At Hope for the Future, we’re passionate about building links between the climate movement and other types of campaigning. We’ve seen – in our work with medical professionals, with farmers, with anti-debt campaigners  – the power of building these connections, how we all become stronger by joining-up, and by joining the dots. There is perhaps a certain privilege to working on a topic –  the environment – which by its very nature touches on every other aspect of society, but we also know that it's crucial to listen to and learn from other struggles. As the poet Diane di Prima wrote: ‘NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us/ shoving at the thing from all sides/ to bring it down’. 

This is where Climate Crossroads comes in. This new project that intends to develop links between the climate movement and other areas of concern. To do this, we will first develop our own thinking on each issue and then publish this thinking in a resource in order to share our learnings with the movement. Each resource will draw upon our bread and butter of democratic engagement to propose ways in which we can engage present issues to our elected representatives. The next stage will be to collaborate with organisations working in the space to experiment with taking these arguments to our politicians. 

For our first resource there were multiple issues we thought about choosing from, but in the end I felt it was important to choose the topic of environmentalism and militarism. As wars have come more and more to dominate the daily news, it has become clear that we are entering a period of intensified global conflict. And as I highlight in the resource, this metaphorical heating up is not unconnected to the spiking temperatures of global warming but is in fact tied up in it, as increasing climate chaos contributes to the likelihood of conflict breaking out, at the same time that conflict itself is a massively significant carbon emitter. 

There was another reason for choosing this topic for the resource. As conflict has increasingly erupted, organising against these wars has become an incredibly powerful movement. And many of the same people that were in the climate movement now dedicate themselves and their energy, rightfully, to anti-war work, a trajectory best exemplified by the inspiring work of Greta Thunberg. From the perspective of climate campaigning, I believe we can find ways of reaching out and bridging the divide between the two movements, in the spirit of finding common ground which is so essential to Hope for the Future.  

And so I’m pleased to publish the first in our Climate Crossroads series:

Environmentalism & Peace: A guide to talking to politicians about the intersections of militarism and the climate and nature crises.

The resource starts by exploring some of the myriad of ways that climate destruction and military destruction are linked, whilst making a case that, as the climate movement, we need to get better at talking about these links. It then proposes some framings (or areas of common ground) to use whilst bringing these issues to our elected representatives, before concluding by outlining some SMART asks that we can make of our politicians.  

On July 16th we will be co-running a free workshop (sign up here) with the fantastic Rethinking Security, a coalition of different campaigns working in the peace space, which will discuss the strategies developed in the report, whilst providing training for activists seeking to engage their MPs. Out of this workshop we also hope to develop a group of individuals interested in taking these framings to our politicians, a process which will allow us to put our strategies to the test and find new ways forward. 

In future, we hope to produce further Climate Crossroads projects, on issues such as the politics of adaptation, the need for international climate justice, climate and migrant solidarity, and so on, so watch this space!