VANCOUVER—The Vancouver chapter of Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental action network, says it plans to continue its protests until its demands are met.

The group in Vancouver started about six months ago, and is part of the global Extinction Rebellion that started in the United Kingdom last year. It made headlines Monday as chapters in major cities across the world blockaded bridges stopping only after police arrested some of the activists. In Canada, chapters in Toronto, Edmonton, Halifax and Victoria also set up blockades.

“Escalation is definitely the name of the game, this is not a one-time thing,” said Maayan Kreitzman, a member who helped co-ordinate the occupation of Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge.

The larger movement, also known as XR, now has chapters in about 50 countries. The group said the protests Monday were taking place in 60 cities worldwide.

“We can’t afford to lose time anymore with just one-off marches, and going home and everybody forgets about it. Extinction Rebellion is about sustained organizing as well as mass mobilization and that’s what’s going to bring us success,” said Kreitzman.

In Vancouver, the occupation of the Burrard Street Bridge lasted about 15 hours, and shut down traffic on the bridge connecting the downtown core to Vancouver’s west-side and its beaches.

In what Kreitzman called a “rebellious celebration of life,” 10 people were arrested at the end of the demonstration.

“We’re feeling really positively overwhelmed by it. We’re feeling really happy about it,” Kreitzman said. “It ended in a really beautiful way. The 10 arrests that we had were accompanied by ceremony and song.”

XR Vancouver’s main demands are that governments tell the truth about the climate crisis, that they act immediately to prevent extinctions and the loss of biodiversity, that they reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025, and that they take direction from and help establish citizen’s assemblies.

Extinction Rebellion’s founding philosophy is based on specific theories of social change, heavily inspired by a book called “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict.”

The willingness to get arrested is one of the movement’s principals of social change. One of its founders, Roger Hallam, wrote in a May 2019 Guardian Op-Ed that “only through sacrifice – the willingness to be arrested and go to prison — do people take seriously what you are saying.”

Before blocking the bridge, protest organizers called for roughly 20 volunteers who were “willing to be arrested.” Organizers found they had more volunteers than necessary and it appeared some were turned away. Those selected as willing to be arrested were taken aside and given special instructions about how to safely be taken into custody.

Aside from the willingness to be arrested, there are two other key components of XR’s theory of change. One is that it’s necessary to disrupt the day-to-day operations of society, the other is that the actions are respectful to fellow activists, the police and the public, in order to win over anyone who opposes the movement.

“The sky is the limit, the proportions of this catastrophe that we are barrelling into are unprecedented in human history and it touches everybody,” Kreitzman said.

“The more that people are waking up to this, the more people that will be willing to put themselves in the way of business as usual, which is driving us towards disaster.”

In May, a collective of people of colour penned a letter to the global XR movement, criticizing the movement’s failure to adequately acknowledge and include people who experience racism, classism, ableism and other structural oppression.

A group called The Wretched of the Earth — which describes itself as “a grassroots collective for Indigenous, black, brown and diaspora groups and individuals demanding climate justice and acting in solidarity with our communities, both here in the UK and in Global South” — wrote the letter, and about 50 grassroots and civil society groups, many based in the UK, signed on. It was first published in “Red Pepper,” a left-wing political magazine.

Among the feedback is a critique of XR’s strategy of arrests. Many people of colour “live with the risk of arrest and criminalization,” and while the groups agree that the focus “is a valid one,” it should be accompanied by “an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence.”

“XR participants should be able to use their privilege to risk arrest, whilst at the same time highlighting the racialized nature of policing. Though some of this analysis has started to happen, until it becomes central to XR’s organizing it is not sufficient,” reads the letter.

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“To address climate change and its roots in inequity and domination, a diversity and plurality of tactics and communities will be needed to co-create the transformative change necessary.”

Three days later, XR organizers in the U.K. replied with an open letter of their own, thanking the groups for their feedback, and committing to address the critiques.

But as a global movement, not everyone reads every critique of its organizing strategies. Kreitzman said she had heard about the letter, but hadn’t read it herself.

“XR is brand new in Vancouver, we’ve only been in existence for less than six months or so.”

However, she understands and has read criticisms that the environmental movement, and XR, doesn’t take the positions of marginalized groups seriously enough.

“We take that really seriously,” she said.

“Indigenous people have been on the front lines for a long time and this is nothing new for them. I think a lot of Canadians and people, you know, in white North America and Europe, are now realizing much later things that Indigenous people around the world have known for a long time, which is that our societies are brutalizing ourselves and our planet.”

Vancouver’s group of about 50 organizers is mostly white and “white-passing,” she said, and made up of people from all walks of life, ranging from teenagers to seniors. Kreitzman, 32, said the person sitting next to her when she was arrested Monday evening was 19, but one of the event’s main organizers is in her 60s.

“We’ve made real strides to connect with Indigenous communities here in Vancouver, the mountain protectors in particular,” she said, referring to members of the Tsleil-Waututh nation who’ve built a watch house to monitor the Trans Mountain tank farm terminal on Burnaby Mountain.

“We’re only starting to do that work, but I think that if you look at the videos from yesterday the Indigenous community showed up there, and sang and spoke and drummed and did ceremony, in many different parts of the day, from the very beginning to the very, very end.”

“The policies that we would need to rapidly decarbonize our economy and regenerate ecosystems and biodiversity would be up to that citizens assembly to decide. We’re not dictating … what those solutions need to be,” Kreitzman said.

The practice of holding up traffic and bridges in urban centres has been gaining steam as a popular method of civil disobedience for the environmental movement overseas. In the United Kingdom, more than 1,000 climate protesters were arrested, and 53 charged, in April for paralyzing traffic in London to relay a similar message.

With files from Jesse Winter and Hamdi Issawi

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