Extinction Rebellion like we look like a bunch of radicals and with our kind of pinned up things
and we look like punks or something when we're on the streets
but a citizens assembly, to me at least, it's not that radical at all
it's an evidence-based democratic solution.
It makes perfect sense actually.
Brexit is an irrelevance when you look at the climate and ecological crisis
The democracy we have right now is essentially deeply flawed.
It shouldn't be left to politicians and it shouldn't be left simply to experts it needs the voice of the people.
People need to understand what the implications of any policy is.
I'm a mother I've got two boys and I'm a co-founder of extinction rebellion.
I quit my full-time job to come work on citizens assemblies full-time with extinction rebellion.
I describe myself as a pan-african community advocate for global justice.
Mostly I suppose I work in a broad sense in permaculture.
I study history and politics at Goldsmith's
I've been an organic farmer for twenty years and then about five years ago
I started a PhD at King's College in London
studying how to bring about radical political change.
Being a farmer, every farmer in the world now is on the front line of climate change.
There's no two ways about that. Around 2005 UK weather changed forever
it's just been extreme, 2006 it rained every day for seven weeks, I lost all my outdoor crops,
I lost a hundred thousand pounds, everyone I employed lost their jobs
so it was a big trauma for me.
it's quite possible that all life on earth, ninety-seven percent of it, is going to go
and possibly in my children's lifetime.
You can't pretend it's not happening anymore when you know the information
and you know what a dire situation we're in.
For a lot of people, climate change, not because they're bad people or anything
but it's just really difficult to sort of grasp viscerally.
what this means? Well for me it means we're gonna starve!
There's no two ways about this, we're gonna starve
because if you can't grow food because it's raining for seven weeks
that's it, there's no plan B.
This civilization's finished, it is finished, whether you like it or not.
if we have three years of really bad El Nino weather events
The food systems are fucked and we'll be fighting over cans of beans
and what we've got is a political system that's incapable of change.
Normal politics is just not sufficient to solve long-term collective action problems
because it's a five year election cycle and that's just not enough.
The system that we have in the houses of parliament it's built in confrontation
so they nearly always oppose each other and on principle
that's how it works, it's set up as two rows of people shouting at each other
and that's a disaster.
I think it's a deeply toxic system, it's got this machinery based on the idea that we have to have constant economic growth
and you can't have constant economic growth on a finite planet.
We can see that the system is broken and what we have to remind ourselves of all the time
is that we're part of that, we've been brought up in
those systems, we've we've been indoctrinated into those ways of
thinking so as much as we can see externally that this is a very broken
situation and that it needs to change rapidly we have to also recognize that
internally we are still part of those constructs we still have those things working on us.
There's no way that we can find our way through this situation
without hugely changing the way that everything is structured
particularly around governments, particularly around power.
In Britain, in Europe, in Africa, anywhere in the world I have no faith that these governments
will positively respond with the agency to take the measures that
must be taken right now to save humanity and the planet.
That's what Extinction Rebellion is putting its money on which is to create an
assembly where people can look at climate change without the influence of
the fossil fuel companies, without the influence of having to run for office
and go with the herd and just say okay what's happening here? And you know we
can make a prediction, can't we? that after about half an hour they're all gonna be shitting themselves
if they weren't already. And then you can bet that they'll go, yeah we've got an emergency situation.
No question about it. Let's get on with it, transform the economy in the next few months.
so citizens assembly brings together a randomly selected group of citizens
somewhere between 50 and about 150 so it's very easy once you get over
about 50 people to make sure that they are a diverse group who have
the age characteristics, the gender characteristics, the geographical characteristics, the class characteristics of broader society
that's very easy to do. And they brought together and over a period of time
they're facilitated to learn, to deliberate and to come to decisions and recommendations.
The fact that extinction rebellion is demanding a citizen's assembly
on the climate and ecological emergency is really what makes it unique.
We're not trying to assert our will on anyone else and we're not just crying out for action.
We're crying out for a very specific thing, we're crying out for the UK public
to have a say on how they respond to this emergency.
The actual rebellion rests on how far we can advance democratization
how far we can bring humanity back to the practice more of direct democracy.
You can feel this is different although people see radicalism as a bad thing,
in the way that we need to change, we do need a radical change to actually reverse the damage that we've caused.
I don't want to get arrested, especially being black
a lot of my friends being people of color as well.
But if I do get arrested I've come to peace with the fact of getting arrested
because once you break through that social stigma it's it's fair game.
I first heard about the citizens Assembly around the time of the abortion referendum in Ireland
and it really elucidated this topic that was so
deadlocked for years and so controversial and no politicians were
willing to touch it because they were just it was just toxic politically.
What's really important about citizens assemblies is that they aren't run by
directly by government government may give them a task it may sponsor the
assembly but the assembly is organized by an independent trusted organization
typically a civil society organization and the facilitators working in that
citizen's assembly are independent, they are not civil servants.
They have no connection with government. These are people who have spent their lives
developing these kind of facilitation skills.
Most of the deliberation actually happens on small tables, tables of around 10 people
and this is where the facilitators are able to ensure that those who like to speak most
are actually calmed down and those people who tend not to contribute
actually get a chance to contribute and the studies that we've done where
citizens assemblies have been run really effectively the talking time is almost
equal across gender, across class, across ethnicity and you don't see that in any other political institution.
If you give this to normal people, a bus driver in Glasgow, a caterer in Basingstoke they're gonna get it.
For me the notion of a citizen's assembly, it's not some technical fix.
For me it's a profound change in the metaphysics of politics.
If that doesn't sound too grand.
And of course, it's not like new, this is the wholebasis of the jury trial.
The jury trial is an institution that has been going for thousands of years.
And why is it? It's because you have to get people that are independent.
And how do you get people that are independent?
You select people by chance.
Our job as extinction rebellion is to create that political space
whereby the people can decide for themselves
throught the transmission system of a citizen's assembly
and that's why we're going out on the streets
so the government will say, well what do you want?
And you say, we want a citizen's assembly, to decide what's gonna happen on climate change.
They're going to do a report and you are going to make sure it happens.
And if you don't, that's the end of your institution because the nation comes
before the politicians and the corrupted class.
I'm still here because I feel like I can make change.
I'm still here because I see this working.
My hope is that in 50 years time people
look back and say, what were they thinking of when they were writing to their MP?
So my daughter is five, fifty years from now she'll be nearing her fifty-six birthday
I would just what to say, I am so sorry because we should have stopped it 50 years ago.
You know
We're already 50 years late!
I hope we can do enough.