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TThe timing is impeccable. In the midst of political ferment around the world, and with the anxiety for the coming winter hardening in dread, Extinction Rebellion is back. During the weekend it has made its presence felt in towns and cities throughout the country; now, following the arrest of several of its organizers, its activists and supporters are preparing to arrive on Tuesday in Parliament Square, opposite the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, and in central Manchester.
As usual, it is assumed that those involved will be portrayed as eccentric and dangerous merchants of despair. But whatever the millennial sense of doom that sometimes hangs over their actions, many of the people at the heart of the movement are admirably practical and focused on overcoming the overwhelming political challenges that climate change still presents. And among the protests, there will be an example of what this means in practice: the climate and ecological emergency bill, conceived in part by people with close ties to XR, and due to be formally launched on Wednesday.
The plan has the support of the Green Party deputy, Caroline Lucas, but obviously, the point is not whether it will become law. The bill is a good way to do two things. It highlights how much our politicians are defying the urgency of the moment. And, by presenting clear and precise proposals to drastically reduce carbon emissions and restore biodiversity in the same typefaces and official vocabulary as the laws that define entire swaths of our lives, it makes the prospect of radical action eminently imaginable. .
Reflecting an old XR lawsuit, one of the core elements of the bill is a citizens’ assembly, which would convene to draw up specific plans to change society and the economy in accordance with the fundamental objective of the legislation. This would be much more than a consultative exercise: even if, for example, the government did not agree with any proposal that had won the support of more than 80% of the assembly, it would still have to be voted on by the deputies. To some people, this might seem like potential frustration and defeat, but it would also mark the entry into the legislative process of a new and disruptive element, one that could turn things away from haunted circles, lobbyists, and the eternal Westminster tendency to conservatives. . groupthink.
The idea is yet another manifestation of one of the few sources of promise found amidst the polarization and chaos of 21st-century politics: the gloriously simple notion of bringing together groups of people representative of the general population to try to plot One Way. through difficult problems, and thus we begin to reduce our susceptibility to division and resentment. In times as turbulent as ours, that can seem almost absurd. The strange thing is, it actually seems to work.
In Ireland, the Citizens’ Assembly launched in 2016 helped pave the way for the country’s referendum on women’s reproductive rights. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have created assemblies that discuss a number of pressing issues, and the appeal of so-called deliberative democracy is spreading at the municipal and local levels. In Bristol, for example, after the work of the Green and Labor parties, a citizens’ assembly is about to start considering how to reshape the city in the wake of all the changes caused by the pandemic, backed by a council that seems be willing to take their proposals seriously.
The French Citizens’ Commission for Climate, created at the behest of Emmanuel Macron after the yellow vests (yellow vest), the president has accepted all but three of your 149 recommendations. And here, too, the first steps are being taken to use citizens’ assemblies to address the variety of issues surrounding the climate crisis. Last year, the UK Climate Assembly was created by six select committees of the House of Commons, and its final report will be published on 10 September. Their task was to come up with recommendations that would meet the UK’s goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, which became law last year and which XR called woefully inadequate. But when I spoke last week with people who had participated in the initiative, what caught my attention was the feeling of a new way of approaching the questions of politics, politics and power.
Adrian, a Belfast father of three, had received one of 30,000 letters sent randomly to people to establish the group from which the assembly would be drawn. He told me that he had agreed to participate out of a “sense of duty to society.” He had long thought of the climate crisis as an issue that demanded “a big change in mindset”, but beyond “recycling and throwing things away in the right color”, he had never been involved in any campaign or protest.
“It was brilliant,” he said. “Just looking at the diversity of the UK population represented in that room and then having a dialogue, as opposed to what you normally see in the media now.” Among other issues, she had talked about “how we live: the amount of travel people make, the kinds of things people buy and how our homes use energy” and agriculture. There were differences of opinion “from the first moment, but despite everything, we reached results that we agreed on. We had to accept that there would be a give and take. “
As he spoke, some questions inevitably came to mind. For any assembly of citizens to truly feel as if they are deliberating on behalf of millions of people, wouldn’t they have to broadcast or broadcast their debates, and wouldn’t the evil and harassment of social media rule it out now? Given that any assembly could easily be portrayed, albeit unfairly, as a fig leaf for politicians, would its decision really do away with the cynicism that often defines the public view of politics? What about people who may reject the very premise of an assembly called to discuss how we seriously transform our lives? But as he listened to Adrian’s account of an experience that he said had completely convinced him of the urgency of what was discussed, he soon gained another thought: Given the large-scale failure of our politicians, what else do we have?
Novelist Elif Shafak just published a poignant and insightful essay titled How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. “We have all the tools to build our societies anew, reform our ways of thinking, correct inequalities and end discrimination, and choose sincere wisdom over bits of information, choose empathy over hate, choose humanism over tribalism. “, he writes,” however, we do not have much time or margin for error as we lose our planet, our only home. ” Part of the answer to that dilemma, perhaps, lies in a vision that will be central to this week’s XR protests, but it couldn’t be more different: crowds of strangers quietly gathering in hotel meeting rooms and charting the future. Based on the things we are In danger of forgetting: empathy, openness, and the basic human ability not only to think about complex problems, but to actually solve them.
• John Harris is a columnist for The Guardian
