It has been exactly one week since submitting my podcast regarding “Extinction Rebellion Huddersfield” and my chat with “Swallow”. I was unsure whether the comments would be unanimous in either way and was hoping for a healthy discussion and debate in the comment section.
The general response to the podcast was overwhelmingly positive, all feedback was in support of “Extinction Rebellion” and their desire to bring down the Syngenta plant in Huddersfield. If we dissect the comments into themes, we can see that the most common of these was of how the protest groups efforts were of great importance. For example, a “Benjamin Poole” commented: “This is of upmost importance, drastic action needs to be taken”. As well as a “Dillon Gill” relaying a similar response: “I completely agree!! Drastic action has got to be taken for this”.
Other comments took a more active response, obviously being educated and passionate about the issue already. A “Carwyn Owen” commented: “The failure of world governments to make tough decisions at summits such as COP26 do demonstrate the legitimate need for more drastic action when it comes to climate change”. It is interesting to see people so unanimously agree that the government should be far more responsible in climate change emergencies, and that the need for groups such as “Extinction rebellion” is more than warranted.
I did try to probe for more responses regarding whether the drastic action people are referring to mean that they agree with the extremist methods groups such as XR adopt, but unfortunately no replies were received. Although, one can certainly assume these methods are “drastic”.
Another very interesting response that begins to take another side of the argument into response was by a “Jessica Draper-Mann”. She believes that XR have “their heart in the right place” but agrees with “Swallow” about some of the more extreme protests taking attention away from the true cause. It was very interesting to see her comparison of XR to the suffragettes, stating that it did indeed work for them. For this reason, she claims there is “potential” in these groups that others may not have gathered yet.  To this I replied that protests from “Insulate Britain” in which they glued themselves to the road did indeed get the government and the public discussing insulation, but these protests do give people the opportunity to “shoot the messenger”. This is something that may oppose people to support certain projects.