Very few Cambridge University English professors have been tried at the Magistrates’ Court, but Jason Scott-Warren is an exception. After his actions at a 2019 Extinction Rebellion protest were judged unreasonable, he was found guilty of an offence under Section 14 of the Public Order Act and fined over £1000. Although long conscious of the climate crisis – he has donated to Friends of the Earth for decades – Scott-Warren’s arrest marked a decided shift for his activism into civil disobedience.
Scott-Warren, a lecturer and research fellow in Early Modern Literature at Gonville and Caius College, studies literary worlds seemingly removed from ours on the brink of climate destruction. However, literature has always had the transformative power to warn of the fatal consequences of a possible future. Shakespeare’s King Lear serves as an example for Scott-Warren of ‘the potential cataclysms that can open up in human life’. With the 2018 International Panel on Climate Change report revealing that we only have 12 years to prevent irreparable damage, it seems unsurprising that Scott-Warren felt compelled to join XR. He cites the report as having ‘punctured a state of illusion I was in that things were basically OK and must be, in some sense, under control’. XR, formed in the same year as the release of the report, attempts to prevent these irreversible consequences, demanding that the UK reaches net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.
Negative press coverage, however, has pursued Extinction Rebellion since its inception in 2018, with its disruptive tactics deemed overly radical. The movement holds the philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience, staging road and bridge blockages and large-scale protests. It has faced criticism for running the risk of alienating potential supporters with its extremism. However, Scott-Warren defends the polemic strategy: the controversy both raises awareness and encourages people to seek more ‘pragmatic’ options. While not all will kneel in front of traffic, they may apprehend the urgency of XR’s actions and implement smaller changes in their lives to help to further the movement’s demands. Scott-Warren acknowledges that the movement ‘partly exists to be irritating’. Civil disobedience transmits the message that change is vital.
Scott-Warren deems English Literature to be ‘quite a rebellious discipline’. It focuses on stories of rebels and underdogs through politically charged narratives; from childhood fairytales, we sympathise with the heroic individual taking a stand against an unheeding world. This emotive power is present in Scott-Warren’s participation in XR’s ‘Rebellion of One’ in 2020, in which he knelt in front of busy traffic wearing a board which read: ‘I’m terrified for my children and my students because of the climate crisis’. It wasn’t the first time he has protested alone, having stood at his local petrol station for months. The decentralised, autonomous structure of XR endows him with an individualistic, dramatic power.
The world of academia has not always been at the frontlines of the environmental movement. Indeed, Scott-Warren has received disapproval from more conservative colleagues. However, with the ever-rising temperatures and sea levels, he sees no reason to call a ceasefire. The underdog, in early modern literature as in today, retains the dramatic power to provoke change in a hostile world.
Image “Cambridge University” by foshie is licensed under CC BY 2.0.