“Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied,” Leonard Cohen once sang. In spite of decades of scientific data proving human-caused climate change, we are still spellbound by a story of enlightened progress. Our high-carbon culture is underpinned by a belief system that tells us we are in control of nature and can fix any problem with our superior technology.

There are signs that this story is losing its hold. In 2017 David Wallace-Wells shocked readers of New York Magazine with an article called “The Uninhabitable Earth.” In 2018 Jem Bendell , a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, published an academic paper discussing the need for “deep adaptation” in the face of impending ecological collapse. More recently, Jonathan Franzen caused another stir in The New Yorker, declaring that in the face of the world’s failure to decrease carbon emissions, “a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful.”

Sometimes, though, the story is larger than words.

In April, colored flags bearing the shapes of an hourglass, a skull, bees and butterflies began to flutter over the River Thames. In the space of an hour five bridges were closed down. Thousands of people poured into the streets and disrupted traffic in central London for 11 days, demanding immediate action from the government on the climate crisis.

Six months later, mass civil disobedience returned to the streets of London and 60 cities across the world. In the course of ten days, over 1,700 protesters from Extinction Rebellio n , a protest movement that through nonviolent direct action seeks to raise the alarm on extinction and other ecological crises, were arrested in London. The police escorted a giant pink octopus puppet to Trafalgar Square. Activists participated in sit-ins at London City Airport, the BBC offices and the Billingsgate fish market. In the second week the police banned protests, but they continued anyway.