Yes!

Extinction Rebellion is made up of people of all ages and backgrounds from all over the world. From under 18 to over 80 year olds – there are thousands of people willing to put their liberty on the line to fight the climate and ecological emergency and protect biodiversity and atmospheric health.

We don’t align with any political party and welcome people who vote for all political parties and none.

As long as you agree with and respect our values and principles, you are welcome to attend general meetings, join working groups, join affinity groups, or just attend actions. Any level of involvement is appreciated. Whatever you have to offer, a better future needs it.

Meetings & inductions

We host biweekly general meetings (alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays, so as many people as possible can make it to some) in a few venues in Tower Hamlets. Working groups might meet more regularly. There is an induction at each of these. For the most up to date information check out the events on our Facebook events page and sign up to our mailing list.

Come to a meeting and get added to the Signal chat!

Sign up to our mailing list

Have a look at our contact section.

Yes. We are ordinary people who care deeply about the world and want to do whatever we can peacefully to stop the destruction of Life on Earth and the deep injustices we see, and to push for the better, fairer and more beautiful world that we all want to see. No one controls us or tells us what to do.

Extinction Rebellion is made up of people of all ages and backgrounds from all over the world. From under 18 to over 80 year olds – there are thousands of people willing to put their liberty on the line to fight the climate and ecological emergency and protect biodiversity and atmospheric health.

We don’t align with any political party and welcome people who vote for all political parties and none.

We are working to improve diversity in our movement. We don’t think it is helpful to set this up as a fight between the “left” and the “right”, we have an enormous challenge before us, we believe we need to lay down our differences and find our common ground.

We don’t know if we will but we can no longer stand by and act as if the future doesn’t matter. World leaders have failed to adequately confront the emergency and polite lobbying, marching, voting, consumer- and shareholder-activism, have all failed to achieve meaningful change.

We are now on the brink and the only option left is civil disobedience, to disrupt the ordinary working of things, so that decision makers HAVE to take notice.

We believe we have succeeded in increasing the conversation about the depth of crisis.

We are a decentralised organisation – anyone can do things in the name of Extinction Rebellion if they agree with and adhere to our principles and values – people don’t need anyone’s permission on that basis.

We have a self-organising system. Power is invested in roles through the use of mandates rather than held by people. It is a creative system that grows in response to the organisations needs.

In Tower Hamlets, we are organised in affinity groups and working groups.

• Affinity groups (AGs) are groups of around 10 people who support each other, discuss actions and ideas and receive wider information about what’s going on. We recommend that you first do a Non-Violent Direct Action (NVDA) training, and then join an existing AG or a newly formed one at the training.
• Working groups have been set up to oversee, coordinate or organise certain areas of Extinction Rebellion Tower Hamlets. Anyone can join a working group - you just need need enthusiasm!

We are always concerned about causing inconvenience to people and it doesn’t feel good when you learn someone missed an important event like a funeral or a hospital appointment. We are doing it as we believe we have to look at the bigger picture of how many people are dying today and how dire our trajectory is.

In the face of this we accept that we inevitably cause inconvenience to people. We sincerely apologise to them. We are firmly and collectively of the view that, given the dismal failure of world leaders to date, disruption is now necessary to get anything like commensurate change. If there was a better, less disruptive way of doing this we would do that instead! Many of us have faced arrest, fines, convictions for our actions; some of us have been on hunger strike and gone to jail. So we are willing to take the consequences of our actions and to make personal sacrifices in order to do them. Business as usual is simply no longer a viable option.

In order to limit warming to 1.5ºC recommended by the IPCC report, global net CO₂ emissions need to decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. Despite initial progress on cutting its carbon emission, the UK will miss legal climate targets without urgent action. The UK Government is also overstating its progress on cutting emissions by leading climate scientists by not including the effects of shipping, aviation and exported production.