How do you get people to act for a regenerative world? Declare an emergency.
What communicators and strategists could learn from Extinction Rebellion and the climate movement.
Last week I wrote two short pieces which both explored what we could do to activate people to work together for a regenerative future rather than the collapse of civilisation through the impacts of climate change. I spoke about a new relationship with death as being one of the options.
In the last two weeks — actually for much of the last 8 months — we have received an absolute masterclass in how to persuade people to take action from the climate change movement. The strategy is simple: lead the public into emergency mode. It is one of the best examples of strategy and persuasion I have seen since consumer brands were at their most powerful. It marks a renaissance of activism, brimming with a new, inclusive, non-violent, persistence.
Today the UK Parliament will discuss declaring a climate emergency. On Monday Nicola Stugeon Scotland’s First Minister already did. Last week the University of Bristol declared a climate emergency. On 13th November last year Bristol city council became the first council to declare a climate emergency, and this year Cambridge, Portsmouth, Leeds and in total 27 local councils have so far followed suit. All this week members of Extinction Rebellion have been meeting with political parties and representatives of local government. [NB.since writing this article the UK government has declared a climate emergency].
What has made Extinction Rebellion so successful so far? What can other NGOs, pressure groups and civil society movements learn from this campaign? Here are a couple of my own observations.
- Be Believable
I think the first and most important thing is the obvious one; base your campaign in a believable idea that can be contagious. What is fascinating is how quickly we have managed to ‘adopt’ the idea of a climate emergency. In normal parlance we would think of an emergency as something that has to be dealt with in seconds, minutes maximum. Now it’s true that we should have been dealing with climate change yesterday, and that it is an existential crisis, but it is still one that will play out in years and decades. However if you look at it in terms of human life on earth — that is a real timeframe emergency. In 200,000 years of homo sapiens existence, the next 10 years is the equivalent of a few minutes. It is still an achievement to be able to put that across.
2. Clear Principles
Have a clear set of principles from which to operate. Extinction Rebellion has a core set of 10 values. These include a shared vision, absolute non-violence, welcoming everyone and every part of everyone, a regenerative culture underpinned by reflection and learning, self organisation and self-responsibility.
3. Designed to be Self-Organising.
XR is based on careful study of mass movements for civil disobedience and disruption but also the prevailing shift and desire in organisations and people for autonomy, creativity and self-management. The local XR groups which sprung up were free to plan and implement their own actions so long as they stay within the movement’s guiding principles. The different sites across London had the same freedom — to organise their own actions, events and activities which resulted in very different qualities from Waterloo Bridge to Oxford Circus and MarbleArch, giving everyone a place where they could culturally feel at home.
4. Visually Outstanding
Extinction Rebellion also benefits from brilliantly clever visuals which appeal deeply not only to the key audience — young people — but across all ages. The bright colours are hopeful and engaging, the extinction symbol (designed by someone else) stark and full of warning.
5. Jargon-Free Communication
It has a clear, open, simple style of communicating. Every email I have sent has been jargon-free, written with heart, humility, inclusiveness and honesty. It’s action-packed programme was communicated with style and panache, — from The Pink Boat finally ‘cast adrift’ and ‘captured by police pirates’ to the relaxed, family-friendly garden and library space on Waterloo Bridge. It has been clever, witty, and when necessary to the point. The endless tide of creativity and enthusiasm to quickly adapt and latch on to every opportunity delivered to make the communication memorable, has been admirable. We are indeed The Boat.
6. Joy of the Human Spirit
Perhaps most importantly it is one of the first activist programmes this century to successfully combine an incredibly serious message, with all the grief and pain that goes with the potential for loss, with love and laughter, art as well as activism. It may not appeal to everyone — a couple of family friends were most put out at the lack of ‘seriousness’ displayed about such a critical subject — but it does speak to a majority of people who are already aware or on the cusp of aware. It called to the heart and soul whether you identified as a nature-loving hippie, a concerned retiree, or a climate change scientist and professional.
7. Simple Short Term Goals
XR publicly declares three concrete short term demands: governments should tell the truth about the climate emergency, they should go carbon net-neutral by 2025, and there should be a citizen’s assembly to explore and devise solutions.
8. Inclusive and personal
I don’t make friends easily. I’m not really comfortable any more in large crowds. I’m used to being on the edge of things. As a facilitator and change consultant, you have to learn to keep an independent distance from emotional turbulece going on around you and I carry that into my personal life like a badly packed rucksack. So I was cautious and not sure what to expect when I first joined the Extinction crowds at Marble Arch. I waited on the edge of the crowd like a nervous horse let out into a field with a new group, circling at a safe distance for a while until the first horse came out of the crowd and sniffed my nose.
Now obviously it didn’t happen quite like that! No one actually sniffed me. I just got talking to someone! And despite my unadorned appearance (I could never compete with the ravishing red brigade) and my rather middle-aged, middle-class ordinariness, I found myself easily integrated and accepted into the conversation. I ended up first sitting it out on Waterloo Bridge and then back at Marble Arch volunteering to help with first aid. I wasn’t arrested or glued to anything but I felt I made a contribution.
To have so many different options to get involved; to be accepted no matter what option you chose, brought the key value of ‘every bit of everyone is welcome’ to absolute life.
9. A carefully co-ordinated long term strategy
If you’re ready to act, and you’re prepared to operate on a true entrepeurial basis, i.e. prototype, test, review, improve — then 6 months from October to March is not a bad window of time. Although Extinction Rebellion was only formed in early Autumn of 2018, it draws on a lot of knowledge and preparation that has been emerging in the climate movement for the past 4–5 years. That has been seen as more urgent since it became clear that developed nations were not really moving on any agreed targets set down in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.
The ground for a climate emergency has been well prepared. Although it many ways it looked and felt spontaneous, the understanding of what had to be achieved — declaring a climate emergency — has been some time in preparation.
Back in 2014 when the People’s Climate March took place, an organisation called The Climate Mobilisation formed and quickly made it clear that in their view what was needed to get people to act was to declare an emergency.
“The Climate Mobilization is a growing group of people who know that climate change threatens the collapse of civilization within this century. We believe, along with many well-respected scientists and environmental analysts, that the only way to preserve a climate that is safe, stable, and supportive of human civilization is to fight climate change with a World War II-scale mobilization.
When the Climate Mobilization was founded at the People’s Climate March in 2014, there was no climate group publically organizing around the need for WWII-scale emergency speed transition. Since then, we have worked to establish an active ’emergency climate movement’ wing of the broader climate movement.”
Three years ago in April 2016, The Climate Mobilization published the paper “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement.”
The strategy document leads with: “Imagine there is a fire in your house. What do you do? What do you think about? You do whatever you can to try to put out the fire or exit the house. You make a plan about how you can put out the fire, or how you can best exit the house. Our senses are heightened, you are focused like a laser, and you put your entire self into your actions. You enter emergency mode.” Sound familiar?
The first mobilisations took place in California led by Naomi Klein’s Leap organisation, a climate NGO. By May 2018, the council voted unanimously “to explore the establishment of the country’s first climate emergency mobilization department and set aside $500,000 in seed money toward the effort. In June 2018, Berkeley declared a climate emergency and committed to an Emergency Climate Mobilization and Just Transition to end greenhouse gas emissions and begin drawing down the excess carbon in the atmosphere as quickly as possible.
The document explains how such an emergency should be declared and handled:
“The way we respond to threats — by entering emergency mode or by remaining in normal mode — is highly contagious. Imagine the fire alarm goes off in an office building. How seriously should you take it? How do you know if it is a drill or a real fire? Those questions will be predominantly answered by the actions and communications of the people around you, particularly people designated as leaders. If they are chatting and taking their time exiting the building, you will assume that this is a drill. If people are moving with haste, faces stern and focused, communicating with urgency and gravity, you will assume there is real danger and exit as quickly as possible.”
“These pressure campaigns should escalate in degrees of assertiveness, all the way to disruptive protest. However, even in a protest, we must maintain an open, welcoming attitude. Thus, while we will need to be quite confrontational and unwavering, we are not “against” our targets of protest. We gain nothing from demonizing them. We need these leaders to do the right thing. The tone should not be primarily angry, but urgent and insistent…….Protests should involve elements of protestor sacrifice, such as risking arrest or hunger strike, to generate empathy from the public. Maintaining strict non-violence is critical to winning widespread public support and is non-negotiable.”
The founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization is Margaret Salamon, a psychologist who specialises in the implementation and use of behavioural science for policy within government. As Ecologist publication stated in an interview in November 2018, “Salamon is part of a team of dedicated activists working on Extinction Rebellion’s international expansion, ensuring it has a robust enough infrastructure and resources to give the movement the capacity and stamina to organise in the long-term.”
We’ve seen the meteoric rise of Greta Thunberg’s SchoolStrike4Climate in 2018 and this year. Earlier this year — on Thursday January 24, 2019 to be precise — Greta took part in a panel at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. At her presentation were many well known other global activists like Jane Goodall, Bono, and will.i.am. The session was sponsored by Marc Benioff the CEO and founder of Salesforce, as well as a co-founder of Breakthrough Energy (nuclear) with Bill Gates. This is what we heard:-
Her words spoke to us. They woke something in us. The house is on fire. We need to panic. You’ll probably recognise the message from the strategy above.
Having a simple but motivating metaphor at the heart of a campaign demand is enormously valuable. We can all identify with the prospect of our house burning down because at some time in our life, we’ve all imagined it. It’s much closer to home (literally) than trying to imagine an apocalytic future in which food, water and shelter are as scare is in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.
Releasing the funding needed
At the heart of this strategy is a desire to activate governments, and more specifically to gain access to and ‘release’ the funds needed to realise the green energy economy. The premise is that citizens must first face, then accept, that there is an existential threat and crisis in order to go into the necessary emergency mode. You will probably have heard both Greta and Extinction Rebellion consistently use the term.
‘Once this belief is triggered through public pressure, ideally the contagion quickly spreads into government and crucially, investment circles. This would enable the release of a huge amount of resources toward solving the crisis which would quickly become the clear, top priority for society.’ [p. 4 & p. 5]
The manuel goes on to say: “The more the climate movement provides “structures for people’s engagement — clear directions and support for people who are ready to tackle the climate emergency — the more people will go into emergency mode.”[p. 7]
For anyone who has studied economies during war time, it’s easy to recall proof that when nations are in emergency mode (and probably corporations and individuals too) “all available /necessary resources are devoted to the emergency and, if necessary, governments borrow heavily.” [p. 9]
“Economic mobilization is an emergency restructuring of a modern industrial economy, accomplished at rapid speed. It involves the vast majority of citizens, the utilization of a very high proportion of available resources, and impacts all areas of society. It is nothing less than a government-coordinated social and industrial revolution. Mobilization is what happens when an entire nation enters emergency mode, and the results can be truly staggering.” [p. 8]
This is what is possible if these combined movements succeed. A vast mobilisation of previously inaccessible funds directed at a clean, green energy economy. The first step has been to engage the public and gain ‘enough’ consent. ‘Enough’ in campaign and influence terms, is generally researched to be about 3.5% of the population. Although it’s too early to say, I would expect Extinction Rebellion to have reached and engaged more than that percentage of people in the UK.
If modern proof were needed that we protect and preserve things we love, the burning down of Notre Dame in Paris, and the subsequent rapid raising of over £345million in a couple of days to restore the beautiful old church, signifies that when an emergency arrives, we act. And that was ‘just’ philanthropic action from a small group of people who value the meaning in beauty, architecture and history.
The most important things to achieve during that mobilisation will be two-fold. Firstly to secure the best possible actions to mitigate any further rises in the planet’s temperature beyond what is already unstoppable (and that’s probably aroud 2–2.5C. Still not good. Many millions will still suffer badly, but 4–5C would kill us all.
The second goal will be to ensure that the new clean, green energy economy is created within a fair and just manner. That will almost be harder than the mobilisation of an emergency that has just taken place. If the new energy economy is ‘captured’ by business as usual, and only delivers a new capitalist economy opportunity for the few to accrue even greater profits with which to protect themselves from societal disruption, that societal disruption will be inevitable and much less friendly than Extinction Rebellion.
I hope it ushers in a new world economy that is not just capitalism 2.0 but one which is mindful of the process of societal change (and collapse), protect the most vulnerable, preserves what can be preserved, and changes the systems which can still be changed.
Rebel for Life. Extinction Rebellion. Declare a Climate Emergency.
Jenny Andersson is a creative strategist who designs strategic narratives, strategy workshops and experiential events for organisations, charities and brands wanting to have a regenerative impact on the future for people and planet.
