I founded Extinction Rebellion – we need rights to protest now more than ever

As communities start to unravel due to the ravages of climate change, it is up to all of us to step up and make sure our voices are heard, writes environmental activist Gail Bradbrook, who founded the controversial group and whose extreme views and protest has led her to being convicted

Since a small group of us gave birth to Extinction Rebellion in 2018, we have been clear that it is the underlying system that is at fault, rather than one or other of the dominant political parties (PA Archive)

Why would a species participate in the destruction of the life support systems that it relies on for its wellbeing, and ultimately its survival? What are the root causes of the predicament we find ourselves in?

The systems we exist within are pathological. Our politics, media and judicial system largely serve an economy that has put us on a highway to extinction and is founded on the destruction of communities across the world. Our diseased culture and individual psychologies have been infected by the poisons of a worldview that normalises greed, inequality, consumerism, and extractive relationships with our family in the global South.

Simple, human-made rules – such as corporate laws that prioritise shareholders’ profits over life and wellbeing; or interest-bearing debt that requires extractive cancerous economic growth – have built an economy that is dominated by psychopathic actors (banks, oil companies, billionaires, corporations peddling false solutions) that are prepared to see the world burn and unravel just so their obscene profits can keep rolling in.

Indigenous Algonquin speaking people from Turtle Island (their name for North America) have a name for this pathology which is Wetiko: a cannibalistic spirit that can take over people’s minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself. Wetiko has many other names, for example Yurugu in Africa, Rakshasas in Hinduism, the Hungry Ghosts in Buddhism, and vampires and zombies in our culture.

These mythologies serve as a warning to community members, but they are warnings that have gone unheeded in the Western economies that have colonised, enslaved and wiped out through acts of genocide the peoples and cultures of other nations. Indeed, first nation peoples have referred to Wetiko as “white man’s disease”.

Since a small group of us gave birth to Extinction Rebellion (XR) in 2018, we have been clear that it is the underlying system that is at fault, rather than one or other of the dominant political parties. One of our key demands has been for an intervention into the system that has the potential to bypass the corrupting influence of narrow private interests – a citizens’ assembly on climate and nature.

Citizens’ assemblies have a lineage that stretches back to communal decision-making in West Africa and to ancient Greece, where the term “democracy” – literally “people rule” – originates and where people were selected at random through “sortition” to make decisions on judicial and official matters, like our juries are today.

In the modern era, citizens’ assemblies have a global track record of reaching decisions on issues that are highly contentious or have become politicised. They bring ordinary people together to deliberate on the advice of experts to reach recommendations that are fair and in the common interest.

In the UK, XR is stepping up the call for an emergency citizens’ assembly on climate and nature with a mass occupation of the King’s lawn at Windsor over the weekend of 30 August to 1 September called Upgrade Democracy. We will come together in our joy, beauty, creativity and collective intelligence to put citizens’ assemblies at the heart of our national conversation.

But we know that the anti-life domination system is highly resistant to change, and that these forces have already pushed us to a place where the climate system is close to flipping into a new dangerously inhospitable state.

As things unravel, we can deliberately, mindfully choose to separate from the anti-life systems of destruction and build the democratic infrastructure that will be needed as our civilisation collapses. There is a growing understanding of ways to support and practice collaboration. And as a movement, we can extend that circle of collaboration by looking for ways to support the longer and deeper struggles of our family in the global South.

Let us be fed by stories of resistance and collaboration, such as the land justice and abolitionist movements. There are somatic practices, breath, dance, sex and medicine practices that can help us to recover our nervous systems. We all need to learn the best ones for ourselves and the groups we work in. This is one important way we pay attention to the system within us – and do something about it.

I offer a prayer of dedication: “We dedicate our lives to hospicing the systems of destruction including within ourselves, to resisting harm, to protecting and building islands of sanity, sanctuary and sanctity. We ask for our arrogance, based in separation and fear, to be released. We ask that we can forgive ourselves and each other. May we remember who we are, feel where we belong, see with new eyes. May we trust in the Mystery, in aliveness and in love. Thank you.”

Dr Gail Bradbrook has a PhD in molecular physics and co-founded Extinction Rebellion, which now has 1150 XR groups in 75 countries. She has been arrested and convicted several times for acts of civil disobedience.

The Independent will be revealing its Climate100 List in September and hosting an event in New York, which can be attended online, to reserve your place click here.