XR Amsterdam and Climate Justice: Making the change?

Disclaimer: I have been in and out of XR for several years in different capacities but have always had fundamental doubts about inclusivity within the movement, and whether we focused enough on the right things. Coming to Amsterdam and seeing the Demand 0 process in action has changed my mind- this is the radical action learning needed to make climate justice action a reality.

After more than a year of COVID restrictions, street protests are picking up pace again. The covid crisis appears to be winding down, but the climate crisis is doing the opposite. Enough reason for Extinction Rebellion to come back in full force with their Oktoberrebellie in the Hague. I attended the first day, 11th October, and saw the full spectrum of emotion that activism tends to involve: the joyous atmosphere of hundreds of us putting our bodies in the streets, the desperation at police violence, and the passion of all involved.

However, something seems to have changed and it is more than just renewed vigour. Front and centre of rebellion messaging is a new demand, climate justice for all. This is not novel in the environmental movement: frontline groups have been demanding this for years. In fact, European XR groups have been criticised for not centring the needs of those immediately facing the worst effects of the climate crisis and for not focusing on Western accountability. However, in this rebellion, a crucial aspect was Demand 0, CLIMATE JUSTICE FOR ALL: ‘we demand a just transition that centres the needs and voices of those and the environmental frontlines and holds to account those most responsible for ecological breakdown’. This is XR’s own wording.

Where did this come from?

I spoke to Enrike van Wingerden and Adil Jaffer, who are leading the Demand 0 process. Enrike is a researcher and university teacher from the Southern Netherlands, who returned to Amsterdam during the pandemic, and Adil is a primary school teacher, originally from the UK. Together, they created a workshop to make climate justice more than just an idea and to face the movement’s internal challenges.

The first thing they emphasise is that this is not a new stream of thought. When XR Netherlands started, in 2019, there were four demands, and “climate justice was a bigger part”, however in the process of shortening demands, climate justice was subsumed into others. The principle was always there, but not quite realised. Adil insists that climate justice was never “taboo”, but that many within the movement sensed that what they “saw, heard and felt” was not climate justice. Demand 0 aims to change this.

The naming emphasises that climate justice should be foundational for the other demands: ‘tell the truth’, act now’, and let citizens decide’. The logic is that “the first and second demands are what we want, the third is how to get there, and demand 0 is therefore the ‘why’”. Climate justice is the foundation to the movement: it is the underlying demand.

This process is happening because climate justice clearly hasn’t always been recognised. Demand 0 emerged from a clear need for XR to engage with issues of r. After the 2019 October Rebellion XR faced (justified) criticism that the movement demographic did not consider inclusion within their tactics, especially visible through interactions with the police. Rebels had been organising around this issue since the founding, but only after this criticism was the Inclusion and Power circle formed, which eventually led to formulating theory into a simple demand. From this summer, Adil and Enrike have been travelling around the Netherlands, doing workshops on Demand 0.

The approach is to take the project across the Netherlands and find consent in each locality, building to a national saturation level. The workshop acts as a toolkit to support XR to understand climate justice, implement a demand and take action. This is easier in some areas than others, as Adil and Enrike are aware. In the past, in one instance, members of the public entered XR meetings only to walk out as soon as the word racism was mentioned.

Acknowledging that those most responsible for climate emissions are those that will suffer the least and connecting this to colonialism and capitalism may not seem radical but in the Netherlands, it is. According to a 2020 YouGov poll, 50% of Dutch people are proud of colonialism. This is not the place to discuss the brutal history of Dutch colonial capitalism, but it seems obvious to me that there is a need for better education. The role of the Netherlands in the murderous Congo rubber and palm regime, Dutch Shell’s role in the murder of the Ogoni nine, Unilever’s operations in Java. It can be seen in Amsterdam through the Hortus Botanicus: two of the first rubber plants taken to Java came from Amsterdam. As Enrike explains, most people in the Netherlands are aware of the climate crisis, but not of its socio-economic history of colonial extraction and exploitation that continues to shape the distribution of its effects until this day.

Enrike sees the process Demand 0 as a way to “engage with local groups who see those issues but haven’t found ways to collaborate with national and international groups”. She uses the example of air pollution: there is emerging Dutch research suggesting ethnic minorities and migrant communities may be more subjected to damaging air pollution.

Enrike also emphasises that the workshop is “joint learning”: a presentation of climate justice narratives through four lenses: toxic system, crisis is now, intersection of risks, and indigenous voices. Once confronted with the facts, it is impossible to deny that those who did the least to cause the climate crisis are those who face its worst effects, and those who did the most – Western corporations – are still profiting off it. The aim is to force people to engage beyond the theoretical level- as Adil states, examining the climate crisis is examining “stories of suffering”. Doing this within a structured group conversation helps people move towards action.

Within the workshop, we learn that 212 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019. That in Bolivia, deforestation rates are 2.8% lower in areas where indigenous rights are protected. That natural disasters on average kill more women than men. Seeing these facts, and having them connected to relevant case studies, makes it impossible to ignore them. The power is in acting together from this information, rather than sitting, stunted in inaction scrolling through climate news on the phone. The workshops are not top-down and aim to include the “voices and ideas of everyone”: not telling anyone what to think but asking to think together. The learning practice is partly based on Paulo Freire’s method of learning through decolonizing education methods, and consults other theoretical work such as ‘counter-storytelling: considering viewpoints outside the dominant culture.

So how can the demand be put into practice? Can it translate into action? Enrike describes how the workshop “meets people where they are”, so they all take something from it. The main focus is making visible the link between “what happens in other places, and what companies/ministries are doing here”, and translating that into action. For example, activists responding to crises in the Global South by targeting accountable Dutch organizations, rather than simply focusing on Western political events, such as COP.

However, are XR Netherlands too late? Climate justice has been foundational to other movements from the start. Adil uses the examples of XR New Zealand and Canada as movements that have always concretely centred climate justice, due to strong local indigenous representation within their movements. As Adil points out, XR Netherlands is majority white, which means that “there are some things it doesn’t understand” as easily. This does not make it a worse, or less effective organisation, but simply one that must dedicate as much effort as possible to actively learning and combatting bias. An example of this, to me, is police brutality towards people of colour and the need to take this into account with regard to activist strategies. Another, more structural, example concerns the danger of adopting a neo-colonial perspective when uncritically going along with the political centring of the Global North. However, as long as XR keeps attempting to mitigate for acknowledging mistakes, using privilege for good, and centring the voices of the most marginalised communities, then climate justice may prevail. XR is still learning- but it must learn fast.