This is a companion piece to Felix Driver, Barbara Brayshay and Toby Butler’s article Oral Histories of the Environmental Movement: Making an Activist Archive recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 100.
As 2025 drew to a close, we looked back on a year when UK climate activists received custodial prison sentences and in Brazil, indigenous campaigners stormed into the COP30 UN Climate Conference in Belém to insist their voices were heard on the fate of the Amazon. The news headlines were dominated by climate change, wildfires, floods and heatwaves, as well as stories of resilience: activists rising up in protest to protect the wellbeing and lifeworld’s of their communities who bear the disproportionate impacts of climate change, extractivism, and conflict both at home and around the world.
At the same time we celebrated the recent handover of Voices for Change: An Oral History of the Environmental Movement in the UK: 1970 – 2020 (OHEM) to the National Life Stories at the British Library. This is a collection of one hundred environmental activist life stories, in which we looked back over fifty years of environmental activism from the grass roots campaigns at the start of the modern UK environmental movement to those of today. As the environmental crisis deepens, voices from the OHEM archive seem ever more prescient, as we are reminded of the ongoing struggles that continue to animate people to act, both individually and collectively to address the environmental challenges of our time.
From its earliest conception, a core aim of OHEM has been not only to capture the history of the movement, but also to create a resource with the potential to inform and inspire future generations of activists. Viewed this way, it is more than a repository of memories, it serves as a dynamic archive with social purpose. Currently, it is the only major national collection of voices which speaks directly to the history of the movement, recording both triumphs and setbacks; the thrills and dangers of frontline direct action; the solidarity born of organising creative campaigns and the effects of professionalisation on one of the most significant social movements of our time. The archive has the potential to inform key themes of interest to contemporary historians of social movements and activists alike.
Selecting one hundred participants from thousands of potential candidates, while ensuring representation from five decades across all four UK nations, required us to define what we meant by ‘the environmental movement.’ We adopted an inclusive approach, recognising its wide range of activities – from direct action protests and community initiatives, to policy campaigns – across six thematic areas: climate change and energy; landscape and nature; wildlife and endangered species; transport; waste and recycling; and pollution. A major challenge in choosing interviewees was confronting a widely held view of the environmental movement as overwhelmingly white, male and middle-class, and questioning the assumption that people of colour and working-class people either lack interest in environmental issues or have other priorities. As one of our OHEM interviewees, Zarina Ahmad, now Co-Director of the Women’s Environmental Network (Wen) pointed out:
there was this bottom line that BME communities aren’t interested in climate change. And they have other priorities. So, we said, ‘Well why don’t we ask them?’ […] And then from that point onwards I helped over 150 projects right across the whole of Scotland with different diverse community groups access the funding. And so, it changed the landscape.
Conducting one hundred interviews enabled the OHEM team to explore the diversity of activism beyond the mainstream and for the intersections of gender, social class, race, equality and intergenerational perspectives to be brought into the frame. At the same time, we wished to avoid over-representing diversity that wasn’t there, or failing to capture voices often invisible, excluded or alienated by traditional narratives of environmentalism. The outcome of an extensive research process resulted in almost equal gender representation, together with the voices of activists from minoritised communities, which have allowed us to explore the class, racialised and gendered dynamics of the movement.
All of this matters because, as Asad Rehman, CEO of Friends of the Earth UK, pointed out in his OHEM interview, if the environmental movement excludes working-class people and people of colour:
you just wiped out a potential power base, and the very issues that you’re talking about, here are lots of people who have got lived experience of that, that would both strengthen, bring new perspectives and make it more likely we’re going to win. So… it matters from our values and our principles that we have a movement that is diverse and reflects that.
Stories from the OHEM archive show that environmentalism is present and woven into the fabric of many ethnic minority and working-class communities but is unseen by the mainstream because it doesn’t look like conventional forms of activism. Zarina’s story is just one of the many that our participants shared about their experiences of racism in the movement. Highlighting the deep links between Britain’s role as a colonial power, the uneven impacts of environmental and climate crises, and the whiteness of mainstream environmentalism in the UK, these participants spoke of their ongoing work to bring racial, social and economic justice into the heart of the environmental movement.
Those who were active in the 1970s remembered the movement as dominated by white, upper-middle class men. Sue Clifford spoke of the difficulties she faced as the only woman on Friends of the Earth’s board, whilst Pete Wilkinson remembered being described as ‘the only working-class green in the country’. As the movement expanded in the 1980s, more women got involved in environmental activism, but some felt feminist concerns continued to be sidelined by major Non-Governmental Organisations. The Women’s Environmental Network (Wen) was set up in 1988to campaign on women’s issues as a response to the dominant male culture of the environmental movement. One OHEM interviewee, Helen Lynn, the Environmenstrual Campaign Manager and Green Baby project adviser at Wen spoke of the ongoing campaigns against toxic chemicals in sanitary and baby products. Another interviewee, Zarina Ahmad is now co-director of Wen, where she has brought her expertise in intersectionality and racial justice to the organisation’s eco-feminist approach.
Other OHEM interviewees, Ewa Jasiewicz and Emma Geen have both campaigned around issues related to disability and the environment, Ewa through anti-austerity activism with Fuel Poverty Action UK and Disabled People Against Cuts, and Emma with Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership. Feminist, anti-racist and disability justice activists have transformed aspects of the environmental movement.
However, as Afsheen Kabir Rashid explained, in Repowering London, an organisation that develops community-led renewable energy projects, they avoid the language of environmentalism, as they don’t want to alienate working class people and people of colour. Instead, they focus on affordability, community action and having fun. The fight for a truly diverse movement, it seems, is not yet over. The lived experience of activism has evidently ranged widely within and across generations, from the privileged pathways of elite public school and Oxbridge networks to the more challenging routes navigated by those who sought to break through the multiple glass ceilings of gender, ethnicity, class and disability.
The social networks and social contexts that support participation are key to understanding the dynamics of activist recruitment and engagement. OHEM narratives therefore have the potential to inform the future of the movement as it seeks to expand beyond its perceived majority white/middle class demographic. These person-centred narratives not only reveal hidden histories of discrimination and oppression, but also the ideological drivers to action. Such knowledge has the potential to move us to a more embodied, nuanced, and subjective understanding of environments and environmental movements. It also provides us with a rich resource for interrogating activist practices, and will inform and open new avenues for research through an exploration of the radical roots of activism and citizen engagement. These narratives also have the power to disrupt and radicalise published histories, for example, those voices that speak to the racialised geographies of territorial dispossession and the feminists whose work has created an alternative account of history which has made visible the experience of women so often missing or marginalised in conventional historical accounts.
Dive into the archive to hear voices that have the potential to inspire empathy and emotional engagement, hope, and efficacy. Stories of personal and collective action demonstrate that positive change is possible, in ways that scientific facts and data often fail. At the recent launch event of the archive at the British Library, Asad Rehman (Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth UK) spoke eloquently about the importance of recovering and remembering stories of individual experience and activism in making change. As he put it, facts don’t change the world, but stories do. Through accounts of culturally specific experiences and diverse voices, the archive also promotes inclusivity and engagement with the wider audiences that present-day campaigners seek to reach. Together, the voices that emerge from the OHEM archive show how the boundaries of the present-day movement are being redefined to encompass broader issues of climate, racial, and social justice. For the first time in fifty years, a person of colour, Asad Rehman, heads up Friends of the Earth UK, and Areeba Hamid, is now the first woman and person of colour to co-direct Greenpeace UK.
With ecological and climate pressures mounting, activism’s future increasingly rests on building collective realms of hope, resistance and imagination as much as on conventional campaigning. In that light, these stories drive a movement committed not just to maintaining the status quo, but to achieving genuine transformation.
The OHEM Archive will be available at Life Stories at British Library in 2026. Voices for Change: Stories from the UK Environmental Movement is published by UCL Press in 2026.