Sara Stefanini is a communications adviser for the climate campaign Mission 2020.
STROUD, England — When the history of 21st century environmentalism is written, this no-frills, post-industrial town in western England can be expected to feature prominently.
Since the turn of the century, Stroud has served as an incubator for firebrand environmentalist movements like Extinction Rebellion and Stop Ecocide. And, after years spent largely on the fringes, many of the radical ideas conceived in Stroud are now breaking into the mainstream — and opening the space for the wider climate movement to seek new levels of ambition.
To be frank, the audacity coming from groups like Extinction Rebellion — which is once again wreaking havoc on roads and airports across the U.K. — can be disconcerting for those of us slugging away at climate change through conventional, diplomatic routes.
Yet their willingness to glue themselves to doors and demand the extreme and unimaginable also brings a necessary shot of urgency and confrontation that energizes the entire movement — whether we welcome them openly or under our breath.
“Change tends to come from the margins, it doesn’t come from the center” — Jojo Mehta, activist for Stop Ecocide
Because the more people call to make the destruction of nature an international crime, for example, the easier it becomes to argue that clean air should at least be deemed a human right.
When Extinction Rebellion first took its message from a Stroud arts café into streets, airports and power plant sites in 2019, it was easy to dismiss the group’s demands. Their call for the U.K. to aim for net-zero emissions by 2025 was derided as unrealistic. But, sustained over 10 days of marches and arrests, that call shifted expectations so quickly that by the time Britain became the first G7 country to set a net-zero goal for 2050 two months later, it seemed rather reasonable.
Others in Stroud toiled on the outskirts for much longer before seeing their ideas take hold.
“Change tends to come from the margins, it doesn’t come from the center,” Jojo Mehta, an activist for Stop Ecocide, told me on a recent visit to Stroud. “We struggled with the fact that we were constantly the early adopters. Now we’re crossing that chasm.”
The push to make ecocide an international crime — started in Stroud a decade ago by the late earth lawyer Polly Higgins — was similarly deemed too renegade for most campaigners and funders. Then, in June this year, French President Emmanuel Macron endorsed a call from France’s citizens’ assembly on climate to make ecocide a national crime. In July, teen activist Greta Thunberg awarded Stop Ecocide €100,000 and included the call in an open letter signed by over 120,000 people.
This new traction for this once radical idea is a result of the tireless work of Extinction Rebellion and Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strikes, Mehta said. Once outrage spreads and takes hold, people are more willing to consider drastic solutions.
The trick to capitalizing on that shift in consciousness is to develop ideas early on that can be rapidly rolled out, argued Sarah Lunnon, an Extinction Rebellion organizer and former Green Party politician for Stroud.
“There are these moments when everything is up for grabs,” she said. “But the solutions have to be on the shelf.”
They also have to be more appealing and make more economic sense than the status quo.
When Dale Vince, founder of the green energy company Ecotricity, built his first wind turbine in the mid-1990s, the former New Age traveler says he was called “silly,” “fringy” and a “hippy.”
Now Ecotricity ranks seventh in customer reviews out of Britain’s 35 energy companies. It also turned the English football club it owns, Forest Green Rovers, into the first certified carbon-neutral football club and developed vegan plant-based meals for players, fans and local schools. Next, the company is building a wooden football stadium outside Stroud and preparing to sell vegan meals in supermarkets.
Stroud, England has been a hotbed of green activism | Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Many of Stroud’s environmentalists say they were drawn to the town’s counterculture, its doorstep to nature and its utilitarian links to train lines and major motorways. Stroud didn’t turn them into activists, but it encouraged them to pursue answers to their concerns.
Lunnon moved here 18 years ago to join a co-housing community, where cars are banned and neighbors share principles and meals. As a county councilor, she spent seven years banging on the English Environment Agency’s doors to trial a natural flood management scheme. In July, six years after the system started, the U.K. government referenced Lunnon’s scheme in a national policy statement.
Simon Pickering, an ecologist for Ecotricity and a Green district councilor, arrived in Stroud in 1989 to work at a prominent wetland-conservation charity. Within months, he was sitting in a tree with protesters every Thursday, opposing plans to cut down trees and widen a road.
The expansion was eventually abandoned in favor of a cycle and pedestrian path. And as a councilor in the 1990s, Pickering pushed for a recycling plan that was never adopted but closely resembles Stroud’s current, nationally recognized, waste-collection scheme.
It’s hard to stay upbeat when you’re inundated by daily news of wildfires, heat waves, floods, deadly smog and intractable politics.
“Back then, we were told, ‘Stop being a silly little Green. We can’t recycle, we can’t cut carbon,’” said Pickering. “Now we’re getting cross-party support, because Conservatives see the business sense of it.”
As a result, Stroud is ahead of the curve on climate action. It became the first local district in Europe to turn its own operations carbon-neutral in 2015, and the second in the U.K. to declare a climate emergency in 2018.
Even with this record of tangible change, Stroud’s environmentalists struggle — like the rest of us — to muster optimism about the chances of limiting global warming as much as scientifically possible.
It’s hard to stay upbeat when you’re inundated by daily news of wildfires, heat waves, floods, deadly smog and intractable politics. We all know what the doomsday scenario looks like; we’re less clear on the healthy, zero-carbon economy we want the world to pursue.
But Stroud activists’ ability to drive change is a welcome reminder that if we can imagine what that wildly better future could look like, that we have the power of making it a reality — no matter how radical it may seem.