THE NEW ECO-RADICALS

The fiery activists of Extinction Rebellion reject the environmental protests of old for campaigns of mass civil disobedience and disruption

- JOSH EELLS

ONE MONDAY MORNING last April, an Englishman named Simon Bramwell glued himself to a glass door at Shell’s London headquarters and refused to leave.

Bramwell, 47, is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a two-year-old climate-activist group dedicated to the belief that real change will only come through mass civil disobedience. For the next 10 days, XR, as the group is known for short, launched a series of coordinated actions targeting several sites throughout London — blocking traffic outside the stock exchange, interrupting train service at Canary Wharf, and generally bringing the city’s business to a snarling standstill.

The atmosphere was more jovial street fair than window-smashing anarchist mob. Activists brought potted trees to the middle of Waterloo Bridge and danced to a samba band while shutting down Parliament Square. More than 1,000 people ended up being arrested — teenage students, octogenarian retirees, teachers, construction workers, doctors and nurses, and a 41-year-old marine biologist who was seven-months pregnant — many of them for the first time.

Extinction Rebellion is part of a new generation of activists treating global warming not simply as an environmental problem, but an existential one — and amplifying their tactics accordingly. With the science growing increasingly dire, and the world’s governments still refusing to act (or worse, denying there’s a problem), marches and calls to Congress, these groups say, aren’t enough. “Unfortunately, people just don’t pay attention to petitions,” says Liam Geary Baulch, 26, an action coordinator with XR. “Movements win by causing disruption.”