Ewa Jasiewicz

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Ewa Jasiewicz: But it was brilliant because it was like a form of, yes, sort of prefigurative politics some people might call it that you’re all there living together, sharing food, sharing the running duties of the camp, making decisions collectively, living in neighbourhoods that according to where you’re from in the UK. Obviously it was really white and quite a lot of middle class people because that’s mostly people who like camping. Or mostly people who are used to camping and feel okay to be surrounded by police in a field in the middle of a countryside location. So that’s, you know, not a comfortable place for like people of colour from urban centres. So that has, it carries its own culture. It also, there is also like some traveller culture in the climate camp lineage. And like the free party culture. So you know people who were living on sites and live a travelling life and have access to kind of marquees and know how like camps work and have lived in camps and have created camps. So they were the absolute bedrock. And that’s, that was- [microphone dislodged]Saskia Papadakis: It's okay.Ewa Jasiewicz: That was a lot of working class people. But yes, the camps were also, or actually when we developed Reclaim the Power they became more participatory for people who didn’t have experience of taking direct action. With the Climate Camps there would usually be a mass action that people took part in. But then there were also other actions and other ways of taking part which brought together people from local groups. So many of them coming out of an Earth First! lineage where people knew each other and had already taken action together and could all be in one place together and just take multiple actions. Or tackle the problem from multiple directions. So that was exciting for people to take part in or witness as well. And yes and like people will run the security of the camp. It was like a temporary town or a village for five days.Saskia Papadakis: How many people would be there?Ewa Jasiewicz: I think Kingsnorth had 800, or maybe up to 2,000. It was big. It was really big. It was a festival. And that was the other thing, it has a real festival element to it. I guess some people were really used to going to festivals. You know there’s an entertainment element. Just loads of socialising, bonding, confidence building, skill building. Yes.Saskia Papadakis: And yes were like people you worked with at Platform were they part of that world as well?Ewa Jasiewicz: They were. They came to it. And then there were other people who, I would say there was a lot of Greenpeace people who had a background of anti-roads movement activism who were involved. And then like new people who were getting skilled up and trained up. And then climate camp, I mean there was, there were quite a few weren’t there. There was like Scotland and that was against the Royal Bank of Scotland. And that was an interesting one because the target was like the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters which isn’t the same as maybe trying to get into a power station. I think with Kingsnorth, I think a few people managed to like get into Kingsnorth and scale it and shut down a part of it. But there wasn’t a mass action. But it did do the job. Because it’s also about the politicising aspect of all of the talks and the meetings that happen at the camp as well. There’s a lot of political education that happened at the camps. You know not everybody wants to go off and shut something down.British Library catalogue number: C2037/85 Project clip number: 77