Rowan Tilly
Rowan Tilly arrested - BBC
Rowan Tilly has studied and worked as a human ecologist. She has thought in depth about the meaning of nonviolence and what this looks like in civil resistance. She has offered this understanding to many grassroots groups; currently these include Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil and Youth Demand. Along with others, she conducts small group trainings to prepare people for nonviolent civil resistance.
Rowan’s nonviolence is informed by her participation in a long line of successful nonviolent actions. The first of these was in 1965 at age 8 when she gathered her friends to talk with a boy who was bullying her older brother. He subsequently stopped bullying. The most significant actions include:
-
In 1993 she was one of 15 Greenham Common Women arrested for climbing into Buckingham Palace to call on Her Majesty, The Queen to recognise the sovereignty of the Shoshone Nation and stop UK nuclear testing on their land. There were no more nuclear tests.
Buckingham Palace Action -
In 1996 she was one of ten Seeds of Hope Ploughshares women who nonviolently disarmed a fighter jet to protect occupied East Timor. Three years later East Timor was liberated.
youtube vid -
In 1999 she was tear gassed during brutal police violence used against thousands who were steadfastly nonviolent, blocking an international trade globalisation convention in Seattle, USA. The convention could not meet.
battle in Seattle -
From 1998 to the early noughties, she nonviolently uprooted genetically modified crops in the genetiX snowball campaign. GM crops have never since been in production on farms in the UK.
Guardian article
She practices nonviolence for the love of values such as kindness, beauty, truth, nobility, humility and reverence. She meditates daily and is inspired by Buddhism and other faith practices to participate wholeheartedly in the human project. Humans are her favourite animal. She lives according to an assumption of an ongoing humanity into the future. If, in the end, we fall then she wants to fall honouring the best of what it has been to be human.