‘Radical change never comes from people who are comfortable.’

Huddersfield Friend Ian Bray is one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion (XR). He talks ethics, history and a potential prison sentence with Rebecca Hardy

How were you first introduced to Quakers?
By a friend. Basically, [it was through] someone we knew from antenatal class. I didn’t start going immediately, but it kind of slowly happened. I’ve always liked to experiment, so I went and it just clicked. I pretty much decided it was for me and have been going ever since.

That’s something I hear a lot from Quakers. People often say it’s like coming home.
Literally. I’d tried sitting in meditation and couldn’t do it. I was very heavily influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh and Zen Buddhism, and Quakerism seemed to be the nearest western equivalent. It’s only in retrospect I’m saying this, [but] I’ve always found Buddhism a little bit impenetrable, whereas [Quakerism] fit like a glove.

So you’d found your spiritual home?
Yes. As a young person I’d been what you might call a seeker, but I never found what I was looking for – but I was in the right place at the right time.

On your Facebook page, you describe yourself as a ‘compassionate revolutionary’. When did you become involved in activism? Was that something Quakerism brought out in you?
It was a direct result of it. Before, I didn’t think you could do activism. They were just other people, like football players or people on telly, so Quakerism, via the peace movement and Peace News and the Peace News Summer Camp, was my pathway.

Has it always been environmental [activism] you’ve been drawn to?
I started off in the peace movement but, in reality, there is no distinction between the environmental crisis and the war machine that drives it. They are always interlinked.

When did you start in environmental activism?
I became aware of the [climate] problems through self-education around 2010 and 2011. I think I was like a lot of people who grew aware of the magnitude of it. It is far more than just a climate crisis. That’s why XR [shouldn’t be] reduced to just a climate campaign. It isn’t. It’s a justice campaign. I became aware of the thermodynamics and the physics, and then I found some particularly interesting people to read. John Michael Greer – he’s a Druid – and Thich Nhat Hanh were the two people that shaped my thinking around it all. Thich Nhat Hanh and the Zen Buddhists had to have a practical response to the Vietnam war, which is what makes it so interesting. They were like, we can’t just go and do more inner work. We’ve got to start rebuilding villages and running schools, whereas so many people from that side thought, let’s do some inner work and it will fix it, but you have to be engaged.

Which is very Quakerly…
Yeah, of course… you can’t pray on Sunday and kill on Monday. You can’t have that contradiction: ‘My faith is in a compartment.’ And the Druid perspective is very much that this is all interlinked, but there’s also this really strong appreciation of nature, and how important that is, which sometimes I think is a little bit missing from Quakerism. So these two things were really going on in my thinking, so I was kind of being made ready and being prepared, and this fell into place. It’s like ‘when the time is right, the messenger appears’. It really felt like that. Suddenly, it was like, ‘everything is going easy, it’s just coming now’…

Doors were just opening?
Yeah, there was a coherence, and then when I first met Gail [Bradbrook] and Roger [Hallam] and Simon [Bramwell], who were the co-founders of Rising Up! [a forerunner of XR], which came out of Gail’s project Compassionate Revolution, I went through what a lot of people have been through when they found XR. People have said to me: ‘I’ve been waiting for this for thirty years.’ They’ve found out in much the same way that I did; this dawning awareness, that there’s this tragedy unfolding… and they were just waiting for it to come. It was a kind of an epiphany for me.

How did you discover Rising Up!?
Huddersfield Meeting has quite a strong involvement with the peace movement and one of the many things that Robin [Bowles] and Ann [Bettys] do is distribute Peace News. So that was the literature that started me realising that there’s quite a political aspect to Quakers. That was like a bonus discovery, and then, at the time I’d just separated from my partner and I was at a loose end, so I thought I’d go to the Peace News camp as an experiment – and there I met a lot of activists.

Let’s talk about the origins of XR. Famously, the story goes that there were fifteen of you in a sitting room in Stroud. Could you set the scene a little?
So, I went to the Peace News camp and met lots of people solidly embedded in the peace movement, and they said, ‘Why don’t you go to a gathering called “Earth First”?’, and I went on a purely experimental basis. The very first workshop I did was called something like ‘How to build a mass movement for radical change’, and this really appealed to me, because this is a really huge systemic problem. What I’d learnt from Buddhism is, all things are interlinked. So I went to this workshop and there was Gail, Roger and Simon [the co-founders of XR], two other people from Stroud, and me – and maybe one or two other people – and [they tried] to roll out this crackpot idea of Rising Up!, because they’d decided that Compassionate Revolution was too woo-woo and wouldn’t really fly with a lot of people, so they’d kind of rebranded it. And then Roger brought in his ideas of using mass civil disobedience, which was not what anyone else in the environmental movement was or had been using. I could be wrong on this, but I know it was done in the peace movement at Greenham [Common] in the 1980s – mass arrests and mass trespasses – but I don’t think that anyone had tried it in a significant way since.

So was that the meeting when you came up with the idea for XR?
No, that was literally the first ever workshop where they were rolling out Rising Up! It was 2016, and we had the first Rising Up! action three years ago when we attempted to have a mass arrest on the M4 at Heathrow [as a protest against the proposed third runway]. The aim was to try and get one hundred people arrested. I think we only managed fifteen in the end. There were so many police there, because we declared in advance what we were going to do! So that was my first arrest, on the M4 to Heathrow – then essentially we were running these campaigns that were testing out all the methods we have used for XR. We had the ‘Stop killing Londoners’ campaign, which was about air pollution. We had two iterations of that, and then we did ‘Vote No Heathrow’, which was around the parliamentary vote last year. And, during that time, we learned to block bridges; we learned to do road blocks; we learned to do criminal damage with spray chalk, and we actually spent a week in prison for putting spray chalk on windows. And then we did our first hunger strike. We were actually outside the Labour Party HQ, so we were going around all the party HQs at the time and doing direct actions, like chalking their windows. Basically, it was all development to find out what works, ’cos XR didn’t just go [gestures an explosion] in October. Every method we used had been though multiple iterations to find out what would and wouldn’t work. We were experimenting on ourselves, essentially.

So, how did you get from these campaigns to XR?
Well, essentially most of the people in there had come on an intellectually similar journey to me. One of the XR demands is ‘tell the truth’. It isn’t that the truth is hidden. It’s that it’s not brought together and presented in a unified way. Once you start understanding about soil depletion, species extinction, ice-melt, you name it, you realise that fixing any one of those things is not enough. And, actually, even fixing all of those things is not enough, because our system just keeps driving everything to destruction and excess. So that’s where everyone was coming from… it’s a bigger, systemic thing, and then came this idea for this big campaign – but, obviously, we had to build numbers. The original idea for ‘Stop killing Londoners’ was that [we could] mobilise several thousand people, given how bad air pollution is, and we could get that to multiply, but it didn’t. But with XR, we dropped lucky. It went way beyond expectations. Instantly. On the Declaration of Rebellion day [in Parliament Square on 31 October 2018], we expected three hundred people. We got one thousand and then it just went like that – everything went triple – which of course is why there are structural problems in XR because it’s grown beyond an exponential rate.

So you didn’t anticipate it would be this huge?
Well, not that it would accelerate quite this fast. It’s a bit like you’re a load of teens in a garage band, and expecting to have the success of The Beatles. You know, no one expects it. I mean, you want these things to accelerate and get big, but it’s kind of – it’s…

Overwhelming?
Yeah, overwhelming, and it has been ever since ’cos the first action we did, which a lot of people are not aware of, is we occupied the Greenpeace offices, which instantly caused a lot of divide in the environmental movement. But just the outlandishness of it put us on the map. Our only ask of Greenpeace was: ‘Would you send an email to everyone on your mailing list, just to tell them about the “Declaration of Rebellion” and would you like to come?’ From the very, very top of Greenpeace, the answer was, that’s just impossible, ’cos the whole NGO approach has been if – and I have to be careful how we put this, because there’s this thing that XR thinks they’ve invented the wheel – [but the NGO approach is] if you tell [people] the full bad news, they will just cancel their direct debits and go on holiday and everyone will default to nihilism. But what we found is, there is a signifiant percentage of people who will default to trying to doing something about it, and they’re not always the traditional activist types. And we had a nice time. It was quite cool at Greenpeace. They said, ‘Well, we’ve occupied people’s offices in the past.’ They took it really well and we’re kind of friends.

It is interesting that when you hear stories of XR activists, they’re not the people you would normally expect – they’re from all walks of life, but all these years they’ve been harbouring doubts and XR has been like a lightning rod that’s suddenly given them an expression; that they can finally try and do something about it…
Yeah, it’s like water landing on something that has literally been waiting for water to come, and they’ve been in the desert sometimes for twenty or thirty years. And the level of passion, and the level of need, which is almost quite worrying actually. The level of need for it has meant that some people have almost become too evangelical. It’s not uncommon for people to come across like that, because they felt so distressed. So we’ve always tried to do things in a regenerative way. So rather than being rationalist, materialist activism – where that is the problem and we’re going to attack it – we try to have a regenerative approach, so the means always have to be justified. And that is partly where the dispute is now, because it’s becoming that the ends justify the means…

So it’s unsettling the whole movement?
Yeah, but it’s always got to be uncomfortable and you lean into it; you’ve got to do the grief work, which is saying that this is a disaster and it looks like we are all doomed, given the trajectories that we’re on for more than four degrees. And this is why we’ve had a lot of people of faith involved from early on, because it comes down to what is the right thing to do now, regardless of the outcome, so you’re kind of putting yourself in service without an expectation of a win. Previously, NGOs said you’ve got to concentrate on winnable campaigns, so you can deliver good news in small drips, and sugar the pill, whereas the whole thing with XR is, you give the people all the bad news in one go.

You’ve talked a little about how the faith movements have come onboard. Do you think that Quakers have brought something distinctive to XR?
Yeah, in both a big and a small individual way. It’s almost complimentary. Gail was an attender for several years…

So Quakers are at the core of the movement?
Yeah, Gail and Simon both come from a Pagan background, but Simon will go to Quaker Meetings. He comes from a Pagan and Druidic background, and we instantly meshed. So I am a Quaker, Gail was a past attender, and then several other people who have been involved from very early on are Quakers. [But also] on an individual level, people have said to me when we did direct action, that I brought this very solid, grounding, calming presence, and that’s partly because I‘ve learnt to be quiet. I’ve also been an infantry soldier in the past, so I’ve been trained to run towards danger. So it’s this weird balance. They were two really useful things to have… in that, you need not to panic, you need to keep those around you steady, and they kind of mesh together in a bizarre way. It’s like all those things had a purpose.

I just wanted to ask you a little about the philosophy behind XR, in particular, this policy of mass arrest. I was watching a YouTube video the other day, and Roger Hallam was saying that the philosophy behind it came out of this research that shows that whenever serious social change happens, it’s required thousands of arrests and hundreds imprisoned. Could you elaborate on that?
So, this is getting into ‘theory of change’ – and what you think ‘theory of change’ is – and we’re obviously getting to a point now where this needs to evolve, or we need to become much more radical. Well, there’s a big tension in XR because lots of people have come in and found it like a safe home and now they don’t want to risk it…

You think they should be more radical?
In the ‘theory of change’ that we’ve got, there is some dispute over the academic work that it is based on, and the applicability to the situation we’re in, and its definition of nonviolence. The ones that [are often quoted], like Gandhi and the civil right movements, were oppressed minorities within democracies, and the current tension with XR is that there are loads of mainly middle-class, white people, which will never build up to great enough numbers and will never be radical enough.

So let’s talk about that, because one of the criticisms of XR is it is too middle-class, predominantly white, and that this policy of mass civil disobedience can exclude people of races that live every day with the threat of arrest. Do you recognise that as an issue within XR and can you see any way of resolving that?
Well, this is why I say you go through a process of maturing your thinking and improving your learning all the time… [Because] these things are a process, not an outcome, which is an idea we learnt from one of the Swarthmore Lectures, ‘peace is a process’. There is no Shangri-La where things are perfect, but every day you have to try and make the world a better place and move towards it, but you will never arrive there, there is always another crisis, or something else going on.

But do you think there is space within XR where it can take action that is more inclusive?
We have to make that space because of love and justice and the strategic imperative. This is partly where it’s getting complicated, because there are people who say there’s no justice on a dead planet. And that you have to rush with the emergency and rush on with the strategy, and that we can worry about inclusion and justice later. The flip side of that strategy is that because it is exclusive, it will never get enough people to really make the change. It will get a lot of people to feel really good that they’re doing something about it, and will love the fact that they belong to XR, but, at a strategic level, it won’t do enough, because at the end of the day, privileged white people are too few and too comfortable and radical change never comes from people who are comfortable. [We’re talking about] centring more marginalised voices, although it’s not true to say XR is exclusively middle-class, because I don’t consider myself to be middle-class. But we need to centre those other voices, and it’s difficult and hard, the politics and the practicalities…

Let’s talk about the three key XR demands: that politicians should tell the truth, to have a citizens’ assembly, and to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2025. Some critics say that the wholesale transformation that getting to net-zero by 2025 would require is unachievable, and would require such drastic change that it could create more problems, like rising food and energy prices, which could create more inequality. What do you think? Do you personally agree with the 2025 net-zero target?
You know, all the emerging fields in science, once they start doing research on ice melt, et cetera, they all start to indicate that these things are getting towards tipping point, or beyond recovery. There’s this whole dispute about what is politically possible. Because, when people say it is unreasonable, what they mean is it’s politically unreasonable and politically impossible. It’s not technically impossible. You know, if all the engineers on earth were put to work on this, we could probably get to zero even quicker than that, if it was like a wartime emergency.

So it does require political leadership… but that political leadership is never going to come if the societal will is not behind it. Can you envisage a point not too far away where people have reached that critical mass, where they are calling for urgent change? Is that something you can see? Do you think you are bringing the public with you?
I don’t even know we need to bring them with us. Again, this is another thing that is a conflict [within XR]: are we trying to build a brand campaign or get something done? I think we’re trying to get something done, so it doesn’t matter if XR is chewed up and spat out in the process, as long as it gets done, and, of course, that’s why there is a call for a citizens’ assembly. Because of the elected politician’s other interests, essentially we haven’t got a real democracy: they certainly can’t make unfettered decisions. That’s why there’s a call for a citizens’ assembly because the thinking is that if you put a randomly selected group of people in a room together and then you have scientific advice – not advice filtered through commercial interests, payments and people looking at their careers – and you tell them all this stuff that I know, most people would say, ‘yeah, that looks pretty bad, we need to start doing something about it’.

So you don’t think that it is necessary to bring a big percentage of people with you, clamouring for change?
The original ‘theory of change’ was that if you got three and half per cent of the population – so two million people, a bit like we’ve had – instead of all coming into town like the anti-Iraq war demo and then going home at four o’clock – if they all came and sat on all of the roads on the M25, the government would be at the table immediately. You could literally choke the system and demand to be heard…

Another criticism is that XR is very good at raising awareness of this huge crisis, but it doesn’t explain to people what we need to do in order to tackle it. You might say that that isn’t the role of XR, which is more about waking people up through disruption. But do you think XR should be more solution-focused, and give people the tools to understand what net-zero by 2025 would require?
There are probably two things that guide this. XR is politically non-binary; we don’t start out saying we’re left or right: we want to see it through a new lens. Also, we’re not vanguardists – so no one wants to be the prime minister. We’re not trying to make it a political party; it’s a campaign to raise awareness of the issues and establish a proper democratic process – a verifiably real democratic process that isn’t owned by lobbyists or corporate interests – to make informed decisions based on the science. We therefore don’t seek to prejudice that by saying what the citizens’ assembly ought to do. Essentially, we have faith that if you have enough citizens and the scientific reality is presented to them in a congruent, non-biased way that they will then make the right decision. So it’s an act of trust in the people.

We’re in a general election period – do you think XR should be saying which party has the best climate strategy?
No, because the idea is that XR is a decentralised network of autonomous groups – an amalgam of anarchic principles. It’s not seeking to be vanguardist. It’s definitely left-ish and attracts those people, but the idea is that XR is a broad movement, which obviously means having lots of people within it who you disagree with. We need to agree that the biggest problem is the one that’s going to kill us all and it’s the one we’ve got to fix [the climate crisis]. Personally, I don’t think electoral politics will make any difference whatsoever, because the time frames are too long. We have to question the shibboleths, and even now you can’t really question GDP and economic growth…

Let’s talk about your activism: you’ve been arrested fifteen times, and on remand for a week. Next year, you’re going to crown court where you may face further imprisonment. You went into XR knowing you would be arrested. So, how do you feel about the prospect of imprisonment now: is it something you feel ready for? Do you feel this is part of your witness, or are you more conflicted than that?
Well, I have to be careful, because this whole thing about going to prison is even more about privilege and being in a position to do it. The idea [came when] someone in The Guardian said that if you get fifty people in prison: front-page news. We were starting then from a place where if you got a thousand views on a Facebook video, [it was a success] – so the idea was, [to] get fifty people in prison for chalking windows, where there’s no prospect of a long-term sentence. But what happened was, the second time we tried it, the judge looked at us and smiled, and said she’d grant us bail with no conditions, so then we couldn’t break them. She was a super smart judge. That was one of the reasons why we started looking at mounting trains [with the DLR train action] because the legislation is completely different to blocking roads. You have to keep evolving tactics. The legal advice was they’d get done for public nuisance and bailed, but what they were charged with was ‘malicious damage to railways’ which carries a maximum of two years imprisonment.

So far there’s, broadly, been relatively good will to XR. Wouldn’t that kind of action alienate people?
Yeah, but it’s a question of whether you’re trying to build membership or get things done politically. The ‘theory of change’ then was that if you could completely disrupt the infrastructural system in London, the pressure on the government to come to the table would be immense.

But the level of disruption you would bring to ordinary Londoners, many of whom are already leading overstretched lives, where, for some, if they don’t get to work, they could lose their jobs. How do you feel about that?
It’s unpleasant. The road blocking stuff and the swarming in November – it was the worst thing I’ve ever done. It was horrible to do: the fact that you are making people late for work and you’re being abused for it. There’s nothing gratifying about it. It was partly an experiment to find out what to do and how politically effective it was, and when someone got Norman Tebbit in a road block and he tried to drive right through, it suddenly went exponential on the media, and when Jim Davidson started complaining, it was suddenly all over the Metro and the Evening Standard, whereas if we had just done nice things, it wouldn’t have got that. The whole point is that significant numbers of environmental defenders have been killed around the world this year and they reckon that the number of those who currently die from climate change are 300-400,000 a year and it’s mainly through the spectrum of diseases, so more children die of things [such as malarial diseases]. People are dying for this. Everyone’s trying to see it through the prism of you’re a bit late for work, but people are dying. You know when nature comes into bat, people are going to be much more than late for work, and much sooner than they think. Yes, it’s not nice, but no social change is ever easy. Usually people have had to die for it, and this is a case of, we’re trying to do it regeneratively, and we’re trying to do it in a compassionate, humane way, but it will still involve quite a lot of discomfort for people everywhere. Even if we’re a hundred per cent successful, it will still involve conflict and friction, which means, of course, there’s this huge debate about what is nonviolence and where does nonviolence overlap with conflict and tension, and if you conflate those two things as violent, then essentially, you’d do nothing. So it’s an uncomfortable place to be.

Let’s bring it back to you as a Quaker – does your faith keep you strong?
Yes it does, because it’s a physical and mental stretch, and even inside XR, there’s lots of pushback about what we should and shouldn’t do. Everything is a compromised decision, so having a sort of grounding is useful. I’ve had a Meeting for Clearness and support from Meeting for Sufferings, Quaker Peace & Social Witness and a support group from my Local Meetings as well.

Has the response from other Quakers been broadly supportive?
Yes. Being ‘upheld’ is a nebulous thing, but it really does make a difference and they are also supportive to my partner ’cos this is not always easy for her. It’s knowing that you belong to a community, because in the troubles to come, the only thing that is going to save anyone is to be a valued part of a community and you get that by service.

What more can Quakers do?
Everyone needs to look hard at what love requires of them. It is easy to get into your secular life and think I can just ignore that, it’s not affecting me yet, but this is along the lines of: ‘Climate change came for the Peruvians, and then it came for the Brazilians, but it didn’t come for me, so I didn’t do anything.’ And what does it demand from you, if you truly take the requirements for love, and that all things are interconnected and linked? And, actually, that’s an abyss to look into, but, at the same time, what it requires of you then gives you a purpose; so instead of peering into that great chasm of despair and nihilism, it’s a kind of a balance or antidote to that.

Have you anything else you’d like to say to Friends?
I’d like to reiterate that my Quakerism beholds me to act in service to a greater good. My biggest spiritual insight since I joined has been that I don’t consider myself, as an individual, as very important, upon having profoundly accepted the scheme of all things being interlinked. To illustrate, I paraphrase Thich Nhat Hahn: ‘What is a wave but water? When the wave has gone, the water still exists.’

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Comments

When the UK has gone carbon neutral and shaved one fiftieth of a degree off global warming levels, what will the campaign do about India, China, USA and Brazil, plus subsistence populations in Africa?

By Richard Seebohm on 23rd December 2019 - 23:03

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