Parliament Square – Beyond Politics

The events this week I have seen as part of the Extinction Rebellion’s uprising has been the most phenomenal display of positive people power I have ever witnessed. And after the negative divisive national meltdown of Brexit, it has made me once again proud to be British. Solidarity, compassion, decency, unity, community, love and respect have been the driving forces and the glue that has kept this protest and the people that are part of it together and showed that with cooperation and togetherness we can achieve anything. We must now put aside all our differences and work for the common good. Regardless of your political persuasion, or your beliefs, or your ethnicity, we all breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat the same food and all of these things will be at risk if we do not pressurise our government to take the action required to avert climate catastrophe.

Last night we were down at Parliament Square and we stood and watched as police, who had surrounded rebels who had chained themselves to each other and to the ground, began the process of removing them one by one with axe grinders and bolt cutters. Whilst this was happening a group of a few hundred people sat around them and sang hymns to them. It was incredibly moving and powerful because, despite massive police presence, it was utterly peaceful.

I have to say that the police have been phenomenal all week and shown such respect and consideration for the protesters because they were, in turn, shown the same. I spoke to a policeman on the frontline and he said that they were in support of the protestors but still have a job to do but the restraint and decency they have used in dealing with this difficult situation has been truly exemplary. Again, it made me proud to be in a country where we can exert our democratic right to protest without fear of violent retaliation. I can’t imagine in any other country the same thing happening as they would undoubtedly have used excessive force to remove us rather than the good natured natured approach the Met have shown throughout this demonstration. The Rebellion has proven that non-violent protest works.

Sadly so much of the mainstream reporting has been on the whether they should be using these methods rather than their reason for doing it. It does not matter whether you agree if this is the right approach, all that matters is that you accept and agree that it is as bad as the evidence shows it to be and that we must all take action to get the government to initiate policies that are drastic enough and fast enough to have any effect whatsoever.

And again I would like to thank all the rebels who allowed themselves to be arrested to maintain the blockades and keep this protest going. Every person I saw get taken away had nothing in common other than they were willing to make the sacrifice and I sincerely hope that now more will join the fight and see that if as individuals we are useless, but as a unified force we are unstoppable.

I don’t know how much longer the rebels can hold on for but I hope it has been long enough for people to become aware of the situation and to wake up to the emergency that we are now in. If we had dealt with this for the last 30 years instead of ignoring it we could have incrementally altered our lives and slowly ushered in a sustainable existence but nothing has been done so now it will have to be fast and severe and we will have to give up lots of things if we want future generations to inherit anything other than a hell zone. The rebellion’s shutdown of London might be drawing to a close but this is just the beginning. And we now all have a choice…extinction or rebellion?

MARBLE ARCH – THIS IS AN EMERGENCY

DAY 3 is underway for the Extinction Rebellion’s shutdown of London. They have successfully held their blockades at their five designated points: (oxford circus, marble arch, piccadilly circus, parliament square and waterloo bridge). As mentioned yesterday each one represents a different aspect of the climate situation and their demands. All the shots featured are from the base at Marble Arch which is where most people have camped out. Some of the Earth marchers walked  from Lands End and left up to 5 weeks ago to get to London in time for the protest. And there are people here from all over the country. People who have put everything on hold to do this. To give up their lives for as long as it takes for the Government to acknowledge the situation and respond accordingly. And these people are just regular folk. Lots of ordinary families who are not born activists, they just don’t know what else to do.

I don’t think I have ever been part of something that had so much goodwill and positivity and a sense of community which is what we will all need if we want to go forward as a species. There was an incredible atmosphere up at Marble Arch with music, meditations, yoga sessions, speeches and even piano recitals powered by kids on dynamo bikes. There is no aggression, no violent intent, no negativity despite the despair felt with the desperate lack of action by anyone in power. There have been dismissals of this movement as a hippy affair but there is not one type here. The only thing that unites them is that these are just people who understand that this Earth was not built for us. We just live on it and we need to take on board that if we don’t live in harmony with it we will not make it.  This is not to protect Nature. We are nature. We are protecting our own compatibility within it. This is not a given. And we are in very grave danger of losing it if we continue to ignore the destabilisation  we  are causing.

Marble Arch has been taken up under the banner of “This is an emergency” because that is exactly what it is. It doesn’t feel like one and it definitely isn’t being tackled like one but it mostly certainly is and the sooner we start treating it like one the sooner we can intiate the drastic changes that are required for the human race to survive. If you think this is overly dramatic read the mountain of scientific evidence which shows that the perfect goldilocks zone we currently live in where this planet’s temperature is suitable for humans to live in and for  us to grow our food and to have drinking water is rapidly altering to shunt the equilibrium that allows us the stability to exist.

If you have been affected by the shutdown and consider it an inconvenience you must understand that this is last resort tactics and not what anyone wanted to do. There is just no alternative left. Farhana Yamin, one of the most respected climate change lawyers in the world, was arrested yesterday at 3pm at Shell HQ. She had glued her hands to the floor. Her reason for taking direct action? “Because writing books wasn’t working”.

And as Owen Jones tweeted yesterday: “If you think #ExtinctionRebellion causes outrageous inconvenience, boy are you in for a shock when climate chaos envelops the planet!”

If you are in London, come down to any of the blockades and see what is going on and you will see these people are not different to you in anyway. They are you. And you are them. And we all need to recognise we are one and the same and this sense of solidarity and belonging amongst us is what is so vital so that we can rise up together to demand action and to defeat this problem which will affect every person on the planet bar none.

The Earth is an Environmental crime scene. The scenes in the shots this week are not. They are just things people have cast out as rubbish and the council have slapped bright yellow stickers on them. Their phrase is overly dramatic for the situations you see before you and is terminology that should be reserved for what is currently occurring on this planet.

Exactly two years ago in April 2017 I posted up photographs from the same series to highlight the fact that no-one was talking about climate change. It had practically disappeared from the news and all attempts to deal with it had evaporated into thin air. Today the situation is even worse  and still almost nothing is being done and still people don’t want or can’t talk about it. At least it is being reported again in the media, mainly as a result of  extreme weather becoming the norm and massive amounts of scientific data showing that the planet is warming at an accelerated pace even the most pessemistic predictions didn’t come close to. And yet, it is still not making headlines and is still way down on most publication’s and people’s agendas.

The Extinction Rebellion (the XR for short) have also done a great job in the last six months of getting the press to report their actions and have successfully managed to get it back on the discussion table and yet still it hovers way below celeb gossip, country politics, box sets and people’s own social media output. The question is, how do reduce the dominance of trivialities in our lives and how do we get it to the forefront of conversations? We live in the ultimate era of outrage, where ever 5mins someone is losing their shit over some insult to their identity group or whatever and yet the biggest outrage of them all, the fact that we are allowing a tiny percentage of people to render our entire planet to the point of total dysfunction because of the fallout from their industrial activity? The air we breathe, the oceans we swim in, the crops we eat, everything is being contaminated by a fraction of our species purely for their own profit and we are all allowing them to do it. Shouldn’t we be getting on our high horses about that more than anything?

Apparently only 100 companies (almost all fossil fuels) are responsible for over 70% of ALL emissions. There is a campaign to make them liable for ecocide which is what they are absolutely guilty of. They are destroying everything and nothing is being done to stop them. We must get our governments to stand up to them. To reject their money. To invest in green new deals instead. They spent hundreds of billions bailing out the banks in 2008. Does our environment not deserve to be bailed out as well? Isn’t that worth it more than saving the necks of the wealthy and the utterly irresponsible? So why aren’t they doing it? They could invest in emission free energy and infrastructure which woud reinvigorate the economy and the climate at the same time. They could put us on a path towards a solution instead of continuing to ignore the problem which will ultimately be our downfall.

I watched the film Bohemian Rhapsody this week and it culminates in the Live Aid show, which shows how powerful people can be when mobilise together to initiate positive change and come to the aid of those who need it the most. What I can’t quite work out is why this same spirited action is not happening with climate change? This is a potentially much more dangerous situation that affects literally everyone but  people just don’t seem to want to engage with this very real disaster which is already well underway. Is it because it feels too big or too complicated to tackle? The Ethiopia crisis was horrendous but simple. They need food. We raise money and send them food. Job done. The climate situation doesn’t require donations, it  requires a much greater sacrifice – we have to change everything we do in order to even have a chance in hell and that’s maybe the problem? But if we don’t  deal with it now our problems will be so much worse and for generations after us, infinitely more so.

I know you might read all this and think its too much to take on but even the acknowledgement of the situation would be a start. Just by admitting we need to deal with this above and beyond everything else and just talking about it would be the first step towards a better future. As I speak to people about this I feel them glaze over, I see the shutters coming down, and as I write these words I feel the same. That is why being around the people who have also joined the XR is a relief in many ways, as you can talk about it, you don’t have to worry about mentioning it for fear of being brandished a downer, a mood hover or a kill joy. You can cry out to the ‘elephant in the room’ and help initiate a stampede which will waken those in power to the needs of all of us to do something tangible, to actually deal with the problem, not just shunt it away.

The XR are gathering together at 11am on Monday at 5 key places in London: Marble Arch, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus, Parliament Square.

See this link here for more details: http://tinyurl.com/y2mhsg5n

Its time to stand up and be counted!

Love and Rage!

Sgt. Rebel says it’s time to stand up and be counted! The Extinction Rebellion are mobilising on April 15th to shutdown London in order to declare a climate emergency as we desperately need to treat it as one. All other avenues have failed and all that is left is civil disobedience, the only course of action that, historically, has initiated change. The Rebellion have no interest is disruption for disruption’s sake. They just know that peaceful protest alone isn’t be enough. So you might not agree with their methods but everything else has failed to make a difference in any significant way.

And remember, if you are anti-extinction, you are already in the Extinction Rebellion. This organisation is not just one group of people, or a type of person, or a single course of action, this affects the entire human race. And we need now, more than ever,  to join together as a species and accept the reality of our situation and begin our journey towards a sustainable future. It is not too late but the time for ignoring it is well and truly over and the longer we do nothing the worse it gets and will continue to do so until we get our heads out of the sand and demand our governments implement genuine and drastic measures that will  match the severity of the problem and not just pay lip service to it. And sooner we begin the sooner we can start to undo what we have done and prepare our world for the next generations who deserve at least what all previous generations were given, a working planet they could live on.

https://rebellion.earth

Love and rage!

Sgt. Rebel

(If you can’t see the youtube vid above please click here: https://youtu.be/SVVoaFDYC0o (please share this link or repost via instagram here: link )

Do the women in this week’s photographs have anything in common? No, nothing at all other than it is most likely that you made a judgement on what kind of person they all were based on how they looked. We think we  have a good gage of people based on what we are presented with but can we really tell what is behind the mask?

We constantly use visual cues to form an opinion on someone when, in fact, they are rarely good indicators. We also use membership of massive groupings to suggest further insight, when again, they are rarely accurate in revealing what a person is actually like. Gender, race and age are the most often used generalisations  when describing someone but they don’t reveal what someone behaves or thinks or emotes, which are really the most important facets of a human being and yet we still think they are good ways to ascertain what a person is like . In contrast, when we think of our own personalities, we tend to incorporate a complex array of  factors that have created the person we are and yet for others, we  over-simplfly their existence into belonging to some very basic and pretty gi-normous collectives.

For example, we talk about women are this, men are that and so on and so on, but how can we possibly explain the depth and diversity of our intricate minds by belonging to a group that incorporates 50% of the entire population of Earth? What can we possibly have in common with 3.5 billion people apart from our genitalia? It is also very evident that our personalities are not that affected by age either. We stay relatively the same on the inside throughout our lives, its just the outer casing that deteroriates and yet so we often judge people based on how old they are when its probably one of the least relevant aspects. As if wrinkles, or the lack of them, somehow revealed how a person was? Race is obviously another utterly inaccurate way to assign behavioural patterns to someone.

And so it seems a shame that our personality traits could not somehow be manifested visually somehow. If you were a kind person, maybe you would always have a mole on your right cheek, or if you were loyal you would have massive bushy eyebrows. Or maybe if you were a total dickhead you would have one of those noses that looked like a penis. Unfortunately external features do not indicate what’s on the inside which is why we are mostly making hugely inaccurate assumptions about people. I chose the women in these photographs as they had very strong looks  and were the most likely to generate a thought process which carried a pre-conception of the type of person they were. But how could we possibly know just based on what we saw?

The most miserable face could be concealing a warm and generous character. A smile could be hiding a mean demeanour. And pretty on the outside ain’t always pretty on the inside. But what else is there to go on? We are all guilty of this. Its not even a personal failing as everyone does it. We cannot stop our brains from processing people like this but we can be aware that it’s a fundamentally flawed system and as long as we accept that, we can carry on, all the while hoping no-one is doing it to us…which inevitably they will be.