As the near-daily temperature records set around the world are truly staggering, yet the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere continues to rise, world leaders have proven unable to act on the overwhelming evidence from climate scientists.
Movement power is Commons Library of Social Change Website.
The need for popular protest to force the rich and powerful to avert climate disaster is now clear, but the means to mount a mass democratic movement for direct action are themselves complex and elusive.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) emerged in 2018 and took climate protest in the UK to a new level, but over the past few years and months it has splintered into thousands of smart but smaller pockets.
Panacea
Even the limited successes of direct action were predictably met with increasingly severe repressive measures by the British government, including widespread attacks on the very right to protest.
At the same time, XR’s core strategy of calling out the media (demanding newspapers and broadcasters to tell the truth) and the decision by some to blockade Murdoch’s printing presses were both met with hostility, and major social media platforms such as Twitter/X and Instagram “shadowbanned” many protest groups.
So now seems like the perfect time to examine how XR suddenly appeared on our screens and in our streets. How did a small group of activists manage to send a coherent and clear message for climate action, galvanize a range of existing climate change campaigns, and mobilize millions of people around the world to take direct action, often for the first time?
The new series “Movement Power” Ecologist Online, we revisit a series of training videos posted to YouTube 10 years ago. The videos didn’t go viral, but they did catch the attention of many of XR’s founders.
The trainers, Paul Engler and Carlos Saavedra, claimed to have found something of a panacea for protest: a hybrid organizing model that drew on lessons learned from the movement’s “structure” and “momentum” traditions.
Hierarchical
XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook had this to say about Engler’s book: This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Rebellion Will Shape the 21st CenturyThe book, co-written with Engler’s brother Mark, was published as the bible of the XR protest movement.
Bradbrook recalls (Issue #344) Revival and the Ecologist How she drafted the principles of XR is covered in the magazine, which is exactly the core idea in Engler and Saavedra’s playbook.
The “magic sauce” that makes the hybrid model so effective is apparently resolving the contradiction between needing protest movements to be unified and coherent, while allowing activists autonomy.
A cohesive movement needs clear goals, an agreed-upon theory of change, a bounded set of demands, pre-planned stages of the movement, and a set of non-negotiable rules and principles. But activists also need both the freedom to express their human creativity and the freedom to avoid capture or corruption by leaders.
Engler and Saavedra say they are embedded in the “structural” tradition of hierarchical, centralized movement bases like labor unions that are familiar to those on the left.
Leap
But with the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization, they suddenly discovered the power of momentum tradition, the ability to seize a “whirlwind moment” and absorb thousands of activists into existing organizations.
The momentum tradition, on the other hand, draws on lessons from the U.S. and international nonviolent civil rights movements, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi.
The hybrid model includes a number of important tools: concepts drawn from systems theory and biology, and an organic whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
These tools include frontloading, grand strategy and narrative, momentum cycles, pillars of support, mass training, and trigger events.
Not all activists will agree with the historical analysis, systems thinking, or reliance on biomimicry, but Engler and Saavedra’s model represents a leap forward in campaign strategy as XR sets the standard for large-scale climate action.
There is a lot the climate movement can learn from this.
This author
Brendan Montague is Ecologist Online. Movement power is Commons Library of Social Change Website. This article was first published on Revival and the Ecologist magazine.
