Gail Bradbrook

If they come at us with tear gas or batons or mass arrests then you get a kind of upswell because they become repressive of people demanding what the public actually want.

I'd been focused on trying to start civil disobedience since 2010. I'd tried many things and they hadn't worked. So I went on a retreat and prayed, with some psychedelic medicines. It was really intense and I prayed for what I called the codes for social change and within a month my prayer was answered.

In the past when I was on protests, it was always people shouting out of the cars, 'get a job, get a bath, get a haircut.' So, am I a dole-scrounging hippie, or am I middle class and privileged? Just by stepping forward, somehow you become scrutinized, rather than the actual issues that count.

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.

Whilst I'm all for psychedelic science - I think it's fantastic - I don't think we necessarily have time to wait for the science to tell us these medicines are useful. The indigenous cultures have already shown us the ways.

I am no longer a scientist as I stopped in 2000. Science was quite a testing place to be as a working-class woman.

I did a PhD in molecular bio-physics.

I was in India as scientist doing post-doctoral research for about four months. I fell in love with India.

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.

For years I have engaged with this ecological crisis on an intellectual level, the mounting evidence, the science... but now I have engaged with the potential destruction of this world on an emotional level and there is a fundamental difference. There is huge feeling of grief, of loss.

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 want the system to change so I think you could call that a revolution.

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

Everyone is into yoni steaming. I've done it once.

I want the planet protected for my children.

The precedent is that civilizations collapse, and everything's stacked up for this one to go, and it's a mess when it happens.

I just like swearing and being cheeky.

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.

We do need a vision that's uplifting, even whilst being realistic. And there's a lot in the world that already speaks to that, like tikkun olam in the Jewish faith.

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.

There is just arrogance in even having an opinion.

The economic system is acting like a cancer on humanity. The regulatory system, the accountants, the legal firms support the metastasizing of this cancer.

Nothing is being done of any real significance. Our demand is the government must tell the truth about the crisis we're in. And that includes working with communities to build resilience... We want to go to net carbon zero emissions by 2015 and reduce our consumption levels.

The UN has given us until 2020 to change the course of humanity. If that doesn't happen human extinction in my children's lifetime is a possibility.

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

People think that climate change is something happening to somebody else at some other time but it's coming home.

We need to go to net zero carbon really quickly. And we're also asking for a people's assembly so people can decide how the change happens. We'll know when governments are doing different things, it could feel like a war, a beautiful war.

It is not a campaign. It is a rebellion. We are in active rebellion against our government. The social contract is broken, the governments aren't protecting us and it's down to us now.

This is not a slow movement of change. It's a shift in the consciousness of each of us. It is a collective shift. It involves facing grief and trauma and undoing our numbness and our narcissism and our indulgence that we have in this privileged western society.

We've tickled the nose of the tiger, the establishment are frothing at the mouth.

One of the tensions in XR are people who want to slow down and be strategic and then people who think it's an emergency, let's get out on the street now. There have been conflicts and disagreements.

We need a revolution in consciousness to overturn the system we live in, to strengthen our democracy, to find courage and give hope to our children.

We had a 25-step process coming up with the name Extinction Rebellion.

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

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.

I also personally think - as do many others - that a shift on consciousness is needed toward one where we understand that we are in a relationship with the earth and all living beings, that we have agency. That life is worth fighting for.

When you say 'no' and you get on the streets and you do an act of civil disobedience, it changes your psychology.

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

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.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

I've always been interested in how things change, in social change. I was involved in the animal rights movement as a young woman, I've been involved in thinking about gender and issues around racism and so on.

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 have a humble background. My dad was a coal miner. My mum worked a receptionist. I was one of the first people in my family to go to university.

We want an economy that grows health and wellbeing, not debt and carbon emissions. An economy that prepares and protects us from shocks to come, rather than making them worse. An economy that shares resources to meet all our needs, regardless of background. An economy that lets us live.

What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, 'Stop climate change' is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we're in.

But the main thing is to give people permission to feel it and to put grief at the heart of what Extinction Rebellion's about.

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

You have to keep building. Movements have to move forward.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

I do have a rebellious spirit.