Ben & Mia’s XR Story

“Seeing the reality of things and reading the newspaper being informed, you just see that there’s only so long you can read about it, and only so many petitions you can sign or letters to an MP that you can write until it’s like actually no one’s listening.

What creates the rage is the criminal denial and obfuscation by the powers that be of the severity of the crisis and their complicity. 

What Extinction Rebellion has done has galvanized a movement of rebels, and I know that every single rebel that I meet, there is a kinship there and the people that I know in Bristol are people who I’m sharing my future with. 

You know that gives me hope. 

That gives me community that gives me a sense of agency. 

That’s the stuff that kind of keeps the fires burning.“

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Daniel’s XR Story

“I used to work at McDonald’s. I had no real qualifications for jobs that I actually wanted to do. 

So one of the first things that I realized when I joined Extinction Rebellion was that there were other people who gave a shit, and cared about other people cared about animals, cared about the climate and to be surrounded by those people who echoed how you feel. 

That was one of the most relieving things that I felt in a long time. 

I think 2023 will be a really exciting year for activism and I’m really excited to see so many more people stepping up out of their comfort zone doing stuff they never would have dreamed of. 

And being there and helping create that change, it’s really inspiring to see and day by day with getting more people, more conversations being happening. 

And through those conversations from daily day-to-day people, they will soon be feeding into government talks and UN talks and EU talks. 

And that is where the real changes will happen.“

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Dave’s XR Story

“So I’m a church warden at my local church down in the city centre and for various reasons, Extinction Rebellion were looking for a venue for the final closing ceremony of the week, so I invited them in and it was absolutely amazing.

It wasn’t just a bunch of, you know, weird hippies in the street making a lot of noise. 

These were people who were serious. It just had a whole lot of meaning that suddenly. 

I felt I had to engage with this in some way. 

Christians of XR wanted to send a a strong message to the Church of England and we decided the best way of doing that was to disrupt cathedral services so we were in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and 13 activists were inside the cathedral and held out banners saying divest from fossil fuels

We feel very strongly that the Church of England is not always fulfilling its obligation to look after the planet, and in particular to divest from fossil fuel. “

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Nigel’s XR Story

The thing that I can’t bear, which keeps bringing me back to the fight, is the fact that I’m now a grandparent.  I’ve got 5 grandchildren. T

They are going to live to see the other end of this century, perhaps as far as 2100. By then the scientists are are telling us there is no doubt we will be deep Into the climate and ecological crisis. 

The only way that I can make things easier for them is to fight for actions which will mitigate and reduce the terrible impact of climate and ecological crisis. 

In Bristol today I’ve found 130 groups that are loosely could be called environmental, social justice, climate justice groups. We’re going to reach a tipping point where suddenly the number of people who are determined to do something about it will hugely increase and we will flip from having only a few people coming to Extinction Rebellion to huge numbers of people wanting to get involved in environmental movements of all kinds

Although it’s a very natural thing to want to run away from it. That’s never going to sort it out” 

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