Tell the Truth! Ring the Alarm on Climate Emergency

One out of three people in the Boston Metro area remain unaware of the most basic fact that global warming is caused mostly by human activities (Yale Climate Opinion Maps, Dec 2018).

~~ TELL THE TRUTH ~~
Extinction Rebellion is here to tell the truth, and act with the urgency that the truth demands.

On April 17th at noon, XR Boston begins its non-violent uprising against the long-standing criminal inaction on our planet’s ecological breakdown. Our governments and the media have failed to tell the full truth about the climate crisis and local environmental emergencies, and failed to wholly communicate the need for drastic action in order to save life on our planet.

We will gather at the site of the Boston Massacre at noon and present a call to action to the Boston Globe, urging them to help us bring about the transformational change needed to face the ecological crisis. We will then take publicly disruptive, non-violent action to declare what we know to be true, and upend the repressive silence around the climate emergency.

~~ PLEASE BRING BELLS ~~
If you have any, please bring bells or chimes so that we can sound the alarm together and summon our communities into action. Bells have a multiplicity of meanings across cultural and spiritual traditions. We invite you to hold those at the action as appropriate.

~~ OFFSITE ACTION ~~
We hope we’ll see you there, but if you can’t make it, help us from afar, starting at 1PM:
https://xrmass.org/boston-globe-plan

~~ HASHTAGS ~~
#ExtinctionRebellion, #InternationalRebellion, #xrus, #xrmass

<– FAQ –>
1. I love the Globe — and they do report on climate change! Why not make a call to action at a media outlet that denies climate change?

We need help informing the public on the climate emergency and we think the Boston Globe is the best placed organization to do it. They already know that climate change is a problem, it’s in their mission to “expose the truth, even in defiance of powerful interests” (and their history lives up to this — think Spotlight), and they have several excellent writers who have devoted themselves to reporting on the environment. We are asking Globe Editor Brian McGrory to prioritize the work of those writers so that the Globe’s reporting is commensurate with the scale of this existential crisis.

We are making a constructive call to action for the Globe to lead on fixing systemic issues. The whole media system has shortcomings when it comes to the climate crisis, and we don’t blame the Globe for this. We are approaching this in the hopes of building a constructive relationship, which is why we contacted Editor Brian McGrory several times with a request to speak together. We will continue to do so, even after we present our call to action. Extinction Rebellion hopes that writers and other staff at the Globe understand that we are coming from a place of deeply appreciating their work and seeing this as an opportunity for leadership.

We aren’t spending our limited energy to ask those media outlets that deny the climate crisis to shape up their act. The problem is far too urgent to spend a lot of time convincing deniers that they should change their minds. Extinction Rebellion hopes to get 3.5% of the population involved in our actions, which has been shown by Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth to be an effective way to promote change.

2. But, it’s not the Globe’s problems, it’s the system!

We agree that the climate and ecological crises are systemic in nature and that systemic change is needed to address them. However, systemic change only follows those brave enough to push for it. Historically, the Globe has contributed crucial and intrepid reporting to oust other kinds of systemic failures. Now, we respectfully ask that they take up that mantle again with regards to the climate crisis. We recognize that this is a difficult task and that many institutional barriers exist which block effective reporting — not least of which is the fact that the public has not historically been interested in reading about the environment. But at a time when young peoples’ futures are being crushed in front of their eyes; when fossil fuel companies put out greenwashing advertisements, all the while spending hundreds of millions on lobbying to secure billions in continued subsidies; and when the arctic is melting far faster than predicted, institutions like the Globe need to cover this escalating collapse as they would a third world war. There is a story here that people will want to hear—we know, because we have been constantly surprised by the number of people desperate for the truth which Extinction Rebellion is committed to telling.