Three climate activists were arrested and charged on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, after parking a large truck across three lanes of Melbourne’s busy West Gate Bridge, causing peak-hour traffic delays on day two of the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit.

The Extinction Rebellion Victoria activists sat on top of a truck they parked across Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge just before 8 am, and then unfolded a large banner that read ‘climate breakdown has begun’ and ‘declare a climate emergency’.

I live in Sydney, so I wasn’t physically inconvenienced by the extinction of reason among those activists, but I was deeply agitated by it –...