Gail Bradbrook

“The absolute key issue is: how do you create enough political pressure? It's up to us to create that political will and there are tried and tested techniques for doing that. So we're talking about the need for civil disobedience that escalates into a rebellion and uprising.”

“We need a grownup conversation about why our political economy is killing life on Earth.”

“The big goal - and it sounds crazy - is to save as much life on Earth as possible.”

“We've been at war with nature. Now we need to apologize and clean up.”

“I want to live in a beautiful, nature-filled world, and, if we get shot on the streets fighting for it, so be it.”

“There is just arrogance in even having an opinion.”

“I would support a mass civil disobedience where we take medicine to tell the state that they have absolutely no right to control our consciousness and to define our spiritual practice.”

“Given the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing this is the appropriate scale of expansion. Occupying the streets to bring about change as our ancestors have done before us. Only this kind of large-scale economic disruption can rapidly bring the government to the table to discuss our demands. We are prepared to risk it all for our futures.”

“I always had a desire to see change and be part of it.”

“Human extinction in our children's lifetime, it should be your top news item every single day, what's happening, you should be holding politicians to account.”

“I planted trees but the idea that you can offset carbon is nonsense - planting trees is more a way of acknowledging harm and apologising.”

“We're not just being dramatic talking about a human extinction - that's the pathway we're on. We have to look at the bigger picture. If your child had cancer and it was unlikely they were going to survive, you'd do everything in your power to fight it.”

“I just like swearing and being cheeky.”

“So many of us who've been thinking about the ecological crisis have had this horrible creeping feeling, like nothing was getting done and it was getting worse.”

“It's only by being disruptive that you get people to have a conversation about an issue.”

“I'm horrified to have been alerted to anti-Semitism showing up in a Facebook group I'm associated with. As a busy mum I don't have time to monitor everything.”

“My dad was a miner at South Kirkby colliery. He went on strike but he didn't go to the picket line, he just put his feet up and got in my mum's way.”

“Some people see protesting as a bit of a dirty thing, and certainly the idea of getting arrested was not on people's radar.”

“Economic growth tends to require the taking of resources from the Earth. So something has to change on a debt-based economy.”

“We have a system that is deeply narcissistic - the consumer sort of capitalist culture. It's all about me and now and what do I need that just makes you feel a bit better with all the stress. But in other healthy cultures, they have a real sense of ancestor and a sense of the next seven generations.”