February 2019). "Extinction Rebellion Is Telling the Terrifying Truth About Climate Change" . Vice . Retrieved 1 July 2019.

^ "European Election 2019: UK results in maps and charts | BBC News" . bbc.co.uk . Retrieved 1 July 2019.

^ Sackur, Stephen (15 August 2019). BBC Hardtalk: interview with Roger Hallam — Co-founder, Extinction Rebellion . London, United Kingdom: BBC. Retrieved 8 September 2019. Video 24:37. (Available on YouTube).

^ Gayle, Damien (12 September 2019). "Heathrow third runway activists arrested before drone protest" . The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 12 September 2019.

^ "Extinction Rebellion co-founder arrested at Heathrow protest" . The Guardian . PA Media. 14 September 2019. Retrieved 16 September 2019.

^ Sharman, Jon (16 September 2019). "Extinction Rebellion co-founder charged over Heathrow drone plot – 'Airport expansion constitutes a crime against humanity,' says Roger Hallam" . The Independent . Retrieved 17 September 2019.

^ Scheib, Katrin (20 November 2019). "Extinction Rebellion: Roger Hallam calls Holocaust "just another fuckery in human history"" . Die Zeit .

^ Connolly, Kate; Taylor, Matthew (20 November 2019). "Extinction Rebellion founder's Holocaust remarks spark fury" . The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 21 November 2019.

^ "Extinction Rebellion: Roger Hallam calls Holocaust "just another fuckery in human history"" . www.zeit.de . 20 November 2019. Retrieved 13 August 2020.

^ "SMWeCGEC & GAPP Statement on Roger Hallam's Shoah Comments & Their Relevance to the Maangamizi" . stopthemaangamizi.com . 26 November 2019.

^ Boycott-Owen, Mason (3 November 2021). "Extinction Rebellion founder's repugnant rant: 'Climate crisis will lead to gang rape'" . The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 7 November 2021.

^ Backes, Laura; Thelen, Raphael (22 November 2019). "'We Are Engaged in the Murder of the World's Children'" . Der Spiegel . Retrieved 7 November 2021.

^ "Extinction Rebellion co-founder to self-publish climate manifesto" . www.thebookseller.com . Retrieved 21 November 2019.

External links #

Official website

Roger Hallam on The Guardian

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An interview with roger hallam — on radical politics, youth mobilization, extinction rebellion, and much more.

Roger Hallam was interviewed by Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews in February and March 2021. Their discussion focuses on ideology, leadership, organisation, communication and mobilisation strategies in radical movements, class and youth politics, transition, community, and resilience , as well as conflict within Extinction Rebellion (henceforth XR), delving into Roger’s thinking on radical politics more broadly.

Athina Karatzogianni: How did you get involved in radical politics?

Roger Hallam: I’ve been involved in radical politics since I was 14 or 15. In the 1980s when I was a teenager, I was involved in the peace movement in Europe. I got arrested and went to prison during that period. So, I was well aware of civil disobedience as a method of bringing about political change. And then when I was at the London School of Economics, I studied Gandhi and non-violence for a year.

Athina Karatzogianni: This was in your early twenties then?

Roger Hallam: Yes, and then I became involved in workers collectives and organic farming and other things in my thirties and my forties. But when I went to London, the main thing I was working towards was how to mobilise people to engage in mass participation, civil disobedience. I was particularly influenced by research in the United States. It seemed enormously clear to me that the most effective way to bring about rapid political change was mass, non-violent civil disobedience. I studied various different forms of direct action as part of my field research: light strikes, occupations, rent strikes and suchlike. Then I was asked to advise climate change activists on how to be effective. So, I talked to them about creating a more civil resistance sort of model based upon the global south, which is to occupy major cities. Given that part of the problem is obviously systemic, as it were.

Athina Karatzogianni: When were you advising climate change activists? 

Roger Hallam: Around 2007 I think, and through those discussions, Rising Up was formed, which was a sort of network of activists and academics researching how to engage in mass participation, civil disobedience. Then I did a paper called Pivoting to the Real Issue in January 2013, which proposes that we create a rebellion against the British government on civil resistance principles and that led to the foundation of Extinction Rebellion. And since that’s been formed, I’ve been one of the main strategic voices in XR on how to do that effectively.

Athina Karatzogianni: Your first very publicised action was at King’s College when you were a PhD student there. You were arrested for that and then you were vindicated. In relation to that specific period of your life, how did that particular action inspire you? Given that arrests are a tactic that is used by XR, what was your own experience of that arrest and how did it influence what you were doing in XR?

Roger Hallam: As I was basing my action designs on the principles developed by Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and the classical theory of non-violence is that you engage in disruption in order to get attention and force an opponent to come to the table and negotiate. That’s the other side of classical non-violence: once the opponents come to the table, you’re very respectful towards the opponent and focus upon a change in behaviour or policy, rather than denigrating the opponent in a in a sort of traditional political way. So those are the two elements. The hypothesis, as you might say, of the King’s College campaign was that direct action would produce a result a lot quicker and more efficiently than traditional forms of campaigning. Usually, a divestment campaign to force a university to divest from fossil fuels can take anything from one to five years.

The campaign I engaged with changed their whole corporate policy in five weeks. The outcome of that case today, as it were, was that vigorous non-violence is massively more effective than traditional campaigning, and the mechanism was to create criminal damage with lawful excuse – as it turned out, causing £7000 worth of damage to the building and then carrying on a 14-day hunger strike. That produced a change of policy in those two weeks. They had an emergency investment meeting. I was suspended from King’s College, banned from King’s College for ten days, and then they reinstated me, because it was too embarrassing for them. And then when we came to an agreement, everyone shook hands and were friends as it were, so it was a classic Gandhian sort of progression of giving an ultimatum, engaging in direct action, negotiation and reconciliation. What I took from that was to replicate that on a mass scale towards the government or towards larger institutions. The main hypothesis being that in any power relationship, there is a certain point of non-cooperation or pressure, at which an opponent will be forced to negotiate and no one has absolute power, and it is all a question of numbers and a non-violent force, those that are two criteria.

Athina Karatzogianni: Were you influenced at all by Gene Sharp?

Roger Hallam: Yes, I mean he was one of the main scholars in classical civil disobedience, very much so. And you know, as I just said, his main proposition is that power is relational. It’s not absolute. In other words, a group only has power over another group to the extent that the oppressed group cooperates with the oppressor, and to the extent that there will come a point where the oppressor will be required to negotiate. That is a very positive philosophy of action and it is empirically robust, as we know.

Athina Karatzogianni: I want to move from the ideological discussion and that of strategy towards organisational matters. From attending some meetings about self organisation tactics, I am aware that in the last six months there has been a restructuring of XR. I broadly understand it is based on the holacracy model, and that this organisational structure is based on distributed, decentralised architecture, distributed authority. There are differences between this kind of architecture and the model of Occupy, for example, that was consensus-based, and where things tended to be a little bit slower, what activists call ‘the muddle of Occupy’, whereas XR has follows the ‘by consent’ model. I wonder about your views on how this architecture of organising came about and what whether you had contributed to the organisational structure yourself. What are your views on movement organisation more broadly?

Roger Hallam: Well, the plan for XR took about a year and a half of research and conversations, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t like Occupy where there was no pre-organisation. We had twenty or thirty people involved in designing a modern social movement. And there were six or seven sort of key elements which made it successful. One, of course, was mass civil disobedience and another one was trying to transcend the conflict between hierarchy and horizontalism. The middle way or the transcendent sort of notion was a whole structure where there is delegated authority to mandated groups to have autonomy to get on and initiate creative action within their mandates and so on. The big advantage was that it created an institutionalisation of the social movement, to avoid it collapsing because of structurelessness, as has happened with all the horizontal movements over the last twenty-thirty years. But it didn’t take on a traditional left wing, sort of top-down, leadership structure, as you might say. It was very successful to the extent that thousands of people joined it very quickly.

But in my view, it’s been extremely unsuccessful in being able to create a leadership structure that can create strategic coherence and inspiration, in the context of the biggest existential crisis in the history of humanity. Sociologically speaking, all crises require a top-down leadership in order to create strategic coherence, so there’s a big contradiction between the sort of high-tech model and the necessity for rapid decision making, which is always needed in non-violent confrontation, if it’s going to be successful. As you can see from Martin Luther King and Gandhi models, there was always a central hierarchy that is even more essential now, because we’re going to have billions of people starving to death in the next twenty to thirty years, if we don’t create some sort of coherence. So, there’s a big clash really between the existential emergency and the idealism of some that don’t understand the urgency of the situation.

Athina Karatzogianni: You talked about being a teenager in the 1980s and the peace movement and getting arrested, etc. Going back to the 60s and 70s, the civil rights movement, the student movement in the US and Europe, basically you had the emergence of this idea of more participatory, shared and decentralised leadership, to recognise the emotional labour of activists, to have more participatory leadership. And right now, in the global north, you find this obsession with decentralisation and horizontalism. For example, Alicia Garza has talked about the same problem of the misapplication of decentralised leadership, decentralised structures in Black Lives Matter. This for me is of particular interest: if you go back to your formative years, what were your impressions from people that mentored you, so to speak, or that you worked with? And what’s going on in this continuum of the last fifty-sixty years? What are your impressions of this leadership question?

Roger Hallam: There was a big transition from what you might call traditional left social democratic organisational structures, which were rooted in the mid 20th century, but lasted until the 1990s, and decentralised New Left and postmodernist sort of orientated movements, which originated after 1968 and became even more prominent after 1989. Since 1989, the horizontal dogma has dominated radical politics. In my view, this has been the primary reason for the failure of radical politics, because of its inability to create material power formations that are capable of presenting a material threat to the neoliberal system. Horizontalism is part of the neoliberal construction of society, which enables radical people to virtually signal their opposition, but not to create any material opposition. You can obviously see that in the failure of the climate movements to prevent a 60% increase in carbon emissions over the last fifty years, and in the failure of the left to stop the massive increase in social inequality.

The left has catastrophically failed, in my view, over the last thirty years, and the radical left has been a disaster, insomuch, as it’s been incapable of creating strategic coherence and mass organisation. This is largely a function of its domination by the privileged urban middle class in the Global North that has been disconnected with the older working-class formations of the mid-twentieth century, such as a structural default. But I think horizontalism now is reaching a crisis point, because of the determination, as it were, of the climate crisis. The climate crisis will be manifested through a rise of right-wing populism and fascistic movements.

Over the next five to ten years, the moment of truth for social movements is whether they break out of that domination of the radical left and move towards a more twentieth century realist model of alliances across different social and economic groups – a little bit like in the 1930s – and accept the democratic hierarchical models which were most effective in the 20th century, where you vote a leadership in, the leadership is given executive control, and you can vote them out if you don’t like it. So, for me, it’s a sort of return: what climate change is going to do is that it will force a return to a modernist political culture in the next ten years. The postmodernist period will be seen as an aberration of northern privilege.

Athina Karatzogianni: I want to ask you about the digital communication experiences you have had in the last three or four years. To my understanding XR used WhatsApp up until a point and then changed to Signal and Telegram due to privacy and security concerns. There’s a platform that is based on a carbon neutral server in Switzerland, and there is also Glassfrog and mattermost that is used by XR activists as well. When you consider communication aspects both internally (their role within the group, the movement) and externally (publicising, coordinating actions with the masses), what role do you think communication has particularly played in the trajectory of the movement? What is your own experience of this?

Roger Hallam: Well, my view is that social media has a heroin like aspect to mobilisation processes, in other words, you get a quick hit and then you got a quick collapse. Social media undermines the ability to create effective hierarchical organisation that will maintain the material resistance to the neoliberal state. What social media does is that it creates very rapid mobilisations and then facilitates very rapid collapse, because it can only and it’s only really good at creating action. It’s not good at creating decision-making structures. It undermines decision-making structures, because it overloads people with information and it also privileges outside voices that are usually destructive. It is a major problem and it doesn’t add anything, in my view, to the process of effective mobilisation. Effective mobilisation really has to be rooted in in meetings and in in face-to-face mobilisation contexts such as public meetings and people’s assemblies and such like, where you can enable people to engage in active speech, which is the primary mechanism of personal empowerment and then free people engaging in the ICT stage. You can go through a process of aggregation and once the aggregation is happening, then there needs to be delegation to an executive to take the aggregation and put it into action. The big problem with social media is that it privileges only a few voices, because there’s too much information on it and it degenerates into aggressive sort of speech. It’s impossible to aggregate, because unless it’s specially designed, you can’t aggregate. And last of all, there’s no implementation because there’s no agreement on who the executive should be. All those things make it extremely difficult, and really a diversion from material resistance to the state. Extinction Rebellion realised this in its design stage of not engaging in social media mobilisation.

Another problem with social media and organisation is that you tend to speak to people similar to yourself and that leads to a dead spot, to disconnected network structures which over and over radicalise people and turn things into a sort of cult-like, paradox of political identity-esque situations. So, what Extinction Rebellion decided to do was to mobilise through 19th century mechanisms, which is the public meeting. And the great thing about the public meeting is that it invites a lot of people. You’ve got the emotional connection and people together. You revisit the age-old successful oratory, which in my view is essential for maintaining and promoting mobilisation, the emotionality of the speech and the testimony of ordinary people. Those are the things that drive mobilisation, the emotionality of collective spaces. Obviously, that’s a major reversal of a lot of the wishful thinking of social media utopianism, but I’m just being empirical about, you know, not looking ideologically against social media. Everything I’m telling you is broadly empirical.

Athina Karatzogianni: I wanted to ask you about this meeting where XR youth came and occupied the meeting. Can you talk to me a little bit about this experience, if you faced challenges from a part of XR in relation to your role in the movement, how you dealt with those, and how you feel about this conflict? Has it harmed the movement, this conflict in relation to you in particular and on a personal level?

Roger Hallam: Well, you know, as you probably noticed, I take a broader sociological view of social situations. What I’m trying to communicate to you – and a lot of scholars have a difficulty understanding this – is that in the next ten to twenty years, it’s highly likely that there’ll be social collapse around the world, and that realisation is creating an exponential increase in social stress psychologically, materially.

You need to understand that we’ll be going over 0.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures in the next five to ten years, which will lead to the collapse of the Paris agreement, which was never serious in the first place. And we’ll be going over 2 degrees in the next ten to twenty years, which will precipitate mass starvation events. Given that that’s 5 to 6 degrees in inland areas, which means 10 to 20 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures during heatwaves, it makes it impossible to grow food. We have an absolute crisis, that will continue to create a fragmentation in the social space, as is well documented in previous social periods, when a society faces annihilation. The fragmentation is between fatalism or hedonism or revolution. Those are the three main fragmentations, and they always happen simultaneously. And these fragmentations interfere with each other, as you might say.

One of the dynamics in Extinction Rebellion is the intense emotionality of people realising that all that they wish for is not going to come true and it is particularly true for young people. There are two sorts of polarisations there. One is to move towards self-pity and try to create safe spaces and avoid what is horrible, as you might say, and another one is towards explicit resistance. Now, those two approaches obviously conflict. And one of the reasons in my sense is that a lot of young people are conflicted between those two: their desire for safety and their need to enter into resistance. So that conflict is working its way through and it leads to a lot of denial and fear. This leads to a bigger tension in middle class northern social movements. Social movements tend to attract people who are very likeable and want to see a good world. They find it very difficult to engage in confrontation. And so, paradoxically, they withdraw from confrontation, because they think confrontation is what they’re against. It is a major challenge to persuade people that you might have confrontation.

Most social resistance movements make that crossing of the Rubicon moment where they decide they’re going to create whatever confrontation is necessary. Because, you know, in the words of one of the girls who did the children’s march in 1963, we are going to get hurt anyway. The realisation you’re going to get hurt anyway for me is the major impetus towards civil resistance. In other words, you can’t escape. You’re already going into the gas chamber, right? There’s no alternative. And obviously, the more privileged you are, the more you can deceive yourself. So really, in a sense, Extinction Rebellion is a transitory movement that has mobilised the wrong demographic. It has mobilised the demographic that’s the most privileged and the keenest on nice things happening.

XR needs to mobilise the traditional revolutionary demographic, which is the lower middle class, which is the main revolutionary demographic. Either it goes to fascism or it goes to the left-wing movements historically. The reason for that is because it doesn’t have skin in the game as much as the professional middle class. But it’s intelligent enough, educated enough and has enough time and money to effectively rebound. So, it’s a sweet spot in the social structure in terms of civil resistance. The major strategy in our transition has to be connecting and integrating the climate crisis with the social crisis. Through that integration, we can create civil resistance that is centered on the lower middle class in Western societies. But that’s a massive challenge because, the professional middle class has monopolised the climate movement for the last thirty years and it doesn’t want to give it up.

Athina Karatzogianni: I want to ask you about your experience, because obviously at some point you said, this is the strategy, in connection to Heathrow airport, and then you were arrested a few days prior and then after. At that point, XR and yourself were at odds with going ahead with that action. How did this conflict arise? I’m talking specifically about XR youth, which, of course, you explained to me really well. What do you think is going on with XR Youth? I want to ask about this particular conflict in relation to you and your strategies. Do you think that this group dominates now? How do you see your role inside XR now? Because I know you have created other organisations, such as Burning Pink. What is your experience of this struggle?

Roger Hallam: In my previous answer, I gave you the sociological structure of the division and conflict. A particular side of that conflict was the inability of Extinction Rebellion to agree to engage in flying drones, safely, to the extent of closing down the airport. So, it wasn’t agreed by XR, largely because of the intervention of those young people. It went along independently insomuch as effective material resistance to the general project is ethically and strategically imperative. A bunch of people did that and it obviously largely failed to have the impact because it didn’t have the infrastructural support. One of the reasons for setting up Burning Pink is to create an infrastructural support for civil resistance projects, Extinction Rebellion being largely appropriated by the privileged middle class of the global north. As a consequence of that, they’re not willing to engage in in classical civil resistance, because they’ve got too much skin in the game.

Athina Karatzogianni: I have noticed that you still post and that you still work with colleagues in XR. You must still feel that there is a role for you to play there.

Roger Hallam: Yes, Extinction Rebellion is a broad church. There are still twenty-five to fifty percent of people in XR around the world who are actively engaged and wishing to bring about civil resistance episodes. There is still a role to play, as you might say. However, I think once we come out of the pandemic, then the movement will probably diverge. Part of it will return to the traditional denial of the old model environmentalist movement. And other people will move forward to a civil resistance social model. My prediction is that the latter will thrive and the former will discontinue, because they’re historically irrelevant, because of the structural determinants of a system.

Athina Karatzogianni: Now some specific questions regarding framing. Your argument is that there should be a culture, not a neutral language, for the mass movement to be built. But then you say that the movement might need to create separate mobilisations to be channeled into a movement of movements. You talk about the need for workers to organise themselves, people say from the black community should organise themselves separately – to have this set of mobilisations that they feed into a movement of humans.

Roger Hallam: To understand what I mean you need to have quite a sophisticated analysis of this area, because it’s quite easy to talk about in simplistic team terms which don’t really relate to the underlying causal determinants of how to be successful. One of the common misunderstandings with the notion of movement of movements is that it doesn’t differentiate between what you might call top-down alliances and bottom-up alliances, which are fundamentally different sorts of strategies, so that the top-down and likely movement alliance idea is that you go to the gatekeepers and leaders, the central power holders of an alternative movement space. And then you persuade those to enact civil disobedience with you. The alternative strategy is to go in at the side of the movement, as it were, and cooperate with people locally or in the local branches. A third strategy is to just create a completely separate mobilisation, which includes people in that demographic, as an alternative. For instance, the three strategies with trade unions would be either to talk to the trade union leaders and they come on side. That’s number one. You go to a trade union office, to branches, and recruit them to do stuff. And the third one is the separate mobilisation of trade unionists who have their own structure. What I was suggesting was that the two that are meaningful and work are the latter two, which is going sideways and going in to create separate mobilisations of people from that demographic.

The reason for that is largely empirical in the sense that if you go and talk to the main gate keepers, power holders or leaders of other social movements, spaces or left political spaces, then what you find is entrenched, reformist orientations, which means that people in positions out of ideology or privilege are going to be unwilling to enter into civil resistance, and they will block your attempts to mobilise for those reasons. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual in terms of social theory about how this works, because the vast majority of civil resistance episodes are created by autonomous mobilisations, separate from the official organisations. For instance, in 2012, in the Egyptian revolution, it was the grassroots of the Muslim Brotherhood that joined the revolution, it wasn’t the hierarchy and the leadership; the hierarchy and the leadership came in at the end. There’s no point going to the hierarchy in the leadership before the revolution, because they don’t have the political imagination, courage or willingness to risk their status to engage in a revolution.  The primary strategic sort of point I’m making here is to criticise conventional movement building, which pursues an elitist, reformist method, and therefore ineffectual political change.

Athina Karatzogianni: I want to take you back to a term you have used, “culturally neutral language”. That is the very classical problem, strategy or identity in a movement. The more open the framing is, the more people can feel included in that, and be mobilised and recruited. But then you have the problem of what is the strategy and who is included. This is the alliances that you’re mentioning externally and then internally. When you use the term “culturally neutral language”, I was wondering about that because the next point is about the separate mobilisations as well. It seems like a paradox, that tension.

Roger Hallam: What I’m proposing is a dual strategy. The first strategy is to make the mainstream movement space as opening open and neutral and welcoming as possible. There’s a whole number of concrete micro designs that ensure that that happens, in order to encourage different demographics, cultures and ethnicities to create their own mobilisations, so that they can draw in the benefits of attracting people. The major mechanism of mobilisation is to have people from the group talking to that group. Neither of those are perfect and both of them have dangers. But the point is that both of those strategies are a lot more preferable to the default political identity problem, which is a movement builds and it ends up manifesting just one particular demographic or culture, excludes people from joining the mainstream movement, and therefore limits its growth and prevents it from becoming a mass movement.

By refusing to enable other groups to self organise, then you end up not being able to integrate groups who do fundamentally want to organise on their own within their own identities, because their identities are quite strong or different to what you might call the mainstream identity. None of that is conflict free. There’s no utopian solution to movement building. What we’re looking at is the best suboptimal scenario and that’s better than what you’ve got at the moment, which is often combined with superficial tokenism, the idea of bringing black people in to make a speech, but not enabling black people to organise, because they won’t fundamentally change the culture of the organisation to welcome black people in.

Athina Karatzogianni: That’s actually very true. You can see it also with how some councils work and the representation there, especially in that sense. I was going to ask you about the Citizens Assembly. It is quite central in what you are proposing and also in relation to the transition period, specifically, because I think you don’t seem to be settled on that one yourself in terms of design, because you talk about a transitional period of two years, where perhaps you will have a thousand people for a fixed period of that, and then you have regional and cities citizens assemblies. I was wondering about this transitional period for the citizens assemblies because it’s a national city/ regional focus. But how does that work in a global context as well? So definitely on the transition point, I have questions in regards to that and the role of the citizens assemblies.

Roger Hallam: One of the annoying things about social change is it’s unpredictably non-linear. It’s very difficult to design transition periods, which don’t involve highly unpredictable breaks in previous social arrangements. In other words, usually what happens is a crisis that will throw up various potentialities and then basically the revolutionary leadership has to scramble around to innovate very quickly because it’s all or nothing. That’s not because it’s proactive design. That’s because no one’s on the street and suddenly everyone’s on the street, because of the collective action dynamics and the herding dynamics of mobilisation. Having said that, I don’t think there’s anything particularly intellectually or academically challenging about a transition to a citizens assembly based constitution.

Citizens assemblies is a constitutional mechanism in the same way as representational democracy is, as the same way as sort of autocratic kingship is. We’ve got numerous examples historically about how you make constitutional revolutions. I mean, there’s been dozens of them. But the general gist is that people on the street demand for a new constitutional arrangement and then that comes in and then the elites fight back against it. People come onto the street and you have a to and fro scenario for two years or a few months, depending upon the historical example. That new constitutional regime becomes embedded and then maybe ten or twenty years later, it gets challenged again. An example is French history over the last 200 years, how many constitutional breaks that they had? About four or five, something like that. So that’s what we’re really looking at. We’re not looking at some total collapse of the social system or something. What will happen, the big break, is when in terms of real political power, citizens assemblies have more political and moral authority than the representational bodies. I think that will probably happen quite rapidly because of the optics of citizens assemblies, given the mass alienation from the political class. I think the big attraction of certain assemblies is not that people are making decisions, so much as that people are being seen to make decisions. That would be highly attractive in terms of real popular political power.

Jacob Matthews: When you mention the fact that in the movement at the moment, you see a clear division between middle class interests. And what you said is that the upper middle class have effectively confiscated the ecologist movement over the past 30 years, that they are not willing to relinquish their position, and that sociologically this is what you’ve seen play out in XR. Now, my question really is, what are the structural elements to actually constitute these two groups as a class? Why would you still consider that they belong to the same middle class? And secondly, I understood what you said about the lower middle class and obviously having had access to better social capital education. That’s where you think lies a soft spot and where the potential for revolutionary change is coming from. This is a slightly polemic question here. Have you actually kind of given up on the working class completely?

Roger Hallam: Whenever you’re talking about this, you’re talking about sort of rules of thumb and a certain degree of generality, because there’s loads of exceptions to the rule that you might cite, because the categories you talking about are obviously very big. There’s lots of diversity within those categories. And the boundaries of categories are highly fluid in terms of definitional elements of them. I think an appropriate approach here is to use the notion of that sort of family resemblance. As you know, there’s no central foundational notion in the lower middle class, but there’s five or six characteristics of that group which interrelate. Often, individuals will display some of those characteristics, but rarely all of them. I think that needs to be said before you engage in an analysis of what the broad dynamics are: you have to accept they are broad dynamics, right? We’re not talking about some vulgar Marxist sort of determinism here. But at the same time, I think that class is massively underestimated in terms of the dynamics of politics in Western societies. And obviously, class does coincide with culture. The two things are quite a bit of a tortuous debate. But there are many elements of class, all cultural, and of course, a lot of cultural elements are very class-based as well. So, it’s difficult to separate the two out. But having said all those caveats, let’s go back to your first question…

Jacob Matthews: When you said that the movement had been, in a sense, confiscated by the upper middle class over the past thirty, forty years, which is something that we definitely relate to, although we’re not using those precise terms. To what extent is there still a unity of class between what you call the lower middle class and this upper echelon? Does it still constitute, a single class?

Roger Hallam: I’m not really bothered by the terminologies. I think what I’m trying to highlight is fundamental differences between the regional middle class and the urban professional middle class. The upper middle class is a bit of a problematic sort of category, because that really assumes the top three or four percent of the population, arguably. What we’re talking about here and various scholars have pointed out that potentially, the biggest division in society is between university educated and the non-university educated, because that has a class element to it, but it has also a strong cultural element to it as well. To a certain extent, this is reinforced by age. The older people who are university educated have a very different orientation between educated urban people that somewhat coincides with urban, educated young people in their thirties. This is a major fracture in society and this is exacerbated by the culture wars and this general sort of cultural irrationality that sees uneducated people moving to the populist right, while educated university people are moving to the elite left, as you might say…

Jacob Matthews: The extreme centre, as we call it, in France.

Roger Hallam: Yes, there are interesting things happening. There’s a specific orientation with the green movement and then there’s a matter of strategic orientation, about how to save ourselves from fascism. My orientation in terms of movement building is that we can provide more specificity about the paradox of the political identity problem. Because my proposition is that the paradox of political identity is a key problematic element in mass mobilisation. I agree that it reinforces its culture and its initial success, but it’s the primary reason why it fails to get further success, a dynamic you see in loads of systems. First movers are not like second movers in very entrepreneurial first movers, all nerdy, and you have to get rid of the first movers in order to get to the second movers.

In terms of a social movement strategy, you have to obviously recruit the urban middle class because they are the quickest to mobilise. But then you have to reduce the power of the urban middle class or persuade them to allow in the rural lower or lower middle class, which is a very different culture, and the regional lower middle class has greater numbers. This is how you create the mass movement. The sort of liberal urban middle class is actually a very small demographic. It’s not half as big as people think it is. Whereas the regional low middle class, of course, is a very large demographic, so people get confused between proportions and absolute numbers.

You might say you’re going to mobilise ten percent of the urban professional class. But that in absolute numbers, it’s less than three percent of the rural, regional, middle class. So strategically, you should focus on the regional middle class in terms of mobilising. Now, the thing to understand about the lower regional middle is although they’re socially conservative, they’re politically left or at least open to political arguments, because objectively they’re in a position of their lifestyles being degenerated and status degenerated for the last fifty years, because of globalisation and the rich running off with tax avoidance and all the rest of that.

That’s really the central conundrum of XR and the ecological movement: to move towards mobilising people that never been in the green movement. A data point on this, for instance, is when I went round and did my speeches two years ago. If I went to North London or Brighton, I would get plenty of people, but only ten, fifteen percent of them would be prepared to be arrested, while in Sunderland or Derby or Newcastle, it’d be more like 30 percent of people prepared to be arrested. I would estimate that at least half of them, and maybe even three quarters of them had never been involved in politics before. So, this is the move that has to be made more generically on the left: to talk in the language and in the interests and in the culture of the regional middle class. And of course, that is what the populist right has done, which is why the populist right is able to mobilise a lot of people, because it’s mobilising people that are being excluded or feel excluded from politics. The problem is with the urban professional class and identity politics, which is completely alienating to the rural and middle class. That’s the conundrum that has to be negotiated.

Jacob Matthews:  That would also apply to the working class or what’s left of the working class.

Roger Hallam: Working class is quite a complicated space as far as I can see, and I’m still not entirely clear about this. My general orientation, as I am on record saying, is that you have to separate the lower working class from the higher working class. The lower working class is characterised by chaotic lifestyles. This is not criticising them; it’s just being analytical about it: broken families, irregular financing, drug problems, domestic violence, all that sort of stuff. But the established working class, objectively it’s in its class interests to join a left mobilisation. And obviously for climate catastrophe mobilisation, they should be on that street, because they’re the people who are going to lose most from it.

But I think in the respectable working class, there are two problems. One problem is that they’ve lost their political confidence, because they don’t have any mentors and they don’t have any revolutionary sort of tradition, within living memory. So, it’s very difficult for them to really get re-empowered by that glorious tradition, as you might say. Then the other problem is, insomuch as they do have collective organisations, those collective organisations are demoralised and dominated by old men who have no imagination and no zest. But I think they are one of key mobilisation demographics. So are the urban working-class youth, which is a different kettle of fish.

You saw this reinvigoration of working-class culture with punk and the anti-racist movements in the late 70s where you’ve got a demoralised youth culture that sprang into some confidence. I think there’s a good chance of that happening. But again, you’ve got the political identity problem that you know: all the climate youth mobilisation is even more middle class than the adult mobilization, and that’s one of the reasons it’s been co-opted by the NGOs ineffectual reformist strategies. I think there’s the space there to mobilise lower middle class urban youth and working-class urban youth, because they’re all so pissed off, of course. At the moment, they don’t have any mentors.

Athina Karatzogianni: About youth mobilisation. I wanted to ask what kind of experience you’ve had of mentoring young activists. In relation to what we said about XR youth that it is dominated by the middle class. What is your experience working with youth or mentoring other young activists over the years? I know you joined as a teenager the anti-war movement in the eighties. I was wondering about this interplay with how you feel you were mentored in terms of leadership or other qualities to be a movement activist.

Roger Hallam: What I’m saying is going to be pretty damning, really. The most disastrous element in global mobilisation at the present time is the inability to radicalise global youth. People promote the world youth for rising up and influencing climate change. However, I think the international youth are totally disorganised, totally ineffectual and totally demoralised given the objectivity of the injustice being impacted upon them. I think in terms of Western societies and particularly Anglo-Saxon sort of America and us and to a certain extent Canada and Australia, the youth spaces are dominated by a completely ineffectual therapeutic organisation of politics, which has the counterintuitive consequence of demoralising, depressing and individualising the suffering of youth, which is what therapeutic action is. It’s basically a post-war strategy of demoralising and dividing rule and atomising people and creating a narcissism of the self.  To my mind, this is an imposed ideology by the dominant sort of left space, which all about victimisation, suffering, trigger warnings and all the rest of it.

The problem here is that this creates a sort of downward spiral, which is that as the objective conditions get worse than the desire to protect young people, it becomes even more extreme if both conditions are imposed by adults and reproduced by young people. This creates an even greater counter-intuitive sort of degeneration of their mental state. The counter proposition is that you’ve traditionally, in terms of revolutionary activity, been fearless, joyful, humorous and strong and all these elements, which is what you traditionally associate historical youth movements with. The challenge here is to really empower working class youth and regional lower middle-class youth who haven’t been infected with this reactionary ideology and enable them to go out and enjoy resistance.

The religious dogma of the radical left is that joy is taboo, right? Enjoyment. It’s pure Calvinism and it’s no surprise that it’s encouraged by the same class that is the traditional Calvinist class, which is the urban professional middle class. This is revolting structurally and culturally, I think, to working class youth, which is why working-class youth are completely alienated from political space, because they are excluded by middle class from participation, through this imposed ideology of middle-class etiquette.

Athina Karatzogianni: What have been your own efforts in that? Have you worked in that direction?

Roger Hallam: Well, I’ve been looking for a year and a half to try and organise youth who want to move away from that self-defeating sort of culture and strategy. And I think there are two things that are opening it up. One is that with working class youth and lower middle-class youth, you periodically get to some sort of critical mass. And when they do, then things will take off. The other thing is that for a lot of middle-class youth can only be in that space for a year or two, before they either burn out, or realise how dysfunctional it is. As people go through that process and come out the other side, then they’re potentially more interested in engaging in a real strategy, which is a mass mobilisation strategy. So, it may happen, but it’s impossible to predict. I mean, this is a bunch of people at the moment trying to create impressionable mass mobilisation events for youth. I think it will obviously take off at some point in the next five years, but it will be despite of the youth movements, not because of them. That’s my prediction.

Athina Karatzogianni: Going “beyond politics”, there is a sense that in your own political spaces and organisations youth and younger activists is not something that you focus on in particular…

Roger Hallam: It’s part of the project, but creating a revolutionary project at a time of massive social repression and social denial is a mug’s game right now. Because if you want to get out, then you join a reformist space, which is why the reformist spaces are so powerful, because of the hurting effects. It’s not because there’s any objective rationality in that strategy. Before revolutionary upheavals, you always get this massive tension between people wanting to break out of the system and create a revolutionary alternative and people in the space realising that everything they do is completely useless and hopeless, and all the cognitive dissonance that goes along with that. So that’s where we’re at the moment.

Athina Karatzogianni: What has been your own experience of mental health? And your own well-being, being part of a rebellion. How do you get motivated to continue? Because, in some respects, this is a really excruciating experience where there are controversies and you have to explain yourself. I have watched you do it on Facebook, for example, where you have these tensions and conflicts. You are one of the founders of this movement and you have to battle every day, not just externally with the governments, the police knocking on your door and so on, but also internally inside that movement and also lead separate organisations as well. I wanted to hear a bit, if you don’t mind, about how you are coping in all of this, if that’s not at all an indiscreet question to ask.

Roger Hallam: I think it’s a vitally important question. This comes back to my previous analysis, which is that, historically, the rebel personality is rooted in virtue ethics. Virtue ethics has been more or less destroyed by neoliberalism, both on the left and the right, and one of the central reasons in my mind, why movements are so fractious: it is because of individualisation and utilitarianism. In other words, all strategy has become rooted in utilitarianism, i.e., if you do that, will that happen? But in the historical experience, rebel uprisings initiating movements are all motivated by virtue ethics, which is: it’s my duty to God to rebound and achieve immortality. If I die, you know, they can come and do what they like because I’m over this shit. This is the central explanation for the inability of Western societies to mobilise: they’ve got a philosophy of life which is completely dysfunctional at a time of annihilation and will.

My prediction is that there’ll be a massive collapse of the utilitarian cultural edifice over the next ten years as people start to disappear into hedonism or, you know, self-destruction or revolutionary activism. And the revolutionary activism will be primarily sustained through virtue ethics construction. What that practically means, of course, in terms of emotional sustainability is that you have no expectation of success. And if you don’t have expectation of success, then you don’t get burnt out. It’s as simple as that, right?

Athina Karatzogianni: If you don’t have great expectations and you can keep going, because you are less disappointed. But it is hard living with disappointment!

Roger Hallam: …No, my life has been one long disappointment, but that doesn’t matter. This is why it’s very difficult to see from ninety percent of human beings have a virtual ethics orientation. The role of my life is to fulfil my tradition and be good and look after my kids and do my duty to my superiors, period. That said, there’s no expectation of social balance. There’s no expectation of, you know, ego sort of massaging or whatever. You’re just a cog in a system that’s a spiritual and material system. And that’s how most people see life apart from the western middle class over the last thirty years. We have to return to that orientation in order to become sustainable. You see what I mean? But it’s an orientation that most people don’t get, particularly university lecturers.

Athina Karatzogianni: Well, thanks for that! I want to ask you something about the concept of resilience. I mean, you use it a lot in your book Common Sense for the 21st Century , in the section on preparing the community for resilience in the Great Transition. What is resilience for you, because it can be seen as neoliberal discourse. As you know very well, resilience is that you can get hit repeatedly but you bounce back, you survive. But I don’t think from what I read in your book this is what you have in mind. You have in mind also some form of flourishing, not just surviving. There’s an extension to survive: you try to bring back the ecosystems, and working towards that, you won’t have to necessarily make decisions about who survives and who doesn’t. These decisions are made by governments. Therefore, the efforts would go toward influencing them, and involves the labs, the scientists. You write about creating a large voluntary service where people contribute and then you have economists looking at the economics of this as well, in your broader vision of this effort of preparing the community for resilience in the great transition. So, I want to ask about resilience in particular, and whether you think it’s perhaps a good concept, or is it overloaded.

Roger Hallam: Resilience means different things to different people, right? To explain how I see resilience on an individual level, there are three elements. The first element is a spiritual orientation where you’re not dependent upon the world: you’ve made that transition and transcendent move, where what happens in the world is not of your concern; what is of concern to you is how you respond to what’s in the world, what is under your control and how you act in the world, which is under your control. The outcomes of the world are under your control. This is a fundamental mental principle. When you get up in the morning and someone doesn’t show up to a meeting, you’re not going to get upset, because that was outside your control. You see what I mean? All people that are highly resilient have that orientation, that transcendent orientation. And obviously it’s embedded in various cultural, secular and religious constructions. But the fundamental structure is the same. The second thing is having a service orientation, which obviously is embedded within the broader Christian tradition, which is to love your neighbour and to be of service to your society. So you’re not looking for personal aggrandisement. What you’re looking to do is make things better for people. And that’s been shown, you know, conclusively to produce better mental health and all the rest of it from looking after number one. The third element is group community. You have a group of people around you that can support you practically in terms of being attacked in the press for example. That will help you prepare responses as a practical element to it. And then obviously there’s an emotional element that you’ve got a shoulder to cry on when you have a bad time. So, you know, that does seem to me to be the three elements of what needs to be created, and that can be juxtaposed to the victimisation sort of neurotic self-worship, pseudo-spirituality of Western individualism.

Athina Karatzogianni: You mentioned Christian values. How influenced are you by religion? Are you a believer yourself? I mean, I don’t know enough about this, about you.

Roger Hallam: Well, I was brought up a Christian, in the Methodist church. So, I’m fully embedded in that from a cultural point of view and in a moral point of view as well, in the notion that the highest value is to love other people, in the sense of seeking their well-being and that’s the purpose of one’s life, is to seek the well-being of others, both as a spiritual principle, i.e., you know, that’s how you can fulfil your soul. And secondly, because of the pragmatic, spiritual principle, which is people that help other people generally have happier lives because you’re outwardly focused.

Athina Karatzogianni: So, you’re not an atheist or you’re just culturally Christian…?

Roger Hallam: I think in a cultural sense that Christianity is at the heart of Western culture. In terms of its social orientation, like we just said with, with reductive Calvinism, that’s part of the Christian tradition. But there are also elements of the Christian tradition, which is about loving your enemies and suchlike. And that’s one of the big strengths, you know, which is the basis of our democratic and dialogical culture: when you don’t like people, you don’t shoot them. You sit down and talk to them.

Athina Karatzogianni: Yes, that’s the basic principle of politics. Can I take you to the leadership question again, in your experience, who is a good leader? What are the qualities? What are they doing and how are they doing it? What have you experienced yourself, as a good leading figure that you aspire to that influenced you at all? What kind of organisation enhances leadership, brings forward emerging leaders, younger people to get involved? We talked before about this evolution of leadership from the 60s and I want to ask more about you and whether you think that you were influenced by a leading figure, or do you think of yourself as a leader, so to speak?

Roger Hallam: Leadership is an extremely complex phenomenon, and I think everyone agrees on that. Ever since I was a teenager, I stood out from the crowd. I’ve always initiated things and been in a leadership position in groups – informally in some cases, as I’ve been involved in left-wing anarchist social groups, but I’ve always been initiator and an organiser, that comes quite naturally to me. Now I’m 54 and I’m arguably quite good at what I do. So I’m quite happy in that position.

What I’m trying to investigate, I suppose, is how to become a better leader. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing on that, but I think a lot of it’s to do with not being reactive to criticism. I’ve worked quite hard on being gracious around getting criticism, becoming detached from it and even welcoming it. I think a sign of a real mature leadership is to encourage criticism even when it’s unfair. That obviously involves negotiating with your ego and making sure you have self-mastery over yourself, as you might say, from an Eastern perspective. For me, that’s the main thing. I mean, obviously, the other side of leadership is being fearless, you know, from a prophetic point of view and leading from the front to being unpopular. The two things go together and in a revolutionary situation leadership is absolutely the central causal factor, I think, of progressive outcomes, which completely counteracts the orthodoxy of the last thirty years. This is coming from somebody who was an anarchist for fifteen years. I’m fully aware of the literature, the last two hundred years of literature of opposition to hierarchy and opposition to leadership. It’s got a lot going for it. But like all orientations, it’s not an absolute right.

There are times and spaces and situations where you need leadership. And we do need leadership in the present context, because what we’re facing is existential: everyone’s going to die, and it’s exponential. We need to get on with that so we haven’t got the time. We’ve got the massive pressure of the horror of it and we’ve got the massive, massive pressure of having to get on with that. Both of those things structurally determine the necessity of leadership in the social system. Like I said before, whether we like it or not, it’s a matter of sociological determinism. If you’re just running a wholefood shop in 1975, you don’t need a leader. But when you’re facing three billion deaths in the next thirty years, it’s a world of difference. You need to have fast moving leaderships.

Basically, what I think I’m trying to communicate to you is that in a revolutionary period, you have a build-up of a certain sort of a mobilisation and then a complete flip to mass mobilisation. Like with the dissidents in Eastern Europe, they were the leaders of the movement. They’d been doing it for 30 years. They were good at what they did. They were really pragmatic, they were valued, and they got to a certain point. And then when mass mobilisation happened, that space collapsed because they couldn’t adapt. What you got was a mass mobilisation of ordinary people, which had a pragmatic aspect. It was an idealist movement, you might say, or whatever: they just wanted to get rid of communism and spend lots of money. What’s going to happen in the climate space is that all the present mobilisations are going to collapse, in my view, because they’re all dominated by the elite urban middle class and they can’t make that transition to mass mobilisation. And if they don’t, then the populist right will take over in the next 10 years. The challenge we have right now is, when the mass mobilisation comes along, whether it has a pragmatic realist left leadership. And at the moment, that’s not there. You see you see what I mean? It’s a dramatic thesis but I think I’m right because it’s happened so many times before.

Jacob Matthews: I’m wondering about where it’s going to spring from, this leadership that we need so desperately.

Roger Hallam: I’m being entirely pragmatic and realistic about it. In the mid-twentieth century, there was no problem with leadership in the 1930s and until the 1970s,  on the left, everyone understood that you need a mass organisation and you need leadership, which obviously had to be democratic and all the rest of it. That was how the 20th century left dominated politics. You know, from the 1930s to the 1970s. So that strategy needs to be really reinvented.

Athina Karatzogianni: But the with the present conditions, it seems that we are looking at something more revolutionary than social democracy and that a strong welfare state is not going to solve the problem here…

Roger Hallam: Any social democrat now has to be a revolutionary. That’s the point right now, like liberals or revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. There’s nothing intrinsic about an ideology and the strategy of revolution.

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Roger Hallam

"Societies don't change rapidly without disruption." Roger Hallam is an environmental activist and co-founder of the resistance group Extinction Rebellion. A farmer by trade, Hallam attributes the destruction of his industry to extreme weather events. From 2017 to 2019, Hallam studied for a PhD in civil disobedience at King's College London, and his research is reflected in Extinction Rebellion's aptitude for high-profile political upheaval. He has explained bluntly that the group's goal is to create a political space for individuals on an international basis to decide "whether they want to live or die in the next thirty years".

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Roger Hallam

Roger Hallam is one of the strategic masterminds behind Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil.

As an organic farmer, he witnessed first-hand the devastating reality of the climate crisis and dedicated his life to mitigating the genocidal actions of the UK and other world governments.

After researching during his PhD how civil disobedience and radical movements can achieve the necessary social change in the shortest space of time, Hallam has since been at the forefront of radical action in the UK. His current project is promoting youth led Just Stop Oil, which has stretched across the media space after shutting down oil refineries and demanding that the UK government invest in no new oil and gas projects. Something that the UN, the IPCC, and the IEA all agree is necessary if we are to have a liveable future.

Join Roger as he explains a pathway to action for you to join a movement that takes the climate crisis seriously. Look up

It's Time for Revolution.

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‘We’re facing a societal collapse’: Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam speaks to ACT UP’s Peter Staley about disrupting the world in order to save it

Text by Elizabeth Rush

Photography by Matthew Morrocco

and Vicki King

As Extinction Rebellion's two-week ‘International Rebellion’ kicks off, Hallam and Staley tell us why civil disobedience is our most viable tool for survival.

This conversation will appear in Document’s upcoming Fall/Winter 2019 issue, available for pre-order soon.

A little over a year ago, I had a conversation that would change the way I think about climate activism. It was a day so swelteringly hot that the interview I was to give for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby podcast got rescheduled indoors. As Peterson Toscano, the host, and I fell into a deep discussion, I found myself turning the tables on him, asking a string of ever more personal questions. I was beginning a new project about gender and the Antarctic, and I wondered how, for Toscano (a self-proclaimed quirky, queer climate activist), the climate crisis intersected with queer rights. Toscano’s response has stuck with me to this day and is best summed up with a line from his one-man show Everything Is Connected—An Evening of Stories, Most Weird, Many True . He says, “I’m going to tell you the worst-case scenario with climate change, promise me you will not freak out. Promise? Well, we are looking at the potential extinction of the human race…but what other people on the planet have faced potential extinctions and exterminations before? Lots of people. But also LBGTQ+ people…There is a special time in our history when we learned a lot of things that might be applicable today. I’m talking about the HIV/AIDS crisis.” Toscano told me that the activist movements of the 1980s didn’t just change hearts and minds; they changed public policy. It occurred to me then that a cross-movement conversation in the era of climate crisis would bear vital fruit. A few months ago, I had the great pleasure of chatting with Peter Staley, a founding member of ACT UP , and Roger Hallam, a founder of Extinction Rebellion . It’s my hope that this conversation can demystify direct-action activism while helping us think about what comes next.

Elizabeth Rush —This year the climate crisis has risen to the forefront of national discourse. How do you move from consciousness-raising to action? Peter, I would love to hear more about what led to the foundation of ACT UP around 1987, and where the public and political consciousness around the AIDS epidemic was when the group came together. Are there similarities between where the AIDS epidemic was in public consciousness in 1987 and where the climate crisis is today?

Peter Staley —It’s always worth noting that ACT UP was birthed six years into the pandemic. A lot of time was lost, and that was mostly because it was hitting very marginalized communities that were frightened to engage nationally, politically, because of a fear of backlash. We were despised. It took that long to have a crucial number of people who had had enough of the fear and the death and the dying to realize that if something wasn’t done we’d all be wiped out. So, right there I see some parallels with global warming in the sense that the activism has been going on for a while, and yet it has felt like not enough and too late, and now we are getting to the point of no return. We’ve got to really change things fast. That was where ACT UP was in 1987. There was a very homophobic culture in the U.S. and it had gotten worse during the AIDS years, so we had to change the public’s perceptions about the crisis very, very quickly.

Elizabeth —In the years leading up to the formation of ACT UP, was AIDS in the news media?

Peter —We had very little press coverage for the first few years and virtually no government response. We even had a couple years of very mild response within the affected communities. They didn’t know what was going on; we were just as afraid as everyone. And it didn’t really become a major news story until ’85, when the Rock Hudson news happened. It was certainly attention-grabbing, but it was all laced with fear and stigma. It became a very frightening news story. It was a year and a half, two years after that that the activists struck back.

Elizabeth —Roger, are there parallels here to the climate crisis?

Roger Hallam —I’ve been organizing campaigns with different social movements for 35 years, but I’m not a pluralist anymore, in the sense that climate isn’t a movement or an issue; it’s basically the whole bloody thing! If it continues, every single progressive movement since the revolution is going to come to nothing because you’re going to have social collapse and fascism, followed by effective extinction. So I think it’s important to get the framework on what’s actually happening in the world now—We’re not facing climate change; we’re facing a social collapse. There are parallels with the way that ACT UP reframed the debates through the disruption they caused so that people woke up to the idea that this wasn’t just a minor thing. ACT UP really broke a mold of what you might call conformist, conventional, differential campaigning and caused as much disruption and support as necessary to bring about a consciousness of the immorality of allowing people to die. There’s a strong parallel there with what’s happening around the world now, with the explosion of Extinction Rebellion. The main message of Extinction Rebellion is that high-level mass participation civil disobedience bringing about enormous disruption to the everyday lives of people in Western countries is the only, and certainly the most significant, way of bringing about the change that we need. It’s all hands on deck.

“We’re not facing climate change; we’re facing a social collapse.” — Roger Hallam

Elizabeth —Your pushback, Roger, is really interesting—climate change as an issue versus climate change as everything. I don’t disagree with you, but one thing that I’m really conscious of is how exclusionary some environmental activism and discourse has historically been. It’s been the realm of well-heeled white elites who have the time or the energy to project into the future and to imagine civilization in collapse. I think some other activist groups might say, That’s really important, but that’s 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line, and we have these other issues that feel more pressing in an immediate sense. I’m curious if it’s important for either of you, as you frame these movements, to think about expanding the coalition of people who are part of the movement. Peter, was that important for you as ACT UP came together?

Peter —Let me back up. I agree with your framing on the issue that XR is fighting, but it would be an interesting debate to say, What will motivate the largest number of people in the next year, two years, three years? Should we be framing the issue that way now? I am assuming the movement is having a healthy internal discussion about that. But, the differences between ACT UP and XR are probably bigger than the similarities. What we were trying to do was a cakewalk compared to what XR is trying to do. It was a very narrowly focused issue. We were trying to get the country to wake up and react to a specific new pandemic, funding for AIDS research, and treatments that saved our lives. Initially, it looked like an impossible thing to do, but over the course of 10 years, we were able to accomplish a lot with a relatively small number of people. Our largest demonstration might have been 5,000 people, and most of them were well under 1,000. We were not a mass-people movement, which is a big difference with XR. As far as similarities, we tried to become experts in our subject so that our voices would be increasingly influential, and XR has been doing similar things in coalition with scientists. And XR’s adoption of in-your-face civil disobedience is very much in lockstep with ACT UP’s history. We really tried to make waves with our activism and we weren’t afraid of offending people. It was about making sure people were watching and listening. Roger, I’m curious if you are all thinking about this members debate going forward. You had the big action in April—will you be able to maintain those numbers or grow them? And if you can’t, will you start focusing on actions that can be equally spectacular with smaller numbers of people, which was kind of ACT UP’s modus operandi?

Roger —The protest that happened in April was actually triggered by a small group of about 800 people, among the 5,000–8,000 who came to London. But those figures are peanuts compared to an average mass movement demonstration. The point is that it’s not the numbers, it’s what people do. You can bring down a regime with 5,000 people—we just need to use our political imagination. Those eight hundred people, by getting arrested 1,200 times, which is the biggest number of arrests in a single episode of civil disobedience in British history, changed the national conversation in a week. What I’m interested in, as an analyst and strategist for XR, is the possibility, as our protest showed, that you can take five thousand people and change the course of history. That’s not some sort of ideological, naïve assumption. It’s actually well founded in historical sociology. It starts with people standing up for what’s right, and that is what a lot of people forget—Being decent to gay people is not a subjective viewpoint. It’s objectively right in terms of the ethical assumptions of Western society. So is the civil rights movement in the ’60s—It’s objectively right to be decent to black people. And it’s objectively right not to destroy your children’s lives.

So if you’re dealing with an issue like this, the strategy is straightforward—you get the maximum amount of people to cause the maximum amount of disruption and, ideally, be reasonably respectful along the way. The idea is to do it again, in October, but on a larger scale and for longer. People get really complicated about it. [Laughs] But I don’t actually think it’s complicated. You’ve just got to cause a lot of shit and be absolutely courageous and absolutely clear that you’re right and communicate the ferocity of your rage that massive injustice is being committed. Somewhere along the lines, the system cracks, and you get a deal. I studied the civil rights movement’s dynamics quite a bit, and all started off with 20–30 people. Once you get to about 1,000 people in prison, then you’re in the ballpark of something significant. In the autumn, we’re quite likely to close Heathrow airport, and there could be 500 people in prison in a week. My prediction is that will change the course of British history. But I could stand corrected. I’ve been talking to audiences in small towns in the U.K., and like ACT UP and civil rights, it’s all about the elites lying in order to protect what they think they are entitled to. There’s a certain point when people decide that they won’t be lied to anymore and they want to do whatever is necessary to change the course of history. We’re in one of those moments, in my view.

Peter Staley photographed at his home in Shohola, PA. Photography by Matthew Morrocco.

Elizabeth —As someone who has regularly participated in publicly sanctioned protests, I feel that it doesn’t accomplish much. What is it like to be part of a direct action campaign? Take me into a specific moment in a specific act of civil disobedience. What is it like to be on the front lines?

Peter —I’ll tell the story of my first arrest. I had been in ACT UP for about a year, was still in the closet at work, but, because I had been diagnosed with HIV, I finally went on disability and started to take whatever time I had left and put it towards activism. Within a couple weeks, ACT UP was having its first-anniversary demonstration on Wall Street, so I was very game at that point to get arrested for the first time. Most movements have good structures for training for a demonstration. It’s not something you just show up and do—I wouldn’t recommend that. You need to go through some civil disobedience training, and that’s what I did. What do you do if the police get violent? How do you react and how do you go limp during an arrest? All the mechanics of it—and you’re doing this with many of the people who will be getting arrested along with you, so it becomes a very communal, almost family-like moment, so you don’t feel you’re doing it alone. And when the moment comes, you’re prepared, you’re excited. Your heart’s beating, but you’re also feeling righteous and angry, and then you’re processed through the system together. We were taken to some holding cells at Precinct One in New York, and we all started singing show tunes and whistling at the cute cop. ACT UP was very blessed to have a legal system that was pretty lenient on us because we were viewed as desperate, dying patients. We often just got slaps on the wrist and were able to go out in about six months and get arrested again.

Roger —The question is framed around the idea that the main method of social change is to talk to people and persuade them to engage in action. But that’s probably the most fundamental misunderstanding about how mobilization works—Mobilization works after action, not before. People go out and act because they’re desperate or outraged, and through the sacrifice of their transgressive action—the visual optics and the emotionality of it—other people are inspired to join in. For instance, after our action in April, and the 1,200 arrests, some 50,000 people joined Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. in three weeks. There’s no mobilization strategy that enables you to double in size in three weeks other than mass sacrificial action though breaking the law and getting dragged off. Social change is basically an emotional process. It’s not a cognitive process. The bigger issue that Peter alluded to is—It creates community, and it’s a community feeling of engaging in resistance together that binds people and gives them the strength to carry on. After the April rebellion, a significant number of people came up to me and said that was the best two weeks of their life because there’s nothing like standing together against injustice and suffering for the cause.

Elizabeth —As someone who’s never been in prison, that sounds terrifying in the abstract sense. But being able to hear from someone’s experience, someone who has been through that and found it deeply rewarding, changes my idea of what it is like, so I would love to hear a personal story about how you experienced the rebellion in April.

Roger —As it happens, I spent most of my time in the office pushing bits of paper around, which might sound like a cop-out, but it was actually really important. Just for the record, I have been arrested, I think, ten times in the last few years—twice wrongfully. It’s a run-of-the-mill thing for me. Usually, it involves getting picked up off the roads and put in the police van and filling in some forms. About eight out of 10 times, the police will tell you that they support you because, in Britain at least, the austerity of the last 10 years has destroyed the police’s confidence in the elites as much as anyone else’s. So, I can’t pretend there’s some major sacrifice involved. Obviously, when you do it for the first time, there’s this big adrenaline rush, and it’s always slightly terrifying, sitting in the road, not least because you might get some taxi driver throwing things at you or something. I went to prison several times in my youth. It was quite rough. Nothing physically happened to me, but it was a very interesting and rewarding experience, sociologically and spiritually, coming to terms with what it means to take that step. I was in prison last November, and the embarrassing truth is that I had a fantastic time.

“We were taken to some holding cells at Precinct One in New York, and we all started singing show tunes and whistling at the cute cop.” — Peter Staley

Elizabeth —In what sense? Tell us how prison is fun!

Roger —Well, I have to preface it by saying that obviously if you’re a person of color or you’ve got mental health problems, it can be a scary, or worse, experience, so I’m not trying to generalize. Having said that, I think there is some generality in the idea that going to prison is a deeply emotional and spiritual experience because it exposes you to a different side of life and what it means to sacrifice yourself to a greater cause, and that is a powerful experience. You’re in the cell and you have three naps a day and read your books. For British people, that’s a definition of paradise. I don’t give a toss that the door’s locked or that the food’s not that great. It’s just a rest as far as I’m concerned. [Laughs]. There’s always the possibility someone’s going to beat you up or do something terrible to you. There’s lots of risks involved, and you have to take those into account, but once you’ve moved into a position of resistance towards a society that’s engaged in a genocidal project, the terror and guilt and emotionality of doing nothing trumps the largely illusionary fears you have of sitting in a prison cell for a week or two. There’s a video of the children’s march in the civil rights movement; they’re talking to these black kids, and they’re going, ‘Aren’t you scared about going to prison? You could get hurt. That terrible thing could happen—you know, you’re going to lose out on college,’ and those sorts of things. And then the black kid basically says that they’re going to get hurt anyway, right? ‘We’re black kids in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s not such a great deal anyway, so what does it matter?’ And I’ve been just talking to big crowds of people in northern England, and you get these women. They’re about 55 years old. They’ve had kids. They’ve had a husband. They’ve seen enough of life, and they’re saying, My kids are going to get hurt, my grandchildren are going to die, so the least I can do is fucking spend two weeks sitting in a cell. It’s not going to bother these people. Do you see what I’m saying?

Elizabeth —Absolutely.

Roger —It’s a privileged position to think that prison is something to be afraid of.

Elizabeth —Yeah. Once you realize what the alternative is, the sacrifice doesn’t feel nearly as grand. Peter, you mentioned the scale of the crisis in terms of the AIDS epidemic is fundamentally different from the climate crisis. It seems to me like some of ACT UP’s success also stems from the fact that once you had successfully moved through a series of direct actions, protests, and events, your organization had a specific set of demands and was very clear about offering a set of solutions. Could you talk about that interplay between direct action protests and direct action activism, and then being ready to offer solutions?

Demonstators from ACT UP, angry with the U.S. government’s response to the AIDS crisis, perform a die-in protest in front of the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters in Rockville, Md., Oct. 11, 1988, effectively shutting it down. A police officer steps into the group, and by mid-morning about 50 of the protesters were arrested.

Peter —Well, we had two movements melded into one, really. The biggest was changing public opinion on a dime, and getting the country to go from not caring that we were dying to caring that we were dying, and wanting a huge government response. And we actually seemed to accomplish that fairly quickly. The National Institute of Health-based research project started to soar during ACT UP’s first three years, to the point where, by year three, other disease groups were complaining about how much money was being spent on AIDS. And by that point, we had moved into an insider-outsider strategy where we were trying to win many battles on the research front, and on the housing issues, and prevention efforts like needle exchange. It became a ground war after that for many years until major breakthroughs occurred. But it sounds like XR is changing not only the U.K.’s opinions of what’s going on, but the world’s, and growing the movement from there; trying to get everybody to rebel and to say, ‘Enough!’ and demand quick change. That’s why I think their job is far more gargantuan than ours. We were able to change American public opinion fairly easily and fairly quickly, and I think that job is going to be a hell of a lot harder for XR. But maybe not. I mean, maybe we’ll have, next year, so many catastrophic climate events that the world’s just going to explode in anger. We certainly had a rising death toll in the ’80s that kept our emotions going and fueled our movement.

Elizabeth —It’s certainly a double-edged sword—As more people become vulnerable, as storms get stronger, as tides get higher, as heat waves get stronger, the urgency feels more intense. For the Extinction Rebellion, what’s a solution? Or is ‘solution’ the wrong word? What is the desired outcome of the event, aside from gaining media attention?

Roger —I think the dynamics of popular mobilizations are the similarities. I think there’s a certain resonance with what Peter just said. At the beginning, you’re basically doing general disruption to make a general point—You’re going out blocking streets to make the point that people are dying and they shouldn’t be dying. You’re making a really big, obvious, political, humanitarian point and you’re starting the conversation. One of the big mistakes of the climate movement is not to talk about the whole situation and not to do anything disruptive about it. Those are the two fundamental errors, I think. ACT UP blocking the streets in New York doesn’t have that much to do directly with AIDS, but that doesn’t really matter. This is one of the key points about disruptive design. You just go and mess things up. It’s like, This is fucking crap, and we’re going to make a big stink about it , and then it wakes people up and they think it’s real. It’s mainly an emotional process. It’s like, Oh, right, it must be real because there’s disruption. That’s how our minds work. It’s not because someone told us it’s bad. It’s bad because some guy’s blocking the road and I can’t get to work for two hours, and I spend the rest of the day alternating between how mad I am with the situation and feeling vaguely guilty because I know climate change is crap and I should be doing something about it. This is how change happens.

I think we will experience a sea change in attitudes on the climate in a matter of months. I think it will be a massive herding transition. The historical support for that is civil resistance movements. So you’re looking at something that’s scarily fast here, and that’s because it’s all or nothing. Then suddenly everyone’s on our side and can’t understand why it was possible there was a time when there was no funding for AIDS. It becomes the obvious new common sense. So, in two years’ time, it’ll probably be, Why the hell didn’t we ever think that we were going to have to transform the economy? You probably think that’s slightly unbelievable, but I’ve read the literature, so I don’t think it is. It’s a function of mass sacrifice or mass disruption. That’s the point you want to get across to your readers. They’ve got to say, Okay, this isn’t about conferences, it’s not about books, it’s not about lectures; it’s about 10,000 people arrested , in a U.K. context. That’s doable. It’s less than one in 1,000 of the British population standing up and getting themselves in a bit of trouble for a while. It’s not like the people rise up or some romantic revolution. The people never rose up. The research shows that even in the biggest rebellions and uprisings, only 3 percent of the population actually gets out of the house onto the street. Everyone else is still watching TV and being cynical.

“We’ve got a choice. We can tear each other apart through virtuous self-righteousness or we can join together. If we join together, we might survive, and if we don’t, we’re all going to die.” — Roger Hallam

Elizabeth —I completely agree, and I think we might be inside of that moment. It’s becoming increasingly clear that our economies need to move away from fossil fuel dependency. But what that looks like, and the specifics around that transition, are far less clear. And there’s a concern around who then gets control of the subsequent policy decisions. There’s a big difference between greenwashing the present economy and fundamentally changing who has control over how energy is produced at a local, national, global level; how to move towards a more equitable, livable planet. As climate change really gains momentum in the public consciousness, these are battles that are worth being specific about. Part of what ACT UP did really well was have a specific set of demands that the organization put together through expert knowledge that might have seemed wonky to an outsider. How can you be mindful in terms of the actual specific policy demands that follow, to ensure that the energy and momentum is not usurped or put in a direction that’s fundamentally at odds with creating a livable future for everyone, not just for the select few?

Peter —This is the juicy part of the conversation that I was most interested in, because this is something ACT UP stays sturdily on. There were certainly members in the group who felt that the only way we were going to get the society to work on AIDS and lower the death rate was overthrowing various systems, like getting the for-profit pharmaceutical companies out of the business and having it be a government-controlled effort for the research from beginning to end. We didn’t even get to the stage of, Do we need to fight capitalism in general? But these are questions obviously facing XR. In ACT UP, mostly it was the people with HIV who said, Listen, we don’t have time for some of those massive changes. Although Roger may feel very differently about that, ultimately we were a movement that worked very much within the system. We took the structures as they were and bent them to do what we needed them to do as quickly as possible. We did not seek to overthrow any of the structures that were in place. And, if you look at AIDS now, that may have been a mistake. But it also got us to some major victories within 10 years that we may not have otherwise seen. I’m curious what Roger is thinking.

Roger —[Laughs] The embarrassing truth is, there’s literature on how to radically change society. A lot of people think this is enormously complicated, but it actually isn’t. Like most social sciences, there are broad patterns, and some things look quite straightforward. I think the ACT UP strategy was great within the structural social context it found itself in, where capitalism was well embedded. Even if you’re blocking New York for a week, capitalism wasn’t going anywhere, because it was well established. So the correct and realistic strategy was to work within that, and obviously it was successful within those structures. The situation now is—and the evidence gets more exponential by the day—that the Western economic model is about to collapse, and not just because of its extreme inequality dynamics, but also because the Arctic’s about to melt and the weather systems are going into chaos and we can’t grow food. The literature shows that the biggest reason for the overthrow of regimes is because we haven’t got enough to eat. It’s as simple as that. The physical crisis of the state means people don’t get enough money to buy the bread. Although that sounds really fantastical, that’s what’s coming—you can see the signs—and arguably in the next five to ten years. So then we’re in a very different ballpark.

There are probably three models—the Scandinavian-style model, where the society collectively changes its mind and radically transforms the economy. The intermediate model, where there’s a lot of contestation, and a big national citizens’ assembly—and that’s the model XR is promoting—which is selected randomly from the population. Because it’s reflective of the general population, it acquires political legitimacy in the same way as the population accepted rationing in World War II because they knew that the Nazis were at their door and everyone agreed it was a bad idea to let them in. The third option is civil war, and civil wars tend to happen in societies that are very fragmented and have extreme social inequality. The classic example there is South American history, where regimes tend to flip from the extreme right to the extreme left because there are few intermediate institutions, as it were. So the grim message for the United States is, you’re heading into a grotesque civil war in the next ten years if the progressive left doesn’t get its act together. If American progressives don’t get their shit organized, they are going to be sucked into this civil protectory, and I’m totally serious about that. Extremely unequal societies, when they come under stress, turn into a violent mess. So there’s a limited number of years for the American electorate to get this right, and by get it right, I mean two things. They need to combine together and stop arguing about who’s more virtuous and just accept that you’re going to be working with people you don’t particularly like. Then you have to reach out to the general population to get majority support and accept that the general population aren’t terrible just because they don’t speak the same language. So there’s a big choice to be had there, and XR is trying to get groups around the world to talk in town halls to normal people because, after all, it’s normal people who are going to suffer the most here. So that’s the strategy. Good luck!

Peter —Thank you, Roger. We’re totally in agreement on that.

Elizabeth —One thing that fills me with a glimmer of hope is the way that climate change makes us vulnerable. That shared vulnerability creates the opportunity for coalitions among people who, as you say, Roger, aren’t necessarily used to working together. This is an opportunity to understand that that vulnerability is shared and that it can be a strength and can move public opinion towards something that might create a unifying narrative. In that sense, it makes me think that the climate movement is the inheritor of all of these different social justice movements.

Roger —Yeah, but the climate justice movement has miserably failed to actually fulfill its historical mission, which is to build a movement of movements which is tolerant of difference. We’ve got a choice. We can tear each other apart through virtuous self-righteousness or we can join together. If we join together, we might survive, and if we don’t, we’re all going to die. So it’s a time of reckoning in a biblical sense, and there’s not a moment to lose. I haven’t got the words to describe how urgent it is. All I can say is, it’s beyond words. So, I’ll be marching off in September and going to prison probably, and I very much hope that lots of people around the world start making similar decisions.

Editor’s Note: Roger Hallam was, indeed, arrested twice in September, for attempting to fly a drone near Heathrow Airport.

The eternal dreams of Jean Paul Gaultier and Simone Rocha

Clarissa dalrymple and david velasco imagine an art world built on human connection, the gospel of schiaparelli according to creative director daniel roseberry and his mom, fran, ishmael reed and boots riley on the art of cultural agitation.

A Welsh farmer became the mastermind behind plans to bring down major UK motorway

A judge described the Welsh organic vegetable farmer as "the theoretician" at the very highest level of the Just Stop Oil plans to bring the M25 to a halt

• 09:19, 19 JUL 2024

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Welsh organic vegetable farmer Roger Hallam has been jailed for five years for conspiring to organise protests that blocked the M25 motorway. It is thought to be one of the longest sentences ever given for a peaceful protest.

Roger Hallam, 58, who runs a small 10-acre farm near Llandeilo , is co-founder of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion and was jailed alongside four other protesters on Thursday. Hallam, Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, and Cressida Gethin, 22, agreed to cause disruption to traffic by having protesters climb onto gantries over the motorway for four successive days in November 2022.

Hallam, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment while the remaining four defendants were each handed four years' imprisonment. The sentences exceed those handed to fellow Just Stop Oil protesters Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker, who scaled the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge on the Dartford Crossing in October 2022.

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The Court of Appeal was later told Trowland, who was given a three-year sentence, and Decker, who was jailed for two years and seven months, were sentenced to the longest terms given for a peaceful protest case in modern times. Prosecutors alleged the M25 protests, which saw 45 people climb up the gantries, led to an economic cost of at least £765,000, while the cost to the Metropolitan Police was more than £1.1 million.

They also allegedly caused more than 50,000 hours of vehicle delay, affecting more than 700,000 vehicles, and left the M25 "compromised" for more than 120 hours. A police officer suffered concussion and bruising after being knocked off his motorbike in traffic caused by one of the protests on November 9, 2022, prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward KC said at the sentencing hearing at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday.

All five defendants joined a Zoom call on November 2, 2022, in which discussions were held about the planned protests, based off "what was said expressly and what could be inferred", and were aiming to recruit others for the protests on the call, Ms Ledward told the court.

A journalist from the Sun newspaper, who had joined the call pretending to be interested in the protest, managed to record some of it and passed the recordings on to the police. Judge Christopher Hehir said the Zoom call showed "how intricately planned the disruption was and the sophistication involved", and was "compelling evidence" of the existence of a conspiracy.

There was "extensive organisation and planning" for the protests and each defendant had a "significant role" in the conspiracy, Ms Ledward said. The defendants were convicted by a jury of conspiracy intentionally to cause a public nuisance, contrary to section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, on July 11.

The defendants, referred to as the Whole Truth Five by Just Stop Oil on social media, spoke to confirm their names in court and shouted "We love you" from the dock immediately after the sentences were passed down.

Judge Hehir said: "The plain fact is that each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change."

Addressing Hallam, the judge said: "You are the theoretician, the 'ideas' man. In my judgment you sit at the very highest level of the conspiracy." The judge told the court 11 protesters were arrested on suspicion of contempt outside the court during the case's trial on July 2, but the court had discontinued its proceedings against them on July 11 after he became "concerned" about their position. There have been no protests on the M25 since November 2022.

After leaving his west Wales farm, Hallam went on to study civil disobedience at King's College London. There, in 2017, the PhD student held a hunger strike pressuring the university to divest from fossil fuels - something they have agreed to do by 2020.

A year later, 1,500 activists gathered on Parliament Square in London during the first protest by Extinction Rebellion. The peaceful demonstration was the culmination of two years of meetings held by founders of activists including Mr Hallam in a group originally called Rising up!

Speaking in a Sunday Times interview, Hallam said: "When I look at the sky, I see death. Because what I see is a process through which I will starve to death. The sky is basically what gives life. If that sky doesn't rain, we're dead. And I know that because I grow food. So I've got that - I got that frontline peasant orientation which obviously has been completely lost in western society." For the latest court reports, sign up to our crime newsletter here

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Roger Hallam

Age, biography and wiki.

Roger Hallam was born on 4 May, 1966 in United Kingdom, is a British environmental activist, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Discover Roger Hallam's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is He in this year and how He spends money? Also learn how He earned most of networth at the age of 58 years old?

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 4 May. He is a member of famous with the age 58 years old group.

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In May 2019, after a three-day trial at Southwark Crown Court, they were cleared by a jury of all charges, having argued in their defence that their actions were a proportionate response to the climate crisis. In March 2017, Hallam went on hunger strike to demand the university divest from fossil fuels—the institution had millions of pounds invested in fossil fuels but no investment in renewable energy. Five weeks after the first protest, the university removed £14m worth of investments from fossil fuel companies and pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025.

Hallam is a co-founder of environmental pressure group Extinction Rebellion, with Gail Bradbrook and Simon Bramwell. He stood unsuccessfully in the 2019 European Parliament election in the London constituency as an independent, winning 924 of the 2,241,681 votes cast (0.04%).

Hallam was interviewed by Stephen Sackur on BBC HARDtalk on 15  August 2019.

Hallam and four other activists were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance on 12 September 2019, the day before a planned action to pilot drones in the exclusion zone around Heathrow Airport in order to disrupt flights. Three days later, in an action organised by Heathrow Pause, Hallam was arrested in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport apparently in breach of bail conditions from the previous arrest requiring him to not to be within five miles of any airport or possess drone equipment. He was remanded in custody until 14 October.

In an interview with Die Zeit on 20 November 2019, Hallam called the Holocaust "just another fuckery in human history".. This comment was made in the context of a broader discussion on genocides throughout human history, where Hallam compared the Nazi Holocaust to the Congo genocide; as he stated the 'fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history' adding that the Belgians 'went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it.' Hallam's controversial comparison has drawn support from African activists the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! Campaign, who while critical of the tone of his language, have lauded his honesty and willingness to highlight crimes committed by colonial powers in Africa.

Between at least 2017 and early 2019 he was studying for a PhD at King's College London, researching how to achieve social change through civil disobedience and radical movements.

In January 2017, in an action to urge King's College London to divest from fossil fuels, Hallam and another person, using water-soluble chalk-based spray paint, painted "Divest from oil and gas", "Now!" and "Out of time" on the university's Strand campus entrance. They were arrested in February when they again spray painted the university's Great Hall, charged with criminal damage and fined £500.

Later in 2017, Hallam was a leading member of activist group Stop Killing Londoners an anti-pollution campaign of mass civil disobedience that they hoped would result in the arrest and imprisonment of activists. Hallam with Stuart Basden and two others were prosecuted and some pledged to go on hunger strike if imprisoned.

Julian Roger Hallam (born 4 May 1966) is a British environmental activist, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and cooperative federation organisation Radical Routes.

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• Who are the Volga Germans?
• Settlements along the Volga

Mapping information provided by Sandy Payne germansfromrussiasettlementlocations.org

Saratov was home to both a Lutheran parish and a Roman Catholic parish which served the ethnic Germans living in this city.

CONGREGATIONS

St. Clement Catholic Church

St. John Lutheran Church

St. Mary Lutheran Church

The Lutheran parish in Saratov was officially organized in 1793, although Pastor Ahlbaum was active in the city before then.

The Pope established the Diocese of Tiraspol, headquartered in Saratov on 3 July 1848. During its existence, there were five bishops:

Ferdinand Helanus Kahn (1850-1864) Franz Xavier Zottmann  (1872-1888) Anton Johann Zerr  (1889-1902) Eduard von der Ropp (1902-1903) Joseph Aloysius Kessler  (1904-1930)

This diocese went inactive in 1930 with the resignation of Bishop Kessler and officially vacant in 1933 when he died. It was formally "surpressed" in 2002 when the new Diocese of St. Clement in Saratov was established.

The Catholic parishners of Saratov built a wooden church which was consecrated in 1805. This building was used until 1880 when a new brick building was erected. The architect was M. N. Grudistova, and the new building was consecrated to St. Clement (St. Klemens in German) when it was completed in 1881. Today the structure serves as a movie theatre called "Pioneer."

In the post-Soviet era, the St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church was founded in 2001 in Saratov. It is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria (ELCI). There is a chapel in Saratov, and the pastor serving there is Olav Panchu.

There were three frontier garrisons founded to protect merchant ships traveling on the Volga River: Saratov (1584), Samara (1586), and Tsaritsyn (1589). Over the next century, the settlements were rebuilt on first one side of the Volga and then the other following a series of natural disasters.  The 1670 peasant revolt led by Stepan Razin also thwarted development of these cities.

Saratov was the first point of arrival for the German colonists and the location of the Kontora (Office of Immigrant Oversite) following the establishment of the colonies in the 1760's. From its beginning as a provincial outpost, Saratov grew to become a prosperous city and served as the center of industry for the Volga German colonists.

Catholic and Lutheran

Maps of Saratov and Saratov Province

Schnurr, Joseph.  Die Kirchen und das Religiöse Leben der Russlanddeutschen  - Evangelischer Teil (Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 1972): 194.

Saratov  (Wikipedia)

Roman Catholic Diocese of Tiraspol (Wikipedia)

Map of Saratov Province (1823) (World Digital Library)

Historic Saratov photos and maps  (Russian site)

Description of the city of Saratov and Saratov Province  ( Encyclopædia Britannica )

Geographic card depicting key features of Saratov Province (1856)  (World Digital Library)