Nature Rebellion launch
Channel: Alex Dickinson
Date: 2021-09-10

Opening speech of XR UK's March for Nature, finale of the Impossible Rebellion, 4 Sept 2021, Trafalgar Square London. Six minutes, including announcing the formation of Nature Rebellion. 

(The first couple of sentences are missing - including where I apologise for reading from a script to guard against brain-freeze. My delivery doesn't sound powerful & direct as a consequence, so next time I'll have to do it unscripted and risk going blank.)

Thank you to Angela Di Tomaso for the video :-)

https://www.aiditi.net/


Text here (excerpt):
 
NATURE REBELLION LAUNCH
========================
Hello wonderful people!
Thank you so much for coming today. 
Thank you for participating in this Rebellion.
I hope you’ve enjoyed it. So far.
For today is a start, not an ending.
Today we remember that not all people are human people.
Humans are in fact outnumbered a billion to one by other people.
People with no voice in our society, and no vote. 
People who this society regards as resources to be utilised.
As things, pests, weeds, trophies, parasites, exhibits, or pets - not family; kin.
But “Western” science is moving towards realising what many of us have always felt to be true - that nonhumans have inner lives like ours: insects have emotions; plants, fungi and even protozoa have flexible, social behaviour, and can remember and learn.
We are animals, not different.
We are nature - not separate.
Our forgetting this is the cause of our suicidal destruction of this planet.
Our salvation lies in regaining humility and learning to sit amongst other life, not above it.
I am telling you this as an ex-conservation biologist, ecologist, zoologist - scientific reductionist, materialist, atheist, anti-theist - not as some wishful thinking hippie with a head full of woo. 

Nature Rebellion will attempt to encompass all of this tiny, rare jewel of a planet’s incredibly complex and diverse biosphere: swamps, meadows, prairies, forests, lakes, seas, rivers, skies, caves, and the life in the rocks themselves… amphibians and reptiles, insects, spiders, mites, springtails, nematodes, crustaceans, millipedes, solifugids, starfish, shellfish, octopi, worms, tardigrades, jellyfish, sponges… plants, lichens and algae, fungi, protozoa, bacteria, archaea... even much-maligned viruses actually play an important role in helping the whole. It will be a voice within XR for nonhumans, hoping to change anthropocentric perspectives such as those which see People’s Assemblies as being just for humans. We will be a place for those who wish to take direct action on behalf of nonhumans to find each other. We will be a discernible unit for non-XR groups working on allied issues to connect to within the bewilderingly complex XR organism. We will try to be a force for change in the external world, with project ideas akin to the wonderful “What The Fuck WWF” campaign to decolonise conservation. And we will seek to spread eco-centric philosophies such as deep ecology - which influenced modern environmentalism but was buried because its non-anthropocentric perspective was too challenging even for most environmentalists. Tell the truth.

(For full text see below.)