A year ago XR gave me hope. We could unite a broad movement around 3 simple aims and use NVDA to change government policy and our world in the face of indisputable scientific fact. XR claimed that the social science evidence backed the strategy up, although in truth the evidence was never really compelling for me, having looked at the research. The need to do something collectively and escape the blind alley of individual ‘lifestyle’ choices felt important. To tell the truth, and act, in the face of despair, was compelling.

A year later and nothing has changed. The COP25 has ended impotently. Governments and media rediscovered appeasement; declaring a climate emergency without action.

We need to hold ourselves to account and to keep on telling the truth, about XR as well as the climate.The world is on fire. We have tried but the strategy has failed to effect change. Governments, and the owners of capital are doing nothing. We need to do something else. We don’t have long. It may be too late.

Like Fleming discovering penicillin, our experiment seems to have failed but in the process we may have discovered something much more important for our survival.

We have found eachother. We have connected internationally; a vast web of hope, of solidarity, of love. XR has enabled systems of international co-operation.We know that co-operation organised our evolutionary survival as people, animals and planet. In XR we have rediscovered the language and systems of co-operation…of sustainability.

We need to keep telling the truth. The task ahead of us is to move outside of XR and be within our communities where climate crisis will impact the most; to protest together in actions against fossil fuels, to share food and resources, to make music together, to protect our wild spaces together. The climate struggle is class struggle. It affects the poorest the most. Collective co-operative action helps us to survive, it is sustainable, and exists in radical opposition to the toxic system. It also gives us hope for sustainable change because we can see a different future, together. And there are a lot of us ‘being’ that future.

It seems to me that governments, the media, military and owners of capital will continue to destroy our world, and to demonstrate their absolute inability to do anything else.Their very existence has always resided in our destruction; in exploitation of our world, animals and people. It is futile to try and persuade them to change course through disruption. Any changes they make towards addressing climate breakdown will be protectionist, militaristic and authoritarian. That is not a world I want to live in.

So as they continue, we must continue. We must turn our attention to developing international mutual aid systems for our sustainable survival and in radical opposition to them… defying them in every way; politically, morally, socially, philosophically, economically and environmentally, and in every breath….For our very survival and for the planets. We need to stop thinking they are our friends….they are not. They had a chance. They did not take it.

So developing mutual aid systems is the new penicillin for the planet. It will help us survive, provides an alternative system, will build confidence and a vision for that change…as well as capacity for change as more people get involved.

It is our last and our best hope….