Ahead of Roger Hallam’s London book launch and UK tour, Sul Nowroz reviews his newest book, Suicide, written while he was imprisoned in HM Prison Wayland.
The Sentencing
On the morning of 18 July 2024, as London shimmered in summer heat, five people were led into the dock of Southwark Crown Court and sentenced to prison for attending a Zoom call. The longest sentence – five years, the most severe handed to a peaceful protester in the United Kingdom since the Second World War – went to a fifty-seven-year-old Welsh farmer turned activist named Roger Hallam.
The case arose from a series of coordinated actions in November 2022, when forty-five Just Stop Oil supporters climbed motorway gantries above the M25, bringing one of Britain’s busiest arteries to a four-day standstill. Roger Hallam, along with four others, stood accused not of climbing anything themselves, but of conspiracy – of talking, of organising, of daring to believe that blocking a road might be proportionate to blocking a future.
The trial was remarkable not merely for its outcome but for what was excluded from it. Judge Christopher Hehir ruled that evidence of the climate crisis was “irrelevant and inadmissible,” characterising it as political opinion rather than empirical fact. He prevented the jury from hearing Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London. He refused the defendants their full right to speak from the witness box when they sought to honour their oaths to tell the whole truth. When Hallam and his co-defendants refused to leave before they had done so, they were repeatedly arrested and removed from the stand by police.
Arnold Toynbee, the acclaimed historian, once observed that civilisations are not murdered – they commit suicide. Hallam opens his most recent book, Suicide, with precisely this thought.
The Land That Held Him
The HM Prison Wayland complex sits in the Breckland district of Norfolk – concrete laid over heathland that had been tended by humans and animals for six thousand years. Potawatomi botanist and author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, would ask us to sit with that fact for a moment, and to name what was there before.
Breckland is an ancient and peculiar terrain – one of the driest corners of Britain, underlain by chalk, blown across by winds that some have said carry memory from the North Pole. Neolithic settlers came here six millennia ago because of the light, because the sandy soil was workable, because the trees could be cleared, and the flint knapped into tools. The word “breck” is medieval, meaning heathland broken for cultivation and then allowed to breathe back into wildness – a landscape that understood the wisdom of fallow, of letting the land rest and return to itself.
Before the prison walls rose, before the twentieth century’s appetite for concrete and control, this land was threaded with stone curlews – birds so ancient in their sound, so strange and wild in their call under grey skies and moonlight, that naturalists have described it as one of the most thrilling summertime sounds of England. Nightjars churned through summer dusks. Woodlarks spiralled upward in ecstatic song. Goshawks hunted through the pine belts. The rare Spanish Catchfly and Military Orchid held their small ceremonies. Otters and water voles threaded the chalk rivers.
Then it all changed. Eighty-six percent of Breckland’s heathland was lost between 1934 and 1980. The stone curlew’s shrill jubilation, once so commonplace it was the soundtrack of summer, grew thinner and thinner. The land was planted with conifers, ploughed for beet, then concreted for a prison. This is not merely ecological history. In the language of Whakapapa – the Maori concept that traces the genealogy and connection of all living things – such a history is a kind of grief written into the soil. To know what grew here before the walls were built is to understand something about what we are willing to imprison – not only people, but the living world’s continuity.
It was here, in a cell inside those walls, on land that once rang with stone curlews, that Hallam sat in his solitude and wrote the book he called Suicide.
Suicide: A Review
Hallam’s book opens with a preface rooted in the events of November 2022 – the Zoom call, the gantries, the arrests, the trial. But it quickly becomes something larger – part memoir, part philosophical reckoning, part forensic dissection of a civilisation that built a machine it no longer understands and can no longer control.
Hallam draws on his award-winning research at King’s College London into the psychology of mobilisation and civil disobedience, on his experience representing himself across four Crown Court trials, and on the particular clarity that comes with confinement and enforced stillness. What emerges is a slender, concentrated work of roughly 150 pages that is far more tender than its provocative title suggests.
Hallam offers three foundational tenets in the book’s opening. First, the effects of climate change are universal and networked — that what happens in one country ripples outward, making borders and national sovereignty irrelevant before floods and heat and the collapse of systems that feed us. Second, that climate change does not merely threaten comfort or convenience, but the very foundations of life as organised human beings have known it – the biological, social, and agricultural architecture of ten thousand years of civilisation. Third, and most searingly, the process of climate unravelling is well underway. The genie is not merely out of the bottle – it has shattered it. Any conversation that implies we alone remain the authors of our own future, is complete fallacy.
From here, Hallam traces the political failure – democracy’s capture by what he calls “the machine” – the vast, self-reproducing apparatus of industrialised modernity that was designed for human advancement but has become an engine of destruction. He is not romantic about this. He does not mourn a golden past. He is precise. We thought we were building a machine of progress. We built a machine of complexity – and in complexity beyond human comprehension, there are no brakes. Those few who benefit from the machine have the greatest incentive to build in further layers of obscurity and control, until the system serves only them.
The book demands a revolution of truth – a call that what is happening must be named for what it is, without the management-speak of “climate challenges” or the euphemistic scaffolding of “net zero pathways.” The book proposes new modes of governance, including the concept of sortition. It addresses the corruption of culture and the shrinkage of our moral imagination to the radius of the self. And it ends, quietly and devastatingly, with the finger pointed back at the reader. Perhaps you, in your disobedience – your refusal to comply with a system that is digesting the future – are the missing piece.
It is a book that breathes the particular atmosphere of a cell — contained, distilled, clear of distraction. And like all things grown in difficult conditions, it has a strange and stubborn vitality.
The Burning World: What the Data Tells Us
What Hallam describes in philosophical terms, the data renders in alarming numbers. 2024 was the warmest year ever recorded, crossing the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial temperatures that the Paris Agreement had set as a red line. We have had twelve consecutive months at or above that threshold. This is not a projection. It is the world we are already living in. The World Economic Forum projects that on our current trajectory, climate-driven events – floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms, wildfires, and rising seas – could cause up to 14.5 million deaths in the next 20 years. Floods alone are expected to account for 8.5 million of those.
The injustice embedded in these numbers is not incidental – it is structural. The Global South, which has contributed least to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, will suffer most. Research consistently shows that increased mortality from extreme heat will fall heaviest on South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and the small island nations of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Indigenous thinkers have long understood that the world is not a collection of separate systems but a web of relations, and that damage to one thread reverberates through all others. The Andean concept of Pachamama – the living earth that sustains and is sustained by all beings – was never metaphor. It was observation. Mother Earth and Father Sky are not symbols. They are systems. And they are telling us something, in floods and fires and the falling song of a stone curlew in a heathland.
Whakapapa: The Thread That Holds
In Te Ao Māori – the Māori world – Whakapapa is the genealogy of all things. It is not merely a human family tree. It is the relational story of connection and interdependence – how cloud is the ancestor of rain, how rain is the ancestor of river, how river carries the memory of the mountain to the sea, and how the sea breathes upward into clouds where the life-giving cycle begins again. Whakapapa is the understanding that nothing stands alone, that every entity is a meeting point of past relations and future possibilities, that to understand anything, you must first understand its kinship.
Hallam’s story, read through this lens, becomes something other than the story of one man and one trial. It becomes the story of a farmer in Wales whose crops were destroyed by unprecedented rainfall – and who recognised in that destruction not a misfortune but a message. The message was that the relationship between the human world and the living world has broken down. The Whakapapa of the atmosphere, of the carbon cycle, of the ocean currents and the monsoon systems and the permafrost – all of it is being rewritten, and the rewriting is happening inside human choices.
This Is About Us
The most important move Hallam makes in Suicide is the one he makes quietly, near the end. He turns the book’s gaze from outward to inward, from the broken court system and hijacked governments, and the Frankenstein-like machine, to the reader.
We have spent decades thinking of climate change as something happening out there – in the atmosphere, in the Arctic, in Bangladesh, in the Sahel – something to which we respond, something that requires a government to act, a corporation to reform, a technology to be invented. Hallam does not let us rest in that comfortable position. The machine we are talking about – the machine of complexity and destruction – is not an abstraction. It is made of individual choices, compliance, and silence in the face of what we know to be catastrophic.
Hallam stepped out of compliance and into consequence.
The question Suicide poses is whether the rest of us are willing to make that same movement. Not to climb a gantry over the M25, but to step outside the normalcy that a system in crisis works very hard to maintain.
The Global South is already living this question without the luxury of asking it. In the Maldives, elders perform ceremonies on shores that their grandchildren may not inherit. In the Niger Delta, communities live within the consequences of oil extraction that heated a world they did not choose to heat. In Tuvalu, an entire nation is negotiating the terms of its own disappearance. These are not future possibilities. These are realities. And the Whakapapa connects us to every one of them. What we burn here shows up there. What we choose here is what they live.
Voices Yet to Be Born
On the last page of Suicide, Hallam arrives at a word the legal system is trying hard to criminalise – disobedience. Not as vandalism. Not as chaos. Disobedience as the act of a person who has looked at the machine, understood its trajectory, and refused to comply with it. He calls such non-compliance a valued and necessary aspect of society – perhaps the most important act available to citizens when the institutions that were built to protect them have turned against them.
The Haudenosaunee practice of the seventh-generation principle holds that every decision made by leaders should be considered in terms of its effect on the seventh generation yet to come — children not yet born, lives not yet begun, who will nonetheless inherit the consequences of choices made today. Read through this frame, the trial of Hallam was not really about whether five people should go to prison for attending a Zoom call. It was about which direction we are facing – backward into the deceiving familiarity of a system that is dismantling our future, or forward into the difficult but necessary life-affirming act of changing course.
There is threaded through the final pages of Suicide, something that feels older than argument and younger than policy. It is a plea – not from Hallam the prisoner or Hallam the activist, but from somewhere beyond him, speaking through the ink and the solitude and the years he spent in a cell on ancient, diminished heathland. It is a plea that whispers from the unborn – from the children of the third generation and the seventh and the twentieth, from the voices that have not yet found bodies to speak from, from the lives that are waiting, hopefully, at the far end of the choices we are making now.
Those voices are not asking us to be heroes. They are asking us just to be honest. To look at the machine, to name what it is doing, and to refuse to pretend that it is something else. They are asking us to understand that disobedience, in the face of a system that is devouring the future, is not a crime. It is a form of love. It is, perhaps, the most democratic act remaining to us – the act of citizens who know what the seventh generation will need, and who find, in the clear light of that knowledge, that compliance is no longer possible.
Civilisations are not murdered. They commit suicide. Or they wake up.
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BOOK LAUNCH: Wednesday March 25 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm Housmans welcomes Roger Hallam to discuss his essential new book: Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. Published by Hard Rain Books
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
