Extinction Rebellion Vancouver winds down, says new group will move away from public disruption

The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Vancouver says a new approach is needed to build a broader, more effective movement to fight climate change. 

Tom Hetherington says founders of Extinction Rebellion Vancouver are winding down the organization and a new group known as Unify Regional Extinction Rebellion plans to take a less disruptive approach based on the recent work of Extinction Rebellion in the U.K.

Hetherington says past actions by Extinction Rebellion Vancouver, which included blocking intersections in Vancouver to disrupt traffic, were designed to snap the public out of complacency when it comes to the climate crisis. 

"Sometimes when people are asleep, you've got to ring the bell, you've got to make some noise to wake them up, and that's what we did for the first three or four years," Hetherington told CBC's On the Coast Monday.

"What we found, however, was we tended to alienate people … who are busy doing their jobs."

Hetherington says while he respects protesters willing to risk arrest to sound the alarm about climate change, emphasis was placed on a specific tactic — one the organization described as "non-violent civil disobedience" — rather than a broader strategy.

"A tactic is one thing that you do among many," he said. "They kind of focused on the one 'arrest' tactic, which didn't turn out for building a mass movement."

Disruptive tactics can 'drown out ... moral appeal': prof

Kimberley Brownlee, a professor in the University of British Columbia's department of philosophy and author of the book Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, says disruptive tactics, such as protesters throwing paint on a museum exhibit, can "drown out the moral appeal" of a cause and lead the public to "lose sight of the reason people are doing this."

She said the challenges of Extinction Rebellion's recent shift brought to mind Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" which called for non-violent civil disobedience to fight racism and segregation. 

In it, he wrote, "we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive."

"I can see ... why strategically they feel they need to shift away from disruptive tactics, but I think Martin Luther King Jr.'s advice would be that we shouldn't misattribute the tension," Brownlee said. 

"People are responding to climate crisis, feel the urgency of the crisis. That is the tension that's coming to the surface and that we as a society have to reckon with rather than pointing fingers at people who are trying to make us aware."

'A movement of movements'

Unify Regional Extinction Rebellion aims to build a coalition — "a movement of movements," according to Hetherington, that brings together organizations with similar goals. 

Extinction Rebellion was founded in the U.K. in 2018 and has grown to more than 1,000 local groups in 86 countries, according to its website. 

Earlier this year, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Clare Farrell told CBC's As It Happens that the organization was temporarily shifting its tactics in an effort to "build a broader, bigger base."

"To put it in a sentence, we're calling for a citizen-led democratic end to the fossil fuel era. We don't trust the people who are holding the levers of power today to make the decisions about how to move into the next phase," Farrell said.

Farrell said they haven't ruled out disruptive actions in the future. 

"We haven't said we're never going to do anything that annoys anyone ever again," she said. "We've just said what we're going to do is we're going to avoid getting in ordinary people's way."

Extinction Rebellion U.K. recently organized an event they called 'The Big One', which saw four days of actions involving a numbers of groups. 

Hetherington hopes to build a similar large event that will bring 100,000 people to the streets of Vancouver.

"If we can't do that in Vancouver, if we can't do that in Canada's greenest city, if we can't do that after four or five years of struggling against Trans Mountain pipeline, who can?"