In January 2017, in an action to urge King's College London to
divest from fossil fuels, Hallam and another person, David Durant, using water-soluble chalk-based spray paint,[10] painted "Divest from oil and gas", "Now!" and "Out of time" on the university's Strand campus entrance.[13][11] and were fined £500.[14] In February they again spray painted the university's Great Hall causing a claimed £7,000 worth of damage and were arrested.[13]
In May 2019, after a three-day trial at
Southwark Crown Court for criminal damage, they were cleared by a jury of all charges, having argued in their defence that their actions were a
proportionate response to the
climate crisis, with Hallam arguing his actions were lawful under an exemption in the Criminal Damage Act that permits damage if it protects another's property.[11][15] In March 2017, Hallam went on
hunger strike to demand the university divest from fossil fuels—the institution had millions of pounds invested in fossil fuels but no investment in
renewable energy.[14] Five weeks after the first protest, the university removed £14m worth of investments from
fossil fuel companies and pledged to become
carbon neutral by 2025.[10][16]
Later in 2017, Hallam was a leading member of activist group Stop Killing Londoners,[17] an anti-pollution campaign[18] of mass civil disobedience that they hoped would result in the arrest and imprisonment of activists.[19] Hallam with Stuart Basden and two others were prosecuted and some pledged to go on hunger strike if imprisoned.[20]
Hallam and four other activists were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance on 12 September 2019, the day before a planned action to pilot
drones in the exclusion zone around
Heathrow Airport in order to disrupt flights.[25] Three days later, in an action organised by Heathrow Pause, Hallam was arrested in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport apparently in breach of bail conditions from the previous arrest requiring him to not to be within 5 miles (8 kilometres) of any airport or possess drone equipment.[26] He was remanded in custody until 14 October.[27]
In an interview with Die Zeit on 20 November 2019, Hallam said that
genocides are "like a regular event" in history and he also called the
Holocaust "just another fuckery in human history".[28][29] He made this comment in the context of a broader discussion about
genocides which have been committed throughout human history, in which Hallam compared the Nazi Holocaust to the
Congo genocide; as he stated, the "fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history" and he also stated that the Belgians "went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it."[30] Hallam's controversial comparison drew support from African activists the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/
Ecocide! Campaign, who were critical of the tone of his language, but lauded him for his honesty and his willingness to highlight the crimes which colonial powers committed in Africa.[31] However, his comments about the Holocaust, perceived by some as
anti-Semitic, resulted in his expulsion from Extinction Rebellion.[32]
In a self-published pamphlet which he wrote in prison, Hallam wrote that the climate crisis would lead to
mass rape, and he featured a story in which the reader's female family members are
gang raped and the reader is forced to watch. The pamphlet was condemned by Farah Nazeer, CEO of
Women's Aid.[32] When Der Spiegel replied to Hallam that "You can't blame the climate change for the rape of women during war", Hallam's response was "No, climate change is just the tubes that the gas comes down in the gas chamber. It's just a mechanism through which one generation kills the next generation".[33]
In September 2023, Hallam was ranked thirty-fourth on the New Statesman's Left Power List of influential left-wing figures in the UK.[34]
Hallam was arrested in a
dawnraid at his home on 18October 2023.[6]
Hallam was interviewed by conservationist
Chris Packham in the 2023 documentary Chris Packham: Is It Time to Break The Law?.[35]
Publications
Publications by Hallam
Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse. Self-published, 2019.
ISBN978-1527246744.[n 1][36]
Publications with contributions by Hallam
Roger Hallam (2019). "Chapter 14: The civil resistance model". In
Extinction Rebellion (ed.). This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. Penguin Books. pp. 99–105.
ISBN9780141991443.