📰 My Interview With The New Yorker

Upbeat about prison’s monastic side and ever pragmatic, Roger looks beyond his own excessive sentence to what these judicial shifts mean for us all—while fossil fuel pollution accelerates the collapse of a liveable climate.

London Orbital Motorway, or the M25, is a vast ring road that runs in a shaggy circle around the outer edges of the capital. If you live in the city, it’s the road you might take to the airport, or the suburbs, or the countryside, and it provides a kind of unofficial border to the Greater London Area. Also provided: lots of traffic. Every day, the road plays host to some two hundred thousand vehicles. It is sometimes jokingly referred to as “the nation’s largest car park.” Had you been cruising along the M25 in mid-November, 2022, you might have encountered a particularly stubborn delay. For four consecutive days, dozens of activists from the British environmental group Just Stop Oil climbed onto and occupied the gantries, or bridges, overlooking the highway, forcing the police to halt traffic. Drat!

Perhaps understandably, people were upset. In the Mail Online, and elsewhere, they raged. “Just Stop Oil eco-mob face jail as 35 are arrested for holding motorists up for FIVE HOURS and ‘blocking an ambulance’ on the M25,” one headline read. The government issued a statement denouncing the action as “criminal activity.” In an emotional video filmed from one of the gantries, a young activist said that they were demanding that the U.K. stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. “I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she said. “And you might hate me for doing this, and you’re entitled to hate me, but I wish you would direct all that anger and hatred at our government.” Below her, trucks roared past. “How many more people have to say ‘We don’t have a liveable future if you continue licensing oil and gas’ for you to listen? Why does it take young people like me, up on a fucking gantry on the M25, for you to listen?”

This past July, at a two-and-a-half-week trial at Southwark crown court in London, five Just Stop Oil activists faced charges of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” for their roles in organizing the M25 action. The defendants—Roger Hallam, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, and Daniel Shaw—had not themselves been up on the gantries. Rather, they had spoken on a Zoom call trying to recruit volunteers. During the trial, the judge, Christopher Hehir, was not very sympathetic. He did not allow the jury to consider evidence about the climate breakdown. Instead, he labelled the defendants “fanatic[s].” “You have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law,” he said. After the jury reached a guilty verdict, he handed down some of the harshest sentences for nonviolent protest in the U.K.’s history: four years in prison for most of the defendants, and five years for Hallam. (His case went up for appeal at the end of January; a decision is expected soon.) “Today marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” Michel Forst, a human-rights specialist at the U.N., wrote in a statement.

“Occupational hazard, you might say,” Hallam told me, recently. He was speaking over the phone from H.M.P. Wayland, a men’s prison in Norfolk, northeast of London, where he had been serving out his sentence. (I was calling from my son’s room, which is also my office. To the extent that we were having drinks together, I had a mug of tea nearby.) Hallam’s lengthy sentence may reflect the fact that he is a co-founder of Just Stop Oil, and also of the British environmental groups Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion. He has been arrested many times. When I asked him to describe his surroundings, he said, “The cell is fine, basically. I mean, for my purposes. Painted magnolia, it’s got a single bed, it’s got a little desk, it’s got some shelving. There’s a loo in the cell, and a sink, and if you want to go for a shower that’s down the corridor.” Hallam is fifty-eight; many of the people on his corridor were also on the older side. He went for a run once a day, and collected his food in the mornings and evenings. “I mean, it’s a bit like being in a monastery,” he said. “There’s not that much to say from an exciting, consumerist point of view.” Mainly, he had been reading and writing. He had just finished Iain McGilchrist’s fifteen-hundred-page neuroscience tome, “The Matter with Things.” “Being a bit of the intellectual type, I’m actually having quite a nice time,” he told me. “Which probably doesn’t fit in with the default story line on these sorts of things.”

Hallam, who is tall and stern-looking, with a long face and gray hair he pulls into a bun, is skeptical of default story lines in general. He is skeptical of the media, the government, and corporations. He believes that society as we know it will collapse in the next decade, as large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Hallam explains this to me with a sense of urgency, punctuated by dark jokes, and an incredulousness that we all continue to live as we do. For many, this tone is off-putting—his brand of activism is unpopular with the British public—but for others it’s electric. Hallam has persuaded doctors, lawyers, teachers, grandparents, students, and many more to participate in climate protests of varying degrees of radicalism. He has encouraged many people to break the law. Under the banner of Extinction Rebellion, or XR, activists have staged a mock burial of the future and carried giant skeletons through London’s streets. They’ve installed a pink party boat near Oxford Circus, stopped trains, and superglued their hands to buildings. Activists for Just Stop Oil, which favors more disruptive tactics designed to shock, have thrown soup at Van Gogh paintings and spray-painted Charles Darwin’s grave.

These actions are not to everyone’s taste, but they have arguably made an impact. XR was founded in 2018, with three demands, the first of which was that the government “tell the truth” about the environment. In 2019, after several days of XR protests, and more than a thousand arrests, the U.K. became the first country to formally declare a climate emergency. Public support swelled; celebrities including Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry spoke out in favor of the group. Then things started to splinter. Hallam, though a celebrated co-founder, was now at the radical edge of the group, advocating for mass arrests as a way to show resistance. (“My view is if you’re not in prison, you’re not in resistance,” he told a film crew for the documentary “Rebellion.”) He also had a habit of making sweeping generalizations that got him into trouble in the press. “He’s got a lot of integrity and charisma, but not a lot of detail,” Farhana Yamin, a longtime environmental lawyer, has said. Eventually, XR issued a statement distancing itself from Hallam, and he turned his attention to other organizations including Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil.

Hallam’s activities have taken place against a backdrop of tightening restrictions on climate activism across the U.K. In 2022, the then Conservative government passed the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act, which gave the police broader powers to shut down protests. This past May, Lord Walney, an adviser on political violence for the previous government, compared activist groups including Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action to terrorist organizations and suggested that they should be banned. When I spoke with Oscar Berglund, a senior lecturer who studies climate activism at the University of Bristol, he told me that Hallam’s sentence was unusually long. “Before this past year, there hadn’t really been long sentences for civil-disobedience activists like that,” he said. Berglund’s research has found evidence of a “global crackdown.” In the U.K., the courts have tried to remove activists’ “right to even talk about climate change in front of the jury,” he said. (Juries are often sympathetic, once they hear an activist’s reasoning.) Hallam was reprimanded when he tried to discuss the climate, and was not allowed to introduce into evidence a fifteen-page statement from the climate scientist Bill McGuire, the author of “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide.” The restrictions on what can be said in defense of an activist’s actions are an attempt to “depoliticize what are political trials,” Berglund said.

Over the phone, Hallam was not at all cowed. “It’s not like we were these innocent protesters, just nice, white, middle-class people who are just trying to have our say, and these nasty judges locked us up, how horrible,” he said. “It’s, like, we’re serious about the end of Western civilization, the mass genocide of people in the Global South. We’re in that tradition of nonviolent resistance going back to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It’s a serious proposition. It’s not like we don’t know what we’re doing.” We were living in unprecedented times, he told me. “No one has experienced this in ten thousand years, since the last ice age. We’re just speeding at a million miles an hour towards ecological collapse,” he said. “The political, moral, and spiritual implications of that are off the scale. And so, this is the first, like, smell of it, the first sense of it—that in a supposedly liberal democracy people are getting banged up for five years for doing Zoom calls. That’s what’s coming down the line. And lots more things, as well.”

Hallam has a long history of advocating for change. Born into a Methodist family in Manchester, he began protesting for nuclear disarmament as a teen-ager. For many years, he ran an organic farm in Wales, until one year it began raining and didn’t stop for several weeks. The vegetables died. The farm closed. The crop failure, and Hallam’s mounting concern about climate change, led him to pursue a Ph.D. at King’s College London on mobilization for social change, or “how to cause trouble,” he told me. He left before completing the degree, but not before spray-painting the walls of the university with “divest from oil and gas.” (He offered the campus security guards who tried to stop him homegrown salad: rainbow chard, arugula.) In the trial that followed, Hallam argued that the action was a proportionate response to the climate crisis. The jury was swayed, and found him not guilty on charges of criminal damage. “Ordinary people, unlike the judiciary, are able to see the broader picture,” he told reporters at the time.

Sometime during the trial for the M25 shutdown, Hallam’s supporters began referring to the defendants as the Whole Truth Five, a reference to the witness pledge to tell the “whole truth and nothing but the truth.” “Part of the story is some people planned to go on the gantries over the M25,” he said. “No one’s disputing that. That’s a fact: we caused disruption. It’s part of the story. But the other side of the story is the right of necessity—in other words, what else is going on?” If you knock someone over in a restaurant, you’ve knocked someone over in a restaurant, he said. But what if the person you knocked over had a gun and was going to shoot someone? “You have two sides to the story, right? So what they’ve done in British courts is only give one side of the story now, which is, You went above the motorways, you disrupted the public.”

Our time together was winding down. I asked Hallam how he copes with grief about the climate crisis. Floods. Wildfires. (I was sitting in a nursery, after all.) “I am actually a reasonably cheerful person,” he said. His strategy boils down to transcendence of the material world. “You basically have a choice of what you focus on.” Earlier, he had outlined one potential solution to ending inaction: a series of citizen assemblies, made up of randomly selected individuals, with real power to enact climate policy. What would he say to the drivers deadlocked on the M25 because of Just Stop Oil? First, he said that many would swear and be annoyed, but ultimately see that the activists had a point. Then he took a harder stance. “It’s, like, What do you say? Well, tough, get a grip,” he said. “If you want all the joys of living in an open society, you’re going to have to get stuck in traffic twice a year. That’s the deal. Life goes on, doesn’t it?” ♦