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If you’re planning to be arrested at a protest, do not bring your wallet. Only your ID, a credit card, and maybe some cash for the cab ride home. Everything else will be taken from you, including menstrual products. If you must bring your phone, disable its biometric-unlock feature so police can’t use your finger or face to open it. Say nothing to the cops except your name, address, and birthday — unless they zip-tie your wrists more than a finger too tight; then you can speak up. Don’t wear sweatshirts with drawstrings (they’ll be taken), but do wear lots of layers.
So went the instructions to the hushed crowd in the pews of the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights on a Saturday in mid-March. Because jail toilets are often in an exposed room, “a skirt is nice,” Yana Landowne said from the pulpit, gesturing to an imaginary cloth draped around her waist. “It gives you a little privacy.”
Landowne is not a preacher but an organizer with Extinction Rebellion, the group that calls for mass civil disobedience to provoke immediate action to avert the worst of the climate crisis. Nearly 100 people, from as far as Vermont and Pennsylvania, had come to be trained in nonviolent resistance to save the planet. For five hours, the crowd — which ranged from pissed off, gray-haired retirees to hopeless 20-somethings — listened intently to how they would use their bodies when XR launches its largest U.S. campaign ever: 11 days of demonstrations aimed at disrupting the city, beginning this week. They call it the “Spring Rebellion.”
Watching in the front pew was Henry, a 35-year-old teacher who went to jail in September when XR carried out a “direct action” against Bank of America, which it targeted for underwriting the fossil-fuel industry. They and five other protesters arrived at the bank’s midtown headquarters, where they first checked in with XR’s “jail support” team, filling out a clipboard with their personal information and sealing their phones in Ziploc bags to be retrieved later. Then the group entered the lobby and attempted to block employees from entering, some of whom told them they were being ridiculous, before cops took them away.
“I was ready to get arrested,” Henry told the crowd, moving to the pulpit to explain their conversion to climate activism. A teacher at a progressive private school in Cobble Hill (who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym out of concern for their career), Henry recounted giving a lesson on the civil-rights movement and showing their students photographs of sit-ins and arrests. They felt like an immense hypocrite, lauding these activists yet doing nothing for a cause they know to be just as right: the climate crisis. Despite a previous warning from their boss not to get arrested, they did it anyway. “We’re gonna do this because we have to,” they said. The church erupted in applause.
Extinction Rebellion’s roots stretch back to a different kind of spiritual setting: an ayahuasca ceremony. In 2016, the British activist Gail Bradbrook traveled to Costa Rica for a psychedelic retreat, wishing to learn the “codes” for making social change. She returned home and met Roger Hallam, an activist farmer researching radical movements, and discussed theories of social change during their first meeting. Out of the blue, Hallam said he had the “codes” she was seeking, and so in 2018, they and a group of academics and activists formed XR to precipitate radical change to avert climate catastrophe. They made three demands of the British government: tell the truth about the climate crisis, get the U.K. to net-zero carbon emissions by 2025, and establish a citizens’ assembly to recommend policy. To convey the demands, they set out to mobilize a new generation of activists who would participate in some of the largest acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in decades.
The timing was perfect. In the wake of deadly heat waves in Europe and a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that the planet had only 12 years to limit disastrous warming, XR held mass protests in April 2019, blocking major bridges and roads, dropping a sinking house in the River Thames to represent rising sea levels, and spraying fake blood on the Treasury in London. Several thousand were arrested before it was over, and a group of XR members was invited to speak with the country’s environmental secretary. The government declared a climate emergency the following day and later established a citizens’ assembly. As for the third demand, the U.K. is still pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions 25 years later than XR demanded, in 2050.
XR’s fury rippled across the Atlantic to New York, where Americans added a fourth demand: a “just transition” to protect communities most at risk from climate change. The group was joining a field of agitated climate groups such as the Sunrise Movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future. XR hoped to replicate the U.K. chapter’s success in the United States, a harder target given the political power of Big Oil and right-wing media that brainwashes the public with denialism. Still, XR started to gain some ground. Seventy protesters were arrested at a die-in outside the New York Times offices, prompting the newspaper to drop its sponsorship of an oil conference. More than 60 were arrested blocking the Brooklyn Bridge to demand the city declare a climate emergency, which it did. “XR is providing a hub for more confrontational tactics for activists who are fed up with the traditional way of doing activism in our country,” said Dana R. Fisher, an expert on environmental activism and social movements at the University of Maryland. “People may just be like, This doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so XR is there with an alternative.”
Then the group’s momentum slammed into the COVID-19 lockdown. The session in the church was XR’s first mass in-person training in the city since the pandemic started, and those who attended were eager to make up for lost time. Presleigh Hayashida, a 26-year-old civil engineer, was drawn to XR because she is fed up with what feels like decades of inaction — she pointed to Biden’s failed push for climate legislation in Build Back Better — and afraid of the future of her four younger siblings. She became an organizer with XR before the pandemic and teaches civil disobedience (her shift was the next day at a Bushwick session). In October, she and others from XR blockaded the FDR Drive by sitting down on the pavement and locking arms through giant plastic tubes reminiscent of gas pipelines. When the police came, they used a grinder to cut her out, and the sparks left her with marks on her hands for a week. “It’s a sacrifice to risk arrest,” she said, understanding that it’s not for everyone. “But I don’t think there’s anything else I’d rather be doing, just because it feels so necessary to me.”
Hayashida was charged with a misdemeanor, which was downgraded to a warning to stay out of trouble for six months, at which point the charges would be dismissed. That’s exactly how XR plans “arrestable actions”: As long as you go willingly with the police — don’t go limp as U.K. protestors do — you’ll get off with a slap on the wrist, which XR legal support will handle. Hayashida isn’t in the clear yet, so she was coy about her plans for the Spring Rebellion. “Honestly, we have less and less to lose as the climate crisis worsens and we continue to see no action from government, corporations, and banks,” she said. “What do people do when they’re forced into situations that they don’t want to be in? I see us definitely willing to talk about higher forms of disruption if climate action goes nowhere.”
Arrest is not the only way for supporters to participate in XR. Landowne drew a large whiteboard out to the center of the church’s transept and began calling on the crowd for ideas for protest roles. People shouted out possibilities as Landowne scribbled them on the board: police liaison, legal support, jail support. “We have a reputation for having really kick-ass jail support!” she said as she wrote it out, the crowd cheering and clapping along. There are also media liaisons, de-escalators, and even musicians. Within XR, each role identifies with a color-coordinated risk level: red means arrestable, yellow means on the fence, and green means non-arrestable. There are plenty of reasons not to want to risk arrest, she said: if you’re at COVID risk, if it’s a professional risk, if you have an outstanding warrant, if you’re concerned about racist police treatment. “Find in yourself what’s right for you,” she said. “But if you’re interested, we’re very interested in having you.”
For every person who gets handcuffed, another five or ten make a demonstration happen. In its early days, XR was heavily criticized for exhibiting friendly behavior with British police and resorting to arrestable actions that people of color might hesitate to engage in. In 2020, the global uprising against racism prompted the mostly white group to focus more on intersectionality and coalition-building. XR members traveled to Minnesota to support Indigenous water protectors in their fight against the Line 3 oil pipeline and helped New York Communities for Change, a grassroots organization for vulnerable communities, blockade Third Avenue to push the state to ban natural gas.
“It’s definitely taught us to open ourselves more to the oppressive systems and realize how hard the work actually is,” said Mun Chong, a media coordinator with XR who joined in 2019. “The injustice and oppression that Black people face is the same system that is causing us to have the climate crisis.” At the same time, she pushes back on the frequent critique that XR is too white and too middle class, saying such identity politics distract from the larger fight. “I am from Malaysia, and we have no freedom of speech. I’d probably be dead or in jail right now doing what I do here if I were back home. So if the white middle-class folks have the privilege to get arrested and are willing, they should. No one should be holding back. Because we have everything to lose.”
That’s why Ha, a 28-year-old noncitizen software engineer born in Vietnam, strictly takes green roles. “I cannot afford to get arrested,” said Ha, who did not want her last name used because of her immigration status. When she joined XR in early 2020, she delivered a tearful address to a crowd of tech-oriented recruits about the impact of capitalism on the Global South. In Hanoi, summers have become so unbearably hot that her family can hardly go outside. The city has some of the most alarming air-pollution levels in the world, and Ha is constantly worried about her parents’ health; she said her brother struggles to breathe every time he goes there. But Communist authorities there have little appetite for environmental protests. “You cannot really protest against the government in Vietnam,” she said. But in the U.S., “you can take action.”
Within XR, Ha said she wants to decenter whiteness and create more space for people like herself who cannot risk arrest. She primarily volunteers as a coordinator of internal digital infrastructure, but she’s also part of a subgroup devoted to supporting at-risk communities. During the rebellion, the group plans to set up a booth in Washington Square Park to do outreach. Ha might volunteer with jail support too. “I want to amplify all the voices of people who cannot afford to partake in this tactic,” she said. “The one thing I have to agree with: There’s usefulness of every tactic,” she said, referring to arrest. “We are in an ecosystem. To enact change, you need all the groups. You need all the tactics. Maybe this tactic is hard for groups of people who are more vulnerable, but it’s still necessary in the sense that we are asking people with privilege to put it down to protect the rest of us.”
XR says arrest is not the goal but rather a tactic, a risk that comes with higher forms of disruption. Others question the purpose of jamming a bunch of activists into a jail cell, saying that it’s not going to precipitate a sustainable future and that things could get out of hand if police get impatient. But it could win sympathizers, media attention, and, for activists losing faith like Hayashida, show the world what ordinary people like her are willing to do for the climate. “It feels like we’re screaming into the void,” said Hayashida. “This is coming for all of us.”
No matter what they choose to do, everyone has to abide by XR’s core principles. In the church, the group recited them in unison: Take responsibility for your actions. No violent language (“That’s a hard one,” Karen Bixler whispered to her friend in the middle of the pews). No property damage (“That’s a hard one, too,” he whispered back).
Bixler, an 80-year-old retiree with a cane and a tie-dye shirt, drove five hours from Bethel, Vermont, for the training session. The first time she got arrested was in Germany in the 1980s, protesting Frankfurt Airport’s Runway 18 West, and a dozen times after that at various events, such as the time in Vermont where she chained herself to an excavator at a pipeline protest. She came to New York because she wants to be part of bigger actions. “I have the least to lose,” said Bixler. “I’m white. I hate going to meetings. I would rather get arrested.” Bixler is especially animated over racism and Indigenous rights. “People of color have been taking the brunt of it forever,” she said, adding that she went to the Standing Rock Reservation to support the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2017.
“Civil disobedience is the one thing that I feel that I can do,” she said. “Sometimes there’s a call to get all the old folks out front because maybe people will feel differently about beating up their grandma than beating up punk kids.” This month, she plans to drive back from Bethel to protest for several days and take on arrestable roles. If any angry bystanders tell her to get a job, she’s got her retort down pat: “I’ve worked more years than you’ve been alive, so fuck off.”
