Reflections on Slutwalk London

Rant about activism, the 'greenest government ever' and some possible solutions

I have been reading a book called Do it Anyway, by the talented Courtney Martin, the founder of the world's most popular feminist site Feministing.com. The book is a portrait of eight community activists in the US, and the project was started to answer the question of how super-sensitive young things could face the overwhelming responsibilities they face to "save the world"; "We know that soup ladling isn't enough", she comments.

Julia Butterfly Hill spent 728 days in this 1,500 year-old redwood tree in California.  Will we see see scenes like this in the UK if our forests are under threat from unsustainable logging?

Martin thinks that our generation is commonly mislabeled apathetic, when in fact we suffer from a paralysis in the face of the quantity and urgency of issues. How on earth do you chose what to focus on? I totally feel the pain of this dilemma. I've often chewed off my boyfriend's ear down the phone, lamenting the financial crisis, homelessness, human trafficking, the need for political reform in this country, unjust wars, environmental destruction, climate change and development, gender inequality in the UK, and FGM, mass rape and the lack of human rights elsewhere.

However, the narratives in Martin's book reveal that a narrow focus is vitally important to achieving even the smallest things, and a devotion to your goal over time can yield real (although probably never perfect) results.

In her book, Martin tackles our moral imperative to deal with the issues and injustices on our doorsteps. And she also observes that from her journey to write the profiles for the book, it is the personal and deeply-rooted in the community that are a driver for actually doing the activism rather than just moping. She writes:

"It's time that our generation embraced our respective limitations, not as a sign of weakness but as valuable information as we pursue lives of meaning. We must resist exoticizing the suffering outside of our own circles."

I am far from an expert myself, but I am not sure if this zoom on the local is the key as I am grappling with where to focus my own energies. It seems unfortunate that of the activists sketched in the book, the only one working on international issues is Rachel Corrie, who died in the attempt to prevent a Palestinian home from being bulldozed (Although Martin emphasises that the book is not meant to be comprehensive, just a collection of inspirational stories).

There are surely other examples of people from the West who have done real, measurable good in addressing the issues of people living in dire need elsewhere in the world. One example is Harper McConnell, who has worked in the HEAL Africa hospital in the Congo, and created two programs - one teaching children waiting to be treated, and one to skill-up women waiting for operations. McConnell is described in Half the Sky by Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. In their book, they encourage readers to take up the gauntlet to help people in developing countries "who desperately need the assistance". (Sorry for using the term 'developing', Hans Rosling - it is one world but this is shorthand for now.)

Another slight quibble with Martin's book is that perhaps it does not follow that people should necessarily work on issues in their own communities as a way to finding their true path. It is clearly important to be passionate about your work as activism is challenging, and this is more likely if you are directly affected or involved with the issues. But I feel that we live in a global society now, more than ever before. Specifically, the actions of industrialised countries are setting up the whole world, but particularly poorer countries, to suffer from climate change on a catastrophic level. I would argue there is too much blindness of the historic harm we have done to other nations.

Also, this kind of argument that actions should be local above all disenfranchises the privileged middle classes to some extent. If we have been blessed and don't feel we have been affected by injustice ourselves, does this mean we have nothing to contribute? Should I be a feminist activist because I was called a slut in secondary school? Although I would definitely describe myself as a feminist and I think feminism is important, I struggle to see that feminism as the only area I could make a difference in my life.

If the root of activism is suffering or empathy, perhaps empathy directs us to places of pain - regardless of their location. It seems definitely worth thinking about acting locally, or volunteering, but I wonder if it would be worth thinking strategically about where we can make the most impact. Is it making a difference in our own, fairly well-off communities that we socialise with, or to communities that are scarcely subsisting, or that are that are under attack?

In other words, the personal is the political, but does the political have to be rooted in the personal? Or should we just direct our compassion and empathy and resources where we know they are most needed?

It seems there has never been a period of time where politics have been so at odds with the data , and on a global scale. As physicist Brian Cox said in a recent G2 article:

“I do not believe that we currently run our world according to evidence-based principles. If we did, we would be investing in an energy Manhattan project to quickly develop and deploy clean energy technologies.”

It's an age-old utilitarian moral philosophy dilemma that we discussed in my university classrooms: if children out there are starving, or lacking an education, how could we justify our flashy watches or sneakers? How much should we give? How much should we expect others to give? What are our priorities? But funnily enough, asceticism is one thing that has not really caught on. I was recently shocked by William Dalrymple's description of a Jain nun plucking out her own hair in his most recent book Nine Lives. And in a similar way, pure environmentalism is has become almost unthinkable and shocking - most campaigns tend to focus on keeping creature comforts such as flying and driving but also 'doing your bit' for mitigation. How many of us are willing to follow the example of Julia Hill, for example, who spent two years up a tree to get protected status of an ancient redwood forest?

I don't have the answers yet about how far we should go or have my personal priorities in immaculate order. But I am inspired by role models such as Harvey Milk and movements such as the gay civil rights movement of the 1970s America, captured in the wonderful eponymous film Milk.

Even though the coalition government is so far not succeeding to live up to their touchstone pledge of being the 'greenest government ever' according to the excellent Johann Hari, I hope that this might galvanise activists and breathe some much needed life into the green movement in this country. Will people come out onto the streets to start protesting the wholesale offloading of their forests? Or the new offshore oil drilling operation near Shetland? (Or will they be so confused and overwhelmed by the complexity of the climate change and ecological issues that they do nothing?)

Hari writes:

"The Prime Minister has said the forest sell-off "empowers local communities" to take over the forests for themselves as part of a "Big Society". Yet sources within the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs say that, unsurprisingly, only about 1 per cent of the sales are anticipated to go to local co-operatives or green groups. The "Big Society" is a fluffy fig leaf for dismantling and demolition."

Perhaps it is time to re-cast the Big Society as a force for political activism and representation to fight the co-alition's broken promises? Or even take the name to fight back against the government on the political platform?

One way to fight the government's cuts right now is to join the False Economy campaign. They’ve got a clever video that makes the point rather well, see below.


Why cuts are the wrong cure from False Economy on Vimeo.

What has this got to do with climate change? At the end of the video, the actor Sam West describes a vision of sustainable economic growth: “...putting the emphasis on green growth and investment. This not only deals with the deficit, but the unemployment and the poverty, and it also deals with the many environmental challenges that the cuts will make worse.”

A spokesperson for False Econony tells me that they are crowdsourcing the consequences of the cuts and they want environmentalist to get stuck in:

“The coalition government has adopted a very deliberate strategy of 'devolving' its cuts down to local government - passing them down for councils to implement, away from the glare of the national media. It's only by collating information on what is being cut, locality by locality, that all of us can see the true impact of the cuts agenda.”

With more data on the site, environmentalists can consider whether the government has chosen the environment as the target of an ‘easy cut’ - without a significant media or public backlash. False Economy say: “Trying to grab a slice of an ever-shrinking pie is not a road the environmental movement should go down; instead, we need to ask why it is shrinking and whether it needs to shrink. These are the questions the government doesn't want people to ask.”

Can women (and men and intersex peeps) save the world?

Caroline Lucas told me recently that she thought it was a "very important" thing to write about environmental feminism when I said I wanted to write a feature about it.

Climate Rush calls for "deeds not words" on climate change

However, getting published on the trend of female-led environmental campaigning is not as easy as I thought. Too niche, perhaps. Or maybe those two words 'environmentalism' and 'feminism' congeal to form an unattractive patina of earnest do-gooders' intentions. Ism-anathema to editors. The public at large is not deeply interested in either, either.

Hopefully, if you are still reading, you are keen on one or both of gender equality and preventing the worst of climate change. Excellent. Let's begin.

I met Lucas at a suffragette-inspired eco-activist Climate Rush vigil commemorating the centenary of Black Friday, a riot involving suffragettes and the police. Guess who came off worse a hundred years ago? The unarmed suffragettes were assaulted, abused and two even died.

Lucas appears constant in her support of Climate Rush; she joined the 'On the Run' road-show last year, and speaks regularly at Climate Rush events. On her own website, a blog post states that:

Dr Lucas is a keen supporter of Climate Rush, a campaign which uses creative direct action to protest against the government’s commitment to environmentally destructive projects such as airport expansion and new coal fired power stations. Together with Climate Rush, she is calling for a revolution in renewable energy and a transition to a fair and sustainable green economy.

At the vigil for Black Friday, Lucas spoke of her own personal inspiration drawn from the suffragettes:

"The suffragettes showed their real commitment, year after year, and there is much we can learn from that. One of the most inspiring bits of that building [Parliament] for me, it's not the wonderful members lobby, or the wonderful public lobby, or the wonderful chamber, it's actually a little broom cupboard. It's a broom cupboard in the basement, about 3ft squared - the most important place to me in the House of Commons because it is where Emily Davison, the suffragette, locked herself in overnight so that when she was found on the day of the census, she could say that her address was the House of Commons."

Climate Rush is calling for the government to fulfil its promise in May to be the greenest government ever. The picture so far is looking patchy: for instance, DEFRA fared badly in the cuts, but the Green Bank will be a 'proper bank' that is needed to stimulate the green economy. Lucas is far from convinced, however, saying:

We had a debate in the House of Commons today [17 Nov] [on environment] and I can report that all of 12 MPs were present. That is shameful. This is why the Climate Rush movement is so important. We can never let is happen again that only 12 MPs think climate change is a sufficient priority to get themselves along to a meeting to discuss it.

There were about 200 climate "rushettes", as Climate Rush call their followers who took part in the vigil. There were women, children, teens, and men - some decked out in Edwardian dress and veils and "Deeds not words sashes. I met a 15-year-old girl on the protest with her mother. She said that Tamsin Omond, one of the founders of Climate Rush, is her hero, and she's starting a school newspaper that will feature the vigil in the first issue.

At a time in our cultural story where the lack of decent female rolemodels is bemoaned, I happen to think that it's a very great thing to have inspirational leaders such as Omond who take action on the world's biggest challenge

This has been a good year for female environmentalists. In one of the happiest moments of the year for anyone who cares about the environment, Lucas became the first green MP. Bryony Worthington, climate change policy expert and campaigner and one of the founders of Sandbag.org.uk, was recently made a Labour peer.

And it's not just in the sphere of politics that powerful women are campaigning on climate change. Ellen MacArthur recently launched a sustainability foundation, and declared that this would be her occupation from now on. Lawyer and author Polly Higgins is campaigning to make Ecocide an international law. At the book launch of Higgins' Eradicating Ecocide, she called for people to "be unreasonable" [watch below] and kick up a storming fuss for the greater good. This resonates with the Climate Rush tagline: 'Well behaved women rarely make history.'.



Higgins wants people to become activists, because political pressure is needed to make a difference on environment issues, as well as behaviour change. And there is also a grassroots movement for women to act on the environment.

It is well-publicised that the Women's Institute is enjoying a trendy resurgence and becoming increasingly influential. But perhaps it is little known that this year they have published an action pack on climate change campaigning encouraging their members to become guerilla gardeners and activists. In it, they state:

"In the UK, women remain influential consumers of domestic products and utilities, providing them with the opportunity to choose greener and less polluting energy suppliers and appliances, or consider the impacts of their food choices, for example. Women are also still the primary educators of the next generation and therefore have huge power to change the way in which today's children think about their coexistence with the planet."

According to a study* published earlier this year in the journal Population and Environment, American women care more about the environment than American men (!). The study was based on a gender analysis of eight years' of Gallup poll data. Leo Hickman blogged this in more detail, and pointed out a the suggestion that feminism rather than gender is linked to concern for the environment (women are more likely to be feminists, one presumes):

Somma and Tolleson-Rinehart (1997)** find that individuals – both women and men – who support feminist goals express greater environmental concern.

The correlation is there, but how it comes about is not clear. Perhaps people who are concerned about social issues and inequalities are just people who are concerned about social issues and inequalities - whether it is gender inequality in this country or ecological inequality between the world's North and South.

However important feminism turns out to be in explaining the gender differential in the developed world, it is certain that women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according the UN. The Women's Environmental Network (WEN) have also produced a report on gender and climate change describing that women are more likely to live in poverty, globally, so are more likely to bear the brunt of environmental destruction. The report finds:

"[W]omen are more likely than men to

• die in climate change-related disasters, and suffer from increased workload, loss of income, health problems, and violence and harassment in the aftermath of such events;
• be displaced, or encounter problems when other (usually male) family members migrate for economic reasons;
• experience increased burden of water and fuel collection, and resulting health problems, due to increased incidence of drought or other changes in climate;
• feel the effects of rising food prices most acutely, and be the first to suffer during food shortages;
• suffer exacerbated health inequalities;
• suffer from violence, including sexual violence, in resource conflicts;
• be expected to, and need to, adapt to the effects of climate change, increasing their workload;
• suffer as a result of intended solutions to the problem of climate change, such as forestry projects and biofuel production."

The WEN report also highlights research that women are more focused on behavioural rather than technological solutions compared to men. I wonder if this is because of social constructs around gender, such as that women are no good at engineering or that men are less empathetic? The Women's Engineering Society, and I'm sure plenty of men, would have something to say about that.

Workshops on gender and climate change run jointly by WEN with UK Feminista are "oversubscribed", the WEN comms officer tells me - another indicator that feminists are heavily into the environment.

Whether you are a woman, man or an intersex or transgender person, anyone can be a feminist, and anyone can follow join the very lively women-led movement to act on the environment - whether it is joining protests, getting informed or lobbying your MP. Go forth and be unreasonable!

Refs:

*The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public, Aaron M. McCright, POPULATION & ENVIRONMENT, Volume 32, Number 1, 66-87, DOI: 10.1007/s11111-010-0113-1
**Tracking the Elusive Green Women: Sex, Environmentalism, and Feminism in the United States and Europ, Mark Somm,  Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, Political Research Quarterly March 1997 vol. 50 no. 1 153-169, doi: 10.1177/106591299705000108