This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
Clare Farrell, Alison Green, Sam Knights and William Skeaping
Penguin: 2019
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We’re so desperate we’re using comic sans.

This planet is getting hotter than young Leonardo DiCaprio.

The wittiest placards on the Australian climate strike came from a generation that’s known nothing but an environmental crisis, an entire cohort for whom the future has always represented a threat rather than a promise. Young people organised the strike, young people spoke from the platform, and young people turned out in great numbers, voicing a mixture of memeified cynicism (about politicians) and untarnished optimism (about the protest).

Their slogans inadvertently exposed the routinism of the established left, whose banners looked stodgy next to all the puns about #hotgirlsummer. Yet the proliferation of hand-constructed signs also suggested an assemblage of individuals rather than a protest built by organised groups — and, without such structures, even the biggest event can remain a one-off media spectacle instead of an exercise of political power.

It’s a difficulty emerging from the particular context in which climate change emerged, a context explored in Nathaniel Rich’s book Losing Earth — an expanded version of his much discussed essay from the New York Times Magazine.

• Tags: Alison Green, Clare Farrell, Extinction Rebellion, Issue 17, Jeff Sparrow, Nathaniel Rich, Sam Knights, William Skeaping