Having been involved a fair bit in Extinction Rebellion (XR) in its early days, I found myself gravitating towards different sorts of actions after the movement’s peak. As I’ve written about before, a lot of XR folks didn’t recognise the wins they’d achieved. They had demanded that councils and organisations declare a climate emergency, and many did. The government set the groundbreaking net zero target by 2050. It wasn’t the impossible 2025 target that XR was calling for and so they didn’t see it as a victory, but it was. What the movement needed then wasn’t more protest, but people to do the work of actually reducing emissions – and lots more people taking practical action in their own contexts.
I’m not the only one who saw that XR needed to give way to a wider and more inclusive movement that was less confrontational, but ultimately more transformative. Rupert Read, an XR founder, has now gone on to spearhead the Climate Majority Project. “There now exists an urgent need to follow through on the gains already made by radical efforts,” he writes with Rosie Bell in the introduction to their new book of essays.
One of the themes of the book is the theory of how radical and moderate flanks work together to make change. XR gave the climate conversation a kick in the butt, and now “the majority of latent energy for climate action now lies in moderate territory, with newly concerned citizens who are still not attracted to participating in radical tactics.” The ecological movement is itself an ecology, they point out, with a diversity of modes of operation. Climate change needs all of us. Some will be drawn to direct action, some to the patient work of change in homes, schools, workplaces and councils.
Another interesting theme is that this climate majority is already out there. Because the headlines have gone to the radicals such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain, many people who are already acting on climate change don’t really see themselves as part of a movement. One of most important tasks then is “making the climate majority aware of itself.”
This climate majority is at work in the community, in faith groups, in families and in workplaces. The latter are potentially powerful – we spend a lot of time at work. There is so much we can do in our workplaces, pushing management to set climate policies, modelling change. I know friends who have done so much of this, and who take great pride in telling me about it – organising talks to staff, lobbying for electric car charging points in the staff car park, inviting colleagues to travel with them by train. All of this is climate work. At this point in the journey it may be far more useful than donning an orange vest and sitting in the road.
Workplace action gets a chapter in the book, and so do climate hubs. These have sprung up in a number of locations in the last couple of years to embed climate action in a local context. Zero Guildford is a leader in the field, running a building that’s a visible presence in the town. There are at least a dozen around the UK, and I’ll write a bit more about them another time. It’s early days and we’re nowhere near running our own climate hub, but my own Zero Carbon Luton project is part of this story too.
Like any collection of essays, this one lends itself to dipping in and out, and reading the bits that are most relevant. There are essays on resilience and communications. Jessica Townsend writes about holding local politicians to account, Joel Scott-Halkes writes about rewilding. Have a browse, see what speaks to you, and maybe you’ll discover that you were already part of the Climate Majority movement and you just didn’t quite know it.
- The Climate Majority Project is available from Earthbound Books UK
The Earthbound Report 