On May 13th Members of XR Buddhists sat in meditation and protest outside Barclays Islington. Here are some images from the action, and our letter to the bank manager.
Letter to the Manager
Dear Manager
Members of Extinction Rebellion Buddhists UK will be sitting in protest meditation vigil at your bank today.
We are sitting to bear witness to the suffering and loss being felt by those at the front lines of climate instability being funded by your bank. Barclays has invested almost $167 billion in the last 6 years, into coal oil and gas projects and industries. The evidence is now irrefutable that fossil fuel emissions are causing climate and ecological breakdown. People of the global south, and indigenous communities are bearing the brunt of these impacts whilst having done the least to cause them.
India is now in the grip of a record-breaking heatwave, and the Horn of Africa is facing one of the worst droughts on record. Your bank is also funding projects with direct effects on local and indigenous groups such as:
- the Correjon coal mine in Columbia, notorious for human rights abuses
- the Enbridge tar sands pipeline in North America which cuts through pristine lands of the Chippewa and Ojibwe tribes
- Arctic Oil and gas projects in the fragile Arctic, threatening the lands of the Gwich’in Athabascan peoples
We send our kindness and care to the staff of Barclays bank; their lives will also be disrupted and impoverished by climate impacts funded by their bank. But as a company it is evident that Barclays’ investment policies are complicit in systemic ecocide, injustice and racism.
Sitting in meditation we display placards which bring the unseen faces and the unheard voices of our fellow beings in the global south into the light of compassion and respect. We acknowledge that these peoples; their knowledge and traditions hold essential teachings in our relationship to the Earth which we ignore to our peril.
We urge your bank to immediately disinvest from fossil fuels and to invest in clean energy projects that can offer a future to all the inhabitants of the Earth wherever they may live.
Yours sincerely
Members of Extinction Rebellion Buddhists