Tom Youngman

My article in The Ecologist

I wrote an article a couple of months ago for The Ecologist on environmental activism, when it’s most effective and the direction I think it should take. The strapline given to it is pretty apt: “constructive engagement, optimism and campaigns that benefit local residents are the best tactics to move eco-activism forward”.

After Copenhagen, I sat down with the twenty or so pupils in the ‘Environmental Action Group’ at my school. I thought I’d get the Copenhagen Accord up on the projector and try to make sense of what comes out of two weeks of negotiations by the leaders of the free world. The only thing worse than a bad response is no response at all. There was nothing to make sense of, nothing to comment on. Twenty teenagers waited for me to tell them that something good had resulted from the conference. As I struggled to find anything worth pointing out in the document, twenty teenagers sat in silence. Some of them never came to our weekly meetings again.

What COP15 proved is that we cannot wait for our elected representatives (and for those my age and younger, representatives who we have no chance to elect) to take the first step.

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It continues a lot more positively than that particular introduction, I encourage you to read on here!