Hackney Friends of the Earth calls for broader approach to sustainability

Broader approached needed: there is no Planet B, says Hackney Friends of the Earth. Photograph: lightsinmotion

Like every group, be it base jumpers, boat trippers or batman fans, environmentalists have ‘mood music’ — small indications that suggest what people in the group are thinking. What books are people reading? What are the controversial tweets saying? Who’s recommended a fundamental rethink of the paradigm?

Let’s be honest — it can be boring unless you know the people involved! But recently, environmental movers and shakers have been saying something a bit different: don’t look inward to what we’re saying to ourselves, look out and ask what are other groups doing. What do they think of us and the issues we represent? And if they’re not interested, that’s our problem, not theirs.

I was at the Friends of the Earth national conference the other day, which – to their credit– FOE opened up to the general public. And the conference was sold out because people were keen to hear Caroline Lucas, Vivienne Westwood and Lidy Nacpil (a Jubilee Debt campaigner) speak. This very range of speakers partly represents that sense of openness, of different approaches.

Vivienne Westwood told us about her direct action during the Olympics: unveiling a 7m long dress embroidered with ‘Climate Revolution’. We’re still a little unclear about whether this actually happened, but it’s a good story.

Lidy Nacpil described how the Filipino liberation movement has come to understand that the environment is not a luxury for any people, no matter how immediate and compelling their social and political struggle.

Perhaps, though, it was Caroline Lucas who best summed up the message of the different speakers. She noted that although the environmental movement is great, it’s just not enough. Self-proclaimed environmentalists can’t single-handedly solve environmental problems, so we can’t just talk to ourselves, comforting as that may be. We have to engage others.

In fairness, I don’t think that our local FOE group is bad at engagement. We’re always very keen to welcome people to our meetings, or to engage in whatever way suits people — online campaigning, helping out at stalls or bringing professional skills to bear. We really do try to engage people wherever they are in terms of  understanding and interest.

But ultimately we need to have people not just signing postcards at stalls, but getting involved and helping to make our campaigns meet broader concerns.

The Bee Cause is about the decline in bee populations, but it’s also about creating vibrant public spaces that bring huge amenity value to people’s lives.

And in Hackney I think we’d like to be better at engaging with other groups. I want us to start collaborating with groups who work with the elderly and the young, because fuel poverty can affect them both really significantly. The Energy Bill Revolution campaign will give us a really exciting chance to do just that, and to campaign for real resources to tackle the human cost of fuel poverty.

We’d also like to work with local cyclists who are the ones working on sustainable transport; and with local food growers, who are at the forefront of what a sustainable diet means in practice, and how it can be achieved.

So the mood music for Hackney should be partnership and collaboration — not growing ‘the movement’ by making you all environmentalists, but by growing our definition of environmental concerns to include the whole gamut of approaches and attitudes to living lives that are fulfilling and sustainable, now and tomorrow.