Activist Clare Farrell’s current framing of the climate crisis– on confronting political paralysis and urging radical collaboration between grassroots movements for a just, democratic response to rising global threats.
This episode, with Extinction rebellion cofounder, Clare Farrell, was recorded in late October at the ATLAS25 conference in Helsinki, following Dr James Hansen’s keynote and their subsequent discussion. A link to that recording is in the notes.
“We cannot keep warming below 2 degrees without purposeful actions to alter the planet’s energy balance.”
Dr James Hansen – ATLAS25
Hansen placed great emphasis on the role of aerosols in masking extra heating from global warming and how recent spikes in the earth’s temperature are linked to a reduction in aerosols over the oceans. He also stressed the need for more research on solar geoengineering citing evidence for how historic volcanic eruptions, not only cooled the planet by reflecting the suns energy back to space but also stimulated carbon sinks creating a greater uptake of carbon dioxide.
Here Clare reflects Hansen’s findings as well as on a range of issues emphasising the need for humility in facing the enormity and complexity of the climate crisis. She also stressed the dangers of arrogance or over simplistic binary thinking.
Clare Farrell
“…the world that you’re in. … It is not like the old one. We have made it unstable and now it’s never gonna be stable again …”
Full Transcript:
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Okay Claire, it’s great to speak to you. Thank you very much for taking the time. Now we have been at this conference for the last few days and you’ve been engaging in loads of different aspects but can you just give me an idea of what your sort of your base framing is when you talk about climate change today?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
Particularly based on the conversation that I had this morning with Jim and having reread his work on the way here and then been talking to him about it, the frame is that it’s very much further advanced precisely because there is so much warming that we have not felt yet that’s there and is being masked by the aerosols that are included in our pollution.
Howard Walwyn Kensington, London, UK
I knew before he started writing Global Warming in the Pipeline there was an aerosol issue with climate problem but as I tried to allude to today, a lot of people told us in Extinction Rebellion’s early formative years not to go on about it because there wasn’t enough scientific information or consensus in order to include it.
So now that we have his research saying, and I think pretty conclusively that it’s the second most important factor in terms of what’s affecting global temperatures in the whole system, that is a very serious like update of information that we are, you know, we have only just received it really in terms of, I mean obviously he started writing about this a couple of years ago, but that’s a very short time frame for us to recognise that something which was pushed out of the debate is actually the number two important thing for us to think about.
So yeah, we are in a time I think of coming to terms with that, which is quite a polite way to say it, perhaps unusually for me
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
At the same time the shipping aerosols that were taken out and there’s been the spike in temperature and you look out the window or on the news or in social media at least and you see the impacts all the way around the world and they’re spiralling out of control and then you say well, we can actually see the atmospheric concentrations [of CO2 nearly at] 40 billion tonnes this year.
We don’t have any time and the policy makers have seemed to have gone in the opposite direction – or are going in the opposite direction. Where do you think this leaves us when we have got this really hard-hitting information, we have got terrible politics, we are here in Helsinki, trying to it figure out. There are things on the table like climate interventions. What is your summary view when you take all of that into consideration?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
That we have to pull as many people together as possible to think urgently about how to act. That may not sound like a new thing for me to say but I do think that we need a renewed urgency and a renewed conversation and we also have to do it in a way which is not apologising for or just blindly accepting the fact but we have to do it with an awareness that we are being governed by absolute idiots all over the world.
It’s like there are insane and idiotic people in charge of lots of things everywhere, who are either unable to have this conversation about the technical reality that we are in, or unwilling to have it, or if they could understand it would use it to their advantage in some horrible way. So yeah, we have got a very serious problem but we have to work out what to do in light of these facts of our conditions that we are working in.
I don’t want to sound like I’m apologising for appalling politics or authoritarian leadership or swerving politically to the right but those are some of the factors that we have to live with whilst we also digest this information. Talking together and thinking about what we might do and obviously the more extreme that this information becomes about what’s happening in the earth system the more extreme people’s response is going to become.
Potentially people will say ‘just do whatever’ and that’s really frightening because the conversations about things you might do to intervene are inherently full of very frightening risks and people are very concerned about the fact that you may cause more harm than good by doing some of the things that are proposed as like climate interventions.
That said, when you look at the information that Hanson’s provided us with– and also Stefan Rahmstorf last night– you know we are embarking on the decades of tipping point changes and they are not reversible. I liked that statement in one of the talks that this is the moment where we commit– I would say we committed quite a long time ago but these are times where we re-commit. Let’s say we allowed them to tip and [now we are having] the conversation about whether or not there’s anything to be done to slow them down or stop them.
I think is important and I think it’s very important not to count yourself out of those discussions because what I can see is that there’s already a big split in the climate space.
People are making big political assumptions and judgments on individuals particularly some of these young people who have been accused of all sorts of kind of spurious, you know, you’re leaning to the right, you’re cozying up to capitalism, or, whatever the questions of their morality of their intentions and what’s driving them.
It’s important to be critical and it’s important to accept criticism and it’s but it’s also important to stay talking together and not just get split apart so I’m basically trying to take part in these conversations because I think it’s really important and I also know that lots of people are going to have them without me if I don’t show up so
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Okay so a couple of things in what you’re saying and one of them is about the moment we are in, the stresses we are in, that the the idiocy at the policymaking level – which is now profound – and you’ve come from a social movement background, how do you readdress that notion of what’s this is [collectively] and how do you get back to bringing the ‘we’ back together, to start trying to confront this?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
Interestingly you know I feel like I’m living in several different realities because I’m trying to do work on grassroots democracy in the UK. I’m trying to look at how to work with people in the cost of living movement to build up popular self-organised democratic work. I am not talking to the people who run the food banks about stratospheric aerosol injection. Perhaps I should! I haven’t started to try and do that yet.
This is very complicated because whilst I have said to myself we need to join the dots between race and discrimination, the cost of living issues, economic inequality and the climate and I have gone towards that work I have also still got a foot in the climate space enough to come and have these kinds of conversations. I don’t know quite how I bridge all of those spaces together and maybe it can’t be done. I don’t know, maybe it can but it it feels to me like sometimes I’m existing in lots of different spaces which don’t know each other and I’m jumping between them but I don’t know how to always join them together.
I’m trying but I have definitely not worked all of it out yet
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Do you think that there’s an element of the climate background and the fact that you’ve gone into it up to your eyeballs and then you’ve gone into these other areas… if those other areas shift, that there will be a climate question in those at some point and at that point, that’s when it becomes really relevant because there could be someone with a different perspective?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
Yeah, that’s it. I set out with a new set of strategic considerations about three years ago and I did it in conversation with a bunch of people including Roger Hallam and a whole load of other people thinking: okay if we think that the answer is more democracy, not less, if we think the answer is more empowerment of more people, more agency for more people, then we have got to work out how to build bridges and create the sort of enthusiasm and learning and sentiment and energy for more participatory democracy.
That means we have got to do a lot of work and so, when we were making that assessment, I looked at what is needed given our planetary predicament. We talked about the … need to talk about economics because the economy can’t go on the way it is, it just can’t. Stuff is gonna change and it’s either gonna change in one way or the other by design, by accident, by blowing up and collapsing and people patching it up… I don’t know what’s gonna happen but it is not possible for us to carry on living the way that we are in many many ways!
Economy is one thing that we are gonna have to have a view on. What is the new paradigm gonna have? What is the new paradigm of governance? What are the new structures that we need? What are the new institutions that we need? What are the things that we could either retrofit and rescue or make new?
We are gonna have to be able to understand how to run an energy system in the future, or a country, or an economy, or anything you are gonna need to understand the world that you’re in. It is not like the old one. We have made it unstable and now it’s never gonna be stable again but we are having the conversation now about whether we can stop it from spiralling out of control and shaking us off, as mother earth has a fever!
So that that’s the circumstances and you can’t really be in the business of trying to co-create a new reality without knowing what your conditions are that you’re working in. I guess you can go on and on but that’s what sort of spurred me on to start having these conversations. I’m just in a process of learning about the issues and having conversations and staying in contact and good relationships with the good people that I can see in the different spaces. Hopefully [I can] help to be a bridge and encourage other people to bridge between spaces … it’s a bit confusing but I hope I’m on the way to like contributing something.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
There are two things I want to touch on which have come up today and one of them is participatory design tell us more about it because I’m in the dark?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
I’m a designer and my background is in fashion design textiles and I did a project before Extinction Rebellion which was called body politic where myself and a friend made all these clothes into messages, which is what I do, I wear messages these days and we were thinking about how to use clothing as a vehicle for communication and expression and struggle and positivity resistance.
Along the way we started to design the way that people engage with our workshops because most people in the UK have got no skill at all at hand-sewing or making things. You have to support the time that those people have in the workshop to make sure they make something good, otherwise they make something rubbish. Then they just ruin a jacket and throw it in the bin. For me that was one of the beginning points of me designing how people could participate well in a workshop, where you do things to ease the amount of pressure that’s on them to know how to do a specialised thing that they don’t know how to do for example.
Then fast forward a bit and I meet Roger [Hallam] and I start doing these campaigns with him before we launch Extinction Rebellion which are all kind of iteratively testing out civil disobedience techniques and mobilisation techniques.
I found it really fascinating because I was like ‘oh this is the same thing, this is like testing out different ways of saying, this is how we would arrange ourselves in a space, this is how we would like do the mobilisation, this is how we would treat people who get annoyed on the ground, this is how we come up with a plan for angry drivers, this is how we would design banners so that they’re very lightweight and they’re very easy to pop up and pack down, this is how we can design objects that help, this is how you…’
I became very interested in it and I think you know a lot of Extinction Rebellion success was about us working together on ways of getting people to take part so that people can all take part together and that is a thing that you can devise. You can either have a a meeting where some old bloke – usually it’s a bloke – stands at the front and wangs on at everyone and everyone sits in rows facing the front, or, you can have people sat around tables in clusters in groups and you can structure a session so that everyone talks to each other.
Most political meetings are the former rather than the latter and that’s why no one goes back because they’re fucking boring. So we were like, ‘okay so the empowering part of this is having a pathway to action, having an idea about what people can do together and having a way of interacting in the meetings so that everyone gets heard, so that everyone takes part, so that people feel some sense of greater equality in a space.’
These are like things that you can either do well or you can do poorly. You can still execute them and not do them to an excellent standard but the point is you can design them in or you can design them out. That is one of the main deciding factors about whether you’ll get a movement or not. People think that the way you get a movement is a hashtag or by doing shit on facebook or you know having some kind of magic that happens.
You know, a lot of people think it’s magic. It’s not, it’s design and it’s labour and it’s like whether you’ve got a good database and a good system and a good process for knowing oh that person they were really interested but they didn’t come back. Let someone give them a ring because they seemed good and interested and why don’t we check on them. Sometimes the person is like ‘yeah, sorry, I have had a family crisis’ but sometimes they’re like ‘oh, actually I didn’t really know what to do,’ You say ‘well come back, we’ll find you some shit to do!’
You have to know who is there and have the systems in place to be able to say well this is how we are going to get people on boarded and involved. It’s so fundamental to being able to build popular power.
Yeah, there’s an element of caring in that, yeah, people will criticise XR and other social movements for burning people out, for not having good systems of care, for saying the things that you need to say about self-care or regenerative whatever and then not being able to deliver on them. The truth is it’s really hard and I don’t think we have got it perfect but I do think that the social design of how you behave and how you work is so important to be able to either make it sustainable or not.
I’m just a student of that in lots of ways. The other thing that I became totally fascinated with is dialogic design, like you can design a way to have a conversation well, or you can design a way to have a conversation badly, or you can like not design it at all, which usually means if it’s a difficult conversation it goes badly. There are plenty of people whose expertise is in therapeutic work, who know perfectly well how you have a difficult conversation well. There are things you can do that are not rocket science and you can learn how to do them in order to have that conversation.
There are things that you can learn about de-escalation that helps you to approach a person who is annoyed. Because you are being annoying [and] because you are having a protest, you are in the way, but there are ways that you can talk to that annoyed person which will either inflame them– and they’ll punch you in the face– or, that will hopefully calm things down.
At some XR protests I was approached by police officers to say please could you come and help us calm this situation down over here because when you sing it takes all of the wind out of the sails of the furious person on the pavement and because we were very good at de-escalation.
Sometimes the police knew we were better at it than they were. You just learn the techniques how to do that stuff. As a designer, I can pay attention to the way that we design non-material things and that is about also jumping from one discipline to the next.
If I’m interested in how psychotherapists operate, as much as I’m interested in how the fashion industry operates, as much as I’m interested in learning how think tanks work, or, learning how rhetoric works, then I’m starting to jump around these different disciplines and go ‘ah’ all of this, to me anyway, I see it all like design learning that we can do.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Something that’s come up a couple of times today is humility and how it connects to the science but it connects to spirituality as well– and these are very topical things generally in society at the moment– maybe for their absence than anything else. Can you talk a little bit about what was striking you earlier about humility in the context of where we [collectively] are?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
You know you can’t engage in these conversations without feeling like we have created circumstances where we have to admit that human beings are quite fucking stupid. At the same time I eternally believe in the central sort of tenet of all of our humanity being love and being collaborative and being interested in justice, being interested in care, being interested in freedom.
There is a whole load of things which, depending where you are in the political space, you may look at them from a different direction but they don’t go away and there is an extraordinary stupidness to the situation that we are in: The people that are putting their foot on the accelerator more and more and more; it’s very frightening that we are allowing our collective fate to be affected, directed by these people and these behaviours and these systems. But that paradox of thinking that human beings are at once fundamentally fucking brilliant and at the same time terribly stupid, is cause for a foundational place to begin from, which has to be quite humble I think.
I guess that’s another reason why I’m interested in these conversations because there is the sense of urgency and, ‘oh shit, it’s worse, it’s worse, it’s worse, but it’s always worse! It’s worse every year and it’s always worse than I think right which is bad! (that means it’s really bad!). But it is also like an eternal call for me to say I don’t know everything and as much as I am trying to understand all of this stuff, I am still really limited. I’m gonna have massive gaps, there is a lack of my ability as one person to be able to know everything, to be able to chart a course forwards where I recognise all the things that I need to know.
I’m just gonna have to think about my work as work that I am doing in a world where I absolutely don’t know a thousand percent more than this amount of shit that I do know and if I proceed like that I might have a hope of behaving in a way which is helpful but if I proceed in a way where I think that I have somehow worked out the whole thing and I know the answer to everything is, then I think I’m leaning into a space which is where a lot of problematic behaviours can come from.
That is not me trying to get out of everything and say ‘oh we can’t make any decisions because we are thick and we don’t know anything’. I’m not saying that but I do think that we have to try and hold that paradox as best we can for ourselves and that’s not really something that our current culture helps us to do.
I think there are other things in the world that I’m aware of culturally from other places that may make that effort and I think there are spiritual traditions that help us to think in those ways, I think there is lots of stuff in the human world that helps us to hold paradoxes well and gently and with humility and that is, I feel, what we urgently need for ourselves to be able to hold ourselves through these considerations and these conversations because it’s not binary and it’s not either/or and it’s not, ‘either we are going to save ourselves, or, we are not’.
There’s something somewhere in between it all which is not good. There are no good options but there is definitely a big splurge of a space which is definitely not helped by all of the sort of binary debate framing that we end up living with. I think it’s probably prevalent in western culture more than it is in some other parts of the world.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Out of everything you just discussed you come across as very determined and that’s a positive thing. I’m not so interested in pessimism and optimism but it’s a very positive thing to be determined to try and would you say that it’s accurate would you think that’s how you feel about this?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
I am determined in lots of ways. I’m very determined to keep working hard. I’m very determined to learn… I mean how wonderful to learn all this stuff but at the start of Extinction Rebellion it was the steepest … look it wasn’t even a curve it was a …
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Vertical line?
[Clare Farrell – XR]
That’s what it was and you know I’m so so so grateful for that and that’s what I’m determined for, is to carry on, keep on showing up like that. The other thing … I said this in an interview yesterday with this newspaper guy, that when I was 13 my mum died and the the line I’ve always used, that lots of my friends have heard me say many times, is that when your parents die you know you are next and in a way although it created a lot of trauma, it was very difficult, it was very horrible, lots of problems– but you know, having that experience at such a young age, I think it cultured me into a state of determination to just survive how hard that was sometimes. It really prepared me in a way that has made me capable of staring into the abyss in a way which is very difficult and I think a lot of people who didn’t have an experience that has helped them to be able to do that probably find it much harder to stay staring into it and into it and into it and into it and um and I don’t think that you keep working as hard as you need to if you don’t keep looking at it because you can take your eye off the research and think well I’d like a break now so I’ll go and make some dresses or something like that and it kind of sounds nice but it’s not. It’s it’s not what I want to do so I’m up for keep on looking at the horrible information and keep on going and working on the ground and somewhere between there is that praxis word– which nobody knows what it means– but it’s actually a really useful word, you know you have to be thinking and acting and doing those things in a kind of very conscious way and I suppose that is a sort of determined work.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
It’s been very great to speak to you … very articulate.
[Clare Farrell – XR]
And thank you very much. Great to meet you