Top 33 Gail Bradbrook Quotes

I want the planet protected for my children.

The absolute key issue is: how do you create enough political pressure? It’s up to us to create that political will and there are tried and tested techniques for doing that. So we’re talking about the need for civil disobedience that escalates into a rebellion and uprising.

My dad was a miner at South Kirkby colliery. He went on strike but he didn’t go to the picket line, he just put his feet up and got in my mum’s way.

This is not a slow movement of change. It’s a shift in the consciousness of each of us. It is a collective shift. It involves facing grief and trauma and undoing our numbness and our narcissism and our indulgence that we have in this privileged western society.

One of the tensions in XR are people who want to slow down and be strategic and then people who think it’s an emergency, let’s get out on the street now. There have been conflicts and disagreements.

I want the system to change so I think you could call that a revolution.

We want an economy that grows health and wellbeing, not debt and carbon emissions. An economy that prepares and protects us from shocks to come, rather than making them worse. An economy that shares resources to meet all our needs, regardless of background. An economy that lets us live.

The precedent is that civilizations collapse, and everything’s stacked up for this one to go, and it’s a mess when it happens.

What I would say is that in its first iteration, Extinction Rebellion is really about democracy, by calling in for these new democratic forms for people to have their power. And frankly, in many countries of the world, democracy is in just absolute shambles.

I want to live in a beautiful, nature-filled world, and, if we get shot on the streets fighting for it, so be it.

Everyone is into yoni steaming. I’ve done it once.

The big goal – and it sounds crazy – is to save as much life on Earth as possible.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

We oppose a system that generates huge wealth through astonishing innovation but is fatally unable to distribute fairly and provide universal access to its spoils.

Love has a cost, and it’s grief. Because we will always be separated from things we love. That’s the nature and price of life, right? But, when you love something deeply, then you’re courageous.

I do have a rebellious spirit.

I’d been focused on trying to start civil disobedience since 2010. I’d tried many things and they hadn’t worked. So I went on a retreat and prayed, with some psychedelic medicines. It was really intense and I prayed for what I called the codes for social change and within a month my prayer was answered.

I also personally think – as do many others – that a shift on consciousness is needed toward one where we understand that we are in a relationship with the earth and all living beings, that we have agency. That life is worth fighting for.

Economic growth tends to require the taking of resources from the Earth. So something has to change on a debt-based economy.

Human extinction in our children’s lifetime, it should be your top news item every single day, what’s happening, you should be holding politicians to account.

The economic system is acting like a cancer on humanity. The regulatory system, the accountants, the legal firms support the metastasizing of this cancer.

I did yoga in the cell, meditated, and slept well; somebody brings you some food and drink. I’ve been arrested four times now.

We are killing life on Earth, we’re in the sixth mass extinction event and it’s possible that human beings will go extinct. We’re in a culture that doesn’t want you to think about that.

I have a humble background. My dad was a coal miner. My mum worked a receptionist. I was one of the first people in my family to go to university.

We do need a vision that’s uplifting, even whilst being realistic. And there’s a lot in the world that already speaks to that, like tikkun olam in the Jewish faith.

I’m horrified to have been alerted to anti-Semitism showing up in a Facebook group I’m associated with. As a busy mum I don’t have time to monitor everything.

We have a system that is deeply narcissistic – the consumer sort of capitalist culture. It’s all about me and now and what do I need that just makes you feel a bit better with all the stress. But in other healthy cultures, they have a real sense of ancestor and a sense of the next seven generations.

What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, ‘Stop climate change’ is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we’re in.

You have to keep building. Movements have to move forward.

It sounds like an extremist thing to say, but what do people think is going to happen to human beings when there’s not enough food?

If your government isn’t protecting you and the future of your kids, you have a duty to rebel, and a right to rebel.

I’ve always been interested in how things change, in social change. I was involved in the animal rights movement as a young woman, I’ve been involved in thinking about gender and issues around racism and so on.

For years I have engaged with this ecological crisis on an intellectual level, the mounting evidence, the science… but now I have engaged with the potential destruction of this world on an emotional level and there is a fundamental difference. There is huge feeling of grief, of loss.