In the Midst of the Coronavirus Lockdown, Environmental Lessons from Extinction Rebellion, One Year On

Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Tell the Truth’ boat in Oxford Circus on April 18, 2019, during a week-long occupation of sites in central London to raise awareness of the environmental catastrophe that is already underway, and the need for urgent change to combat it (Photo: Andy Worthington)..


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As we all continue to try to make sense of — and live with — the extraordinarily changed world in which we find ourselves, I’m reminded of what a different place we were in a year ago, and also how some of our insights from that time so desperately need to be remembered today.

One year ago, we were five days into Extinction Rebellion’s occupation of four sites in central London (Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch), which largely brought the traffic to a halt for a week, and enabled anyone paying attention to directly appreciate what a city not dominated by the choking fumes and noise of relentless traffic felt like, and what that, in turn, said about so many of capitalism’s priorities in a major capital city.

It was, to be blunt, something of revelation, as I explained in an article at the time, Extinction Rebellion’s Urgent Environmental Protest Breaks New Ground While Drawing on the Occupy, Anti-Globalisation and Road Protest Movements, in which I also related XR’s efforts to those of earlier protest movements, and noted how we had, it seemed, all become so accustomed to how loud and dirty London was, with its relentless traffic, the incessant din of its numerous building sites, and the lorries servicing those sites, which were the most unpleasant of all the vehicles incessantly filing our streets — other huge lorries, buses, taxis, white vans, and an inexplicable number of cars — that the sudden silence and clean air was astonishing.

As I explained in my article, when Extinction Rebellion’s occupation began, “I wasn’t sure that the ongoing intention of crashing the system through mass arrests, and waking people up to the need for change by disrupting their lives was going to work.” However, on return visits I saw something that “gave me hope that a genuine disruption to the system is possible.”

On April 18, to get to the Waterloo Bridge occupation, “I had cycled through a smog-shrouded London, making my way from my home in Lewisham, in south east London, over Southwark Bridge, through the City with its absurd and endlessly greedy building projects, and passing through Temple, where, with a few noble exceptions, lawyers have spent centuries protecting the wealthy, and no one has given a damn about the environment.”

I added, “All this changed as I reached Waterloo Bridge, normally hideously choked with heavy traffic, which was empty of all but cyclists and relieved pedestrians. As I approached the Waterloo end, there was a stage, various stalls providing food and information, people happily lounging around, and trees brought to the bridge by campaigners — and it wasn’t lost on anyone that, with no expenditure whatsoever, we now had a garden bridge without the insane amounts of money squandered on the ludicrous garden bridge vanity project that Boris Johnson had thrown his weight behind during his eight execrable years as London’s Mayor.”

Extinction Rebellion campaigners on Waterloo Bridge, having stopped traffic and re-claimed it as a “green bridge”, on April 17, 2019 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

As I also stated, “On Waterloo Bridge, everyone realised how pleasant London would be if there was, suddenly and permanently, signficantly less traffic. And it has been the same elsewhere in London as so many major roads have been shut down: most of Regent Street, much of Oxford Street, Marble Arch, Parliament Square.”

In conversations that I had on the people’s green bridge that Waterloo Bridge had suddenly become, I took to asking what all our hectic noisy pollution was actually in service of. Critics of the occupation made a big deal of discussing how it was obstructing buses taking people to work — not, apparently, noticing that all the other bridges were still open — but little else that was suddenly not on the roads appeared to be even remotely essential. Most significantly, it seemed to me, what had mainly shut down was unnecessary car use, on an insane scale, and an entire network of vehicles delivering — to give just one example — millions of corporate sandwiches, snacks and drinks, part of a network of petrol-guzzling recklessness that involves giant warehouses located up and down the country, the absurdity of which only became apparent when it was suddenly all switched off.

The coronavirus and the economic shutdown

Since the coronavirus lockdown began a month ago, what we glimpsed a year ago has now spread to almost the whole of our hectic, globe-trotting, and insanely environmentally destructive culture.

To start with, the horribly polluting cruise ship industry — whose monstrous ships plagued Greenwich every few weeks throughout the summer — has collapsed, and most of the airline industry is grounded — something that only the most extreme environmentalists wanted to see a year ago, as discussions took place about how often a year it would be acceptable to take a flight. Furthermore, the roads are almost empty, as most shops are now shut, and the upshot of all this is a huge drop in pollution. Clean air abounds, and bird song is ringing out everywhere.

Obviously, none of this is sustainable in the long run. Millions of people have suddenly been made unemployed, and, while the government has committed billions of pounds to supporting them, profound and irreparable damage will end up being done to the economy — to say nothing of people’s mental health, and their very lives if they are trapped in abusive relationships — if the lockdown continues for months.

However, while those who learn nothing from history, and don’t even want to, are salivating at the prospect of resurrecting the pre-coronavirus world in its entirety as soon as is possible, that would clearly be deranged, as the problems identified by Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and numerous other climate activists and experts are just as severe now as they were a year ago.

The culture that our leaders love, and that so many people have bought into, is an environmental disaster. Having tourism as the planet’s number one business is unsustainable, as are our patterns of consumption — a “fast fashion” clothes industry that is environmentally destroying vulnerable eco-systems around the world, a food industry that is also insanely environmentally destructive, and a building industry that is also massively responsible for catastrophic climate change. Check out a good analysis of major polluters here, and this Guardian article about how polluters are being bailed out (and another here).

How do we get to where we need to be?

So the big question, as countries begin contemplating how to ease the lockdown, weeks or months from now, is how we can somehow prevent the entire pre-virus world of mad over-consumption and deranged self-entitlement from picking up where it left off on our suicidal dash to environmental destruction.

Our politicians, sadly, are almost all likely to betray us, given that we tend to alternate between one major party of another, both of which are fatally wedded to the status quo, and to doing everything in their power to appease huge and powerful corporate interests.

In addition, the mainstream media are also almost entirely useless, as we can see from their coverage of the crisis, with very little space — if any — given to forensic analyses of what it means for the future of our reckless, suicidal culture.

However, I suspect that the virus itself might provide a brake on the return of “business as usual”, given that there is no magic wand that can be waved that will result in the creation of an instant and effective vaccine. Even if one is developed — and it may be a big if — its arrival is not imminent, leaving us with an ongoing situation in which “social distancing” of some sort is likely to have to remain in place for some time, wreaking havoc with airlines, cruise ships, the tourist industry, and all manner of sporting and entertainment events.

Shops can probably re-open, with “social distancing” in place, and offices too, but the notion that the whole of the pre-virus world can be magically revived looks extremely unlikely, and if that’s the case then opportunities not only exist to put forward cases for alternative way of operating, but necessity will dictate that those discussions have to take place.

When so many aspects of our economy rely on both a huge number of consumers, and, simultaneously, the massive exploitation of workers, change will have to come as demand will inevitably struggle to recover, with so many millions of people having lost their incomes for a period of many months.

With demand down, the furious exploitation of workers — in “fast fashion” around the world, in just-in-time food production, in hospitality and entertainment both at home and abroad, to name just a few sectors of the economy — will, surely, no longer be tenable, leading, I hope, to two particular outcomes: prices kept artificially low will have to rise, and rents kept artificially high will have to drop.

I’ll leave you to work out how both of those outcomes play out across the economy, but, in conclusion, to return to Extinction Rebellion and the environmental crisis that is already underway, don’t forget that this pause in human activity is already the most significant brake on catastrophic climate change that we’ve seen in our lifetimes, and don’t also forget that, in response to XR, Greta Thunberg, and the increasingly vocal and doom-laden warnings of scientists, governments and local governments scrambled to declare “climate emergencies” last year, to show how clued-up they were — although these promises then ended up looking monstrously hollow, as they were, essentially, followed by no action.

If we don’t come out of this with an even greater appetite for necessary changes to our idiotic behaviour, in order to safeguard our very future, and to have some chance of preventing an unthinkable and imminent environmental catastrophe, I might have to conclude that we deserve everything that is coming our way.

However, I hope that meltdown can be avoided, and that we take advantage of the pause that the coronavirus has so forcefully imposed on our hectic rush to self-gratifying self-destruction, not, lazily and self-righteously, to try to resume where we left off, but, for once, to actually learn some important lessons about who we are, why we are not as clever as we think we are, and why we urgently need to change direction before it really is too late.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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