On November 18th the Extinction Rebellion Global Hunger Strike will officially launch to demand that governments act on the climate and ecological emergency that threatens the extinction of a million species, the collapse of civilizations and the death of billions of humans.

Many of these rebels will not consume food for one week and others will go for a longer period of time. They will go on hunger strike in solidarity with people starving because of climate and ecological breakdown and to force governments to confront the crisis by enacting Extinction Rebellion’s three demands.

- XR Rebels from Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Germany, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, Turkey, the United States, and more to go on hunger strike in symbolic locations

- 820 million people already suffer from hunger and starvation worldwide while billions of are at risk of starvation and death from climate and ecological collapse

- Action to highlight how millions are already living through the hell of our Planetary Crisis. Migrant justice and the rights of indigenous peoples must be put at the heart of efforts to end the climate and ecological breakdown

Rebels are employing this last resort tactic after more than three decades of petitions, protests and campaigns have failed to secure the urgently needed responses to mitigate ecological and climate breakdown. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and widespread ecological destruction is accelerating. Our leaders have abandoned us as the catastrophe escalates with each passing day. By denying themselves of their basic needs, the hunger strikers hopes that their bodies will sound the alarm.

The hunger strikers recognize that what they are doing is minor compared to the truly dire starvation that ten percent of the world’s population faces. They have the privilege of being able to choose when to eat, so the strike is carried out in solidarity with communities worldwide and particularly with those in the Global South who are forcibly starved. They also strike in solidarity with prisoners, migrants and racially marginalised peoples who hunger strike as a last resort against systemic oppression. And they do strike in solidarity with those who have pioneered, and continue to use, this incredibly powerful last resort tactic as a means to liberate themselves from the shackles of depression, apathy, and oppression.

Throughout history, hunger striking has been is historically a deeply-personal measure of last resort. It was used by Mahatma Gandhi in the Indian Independence Movement, Marion Wallace Dunlop in the women’s suffrage movement, US prisoners protesting solitary confinement, the students of Tiananmen Square, and other movements.