Jay Jordan

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:Jay Jordan: And had this burn out, half my face is paralysed. Three years later I have another burn out, half my face is paralysed. And I, I do, when I’m- Oh yes, so this is a nice end, yes. So in 2019 I go and between the two burn outs, I go and do a course at Ulex which is direct action, eco-direct action people who are also Buddhists, who set up this centre after Copenhagen, seeing the depression in the ecological movement, and, and saying, okay we need to work with Buddhist philosophies, with the direct action movement to do a course around burn out. And their analysis is, the reason we haven’t had the social change we want to is because everyone burns out, you know. How many of fifty, sixty, seventy do we see in the movements? None. And so they have been running this course since Copenhagen. And we had seen it in Copenhagen after that. And I always remember, I was in a workaholic mode and I was always saying, oh people go there and stop being activists. Eventually I go there because of the burn out. Do this course and it’s extraordinary. And for once in my life I’m not in mega productivist workaholic mode, activism, activism, activism. And go and we have to do, at one point we have to do this- And one of the trainers is trans, and we have to do a, a pathway of the next six years. And we have to envision what we want to be in six years time, five years time. And it involves this kind of trans thing. It’s at the end of ten days, really intense, on the Catalonian mountains, doing bodywork, doing work around questions of domination. The whole thing is about three levels of connection, connecting more with yourself, connecting more with your friends and comrades and others, and connecting with the living world. And it’s really intense. And I do this pathway and suddenly number two is come out as gender queer is what I wrote. Because I, yes, I’d had a conversation the year before with a friend and she’d said, ‘Oh but you’re gender queer Jay.’ And I was like, ‘What? What is gender queer?’ I didn’t even know the term, you know. I was just like pfff. Yes.[…]Jay Jordan: I can’t work anymore. I can’t work. I can’t actually- I’m, I can’t organise big actions anymore. That’s finished. So the work I now do is organise rituals. And interesting, you know, when I was doing stuff in the Forest of Dean it was around shamanism and linked to ecology and spirituality. And I was reading things Satish Kumar and stuff like that and Resurgence magazine. And Beuys was a link between spirit and politics and, and ecology. And I’ve kind of come back to that. Also the link with Starhawk and the friendship with Starhawk and stuff. And now I work with a collective called Cellule d’Action Rituelle and we’re four of us, Isa and me, Thibaud and Nat. And we basically decided, just after the evictions to use ritual as a healing tool for the community. And to have a thing that’s a different kind of texture that makes you- I mean because on the zad we fell in love with the land, that’s what happened. You know we, you live on the land, you live from the land, you have a relationship to the land which is so different when the cops come in to fight, to take it away. You, you know, people were prepared to die, not in a kind of macho way, but just a sense of having this attachment to the land. And yes and I, I truly believe that we need to find the left way of having an attachment to the land which isn’t about the, you know, the, the right is not about, you know, blood and soil and in the way that the Zapatistas have an attachment to the land. And I don’t believe we’re going to get out of this crisis unless we have a spiritual relationship. And I don’t like the word spiritual because I think we’re just embodied beings. But we don’t have a, I think we’re animist. I think our natural default I think the human species is animist and the problem is that that’s been taken away. And increasingly I think what’s really exciting me is the way that biology is now showing how every living thing is a subject. And has an intelligence. And it’s, you know, and, and the kind of, anthropocentrism is, is going to go I think, you know. If you’re listening to this in 100 years time and there’s still some kind of life on this planet, I think, you know, I think we won’t be the centre, you know, we’ll no longer see humans as the centre. And that’s been really beautiful doing this. So the work we try and do with the rituals is to develop animist culture. But creating new aesthetics. So we’re totally against hippy aesthetics. We’re totally against cultural appropriation. And we do what we call animist kitsch. So it’s this kind of queer pagan, you know, sometimes using, you know, we go and buy things in action for the rituals. And it’s really not feathers- We’ll never put a feather anywhere. [laughing] And that’s the work I’m doing at the moment.British Library catalogue number: C2037/72 Project clip number: 218