Over 300 Extinction Rebellion activists arrested this week
April 18th, 2019
More than 300 protesters have been arrested in London as Extinction Rebellion’s Week of Rebellion enters its fourth day.
The week-long action calls for governments to take the movement’s core demands on board, which include informing the public about the scale of the ecological crisis.
Protesters have been blocking traffic throughout the city, including at Waterloo Bridge, Marble Arch, Oxford Circus and Parliament Square.
On Wednesday, four Extinction Rebellion members glued themselves together outside of Jeremy Cobryn’s north London home to call the Labour leader to act on climate change.
“The London Rebellion has surpassed all expectations,” Extinction Rebellion Ireland member and London action participant Dr Ciarán O’Carroll told The Green News.
“This is what we need to do again and again until governments start to take the climate and ecological crisis seriously,” he said.
The group announced on Wednesday that it intended to disrupt one of a line of the London Overground train network.
Amongst those speaking at a gathering at Parliament Square yesterday included climate change lawyer Farhana Yamin. She was arrested yesterday for supergluing herself to the pavement outside of the Shell’s London office.
“I feel at the moment like we are living in a time where so much public demand and protest is not being heard or taken seriously enough to influence real change,” said London-based participant Zoe, who asked that her full name not be disclosed.
“For me, XR is about doing something about this. It is about engaging in a rebellious action that feels true to my intuition: disrupting non-violently but disrupting nonetheless,” she told The Green News.
“[Its] about disobeying the laws made by those who are letting us down in an effective way that insists on us being heard,” she added.
The movement began with 10 people in the UK last summer and rose to prominence in November 2018 when thousands of activists blocked London bridges, disrupted traffic and glued themselves to public buildings.
Irish activists are set to “disrupt business as usual” in Dublin and Cork this weekend as part of the Week of International Rebellion taking place in 43 countries around the world.
Irish Extinction Rebellion activists marked World Wildlife Day in March with a mock Funeral for Humanity in the centre of Dublin to raise awareness on the planet’s extinction crisis.
Roughly one-third of Ireland’s 98 wild bee species are threatened with extinction, and recent findings show that over 60 per cent of the 202 species of commonly occurring birds in Ireland is now on the red and amber conservation lists.
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