Upstream - Extinction Rebellion with Gail Bradbrook

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

In recent months, thousands of people from coast to coast have confronted politicians and asked them to take action on climate change. Few of these political leaders seem to be listening, however, and so, in the face of this inaction, and with a renewed sense of urgency, people of all ages and backgrounds have begun taking directly to the streets and participating in mass disruption events in the United States and beyond. Extinction Rebellion (XR) is on the forefront of these actions. XR is a global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid ecological collapse. Growing out of the United Kingdom in 2018, XR now has an international presence. You may know them through their provocative style of direct action which includes intentional arrests, public swarms, banner drops, die-ins, gluing themselves to prominent structures, and more. Gail Bradbrook is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. We spoke with her in southwest England.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Yn y bôn, rydyn ni'n ymdrin yn ymdrin yn ymdrin. Mae'n dweud bod y cyfrifiad cymdeithasol wedi'i wneud. Mae'n dweud bod y cyfrifiad cymdeithasol wedi'i wneud. Mae'n dweud bod y cyfrifiad cymdeithasol wedi'i wneud. Mae'n dweud bod y cyfrifiad cymdeithasol wedi'i wneud. Mae'n dweud bod y cyfrifiad cymdeithasol wedi'i ffwrdd. Y contract cymdeithasol yw eich cytuno â'r dde, i fynd ymlaen â'r hyn sy'n dod o ddemocraith, er ei fod efallai nad ydych chi'n cytuno â'r polisi neu'r

partid gwleidyddol honno. Ond yn y bôn, rydych chi'n deall bod y dde yno i'n sicrhau ein bod yn ddiogel ac mae'n gwneud ei gwell neu rhywbeth. Ond, rydych chi'n gwybod, yn crisg ecologol, pan mae ddemocraith wedi'i ddod o hyd i ddiddordeb, You understand that the state's there to keep us safe and it's doing its best or something. But, you know, in an ecological crisis, when democracy is captured to vested interests, it's the social contracts broken. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. This is a conversation with Gail Bradbrook, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Growing out of the United Kingdom in 2018, Extinction Rebellion now has an international presence.

You may know them through their provocative style of direct action, which includes intentional arrests, disruptive swarming, banner drops, die-ins, and even gluing themselves to prominent structures. We spoke with Gail in southwest England. Welcome, Gail. Good to speak with you. I'm wondering if you would start by just introducing yourself. Who are you and how did you come to do the work that you do? Yeah, so I'm Gail Bradbrook and I'm one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion. And it's been quite a long journey. In some ways, it feels like a life's journey, wanting to start something big, civil disobedience,

certainly since 2010. It's one of those things, isn't it? There's lots of threads in a person's life. Some of it is on the intellectual level where your understanding of things develops over years and you realise, at least I realise, that no amount of arguing about what's needed is going to get the thing that's needed.

You know, political change comes through civil disobedience. And then there's the shifts that happen on an emotional level. And for me, there was also shifts that happen on an emotional level and for me there was also shifts on a spiritual level as well and finding the right moment finding the right team so that's how things came about in a nutshell without all the details but yeah you mentioned 2010 and so if I were listening I'd be like well what happened then? So what was kind of the catalyst or the spark for this part of your life? Yeah, in 2010, I'd been working for a couple of years around the transition movement, around woodcraft folk.

Do you have woodcraft folk in the States? It's kind of like scouts and brownies for hippies. And I was feeling a call around change. I read a George Monbiot book actually and he mentioned about the amount of tax that's been evaded and avoided. It was a figure from Tax Justice Network and I looked them up and contacted John Christensen who led the network and said surely we just need a mass tax disobedience then. Because I always knew the rich were up to things like that, but it's great you guys have got the figures for it. And he said, indeed, let's do it.

You know, he was very encouraging. So I was trying to start a mass tax disobedience, but obviously you need a team to do it with. So I took some years trying to find people to work with. And obviously with anything like that, people find it A, hard to believe in, and and be if you've not really got any credibility. So there were some years where I supported tax justice network in general. And I learned a lot about economics as well. That was the other thing. So you mentioned that you have done a lot with economics. And I know that you

said that you had done a talk on street economics or something. Can you talk a little bit about your, yeah, your thinking around economics? And how did that develop? And what are the key insights that you came to around economics and what needs to change? Yeah, so I started something called Street School Economics. It used to take a little structure onto the streets with quotes. Like Mrs Thatcher said, economics are the method. The object is to change the heart and soul. What a chilling thing to say, right? And things that might be in people's minds about economics.

So if there's so much debt around, why don't they give all the money to us rather than the banks that kind of thing so the idea was to not force economics on people but maybe put some questions in a sort of artistic form that people might come up to this store and they might want to learn about economics I didn't know anything about economics and I was working with economists and accountants and tax advisors and I felt quite inadequate. So I went on a couple of courses. I read lots of books. I watched lots of videos online. And to the point that I was full of it and I distilled it into about a 45 minute talk. And I just wanted to say, here's what I've learned about economics in 45 minutes. And part of it was to say, it had this like ABCD thing. So it was about economics, how it affects

your life. You know, it's not this boring thing over there. It's like why you're feeling stressed, the economic system you're living in, the basics of it, the neoliberal system. Steve Keen's brilliant for that, and there's others, but you know, how you're using neoclassical economics. In fact, I was with students doing PPE at Oxford recently, and I asked them, are you still just getting neoclassical economics for your schooling? They said, basically, more or less. And so that's a bad education. That's not cool. So anyway, what neoliberalism's about, how it's been brought about, largely pushed through with lots of corruption.

I think Naomi Klein's book, Shock Doctrine, really explains that. And then how that economic form leads to depletion of the environment and to a distribution of wealth that's deeply unequal. And that leads back into the corruption, which gives more. So there was a kind of flow around, if that makes any sense. And so the bit before the depletion and the distribution piece is the debt, you know, how debt shapes economics. And in fact, in near classical economics, they don't really treat money as a thing. They talk about the household and a worker in a factory

and try and model it like physics and don't actually include money creation in the models. I mean, that may have changed since I studied things, but it seems like a really crazy system. They try to find an equilibrium model. But anyway, I think what's interesting, though, is some of the neoliberal economists when you listen to them you think that person's actually not evil they're coming from a place of love or that they're wanting something better for the world and they believe that the market system is going to achieve it one of my favorite videos is Milton Friedman talking about the wonders of the capitalist system. It's all images of factories making shit, getting stuff done, innovation, you know, it's all that type

of progress messaging. And at the end, he says, because of the market system, there'll be no concentration of power, and therefore no harm will be done. And you're like, that didn't really quite work out as you planned, Milton, did it? But for him to have that desire as a vision seems interesting to me. Yeah, of course, there's something quite beautiful to math and to numbers and to equilibriums. There's something quite simple and elegant about it. And of course, we don't want to take away from all the math and statistics that are in economics. But I definitely hear that, yeah, there's been kind of a reduction in it and kind of a lack of the more critical thinking around it, like questioning it, for example, and some of the assumptions behind it. So i i hear that what i would say really is you have to ask what the purpose of an economic system is so that's what i'm really saying with milton

friedman if the purpose was let's make sure that no power gets concentrated and therefore no harm gets done i would be like i'm behind that purpose then we can check whether that purpose has been met and when eight people have got the wealth of 50% of the world, no, we've failed. When the system's about to collapse and it's killing life on Earth, like massive hash fail, isn't it, with neoliberalism. So, I mean, they say like economists have got physics envy sometimes, you know, they're trying to come up with a way of modelling

a really complex system and there's bits of behavioral economics and this form and that form and it's like with anything that you study the more you learn about it the less you know and the more you realize that nobody's really got a grip on this thing properly and actually Mrs Thatcher said there is no alternative Tina there is no alternative she was wrong there is no alternative. She was wrong. There are many alternatives. Who knows how best to go about a transition? Who knows how best to design a different system? But we be a good purpose for an economic system. You've got Kate Raworth with her donut economics. You've got what Steve Keen comes up with. You've got post-capitalism from Paul Mason. You've got, you know, bioregional economics from Molly Scott Cato. There's lots out there. Let's put them all in a room and say, what shifts do we need to do

immediately to stop killing things? It seems like the debt based systems are a key part of it. Yeah, and we'll come to that. I'm just wondering where the personal is in all this. I mean, if you were to go back to either how you're feeling now or what kind of sparked this in 2010, just kind of like what that was that was breaking your heart or that was moving you what what was what was happening for you that motivated you into this and if you were to go into those those points and you were to go upstream to the root causes of those those challenges or crises or or sufferings what what what do you find there you know personally i think after the financial crash of 2008,

lots of people were saying, what is this finance system? What are they up to? You know, this incredible machinery that's happening. And also the whole thing of like property ladders in the UK, like whether you can actually afford a house, whether you can afford a mortgage, that was getting really tight for people. The sense of desperation about whether you had a job or not.

And the more I read about economics and part of the neoliberal goal, as named in one book at least, being to keep people from feeling some insecurity so they're willing to put up with shit, frankly. So all of that. And I guess, you know, my dad was a coal miner and he was on strike in the 80s so I have um he wasn't particularly political but um I have an understanding of what it meant when the economy

changed uh and we tried to you know successfully got rid of the power of the unions in the UK and so on. So there is that history there. I mean, for myself, there's just a deep interest in, the best word I can use is kindness. How do you have a world that's kind? You know, why is it so mean? You know, that's where it's personal for me when you see people suffering. And I mean, I find Mickey Kashtan's definition of patriarchy to be very useful, the scarcity mentality, that we're in competition with each other, that we're separated from each other, that we're powerless to this system. And it's like, that doesn't sit for me, especially when this thing's killing us. Something needs to change. when this thing's killing us, something needs to change. You mentioned how you got interested in an attack strike, and then you wanted to work with other people. And then how did we get from there

to Extinction Rebellion? First of all, what is Extinction Rebellion? How would you describe it? And then how did that process take place? So Extinction Rebellion came out of a network called Rising Up. and there's a bit more history than that I can say. But basically, we are in active rebellion. We've declared ourselves in rebellion against our governments. We're saying the social contract's broken. The social contract is your agreement with the state to go along with whatever comes out of a democracy, even though you might not agree with that policy or that political party, but fundamentally you understand that the state's there to keep us safe and it's doing its best or something.

But, you know, in an ecological crisis, when democracy's captured to vested interests, the social contract's broken. So we declare ourselves in rebellion. There's a really beautifully, in my opinion, declaration that we read out and have read out on a number of occasions and then we go into active civil disobedience and periods of civil disobedience and in between there's periods of of rest of debrief of re-strategizing of

building the movement so there's kind of like the spring rebellion, the October rebellion we've done so far. We launched October over a year ago now, 2018. We blocked five bridges in the UK. And people had a hunger, I think. There was a real zeitgeist. People had a hunger for taking action. We used emergency mode messaging, which is basically telling the truth, holding a vision that change is possible, and then asking people to act according to their values.

So not being afraid to name what the science is telling us, which in our shorthand, we say we're fucked, you know, the path that we're on. And also welcoming grief, welcoming people to feel what it is to live in these times, not to try and deal with this crisis from a disconnected intellectual perspective, but actually to feel it and then, not to try and deal with this crisis from a disconnected intellectual perspective, but actually to feel it and then to listen to the calling.

It's interesting thinking about tax disobedience. I mean, there's tax avoidance, which is an unpleasant thing to be doing to the world. It's like, you know, tax is the way we redistribute wealth and a healthy tax system. It should be seen as a way of paying your dues to society or, you know, investing in development and progress. Tax disobedience is a way of saying to the state that I'm not in alignment with what you're doing. But it's actually quite difficult to do because most people, again, I'm speaking from a UK perspective, are on what's called PAYE. It means pay as you earn. So the tax is taken off before they've seen it. Some people do do tax returns. Some people pay council tax, but your council, that's like your local municipality, they might be something that you're aligned with, whereas you're not aligned with the national government. So I was looking at not paying VAT

in cafes in the end, but it would be more of a cheeky and symbolic act. And I did try to start a tax disobedience in 2016. The video I made, it had a few thousand hits, so it kind of got out there a little bit. But that process of starting that was what got the attention of Roger Hallam, who was doing research in how things change. And so he asked me for a meeting and he said that I was working with something called conditional commitment, which is the idea of, I'll do something if you'll do it it so you can build an agreement before you proceed with a civil disobedience in actual fact it turns out that most people are willing to do something if the numbers are already there so you've got to kind of start to to prove it you've got to

you've got to start small I was trying to go too big. So there was lots of lessons to all of these things. That's what the full right is to learn. So you mentioned Roger and that he was looking at theories of change. And I know you've spoken about theories of change in XR, and it's definitely clear that they're thought of. And you just mentioned one insight from that, this, you know, conditional agreement piece. What are some of the other insights that you've learned about theories of change, both in the research and then also in the practice? There's lots of great writings out there. I mean, you don't have to make this stuff up. So this is an uprising by Paul and Mark Engler, for example, talks about dilemma actions.

So this is more tactics than theories of change, but the idea of setting up an action so that you can't lose. So one of the things we did early on in Rising Up was something called Toxic Bankers, where we were spray chalking on Barclays Bank because they were funding fracking. And you could get a spray chalk, something that comes off really easy off glass, actually.

And it looks really bad that you're like graffitied on this bank. You stand there with cakes and cups of tea for the staff and maybe a note to say it's not personal. And people are outraged that there's, you know, somebody's graffiti and sometimes you clean it off afterwards, but the police come and you say, so yeah, I did that. and here's why and the press come and you get your piece of information out in the world about barclays and fracking and the bank doesn't want the hassle of you getting arrested so maybe you avoid arrest but in some cases in Bristol they just kept doing the graffiti until they did get arrested but you see like either way whether they arrest you or you stand there with graffiti on this,

you've really made a bank look like a mess because lots of them have got a lot of glass on them. Yeah, so that would be one thing. That would be a dilemma at action. There's things, I mean, one of the things Roger spoke about when we met was the Olympic principle. And by that, he meant fine-tuning things so that when you're designing anything, you're looking at the things that are going to get in the way of it going well so olympic swimmers for example they change their diet a tiny bit or their exercise regime a little bit or their swimsuit a little bit and it would be all those

little things that add up to make something go well the conditional commitment that i'd put online for the tax disobedience i just had glitches in it. And each one, you're going to lose people. I mean, we are quite fickle. We want things to be quite easy. So you have to make things attractive. People want to come to well-run meetings. Another thing that we did was to define 10 principles and values and then say that that would be part of our DNA, part of who we are, and then say you can be part of XR, part of Extinction Rebellion, if you agree to abide by these 10 principles and

values. So people can then run with it without some controlling central authority saying yes, no, or whatever. So all of those things are a part of what helps XR to do well. And then in terms of theories of change, and I know you mentioned civil disobedience. I'm wondering what, in general, you see as kind of some of the insights around how to, well, first of all, what's the change that you wish to see, but then how to get there, what you've learned about that process?

I mean, the basic theory of change in Extinction Rebellion is do mass civil disobedience cause maximum disruption, especially to the state, so you can overwhelm the state in terms of mass arrest, or if they don't arrest you by blocking the streets around the government buildings so that you're causing mass disruption, more people join you, that kind of thing. So you put the government in a position where it has to respond. And in the UK, I mean, in less than a year, we've definitely helped to change the conversation. People are talking about the ecological crisis like never before. They're saying 54% of people are saying they're going to vote on that basis. We saw a massive spike in April of people being concerned. And then Parliament declared a

climate ecological emergency, I think, and then they, Theresa May, just as she was leaving, set a legally binding date for decarbonisation. It's just way too long, and they've actually started having a citizens' assembly, but it's not legally binding, and it's not on the right date either. So we haven't achieved any of our three demands, but we've certainly seen a shift in all of them in the right direction. So in that way, our theory of change is partly showing itself to be correct. My bigger perspective here is that we have to shift the paradigm, that this isn't simply about a government's policy, that government policies are in the context of a deeply flawed democracy, which is captured to vested interests, which is

baked into an economic system that doesn't make sense. And why have we let that system and that democracy get so terrible is because, you know, our culture has become deeply narcissistic, consumer-focused, has no deep values and purpose to it. And underneath that, we are separated from each other by various oppressions. We're separated from ourselves, from our purpose. We're feeling powerless. We're feeling like there's not enough to go around. And even underneath that, there's a spiritual separation from the divinity is how I would say you don't have to think about

all those things to be an exile they may not speak to you but that's how I see it and I think to work on all of those in how we rebel is how you can shift a paradigm and for some of that that's to do with how we organize in a self-organising system. It's prefigurative of a changed world. And what I mean by that is, you know, how do we work out, how we work together? You know, when you're trying to get 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people on the streets, 5,000 people might get arrested. You need to take care of the regenerative culture. You need to organise how the money gets spent within that. It's a big thing to take on. And we do it like this central control and authority. There are groups that have remits or mandates, we call them,

based on actually a Buddhist system. And they have nominated power to do things and then you have the local groups have their own authority and so on and so we're trying to find a system that's going to work and i could see that working for us in a collapsing world as well what's the buddhist system well it came from buddha field um so i'm not sure that it's actually a bud system, but it was invented for Buddhafield, which is a Buddhist festival. And so in that, rather than everything going through one controlling body, they define mandates. So if you're in charge of sound for Buddhafield, then you've got the overall sound engineer mandate. And maybe, you know, you've got five people in your team that have these five mandates or something or if you're in charge of food or whatever so that people are

really clear what their remit is and they can be empowered to make decisions so you want sound to work well at butterfield or the food to taste great you don't have to tell people how to do that then they decide how they make that happen I'm wondering how how your conversations have gone with people who one might think are on the other side or are you know quote unquote the enemy for example I know you've been invited to speak with many different folks I know Russell Brand was one of them not that he's on the other side but also folks in in the media and even in some banking institutions. So I'm wondering, how has that been? What is that like for you to do that paradigm shifting that even those conversations?

What's been the response? Yeah, I was recently at a Creating the Future event, which was hosted by Weatherby's private bank. And then I was speaking at the Financial Times to a small group and I was told that it included at least three people that were deeply significant within the City of London and I just don't think it's going to be useful for me to in any way attempt to tell these folks off or tell them what to do. I think that comes from a place of separation. And whilst it might be mildly satisfying if I was in a bad mood and I could, you know, speak on behalf of how it's been on the receiving end of austerity for some people

or whatever. I mean, there is that possibility, but it doesn't feel like the most useful thing to do in that moment. What feels to me is to try and make a human connection and to ensure that people have faced the crisis. Because for myself as an environmental activist for some years, I hadn't really faced it until about a year ago. And I think there's something about really staring at this thing so when as FT for example I said FT Financial Times I said I'm not here to tell you off or tell you what to do I'm here to ask you to stare into an abyss and really look at it and really face it and then I walked through some parts of the science and quoted some scientists and some generalist researchers in that space. Because from my perspective, the IPCC is not a guide, actually.

The IPCC, you know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the backstop against the ridiculousness of climate denial. It's the consensus science. It's very conservative and it's incorrect most of climate denial. It's the consensus science, it's very conservative, and it's incorrect most of the time, and things are worse than what the IPCC says. So you have to look at the papers beyond the IPCC and what some of the scientists are saying. And there's sort of three scenarios, really. One is civilisation's going to collapse. The second one is most people are going to die. And the third one is human extinction. So I walked the FT people through that and through some of the science and why each of those is a scenario that could happen, definitely could happen. Certainly the most people dying one, we're heading for four degrees of warming at the minute. And that's what happens

on that situation. And they look horr horrified and they're people that knew already that there's a crisis right but they look and they sort of go like give us some hope and I'm not here to give them hope I said I'm here to get you to think about and feel it so at the end of the speech I said turn to the person next to you and say how you're feeling which was unusual in that situation and then they started to give each other a bit of hope and one of them was saying well this is getting better and that's getting a bit better more people are here and doing this thing and you could tell in a genuine way that the shifts are happening but I also said could you see what you've just done there's a way of you're just

trying to make it feel okay and it's not okay and I don't think that this little shift here and that little shift there is going to cut the mustard we have to question everything and from my perspective I reckon it'll look like a post-war economy or again in the UK we can understand that a wartime economy as in the system is geared towards healing the harm, we can understand that a wartime economy, as in the system is geared towards healing the harm that we've done, repairing the harm that we've done, and making the changes, making the transition. That's when we'll know, not when somebody's saying, oh, well, some investment bankers are doing something different over there. Great. But by the way, carbon dioxide went up 2.7% last year, and it's supposed to be turning down the curve

this year. So it's interesting to talk to people. I think mostly it's about making a human connection, but also holding faces to the fire. Let's return to the conversation around economics. So obviously, Extinction Rebellion, you're really bringing in the ecological crisis as you've mentioned and you're you are making those connections with the economic system I'm wondering how is that feeling the economic element to the ecological and any thoughts on the use of the word capitalism and and all of that and then a little bit about the next work on debt anything that you can tell us about that? So, I mean, in its first phase, Extinction Rebellion's focused on democracy by saying there's

a crisis and this current democracy is not going to cut the mustard. We need a citizens assembly. That's when you choose through random sortition, a body of people that are demographically representative of your population, and they come up with the solutions, having listened to experts and being taught critical thinking skills. So that's the shift in the democratic system. We say in pretty much all of our press releases that there's the systems at fault. We use that word, the the system it's a very generic word certainly in the uk they try to paint us as anti-capitalists and that phrase means um extremists it means anarchists and i know anarchism can be a great thing as well right but anarchists again it it conjures up in the public mind people with masks on, thrown bricks through windows. It's got a really poor optic to it.

And also there are people like the renegade economist in the UK who does a great podcast who are pro-capitalism, but they just don't think we've got capitalism anymore. They think we've got crony capitalism. We think we've got capitalism anymore they think we've got crony capitalism we think we've got captured capitalism and whenever i talk to anybody about economics that people have a very different understanding of the word capitalism from my perspective capitalism is where the inherent purpose is profit and neoliberalism is free market fundamentalism it's like all regulations have to

go but there's different versions of capitalism that aren't neoliberal you know there's asiatic capitalism there's nordic capitalism that's got a really high taxation and redistribution you know there are different forms so i don't think it's useful and it's not the way of extinction rebellion to say we're against this thing and for this thing. In the same way, I wouldn't say I'm against nuclear power and for solar panels or I'm against eating meat and for veganism or I'm against veganism and for, you know, agriculture that raises beef on pasture. It's just not for, obviously within the movement, there'll be lots of different opinions. The importance is to say, clearly something's wrong folks with the system. I call

it the operating system that we're running now. And we need a grown up conversation that's not ideological. That's not about, I'm on this team, you're on that team, we're going to have a fight about it. I'm going to take this label, you'll have that label, and we're entrenched. I mean, that's not going to help us right now. We need to be willing to be in dialogue. And I think that needs some kind of bridge building. But it's absolutely about the economic system. You know, it's clearly geared.

I think, is it Daniel, I can never say his name right, Smattenberger, who talked about the out-of-control paperclip machine. No, it's just like machinery that's designed to turn the natural world into shit, essentially, isn't it? That breaks most of it, the stuff that I get in my life. I hate it. Where's the quality? Anyway, the system's a mess.

And I think at the minute it needs 1.7 planets and it's only going to grow in its current form. So something huge has to change. And one of the plans we have is to start a debt strike. And its purpose would be to say to the big bodies, the IMF, who, by the way, talked about human extinction recently, you know, the IMF, who, by the way, talked about human extinction recently, you know, the World Bank, the OECD, the major head funds, the big banks and so on saying, look, tell the truth. Humanity in the crisis because the operating system that we're running is not working for us. It's not like, oh, sorry, we forgot to buy some solar panels, is it? It's like something fundamental is wrong and that we have to stop and repair the harm

and the ecocide law at the Rome Statute level, the law that Polly Higgins was designing before her early death this April, would be a great second demand. And a third demand to find a democratic way, which may be an International Citizens Assembly or something similar, to look at how we rewire humanity. And so if you're going to have global demands like that, you have to have something that pushes on the levers of power. And to me, that would be a debt strike.

And so at the minute, we've got a paper out amongst the movement to ask for feedback. So the debt strike would involve potentially some people taking on loans, not paying them back, giving the money in solidarity to the frontline communities that's been damaged by that bank. Some people have already got debts refusing to pay them. Or some just naming they'll never pay them. I mean, so many students are never going to be able to pay their debts off and it's like the emperor's got no clothes on this economic system's going to kill itself that's the other piece here i mean for every degree of warming

you get a one percent collapse in gdp so it doesn't have to be anti anything it's it's killing itself and then the other bit in the debt strike would be that people who can't manage debts and don't want to do illegal things or things that are going to bring more pressure on them are given support to resist debts through debt resistance tools. So we've been talking to Debt Collective in the US about how to work with those tools. And that would be a really good way to work in communities that are more disadvantaged, that probably don't have the privilege on the whole.

I don't think we should ever make assumptions, by the way, but on the whole, wouldn't have the privilege to get on the streets and talk about an ecological crisis because the economic system's pressed against their face and their stress. To then talk about the crisis, the systemic issues, and how to resist debt as part of that. So I'm in this program with a bunch of people from the Global South, and we had Jason Hickel come and his amazing book, Divide, and yeah, thinking about the debt from countries, either

colonized countries, and also the debts that many countries have paid off multiple times over, and now they're still just paying off the interest. So the beautiful vision, because it even feels like it could even be expanded, of course, it'd be very difficult. But like a global debt jubilee would be one of the ways of that reparations or that restoring to the global south. So I guess just, you know, second to last question, you know, if just the intersectionality that you're feeling, you know, this is in the UK that this has been born, but how is it spreading? What are the things, what's the thinking around other countries?

Where else is Extinction Rebellion showing up? Just any thoughts around any of that? Yeah. There's Extinction Rebellion groups in 72 countries already, which is incredible within a year. And we have an internationalist solidarity network in the UK that's been born out of a group called Stop the Ma'angamizi, which focuses on the African. how they talk about the Holocaust,

what's happened to African people through years of slavery, colonialism and so on. And the internationalist piece there is reaching out to frontline communities. There's the strongest piece, I guess, from the UK's perspective has been with West Africa. We've actually been supporting the building of a centre for environmental activists who are at risk. But that kind of work, it needs connection and relationship

and it takes time to build. And it's not as apparent in the work that we're doing because quite a lot of apparent focus on global south issues can be mediated by groups where the local communities don't genuinely feel represented. And it's how to really be in solidarity and be able to amplify and support frontline struggles. I mean, there's also been actions at certain embassies like the Brazilian Embassy. In fact, somebody, a wonderful Christian climate activist, through pain to the Brazilian Embassy, which in principle is an instant six months in jail. So that's part of the work. I think huge piece here about how we think about the ecological crisis as a deeper crisis in in our disconnect in the tearing of the human family is the way i say it in the disconnection between

countries in the relationship the extractivist relationship between countries. So our third demand says that we want a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice. So the idea is that you can't just come up with solutions that somehow force poor people to pay more taxes. I mean, they can't anyway. There's literally no room there. Or you can just grab a load of resources from another country to make a load of battery powered cars or whatever it's gonna have to be done with justice in its heart and i think there's

a there's also a conversation about whether there's a missing uh fourth demand that looks at from a particular country's perspective what their relationship with the rest of the world should be, not just how their own policies internally get set. So that's a conversation. I'm just wondering, you know, if somebody is listening, and they're sitting here with an open heart and open ears and, you know, wondering how to get involved in all of that, what might you say from your heart to theirs, maybe like a like a prayer or a wish or an invitation, just anything to the listeners that you'd want to invite them into or say to them as they're listening to us now. The prayer that I'm really sitting with is for the family to reconnect,

the wider human family, all the places we've been divided, to reunify with love at the heart and justice as a purpose and in that way stopping the harm that we've been doing and starting to repair the harm. The possibility of that, you know, the taste of that, the smell of that, it's tantalising to think that if that moment comes, when that moment comes, we're going to make this collective decision to face what will come together and the possibility, the vision of actually cleaning up our rivers,

supporting people to heal from trauma, all the trauma that this system does to all of us, actually taking the plastic out of the oceans, finding a different way to create energy, working with the land to capture carbon in the soil, to do agriculture in a new way, eating healthy food, simplifying our lives. You know, that's my prayer, really, and I just share that as a longing for those times and I

think as much as rebellion looks like being on the streets and singing in placards and so on it's about that deeper longing. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Gail Bradbrook. Upstream is a labor of love and we couldn't possibly make this project happen without the support of listeners like you please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or reoccurring donation and to find out about volunteering also if your organization or business is interested in sponsoring an episode or season of upstream we'd love to talk you can find out more about our sponsorship packages at

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