3rd-Space has been intimately involved in the climate movement as an historic mechanism for spiritual, social, and political transformation, a much-needed paradigm shift in Western consumerist consciousness.
In previous essays we have explored the relationship between corporatism, politics and the judiciary, the attempts to silence climate protest, and the inevitable existential questioning many of us are facing – who are we as a society?
Alarmingly, a raft of new anti-protest legislation has been enacted, and more than 2,000 climate and environmental protesters have been killed over the past 12 years. In Western democracies, increasingly draconian measures have been applied to climate activism. And in the UK, new police and prosecutorial powers have seen hundreds of people imprisoned.
In July 2024 Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil – climate movements grounded in principles of nonviolent civil disobedience – received a prison sentence of 5 years (the longest in British history), for advocating civic protest.
Far from being silenced, however, from his cell Roger is developing a democratic theory and practice for citizens and communities to take back the power to shape their own future.
This week 3rd-Space is publishing excerpts from Aaron Gell’s in-depth observant interview with Roger from his prison cell, recently published in the The New Republic.
They discuss “the degeneration of democratic culture, spurred by the capturing of states by corporate power” at the heart of that global crisis and what working together for an authentically regenerative revolution looks like.
This Climate Activist Has a Plan to Defeat Trumpism. He’s in Prison.
By Aaron Gell
Though virtually unknown in the United States, the 58-year-old Hallam, strategic mastermind of the civil resistance groups Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil, is a polarizing public figure in Great Britain—perhaps as famous for his rhetorical vehemence as for his extraordinary record as a climate campaigner.
As discomfiting as Hallam’s methods might be, there’s little doubt the approach has borne fruit. XR made its official public debut on October 31, 2018. Drawing on a year of planning by Hallam and a handful of others, the rally in Parliament Square drew 1,000 people, including then teenage activist, Greta Thunberg.
Just a few weeks later, XR all but shut down London, deploying an estimated 6,000 protesters from around the U.K. to block all five bridges crossing the Thames, in what became one of the biggest mass acts of civil disobedience in British history. After a variety of demonstrations over the succeeding months, including an action in April 2019 that packed police holding cells, XR’s demand that Parliament declare a climate emergency was eventually met.
Defying the authorities in this way is a proven strategy—see the Civil Rights Movement—but it is not without risk. In 2017, Hallam and a colleague were arrested for spraying graffiti around King’s College, where he was working on a Ph.D., demanding it divest from fossil fuels. (The university eventually pledged to do so.) Hauled into court, the pair argued that their action had been a proportionate response to the climate crisis, and the jury agreed, a major win for the movement. But last year, an attempt to mount the same defence in another case was thwarted by a judge, who declared the rationale behind the criminal acts immaterial.
In July 2024, Hallam was convicted along with four fellow activists and sentenced to an unprecedented five years in prison for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” (Hallam’s ‘crime’ had been advocating direct action during a videoconference.) The ruling prompted a harsh response from the U.N.’s special rapporteur for environmental defenders, who warned that the sentence may violate international human rights law. The results of an appeal taken to court on January 29 is yet to be announced.
Meanwhile, Hallam is being held in a medium-security prison in Norfolk, England, where he’s been doing some hard thinking about what comes next.
From Organic Farmer to Social Revolutionary
After two years of flooding put his organic farm out of business, Hallam rededicated himself to activism, pursuing a doctorate in sociology at King’s College, with a focus on mass social movements, to better understand the characteristics of successful efforts. Drawing on the work of Erica Chenoweth, Paul Engler, Gene Sharp, and others, he began to put together a list of principles. Among them: Movements must dedicate themselves to nonviolence, for spiritual as well as strategic reasons.
Nonetheless, while XR remains a going concern, with chapters around the world, the original magic that fueled its explosive growth was fleeting—and some of the blame for that no doubt falls to Hallam himself. For one thing, as the group became more of a threat to the established order, Hallam’s defiant approach and polarizing language became a problem.
Not for nothing did XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook describe him as “our biggest asset and our worst liability.”
Hallam went on to co-found Just Stop Oil, which took the same radical approach to climate protest that had animated XR, helping to build an international network of climate protest groups called A22. But even then, Hallam was beginning to reorient his thinking—shifting away from a focus on climate collapse and instead aiming to overturn an entire political system he believes is failing us.
The real problem is “the degeneration of democratic culture, spurred by the capturing of states by corporate power,” he told me. And a side issue of that is the relentless pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—“which is going to destroy the corporate sector and Western society and everything else.” What we really need, he came to believe, is to reimagine, and then recreate, society in a way that supports our shared humanity as we enter a frightening new epoch.
In short: a revolution.
Non-violent Democratic Revolution
Hallam knows his message—that a nonviolent democratic revolution is not only possible but essential, and that we actually have the power to shape our collective future, as humans have done throughout history—is a challenging one. Most of us came of age during a period when progress was thought to march forward of its own volition, albeit in baby steps, and revolution was a dirty word (except when cast in the elegiac hues of 1776). Talk of upending the established order makes us nervous. “We all want a nice, linear transition to a post-carbon future,” Hallam acknowledged, “But that’s not what historical sociology says, right? It just doesn’t happen like that.”
Climate activism alone, he now believes, will never suffice. And while revolution sounds scary, “the concept is simply the necessity to change the political regime to something that’s more functional, more suited to the social context at that point in history,” he said. “It’s a perfectly respectable idea. It’s got its dangers, but welcome to political life. Everything good has its dangers.”
Hallam’s program is elaborate (I would direct those seeking a deep dive to his 30-plus hour podcast, Designing the Revolution), but it boils down to a few central themes: Due to a cascade of carbon-induced emergencies, the coming years will bring major social upheaval. Right-wing forces are adept at exploiting such moments. To combat them, we need to envision and model a new social order based on radically democratic principles.
Citizen’s Assemblies
Hallam’s plan for replacing the existing political paradigm involves the formation of a network of citizens’ assemblies—local, regional, and finally national—which will come to act as a shadow government, pressuring the existing system for critical change. When their pleas are ignored (as they almost inevitably will be) pressure will be applied by a disciplined, relentless, and strictly nonviolent mass movement of the sort he’s already helped create several times. Eventually, the assemblies will create a new constitution and supplant the system altogether.
No doubt this outline will strike most readers as callow fantasy. But as Hallam points out, revolutionary change always seems impossible until it happens; in retrospect, it appears inevitable. He offers the example of citizens voting for their own leaders—a scheme that the eighteenth-century European aristocracy viewed as lunacy.
In considering Hallam’s revolutionary project, the first thing to understand is his unwavering certainty that the status quo is simply no longer on the menu; profound ruptures are coming whether we prepare for them or not. We’ve accustomed ourselves to a world that mostly behaves in predictable ways. But the rate of change is quickening. As we surpass 1.5 degrees of warming and stumble toward 2.0, the capricious will become routine. “All the black swan events are becoming white swan events,” he observed.
On some level, anyone paying attention understands this. We recognize that relentlessly pumping carbon into the atmosphere is destabilizing the complex environmental system on which human civilization rests, that things are going to get worse, and that our inherited political structures, built for times gone by, are not only incapable of addressing the emergency but seem in some essential way precision-engineered to ignore it altogether.
This is not news, or it shouldn’t be.
The Casualty of Moderation
Hallam calls our current moment a “pre-revolutionary period.” Such eras have arisen throughout history—and they unfold according to a distinct logic. One of the first casualties is moderation. “The centre does not hold,” Hallam said. “You saw this before the Nazis, you saw it before the Bolsheviks, and you’re seeing it at the moment in slow motion in Western democracies.” It’s easy to miss the signs, because “the centre still has institutional power,” he added. “In other words, likeit’s a zombie space. It’s dead, but it hasn’t yet been pushed over by the new.”
Under such conditions, wrenching paradigm shifts are inevitable. The only question, Hallam suggested, is whether we submit to authoritarianism, as many Americans seem all too eager to do, or embrace a genuinely pro-social revolutionary alternative.
While it would have been comforting in the US to hit the snooze button with four more years of Biden-style liberalism—a sound approach in simpler times—when survival hangs in the balance, there are distinct advantages to being awake.
A Radical Reinvention of Democracy
The centerpiece of Hallam’s plan is a radical reinvention of democracy. If there’s one thing Americans seem to agree on, it’s that our elected officials do a poor job of representing our interests. According to a 2021 Pew survey, 67 percent think most politicians are corrupt, and 65 percent believe the political system should be profoundly altered.
The reason for our mistrust, Hallam says, is quite simple: Despite the widespread belief that we live in a democracy, i.e. a government ruled by the people, the electoral process guarantees the opposite—that only those with access to money, privilege, and elite social status get anywhere near real power.
For Hallam, the path forward demands a look way back to the origins of democratic governance in ancient Athens. In Aristotle’s time, representatives were selected not by election but by drawing lots, a process called sortition. Although largely unknown outside of a circle of academics, the concept lives on in our modern jury system, in which enormous power, sometimes over life and death, is granted on a temporary basis to a randomly selected group of citizens.
The approach works remarkably well. On the whole, jurors serve with impressive seriousness of purpose, viewing their work as a sacred duty. Corruption is vanishingly rare. The isolation of the jury room seems to tamp down partisanship. And as it turns out, getting a group of everyday people together, providing them with basic facts, and letting them hash things out results in reasonably good decisions. Not every jury verdict is perfect, certainly, but perfection is not the standard. The standard is reflecting the will of an informed public, and in this respect, there’s little doubt that sortition beats election hands down.
In recent decades, sortition-based citizens’ assemblies have been convened in numerous countries, including France, Australia, Spain, Germany, Britain, Iceland, the U.S., and Ireland, where one such group focused on the contentious issue of abortion, leading to a national referendum that overturned that nation’s ban. These experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that average people, chosen by lottery in a manner designed to represent the full spectrum of political, ethnic, age, gender, and other categories, generate sound policy with minimal rancour.
Perhaps more importantly, by removing expensive campaigns from the political process, sortition eliminates the corruption of incumbency, and removes the key mechanism through which wealthy elites manipulate the system. “The first thing is these are ordinary people, who are honoured to be part of the assembly,” Hallam explained, “so they’re not in this space of power and hierarchy. You get rational policy outcomes … but also you create a different political culture, because people listen to each other, and you overcome extreme polarization and all the rest of it.”
Sortition Versus ‘the Culture of the Rich’
The major threat to the Republic has always been “the culture of the rich,” he added, “which puts self-interest before the public interest.” While this dynamic has a long history, the spectacle of a handful of billionaires dismantling America’s social safety net and civil rights law puts the issue in unusually stark relief.
Under a representative lottery system, Hallam added, “by definition, the one percent is just one percent of the chamber.” As a result, citizens’ assemblies tend to garner exceptionally high levels of public legitimacy.
It’s important to note: Sortition-based assemblies are not a partisan project. They are as liable to arrive at conservative policy prescriptions as liberal ones. That’s the point of democracy.
Political categories shrink in significance when the focus is on genuine deliberation rather than surly displays of tribalism. By putting actual power in the hands of average people, assemblies act as an antidote to the political resentment and resignation that sustain our polarized climate.
And critically, in cases where a people’s movement actually does manage to topple a regime, assemblies could provide a governance model with wide legitimacy, avoiding the sort of power vacuum that occurred in Egypt after Mubarak was deposed, for instance, and tamping down authoritarian strains that might arise within the movement itself (see Russia, 1917).
Legitimate Questions
Many readers will remain unconvinced. They will doubt the intelligence of their fellow citizens. On learning that assemblies will hear from experts as they deliberate, they will spot an opportunity for bad actors to stack the deck. They will imagine ways in which bias will warp the attempt at representative sampling. They will predict that, as in any group interaction, certain people (loud, charming, aggressive, etc.) will tend to dominate the process.
These are all good points, and advocates of sortition-based democracy have devised a variety of mechanisms to deal with them. While such details are well beyond the scope of this piece, a 200-page study published in 2020 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development offers one good primer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while recommending ways to institutionalize the use of assemblies as a supplement to governmental decision-making, it stops short of endorsing a wholesale replacement of the electoral process.
As for those who are persuaded that the urgency of climate collapse not only demands but invites a more radical implementation, it’s natural to wonder how exactly Hallam proposes to get there. How does a wonky experiment turn into an authentically transformative revolutionary project?
This may be the toughest question of all, particularly for those of us living in the U.S., a country that seems much too big, complex, powerful, and fundamentally complacent to ever ditch the neoliberal paradigm.
Could it really happen—a democratic revolution without a drop of blood spilled? In an era when our institutions are rapidly shedding legitimacy; when an empowered far right teams up with a corrupt oligarchy and begins openly dismantling the last vestiges of our democratic system; and when the climate emergencies begin to really bite, I think it’s possible. It certainly sounds a lot better than the other options on the table.
For now, Hallam is well aware, many will cling to the status quo for as long as they can, even those well-credentialed, liberal elites who presumably know better. “They’re all sitting on their hands, right?” he told me as the last few minutes of our call ticked down. “But what needs to be said is, ‘Look, the worst possible thing imaginable is going to happen to your values in the next 10 years if we don’t get our shit organized, right? So, you have an absolute moral obligation to look at non-fascist alternatives.”
