Rupert Read

Ecological philosopher and green activist

  • Writings
  • Audio and video
  • Books
  • Academic CV
  • Events
  • Why I accept donations
  • In the media
  • Contact
  • Writings
  • Audio and video
  • Books
  • Academic CV
  • Events
  • Why I accept donations
  • In the media
  • Contact
  • Writings

    Will the Whales Inherit the Earth?

    7 April 2021 /

    Our planetary home is haunted by a spectre, one becoming more incarnate by the day: the spectre of extinction. What would it mean, to rebel against this ‘fate’? To rebel against extinction? Here’s my take, as one of the many who has heard that call, inner as well as outer, to rebel: Surely it is to stand up against the extinctions that are happening right now. The sixth mass extinction, anthropogenic, that is taking out many many species every day; alongside the extinctions of much-needed ancient human wisdom cultures; and of biodiverse wild ecosystems. And to revolt against the prospect even of human extinction that comes with a business-as-usual trajectory.…

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    A still from the film Avatar 2.

    Avatar 2 should make us completely rethink our relationship with the planet

    21 December 2022

    Time to access our superpower

    12 May 2023

    Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies

    21 December 2022
  • book cover of Parents for a Future.
    Books

    Parents for a Future: How loving our children can prevent climate collapse

    1 January 2021 /

    Parents for a Future is a book authored by Rupert Read and published by UEA Publishing Project. That our ecological future appears grave can no longer come as any surprise. And yet we have so far failed, collectively and individually, to begin the kind of action necessary to shift our path away from catastrophic climate collapse. In this stark and startling little book, Rupert Read helps us to understand the direness of our predicament while showing us a metaphor and a method — a way of thinking — by which we might transform it. From the relatively uncontroversial starting point that we love our own children, we are introduced to…

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    Book cover of Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution. It features a picture of Kuhn overlaid with the title.

    Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution

    1 October 2002
    This is the cover of The New Wittgenstein. It contains an image of Wittgenstein and an overlaid title.

    The New Wittgenstein

    30 March 2000
    Book cover of Collaborations. Contains a drawing of a tree.

    Collaborations: Joint writings on Ecology, Economy, and Society

    1 February 2022
  • Writings

    Justus Wenzel reviews This Civilisation is Finished

    6 May 2020 /

    A sky almost without contrails, hardly any cars on the roads, better air: between yesterday and today a virus has made possible what seemed impossible until the day before yesterday. When the Corona crisis however is overcome, will it remain more than a reminder of the possibility of the impossible? Will the new experiences we have been having also open up perspectives for what it is necessary to do in the face of the coming climate catastrophe? Questions of this kind would certainly have been raised if Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander had begun their talks about the climate crisis and the chance for a new beginning after the outbreak…

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    Greenpeace protesters at the Conservative Party conference.

    Who Voted For This, Liz?

    5 October 2022

    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022

    The Former Extinction Rebellion Campaigners Rallying A Climate Majority

    8 May 2023
  • Writings

    Another Brexit is possible

    19 December 2019 /

    With the Tory landslide, Brexit is bound to finally happen. Therefore what matters is making it as good, or as least bad as possible. The argument is finally settled; it will be pretty pointless to recriminate, completely pointless to try to pretend we can still Remain in the EU and (for the foreseeable future) both dangerous and pointless to fantasise about rejoining it. We need to get used to the UK ‘going its own way’ for a long time to come. This will, for a while, probably be very bad… See here and here if you need convincing on why. What this hard-Brexit hard-Right government will do is seek to…

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    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022

    When time is not on our side, can we afford to keep the same strategy?

    2 March 2023

    The King’s Speech

    21 December 2022
  • Writings

    A memo to Extinction rebels: on the need for truth-telling and its possible needful consequences

    13 August 2019 /

    Telling the truth Extinction Rebellion’s (XR’s) first demand is for the Government to tell the whole truth about the gravity of the climate and ecological emergency. The time is now because everything is not going to magically sort itself out, everything is not going to be ok. What we are currently witnessing is climate spiralling out of our reach while ecosystems are already thoroughly degraded with the sixth extinction crisis under way. Climate disasters are coming, inevitably, and the climate situation will worsen for at least a generation, probably far longer, whatever we do. This is because of the time-lags built into the system: CO2 stays in the atmosphere for…

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    Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies

    21 December 2022

    The Former Extinction Rebellion Campaigners Rallying A Climate Majority

    8 May 2023
    A still from the film Avatar 2.

    Avatar 2 should make us completely rethink our relationship with the planet

    21 December 2022
  • Writings

    How a movement of movements can win: Taking XR to the next level.

    13 August 2019 /

    Our October Rebellion needs to be bigger than April’s was. Way bigger. Because this time, it has to be about not just getting verbal concessions from power, pious declarations of climate and ecological emergency without actual consequence. No; that’s just not good enough. Because this is the age of consequences. There’s no more time to play with… No less than Antonio Gutierrez, UN Secretary General, has said that if we don’t start making serious – transformative – change within about the next 12 months, then there is no way the world can head off the kind of catastrophe outlined in last year’s IPCC 1.5degrees report. The Budget this autumn is…

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    “Adversity is the first path to truth”: How climate grief could be the making of us

    10 October 2022

    When time is not on our side, can we afford to keep the same strategy?

    2 March 2023
    A still from the film Avatar 2.

    Avatar 2 should make us completely rethink our relationship with the planet

    21 December 2022
  • Writings

    Academics should take to the streets with Extinction Rebellion

    18 April 2019 /

    Naomi Klein writes in her call-to-arms book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the climate, that there are two types of climate change denial holding back effective action to protect our planet: denial of the problem and denial of the seriousness of the problem. While the first is thankfully rare in this country and can be easily dismissed as politically motivated head-in-the-sandism, the second is rife throughout society—from our politics to our media and, unless we are careful, in our universities. Academics must not allow this soft denialism into our institutions and onto our curriculums. Yet, we often do this when we fail to give students the full—and scary—information they need…

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    Greenpeace protesters at the Conservative Party conference.

    Who Voted For This, Liz?

    5 October 2022

    Time’s up! Green surge in the East alarms the old parties

    26 May 2023

    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022
  • Writings

    An open letter to David Wallace-Wells

    4 April 2019 /

    As a group of British academics and others who think and write about dangerous anthropogenic climate change, we have been impressed by your new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. This already best-selling book, like the viral article in New York magazine from which it grew, states with passion and eloquence the hard truths of our current global plight. Far from being irresponsibly alarmist, as some have alleged, your straight look at oncoming disaster offers a vital stimulus to realistic understanding and action. We are so pleased that your book is receiving the mass attention it deserves, and is thereby making the very real risk of an…

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    Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in London and threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on 14 October 2022. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

    Will disruptive action help save the planet?

    30 October 2022
    Image of a sunset from space

    Is “longtermism” the cure or the sickness?

    5 October 2022

    When time is not on our side, can we afford to keep the same strategy?

    2 March 2023
  • Writings

    Climate change and deep adaptation

    8 February 2019 /

    I want to start out by addressing younger readers in particular. And what I have to say to you is stark. It is this: your leaders have failed you; your governments have failed you; your parents and their generation have failed you; your teachers have failed you; and I have failed you. We have all failed to raise the alarm adequately; and so of course we have failed to prevent the dangerous climate change that is now here, and the worse climate change that is coming and that is definitely going to get a lot worse still: definitely, because of time-lags built into the system. This crisis already shows our…

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    A still from the film Avatar 2.

    Avatar 2 should make us completely rethink our relationship with the planet

    21 December 2022
    Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in London and threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on 14 October 2022. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

    Will disruptive action help save the planet?

    30 October 2022

    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022
  • Writings

    An ecological philosophy of film

    7 January 2019 /

    I’ve just published a book, called A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. In this book, I discuss films such as The Road, Melancholia, Gravity and 2001: A Space Odyssey. But what’s it all about? What does the title of my book mean? I’ll briefly explain, by way of an example. Which constitutes a kind of ‘trailer’ for the book… Incendiary themes The final chapter of my book is about the biggest blockbuster of all time, Avatar. Consider the following important fact about Avatar: this was a film so potentially incendiary, eco-politically, that the authoritarian Chinese Government felt compelled quietly to ban it, for fear that it would ignite rural land-revolts.…

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    Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies

    21 December 2022

    Time’s up! Green surge in the East alarms the old parties

    26 May 2023

    Time to access our superpower

    12 May 2023
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