THE EXPEDITION Chapter 1: Plot Twist (section 2)

Date: Winter 2018-2019. Place: Calgary, Alberta

In which Ann rebels against extinction from within the heart of oil country 

Researchers, scientists, experts in various related areas, and growing numbers of regular everyday people are stepping up, as are entire countries. Costa Rica will be carbon and plastic free in a few years, as Bhutan has been for years already. Jamaica, a country which has arguably kept the polystyrene foam industry in business for a while now, has banned the stuff. More and more areas are refusing to allow agricultural chemicals such as glyphosate. Entire countries are legislating and practising changes which only a few years ago seemed inconceivable. The number and effectiveness of people and organizations who believe we can do this is growing. If it grows enough, and we act quickly enough, we might not be the species who killed a planet. Some of us might even survive.

That is the future I believe in and want to be part of creating.

People who’ve never before even considered trying to joust the status quo are using their own bodies to stop traffic to make themselves heard. Calmly retired citizens are being arrested alongside career activists for locking and gluing themselves to government offices and spraying chalk graffiti across buildings and roadways. Housewives are supporting radicals in the streets. Greta Thunberg, a small girl in a small country, with a brilliant mind and heart and no tolerance for the interminable excuses of governments and industry, broke her autistic silence to tell those who run the world what most of us don’t dare think. Inspired by her ongoing school strike, millions of children all over the world are now striking from school on a regular basis, demanding solutions and change, demanding their own future.

Groups acting for every good cause nameable are trying to act in solidarity with each other and support each others’ causes, because it’s all intertwined. Regular people are coming together and doing the most unregular things.

This is because the climate crisis is a threat multiplier. It affects every aspect of every form of life on the planet. It exacerbates the inequalities most contemporary civilization is built upon, while civilization destroys the planet faster and faster, and that is doing more harm at the lower levels of society, which exacerbates the inequalities………. It tangles all the environmental issues and human rights issues and all the rest of them into a complete absolute mess. It changes everything and makes it all worse.

It’s also because, I believe, human beings are innately good. We don’t always act like it; we’ve made mistakes and done unspeakable harm, we’ve been twisted and manipulated, and we seem to learn an awful lot of things the hard way. We’ve most likely got a whole-species form of CPTSD and are living out the genetic trauma of all of our ancestors. History is full of awful stories and truths. But it’s full of far more positive stories and truths.[1]

We are not a race of monsters. We generally do the best we can with what we have and know at the time, and keep trying to do that better. We have both love and reason. We learn, we regret, we heal, we change, we grow. We help each other, support each other, we care. This is what life and study have taught me. So I believe that somehow, we will do this. It’s what being human is for, now.

Sounds great, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what to DO.

Almost immediately after the IPCC report was released, Extinction Rebellion (XR) groups began sprouting up all over the world. In groups of only a few, or thousands, they began acting in solidarity with each other and with other activist groups. I never had the nerve to be an activist before, but regardless of other issues around XR, their steps to facing this existential crisis were and still are the only viable way to not end everything including ourselves, so I got involved.

In a nutshell, XR is an international grassroots movement that uses civil disobedience to try to halt mass extinction and minimize (or navigate) the potentially unavoidable and completely related social collapse. Extinction Rebellion is held together by principles of nonviolent direct action (NVDA) and respectful, regenerative culture. The XR demands basically call for governments to change everything. Tell the full and complete truth about what’s happening and how we must face it. Make it part of mainstream knowledge on an ongoing and updating basis. Reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, along with many other related drastic measures. Make ecologically responsible living normal. Establish citizens’ assemblies as a functioning part of governance (till we have time to change that as well). Last and far from least – these and future measures will leave no one behind. Truth be told, the indigenous and marginalized populations of the world are the front lines of this fight for all our lives. The only way we can change the world enough, and in the right ways, is together. And honestly, whatever happens, it won’t be comfort-addicted, over-privileged, still-colonial folks who survive.

In another nutshell, no organization is perfect, but I still agree with the ideals and the principles, and many of the people.

The XR demands may sound impossible. They’re not. But having lost so much time arguing and discussing since that devastating IPCC report came out, all goals like that are more difficult every day, and before we know it, it really will be too late. Basically, there isn’t a choice if we want to live, or if we hope anything else can live. We are all responsible, in different ways and degrees which are besides the point now. The point is that we must hold ourselves accountable and act accordingly, from ground level to governments and the infamous 1%. It’s our responsibility to do as much as we absolutely possibly can. If we do, life might continue, and if we do it well enough, so will humankind… though probably in a rather different way, and honestly, it will be a bonus side effect of doing the right thing.

When I tried to find out if there was an XR group anywhere nearby to join, there weren’t any in my whole general area of the country. Calgary, and Alberta as a whole, are not the most environmentally- conscientious places. Big oil has ruled for decades. Green is for cows and cows are for dinner. Get your boots on and buy a big truck and don’t rock the economy-boat. I’m over-generalizing terribly, but you get the idea. It’s the West, and it was won a long time ago, by businesses and politicians who can’t see past their own pockets. So I wound up starting the Alberta and Calgary groups, with a handful of people who had very little in common except our shock and determination.

The Calgary group met in my seedy little basement apartment the first few times, and cracked jokes about how all good revolutions start in dubious little dwellings, till we moved to a free room at the public library. There’s so many facets to the climate crisis that it does make a lot of room for disagreement, but it really all comes down to living or not, and that’s something most folks can agree about. We put our differences aside as much as we could and started trying to organize. We even staged a die-in downtown one afternoon, confusing a lot of distinctly non-environmental people, but also getting the attention of some who understood and cared.

We had an official public declaration of rebellion – I shouted against the wind from the steps of City Hall, demanding climate action in a forty-something-below snowstorm, with a few die-hard rebels who tried to record it to post online, but all our phones and cameras froze.

I really couldn’t organize my way out of a paper bag, though, so I was pretty much operating on the Field of Dreams theory that if we built it, they would come… “they” hopefully including people better at organizing. That did happen, and then I sat down with myself to figure out what to do next.

1 Rutger Bregman explores this quite thoroughly in Humankind - A Hopeful History of Humanity, which is absolutely worth borrowing from your library or friend (and you needn't be an academic to read, but by all means do if you are!)

#expedition #extinctionrebellion #TheBackstoryWalktoWakentheNation