Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death (Prison Notebooks)

Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges

In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act.

From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam—farmer, researcher, and co-founder of Just Stop Oil—delivers a searing indictment of a legal system that punishes those who resist, while protecting those who destroy. In July 2024, Hallam was dragged from a British courtroom for refusing to stay silent about the climate crisis. For “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” he was sentenced to five years in prison, the harshest punishment for civil disobedience in the UK in modern British history. The case made front-page news and drew global outcry.

Suicide is part memoir, part political reckoning. Drawing on Hallam’s award-winning research and experience representing himself in four Crown Court trials, it lays bare the moral and legal failures of a society sleepwalking into catastrophe. From climate science and the right of necessity, to the collapse of democratic norms and the illusions of secular reason, this is a radical call to rethink justice, truth, and duty in the face of extinction.

“These protestors are not criminals—they are messengers.”
— Open Letter signed by 1,200+ public figures, incl. Rowan Williams, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox, Sir David King, Tilda Swinton & Philip Pullman

Praise of Roger’s Work

“Brilliant: wise, profound and persuasive.” — George Monbiot

“An instruction manual for ripping through the corruption.” — Paul Mason

Praise for Suicide

"Mr. Roger Hallam is the charismatic voice and face of Britain’s climate crisis movement. His devotion to this cause has been like a burning cigarette carelessly tossed from a car window. It ignited a grass fire that became a brush fire and then a forest fire in the minds of Britain’s youth and socially aware grownups. Roger chose the succinct title “Suicide” for his account of the M25 trial that led to the imprisonment of all who took part in an act of civil disobedience. This book echoes Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”, and Gandhi’s Satya Graha movement. He borrows from the irony of Socrates’ trial in “The Apology” and avoids the self-pity of Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”. The book “Suicide” is an erudite, well researched, reasoned defense of the movement that was on trial for the M25 disruption. Mr. Hallam calls upon some of the most celebrated names in British intellectual history to support his arguments for leniency toward protesters trying to forestall the extinction of all life everywhere. The harshness of Mr. Hallam’s sentence was only slightly mitigated by its curtailment as the government sought to remedy the outrageous verdict.
This short book of 150 pages is finding its way into the hands of students in universities and public schools. Thus the M25 case and its resolution will influence trials for climate crisis protests in coming years. Yet Mr. Hallam minds us of a disconcerting likelihood. If it takes twenty five years for a new generation of judges, members of Parliament, teachers, professors, and technocrats to replace the present generation, the year will be 2050 and more irreversible harm shall have been done. Mr.Hallam’s book strikes a note of true urgency without giving way to despair." - Jim McKee, Austin, USA.