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Demonstrators say they will stay until they are arrested or their demands are met.
Lindsay Shachnow
Climate protesters chained themselves to the State House gate on Monday and Tuesday, promising to block the Hooker entrance until their demands are met or they are removed by police.
Extinction Rebellion Boston members stationed themselves at the gate until the Massachusetts government declares a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure.
“This specific demand, no new fossil infrastructure, is pretty modest,” Paul Shorb, a demonstrator who locked himself to the gate and a retired environmental lawyer, told Boston.com. “It’s one of the first steps towards all the changes we need to make.”
The group arrived around 2 p.m. on Monday and then again at approximately 9:45 a.m. on Tuesday, chanting and hanging out flyers.
“Our plan is to be here indefinitely,” Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Isaiah Shadrach told Boston.com. “We will see what the police have in mind.”
Extinction Rebellion is active in 56 countries and has 645 local groups, according to its website.
Shadrach said the group is now intensifying their demonstration by disrupting “business as usual.”
“The message is, if we don’t get our demands, we’re going to shut it down,” they said.
Extinction Rebellion previously held a months-long stand out at the State House with the same demand but to no avail.
“We’ve been protesting for one year with the stand out, and they didn’t listen,” Johanna Vollhardt, a demonstrator chained to the gate and professor at Clark University, told Boston.com. “So now we need to escalate the tactics, because we really don’t have any time to lose if we want to survive.”
Vollhardt said the “worst” can be prevented if “we act with urgency right now.”
“Every little bit of warming that we prevent will make a difference in the scale of the disasters,” she said.
Some of Extinction Rebellion Boston’s previous demonstrations have led to police interference, including 10 arrests during a roadblock in September 2022, eight arrests during a State House demonstration in September 2023, and 20 arrests during a “slow march” in the Boston Financial District in September 2023, according to the advocacy group.
No arrests were made at the protest on Monday, and Shadrach, acknowledging the police presence, said they were unsure if arrests will be made on Tuesday.
“They chose to not arrest us, which one might speculate is because whoever is calling the shots didn’t want the additional publicity that might come from arrests, because they don’t want the light to be shined on their inaction,” Shorb said.
Shadrach said the goal of the protest is twofold: to raise awareness among the public and to put pressure on state representatives.
“There’s that public-facing goal of conveying to our fellow residents of Massachusetts that this demand is significant and worth taking seriously,” they said. “And then there’s also a direct message to the representatives that if they want peace, if they want to be able to get to the State House without much delay or disruption, they should do their job and take seriously the climate crisis that we are facing.”
Craig Simpson, another chained protester and retired preschool teacher, said his job has inspired him to advocate for climate reforms.
“I was a teacher for 45 years of young children, and that really dictated what I should do with my life, to work in favor of the young children,” he said. “I’m thinking about future generations and how we’re handing them this terrible situation.”
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