Editorial: Climate strikes to Extinction Rebellion: environmental activism shaping our future

Abstract

Covid-19 has dominated global news in 2020, but even the pandemic has not stymied a new generation of activists mobilizing for action on interconnected grievances of climate breakdown, economic inequality and social injustice. Numerous countries have experienced the mass mobilizations of Extinction Rebellion (XR), the youth-led climate strikes associated with Greta Thunberg and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) rallies, as well as localized protests such as Indigenous First Nations blockading oil pipelines and railways on their traditional territories. With electoral politics struggling to generate the ambitious laws urgently needed to avert irreparable environmental breakdown, many have turned to protest. Protest mobilizations embrace diverse grievances, goals and strategies, and indeed some may seem to be highly reactionary, such as France’s Yellow Vests movement (Mouvement des gilets jaunes) sparked by higher fuel taxes to combat carbon emissions. The contemporary protests however share some intersecting points of interest for scholars researching the influence of civil disobedience, the roles of grassroots activists challenging state or corporate elites, the policing of protesters’ space and voice, the breakdown in the legitimacy of the nation-state and the increasing invocation of emergency powers in unsettled times. Environment-related protest of course is not new, and draws sustenance from a long tradition of grassroots activism including the Occupy movement, the anti-globalization and anti-nuclear movements, and earlier civil disobedience campaigns associated with black civil rights and the Suffragettes. The recent social upheavals – the subject of this special issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment – involve some shifts away from these precedents, shifts including the rise of a rhetoric of a climate or planetary ‘emergency’; the emergence of new political actors, notably children; and the deployment of distinctive tactics such as the hyper-aesthetic character of some protests, as is evident in XR’s street performances and paraphernalia. Concurrently, some governments have recently introduced unprecedented measures to thwart environmental activism, including anti-protest laws that criminalize some forms of activism. The modern era of environmental law, dating from about the 1960s, has brought many benefits, such as cleaner air and water, greater due diligence on proposed developments, and larger protected areas networks. Many of these laws have also enhanced opportunities for public participation in decision making and access to justice, thereby