[Caption: Doctors for XR sitting on Lambeth Bridge holding protest signs. Credit: Ray Tang/Shutterstock.]
April 10, 2022. It was a mild spring day.
Thousands of people flooded the streets of London in support of Extinction Rebellion (XR). The pavements were alive with carnivalesque drumming, creating a wall of sound. A fluorescent rainbow of flags wafted through the air. Printed on them was a stylised hourglass: time was running out.
At 4:30 pm, the sun went in. The laughter and drumming faded as a solemn wave passed over Lambeth bridge. The protestors marched further and further away. The shadows left the concrete. All that remained were thirty healthcare professionals, sat in rows of ten. Facing them was a line of police.
Up to £10m was spent policing XR protests based on the sheer scale of the demonstration and the manpower needed.
Alice Clack was forty-seven. Her curly brunette hair was arranged in a somewhat casual fashion. The breeze clipped at her blue scrubs. The polyester uniform made her instantly recognisable as the most respected and trustworthy profession: a doctor.
The police nervously shifted their weight from side to side. Not launching into action, but not holding back either. “You could see they were struggling with it," recalled Patrick Hart, a Bristol GP.
The previous day, the group were frustrated and demoralised by the little coverage they had received blocking the Treasury. Now, with fresh determination, they challenged the media to ignore them.
The police moved quickly: briskly walking over to the line of protestors. Chris Newman, GP and co-founder of Doctors for XR, remembers thinking: “This is going to be an amazing photo.”
For twenty minutes, each officer crouched down in front of a protestor and politely asked them to clear the road. Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 was in place. The police had the authority to disband the demonstrators for the potential to cause serious public disorder.
Alice sat still, undecided what to do. It was all so rushed, none of it was planned.
Spread across the road in front of them was a homemade black banner. Alice had resourced the materials from home. It was capitalised with: “For health’s sake: stop funding fossil fuels.”
On April 7, the UK government had released its new energy strategy. The plan was dominated by the expansion of carbon production by North Sea oil and gas. It also included new oil and gas licences, opening up discussions of fracking in the North-West.
Matthew Paterson, Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester, argued that the scheme was a significant shift from previous approaches. He said policy needs to be “actively minimising demand through efficiency and conservation strategies, while shifting supply over to zero carbon sources.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report advocated for emissions to peak by 2025 and halve by 2030 to avoid excessive warming and climate catastrophe.
UK emissions in 2021 had increased 4.7% from 2020. The evidence suggested the country was not serious about its climate obligations.
Anger and frustration welled up inside Alice, stretching into her throat and to her chest. She started crying, a few tears dribbling down her cheeks as she pleaded with the police officer to understand.
Doctors for XR were protesting the government’s £10bn a year financial support towards the fossil fuel industry.
In February 2022, fifteen of the largest oil and gas companies revealed they exceeded their share of emissions in line with 1.5’C global heating by 37%.
Next to Alice, Newman was talking to fellow XR member Dan. He was crying: “I really want to do this. I want to be part of it, and I want to support it.” Newman tried to assure him: “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
Dan stood up. He felt guilty, like he was not doing enough. He wished he could do something different.
The officer asked Alice to move again. She tried to soothe herself: letting the air breathe deep into her lungs, and then exhale slowly out of her trembling nose. Her pale green eyes stared across Lambeth Bridge and onto the River Thames. The murky waters ebbed and flowed, gradually rising.
Alice had made her decision: she was resigned. She said: “Of course, there is a kind of process of: Am I willing to let this happen?”
The officer read Alice her rights, then she was asked to get up and was led to the police van.
"The most challenging, tension-filled moment is the point of arrest, when your heart is full of fear," one XR activist remembered. "The rest of it is quite boring, actually."
Shortly after 5pm, it was all over. Seven doctors were arrested. Did they really call themselves health professionals?
For six years Alice trained in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Edinburgh University, graduating as a doctor 2012. She developed specialist expertise in low-resource settings in West Africa.
Emergency after emergency, Alice could see the difference she was making not only in the women’s lives but in training the community. “It was just hands-on medicine all the time…it’s quite high octane but also rewarding,” she remembered.
Alice did not speak passionately of her time in Africa, her eyes did not light up with infectious enthusiasm. Yet, the gravitas of her speech revealed her conviction that it was important work.
Sat at home, feet perched on the sofa, her every move was careful and considered: “I think there’s different parts of our personality that feed into the different choices we make.”
XR was launched in October 2018 by three academics concerned over climate change. The IPCC had declared that without urgent mitigation to keep global temperatures below 1.5’C by 2030, it will cause “irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people.”
Following in the footsteps of civil rights movements akin to Martin Luther King and the Suffragettes, XR use tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience to alert society to the climate crisis. XR's three core demands are: tell the truth, act now and decide together.
Co-founder of XR Roger Hallam used research in mass engagement to strategise civil disobedience. Disruptive action captivated the public’s attention; but only through sacrifice, risking arrest and prison, would people take the crisis seriously.
Professor James Miller, media organiser for XR and founder of Writers Rebel, explained that: “The rationale for arrests is to create a mass event and collapse the system…It’s to make a mockery of the law.”
Protests are often very theatrical. On September 2, 2020, Doctors for XR performed an action entitled ‘Climate Corpses’ in Parliament Square. Chesterfield GP Kathy recalled being dressed in a lab coat, mock-checking people’s pulses and assigning them climate-related death certificates.
[Caption: XR protestor dressed as the Grim Reaper on Lambeth Bridge. Credit: Ray Tang/Shutterstock.]
From 400BC, the Hippocratic oath has been foundational to ethical codes in medicine. No longer formally taken by doctors, the General Medical Counsel’s (GMC) guidance rest on similar principles. It states: “doctors…have a duty to act when they believe patients’ safety is at risk.”
“One of my core values is truth,” said Newman. “I thought the government was fixing it…I felt lied to.”
Newman recalled the moment he started Doctors for XR in 2019. He was watching an activist being ruthlessly interviewed by Robin Boardman on his phone. Clutching his device in anger, he wanted to jump into the screen. If only there was a professional group that could demonstrate show the climate crisis was serious.
Suddenly he felt a crushing weight on his chest: “Fuck. Do I have to do this now?"
He then spent the next twelve hours, until the early hours of the morning, building a website. He published a video defining all the duties of a doctor as ascribed to by the General Medical Counsel (GMC). Within days, Newman’s WhatsApp blew up with hundreds of health professionals wanting to get involved and do something. A few more days, five of them met at a house in Dalston to talk about what to do next.
"I didn’t begrudgingly do it," Newman said. "But I thought I had no moral way out.”
Alice’s interest in climate increased after the Paris Agreement (2015) when 196 countries adopted the legally binding policy to keep global heating under 1.5 degrees. Fast-forward to 2018, the House of Commons voted 411- 119 in favour of a third runway at Heathrow airport being built. The new runway would actively encourage greenhouse gas emissions in opposition to the Paris Agreement. There was a conspicuous lack of action towards keeping the promises of minimising global heating.
Alice joined XR in late February 2019. Her contract in West Africa had ended and she had a brief stint of time in the UK before starting her next project.
She attended an introductory XR meeting. Hands moist with anticipation, she clutched a mug of decaf herbal tea in a hall cloaked with musty air. Her heart fluttered, nervous about the unknown: what were the people going to be like? It was unlike any meeting she had attended: meditation, people ‘checking-in’ with each other and strange wiggly hand signals. It was enough to arch most people’s backs up with prejudice.
Still, Alice was undeterred. XR was a fresh movement that could draw attention to the situation and change the climate trajectory. In her mind she had resolved to return to Africa and work on long-term projects. Not wanting to threaten her chance of getting a visa, she had no intention of getting a criminal record.
In April 2019, XR initiated a month of disruptive protests, resulting in 1,065 people arrested and 53 people charged.
Witnessing arrest for the first time, Alice was overcome with emotion and gratitude that people were willing to be arrested for what they believed in and create change.
In the rebellion actions afterwards, Alice dug deep and got involved in arrestee welfare. Run by XR volunteers, arrestee welfare team ensures no one is lost in the criminal system and that individuals have access to support.
XR promote a sustainable and regenerative arrestee lifecycle which support members before, during and after arrest. There are arrestee and welfare training days for those contemplating arrest. Shrouded in language of sacrifice and truth, XR attempt to strike a balance between mythologizing the sacrifice of arrest as well as respecting individual choice.
Alice was only expecting it to be a short-term commitment, not an 18-month undertaking. Feeling a sense of duty, she reasoned it was important to support it.
The more Alice surrounded herself in the climate movement, spending time with members and learning about the crisis, the harder it was to leave.
The World Health Organisation predicted an excess of 250,000 deaths per year by 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress. More than half of this number was projected onto Africa.
Niggling in the back of Alice's mind, was her career in Africa. She recalled there was a shift in what she thought was important at the time. “If climate change isn’t tackled then the work I was doing in [low-resource] settings wasn’t sustainable anyway,” she said.
West Africa has been described as the ‘poster child’ for the climate crisis. The nations in the region are faced with extreme droughts ruining harvests, coastal erosion threatening the local population and assets, all exacerbating an already weak infrastructure ridden with disease and poverty.
Alice had accepted that if she could not go back to work in Africa, she could live with that. In rare glimpse of her professional composure fraying, she urged: “I [didn’t] want that to happen, I want[ed] to do that work. But I was willing to accept that it might be a consequence.”
Working in a hospital in Wales three days a week, Alice was travelling up and down from London. Despite this busy period, she still found time for activism.
Alice said she “fell” into the “back-office stuff” within Doctors for XR. This was an understatement. She connected people from outreach and WhatsApp chats, networked to bring individuals together, and helped manage the group.
The night before an action, Alice would entertain her fellow activists in her London apartment. It was peppered with African memorabilia from her and her late father’s separate travels. A keen hostess, she supplied copious amounts of herbal tea and vegan chocolate.
“Alice”, Newman paused in search for an apt description, “is an incredibly committed individual.” He admitted: “I don’t know what we’d do without her, she’d like the glue holding everyone together…often at a personal cost.”
If charged with a criminal offence, doctors are obliged to report it to the GMC. By participating in disruptive nonviolent protest, Doctors for XR risk their careers and license to practice medicine. At the time of writing, no doctors have had their licenses withdrawn.
After years of intense training, various medical qualifications and buckets of experience, why would a doctor put this all on the line?
In 2009, The Lancet claimed that: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”. Increased carbon dioxide levels, extreme heat waves, food insecurity and infectious diseases are just some of the adverse impacts of climate breakdown.
For many, the climate crisis is a health crisis.
The doctors interviewed for this piece struggled to articulate the climate emergency. Hesitantly, they grasped for an appropriate description to do justice for ecological catastrophe facing them.
Hart, who was at the same protest, had also worked in low-income settings in the Global South. He worked with communities with Tuberculosis and HIV, and questioned the point for treating these conditions when it was only going to get worse.
He realised that the climate crisis was the thing that everything else hinged on. Hart was haunted by livestock dying, devastating droughts and patients becoming terminally ill from diseases that was so easily curable in the UK.
Hart explained: “It’s an issue of scientific data and of preventive healthcare…this is exactly my job."
Sleepless nights, grief and depression, excruciating anxiety over risking a career that he loved, Hart finally processed his obligation to climate activism. “Physically, I could not stop doing this,” he said. “I would just psychologically collapse into despair.”
Although Hart displays what some psychologists term as climate anxiety, it is a completely rational condition from his world view.
Doctors consider well-being as a duty, and therefore finding a remedy for the patient is a task they must fulfil. Alice spoke about how professional obligation to protect her patients and tell the truth, as well as her duty to act if she sees policies that are going to harm the public. Alice explained: “If you consider health care workers have respected voice in society then you could argue they have more of a responsibility…It would be illogical not to act.”
This altruistic strength of professional duty can also be a weakness, as Alice acknowledged.
“I have quite a developed sense of responsibility,” she confessed. “When you feel responsibility quite heavily…it’s difficult to make it a nuanced balance and feel things in perspective.”
[Caption: Doctors for XR stood outside the National Gallery during the Festival of Resistance. Credit: Em Dalton.]
Back on Lambeth bridge, Alice caressed her necklace under her scrubs. She had organised wooden necklaces to be laser cut for the arrestee welfare team in October 2019. It was a gift of gratitude after a challenging action. A mark of community and source of pride, she held the circular XR pendant.
Alice was conflicted by her duties.
She was worried of being unable to work in Africa again and jeopardizing her career. Then there was the climate crisis: the devastating government policies, the countries that were already enduring extreme floods and droughts, the disease and poverty rampaging through communities.
Alice had personal commitments too. Her partner, six months, was introducing her to a friend tonight. a not unimportant step. she didn’t want to let her down.
“The downsides become less important,” she thought. “It’s not about wanting to, it’s about willing to.”
So often Alice had been delivering arrestee care. This time, she was the recipient.
Instead of ringing the office, Alice rang her partner and told her what happened. “I’m not surprised”, she said. Hit by a pang of guilt, Alice apologised again. “Are you okay though?”, her partner asked.
They had discussed it over the last 6 months of them being together. But she couldn’t escape the guilt of letting her down.
“Ultimately everyone gives what they’re able to give”, Alice reflected. “People have to find their own balance…it is easy to overdo it, very easy.”
Hart avoids ringing people altogether now. “I don’t ring anyone anymore.” he said. “My family would just stress.”
After being released from police custody, Alice returned to her hospital work in North Wales. Back in her scrubs, but the blue material felt different this time.
“It’s surreal.” she remembered. The cognitive dissonance between the high emotion of activism to the monotone hospital wards, taking care of patients. “The contrast of being amongst activists seeing what you see…and then being back in the real world where everyone is just ignoring the crisis,” she said.
The divergence between her two lives was still frustrating: “You end up feeling silenced.”
On November 15 2022, Alice and her colleagues were acquitted from all charges. West London Magistrate’s Court Judge ruled that the disruptive action was proportional to the risk of the climate crisis. Judge Robinson was “impressed by the integrity and rationality of their beliefs.”
Others have not been so lucky. Eight climate activists were imprisoned in 2021, and at least thirty climate activists were behind bars at the end of 2022.
Alice admitted: “I still have slight conflict between what I’m doing and what is useful.” The urgency of the crisis tipped the balance.
Sat at home, feet perched on her sofa, Alice admitted: “I still have slight conflict between what I’m doing and what is useful.” She had been on numerous protests since April, one of which she is awaiting trial for.
On December 31 2022, XR announced “we quit” disruptive tactics. In future, they would prioritise “attendance over arrest”.
Would Alice risk another arrest? “I am prepared to do it again, if the circumstances demanded it.”
[Caption: XR rebellion protestors on Lambeth Bridge forced to move by police. Credit: Ray Tang/Shutterstock.]
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[This is a creative nonfiction long-form piece that I submitted as part of my Journalism MA at Kingston University Jan 9, 2023.]
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