Episode Details

Text originally published Oct. 06, 2024

Roger Hallam — by Mr. Fish

Norfolk, U.K. — I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing. The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are. Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky frame tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.   

Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”

He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses. 

This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.

Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published<