Rousing the professions to climate radicalism - whether it's doctors, architects, engineers, teachers...
It’s a tactic we remember from the Scottish independence referendum - when occupation and professions identified themselves with the Yes side (Academics for Yes, Teachers For Yes…). Now Extinction Rebellion is inciting the same kinds of occupational affiliation. Interestingly, each one is trying to link its vocational ethos, in an intrinsic way, to the challenge of radical climate action.
Doctors For XR
Above is a video by Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet. He makes very strong claims that the General Medical Council’s The Duties of A Doctor document (more here), issued to all medical professionals, enables full support for radical action by members. If they want to protect their patients’ and communities’ health by committing non-violent direct action, that sits within the document’s prescriptions.
This is the core claim of the Doctors For XR site - which is a fully-featured support network, for doctors who line up with XR’s radical actions.
Their blurb is direct:
We have carefully considered our position. As a highly respected group of professionals, publicly backing and acting with a group which commits to breaking the law may seem like an unusual move, but we believe that the severity of the crisis is so great that such a decision is justified.
The strong, academic consensus from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted catastrophe without unprecedented change.
Some of the more disturbing predictions suggest there is a 10% risk of 6 degrees of warming. Which has been described by one leading academic as “So extreme it's almost unimaginable”
To put that into context: National Health Service targets recommend anyone with a risk of greater than 3% of having cancer be seen by a specialist within 2 weeks.
A doctor ignoring a level of risk this high would rightly be struck off for negligence.
The “Duties of a doctor” are laid out in the Good Medical Practice Guidelines, written by our regulator the General Medical Council.
We refer to 2 of these statements:
You must take prompt action if you think that patient safety, dignity or comfort may be compromised.
You must make sure that your conduct justifies your patients’ trust in you and the public’s trust in the profession.
Our code of conduct compels us to act where we notice unacceptable risks to current and future patient health, and act promptly. We have noted that traditional techniques of writing academic papers and journal articles have not produced sufficient meaningful results to continue with them alone.
Therefore we must take a different approach.
More here. Note also this statement from nurses’ groups and Health Workers For XR
Architects Climate Action Network
Very much involved with the XR protests - some of their members, specifically Studio Bark, provided modular building blogs for the recent wave of London occupations - Architects Climate Action Network features a classic example of how the ethos of a profession is used to express climate-protests commitment:
We also acknowledge that the construction industry and the existing built environment are major contributing factors to the crises and as such both require complete and rapid transformation. In the UK, the built environment as a whole is responsible for 42% of national emissions. The manner in which we produce, operate and renew our built environment continues to curtail biodiversity, pollute ecosystems and encourage unsustainable lifestyles.
This state of emergency calls for a new kind of professionalism. We can no longer remain secluded within our personal and professional silos. Instead we are harnessing our collective agency; as citizens with a shared professional background and a common goal, mobilising to bring about necessary changes to our industry.
Engineers For XR
Again, coalescing around the October demonstrations , the Engineers for XR Facebook page is lively and full for content (they nicely adapt the XR logo style too). Here’s an excerpt from their professional-ethos statement (PDF):
We stand together as engineers to demand the government tells the truth on the climate and ecological emergency.
The science is clear. We have to act now. Many engineers are committed to finding ways to lower the impact of their work and tackle climate breakdown. But it is now apparent that as a society the current rate of progress is not enough to avoid the possible death of hundreds of millions of people and the extinction of many species, including ourselves.
We believe engineers have a crucial role to play in tackling this crisis, by helping to steer us away from the worst climate breakdown scenarios, and by dealing with the consequences of whatever irreversible damage that has already been caused.
To enable engineers to play this important role for planet and humanity, the government must enact policies to make positive change happen at the necessary speed. However, the current government has failed to act swiftly enough, and so we are joining Extinction Rebellion in support of its three demands.
Teachers For Climate Truth in Schools
This group attached itself to one of XR’s key demands - Tell the Truth about climate urgency - and uses it to argue for a change in teaching priorities in schools (see their letter to the Department of Education). From their Facebook event page, they make this statement:
In most UK secondary schools, students will only learn about climate change in one or two modules in Geography, maybe in one RE lesson and in as few as four Science lessons. In the National Curriculum for Science the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is referred to as 'uncertain'.
There is now an overwhelming body of evidence which makes clear that we are facing catastrophic ecological and societal breakdown if we do not take immediate and far-reaching action. We believe young people deserve the truth. They deserve the truth as a moral principle, but also because they need to learn what is happening, why it is happening and what they can do about it - they need to be empowered to face their future.
Schools must also teach the reality of what we are all facing because this will hold the present generation of adults and leaders to account.
Update: we’ve been tweeted that a new site, Learning Rebellion, has been set up - their latest action is reported here.