Over the past year, Extinction Rebellion has drawn a new generation into mass civil disobedience over climate change—literally bringing the London traffic to a halt. Could you tell us about your background, and how you got involved in xr ?

I was born in 1984 and grew up in an industrial suburb of Birmingham. My parents were from India—a little village in the Punjab—and came over to get factory jobs. I actually began thinking about environmental issues as a child—we learnt about the Amazon rainforest and global warming in school; this was around the time of the 90s Rio Earth Summit. There was a tv advertising campaign about taking care of the planet—turn the taps off, switch out the light when you leave the room—which had the tagline, ‘It’s not too late.’ I remember watching it with a horrible feeling: what if we are leaving it too late? I used to get my parents to collect all our glass bottles and take them down to the bottle bank for recycling when we went shopping on a Saturday. And I turned vegetarian too. At university I was part of a campaign to switch the campus to renewable energy, which we won. And later I was involved in the Climate Action Camp, which focused on corporations rather than public disruption.

Then my children were born, which was a turning point. The stakes seemed higher: what situation were they going to inherit? I’d moved to Devon and was doing a lot of freelance writing about environmental politics and sustainable lifestyles, including a book called The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting, put out by New Internationalist—it’s a science-based approach to green birth, baby essentials, greening your home. So, like a lot of people, I was chipping away on my own. When I first saw Extinction Rebellion come into being, I was excited, of course, and got in touch with my local group—but I thought it might be another movement that would just fizzle out, like the Climate Camps or Occupy. With the April Rebellion this spring, when we blocked five sites in London—Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Parliament Square, Piccadilly Circus, Waterloo Bridge—I realized this was different. I helped take Waterloo Bridge, which turned into a sort of festival, with huge numbers of people turning up after seeing us on television, many of whom had never been involved in protest before. We ended up staying there for two weeks. That’s when I thought, if anything works, it’s this. I gave up my other work and ended up switching over full-time to Extinction Rebellion.

So how did Extinction Rebellion get started?

What really galvanized xr was the 2018 ipcc Report, Global Warming of 1.5°C—just as it did Greta Thunburg and the school-students who protested in the Fridays for the Future campaign. The International Panel on Climate Change is very careful in its formulations to avoid anything scientifically contentious—it always seeks a broad consensus among the international climate scientists whose work it draws on. They agree that the global mean surface temperature now is around 0.87° higher than the 1850–1900 average, the proxy for the ‘pre-industrial level’. Over the last thirty years, as carbon emissions have soared, it’s been rising at roughly 0.2° per decade. This warming has already brought loss of ice, rainfall changes—increased droughts and floods—and ocean acidification, as the seawater absorbs carbon. The southern Arctic permafrost is already softening, the northern tundra and boreal forests are changing, sea levels are rising and marine ecosystems have already been affected—70 per cent of warm-water coral reefs are dying off and fish populations are migrating to cooler regions. At 1.5° hotter—and the greenhouse effects of past emissions guarantee we’ll reach it by 2040—these present problems will be intensified, with the Arctic ecosystems, high mountain ranges and coastal regions most affected. But the ipcc Report warned that simply limiting global warming to 1.5° will require ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’—and if we don’t make those changes now, cutting emissions by 40 per cent in the next twelve years, global temperatures will increase well above that, with terrifying effects.

xr was launched in October 2018, the same month as the ipcc Report?

Yes. Its precursor was a group called Rising Up, started eighteen months before by some long-standing direct-action campaigners. There was Gail Bradbrook, who’d been involved in environmental campaigns since she was a teenager and had led anti-fracking protests around Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was Simon Bramwell, a builder and bush-craft teacher, who founded the Stroud-based Compassionate Revolution group in 2015 with Gail and George Barda, an Occupy and Greenpeace activist. Roger Hallam was studying civil disobedience at King’s College, London; originally he’d been an organic farmer in Wales, but he could see the impact of climate change on his crops and began reading up about it. Clare Farrell was a fashion designer, she does a lot of xr’s art work—the block printing, for example. Robin Boardman was a student from Bristol, a bit younger than the rest.