A conversation with Clare Farrell

Extinction Rebellion Protest at London Fashion Week, September 2019. Image by Alexander Coggin.

On April 15th, 2019, a bright pink boat called Berta rolled into Oxford Circus in London's city center. Named after the murdered Honduran climate activist Berta Cáceres, it declared 'TELL THE TRUTH' in black block capitals.

No cars crossed Waterloo Bridge; instead, people did yoga, and a skate ramp was rolled in. Traffic was ground to a halt as activists glued themselves to Berta and Emma Thompson read poetry. At Heathrow Airport, 20 young protesters, all born after 1990, hoisted a banner that read "Are we the last generation?" As police swarmed them, they hugged and cried. Back in London, a samba band held down Parliament Square, and Marble Arch was occupied.

Over the next eleven days, 1,130 people were arrested — it may have been more if the police hadn't kept running out of holding cells. From retirees and parents with toddlers bouncing on their shoulders to teenagers, the campaigners hoped that their action would put economic pressure on the government by disrupting the infrastructure of the United Kingdom's capital city. They wanted people to confront the reality of the climate emergency through disruption of their everyday lives.  

Organized by Extinction Rebellion, by the end of the second day, an estimated 500,000 people had been impacted by the disruption. The movement had spent six months prior, since its launch in October 2018, gathering momentum traveling through the U.K. giving the lecture 'Heading for Extinction (and what to do about it).' Upon hearing the lecture, many left their jobs to join the rebellion. 

One volunteer told The Guardian in April 2019, "The phones never stop ringing, we have press inquiries round the clock from media around the world … it wasn't like this at my old job... this has been one of the most exhausting, exhilarating weeks of my life."

This week I spoke to Clare Farrell, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion. A fashion designer, Clare began her career working for high street brands. When I met her in 2011, she was the designer and production manager for the ethical fashion brand Goodone, since she has founded the Sustainable Fashion short course at Central Saint Martins, where she welcomes a range of people, some from the fashion industry who are grappling to make sense of their work within the context of the climate crisis and the existential threat they face. A threat many of them have heard about through the actions of Extinction Rebellion. 

Shonagh Marshall: What was your role in founding Extinction Rebellion (XR)?

Clare Farrell: I accidentally became part of the network. I started working with Roger Hallam in 2017. He'd been on a hunger strike at King's College London demanding they divest from fossil fuels. Somebody told me about his action, and I said, "Oh, we should meet him. That's great. Why isn't everyone doing that? Divestment is not moving fast enough."

I went to meet with him and got involved with an air pollution campaign. We started testing civil disobedience tactics, but it was quite some time before I realized that we were part of a more extensive network called Rising Up. Roger didn't tell me that there was a whole group of people all around the U.K. doing similar work and that they were all connected. 

In early 2018, he presented a paper to everybody called 'Pivoting to the Real Issue,' which said if we lose the climate, all social justice concerns don't matter because we will witness a societal collapse. Everybody at the meeting agreed, in principle, and wanted to do something. 

Some friends and I were already doing art and design work for the previous campaigns we'd done with Roger. We had a six months lead time to the launch of XR in October to develop the identity. I worked with Charlie Waterhouse, Clive Russell, who did most of the graphics work, and Miles Glyn. Miles and I had worked together before on a project called Body Politic, which was about wearing messaging, and embodying protests — embodying positivity and struggle at the same time. We'd already started that work, and so this is the point it all came together. We became the art department and spent about six months putting together how the movement should look and feel. Various people inspired it; Roger and Gail Bradbrook, two of the co-founders of XR, were significant influences, and lots of people from the group were giving opinions about what it should be.

We knew we needed to make an identity that you could give away, something that was replicable. So it had to have a certain amount of simplicity and use templates. That was my part in it, and at the same time, loads of other people were doing loads of different elements.

I was also in the actions team where we were designing actions. In between deciding to start a rebellion and launching it properly, I also did a small campaign in the summer of that year, a hunger strike for two weeks. Then we occupied Greenpeace. That was one of the first things we did. Everyone said, "you'll never make any friends if you do that. Nobody will ever talk to you. Who do you think you are?" (laughing).

Shonagh: Extinction Rebellion launched in October 2018, and it immediately captured people. Why do you think that was?

Clare: I think there was some serious serendipity involved. We were working on our launch, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1.5℃ report came out, which was super alarming. That summer, when I was on hunger strike, a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science for the United States of America called 'Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.' It grabbed all the headlines and said the Earth's system could cascade into a hothouse state. Greta Thunberg had started striking, and she made the news. David Attenborough started making noise about it.  

I think the other reason why it worked is that we employed the system of momentum-driven organizing. It's a self-replicating mechanism, trainers train trainers, who train more trainers, you roll that out, and you can do it quite fast. Aside from that, I think people were waiting for permission. So many people had read all this stuff and seen no response. Ten years ago, you read something that says, at some point, we might lose the entire Arctic, and you look outside, and nothing is being done. There were enough people who'd read that information over the years. People had said, "we've got ten years." Then at the end of ten years, they'd go, "oh, we've only got another ten years." You think hang on a minute; we had ten years ten years ago, what are you talking about? 

We offered a route to meaningful action. We didn't say, "Can you sign a petition? Can you come on a March?" We gave a lecture and then said, given what we've just talked about and the suggested action of civil disobedience, would you like to provide us with your details and somebody will phone you up personally. We had a stack of papers where three boxes asked, would you be willing to help? Would you get arrested? Or would you risk prison? That was it. 

Oxford Circus, London. April 2019. Image by Mark Ramsay via wiki commons.

Shonagh: There has been a focus in the media about the emphasis you put on getting arrested. 

Clare: We were always very, very honest about it, that the nature of struggles for rapid social change usually involves people in jail cells. I don't think there's any precedent where that's not the case. The movement was galvanized by people that said, "I'd rather get arrested than let this happen on my watch, and to my kids." 

It is essential to frame the movement through the lens of virtue ethics. A lot of people in British culture are in a very utilitarian mindset. They say, "I'll do it if it will work. But if it won't work, I won't bother." That not only comes from a place of abject privilege, where you think that you'll be fine, even if you don't do anything, but it also points to the pervasive reasons why we do things in our society. 

This thinking comes from Roger's research; when I met him, he was doing a Ph.D. at King's College London, focusing on how to get rapid social change to happen through radical campaign design. From his research, he found that people who care less about their effectiveness are more effective. This seems counterintuitive, but it works because you have a group of people acting in virtue — they think it's the right thing to do. Of course, they try to make it effective, but they don't care if it doesn't work because they feel they have done the right thing. They've stood up for what they believe. 

The reason these people are much more effective is in part that they're more resilient. They don't get upset when they lose, which many activists do, because they say, "this is too hard, I'm losing, and I'm burnt out." It's okay to lose; at the beginning, that was the real shift baked into XR. Over time, this hasn't stood up that well to a mass movement of people that I don't think understand the importance of that ideology. For me, living a good life is living in total resistance to the incomprehensible amount of suffering, which is coming nearer and nearer and nearer every day.

Rabbi Jeffrey Newman of Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, protesting October 2019. Image via Extinction Rebellion.

Shonagh: So what are your demands? What is XR campaigning for?

Clare: Firstly, it's an act of rebellion to say that there is a truth that should be told. We're swimming in postmodernism, alternative facts, and post-truth. There is confusion around climate science in light of disinformation campaigns and people are unsure whether there is an objective truth. To be able to go out and stridently say "tell the truth" is culturally an act of defiance, in my opinion. More concretely, it was about demanding that governments, institutions, the media, and the education sector tell people how bad this is. 

Something else, which has been minimized by the movement, in my opinion, because it's been self-organizing, is a focus on reticence in the scientific community. They won't talk about how bad it is and how much time we've lost. They've long lost the battles with PR firms representing big oil, just like they did with big tobacco. Also, the IPCC is on the side of really quite hopeful planning. As we've expanded, more and more people have joined that tend to be a bit more liberal or a bit more mainstream. They say, "you shouldn't say the IPCC is bad; it's the world standard." I know some people who are utterly critical of the IPCC, and I think it's okay to be critical of them. 

What we are talking about is not just a scientific question; it is a risk question. Risk is a different discipline to science, just as economics is another discipline to science, and politics is another field. All of that is mushed into the position the IPCC inhabit. So critical analysis of its stance is fundamental; there should be much more caution. 

The second demand is to act now to get carbon net-zero and reverse biodiversity loss by 2025. Many people have said it is impossible, but we have to demand the impossible in my opinion — so that's fine by me. 

The third is for a citizens assembly to bring people together — a randomly selected group of citizens — that can deliberate without party politics getting in the way. The citizen's assembly model is important because it crosses divides, it gets away from party politics. We're lucky here in the UK because we don't have a party politics problem concerning climate policy. The Conservative Party in the U.K. have brought in some of the most groundbreaking environmental legislation in the world into action; they passed the Climate Change Act in 2008.

Although it's not divided by party politics, the U.K. is still divided, so the citizen's assembly model is designed to get beyond that. You bring together a group of people who are not lobbied; they're not corrupted because they're randomly selected. They come together and are exposed to all the best information on the topic. Then through a deliberative process, they decide on the best route forward. 

We've fucked up so badly for so long, and the changes are so massive, this is the only way that we can get the public behind the changes that need to happen. You're not going to win an election running with policies focused on solving the climate crisis because you're going to have to tell people to not eat meat, to ground planes, to retrofit their homes, and to stop going on holiday. But there's no way around it; people have to stop doing some of the things they like doing — or that they think they like doing; I think people could be quite happy without some of them! You have to have public support. 

Shonagh: There was a Citizens Climate Assembly in the U.K. last year. What was the outcome? Do you see this as successfully meeting your demands?

Clare: There are a series of things to consider about the assembly last year. They enacted it through a select committee, but by the time the group had finished, the select committee had changed entirely because the leadership had changed. So it's questionable whether it is going to be paid attention to. The other problem is it's not binding, so it can only advise the government. That's not to say it's not valuable, but it's not binding. 

The other problem, which is a massive problem, is that they held it on the wrong topic in our opinion. It was focused on carbon neutrality by 2050, which is the government's target. As far as we are concerned, that is 25 years too late. There is a science to back up that if rich countries can act, they should move as quickly as 2025. 

Shonagh: I am interested in how XR has used the media to galvanize the movement. Is this something you have been mindful of? 

Clare: Originally, a lot of the creative work came together really neatly. Because we were a small bunch of people working on a model that can achieve a significant reach, we could create something coherent. 

I was previously in a group called Space Hijackers founded by my friend, Robin. Our activism was based on situationism — the idea of the disruption of the spectacle of everyday life. I've done a lot of thinking about that and its importance.  

There's always been an understanding among us that there is a need to dramatize. It's not just because you have to dramatize the issue when running a social campaign, but what I have been thinking more and more about is what's different about this movement than the suffragettes, for example. 

When we launched, we were interested in how other movements had gone before us. In the beginning, people would ask, "what part of the Green Movement inspired you?" It hasn't. It's not worked so far. It's not interesting. I take that back; some of it is interesting. But what's interesting is civil rights, women's suffrage, Gandhi fighting for Indian independence.

Those struggles are interesting. Because the efforts for survival hinge on the people within these groups, they have changed the world. They might not have won everything that they wanted, but they changed things massively. 

In the beginning, it felt like bad taste to go around saying, "we need to be the new suffragettes." People couldn't accept that you were allowed to compare yourself to them; they felt they belonged in the past. That was then; we don't do that stuff now. When you look at those struggles, they were highly, highly dramatized. Their nonviolent acts were designed to draw the violence out of the system so that people see it. We worked on theories around how you create a dilemma for the authorities and create drama in the space.

We asked, "what is worth reporting on?" A lot of journalists since have said that we gave them opportunities to write about these things, which otherwise they didn't have. There's a symbiotic relationship in some ways there, although obviously, they treat us like shit now because we blocked the print works and they got upset with us.

I am interested in comparing the struggles of marginalized people I have drawn comparisons with and the people affected by the climate crisis. Our lives in the U.K. aren't seen to be at risk by the public. We stand up for people elsewhere who are on the front lines and people in future generations who aren't with us yet or can't speak for themselves. This is where there is a fundamental difference from the other movements I mentioned; rather than trying to expose something that exists, we're trying to create a crisis before the crisis happens to us here. This is still a bit of a dilemma for me. How do you deal with that? Because I think it's an issue. 

XR Poster design, via wiki commons.

Shonagh: Your background is working in the fashion industry as a designer, originally for high street brands, and now you teach a sustainable fashion short course at Central Saint Martins. How have you used fashion within the XR movement? 

Clare: We were conscious when we set XR's look and feel that it needed to be punk — but not punk. Clive puts it well; he said we wanted it to feel new but simultaneously as if it had always been there. We also wanted to make something that was replicable.

I was dedicated to the fact that we weren't going to make or sell merchandise. It was challenging to hold that line at the start because everyone wanted to raise some funds, and we had a sexy symbol. You can't sell t-shirts to save the world; you just fucking can't — no matter where they come from, it's terrible marketing.

I kept saying no, and I'm happy that I did because what emerged was print stations on the ground. Miles had made these print blocks that he'd carved that we used to make symbol flags, and we realized that we could roll that out. Interestingly, you start with something physical — a print block or a wood typeset for text — you digitize that, and then you can send it to a 3D printer. Then you can remake it into something analog by giving people a roller and some ink so they can print and make their stuff. 

Because of the project we'd been doing before, Miles and I already had this in our mind. We knew we needed to create an identity that looked so interesting that you might want to join in even though you didn't know what was going on. 

We also recognized the power of clothes. My original memo to everybody was to wear a suit or something smart to the actions. Dressing this way has continued quite well; it's not carried through thoroughly, but most people do try and dress smart if we have a big event. I think this is helpful because the green movement has a reputation for being a bunch of crusties. If you look at the suffragettes in pictures, they all wore the same thing. They have their font, their color scheme, and they had sashes; it looked beautiful. We were conscious of that. 

We also wanted to give people a sense of agency — you only get merchandise if you produce it yourself. So it's connected to action; you force action at every step of the process by designing systems that facilitate it. Related to dress and fashion, we wanted people to use things that they already own to communicate the movement's messages.

Shonagh: In the broader sense, what role do you think fashion plays in highlighting the climate crisis?

Clare: The fashion sector is just so powerful, and because it thinks it's art and that it's culture, it is highly susceptible to cultural and social change. It's extractive capitalism; it's not culture at all — the business is just a big, dirty capitalist monster. As a fashion person who's been teaching this stuff for ages, the fact it's inextricably tied up with fossil fuels and big agriculture and that you can't separate those two things means the fashion sector touches most parts of our life and most parts of the system that needs to change. Everyone wears clothes, and it employs people all over the world, whether you're working in chemicals or retail, whether you're sewing on a machine, even a shopper is part of the supply chain. It's a fascinating space to talk about environmentally because it's so destructive and damaging. It has all these facets, and it's so complicated. 

A funeral for London Fashion Week, September 2019. Image by Alexander Coggin.

Shonagh: XR called on people to boycott fashion and not buy any new clothes for a year. I have been learning about the degrowth movement. Do you think that XR is aligned with it?  

Clare: I'm interested in degrowth too. I recommend the book In Defense of Degrowth by Giorgos Kallis. It's a series of essays that he wrote for magazines and blogs, so it's written for people that aren't economists. I am interested in it because I think it's going to become increasingly clear that economic growth is incompatible with the human race's survival. Whether economies need to degrow, go to a steady-state or do something else that I've never heard of because I'm not an economist, I don't know — but something's got to shift.

I've been interested in fashion's increased rapidity; it's ramping up of speed. I've seen high-quality clothes as a child that have gone down and down in quality in my lifetime. When you look at the vintage landscape, you can see where the quality drops off. Where's the 90s vintage? It's in fucking landfill because it was so shit, and it's just got worse and worse. 

People have to be interested in learning about different ways to think about this stuff because we're quite far away from the general public being ready to get behind something that's not growth.

The boycott fashion campaign was organic. Some things in XR have happened in a very organic way; movements are messy places. The boycott was set up by a very beautiful person who sadly died; he was young, it's really tragic. His name was Iggy, and he wasn't a fashion person, and he wasn't involved in campaigning on fashion. He was interested in the environmental impact of the fashion sector and people living with less. So he proposed that people engage in a year-long boycott of new clothes. He was also interested in working to protect endangered species. 

It got to a point where he wasn't holding it well, so the others who had started to work on fashion took it on and connected it with our fashion protests. They had begun with a fashion week focus calling on the British Fashion Council to cancel London Fashion Week and instead have a meeting about what they were going to do with the industry. They took over the boycott from Iggy and absorbed it into their space. 

The idea to stop buying clothes came about organically through the movement, and it got a lot of attention. One of the reasons it got so much attention was that it flew in the face of job protectionism and workers' rights. People can't cope with that, even the basic argument. You hit on that, and it's a block. But you're just going to be stuck there forever; you're going to end up labor activists fighting environmental activists, which is a joke. There is no way that the future can look like that; we have to do something else. 

I was interested in how people responded by saying it was bad for workers or bad for labor. They felt if you reduce fast fashion consumption, it would negatively impact some of the poorest people on the planet. I thought, "okay, well, now we're having the conversation." I thought it was an opportunity to get together because it's complicated and I don't know the answer. But we can't destroy civilization to give people shitty jobs that sometimes kill them. That's not a good argument. The boycott drew that out. 

I think what's also interesting is how much people seemed to believe that we would impact a brand's sales enough that they would notice it. I'm quite sure that our boycott campaign hardly hurt any fast-fashion retailers. Unfortunately, I think it might have affected some ethical shops and makers because people who were already ethically-minded were boycotting and not buying anything. That's not good; that's an unintended dire consequence. There were plenty of bits of messaging designed to try and stop that from happening, but I don't know if they were strong enough that everyone got that memo. 

Shonagh: I am interested in the role the consumer plays and the blame that they shoulder. Why do you think that the consumer feels so much guilt? 

Clare: I think people have taken on that guilt because they've been manipulated to do so. There's an episode called The Litter Myth on the NPR Throughline podcast. It highlights how in America in 1953, an organization called Keep America Beautiful was set up in partnership with the packaging lobby. It also highlights how PR firms at the same time invented the term litterbug to stop people from saying litter was the producer's fault. This was a very clever manipulation of the public, who at that time would have seen that amount of waste and disposable packaging as totally disgusting. Why would you throw something made of glass in a dustbin? Why would you throw away a plastic bottle, which is sturdy enough to keep for a long time? They engineered the campaign to make people get their head around vast quantities of waste and feel like it was their fault.

It's super smart because you've got a general public that thinks bottles are reusable and packaging should be minimal. They had an ethos not to waste things coming out of the war era, which turned into a new era where corporate powers were getting their heads together and planning to increase obsolescence so they can make more money. The way to do this was to throw more stuff in the bin because that would be good for the economy. That's why people feel guilty and like it's their fault because they've been told it's their fault though ingenious manipulation. 

When you throw something away, where does it go... People don't think about that; it has to go somewhere. As a child, I used to think about the stuff going in the bin and ask, "where does it go? What's going to happen to it?" More recently, I've done meditation thinking about things I owned that still exist, completely intact. They are just buried somewhere, in their original form. Every single pair of shoes that I ever had as a child are probably buried in the ground somewhere next to some old tea bags, not breaking down; they'll be there for the next 100 years. It's horrible, and I think children think about these things. 

You can't just keep burying plastic in the ground, but because things are going on as if it's normal, you go along with it. You say, "oh well, this is just how it is." Over time, as an adult, you become jaded into a position where you've sort of accepted it. If you put a six-year-old in charge of our waste systems, they'd go, hang on a minute, that won't break down in the ground.

Shonagh: In more recent years, there has been more reuse of some of this waste, turning plastic bottles into rPET textiles, for example. What do you think about the circular economy?

Clare: I think that there's a lot of good intention and goodwill in the circular economy space. Recognizing biomimicry, for example, and being inspired by organic living systems. We need designers to look at systems, and the circularity conversation is having a systems conversation, which is good. 

But, in my opinion, it presents a high risk. The fashion industry loves a cheap, shit solution that's not been very well thought through. So if there's a way to recycle things and keep waste out of the bin, but keep everything else the same, then the fashion industry will jump at that. Fashion doesn't want to reckon with itself. I talk about the industry as if it's like a person. It's difficult because it's not a person; it's made up of big companies run by people. Those companies don't want to reckon with the reality of how much things need to change at all. In some way, circularity offers a route to the least resistance in dealing with the big problems.

Shonagh: My last question is, do you have a vision for a utopia? What would you ideally like to happen?

Clare: We're dealing with hyper complexity, so I'm not sure. There's no way that I know what is best because it's so complicated, and there are so many people at such severe risk. I guess one thing I think we need is multiple uprisings on all continents. I want to see an awareness that once it's too late, it's just too late. I think that's a significant problem that we've got; even in the current justice system, we can't talk about the crimes that are being enacted because it seeks redress after the fact. When it's time to seek redress for what's happening now, there might not be anyone to put in jail. It's now or never. 

I feel like a utopian outcome, well it's not utopian, but the best outcome that I could hope for would be that there are multiple uprisings of peaceful people everywhere to try and engage in a shift, which can change the paradigm all over the world. We need a rewiring of our social relations, a rewiring of our international relationships, and a rewiring of economics. It's hard to describe a way that should happen. 

I think this is a challenge for artists and people who've got the capacity to do this imagining. We desperately need more people to imagine what is possible because often, things are impossible until people think of them.

Sometimes, people are too quick to say, "We could fix this if we just had authoritarian global communism." Some want to have a world government that says, "No, you can't do that," and manages everything, but that would be so awful. It would be so blunt; it would be so dumb — it wouldn't work, it would hurt people. So the mentality has to minimize harm. I guess that's the closest thing I've got to an answer.