‘In order to win, you need to have a huge number of people who are broadly behind you, which led me to thinking what that might look like.’ Photo: Rupert Read
Rub of the green: Rebecca Hardy talks to Rupert Read about a new climate project
‘I could say my whole life has been leading up to this.’
My interview with Rupert Read, the ecological philosopher and Salter Lecturer 2023, starts off on a surprisingly optimistic note. It’s an unlikely twist, given the fact that my newsfeed is filled with headlines of heatwaves, wildfires, floods, evacuated tourists, and politicians stepping back from vital climate pledges. But Rupert Read is encouraging. ‘It’s a terrible, but also possibility-filled moment in our history.’
rprised. The Norwich Quaker’s well-received Salter Lecture in April delivered a similarly-nuanced reflection on the need for what he calls a ‘newer mode of realism’. A reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (XR), Rupert Read’s message was steeped in the rousing call to find meaning and purpose, even amid ecological collapse. To be clear, though, this kind of ‘active hope’ is not about ‘glossing over things’, he says, but about looking the situation squarely in the face. ‘That‘s kind of what the Salter Lecture was about,’ he tells me, when we chat over the phone. ‘I’m saying that the moment is very dark, but, in that very darkness, the seeds of hope can be sown – not by trying to make light of it, but by daring to face the horror of the moment, and the difficult feelings that arise.’
It was out of this belief that the Climate Majority Project (CMP) was born. CMP is Read’s latest initiative, an organisation set up with Liam Kavanagh, a cognitive and social scientist. Launched in London at the end of June, the CMP’s aim is to ‘shift the mainstream climate narrative towards truthfulness, and collectively build resilience in response to the challenges that lie ahead’. Central to its approach is the belief that there are millions of people who care about the climate crisis but feel helpless about how to respond. ‘We believe there already is a Climate Majority, but that majority needs to be deepened and it needs to be activated,’ says Rupert Read in the CMP’s launch video. Describing these people to me as ‘the vast middle zone of society’, he says they differ from ‘the radical flank’, typified by Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil activists. Nearly seventy per cent of British people want urgent political action to tackle climate change and protect the natural environment, according to research in 2019 by a coalition of green charities. It is these people the movement is hoping to connect and spur to action.
‘I could say my whole life has been leading up to this,’ Rupert Read tells me, mentioning his work in academia and the Green Party. ‘It became clear to me that, while XR had accomplished something splendid in 2019, there was a ceiling to what it was capable of accomplishing. Partly, that was because it developed a bit of a toxic brand, and, more generally, because most people are just never going to join in those kinds of activities. It just isn’t true to claim that you can win with a tiny minority on your side. In order to win, you need to have a huge number of people who are broadly behind you, which led me to thinking what that might look like. What we need is to develop a new moderate flank to take advantage of what XR had accomplished in 2019.’
There are no easy answers, he says, and no simple solutions – such responses are ‘wrong or incomplete’. ‘The simple answer that we all just have to get into the street [and agitate] is wrong, partly because it’s unrealistic, and also there is more constructive stuff that needs to happen, and that we need to take on ourselves, and not just demand the government to do. Simple answers like “technology will solve it” are wrong too. Well, no, sorry; technology can make a contribution, such as with renewable energy, but it is pure speculation and very dangerous wishful thinking to think that technology is going to fix it. So, we have to live in the complexity of multiple answers, and multiple contributions.’
Rather, what the situation really demands, he says, is that a critical mass of people wake up to the need for imperative action and organise where they can; be it in the workplace or their communities. Not everyone is going to be an activist, ‘but everyone has the potential to take action. The Climate Majority Project is saying, “Look, the people who are really worried, or starting to worry, are the majority” and we all need to become those active citizens and changemakers, so, at the end of our lives, we can answer our children or grandchildren when they ask: “What part did you play”?’
The situation looks ‘very, very bad’, he says, but there are some early signs of hope that more people may be waking up to the scale of the challenge. The scientific consensus, fuelled by the harrowing news of wildfires, droughts and climate damage, is ‘grinding out a remorseful logic that makes the old narrative make less and less sense. It makes climate deniers look more irrelevant and more dangerous. I think we are going to see more people going through the painful journey [of climate grief] that I described in the Salter Lecture. So, yes, I do think that it is quite possible that astonishingly good things might occur in the coming next decade or so.’
One of the CMP’s main tools is ‘the incubator’, which gathers funding from investors to help green initiatives grow and build networks, as well as providing expertise. Groups supported by the incubator so far include Wild Card, which is working to achieve its aim that fifty per cent of the country will be rewilded, and Community Climate Action, which creates plans to help people meet local climate emergency targets.
‘The incubator is partly there to say, “Look, there are some brilliant projects”.’ These are important in their own right, he says, but also provide ‘examples and models’ of the kinds of things that need to happen. ‘So, yeah, one of the things we hope is that the organisations that we are incubating will be particularly strong examples for people to create their own similar enterprises.’
Another unique feature of CMP, he says, lies in its theory of change, which is organised around four interwoven strands: ‘truthfulness’; ‘communities of awareness and resilience’ (also referred to as ‘inner work’ or ‘faith’); ‘serious action’; and ‘building a shared understanding’. ‘Most of the organisations that we collaborate with, or incubate, emphasise shared inner work, the kind of things that Quakers do and have long contributed to. We think the inner dimension of climate action is essential to it working well, and, if what you’re trying to do is make external change, and change other people… which is, frankly, going to fail at certain points… then to make deep transformative change, we need to be working on ourselves.’
To this end, CMP highlights this ‘shared inner work’: ‘building a culture of psychological resilience as well as practical resilience. This is worth highlighting to a Quaker audience,’ he notes.
So far, the launch has had an encouraging reception. It been endorsed by a diverse and cross-political party group of public figures, including: Chris Packham, the TV environmentalist; Michael Rosen, the children’s author; and Carice van Houten, who acted in Game of Thrones. It has also featured in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and on Sky News, the BBC, and local radio. There has also been positive coverage in right-wing newspapers, which the team thought would normally be uninterested in, or try to denigrate, a climate group. ‘That is hugely exciting for us,’ he says. ‘But that’s only the beginning. We need a lot more coverage; a lot more money; a lot more people to get involved.’ Because the issue isn’t going to fade away, he says, but will grow more and more pressing. ‘We are still in the early stages of climate breakdown. It’s going to get a lot worse because of the inertia in the system. We’re going to have to project our thinking forward, our hearts forward, into a future where it is obvious. It is in your face, all the time, like the second world war was for people in their daily lives. That is how it is going to be in fourteen or twenty years’ time.’
What happens in twenty years time will be affected by what we do now, he says. ‘In the future people will be spending a lot of time seeking to survive in the midst of the enormous climate challenges that are thrown at them. Right now, we have a lot more room for manoeuvre, and we have a deep responsibility to do what we can, whether that is through citizen community action or in the workplace. If you are fortunate enough to have money, what are you doing with it now? That is what everyone needs to ask themselves: what are you doing now to meet this crisis?’
What do you think really needs to happen now, from a very broad, crude perspective, I ask. It’s a huge question, and I know the minute I have asked it, that there is no easy answer.
‘It is critical,’ he says. ‘Absolutely critical, that the majority comes to know and understand itself [and face up to the crisis]. It’s too late to outsource this issue to so-called political leaders or to activists. Everybody needs to step up, into their full power. We need to do it together, where we have a voice, such as in our workplace and where we live. I think there is going to be sufficient change to the majority. That is not going to happen overnight, which brings us to the sense that there are no shortcuts.’
‘There is going to be immense damage,’ he goes on. ‘There is no way of avoiding it. We have to face it, and, on the basis of facing it, that is actually stepping into our full power… what we are trying to do is help and engineer a future, not for tomorrow or next week, or next year, but over the next years or decades, so the whole political culture starts to change; common sense starts to change; and we get to a situation where it becomes impossible for politicians and the media not to pay specific focus to this.’
The idea that we can change the situation just by individual action or green consumerism he says is ‘bananas’ and ‘pie-in-the-sky thinking’ – as is hoping that our leaders are going to fix it by themselves. ‘What is needed is the intermediary stage. Collective action. Modelling, which will grow and grow, and start to put pressure on those in charge – to finally do the right thing.’
Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend. You can find out more about the Climate Majority Project at https://climatemajorityproject.com.
Comments
Those who do the most shouting about it offer little hope unfortunately, and this makes it difficult to respond. There is much anger, anxiety and blame, all of which does not lend itself to a considered and united response. Climate change will not be solved by bullying. We do need the major actors to become involved, to feel that government(s) actively seek solutions, and that big companies are not simply allowed to continue to operate in ways that damage the planet. Hope is what we all desperately need.
By pen@rossell.org on 3rd August 2023 - 9:01
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