Dear Extinction Rebellion (XR)

Thanks so much for helping to raise awareness concerning the urgent necessity of dramatic and rapid action on climate and ecology.  Your employment of civil disobedience in the form of disruptive direct action has dramatically helped raise public awareness of our need for urgent, rapid and dramatic social and political change toward a very low carbon economy. 

Now, I feel, it is time to begin to phase out principally disruptive direct action tactics and to phase in a lot more prefigurative direct action of a constructive sort. Direct action tactics usually take up one or more of these kinds:  obstructive, destructive, constructive, instructive and disruptive.  

Eco-cultural obstructive direct actions usually obstruct the movements of machines, trucks and equipment used in mining or logging, and such. Destructive direct action generally refers to sabotage of such machines and equipment -- or pipelines, and such. Constructive direct action is the heart and core of prefigurative direct action, in which we directly go about creating the kind of world we want to live in, rather than asking government to do it for us. Instructive direct action is an educational project, a project of informing the public about crucial perspectives and understandings about our situation and how we can transform. And disruptive direct action is mainly about causing a disruption to business as usual, but mainly for the sake of getting attention from the media and government. 

Most -- almost all -- of XR's direct action has been disruptive civil disobedience, and XR has not engaged in many, if any, truly large scale, high profile constructive direct actions.  I think this is because XR chose disruptive direct action as its core practice / praxis from the beginning, and it sort of got stuck there.  It's easier to be disruptive than constructive in direct action. It's easier to imagine how to disrupt a city than to imagine how to construct a new city from within the old one.  But the time has come, I think, for a re-imagination of direct action within XR. It's time for some major direct actions which include more constructive and instructive aspects or features.

There are also some good potential major actions which blend several or more of the types of direct action in my list.  For example, I have a proposed mass direct action which would be global in scope and is both strongly constructive and disruptive. It goes like this:  

Action Proposal

Fill the streets of every city on Earth with as many bicycles and other small, light, slow vehicles as possible (e.g., velomobiles, electric scooters...) -- the sorts of personal transportation vehicles we must adopt for personal transportation as we phase out fossil fuels. (This would not include the big, heavy and fast electric cars. Only vehicles which move at the speed of a bicycle would be allowed to participate, and only vehicles which are not a serious threat to bicycle-friendly streets.)

Fill these streets in this way for two hours, once a month, every month. Do everything possible to allow passage of emergency vehicles of every kind, but keep car traffic down to the speed of bicycles. This is to make the streets as safe as possible for bicyclists and to begin to send the world the message that we could begin to fold into our urban traffic mix a new kind of vehicle as well.  The new kind of vehicle would be very light, much smaller than a car, but enclosed like a car. These may be fully electric velomobile-like vehicles, or may be electric assist velomobiles which are fully enclosed against rain, snow and winter winds. They will be comfortably usable in inclement weather as well as by people who have disabilities, are unfit, or who just prefer not to use muscle power. 

The smaller, lighter and slower a vehicle is, the less materials and energy is required in its manufacture and use. Manufacture is crucial here because the world is ramping up to produce perhaps hundreds of millions of new electric cars. The average or typical electric car will use about one third of the energy it will ever use during its useful life in manufacture alone.  So the manufacture of hundreds of millions of new electric cars will blow our 'carbon budget'.  That is, electric cars are not a solution to the climate emergency. That's the messaging (instructive) aspect of the proposed direct action. The constructive aspect of the proposed direct action is that for those two hours, once a month, we'd actually be doing what we ought to be doing -- directly transforming our transportation culture. That's prefigurative direct action. This direct action would center on the prefigurative / constructive aspect.  But it would disrupt traffic for two hours on one day a month all over the world.  It would also, thereby, also be disruptive direct action: a blend. And it would be a marvelous opportunity for instructive direct action, a time to inform the public world-wide why it is we should not manufacture hundreds of millions of electric cars. 

I could say more on this, but this letter is a seed toward a hoped for conversation among those in XR who conceive and propose actions. I think it says enough to spark that conversation.

Thanks, XR, for all you do and have done. It's been crucial.  But now is the time to put constructive and instructive direct action at the core of praxis.