Victor Smith

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews and witness seminars with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The clip is from a witness seminar on artivism and the environmental movement. The full seminar, along with the rest of the collection, will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue, and the audio recordings will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from Spring 2026.For more information about the witness seminar, visit the project blog.For more about the project as a whole, visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Chris Church: I just think there is a counterpoint to that, which is what some people have called the joy of activism. The first successful stunt. The first time you hit the media. The first time you come away from an action thinking, wow, that went really well. I mean there is a huge- I mean there’s an awful lot of grind and a lot of failure but the occasional flashes of success are, I think, in some cases, what keep people going. But that does slightly open you to the idea that this is all a bit narcissistic, in that we’re doing it to get those kind of flashes of success. But I think they are there, and an awful lot of people I know would certainly say they can really remember the first time they felt they had the power to change.Saskia Papadakis: Victor and then Chris.Victor Smith: I think there’s a shift that I’ve seen in, I mean probably maybe starting around my kind of age, like slightly under forty, but definitely in the very youngest activists, is that they’ve never had the hope that everything’s going to be okay. It’s more like we know everything is fucked, what can we do to get back against the people who are doing this to us. And it’s more of mindset of prevention and amelioration, I guess, rather than ‘we’re going to save the world’. And that’s kind of an interesting shift, and I think that is something that even XR, I think can sometimes not be recognising that and not be recognising that like a lot of kids really don’t have any hope, and the message is not ‘Hey, wake up there’s a climate crisis’. It’s more like, we know you feel depressed and we know you feel that everything’s going to god knows what, here is what we can do to look after each other in the meantime…British Library catalogue number: C2037/102 Project clip number: 226