Joanna Watson

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Saskia Papadakis: Yes, what do you think some of the failures of the environmental movement have been thus far?Joanna Watson: Well I think the thing that we beat ourselves up most about, and certainly Friends of the Earth is making real attempts to put right, is the whole sort of diversity of the movement. I mean you will probably find the more aware, I hope you are finding the more aware when you’re interviewing folk for this project, are aware that it’s been a very white person-led movement and that it hasn’t found the way to appeal to more diverse communities. And I think my view thirty years ago before I became much more sensitised to these issues was probably you should always start with the people who care most to start with because that’s where you get the energy. You know that it, and that, if they happen to be white middle-class and articulate, that was not necessarily a bad thing because you were probably dealing with the elites who were white middle-class and articulate and you needed to battle for solutions. That’s probably what I thought thirty years ago. It’s not what I think now because I’ve got a much better understanding about how change happens. I do think though that it’s not about co-option, it’s about working with. I mean it’s now fantastic, I think you were talking about working with one of the, you know, Black Men Walking or something. I mean there are quite a few groups like that. That shouldn’t be about Friends of the Earth joining Black Men Walking, that should be about finding common cause with Black Men Walking, which I think it is by the way, I mean that’s what we would do. But it is about finding common cause and finding ways of working together, each to their own sort of needs and button pressing, you know. I mean that I think is the important bit. And I think the failure to do that earlier was just, if you are so driven to get something, to achieve something, you don’t step back and think, what am I not doing? And I think that’s the problem. And I think we can see it much more clearly and also because we are fortunate in having a cohort now that really cares, that really sees that’s important. I mean and that’s, that is an impulse from much younger people, which doesn’t mean to say that all the older ones disagree. I just mean that we’ve been through that bit and the thing that really stirs up the youngest ones is the intersectionality. It is the anti-racism. It is the discrimination side. It is EDI and all those things are really, you know, pressing buttons all over the shop. And that’s good. It’s really good. So I think it is a failure but it is not, it is one we’re trying to address. And I think the other thing is messaging. How can we all- But this is global, this isn’t just the environmental movement, how can we see in front of us what’s happening to the planet which we depend on utterly and not want to pull together to put it right whatever our political beliefs? How have we gotten to the kind of situation democratically or otherwise where whether you believe in climate change or not depends on who you vote for? I mean it’s nonsense. That’s a huge failure. But I don’t think it’s down to the environmental movement per se. I think the need to make our, make what we do relevant is more, more of a failure. But you know it’s, the number of people working on it is not that big. Not compared to some things. And people lead very busy lives. But I don’t know, I think yes, I think probably the diversity of the movement is the thing that we are most challengeable over.British Library catalogue number: C2037/53 Project clip number: 161