Episode 5 - Gail Bradbrook founder of Extinction Rebellion

Gail Bradbrook lives in Stroud and is one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion. This global environmental movement uses non-violent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping point in the climate system, biodiversity loss and the risk of social and ecological collapse. 

In this conversation, Christina asks Gail about her early influences and what it took for Gail to found a movement which led to 10,000 people protesting in the streets of London in 2018 and being named number one influencer on the globe in 2019. 

The Green Pledge project at Gloucestershire Archives has been made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund. To find out more and sign up for updates visit www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/our-projects/the-green-pledge-project/

Our pledge is to create awareness and discussion about climate change and biodiversity loss using our environmental records. 

We are also reducing our ecological footprint, by consciously using less resources, reducing waste, and, in our Heritage Hub garden, by encouraging wildlife and growing local food for local people.

If listening to these podcasts has inspired you to make changes in your life, you can also make a pledge through our partners at the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. find out more at www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/our-projects/the-green-pledge-project/public-pledge/  (make sure you press the button that says you heard about it through the Green Pledge)

Transcript

The Green Pledge Podcast

Episode 5 – Gail Bradbrook

00;00;14;04 - 00;00;18;01

Christina

Welcome to the Green Pledge podcast from Gloucestershire Archives.

Meet people from across our area committed to protecting and respecting nature and the planet. We'll be sharing stories from the past and the present, and imagining what our future could be.

In this episode, I'll talk to Gail Bradbrook, who lives in Stroud and is one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion.

00;00;45;11 - 00;00;48;15

Gail

I was trying to be more green as an individual, of course, you know, butStroud's a very hilly place, for example. And I have got a video online of describing how I'm trying to transport my kids are a little on on the back of an electric bike with an additional sort of tandem tag along, you know, all this sort of struggle as a mother, you have, you know, with, with washable nappies, but then your kids start getting skin problems with the wetness. Anyway, all this stuff, you're sort of stressing about and just realising really on the whole, the systems that need to change aren't changing. And this is fundamentally an economic issue. Woven into all of that, which is another story, is really there's a deeper spiritual malaise here. And, that's been a part of my life, since I was a teenager,

00;01;30;19 - 00;01;43;28

Christina

Gail, thank you so much for meeting with me today. You're an environmental activist and one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, which began in 2018 and led to 10,000 people protesting in the streets of London. We'll talk later about how all that came about. But firstly, I really like to know a little bit about your early life, what you think may have influenced you to go on to do what you've done.

00;01;53;08 - 00;02;16;10

Gail

I grew up in a coal mining community called South Emsal, which is in West Yorkshire. and my dad was a coal miner. so the the mining communities were just normal life for me. my dad was an electrician. He didn't like my mum to work. although he gave up on that one and let her let her after a while.

So it's quite a traditional family. and there were this sort of mining in the family for several generations, an abiding memory in my childhood is, you know, we didn't we didn't do, like, nature connection. You just played outside. and one time I went round the backs, as they would called back of the houses to play in the fields, and there was a half built factory there on my fields, you know, and I was enraged.

00;02;44;00 - 00;03;04;03

Gail

I never had a say as to whether that field was going to get taken out of action. And they concreted over a little stream and, which had a little sort of area where you could go and study the frogs. And me and my friends used to do that and used to rescue little frogs out of the grate where they'd fallen down. So I had a a real care for nature as a young one, I guess to say, my dad wasn't especially political, like, he didn't he wasn't on the picket lines. But Arthur Scargill used to march past the house every year, and the brass band still, you know, I still I hear a brass band and I immediately want to cry, if I see a lump of coal, I want to cry. Not because the damage is done to the earth, but it's just foundational part of my life.

00;03;30;06 - 00;03;52;21

Gail

you know, the, the, the, the nourishment that comes from nature, was significant but not conscious in my childhood. I it's not like I knew the names of plants or anything. I just liked being outside. I'm often talk about the sparrows, the big packs of sparrows that would be in the, you know, just outside the kitchen window bombing around. And my grief that they've, you know, they've declined hugely in this country. And I just feel deep love for all the little birds, but especially the sparrows somehow. And I miss them. Yeah. I don't know why. It always makes me cry that, you know, it just somehow. It's funny, isn't it? There's so many people and communities and wildlife suffering versus sparrows. 

00;04;17;15 - 00;04;36;03

Gail

My school was a working class comprehensive. There were some great teachers there. There was some poor teaching as well, you know. I self taught out of books. I was, you know, impacted quite heavily by some of the unhealed trauma and dynamics in my family.

I don't hold anybody sort of responsible for that. I feel like everybody does their best, you know what I mean? But, and there was bullying in my school as well. So I ran long distance even as a teenager and even without proper trainers on, to be honest, just to cope. And I used to run into the local woods called Howell Woods and I would listen to my school notes. So I got really good exam results. I often think, you know, quite a lot of people would react to a background that includes some trauma, bullying and so on. by, you know, going off the rails. But what I did was to sort of study even harder and just try and keep everybody happy.

00;05;20;23 - 00;05;29;23

Gail

so I anyway, I studied hard and I got, you know, we had GCSEs the first year and I got all A's and then went on to do A-levels and, I ended up going to Manchester University and I, you know, studied chemistry and then did a PhD in molecular biophysics topics.

00;05;39;11 - 00;05;40;17

Christina 

How was uni life?

00;05;40;19 - 00;05;49;17

Gail

Yeah. Had fun. I still carried on being, you know, what you'd call a girly swat, I got the sort of best degree in my year and various prizes and that sort of thing. I was always involved in politics, actually, as soon as I went to university, but I was getting increasingly involved in that, and it was kind of, did I really want my career to be about, science and sort of that version of progress or, something more sort of political and social change based because, you know, it's sort of easy to say it's great to invent a new medicine and sometimes that you know, incredible when new medicines are invented. And what I was looking at was relevant to new medicines. But, at the end of the day, health issues and humanity foundationally come down to inequality, not to a lack of medicine. So I got increasingly more interested in that path. And then also, it's just so it's not very easy being, a female with a working class background in science, you know, you sort of have an inner sense of imposter syndrome. So even even getting all these, like, accolades and whatever, I felt incompetent in the face of, like, mostly men that were sort of, the internet was coming in around that time in my PhD, and so they'd be sort of playing on it, or they'd go down the pub and talk about football and then talk about the science, and you'd left because you were bored of the football talk.You know, again, nobody's intentionally sort of excluding you,

00;07;08;04 - 00;07;09;04

Gail

Went to India for a while to Indian Institute of Science, and I was in Grenoble in, in France as well. but I kind of got to a place where I'd done, I'd sort of made, sort of statement, if you like, through a paper about what the nature of the work was. And you know, two separate people talked about the possibility of this being sort of Nobel Prize winning stuff. So it wasn't minor, but I never really knew if it was actually had any meaning.

00;07;35;24 - 00;07;46;00

Christina

So you're clearly heading to kind of leave the science world and move more into activism. What was the trajectory then that brought you to Extinction Rebellion?

00;07;46;00 - 00;08;08;24

Gail

I mean, I've had a period of setting things up and been involved in things in university, which was sort of like things around gender issues and things around anti-racism and, some environmental stuff as well, although and animal rights, I found the environmental movement quite middle class and I just, I didn't I didn't actually consciously think those words, but I sort of bounced off it a little bit. and then I, I, I left science in sort of around year 2000 to, go and work in the community, in voluntary sector, I learned about strategy and fundraising and project management and program direction and things that were a useful set of skills. I moved to Stroud in 2006, and I had two children. So, you know, that took up quite a bit of time.

00;08;35;21 - 00;08;38;14

Gail

but I think it was sort of 2008 when, the paid work I was doing was just not satisfying me enough. and I started doing work in the community in Stroud as well,

00;08;46;27 - 00;08;53;03

Christina

Were you at that point really aware of how bad the climate and ecological crisis was?

00;08;53;03 - 00;09;04;29

Gail

I think it was about 2008. I went and did some work locally for what's called Woodcraft Folk. You know, it's a bit like the Scouts for hippies. I was a bit more cooperative based education for little ones. that was a sort of starting point. And then there I was a director of Transition Stroud for a few years as well, like a volunteer director. One of them, I did fundraising for that and some strategic work. but I do remember in that period a friend coming to listen to someone talk about climate change, and I'd seen something on channel four that was sort of downplaying it. So although I had a sort of general environmental consciousness, I didn't really know then how bad it was. Absorbed a bit of climate denial, actually.

00;09;38;03 - 00;09;44;12

Gail

it was in 2010, I remember buying a George Monbiot book. actually, it was because he was talking about tax justice and the Tax Justice Network and their research showing that. How much money is hidden offshore and the sort of one set of rules for the rich, and one set the rules for the rest of us. And I was like, oh, I knew that was going off. But these guys have done the research on it, and I contacted them and said we should have a mass disobedience around non-payment of tax. And I was very encouraged by the director then, John Christensen. So the civil disobedience came in through economic analysis to start off with, I realised that I had a a lack of economic literacy. So I started something called Street School Economics, and we would take things onto the streets and

00;10;28;17 - 00;10;37;29

Gail

I it's it's turned out tangentially to mention, since I'm in the perimenopause that I've looked at my own neurodiversity and I'm probably autistic, one of the things I do is go deep into special interests as they’re called for autistic people, and one of them became economics for a while. So. So this three year deep dive. And then I, you know, went out to sort of try and teach. And part of that was environmentalism. And that was really around that time that I got real about the climate crisis. All this talk of transitions, transition towns and environmental policies, but you just looked at everyday life and us all doing the same thing, pretty much. And you thought, you know,

00;11;11;01 - 00;11;14;13

Gail

I I was trying to be more green as an individual, of course, you know, but Stroud's a very hilly place, for example. And I have got a video online of describing how I'm trying to transport my kids are a little on on the back of an electric bike with an additional sort of tandem tag along, you know, all this sort of struggle as a mother, you have, you know, with, with washable nappies, but then your kids start getting skin problems with the wetness. Anyway, all this stuff, you're sort of stressing about and just realising really on the whole, the systems that need to change aren't changing. And this is fundamentally an economic issue. Woven into all of that, which is another story, is really there's a deeper spiritual malaise here. And, that's been a part of my life, since I was a teenager,

00;11;56;01 - 00;12;01;28

Christina

Like you, when my kids were really small, I was doing my best with washable nappies and organic food and I couldn't really afford it. it was almost like Extinction Rebellion's message of needing, you know, the need for system change. It was the first time I'd really become aware of anyone else saying anything like that, and it really spoke to me. It was very zeitgeist wasn't it?

00;12;15;03 - 00;12;50;02

Gail

mean, just to say, like what Miki Kashtan said, which is something she's a great thinker in the world who I've had the pleasure of being mentored by. She said something like, you don't create a social movement, you just invite it into being. And that's how it felt to me. It was all those years of people working for the Green Party, trying to do that version of change or in Transition Towns, trying to do individual change, and not feel sufficient agency and knowing that it wasn't enough, you know, and then, of course, there had been, you know, the road building protest movements and, various other environmental forces that were had and more sort of civil disobedience angle on them. I think sometimes XR came with a certain arrogance of talking like it was, you know, this had never been thought about before. Well, what we did was we did do some of the organising differently with some key ingredients, I think helped it to, to flourish. But I would never want to make it sound like it just appeared out of nowhere. It appeared out of a need, and a desire and a lot of other people's hard work.

00;13;21;15 - 00;13;26;23

Gail

I probably feel to just tell you a story to do with my dad in the coal mine, in the strike that I told, recently. And, where they're talking about the opening of an under the sea mine in, in Cumbria. And so I went there knowing that there was some ex-miners going to come and the trade unions were there. And there's something really, deeply offensive to me about how the elites of this country, the media billionaires, try to divide and rule environmentalists from working class people when in my view, our interests are absolutely aligned and actually, some of the environmentalism of working class culture is really clear to me. Like my Nanna's house was always like a sort of almost like Freecycle before it was invented. She always had stuff that people don't want to hand on somebody else. You know, people don't waste things. There's a real care in coal mining communities of nature because people spend so much time underground. So, you know. Anyway, the story was that, you know, I've mentioned this dementia,

00;14;29;19 - 00;14;34;17

Gail

we didn't realise that it was dementia in our family for a while, even though my granddad had gone mad. You know, that's probably not the right phrase these days. Anyway. And, my uncle then had some form of early onset dementia. My dad started showing signs, but before then, as the coal mines had been closed down, he'd gone had to work, doing cleaning work for a while, and then he he got a job in a private coal mine, and it was very memorable. He said to me, Gail, this is the easiest job I've ever had. I just turn up and, I just have to sit down and read my book sometimes even have a sleep. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Maybe, you know, maybe they just need an electrician on site in case it's needed. and then he came to a house that I just bought and I needed some electrical work looking up, and he was just sort of jabbing his screwdriver really incompetently. and I realised that he didn't have the capacity to do electrical work. And then it sort of slowly dawned on me that the men were carrying his work in the coal mine. And after he died, which was, you know, some ten years later or whatever, we met some of them at his funeral and, I said, you carried my dad's job, didn't you, for years.

00;15;46;07 - 00;16;07;27

Gail

And they said, yeah, it was no big deal to them. But, you know, they that's what they did. And I and I said to when I was at the site, this potential coal mine with these miners there, like, of course I understand why people want mining to come back. It's not just about the jobs, it's about that level of deep solidarity between working class men, you know, and all the banter. As well of course. Right. I mean, that people would be there for each other in that way is it's really moving and that people would want that return to those times makes sense to me. Modern coal mining is not going to be like that anyway, I don't think.

00;16;23;24 - 00;16;30;19

Gail

but it was relevant to Extinction Rebellion because I thought I had a 5050 chance of some form of early onset dementia. around age 52, around the age I am now. And it made me think about seven years ago. You better go along with it then.

00;16;39;15 - 00;16;42;08

Christina 

just lead me into how that came

00;16;42;08 - 00;16;45;11

Gail

How XR came about. It came about. (Yeah. Yeah,) well, so I mean everybody had had their own slightly different version of events and story, you know, but for me, I had started a company called Compassionate Revolution, having met George Barda, who was part of Occupy Democracy, and he'd been part of the Occupy movement when it was at Saint Paul's.

 He’s wonderful. George. And he's not really somebody who's great at getting things organised, alot of it was left on my shoulders, but he was willing to be a director of this company, and it was a starting point. So that was good. and we were we created a website where people could pledge mass acts of art, heart and civil disobedience. So we felt that art was a key part of the change. Heart might be like sort of mass meditations or acts of mass care, you know, and then civil disobedience actions. And the idea was that you would have lots of different groups that would use this platform and build up civil disobedience acts, and we were the ones taking the bigger risk.

00;17;49;01 - 00;18;06;27

Gail

so we were running Compassion Revolution for a while and then but it wasn't really growing. And I just felt like I was missing information, that I was perhaps not showing up in the best possible way. And that was missing other people that could really help this to fly.

00;18;06;27 - 00;18;09;21

Christina

you talked about the importance of the spiritual side for you. What part did it play in terms of Extinction Rebellion coming into being?

00;18;13;04 - 00;18;31;10

Gail

I had the good fortune to sit in a women's circle for many years with a very amazing medicine woman, who held us in that space and helped us just to connect to the land and connect to our feelings around a fire once a month with the full moon. I've been to I've done various sort of healing practices, breath practices, yoga for many years I started on the path probably about 15 years ago, which is some would call it a medicine path when you're working with psychedelic psychoactive plants. obviously tricky subject because it's not legal, which I think is outrageous. It's an outrageous, sort of human rights issue, actually, and the sort of cognitive justice issue. But anyway, I've done that stuff and I've done some of it overseas as well. and that it's more the practice though alongside those medicines of, of prayer, I've been in sort of some communion with a wider consciousness, but some version of divinity, I say some version of it.

00;19;21;28 - 00;19;48;06

Gail

I mean, I'm not trying to downplay the great mystery. I'm just saying that, It's like the Dao, isn't it? The unknowable. So how to put even it into words? I've had some direct experiences. and I've had prayers answered, most notably the prayer for Extinction Rebellion to come to life, you know, to find the right people to work with. to have some specific healing in me that would help the movement to happen. I'm, I'm open minded. I'm not sort of into every sort of half baked sort of what people might call woowoo thing that comes along. But it, it feels like these that humans are in a spiritual crisis largely. It's certainly in the global so-called North,

00;20;13;09 - 00;20;33;12

Gail

So that's when I took this, flight and it wasn't, you know, a small thing to, to do that, but to with a carbon footprint. But to go to Costa Rica, it was both a sort of very deep healing using a medicine called iboga for PTSD and in myself, I think, complex PTSD. And then, it was incredible. but what you particular do is make prayers and request, you know, you're offering your life in service. the, the, you know, you're willing to take the risks that come with that and you need some help. And in particular, I asked for the codes for social change and then I met Roger Hallam through an online forum. We'd been a bit in conversation. I came back and tried to start a mass tax disobedience. So I was talking to him about that, and he gave me a lot of useful information because he was doing research at King's College and his own research. And then a wider literature review, so it turned into his four hour meeting, and it was obvious we're going to work together. the sort of magic moment was right at the end of the meeting when I said to him, Roger, you just told me everything I really, really needed to know right now. He tapped my notepad and said, ‘Well basically Gail, what I've just given you here are the codes for social change.’ And I was like, I should realise afterwards if he'd not use that word, I wouldn't have linked the fact that the prayer would been answered in that moment. 

So we we were gathering people around us and we, rebranded Compassionate Revolution, Rising Up, people didn't like that branding.

00;21;41;27 - 00;22;05;00

Gail

I think it's good branding, but who knows? I'm not a comms expert. And Rising Up was trialling different things we were doing different things in different parts of the country, and we’d gather every few months and do a review. Roger was, bringing us his various designs. He's very much focussed on how you design campaigns at a quite a detailed level. He was bringing a lot of useful thinking in that way. I also went and had training with the IENE institute on what's called momentum driven organising, and that proved to be essential to sort of XRs flourishing. And it gave Roger, who's a like a nerd for that, access to that thinking. And part of it was that, you know, as a movement, you needed to define your principles. And I took quite a long time working with those of us in the network on those principles. We had some drafts that we've taken from elsewhere, and then slowly they just sort of organically became ours. We sort of meant it. I think one of the things that came up on that trip in Costa Rica was that no blaming, no shaming principle and value,

00;22;52;02 - 00;23;07;23

Gail

So that came through. But, you know, like debrief and reflection was brought through our co-founder, Stu Bastian. Simon Bramwell was advocating for regenerative cultures, which I think is central. So there's just different aspects. You know, it took a long time to write the principle and value on non-violence. and then also as part of that, I just hit a wave of climate grief. And then I thought, that's has to be at the heart of this movement, that we feel it's not an intellectual exercise. We've got to feel the grief. And that had been, I guess, part of my spiritual practice was like, welcome in and being involved in, healing our emotions and letting them flow, you know, like water, not stagnate. So that was baked in. I think that that and the principles and values, framing the science to start off with the sort of key contribution I made from the start.

00;23;42;04 - 00;23;44;23

Gail

we were genuinely building connections and networks. And, it wasn't just an environmental consciousness, a sort of rising up document that used to give to everybody, talked about the sort of wider systemic issues. It wasn't the environment the most for some of us, anyway the most obvious symptom of a culture and a and a system that is anti-life. But, you know, XR was just ‘just’ another, campaign of Rising Up. But of course, it took off, it went ballistic. So, it then became the thing

00;24;21;05 - 00;24;22;12

Christina

So what happened next?

00;24;22;12 - 00;24;45;07

Gail

I mean, the first thing that happened actually was that we had this launch event and we wanted to ground it in spirit, some of us anyway. And we also had a little bit of a disagreement around including biodiversity loss. I mean, because it was a campaign Roger wanted to keep it simple, the three demands. But some of us just really insisted we had to keep the biodiversity crisis and never did. It's always the sort of poor relation and it shouldn’t be. anyway, anyway, we had enough coherence and agreement to have a launch event in Parliament Square, and that was on Halloween, which for those of us with sort of pagan orientation is called Samhain. And it's this times when they say the veils are thinnest with the other worlds that in principle are here supporting us.

00;25;09;05 - 00;25;09;21

Gail

You know, you know, we sort of thought there'll be about 100, 150 people come in. One of our co-founders called Neil Sager, Swedish. It sort of told us about this interesting Swedish young lass who was doing school strikes, and maybe we could invite her. So she came old Greta, young Greta, we had this event in Parliament Square on on Samhain 2018, and there were about a thousand people there, actually.

So ten times what we thought George Monbiot had mentioned is at the end of an article. And that helped. he came. And it was sort of funny that day because, you know, we didn't expect to sort of get away with it. But the police just thought it was another protest. And I was doing the MCing and and there was sort of a lot of talk about rebellion, of course, time to rebel.

00;26;03;14 - 00;26;24;02

Gail

But all we actually had planned was for two people to lay in the road in a sort of symbolic act, with the one lock-on tube, and it was just starting to feel a bit sort of pathetic just doing that. So I was desperately trying to get people's attention because they were off doing stewarding and all the rest of it to say, I think we need to do more than this.

In the end, I took a bit of a decision without much consultation, knew it was the right thing to do, but we invited everybody to go into the road if they felt to and the whole crowd started to slowly walk towards the road and we have this Buddhist samba band. So that's when the samba started and dear old soul started singing about if you know where the power lies, now turn and look into each other's eyes.

00;26;50;07 - 00;27;10;07

Gail

The power is in our hands. This sort of lovely song. And we were in the road. And it felt amazing. And you could feel the, sort of hairs on the back of the neck stuff, you could feel that something was starting then. Then we had a plan to do some specific actions to keep the attention. So there was quite a strong focus on fracking.

I was arrested with others at BEIS, at the Business Department for business, energy, Industrial Strategy and had anti-frackers with us.

I've been arrested at an anti fracking site and an incinerator site, it wasn’t my first arrest, but, and then the plan was to have this bridges action in November. And one of the ways that Roger organises this and is quite right, but it creates a lot of stress actually, is to set a date and say that's what we're going to do.

And then of course, there's nobody actually got any capacity to make it happen. So we’d announced the this bridges action. But there's something about saying it like, you mean it. People come, they showed up. There was this amazing woman, Tiana Jacques I think we were driving down for one of the events and I said, you know what, Tiana?

00;27;56;22 - 00;28;11;27

Gail

She organised a women's festival. I said, you know what? We really need some help with the bridges action. And she took it on and we just met her in the back of a car. So that sort of thing happened a lot. It felt like a lot of synchronicities. A lot of people come in, it was very, honeymoon period.

00;28;13;03 - 00;28;14;21

Christina

Can you describe what it was like?

00;28;14;29 - 00;28;48;24

Gail

I think is where I might use that word spirit again. Right. You know, because I, I sort of try to explain this to people in our movements who don't have that, you know, it's a word that has charged meaning not really nice word spiritual, right. But I think that what you do is you create a spiritual container or even a sort of more like an entity, or you could create something together, that has a feeling, and you enter into that space and you add to the resonance of that space somehow it has a feeling of vision. It has a feeling of agency. It has a feeling of togetherness.

it has a feeling of wisdom in it. And it's an attraction energy. And that's why I think if you only look at the mechanics of trying to build a movement, which is absolutely important,

you have to have this many hits on Facebook and you write to people and invite them to do talks. And it's all mechanised, important important stuff, but you have to have this container that has this feeling for people because there's so many different things that we can get involved in in the world. And it's overwhelming and too much need and we're all stressed where our lives are leading.

00;29;22;11 - 00;29;47;11

Gail

What what makes you stick with something because you go and you tangibly experience something. I would say I have more of an understanding of that now, but I would say that we did deliberately try and create that, you know, my friend Skeena Rathor took charge of the vision team, and there was lots of things behind the scenes like foot washing and, the sacred intention, why we’re here, sort of almost like a publicly spoken prayer, you know, of commitment and things like that, that really brought that sense of beauty. And then you have this sort of punk chic that Clare Farrell had brought, where we we're not doing merch, we've never done merchandise. So it's been about stamping your coats and putting little patches on that. That was a really good move and Claire had done that work for some years before. So there's a real sort of beautiful constellation of of people bringing their gifts. that was there in the those of us that helped found XR

00;30;23;18 - 00;30;27;25

Christina

And then there was the November 2018, five Bridges action. What was that like?

00;30;28;28 - 00;30;55;26

Gail

just a day. But it was one of the most epic days of my life. Right. I was on the Westminster Bridge. I think it was Lambeth Bridge where most arrests were being were happening and you'd sort of, you know, we've been doing these talks, talking about civil disobedience and the power of, standing up and how it might lead to arrest and how to go floppy and all these, you know, we've been doing non-violent direct action trainings. and it you know, again, who knows if this had any impact, but that there was that thing of trying to shift the consciousness from when I first gave the heading for extinction talk in my sitting room, which where we decided on XR, so that’s had over 200,000 hits or so that that video. But, when I mentioned civil disobedience, I always said it was like, there's all these, you know, long term climate activists in the room. And I always say it was like I'd ask them to get naked and take a poo in front of everybody, you know, like what? You're asking me to get arrested. So something needed to shift to normalise civil disobedience that was like an early intention, let's just make it normal. This is what we can do. And actually, we know in this country, certainly back then, it has been changing.

00;31;47;02 - 00;32;03;15

Gail

And obviously talking more about people racialized as white here and people with some class privilege, etc. but, it's not that big a deal getting arrested. If your mental health. Well, I'm not saying it's for everybody and you need lots of people behind the scenes supporting it in any way. So it does. Not everybody has to do that. But people went to Lambeth Bridge and they more people would file over there if they were up for arrest that day. I was doing the media stuff, so I wasn't getting involved in that that day. There's something really important about Rob Roger's sense of is some version of ambition and a sort of lack of care that can have a dark side that's not healthy, but there's a lack of care that's just like, exactly appropriate in an emergency situation, you know, like, yeah, this might not work and we might all end up looking foolish. We might waste some money, but what if we got to lose, you know? So there was that sort of attitude in the room. yeah, that was the Five Bridges and that really sort of put us on the map. And at that stage, XR started to be copied in other countries. And then we were planning towards a sort of April rebellion, building the crowdfunding and, the capacity towards that. that was really the biggest, I think, biggest thing that we ever did. I mean, the Big One that was in 2023, I reckon probably had more people involved, but certainly didn't have anything like the impact, because it wasn't a civil disobedience event.

00;33;18;27 - 00;33;40;25

Gail

The rebellion in April 2019 was phenomenal. And actually, I was behind the scenes trying to handle the financial side of it and not getting involved in the details. And that's how you organise, in a decentralised way. You know, you've got your patch and you focus on that and somebody else is doing, Oxford Circus and somebody else was doing Marble Arch or whatever. I think it was a couple of days before I even got got out of the office. So I down, and I was like, oh, my goodness. You know, it was like a miracle had happened. and you know, I think since I was I remember saying to Roger, I, I knew this was going to happen since I was about nine years old. And he said him too, since about 12 or whatever, it felt familiar. I had to do some media, which was challenging, but, we managed it anyway. You know, the April 19, 2019 rebellion, we had five sites. We held on to them for quite long time. They were, I think, of order about a thousand arrests. and I think I know everybody was doing that unless I had a bad back doing that floppy thing. So it was requiring a lot of police resources. It got the we got the global media's attention on it. We actually had this amazing head of our media team, called Ronan McNern, who'd come from the Occupy movement.

00;34;39;10 - 00;34;55;29

Gail

and then after the 2019 rebellion, a Banksy appeared at Marble Arch, you know, which was amazing. And, we were invited to meet, do a delegation to the government, not sure that had a lot of meaning, but we did that. There was, a meeting Skeena organised with the, some of the key people in the Labour Party because Corbyn was in power then, they helped organise the parliamentary declaration of climate emergency, which was a big moment. And then Teresa May was a sort of outgoing prime minister, announced a 2050 target where we had said 2025 for getting towards a version of net zero. and then I was invited to go to a committee, I think, in May, of BEIS and they one of the civil servants whispered in my ear that they were going to help to organise a citizen's assembly, which is documented on the BBC. So some aspect of all our demands were met. none of them fully, of course. And then, of course, there's a big pushback, you know, there's attacks from both the right and from the left where you're not getting it right. there was critiques were fair enough, but we were trying to do things differently.

00;35;54;02 - 00;36;22;01

Gail

We didn't want to be sort of sounding like echo chamber lefties, where we all knew what we meant, but nobody else got it, you know? So there was all of that. Right. we got our Extinction Rebellion International Solidarity Network going. it was a big, a big time. And, I suppose I suppose one of the things that became problematic was how how do you make decisions? Who decides, who decides? You know, when people are showing up and they're putting hours of their life and maybe getting arrested as well, they want to be part of how things are decided. And actually what social movement theory says is after you've had what's called a moment of the whirlwind, so the energies really high and you achieving big things, there can be quite a crash. And it's sort of like the advice is to let it happen and recover. And that's the time to reflect and debrief and sort of believe in yourself and to build from that place. And, and what Roger works on is escalation strategies. So it's the idea that, you know, you're getting attention for so much, but then you've got to push it up to the next level.

00;37;01;21 - 00;37;22;27

Gail

and so you have to do the next thing that's sort of shocking or huge in some way. but it just felt like he was pushing us constantly for the next escalation and also tried to take it into political party straight away. We were just not ready. so that he was bringing forwards this idea around Heathrow Pause. And he went off to do that separately. a part of what was going on for XR in that period was that we were it's a little bit like getting in the ship and paddling, but you it's not really built properly. So you're trying to build it while he's still trying to move that that was what was happening. So I was involved in trying to create our Self-Organising system and then we have this sort of October rebellion. And I think two big things happen there. One is that the police reacted very differently to us. there was a major clampdown, people thrown off the streets quickly. It was raining. It was hard work being there and it's part of sort of Heathrow Pause. Roger had been put in jail, but he was still sort of had the ear of some people quite central to XR. And there was a decision to do this tube action, the Canning tube action, which was in a working class community. I'm not sure I still see this day

00;38;17;21 - 00;38;39;29

Gail

I don't know why they chose that community. We'd done something like that but in a in the City of London, which is where it makes more sense to people. and it, it broke down into some violence, including from our own people. You know what, one of one of the organisers actually did a 36 hour fast of atonement, which I found very beautiful. But it's like as a movement, it sort of left us feeling a bit stunned. And lots of people had said before it happened that they didn't want it to happen. And there was this sort of excuse of, well, you can do whatever you want in the name of XR but this was being driven by some people in the centre. You know, it wasn't just a sort of autonomous action over there. Like sometimes people would do the odd thing where you think, oh, sure, that's a great look. But, you know, they'd done it and it wasn't particularly getting any traction. But that got a big a big push back. think we just did our best. What can I say? You know, hindsight is a brilliant thing. Isn't this more the wisdom is actually what matters really, now is what do you learn from that? How do you reflect on that and think, okay, if these things happen again, I would rather do this thing differently.

00;39;24;00 - 00;39;47;27

Gail

You know, it's like, if you look back in history like the, the Pankhurst's, they were separated even as a family with Sylvia, who I would more strongly identify with when a much more sort of socialist route, internationalist route where was sort of Christabel and Emmeline, you know, daughter and mother were much more sort of it's just about the women's vote, not just about that in the women's struggle, rather than maybe the somewhat bigger than the women's struggle, even. That's a that we're all in and that there's an alliance between all the struggles. Otherwise, how are you going to make change because you're just so separated and divided, you know, it's too big for any one group to think they're going to sort it out. That's that's my I mean, I sort of the way I describe I sort of stepped to the side in 2021, I was trying to do this strategy review and there was sort of strong forces at the centre of XR who were like, you're wrong, Gail. we just need to sound the alarm. I felt like, the alarms ringing is doing everybody’s head in. just ringing this alarm bell. It's about agency in the in that we needed to focus on, the deliberative democracy, but not just asking for it, but doing it. we needed to be much more focussed in our communities and not have this sort of one story that we're going to get a mass of people on the streets, and it's all going to change, you know?

00;40;50;26 - 00;41;16;08

Gail

So, so that sort of, group that wanted to do more, let's get as many people on the streets as possible sort of carried on and so did you know, Roger around that time, he's never chucked out of XR but he was asked to leave a particular circle because he'd been doing this Burning Pink stuff. And, I just people just didn't think it was a good fit going attacking the Green Party. And And I actually, funnily enough, in 2019, I said to him, Roger why don’t you form a radical flank, because then you could just be liberated and get on with it and, at that stage, he didn't think it was a good idea. But he went on to form Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil. And I was sort of saying to people in XR, look, you know, nobody is going to be a big a master of mass mobilising the Roger. Like we can give it a shot, but he's going to, we need to be doing something different. And I think it's much more of a community focussed now.

00;41;45;06 - 00;41;51;29

Christina

Personally, I think that one of the biggest legacies of Extinction Rebellion is that they've changed the narrative. You know, not just on their own, but climate change is just talked about now as if it's a given where it wasn't before. so that's my take on it. What would your take be on the achievements?

00;42;00;04 - 00;42;01;23

Gail

Yeah, we've had many impacts, I think a really significant achievement is putting the idea of deliberative democracy on the, on the map, you know, degrowth, we I would really like to see there's even more pushing that idea, But to break the sort of the thing around economics, it's just, very clear from the literature that you can't have so-called green growth. You can have partial green growth, you can have countries that need to grow their economies to some extent do it in a more green way. There's a company might want to grow. It's like not anti-growth, but ultimately you can't have GDP keep growing. It's just not physically possible. Physics doesn't allow it. Never mind, you know, there's no evidence of this sort of so-called decoupling, of 

So we have to have a different economic system and Thatcher said, TINA, there is no alternatives. It's really important to put forwards an alternative. for me personally, I mean, just what a wild and crazy time I used to say it was like being strapped into a roller coaster.

00;43;05;22 - 00;43;14;14

Gail

was dizzying. I'm so glad it's for my own sanity that it slowed down a bit. But I keep saying to  like Just Stop Oil keeping this topic in the public eye is an important thing that has to happen. So good for them. You know, somebody else has to be naming the finance system, etc. so, yeah, I mean, we won awards, you know, we were named the number one influencer on the in the globe in 2019. We were less than a year old. So I feel hugely proud of what we did. And also kind of like the responsibility of what comes next

00;43;45;28 - 00;43;56;24

Christina

You've just let me really nicely into my final question, which is I'd really just want to know what comes next for you as an individual. What are you working on now? What's become the most important thing?

00;43;56;24 - 00;44;04;19

Gail

As much as I helped get off the ground and support the XR Internationalist Solidarity network, I never really understood what they were doing. And I thought I'd better go and actually find out what they're about. And there's so much wisdom in eldership and I .. understand things very differently having worked in those spaces. So I sort of with them, we sort of formed something called XR being the change, and that's still in development that in the meantime, I had set up XR Money Rebellion as a strategic move. That was in 2020 during lockdown, which obviously had a big impact. And the window breaking actions with the banks and, you know, stuff focussed on finance. I wanted us to move up to talking about the economic system and I think Money Rebellion to some extent felt marginalised as well. It was like it's just the same as Ocean Rebellion and Plastic Rebellion and which are all very legitimate and cool campaigns.

00;44;49;28 - 00;45;12;14

Gail

But they're they're not the causative factor. They're, they're, they're looking at the and they're in the symptoms aren’t they? And I think we should have all these different groups in XR Scientists, Muslims, Business Declares, whatever, where people can find their place in a broader movement. That's really what Compassionate Revolution was about. Actually, you'll be in your in your piece of it was different tendencies. As my friend Kofi would say, within a broad umbrella. And then you can come together for the big pushes, but you need come together for the, they’re called power breaking moments, you only come together for them when you've got sufficient, sufficient capacity. So that's what XR’s saying now, ‘we’ll wait until we've got the capacity and we'll work more in communities.’ So a big thing for me in more recent years has been how much relationships matter to to really be in there with each other, and make commitments and

00;45;41;21 - 00;45;56;22

Gail

and listen to people who, who not only aren't being listened to, but come from cultures and communities of deep organising and struggle like I'm much more connected to Pan-Africanist struggles these days. And I just the level I can see the level of separation, it's just that the struggles for sovereignty in Africa are so very deeply connected to our movements in the global North, but we are blind to it From a Pan-Africanist point of view, probably the most exciting thing is happening in the Sahel, in West Africa, in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. And I working on that at the minute. as in writing some FAQs around. But, getting to know it more myself. So they have formed an alliance of states. they've unhooked themselves from sort of neoliberal economic bodies. and they're starting to Niger, for example, French France was taking its uranium for $0.80 a ton, but it's €200 on the open market. They've said enough, you know, we're not you not having our uranium for that much.

00;46;57;05 - 00;47;18;03

Gail

And also the leader in Burkina Faso has said it's called Ibrahim Traoré, who said they won't be recognising colonial debt. So my understanding goes back to this whole economics business is it's debt refusal repudiation that's going to make the difference, not this. You know, what we're doing in the Global North movement is looking at our governments and our businesses and say, please be different. And when I think about it from a systemic lens, they can't be different, individuals could be, but they'll find themselves out of power. They can't do it differently. It’s baked into the system, especially in the economic system. And you know, Jason Hickel, who's written about degrowth, he said the way that degrowth will happen in the global north is when the global South control their own resources, which is theirs to control. 80% of the resources in the world is global South owned. We keep stealing it. And when they say no and they want equality, our economy based on growth, which is rapacious and extractive, will fall to pieces

00;47;55;22 - 00;48;10;11

Gail

But what we really want to be doing is developing a degrowth economy. And in order to develop that, we need to develop some community power, and we need to be real about where we are as a species and what's going off and historically where we're coming from and where the struggles are in the world. You see what I mean? I've been on a learning journey. I had some of this knowledge before XR was launched. But I have been eldered and supported, as I say, largely by folks of colours and cultures who get marginalised. And so now I really, really understand the I feel like I do anyway when people talk about and I teach anti-racism. Right. But

00;48;34;19 - 00;48;48;28

Gail

it's how sort of, paradigms white supremacy is the phrase, you know, which brings to mind Klu Klux Klan it doesn’t just mean that it just means thinking that we know best and we don't. We need to listen.

00;48;50;27 - 00;48;54;07

Christina

Huge gratitude to Gail Bradbrook for talking to me.

The Green Pledge project at Gloucestershire Archives has been made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

We're committed to being part of the conversation about climate change and biodiversity loss.

The archive also has pledged to reduce its ecological footprint. So we're using less resources, reducing waste in our Heritage Hub garden by encouraging wildlife and growing food for local people.

if listening to this podcast has inspired you to make changes in your life, you can also make a pledge through our partners at the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. You can find out more by visiting our website, which you'll find in the programme notes.

Please sign up. Get updates and news here about the next podcast. And do please share these podcasts with others. And join me for the next episode, which will be from the forest of Dean.

Thank you for listening.