Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?
Ocean Rebellion protesters en route to the Marine Stewardship Council’s annual awards dinner at Fishmongers’ Hall by the Thames, London, 2023. Photo by Crispin Hughes/Panos Pictures
Ocean Rebellion protesters en route to the Marine Stewardship Council’s annual awards dinner at Fishmongers’ Hall by the Thames, London, 2023. Photo by Crispin Hughes/Panos Pictures
is emeritus associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and a former political liaison, strategist and spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. He is now co-director of the Climate Majority Project, which he co-founded, and the co-editor of The Climate Majority Project (2024). He lives in Norfolk, UK.
One fine day in 2015, near where I lived in Norwich, I was delivering leaflets for the Green Party, noticing on my way the deathly state of the gardens in the area – this one, scattered with rubbish; this one, manicured to death with weedkiller; this one, and the next, paved over for cars; this one, with a dead fridge standing forlorn on the grass – when these words flashed into my head, unbidden:
For some time afterwards, I was in a state of shock. But, being a wannabe public intellectual, after a few weeks, I did what any half-decent intellectual would… I started writing about it. The piece I wrote, I considered at first too incendiary to publish. When friends and colleagues persuaded me to go ahead, saying that this was the kind of authentic writing they’d never encountered from me before, I was unwilling to do so under my own name. At length, for the first time ever, I published under a pseudonym. After remarkably supportive feedback, I started giving talks with the title ‘This Civilisation Is Finished’. It seemed that people loved the breath of fresh air: someone was calling it.
