Extinction Rebellion Protesters Are Getting Quite Silly With Glue

The group has been around since 2016, though it’s only since 2018 that’s taken to calling itself so. It’s comprised of supposedly pacifist activists who set out to cause disturbances wherever they can, thus forcing the government to act and stop climate change. XR is most active in the U.K. and Australia, where it counts with thousands of members, many of whom have already been arrested at least once in 2019.

The goal of the members is to get arrested, and it’s explicitly stated so. By having police forces deploy more officers in the streets and effectively putting them to work, XR causes disruptions and gets more attention. They don’t openly embrace violence, but members have been known to break windows or get physical with the cops.

So why the anger? Why the need to ditch everything else (work, family life, errands, whatever) and take to the streets with the explicit purpose of shutting down traffic and blocking other people from getting on with their own lives? XR members in the U.K., for instance, want the government to reach a zero net carbon emissions by 2025, which even scientists agree it’s not doable. That would entail restricting vehicular traffic and passenger flights, in addition to other drastic measures.

But XR believes the time for talk has or should have ended decades ago, because time is running out for our planet. So, to get their point across, they’ve started showing up for protests at the busiest hubs, be it Trafalgar Square or Heathrow Airport in London. Some of the most recent incidents to make headlines involve protesters gluing themselves to stuff, which seems to be the latest “it” thing. So far, they’ve glued themselves to trains and buildings, and also on the tarmac of a dual carriageway, and on an actual airplane.

That last incident occurred in early October 2019, when former Paralympic cyclist James Brown managed to get up on a British Airways Embraer 190 jet, where he glued himself until security arrived and had him removed. The man is blind, so he faced more risks than any other protester would have – and that was the whole point of the exercise, too.

“This is all about the climate and ecological crisis, we’re protesting against government inaction on climate and ecological breakdown. They declare a climate emergency and then do nothing about it,” 54-year-old Brown said in his camera phone, as he was streaming the protest from atop the aircraft. “In fact they go the opposite direction, they sanction the expansion of airports, Heathrow, Bristol and others. We can’t let this go on, we can’t have our cake and eat it.”

XR do have a point here: politicians have long agreed, at least verbally, to take action to reduce pollution and stop climate change, but at the same time, they also approve airport extensions. But whether the best means to get the message across should involve a bottle of glue is debatable.

If a certain teenager from Sweden has taught the world anything is that protests can be done peacefully, without resorting to shock tactics and dramatism. Greta Thunberg, the prodigy eco-warrior who scolded U.N. members (her “How dare you? ” speech will probably go down in history as one of the most important moments of 2019), has been protesting for more than a year and traveling the word in an attempt to get politicians to listen to her – and others of her generation – about the need to act fast.

Comparing the two, it’s XR members who come across as immature, what with dousing buildings in fake blood, gluing their hands and buttocks to trains and airplanes, and tying themselves to fences and buildings. We get it, these tactics get the most media attention, as would anything scandalous or out of the ordinary. But at the same time, they also discredit a (valid, if you ask us) movement, turning the protesters into clowns that are destined for ridicule instead of serious discussion. If Greta could, she would probably slap them for being so childish in their approach. How dare you?