Roger Hallam

Roger Hallam is one of the world's top climate campaigners, famous for being a founder of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil—the most prominent social movements of recent years in the UK. He has worked as an advisor around the Western world, facilitating the creation of significant climate campaigns in Italy, Germany, and Sweden. Roger has been committed to social justice for decades - dropping out of LSE in his 20s to join the peace movement. Afterwards, he worked as an organic farmer in Wales for 30 years before unprecedented rains destroyed £100,000 worth of his crops. In 2024, a British judge had Roger dragged out of court by police for refusing to break his oath to tell the "whole truth" to the jury in a climate protest trial. For his efforts to speak publicly about the greatest crisis in human history, he was given a five-year prison sentence in July 2024—the longest sentence for civil disobedience in the UK since the Second World War. His prison sentence was front page news in The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. He has written for a broad political spectrum, from the Guardian to The Daily Mail. On TV, he has appeared on BBC HardTalk GB News with Nigel Farage and has starred in several films about his civil disobedience, including The Troublemaker and Conscientious Protectors . Only mass civil resistance can stop the top global 1% imposing mass death on billions of people. I studied the science and realized beyond unequivocal doubt that the extinction crisis was upon us and that our impending annihilation was being perpetuated by psychopathological criminals who have no interest in the wellbeing of the average human being or the natural world. Some of them however are carefully crafted media propaganda, which even my own movement has used against me. This is something that you can expect unfortunately when you use your voice and stand out from the crowd. The only way we’re going to sort ourselves out is if we realise that this is not about us, but about our children and everything we hold sacred. Something bigger than us. About all that we hold to be sacred. I started Burning Pink in 2019 to create a direct action movement which would stand in elections to create a political revolution: legally binding citizens assemblies to take over from politicians. We have painted the buildings of NGOs and political parties that refuse to tell the truth and act upon it. It is clear that catastrophe is now locked in. Short of a technological miracle being rolled out in the next five years, global heating will force around a billion people to leave their homes within the next two decades as the world heads over 2C – that’s 7C in inland areas, 15C on a “hot day”. The global economic system will collapse and impoverishment will hit billions of people. Revolutions are now inevitable. Functional human extinction – only around a billion people located about the polar regions – is not. The key question for humanity now is whether the revolutions will be fascistic or democratic – based upon hate or popular deliberation, enacting escapist nihilism or compassionate realism. So what is to be done? Reformism makes sense when the structure of society is sound. When it is about to collapse then it becomes at best a displacement activity and at worst an active block to effective collective action. Preparing for the revolution means two things: first to give up our jobs and “go to the people”, working 60-70 hours a week – leafleting, setting up stalls, door knocking, creating public meetings for working class orators who can move people to tears, and also people’s assemblies where people reconnect and discover the ecstasy of solidarity. Second, a growing alliance of the willing needs to shut down “the economy” – that is, the death machine that is taking us to extinction – blocking roads and transport infrastructure, city centres and financial districts, week after week until arrests lead to