BY REBECCA GAGNON ’23
On Nov. 17, members of Sunrise Mount Holyoke stood in solidarity with the Red Brigade and the Western Massachusetts Extinction Rebellion in greeting Rachel Maddow at her event for her new best-selling book, “Blowout.” At the book event, there were performances, flags, signs and an invitation for the audience to join the climate change movement.
The Red Brigade is an organization of climate protestors who perform in red costumes and white painted faces, moving with slow motions for a stronger impact.
“It is a way to embody raising consciousness of this crisis, peacefully, through the ancient arts of movement, gesture and expression — a universal language that speaks to us deeply and truly,” Joyce
Rosenfeld, the artistic leader of the group, said. “I see the Red Brigade as a center of calm in the eye of the storm, a witness and a mirror reflecting back to us the urgency of the moment.”
The Sunrise Movement is a call to stop climate change. Their belief is that, if we come together, we can change the world. The organization has many hubs across the country.
“The MHC Sunrise students invited XR [Extinction Rebellion] to attend their rally on Nov. 8 when they wanted to follow up with President Sonya Stephens, who has so far failed to make a simple statement acknowledging the climate crisis, after saying that she would do so,” Jackie Ballance, an organizer of the event, said. “We all went together to Mary Lyon Hall to petition President Stephens, to tell the truth and declare a climate emergency. Her assistant met us in the hall, took the petition and spoke with us for a few minutes.”
After the rally, the groups considered another col- laboration, and decided that Rachel Maddow’s event would be a perfect fit.
Extinction Rebellion is a non-violent disobedience organization whose mission is to stop our world’s destruction before it is too late.
On the Extinction Rebellion website, it states, “We hear history calling to us from the future. We catch glimpses of a new world of love, respect and regeneration, where we have restored the intricate web of all life. It’s a future that’s inside us all — located in the fierce love we carry for our children, in our urge to help a stranger in distress, in our wish to forgive, even when that seems too much to ask.”
“I was drawn to join Extinction Rebellion through the Red Brigade,” Rosenfeld said. “I am an artist and to be able to bring awareness of our climate emergency through performative action feels organic and right to me.”
Ballance first started with the Extinction Rebel- lion and Sunrise Movement when “the United Nations climate report came out in October 2018 with the warning that there were only maybe eleven years left before catastrophic and irreversible climate change would be locked in unless rapid and drastic measures are taken,” they said. “Within a couple of weeks of that report, Extinction Rebellion appeared in the U.K. ready to use civil disobedience to draw attention to the emergency.
“At the same time, the Sunrise Movement was rapidly growing in the U.S. as the Green New Deal was offered as a blueprint for making the necessary economic, ecological and social changes needed to meet the challenge of the climate crisis. Both Sunrise and XR inspired me to get involved,” Ballance said.
Rosenfeld said, “The hopes for our future is to tell the truth. Once we dare to tell the truth — that we are at the tipping point moment of a climate emergency — tell that truth to ourselves and to each other, then we can put our considerable, powerful resources of mind, body, and spirit to creating and building our solutions. Daring to tell the truth, to ourselves and to each other, is a form of rebellion.”
“Get involved,” Ballance said. “The next couple years are the most important ones in our lives. We’ve got to start radically reducing carbon emissions.