{"id":49220,"date":"2019-10-28T18:26:42","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T23:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49220"},"modified":"2019-10-28T18:26:45","modified_gmt":"2019-10-28T23:26:45","slug":"extinction-rebellion-four-criticisms-and-why-theyre-unconvincing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49220","title":{"rendered":"Extinction Rebellion: Four Criticisms (and why they\u2019re unconvincing)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Extinction Rebellion: Four Criticisms (and why they\u2019re unconvincing)<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The issue of climate change activism and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has caused me a good deal of intellectual and emotional soul-searching. A journey that began last year with a large helping of scepticism on my part took me last Friday to a cell in Sutton Police Station, where I whiled away several hours. I\u2019m not going to tell that story here, but my enforced idleness at least gave me the opportunity to reflect on the various criticisms of XR that have been doing the rounds of the media, formal and social, during its actions over the last couple of weeks and why I\u2019ve now come to find these criticisms unconvincing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So below I bring you a sceptic\u2019s guide to XR scepticism, in a two-part post that\u2019ll be continued next time. In this first one I focus on issues that strike me as requiring a genuine, substantive response and\/or that I wrestled with myself in embracing the movement. In the next one, I discuss objections that seem more like flummery to me (\u201cXR is too white and middle-class\u201d, \u201cXR is a millenarian death cult\u201d, \u201ctechnical innovation will save us\u201d etc.) but nevertheless tell us interesting things about our times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve chased down a few references and datasets to inform this post after regaining my freedom and internet connectivity (same thing, right?), but I\u2019m dashing this out kind of free-form while I can still remember my thoughts without explicitly linking to many sources for these criticisms. They\u2019re not hard to find online for anyone who cares to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here we go, then \u2013 XR defended, Part I, in relation to four common objections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. With their nylon tents, smartphones, coach rides to London and so forth, XR activists demonstrably participate in the fossil fuel economy and are therefore hypocritical.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Extinction Rebellion: Four Criticisms (and why they\u2019re unconvincing) The issue of climate change activism and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has caused me a good deal of intellectual and emotional soul-searching. A journey that began last year with a large helping of scepticism on my part took me last Friday to a cell in Sutton […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15683,141,23169,22932,9738,27400],"class_list":["post-49220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-chris-smaje","tag-climate-change","tag-extinction-rebellion","tag-scepticism","tag-small-farm-future","tag-xr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49221,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49220\/revisions\/49221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}