They chose Berkeley Square. This is in Mayfair, a global centre for hedge funds, offshore capital and the super rich. So the peaceful occupation of a green space at its heart had obvious symbolism. But the square has other resonances too. It features in a song that almost everybody in Britain knows. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, composed in 1938 and made famous in 1940 by Vera Lynn, is a love song associated, in the imagined national story, with a moment of extreme crisis and danger. Further, the nightingale is totemic for those concerned about wildlife. This species, celebrated for more than two thousand years for its beautiful song, is in catastrophic decline in Britain. (Populations are relatively robust elsewhere for now.)

On display in the square, and speaking to a troubled history, was a painting by the artist ATM of a nightingale on the tail fin of a Wellington bomber. In May 1942 the BBC discontinued its annual broadcast of nightingale song when it was feared that the drone of bombers passing overhead might forewarn the Nazi military. The painting will be featured in a new film The Last Song of the Nightingale.

“To understand nature we have to love it,”  Sam Lee, a folk singer and member of The Nest Collective, told a crowd of two to four thousand. He conveyed greetings and support from Sarah Darwin, a botanist and great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, who works in Berlin — a city where nightingales are thriving to the extent that their songs, which can be so loud as to break EU law, are an annoyance to some Berliners.

Lee led the crowd in practice runs of an old French round about the nightingale, and an adapted version of Lynn’s schmaltzy, seductive hit, later reprised with a string band. If it wasn’t a folk song before, Lee later said, it is now. Lee also highlighted Let Nature Sing, a campaign by the RSPB to get a track of pure birdsong including the nightingale to number one in the UK charts. The song can be streamed or downloaded here.

An Extinction Rebellion organiser reflected on the significance of the evening of meditation, song and poetry. “Nightingales sing loudest when it is darkest,” she said, “and this is the darkest moment for humanity. We come together not in fear but in hope and love.” There was praise for the Metropolitan Police — “the most light-handed police force in the world.”

The composer Cosmo Sheldrake joined Sam Lee in a performance of Children of Darkness.  Sheldrake then mustered all those assembled into tranches to sing the names of disappeared species on different notes. The dissonant but arresting ecophony that this produced was followed by two minutes of silence. The event continued with songs and poems in small and larger groups, coming together again for a last sing.

Alongside the global youth climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion has commanded significant attention over the last few weeks even as horrors dominate the news cycle. In response, some politicians and others in positions of power have said they recognise the need for change.  There is talk of a Green New Deal. The Scottish and Welsh governments have declared a climate emergency, and the Labour party  wants the UK to do the same. According to a poll by Greenpeace, 76% of people in Britain say that they would cast their vote differently to protect the planet.  What follows in practice remains to be seen. The climate and anti-extinction movements themselves are evolving. One thing seems sure: those present in Berkeley Square on Monday night showed that love, music and story can play a vital role in our possible futures.

Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings and an Associate at Perpsectiva

Photo by Hugh Warwick

I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to be arrested this week. That feels like such an odd thing to write. I’ve been on plenty of marches and done years of NGO lobbying, but I’ve never been involved in direct action protest before. By the time this post goes up on Perspectiva’s blog, I will be blocking a road somewhere in the middle of London, possibly with many thousands of other people who are heeding Extinction Rebellion’s call to fill the streets until the government acknowledges the climate and ecological crises we are in. By the time you read this, some of my hitherto law-abiding friends and neighbours might already have been arrested.

It’s not because it’s a complicated decision that I haven’t decided yet. The tactics, about which Extinction Rebellion is open, are very simple. There are three options to bring change, they say. There’s the kind of campaigning – lobbying, petitions, letters, meetings, marches – that for decades has failed to reduce carbon emissions and the rate of destruction of nonhuman species and habitats. I did many years of that sort of campaigning and became depressed about its limitations: that it can slowly change individual laws and policies but not make the necessary systemic shifts. At the other extreme there’s violent revolution, which as everybody knows does not end well. And then, as a third option, there’s mass nonviolent civil disobedience, which is what Extinction Rebellion is proposing.

If a small proportion of the population – 3.5% according to the research into previous nonviolent resistance movements that Extinction Rebellion is leaning on – rises up in nonviolent civil disobedience, change can happen. There are many things to say about the differences between the civil rights movement, in which people were mobilising and standing up against already-existing omnipresent threats to their lives, and the type of environmental and climate activism in developed countries where privileged and often white people are still only starting to realise that what feels like a looming existential threat to them has long been an existential threat to communities of colour and other less privileged people.

But as an alternative to the grinding work of policy campaigning or the disaster of violence, the XR route makes sense to me. It’s the first time an activist proposition has made sense for a long time, and it does so more because I know the other two won’t work, than because I’m particularly convinced that this route will: we clearly have to try it. My indecision about my arrestability is really quite boringly practical. We have small children, no extended family living nearby, my husband and I both work part-time in order to share earning and childcare duties, and if I end up having to travel three hours to London to attend court – or worse – when my husband needs to be away for work, we’re kind of stuck. We have reciprocal relationships with kind neighbours, but I wouldn’t want to impose my energetic three year old on any of them, nor deprive him of the company of those he knows best, for too long.

So in this dilemma I find myself weighing up two impossible-to-compare scenarios. The practicalities of childcare to cover a night in a police cell and court dates, against the possibility of halting the extinction of human and nonhuman life on earth. That’s what climate change and mass extinction do, once you take them seriously: they make everything else seem utterly ridiculous. And yet even as we’re trying to protect life in the future, we cannot entirely forget the life that we are living; I cannot leave a three and a six year old without care. Luckily there are many options for support I can give to others who are going to get themselves arrested, even if I don’t, so I will find a way to join in.

Activism is all about dilemmas. It puts its participants in dilemmas about how far to go, as I am currently experiencing. It puts its opponents in dilemmas about how to respond. The police next week will have to decide whether to let Extinction Rebellion bring London traffic to a standstill, allowing us to achieve our aims, or arrest us to clear us out, which will also allow us to achieve our aims.

Activism puts its audience, too, in dilemmas about whether to join in. I know people who are deeply worried by our ecological emergency, yet who cannot bring themselves to participate in Extinction Rebellion: they can’t see themselves behaving or looking ‘like that.’ The journalist and author Jamie Bartlett was talking about this unappealing side of activism in his book Radicals; the American activist and writers Jonathan Smucker despaired, in his recent book Hegemony How-To, of the clubhouse mentality which puts outsiders off.

I’ve been working on a project with Perspectiva called Beyond Activism and will be publishing a book at the end of this year, and a chapter of it online soon. We’re not beyond activism because it’s not needed: quite the opposite, in such a time of ecological and political breakdown. But I am hoping to get beyond some of the ways that we commonly think about activism. I’m starting from this observation that activists, by behaving as activists, can help to inoculate non-activists against wanting to take part, and am investigating what might be going on in the unconscious aspects of these interactions.

At the core of the Gandhian nonviolence that inspires Extinction Rebellion is the proposition that you can oppose and resist a system without dehumanising your opponents. Extinction Rebellion, a decentralised movement in which anyone can organise actions as long as they stick to the principles, is insistent on not blaming and shaming. Only by observing this principle can we avoid creating an ‘other’ on whom we end up projecting the unwanted, unacknowledged, perhaps less attractive parts of ourselves, since that route, as psychotherapists recognise, has always been the path to conflict. In Gandhi’s words, ‘It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself.[1]

I have enjoyed holding and working with this idea since joining my local XR group, after years of feeling that my activist calling was to call out the ‘bastards’ who were running the companies and banks and tax havens I was investigating as an NGO campaigner and journalist. But even within Extinction Rebellion’s principles and values, we still find ourselves inevitably in positions of opposition across a divide: the divide being, in this case, the banner that we are holding in front of us on a roadblock.

My local group engaged in some deep soul-searching after holding up the traffic in Exeter last month and experiencing utter fury from motorists. We might have been nonviolent in our words and thoughts, but the people held up at several junctions certainly weren’t. So we are still wondering about the possibility of finding common ground in such oppositional situations, common ground on which we can all share our experience of being frightened humans who are worried for the future. No doubt we will be continuing these discussions somewhere on a blocked road next week. Perhaps we will see you there.

Anthea Lawson leads Perspectiva’s Beyond Activism programme

[1] Fischer, Louis (ed.), The Essential Gandhi: An anthology of his writings on his life, work and ideas, Vintage, 1962, p87

Revelations about the speed of climate change took off at a gallop in the first weeks of 2019. A new study has determined that the rate of ice loss in Greenland has increased fourfold since 2003. “The research,” noted The Guardian, “provides fresh evidence of the dangers posed to vulnerable coastal places as diverse as Miami, Shanghai, Bangladesh and various Pacific islands. ”  And, observed The New York Times, the new study “is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative.” Just a few days before, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is losing six times more mass than it was four decades ago.

And there’s more. Another new study published this month has found that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. This will contribute to further sea level rise and likely cause major changes in ocean chemistry and ecology.

Keeping up and making sense of all this is as challenging as ever. In about 2010, Timothy Morton the critic coined the term ‘hyperobject’ to describe matters that are so big and far reaching that they elude our metaphorical and conceptual lexicon. He had climate change in mind, and the term may have its uses. But, I think, it is vital to try to appreciate what is changing and what is being lost in very specific, non-generalised ways: to pay attention to the details. And in this regard, another kind of work published this month is helpful. Dahr Jamal’s The End of Ice (excerpted here) is directed at the general reader, and it is worth slowing down a little to read. Jamal writes:

Modern life has compressed time and space. You can traverse the globe in a matter of hours, or gain information in nanoseconds. The price for this, along with everything we want, on demand, all the time, is a total disconnection from the planet that sustains our lives.

As a result of this disconnection we fail to appreciate that:

swathes of the natural world are, in the blink of a geological eye, falling into oblivion.

Jamal’s aim is to help his readers to see and feel  rapid change and loss in some of the places he loves best, which in his case are the glaciers and high mountains where he has spent much of his life. Other artist and authors are trying to do this too. Two fine examples are Nancy Campbell’s fine  The Library of Ice and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, which will be published in May, and which includes some of the most transcendent and powerful writing about Greenland in recent years.

Back in 2014 the philosopher Thomas Metzinger wrote that the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming “seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species.” He predicted that during the next decades “we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings.”  The view would seem to accord with the track record: since 2005 total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the worse case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But the show is not over. Responding at Perspectiva Jonathan Rowson has observed

Failing is not the same as failed, and it is sometimes wise to accept limitations, yet there is hope in Metzinger’s premise — “the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species”. Those abilities of our species are not fixed. We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can grow and change for the better. We also know that is deeply rewarding but difficult.

Metzinger would surely agree. In an essay published on Aeon around this time of year in 2018 he wrote

The real challenge is not climate change as such; the true problems humankind must confront are the inbuilt features of our very own minds, such as systematic rationality and empathy deficits, self-deception, and the extreme vulnerability of the inner mechanisms creating mental autonomy.

Vital to building any mechanisms for mental autonomy is regaining control over one’s sense of attention. Perspectiva Associate Dan Nixon argues (on Aeon and InsideOut ) that:

most effective of all… is simply to return to an embodied, exploratory mode of attention, just for a moment or two, as often as we can throughout the day. Watching our breath, say, with no agenda. In an age of fast-paced technologies and instant hits, that might sound a little … underwhelming. But there can be beauty and wonder in the unadorned act of ‘experiencing’

And it can be possible to bring greater attention and awareness to what one shares in community and action with others. In a post on the importance of reconciliation, the geographer Jem Bendell writes:

I envision seeing whole neighbourhoods and camps of people spontaneously singing and dancing together of their pure joy of experiencing all sensations of life, both during and between working together on useful tasks. Not because they are singing from habit, custom, obligation, or recreation, but because they are so connected to the wonder of experiencing life while serving life.

In The End of Ice, Dahr Jamal celebrates the approach of someone half a world away:

I am heartened by people like my friend Karina Miotto in Brazil, who has devoted her entire life to protecting the Amazon. Each time a report is published about increased deforestation in her beloved rainforest, I watch Karina become consumed in grief. But each time, she goes deeper within herself and her community, further strengthening her love for that portion of the planet where she lives, and repurposes herself into her next action to protect the Amazon. I find solace in the fact that there are millions of others like Karina, particularly among the younger generations, who have drawn their lines around their respective portions of the planet closest to their hearts and are making their stands.

In the struggle to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change, or adapt to them, the wisdom and courage of those we love, and others we may never know, could be our greatest resource.

Caspar Henderson @casparhenderson is an Associate at Perspectiva

Image: Cyanometer of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt. Credit Kirsten Carlson. Source Amusing Planet