Lessons from Extinction Rebellion: the spark

Of the many thinkers cited by XR’s founders, Charles Tilly is among the more notable absences. Tilly, one of the key theorists of modern social movements, proposed that movements largely live or die by demonstrating ‘WUNC’: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment.

This framework clearly isn’t all-explaining, but it is one of several useful lenses through which to understand XR’s trajectory. In this light we can see that XR’s art was essential in not only communicating but constituting all of these important elements. 

By extension, it’s worth underlining that XR’s unusual origin as an intentional movement was a fundamental precondition of this aesthetic coherence.

Mobilising

Artistic work marked XR’s transition out of what momentum theorists call ‘front-loading’. Instead of developing ideas and plans, XR’s founders were now applying them. The most direct form this took was in the many talks run across the country by the Outreach Group.

This group was largely driven by two people: Roger Hallam and Robin Boardman. The pair were drawing heavily on the momentum playbook, a core element of which is the explicit expression and dissemination of ‘movement DNA’. Momentum understands this DNA as comprising three strands: of metanarrative, metastrategy and metastructure.

While XR’s Overview doc is the most rigorous expression of these elements, it was the ‘The Talk’ which brought them to life. This 50-minute presentation was, and remains, the definitive hyper-concentrated introduction and initiation into XR’s world.

It featured soon-to-be classic XR-isms like nonviolence, invocations of MLK and Ghandi, evidence-based belief in civil disobedience, The Overton Window, all of which was located in the context of a dire metanarrative steeped in credible climate science. 

Notable both for its presence and brevity was a two-minute pause for emotional response. Notable for its absence – as Paul Engler, a core momentum theorist, would later remark to XR strategists – was anything on ‘metastructure’.

Behemothic

Boardman and Hallam were not using momentum in isolation, though. Alongside it, they were drawing inspiration from Rules for Revolutionaries by Becky Bond and Zack Exley, a book extolling mobilising methods of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. 

Even more so than momentum, Rules proposes a science of rapidly-scalable social change. This was certainly helpful. Rules applications included a long-running emphasis on upskilling and empowerment. And XR showed exceptional strength in mobilising (i.e., generating and directing large numbers quickly).

However, its influence likely also did a lot to entrench a blind-spot in XR’s organising philosophy, obscuring a much shakier grasp of organising, (i.e., building deeper and more qualitative community-power).

This dichotomy, best articulated by Jane McAlevey, is often presented as a dilemma. By using momentum, XR came closer than almost any single movement to combining both tendencies of movement building and more structured organising. 

But as Gail Bradbrook recalled to The Ecologist: “The important thing to remember about XR is that it was a campaign of Rising Up”. 

For all their ambition, XR’s founders did not anticipate the behemothic role the movement would grow towards – and would arguably need to if it was to successfully challenge fossil elites.

Energising

Alongside slick American theories (the Sanders campaign was famous for its sprawling phone-banking network), Boardman and Hallam held some earthier sensibilities. 

Hallam had done work and research of his own on organising, yielding an award-wining paper on the micro-design of empowering meetings. 

Beyond this, he and Boardman shared a distrust of the seemingly-unstoppable rise of social-media-centric activism; instead, Boardman tells The Ecologist, “we prioritised real-life public talks”.

This decision is one of many in XR’s development which seems natural and inevitable in hindsight – notwithstanding the irony that a year later XR’s entire organisational apparatus would transmute to an online form, with disastrous results.

By contrast, the story of The Talk’s rollout runs counter to contemporary intuition. The standard narrative paints XR as an essential product of a vaguely hippy middle class, with ‘birthplace of Stroud’ enlisted as decisive evidence. And it’s certainly true that one aspect of XR’s 2018 outreach efforts was the festival scene.

But the bulk of XR’s initial outreach and composition was what Boardman and Hallam termed ‘low-hanging fruit’. 

Escalation

What this meant, according to Boardman, was “people who were disgruntled with NGOs and left/anarchist spaces. Greenpeace, Green Party, Friends of the Earth, Reclaim the Power.” 

Boardman reached out to groups like these across a broad sweep of England and Wales in a deliberate bid to mitigate regional unevenness – and, indeed, to turn it into an advantage.

“Were trying to shake up spaces which had become politically stagnant”, he recalls, noting that his reception was often stratified. 

“People who were leaders in those spaces, they’d normally say that’s not really their thing – but when you spoke to the membership people were generally excited”. 

For all the mobilising model’s shortcomings, it’s worth considering that many of these early initiates may well have felt this aspect of XR as a kind of giddy liberation from traditional local organising or stale NGO routines.

That excitement was undoubtedly stoked by the history-making IPCC report of 2018, which issued a rhetorical escalation in its dire warnings about climate impacts; without this, XR’s trajectory would likely have been very different. 

Lovebomb

A big part of XR’s insurgent appeal was its immediate sense of movement and direction, cutting a stark contrast with most of 2018’s ‘protest as usual’. 

As Hallam himself had counselled back in his 2016 research into successful meetings: “More broadly then, the meeting has to be embedded in a detailed (i.e. it has numbers on it) escalation/momentum plan of mobilisation. 

“This needs to be worked out beforehand and be part of an overall strategy. So you don’t do the meeting and then have 10 people keen to do stuff but not have any real idea of what you want them to do. Everyone needs to know the plan and off you go.”

Much as prescribed in this paper, Hallam and Boardman started producing numbers after the first few talks: they found that on average 50 per cent of attendees were willing to do organising with XR, 30 per cent willing to face arrest, and 10 per cent were willing to do prison time. 

Factoring in the Sanders-style nonlinear growth of training new recruits to themselves give talks, the pair projected that by mid-autumn they would have the numbers needed for XR’s official launch actions.

Bridges

Unofficially, however, XR’s first action was actually a ‘lovebomb’ of Greenpeace’s national offices in London. The event included bona fide disaffected Greenpeace members.

It’s always tempting to decry disunity – and indeed, one of momentum’s many smaller pointers is to practice ‘movement appreciation’. But as the ‘rebels’ argued this ‘diversity of tactics’ impulse can end up as perniciously conservative, legitimising institutional inertia both within NGOs and across entire movements. By contrast, XR represented a burning clarity of analysis and purpose.

It’s a typical temptation of hindsight to understand XR as playing an antagonistic, annoying, and even sanctimonious role in its Greenpeace occupation. 

The reality was more nuanced: the proclaimed ‘love’ was really on offer, taking physical form in freely-given flowers, and more strategically at work in the occupation’s purpose, which was to invite Greenpeace’s members to the XR launch.

The invitation was declined, at least officially, and this confrontational stance towards established actors would pose real, ultimately existential, costs for XR. 

At the same time, this policy was undoubtedly integral to XR staking out a genuinely grassroots identity. One senior Greenpeace figure remarked privately that had the organisation tried to occupy five central London bridges, it would have been swept off the streets and castigated in the papers.

Congregation

The day after the ‘lovebomb’, XR received its own explosion of affection: George Monbiot published an article on fracking, calling for ‘a people’s rebellion’, at the end of which he mentioned XR and hyperlinked to its declaration event.

In an unusually clear illustration of how movements can cross-pollinate, the real breakthrough came when Bernie Sanders shared this article, prompting what Boardman calls “a mini whirlwind of interest”. What had been 100 sign-ups became hundreds.

The declaration itself, held on Wednesday, 31 October 2018 in Parliament Square, was the first time some of XR’s powerful emergent properties became apparent. 

One of these was a seemingly preternatural edge in numbers: what had been 500 Facebook event sign-ups materialised not as 250, as is standard organising practice, but as more than a thousand. Boardman says this doubling effect became a ‘rule of thumb’ in the ensuing months.

Amplify

A second emergent property was more qualitative: the people who’d shown up, and the crowd they added up to, were energetic. 

What had been planned as a purely symbolic opener changed course when organisers held a spontaneous vote to move onto the road outside Parliament. Fifteen people laid down and awaited arrest.

But perhaps the most elusive and foundational of XR’s gifts was that momentum keystone, narrative. This is a hard to thing to measure in itself – but it was, after all, the main reason why so many people had shown up with such spirit.

The narrative was certainly still forming, but it was established enough to contain and amplify supportive speeches from George Monbiot, MP Clive Lewis, and a very early- career Greta Thunberg.

Declaration

The most direct narrative development came from Robin Boardman, who led the crowd in reciting the ‘Declaration of Rebellion’.

The words themselves were in many ways incidental to the context of reciting them, en masse, led by one (white, Queen’s English, young) man, right outside Parliament, ahead of a campaign where participants would make real sacrifices, for real stakes. 

As someone who joined the movement a few days later, I remember the curious, quasi-spiritual binding effect these collective speech-acts could carry, making explicit and real the sort of ‘shared purpose’ which progressive movements tend merely to invoke or assume.

Six years later, the declaration’s text itself is hard reading, often paradoxically so. It’s easy to smirk at the high register (“in accordance with these values”, “we hereby declare”, etc.), but also hard to say what would work better. 

Likewise, the declaration’s sheer, clear-eyed sincerity is hard to sit with: “The wilful complicity displayed by our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gain and private profits”. This is followed by an invitation for us to do something about it.

The next five years would ultimately see parliament refuse “the right of its citizens to seek redress”, whether by rebellion or any other means. Some of the declaration’s warnings now seem frighteningly real – “unpredictable super storms”, to name just one.

But the next six months would witness one of the most successful social movement campaigns in UK history. Anyone looking to change the world in 2025 could learn a lot from XR’s rise.

This Author

Douglas Rogers is a writer, activist, and editor of Raveller magazine.