What’s an Extinction Rebellion meeting really like?
Freya is a member of the Bristol group, and she reveals all on the nuances on what makes the group tick. She even lets loose on THAT tube incident.
We all know we should be doing more to help the environment, and we all know there’s a movement based entirely around doing just that. So why aren’t more of us getting involved? There’s a lack of knowledge about what the organisation does, how it works and why it seems to be responsible for a few slightly questionable stunts (we all heard about the tube incident late last year). I’ve been along to a quite a few meetings in the past months, and can try and help explain how it works and what you can expect if you want to pop along, vegan snacks in hand, but don’t quite know what to expect.
The meetings are, first and foremost, one of the most welcoming and well organised events I’ve ever attended. With no assigned leader, ‘hosts’ take turns leading discussions. In meetings, you can stay quiet or be as engaged as you’d like. I hadn’t been warned about the hand movements, though, and they slightly threw me off. To keep the conversation moving forward, you’re encouraged to show agreement or disagreement by various signals (it’s basically all variations of hand waving). The desire to interject also has its own signal, so as to avoid people talking over one another. It all seems slightly woo-woo, but within minutes you find yourself happily waving along, stunned at how seamlessly the discussions are progressing, with the aid of the odd hand movement.
The views held within each meeting are wide-ranging and often not politically or even ethically aligned. This is why you sometimes have incidents like the Canning Town tube demonstration — as a totally decentralised movement, XR is totally democratic and can allow its members to carry out their own ‘actions’ without permission from a higher power. However, this also means individuals are allowed to act of their own accord, sometimes with damaging repercussions for the XR image. From my experience at XR meetings, I can’t imagine that tube demonstration would have been hugely well received at all, in fact.
Despite differences in opinion about the way in which environmental activism can be carried out, the group is galvanised around its common goal and real decisions are made. This is something other movements often struggle to do. I think of feminism, a belief system rooted in a single goal of equality. It is constantly coming up against problems, because of various fractions splintering off, with disagreements within the movement somehow louder than the cause those within it are trying to fight for.
There’s nothing dangerous about going to an XR meeting and helping out in whatever way you can. The movement is set up in such a way that if you have absolutely no desire to put yourself out there in a demonstrative way and risk arrest, there is no pressure to. They need rebels to help design artwork for their protests, provide legal and media advice, and even just hand out water during the ‘uprisings’.
What’s there to lose? The suffragettes did much worse, and we all rather like having the right to vote, don’t we? It would be awfully nice if we still had a planet to be able to vote on in a few years’ time too.
If you’re interested in popping along to a meeting, find your local group here. Best case scenario, you help make some real change and meet fascinating people along the way. Worst case, you enjoy a falafel ball and have a good anecdote to share at the pub.
