Of Many Worlds in Resistance, and Why Roger Hallam is Dead Wrong
Artwork by Chilean painter Beatriz Aurora, inspired by the Zapatista Liberation Army.
Roger Hallam is not great at making friends. In an impassioned video message addressed to the young people of the world –if ageing Millennials are still included is not clear–, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion makes a heartfelt plea for disruptive direct action. The world is in mortal danger. The climate crisis is in full swing and, unless we take the streets and force drastic measures now, this generation might be humanity’s “last chapter”. His message is powerful, capable of causing long-lasting insomnia and recurring panic attacks. And his goal is noble: to get as many people as possible on their feet and actively resisting what he calls a “murder project” that will end the human story. However, despite all his passion and urgency, Hallam has isolated himself in a world full of perils, with no hope and only wet gun powder.
Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation (Hallam 2021) runs for a bit longer than two hours. In that time, Hallam, who presents himself as an expert on civil resistance with more than 30 years in the business and a nice rap sheet to brag about makes a detailed exposition of the state of affairs. He begins with a tour of horrors. After a brief introduction, he draws on a compendium of climate science to paint the picture of a world in flames. Within a few decades, Hallam argues, the Earth will be several degrees hotter, beset by famine, war, and all kinds of atrocities. “There is no hope”, he insists as he tries to scare his young viewers. Then he moves on to the obstacles for “effective direct action”, namely the complicity of the ‘liberal left’ and the complacency of the ‘radical left’. He then lands on a recipe for what “actually works”, a playbook with all the tricks for “maximum disruption”, from glueing bodies to the gates of Downing Street to blocking railway lines.
Hallam is a disciple in the tradition of civil disobedience. Having participated in countless mobilisations and even conducted some academic research on the topic, he follows the principles first sketched by Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay On The Duty of Civil Disobedience (Thoreau 1966). In this piece, written after spending a night in prison for opposing American war on Mexico, Thoreau revises the relationship between the individual and the state. He contends it is the duty of conscientious citizens to disobey the law in the face of injustice. Men –always men, in Thoreau’s mind– must rebel against the fundamental immorality of the government and valiantly revolutionise, “though it cost them their existence as people” (p. 231).
Thoreau’s ideas became a foundational text. Leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were deeply inspired by his tenets and channelled them into some of the most important non-violent social movements of the 20th century. Hallam aspires to follow in their footsteps. Although he does not mention Thoreau, he invokes the Indian independence movement and the civil rights movement as beacons to be recovered from the past for guiding present struggles. “What changes the world is action”, he affirms and calls to break the law to uphold morality. If one has to put themselves in harm’s way, to endure arrest and police brutality, so be it. “A total fearlessness is what changes society”.
Hallam’s brand of activism requires a certain kind of hero. His intent to “bring the inherent violence of the opposition out in the open" –the opposition being an abstract corporate-government coalition that is consciously seeking to exterminate life on Earth– demands non-violent demonstrations to be crushed by the capitalist state apparatus. It necessitates skulls fearless of batons, lungs undaunted by tear gas, and freedoms uncontainable by prison cells. The plan is that this display of courage will capture –via media exposure– the heart of public attention and prod the masses into action. “There is nothing pretty about civil resistance”, he dictates.
In a sense, we have seen this approach work before. To illustrate his point, Hallam mentions the historic Children's March of 1963, also known as the Children's Crusade, when more than one thousand African American students skipped school in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest for the civil rights of black Americans. As they approached police lines, they were met with brutal force and catapulted into global consciousness. The National Museum of African American History and Culture relates how "images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, being clubbed by police officers, and being attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, and triggered outrage throughout the world" (National Museum of African American History and Culture 2017). The power of such images prompted President John F. Kennedy to express support for the Civil Rights Movement and paved the way for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Resistance became violence. Violence became image. Image became change.
Environmental groups are no strangers to the power of images. In fact, they have weaved what Kevin DeLuca (1999) calls ‘image events’ into a form of rhetoric, “a sustained critique of the articulation of humanity, reason, technology, nature, and progress in the discourse of industrialism”. Image events are, quite simply, spectacular occurrences transmitted through audio-visual media that capture public attention. Greenpeace crafted one of the most iconic image events in the history of the environmental movement when, in 1975, activists hopped on a flimsy zodiac to stand in the way of a Soviet whaler ship. They failed to save the whales –a massive harpoon flew past them and landed on its target–, but the images of that tiny boat manoeuvred by humans willing to risk their lives to stop the industrial death machine became a symbol, one repeated many times by the media and lodged in public imagination. DeLuca calls these psychic accelerators ‘mind bombs’, “crystallized philosophical fragments that expand the universe of thinkable thoughts” (p. 6). A memorable event that shifts our consciousness and opens possibilities for change.
Greenpeace activists went after Soviet Dalniy Vostok whaling vessel off the coast of California in June 1975 . Photograph: Greenpeace
Hallam is fond of mind bombs. Even if he criticises the NGOs on the liberal left –which, like Greenpeace, have indeed become capitalist corporations themselves– he is employing the same strategy. When he asks young people to be fearless and say to the police “do what you will with me”, he is hoping that this selflessness in the face of peril will spread in images around the world and inspire others to follow. And here is the main problem with his argument. After a lengthy critique of what he calls the liberal and radical left, in his estimation obstacles for effective direct action, he arrives to a unique formula to tackle the climate crisis. In his obsession with solidifying all his expertise and experience in one fool-proof path, he burns every bridge with possible allies and focuses on a single target that is too far to shoot at. He hits a high note in saying:
If you have any consistency or morality or political credibility, you have to engage in civil resistance, [...] the material disruption of the oppressor. You have to glue yourself to doors, block roads, go on hunger strike, [...] which will result in you going to prison. It is the only thing that is going to remove the oppression. In other words, if you are not arrested and put in prison, then you’re not resisting. And if you’re not resisting, then you are part of the problem. (Hallam 2021)
Bombast aside, there is more than one grave oversight packed in this rant. Firstly, for this logic to work, Hallam has to reduce the environmental crises to one problem –climate change, or an issue of adding too much CO2 to the atmosphere. And while he is good at creating a list of forthcoming horrors –with starvation and rape featuring at the top of the list– his entire Real World section is a selective description of climate science that looks at nothing but rising temperatures.
Counterintuitively, such reduction makes the problem even more difficult to solve. Hallam has isolated himself in an unwinnable fight against an unfathomable enemy. Collapsing the politics of resistance and a diversity of tactics into a single strategy leaves him with only one bet: that millions of people, inspired by a catalytic event and the fear of imminent death, will simultaneously glue themselves to doors and save the future. The veteran disruptor hopes a large enough civil resistance movement will topple corporate-government power, end fossil fuels and halt global warming. Tough chance. He has forgotten that “industrialism is not concentrated in a centralized seat of power” and thus “revolutionary overthrow of such a seat of power is not possible" (DeLuca 1999, 60). He overlooks that climate change is not a disease, but a symptom. But perhaps most importantly, he dismisses the very notions of diversity and community. No wonder he sees no hope.
Activism is already moving far beyond those constraints. According to Paul Hawken (2007), the largest social movement of all time is currently underway. Like the planet’s immune system deployed against infection, it is decentralised and acting simultaneously on multiple fronts, more a collection of struggles than a coordinated unit. The movement is made up of myriad organisations and individuals anchored by “three basic roots: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization, all of which have become intertwined” (p. 36). If it is even a movement is hard to define. In fact, there is no agreement on what a movement actually is. It is not an empirical object that one can observe and quantify, but possibly rather a set of actions and ideas (Hawken 2007), a compendium of peoples in struggle connected by common values and symbols (DeLuca 1999). This fluid entity, Hawken abounds, has a common dream: democracy. A particular brand of it, nonetheless, “a reimagination of public governance emerging from place, culture, and people” (p. 52).
John Keane sees something similar to this ideal already at play (Trägårdh, Witoszek, and Taylor 2013). Since 1945, the world saw the emergence of what he calls monitor democracy, a “variety of ‘post-electoral’ politics defined by the rapid growth of many different kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinizing mechanisms” (p. 23). In other words, monitor democracy is civil society in motion, materialised in all forms of participatory organisations that are independent of governments’ electoral structures and act as a balance to the authority of central governance. These organisations are critical of power and its holders but do not seek to seize it. They can emerge within national contexts but are increasingly transnational, spilling over borders to generate collective action. They are influential whistle-blowers but depend on the media to propagate their messages.
Extinction Rebellion, Hallam’s co-creation, fits neatly into this category. It was founded in the UK in 2018, and just a few years later it has a presence in over 45 countries. It has staged protests on different continents and prompted thousands to join the cause. And although these kinds of organisations have done crucial work (XR continues to be massively influential and effective at directing attention towards environmental issues), their tendency to globalise and rigidise into power structures of their own, as well as their proclivity to end up cooperating with big money and the state, alienates them from the quotidian experiences where the origins and consequences of the environmental crises are lived by ordinary folk.
Like I said before, climate change is a symptom. It is one of the physical manifestations of an economic, social, political and ideological system that requires the exploitation of nature –with people within it– to exist. It goes by many names –capitalism, industrialism, modernity, extractivism, progress, patriarchy, imperialism– and is disperse, rooted in discourse and impossible to attack in a single location or with a unique strategy. It stands on many legs –racism, classism, gender inequality, religious discrimination, etcetera– each oppressing different people; some oppressed by more than one. All injustices are connected in a structure of power that is complex and mutating.
The Declaration of the Occupation of NYC produced this beautiful diagramme to illustrate how “all our grievances are connected” (Klepper 2012).
Hallam seems to understand this. His mentions of social justice and solidarity with people in the Global South suggests as much. Why, then, does he limit himself to a single path of action? The silver-lining of such a complex problem is that it offers so many pressure points! These are found in everyday matters that ordinary people can influence directly, what Naomi Klein calls “all kinds of prosaic issues: the right to decide where the local garbage goes, to have good public schools, to be supplied with clean water” (Klein 2001). If we manage to demystify ‘the system’ and begin to see it operate close to home –in the stress of an overdue insurance bill, the pressure to be productive and work longer hours, the increasing isolation from our neighbours– then everyone can get involved.
Because the problem is right here at street level it is solvable and we can engage with the issues we care about personally using all kinds of creative strategies. We have become used to rallying around ideology. Movements are commonly assembled under the banner of an -ism –in this case, environmentalism. However, given the scattered nature of the problem at hand and its countless incarnations, committed actors all around the globe can resist from their own corners, forming “a broad nonideological movement [...] that does not invoke the masses’ fantasized will but rather engages citizens’ localized needs” (p. 51).
The goal here is not to discredit organised direct action. Not in the slightest. The streets have long been –and will continue to be– the primary stage for social eruption, the grand battlefield for demanding change. It is vital that we continue to mobilise and occupy public space the way XR and other collectives continue to do. Rather, the aim is to revalue the smaller, more constant forms of resistance, those that maintain us connected with global struggles from our everyday arenas. As Klein points out, activism often sees two kinds of solitude.
On the one hand, there are the international anti-globalization activists who may be enjoying a triumphant mood, but seem to be fighting far-away issues, unconnected to people’s day-to-day struggles. [...] On the other hand, there are community activists fighting daily struggles for survival, or for the preservation of the most elementary public services, who are often feeling burnt-out and demoralized. (Klein 2001)
Our best option to rebuild this connection is to spread out and “turn into thousands of local movements, fighting the way neoliberal politics are playing out on the ground” (Klein) while keeping an eye on the global scale. It is the consciousness of fighting a common battle on different fronts that will turn us into the cells of a single insurgent organism. Further, this optic means that everyone can join the kaleidoscopic environmental-social movement regardless of their cause of choice. It means togetherness in the dark distance. It means hope. Does this sound too optimistic? Maybe. The stakes are indeed incredibly high and the odds not in our favour. But if Hawken is right, “evolution is optimism in action”. It is time for humanity to evolve.
Regardless of critique, XR has been highly effective at engaging young citizens. Here, protesters show banners at Trafalgar Square, London. Photo: BBC
The word evolution may sound grand, but it is no exaggeration. In their book The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis (2018) pose a startling question: Are humans akin to bacteria in a petri dish, destined to die off after eating up the resources available in our finite space? They conclude we are not. We are aware, we know what is happening and have the opportunity to solve it, even if it means changing our perception of human nature. Nordhaus and Schellenberger (2007) propose a similar reflection by saying “The problem [of the ecological crisis] is so great that before answering ‘What is to be done?’ we must first ask, ‘What kind of beings are we?’ and ‘What can we become?’" (p. 8).
It seems that we are after evolution in thought. It is the re-conceptualisation of humanity in nature and the re-weaving of the narratives we create about ourselves in relation to the rest of the world that will lead to change. For this to happen, we need to free ourselves from the limitations of ideology and a single course of action. Hawken (2007) writes that: "Because we are educated to believe that salvation is found in the doctrines of a single system, we are naïvely susceptible to dissimulation and cant. Ideologies prey on these weaknesses and pervert them into blind loyalties, preventing diversity rather than nurturing natural evolution and the flourishing of ideas.” (p. 43)
After analysing the emergence of thousands of citizen initiatives, he sees as the key contribution of such a heterogeneous movement “the rejection of one big idea in order to offer in its place thousands of practical and useful ones” (p. 51). Maybe it is that radical diversity of approaches that will grow to critical mass and lead to a change of paradigm.
Katherine Burke calls this type of paradigmatic inception ‘regenerative culture’, “a complex emergent whole out of relationships in complex interaction in a system that can respond to its individual members and its environment in ways that enhance and evolve the health of the group”. It relies on mutuality and synergism to build a new whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Diverse and autonomous elements with their own unique potential interact in different ways of doing and being to create one thing: life.
Does this sound familiar? We are talking here of distinct ways in which people relate to the world, which in turn create an interdependent community. But we have seen this kind of entanglement before. Look at a forest, for instance. Under the green canopy, itself composed of many kinds of leaves and branches, there is a mesh of extraordinary complexity. Plants, insects, mammals, reptiles, fungi and innumerable others interact in a tightly woven net we know as a biotic community. This symbiotic entity is composed not only of different anatomies –some creatures with eight legs; some with two and a pair of wings– but different ways of knowing. Just stop for a moment and think of how vastly different life is for a willow and a bee; how dissimilar must reality appear for a lichen and a deer. Each species is equipped with sensorial capacities that create for them a world unique. Thus, they exist in different realities that require them to produce particular kinds of knowledge. A sprouting oak tree needs to learn how to capture rich rays of sunlight. A moose must figure out the most nutritious plants to eat. A fungus must manage vast underground networks. All these creatures exist in a cosmos of their own, with different stimuli to guide them, different understandings of space, and even different meanings of time. Yet, they all depend on each other. It is because of their linkages that they are alive.
What if humans are the same? What would humanity look like if we saw it not as one species, but as many? Each of those species would have its own conceptualisation of what the world is –what we sometimes call ontology. In turn, they would have special ways of knowing that particular world –what we often call epistemology. That richness would create relationships that blur the boundaries of individual and community. Further, if diversity is what makes the biotic net adaptable to change, maybe we should stop trying to concentrate all energies on a single way of acting, of being, of rebelling. Perhaps Hallam is wrong and there is no “real world”, but many worlds, each full of possibility, the articulation of which becomes the very fabric of hope.
Zapatista art by Chilean painter Beatriz Aurora.
Constructing such a narrative is not that far-fetched. After all, humans tend to create themselves through stories, which is why Martin Lee Mueller calls the human a storytelling animal. In his book Being Salmon, Being Human (2017), he relates how, in the early 1600s, René Descartes came up with a very powerful thought: that the only real thing is human intellect. His idea opened a deep split in nature, with humans on one side and the rest of it on the other. It made all non-human beings “ontologically, epistemologically and morally
irrelevant” (p. 13). That story has determined, to a large extent, the future ever since. For centuries humans have treated themselves as superior, self-righteously dissecting and dominating their environment. Such a long-lasting philosophy was created when the previous narrative was exhausted and Copernican ideas removed Earth from the centre, leaving humans confused about their place in the vast universe. Cartesian thinking then took hold and remained in force for centuries. Now, amid environmental collapse, that narrative is exhausted too.
Like Mueller himself has often said, there is a need to reinvent the human4. The good news is, that reinvention is already underway. The story of radical diversity is currently being embodied in fights for life around the planet, from indigenous land defenders and feminist marches that flood the streets to community food gardens and art spread through social media. Together, these movements are creating new symbols, rewriting relations and challenging deeply entrenched myths of industrial society, among them, that humans are little more than selfish economic units, that humanity and nature are separated categories, and that non-human beings have value only when turned into resources.
Joining and empowering that multifaceted effort is our best chance of overcoming barriers the appear insurmountable. Charles Guignon (quoted in Mueller 2017) wrote that “When a worldview becomes firmly entrenched, it tends to perpetuate a set of problems that are taken as natural and obvious. The possibilities of thought become calcified” (p. 27). This, I am afraid, is something Roger Hallam fails to understand. Entrenching ourselves in “what works” not only makes civil resistance predictable and manageable, but it also makes us reproduce issues that we eventually become blind to.
This will inevitably bring us to a conclusion very similar to that of Naomi Klein when she wrote her speech Reclaiming the Commons (2001), an idea uttered by the Zapatista before her: we need to build a world where many worlds can fit. The original Zapatista phrase –Un mundo donde quepan todos los mundos– comes across as a wish, a goal to remind us of the direction we should be heading and a reason to resist the totalising veil of industrial globalisation. But perhaps we already live in such a world. We may inhabit a single biosphere, but the realities of octopi and locusts coexist. Conversely, we may have different 4 Cited from a forthcoming interview, part of the Entangled Epiphanies podcast.
visions of the world and how to make it better, but we share a single home. Perhaps we will learn that this diversity is what brings us together in a vibrant community, from which a new story and a new culture that regenerates with the Earth can emerge.