I feel like protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion seem to overwhelmingly elicit negative responses from the public and I’ve been wondering whether there are any examples of where carrying out similar direct action activism has acomplished it’s goals in the past?
I recently watched a VICE piece on the Australian coal industry discourse between activists and industry workers and I couldn’t help but come away feeling like antagonising these industries & their workers wasn’t helping. I feel it showed the industry workers weren’t the enemy and engaging in confrontational activism with them only seemed to galvanise the workers against the activists, rather than bringing them round to the activists point of view.
Is direct action activism really the right way to prompt policy change?
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Many of us follow the teachings of one John Joseph Lydon. “Never trust a hippy.”
This is something I always wonder too, I have a reasonable dislike for extinction rebellion (to me it’s a very white middle class version of environmentalism but I did absorb that opinion from twitter) and a lot of protests that do make the news are people doing things that are very disruptive and annoying – like blocking cars on main roads etc. The issue is that I’m sure there’s plenty of other people making efforts to raise awareness to environmental issues, but only the really disruptive things will make the news and get attention.
I doubt it. The trouble is that it never seems to be particularly well organised or credible at the point that people are lying down on roads or digging tunnels underneath railways or sleeping in trees. Supergluing your hands or face to the environment to protect it just makes the activists seem like poundshop martyrs.
Properly done, with science, examples and a respected figurehead is far more successful. Look what David Attenborough did for plastic use.
I think it’s more indirect.
The government see the protests and the public response, then have that in mind next time they’re coming up with a policy or making a decision.
I think it’s rare that it has a direct impact.
More like “Quentin, do you think we should let that coal mining company dig next to Stonehenge?” “no probably not, remember the fuss last time we tried to build a road under it”.
Direct action in the U.K. environmental movement comes out of the road protest camps in the 90s which were hugely successful. The Government wanted to embark of a massive road building programme and extend the motorway network, including through various environmentally important areas, so activists set up camps on the proposed building sites. It went on for years but the programme essentially couldn’t go ahead due to the protests and by the end of Majors government it had been scaled back by 2/3rds.
I think this is where lots of the tactics being used against HS2 come from.
The idea isn’t to win people over to your point of view, but to actually prevent or change something yourself without appealing to an intermediary like the Government.
The Newbury bypass protests all but killed road building on grand scale in the UK. Yes that got finished but many more schemes like the arrundal bypass near me just died as all the legal challenges etc. Needed make them just too expensive
This one was pretty effective as evidenced by the response of the French (terrorism) https://history.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/nuclear/
They attract a negative reaction because of the tactics they use. They’re antagonists. They’re the same group of people that are linked in with other anarchist. Their anti-everything.
Anti-government, anti-conforming, basically anti-everything mainstream. They like to be different and stand out