Yesterday's 50+ Last Generation supporters were arrested during blockades. After being released Friday morning, many of them are out again drawing forcing the climate issue into the spotlight and putting pressure on the German government.

These Last Generation supporters are showing intense commitment to be back in the streets so soon after being released from police custody.
Letzte Generation supporter, Svenja Schraut, 19, says, "In a three to four degree warmer world, democracy and the rule of law are massively endangered. This has to be recognized as a society as a whole and to act accordingly. And the course for this can be set in a social council that brings together the most diverse citizens.”

  With the writing of the Basic Law came the promise that future generations should be better off. But the pursuit of prosperity and growth at all costs has led us to where we are now. The narrative of infinite growth has not only failed, it’s led us straight to climate hell.

Letzte Generation supporter, Michael Winter, 60, says, "75 years ago, the cornerstone for our Basic Law was laid here in beautiful Bavaria - the cornerstone of our society. But the beauty of Bavaria, the continued existence of our society and the Basic Law are threat-ened by the effects of the climate catastrophe. It is the task of the federal government to prevent this.” The biologist sat in front of the Faber-Castell Castle on the B14 roadway.

Resuscitating our democracy

XR Co-Founder, Clare Farrell: Well that is what we've always been talking about from the beginning of XR. That's definitely the idea - that you can do politics differently. The idea that you can make decisions differently, the idea that people could get together and make evidence based decisions about what to do in the world is probably the thing that I think has landed the least well out of all of Extinction Rebellion’s intended impact.
We were always saying that we think there's different ways to do politics. It's very tried and tested. You can look it up. It's called deliberative democracy. People sit in small groups around tables and talk about what to do. Having been furnished with all the best available information on a topic and the outcomes are fair, inclusive and representative. This is something that I think needs to be more broadly discussed, particularly where we see that this has become such a big partisan divide.

We were quite lucky here in the old days, there was quite a lot of conservative voices on environmental policy, on Thatcher, on climate and so on. The Conservative Party could say historically they've done some things for the environment that were world leading. They love wheel those things out. But now the culture war is just denigrating our political discourse to the point where politics basically sounds like the Daily Mail. There’s no difference between the rhetoric of the prime minister and the and the rhetoric of the tabloid media. it’s becoming more and more like a partisan split. (We have) this sort of unhinged kind of (behavior of) I'm going to go after all our oil and gas ...

It's clear, these people are not going to deal with the problems at hand. So if you’re going to work your way beyond the blockages of all the lobbyists and all the money and all the darkness that's there, then the thing that can square up to that is something that says, “This is democratic.” We haven't got anything else to use because we don't have the collateral to meet them on their terms with money or other bad behavior, lies and all of that.
The idea is to have citizens assemblies that come together. So that ordinary citizens can make decisions about what should be done. Citizens Assemblies have 100 or more randomized people in them. And you can always see someone in there that's like you, basically. It's representative of a country based on age, socioeconomic background, race, gender or whatever else... And that means that there's somebody in that room who's like you, who's advocating for something like you.

Click Video to watch on YouTube

So that would be my advice to people is to join local XR groups, donate to Extinction Rebellion, support people like Just Stop Oil, get out and get active and get involved with people who are fighting the good fight. But also, please go and learn about other ways to do democracy. Our democracies all over the world are in decline. And we've always been advocating that you need more and not less. And that message hasn't landed strongly enough. So please go and look up deliberative democracy and learn about ways that we could be resuscitating our democracy rather than just watching it get killed. I was going to say die, but it’s being killed. This is not a passive thing that's just happening. This is being done to us deliberately. And we need to stand up and fight back against it.

For the full Video, go to XR UK YouTube