The first time I volunteered at my local community garden, I only wanted to do some physical work outdoors and possibly make some friends. And while it felt good to paint sheds and build cane obelisks, what kept me coming back through the winter was the feeling of being part of something bigger.
I slowly realised that I had joined a network of community activists, mental health advocates and refugee support groups, whose work offers rare glimpses of a world I want to live in. It felt more transformative, and therefore more radical, than any climate action Zoom call or nonviolence training I'd ever attended.
It got me thinking: the climate movement is experiencing a lull. Battered by repression and fading from the headlines, we must broaden our tactics if we’re to reclaim the media attention of 2022–23, as well as the popular support of the pre-pandemic era.
I welcome the recent shift by some in the movement towards sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure – as Andreas Malm says, if someone places a time bomb in your home, you’re entitled to dismantle it. But community initiatives, which produce tangible results in a country ravaged by austerity and isolation, build a credibility that is rooted in local lives and therefore can weather attacks from the right-wing press in ways that more radical action can’t. For these reasons, I see community as a deeper well of energy that the movement needs.
“My activism is rooted in the garden,” said Tila Rodriguez-Past, the communal space’s garden officer—whose inspiration for urban forestation stems from her upbringing on the fringes of a nature reserve in Southern Mexico. “Despite being a British citizen for many years, I’ve never felt able to accept the risks that getting involved in climate action poses to me and my son.”
We were mid-way through a nature-based arts session for local families, and her eyes flitted between me and some toddlers playing on the floor a few metres away. “The same can be said for people in situations more precarious than mine,” she said. “I strive to create a space for people to experience nature and feel empowered to act on the crisis.”
While community care is often at the heart of environmental groups’ agendas, the green movement’s diversity problem is well known. As Adam Williams discusses at length in his Working Class Voices series, climate groups are not only predominantly white—they also have “the biggest blind spot in history when it comes to the working class.” Recent research from Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) highlights that the narrow parameters environmental organisations set for what constitutes ‘action’ leave many people feeling “excluded from both decision-making and opportunities to network, learn and implement projects.”
After the session, I headed across town to Banbury Larder—a food hub run inside a Methodist church, where members from 104 households pay £3.50 per week to ‘shop’ on free surplus food rescued from supermarkets. Working-class locals, immigrant families, retirees and a few familiar faces from the local XR faction chatted over cups of tea as I filled my basket with a mix of fresh, dry and tinned produce.
“I grew up in a society where there was no safety net,” said Taraji Ogunnubi, a Nigerian-born mother of two who founded the project. “If you don’t have money, you don’t eat. But I didn’t want to just open another food bank: I wanted to empower people to do something positive for the environment while saving money. We get 400 kg of food from supermarkets each week, which would all end up in landfill if it wasn’t reclaimed here. The impact we’re having might seem small—but it’s something.”
I would in fact argue that the impact of an initiative that links environmental action to helping people with their food bills is potentially huge. In his essay 'Community is Resistance', the American writer Elad Nehorai points out that such initiatives steer us away from “transactional” thinking and towards seeing communities as having inherent worth. This creates a democratic model which can be scaled up or replicated elsewhere.
“Investing in community is both modelling democracy and seeding democracy,” he writes. “Each community becomes its own lived version of it, leading us directly to the world we are making.”
As I left the larder, I reflected that many of us will have to broaden our perceptions of what constitutes climate action if we are to build a truly diverse and robust movement. As the OCC research explains, minority groups’ perceived underrepresentation in environmental spaces is often due to ‘exclusionary assumptions’ and narrow parameters for what constitutes action. It is not, as Phoebe Rison explains, due to a lack of grassroots interest or concern for nature’s wellbeing, as respect for nature is often integral to traditional belief systems:
“Many cultures, religions and communities have a deep connection to nature and the natural world, and protection of nature is central to how they make their decisions day to day.” She goes on to explain that some cultures and religions position human beings as rooted within “a global ecosystem of life.”
I reached out to community activist Zainab Ahmed, who has been instrumental in running cultural events in Banbury. She explained that environmental concepts like khilafah ('guardianship') and israf ('avoiding waste') are fundamental to the Islamic worldview:
“While they’re usually framed in a traditional context, they provide practical tools that can be applied to tackling the crisis.” She went on to inform me that Green Mosque Projects – which position places of worship as agents of change in the fight against climate change, and plastic-free Iftars – which advocate for zero-waste meals that break fast during the holy month of Ramadan, “are part of a broader push for environmental training and education” happening within the Muslim community.
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Environmental consciousness isn’t something to be imposed from above. Communities are already equipped with diverse toolsets to tackle our myriad crises and seed decentralised power that naturally resists authoritarianism.
Faced with the ongoing fascist takeover of the United States, the Democratic US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged listeners in a recent livestream to begin building community immediately:
“Believe it or not, community,” she said. “Whether it’s your church or mosque or temple, whether it’s a knitting group, whether it’s your dinner circle—building that community is far more transformative and far more important than you may realise.”
With plenty of reasons to fear a similar takeover happening in the UK, we mustn’t wait until that day to start building the resilience necessary to weather the political and climate shocks on the horizon.
Let’s start building today.
Main image: Unsplash/Priscilla Du Preez.
Joe Attlee is a writer and community activist living in Banbury, where he explores the intersections of climate, care and local resilience.
