Over the past six months, members of an Oswestry group has been taking the fight against climate change into their own hands.

Oswestry Extinction Rebellion (Oswestry XR) held its first meeting earlier this year to highlight the importance of acting urgently against global warming.

With 90 people attending the opening meeting, the group has since almost quadrupled in size, and has taken part in both national and local protests and demonstrations to spread their message.

More than 20 members attended the Cardiff XR march, while locally the group organised an anti-plastic demonstration outside a supermarket, a demonstration at Barclays bank and worked alongside ‘Do It for David’ – a campaign set up to stand against plastic in the ocean.

Group member Jonjo Evans has attended many of these events along with others from Oswestry, and believes focus now needs to turn to pressuring action from the government.

He said: “The government have declared a climate emergency, Oswestry Town Council were one of the first town councils to declare one, and Shrewsbury Town Council has declared one too I believe, but nobody’s doing anything, that’s the issue.

“It’s really got to that point at which people need to stand up and be counted a bit.

“There are a lot of people out there who are not in denial as such, but just ignoring it.

“Prince Charles has said we have 18 months to act on the cause.

“This whole process has not been helped by Brexit – from a political point of view as well as looking at it from the media side of things, Brexit has taken the majority of the headlines.

“Disrupting day-to-day life for people is not the way to go about getting our message across now, I feel it is now time to pressurise the government into acting now.

“Whether they will or not, I’m not sure – they’ve been so busy with Brexit and the leadership that they’ve not given it enough time.

“Politically it has been an incredibly busy time – but this is extremely important, this is an ‘act now’ thing.

“It doesn’t matter which party is in power, they all need to do something.”

The lack of action coupled with the lack of media attention certain climate issues receive is frustrating for XR members not just in Oswestry, but across the country, explained Jonjo.

He added: “There are so many gobsmacking facts that not many people are aware of, like the fact that at the moment there are huge wildfires burning in peat bogs in the Arctic Circle for about a month and a half – they usually only last about a day.

“Earlier this year one of the biggest emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica fell into the sea with newly hatched eggs because a huge ice shelf melted and fell.

“One thing I find frustrating is how little of these things actually make the news.

“The wildfires have made the news, but other things like huge floods in the Mississippi basin which has led to a lot of animals drowning and farmers not being able to get their crops in the ground have not been mentioned so much.

“For us, the denying of everything has to be over with.

“There are far more gases in the Arctic Circle now which is making the greenhouse effect worse.

“The more of it that melts, the less likely it is for us to stop it.

“When you ask people ‘when do you think the snow and ice will disappear in the Arctic?’, people will often say 50 to 60 years or even further away – it’s probably more likely within the next five years, that’s a fact.

“The longer we take to act, the shorter that timeframe is becoming.

“The rate at which the Amazonian Rainforest is getting ripped down is accelerating at every month. In Australia, the biggest coal mine ever is being planned.

“So, all the plans made to put things right are constantly being made more difficult by things like this.”

Oswestry XR now consists of more than 350 members after being set up initially by fewer than 10 people earlier in the year.

Jonjo insists the group is still more than happy to welcome new members, and said the group hopes to eliminate the scariness surrounding XR groups.

“These groups are springing up everywhere now – Wrexham and Llangollen have now started up groups,” he said.

“I’m not entirely sure why it has taken off so well in Oswestry, but even within the wider Extinction Rebellion group we’re getting a bit of a name for ourselves.

“The groups all have a range of different types of people – we have retired members and a lot of our members have children.

“I don’t know how I could face my daughter if I just continued to be wasteful and drove my car everywhere.

“Some people find XR a bit scary – we have been accused in the past of being anarchists.

“It’s not really about anarchy at all, it’s about facing up to the fact that we are in the middle – or possibly beyond the middle – of the sixth mass extinction that has happened on this planet.

“At this moment, we can’t argue with that, because this one is accelerating to disaster faster than any of the other ones had.

“We’re trying to get the scariness out of XR, which is why we’ve set up the XR Families group.

“They’re going to be setting up events of their own like a plastic free picnic in the park later this year.

“If you join XR, you don’t have to go to London and glue yourself to a train or get arrested.

“The police, especially when we went to Cardiff, were absolutely fantastic with us.”

Oswestry XR group meets twice a week – Monday from 6.30pm at The Fox Inn, and Wednesday from 6.30pm at the Golden Lion.