Each morning, I file my vlog. The leaves rustle round me and the squirrels curse at me but I hold up my phone and talk loudly at it. Yesterday, for the first time, I didn’t feel like it. Not much had changed so it seemed a shame to disturb the tree top talking about […]
To James ‘Iggy’ Fox We are nature. We are science. We turn grief into action. We protest and we sing and we play and we dance. We do so for life. We are mourning the earth. We are mourning us. We are re-inventing the city. We are the grief-stricken carnival spirit that marks […]
José Gualinga is a leader of the Native People of Sarayaku, an indigenous Kichwa group with 1400 inhabitants living in a remote part of Ecuador’s southern Amazon. Known for their defence of the rights of nature and indigenous peoples, the Sarayaku call themselves the People of Noon, referring to an ancient prophecy of their ancestors […]
José Gualinga es un líder del Pueblo Originario de Sarayaku, un pueblo indígena Kichwa de 1400 habitantes situado en una parte remota de la Amazonía ecuatoriana. Conocidos por su defensa a favor de los derechos de la naturaleza y de los pueblos indígenas, los Sarayaku se llaman a sí mismos “el Pueblo del Medio Día”, […]
Writers Rebel interviews Nayra Chalán, an indigenous leader from Ecuador who played a key role in the October 2019 indigenous uprising. […]
Read More… from Read: Nayra Chalán on the Anniversary of Ecuador’s Indigenous Rebellion
Writers Rebel entrevista a Nayra Chalán, una líder indígena de Ecuador que tuvo un papel clave en el levantamiento indígena de octubre de 2019. […]
Read More… from Leer: Nayra Chalán en el aniversario de la rebelión indígena de Ecuador
Feathers & Bones There are many carcasses, hundreds of thousands falling out of the sky in a two-mile stretch inland, just in front of my house. Over a dozen flycatchers, swallows and warblers, a volume of deaths both common and sensitive, inexplicable. Before dying to reach winter grounds three billion […]
During the recent Rebellion we lost an inspirational friend and ally, David Graeber. This Sunday, 11 October 2020, sees an Intergalactic Memorial Carnival take place in over 100 (and counting) locations around the world – and everyone from XR is invited. Rebels in London can head to Portobello Road, and there are events planned […]
Read More… from Read: We Celebrate the Life of David GraeberDavid Graeber
Diana McCaulay, Jamaican environmentalist and author of Daylight Come, (Peepal Tree Press), spoke with Trinidadian author and Writers Rebel co-founder, Monique Roffey. They talked about about ‘Goatillas’, a carbon Neutral Caribbean, deadly heat, and Climate Change as bedfellow with our Colonial past. Diana, congratulations on publishing such a relevant book for our […]
Read More… from Read: Q&A with Diana McCaulayDiana McCaulay and Monique Roffey
The day before the sky swallowed us, I sat in my car in the parking lot of one of the island’s crowded supermarkets and listened to the radio for storm updates. The 11 o’clock was late, gospel music blared hope on the AM channels and an aimless circle spun blindly on my phone. Bobby’s […]
Read More… from Read: In the Shadow of the StormRichard Georges
Sakura Not Yoshino in April when blossom-fringed branches bow towards the ground in prayer beneath an early moon illuminating the frailty of white clouds where friends gather to sip sake and petals flutter to the ground pale as moths but deep January in Islington’s Highbury Fields where these tender buds this early […]
Liz Jensen gave this speech at the XR event Forfattere gør oprør, which was held in front of Danmarks Radio (DR), the national broadcaster, on the afternoon of 18 September 2020. Grief can do two things. It can shrink your soul – or it can expand it. Most of us here know grief. And if […]
What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene? I’m not sure writers have much of a role in the world we inhabit now, or that we ever did: literature is wildly overrated; remember Auden’s ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? I say this with sorrow and anger and disillusionment, not triumph. […]
The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in […]
Read More… from Read: Tufton Street – Fiery Words Under a Police HelicopterCharlotte Du Cann
I first got involved with Extinction Rebellion when I was researching a novel set in 2030. As I read the science, waves of emotion crashed over me: anger, dismay, grief. I had a lot of questions: why hadn’t I heard any of this before? Why wasn’t the crisis on the front pages? Why, too, […]
What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene? X: the implications of the anthropocene are huge. We writers should help to provide a change of vision about our place in the world, on this planet. But if we are reaching the final stretch of anthropocene, then the writers are […]
I lost my heart in Leafless Year. I like the sound of that phrase, and it’s very nearly true. Her name was Emmanuelle. Everyone called her Nelly but I preferred her full name and she let me use it, every Saturday in our afternoon drama club. She was very slender, with brown hair cut […]
Let’s take a moment, this moment, to reflect upon where we are and why, before we launch into the urgent matter of September. Why ‘Extinction Rebellion’? Because when your government is driving you and your family over a cliff, it’s no longer a legitimate government. Rebellion against it is permitted – indeed, it’s required. […]
Read More… from Read: Now and never: a note of reflection for the September RebellionRupert Read
Rebel diary — October 2019 This is for my children — and your children too. Love like you have never loved before. Rebel for life. It doesn’t take many people to take a bridge and we took it quickly. But we didn’t have infrastructure, the police had taken it all the day before in a raid on a nearby […]
Read More… from Read: Rebel diary: for my childrenWoodford Roberts
I did my GCSEs last year, a few weeks after the April Rebellion. I just scraped through – when you’ve spent two weeks on the barricades watching people being carried away by the police and hearing scary facts about the future of the planet, exams don’t seem that important. Why do I care how […]
Read More… from Read: I dropped out of school to protest the Climate EmergencyBlue Sandford
Much is made of the relationships, the intersections, the similarities and differences between various feelings and emotional states. How do you tell envy from jealousy? Why does love so readily turn to hate? What are the tonal variations between shame and embarrassment, fear and anxiety, guilt and remorse? I find myself churning over these […]