Balance: Building the Next Civilisation in 2024

I’ve been thinking a lot in 2023 about fundamental strategic matters – more than at any time since the beginning of Extinction Rebellion. My work was mainly focused on refining and enhancing an established civil resistance model of “how to cause trouble effectively”. The basic frame was – “Look, let’s work together to create a massive nonviolent disruption and push the state into making big reductions in carbon emissions”. We were pushing up against a boulder called ‘the carbon regime’. Now, like Sisyphus, I see that we were doomed to watch it roll back in our faces.

In 2024, I’m working on a profoundly different framing: it goes something like: “Look, the carbon regime has totally fucked up so the climate crisis is now locked in. We don’t need to create massive social disruption because it’s going to happen anyway! The regime will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. So, what next? We need to build the next civilization and stop fascism from taking us to a terminal hell”. Bit long but you get the idea.

Read the full blog here.