Quaker launches new climate movement
'The Climate Majority Project aims to support promising green initiatives, particularly those that coordinate citizen action.'
Rupert Read, the Quaker who delivered this year’s Salter Lecture, has co-launched a new climate movement. The Climate Majority Project (CMP) is aimed at harnessing the growing majority of people in the UK who are in favour of more action to tackle the climate crisis. The initiative is aimed at helping citizens come together and organise in their communities.
Rupert Read told the Friend that the network was created to reach ‘the vast middle zone of society’, many of whom he says want to see climate action but are not on ‘the radical flank’, such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil. ‘We are trying to generate an awareness of what’s happening in that vast middle zone that requires all of us to consider where our potential greatest contribution is,’ he said. ‘For some, that could be through the Quakers, but, for many of us, it’s going to be in some form of community-organising, or what we do in our workplaces. Everyone has the potential to take action or become those active citizens and changemakers we need, so, at the end of our lives, we can answer, what part did we play?’
The CMP aims to support promising green initiatives, particularly those that coordinate citizen action, through an ‘incubator’, which will gather funding from investors. Groups supported so far include Wild Card, which promotes rewilding across the country.
Alongside Rupert Read, who is a philosophy professor at the University of East Anglia, and a former XR spokesperson, the group is being coordinated by Liam Kavanagh, a cognitive and social scientist researching how best to boost human motivation to combat the climate crisis.
Launched in London last month, CMP’s mission statement has been backed by a diverse range of high-profile figures, including: Chris Packham, the TV environmentalist; Michael Rosen, the children’s author; and Carice van Houten, who acted in Game of Thrones.
One YouGov poll in April showed that sixty-five per cent of people in the UK said they were ‘very or fairly worried’ about climate change. An article in next week’s issue will look at CMP in more depth with an interview with Rupert Read.
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