For all that I have been saying in Chapter 7, XR is evidently the nearest thing to a climate-driven revolution yet to have emerged in the advanced West, where the emergency must be decisively confronted if there is to be any future for humanity. It draws, as we have seen, on genuine energies of recoil, rejection and revolt. The importance of those energies cannot be overemphasized, but nor must their nature and dynamic be misconstrued.

We can bring out what is at stake here by reflecting on a characterization of Rebellion which might strike one, prima facie, as peculiarly insightful:

This emphasis on the ‘metabolic’ combination of ‘political, instinctual and moral’ motivational elements – the gut and the conscience working together – tells us something very important about XR's genesis. But the conjunction becomes still more revealing when we register that we have here not, in fact, a description of the current situation at all, but part of the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse's enthusiastic welcome for the student movement of the later 1960s. That is, or should be, uncomfortable as well as revealing, because we know what happened that time around. Those student protests, described unsympathetically but not unfairly by Alasdair MacIntyre as ‘more like a new version of the children's crusade than a revolutionary movement’, were an expression of typical adolescent discontent which happened to coincide with widening access to the protected space of tertiary education, increasing availability of contraception, the beginnings of the televised ‘media cycle’ and an easy target for moral outrage in the Vietnam War.