Rush! E-Book

Omond Tasmin

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

When Tamsin Omond left university, she had no idea that within a year she would be up on the roofs of Parliament, breaking the law for her beliefs about climate change. The book is a candid account of her journey from student to rebel with a cause. She takes her first steps in eco-utopia, joins Climate Camp and forms the activist group Climate Rush.

Leseprobe

RUSH!

THE MAKING OF A CLIMATE ACTIVIST

Tamsin Omond

‘I dedicate this book to where we are now, to climate change and the possibility it presents, to all of the women who are doing something to change their world, and to my Granny who helped change mine.’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the bit where I admit that some of the stories in this book have been blurred by memory and written as fact. Some names have been changed, some of the people I’ve met have merged into one and others are as true to life as I could write them. I’m sorry if you’re surprised to see yourself written about here without warning, but I also thank you because it’s your story that has made mine and I hope that ours might inspire others.

This is also the place where I thank the people who made this book happen: Plane Stupid; the Camp for Climate Action; the incredible women who give up whatever time they can to change their world with the Climate Rush; Deborah – editor extraordinaire and future leader of the world; Sasha for her guru-like status; Laetitia and Catheryn for saying yes; Chris and Jennifer for giving me hope; Mum and Dad for giving me faith, Emily for making me look talented; Alice for making me look fierce; Ben for making me look smart; Will for making me look good and Jessi for making me happy.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six: A DIY Guide for the Climate Suffragette

Chapter Seven

Endnotes

Resources: If you want to find out more..

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I JUST WANT TO GO BACK.

The past is a big place but I guess if I had to put a date on the point at which things changed it’d be about summer ’06. That was the year when everyone’s clunky white iPod was playing ‘Smile’ and James Blunt was pissing off the whole country and making his name in rhyming slang. My second year exams weren’t important. My biggest worries were whether I should keep kissing my ex and how to somehow get my hands on a Bestival ticket so I could be part of my friend’s rainbow costume troupe. I remember the sun shining, getting a good tan and being wound up by The God Delusion. That summer was also the last time I flew.

I was saving for my summer trip, working on a market stall a couple of times a week. It was breaking the rules to work during term time but I managed to read a lot hiding in between the racks of clothes and nobody ever caught me. I still think it was the best job I’ve ever had – maybe the best I ever will have – though there’s not much to compare it to: washing people’s hair; working in a pretentious cocktail bar; typing up hymn sheets. It was great because the market stall owners knew me and I could almost always get free food. I’m a bit of a sucker for free food. Last year, when I was really, really skint, I became amazingly good at asking people in restaurants for their leftovers. Doing that now would make me cringe, but I still think it’s stupid how much we waste.

I spent most of the summer cat-sitting for my English tutor, Dr Jessica Martin. She was a practising priest, but you wouldn’t have known it unless you were up on a Sunday morning and saw her setting off in her dog-collar. I’ve heard her tell people about the first time she lectured me. I guess she wants to keep me in my place: she knows that I can take myself far too seriously. It was my first day of lectures and I was stressed out and hung-over. I arrived five minutes late – great start. As I sidled into the packed room, as quietly as I could, the class was already reading a poem. I took a handout and started racking my brains for something clever to say. The poem was about being a trickster. It was about saying one thing and doing the other; about misleading people with words.

Dr Martin looked up. ‘Any comments, queries, ideas?’

Silence.

We all looked around wondering who’d be the first person to speak; the first person to risk making a mistake.

‘You’re studying English – don’t be scared about saying something stupid,’ said Dr Martin. She gave a wry smile. ‘You’re lucky to have chosen this subject. For better or worse, almost anything goes.’

I like being the first person to speak. I don’t actually enjoy forming the sentences but I do love the kudos that comes with biting the bullet, swallowing my fear and uttering an idea into the silence. On our first day of lectures, I’d be known as the girl who spoke first. I raised my hand. Jessica nodded at me.

‘I think it’s interesting that the rhymes themselves are tricky. The words don’t quite rhyme but they look as though they should. You stumble over the end of the line – it doesn’t trip off the tongue. Like “red” and “misled” [I pronounced it “myzled”]. They look as though they might rhyme, but then it doesn’t quite fit. “Myzled” doesn’t rhyme with “red”.

‘But the word’s not “myzled”, it’s “mis-led”. Tamsin, it’s a perfect rhyme.’

Jessica still laughs when she tells people this story, teasing me about wanting to enter academia when I couldn’t even pronounce a simple word like ‘misled’. That was the good thing about the market stall: Dixy – my boss – really didn’t care about that sort of thing. The breezy marketplace was an escape from the hushed tension of the library, or the claustrophobia of dusty rooms where even dustier men frowned when they glimpsed my bare feet under the desk. The marketplace, the summer sun – totally stress-free.

From behind the clothes racks, book in hand, I watched the life of the city pass by. The trendies strode along in leggings and gypsy skirts, but my friends would visit the stall to see if there was anything worth buying second-hand. I’d spend the mornings sorting through bin-liners of crumpled clothes and always put aside the good stuff. One morning, I found three dead ferrets in a bin-bag. I suppose they were meant to be worn as scarves but their little faces, complete with teeth and staring eyes, really put me off. My friend Apoc, always fascinated by the macabre, loved them. I sold him the lot for £10 and I’m still regretting it. He hasn’t lost them, or got tired of having their little hands clawing at his neck.

One tutor knew what I was up to. He’d come and visit me when he was at the farmers’ market, and sing the praises of local food, though he once gave me an apple he’d bought there and I found a Waitrose supermarket sticker on its side. He’d smile if he caught me reading on duty, but still seemed worried that my ‘giddy’ lifestyle would end in my failing my degree. I suppose he saw the merit of sitting outside in the sun, selling second-hand clothes, but he also thought that perhaps I should be doing more, setting my sights higher.

One week I told him that I was doing the ‘milk round’, where city firms ply you with expensive alcohol and try and persuade you that working for £10 an hour, seventy hours a week, makes for a fulfilling life. I guess it’s easy to be cynical now but at the time I did find it quite appealing. It was the women really, how smooth and polished they were. I was a bit in awe of them, even if they probably didn’t deserve it. I went for some drinks at an advertising agency, with my friend Emily, and this woman with hair so immaculate it looked like a wig asked us why we were interested in the firm. I said something inane like, ‘I’m really interested in brand recognition,’ which sounded particularly dull when Emily came out with:

‘I want to be able to manipulate people.’

The woman said ‘Oh!’ with a startled look on her face. She clearly liked Emily’s abrupt honesty though, and spent most of the evening next to us, chatting about her New York flat and her Sex and the City lifestyle. It helped that she was really beautiful, her life seemed exciting and glamorous and I forgot that I was mostly there to eat the canapés. The next day, hung-over and trying to concentrate on Chaucer, the market stall seemed small and provincial. I was ambitious; I wanted to be successful; I wanted to make my mark on the world.

But I still had a year to work things out. The possibility of a city job was not going to disappear (or so we all thought) and for now, what mattered was working on the market stall until I had earned enough money for my holiday to Spain. My friend Charlie and I had booked our flights to Jerez. We planned to be there for a month, travelling around, and before we left we wanted to raise at least £300. The flights had only cost £30 return and we were taking a tent and planned to travel cheap, but I knew that once you start travelling you can never anticipate where you’ll end up, or how much money you wish you had brought.

As it was, the only good thing about that flight was the price. At Stansted Airport, we were greeted by news of a terrorist threat. Our flight was delayed by ten hours and at the security check all our liquids were confiscated (no contact lens solution that night). Then when we finally got to Spain it turned out that our luggage had been lost. It was like the universe was trying to tell me something.

Charlie wasn’t that bothered. He bought me some sun-screen and a hideous pair of shades and suggested we take the boat to Morocco and spend a month sleeping outside. We passed the night beneath the Castillo, woke up to a free shower from the sprinklers and caught the boat to Tangiers. We spent the month taking long, sweaty walks and sleeping out under the stars. We dropped into a festival and I nearly drowned when I took a drunken swim in the strong currents that swirled around that part of the coast. We watched the World Cup final in an Italian restaurant which served awful food, but also endless illicit alcohol when Italy won. An old Eritrean guy tried to tell me his life story in pidgin Italian. I found him impossible to understand, until he brought out his hashish and it suddenly began to make a lot more sense. I remember walking through the streets at five in the morning hand-in-hand with Charlie – my ‘husband’ while we were there – and feeling dizzy at the coincidences that had brought this strange group of people together for a few short hours on a hot Moroccan night.

There are days when I just want to go back. It’s crazy, really, the difference that cheap flights made, how quickly they opened up the world and made it feel like flying is something we all have this right to. Now I’ve closed that world and sometimes it can feel like I’ve given up so much, the thousands of places I’ll never see and thousands of experiences I’ll never have…but there’s definitely a pay off. Weekend trips to Italy or my Gran’s house in Prague are things of the past, but taking slower journeys on hulking, Soviet trains in Eastern Europe, or setting off on a bike with a backpack and feeling this total sense of independence – experiences like that start to change your whole concept of travel. The idea of being on the rainy tarmac at Luton Airport one minute and out in the Ibizan sun a few short hours later begins to seem really unnatural, as though by moving at that speed you end up leaving something really important behind. It was definitely hardest at the beginning, watching my friends jet off round the world and wishing I could just forget about climate change for a bit and pretend that my choices didn’t matter. But then I’d think about all the places they were missing as they travelled above the clouds at 500 miles an hour, and what they would get to see if they just slowed down and kept their feet a little closer to the ground. And the longer I live this way of life, and the greater the distance between now and my last flight, the more I recognise what I have gained and the journeys and adventures still to come, and the more excited I get by the plans my friends and I speak about, on so many nights as planes pass high overhead: the things we’ll see when we go overland to India, one day.

***

At the end of that summer, as the new term began, I met Alice. She’s married to a famous poet, Geoffrey Hill, and when I heard she’d been hired as college chaplain, he was the one I wanted to meet. I’d written a dissertation on him and I thought that maybe I could be his protégé. I helped them move into their new house, I guess hoping to impress him, but by the time I’d finished arranging their bookshelves I’d realised that it was Alice who would change my life. She’s the most unexpected priest I’ve ever met. She isn’t nice (at least not in that way that means nothing more than sweet and dull), she doesn’t pat people comfortingly and she doesn’t mince her words. She’s American and Jewish and on a mission to pull people into the church. I’d pretty much given up on Christianity after a bad experience at the start of university, but she managed to reconnect me with the kind of love and acceptance my grandparents had shown me.

Both of my grandparents had removable body parts. Grandad’s eye was shot out before WWII. When we were much younger, he’d take his glass eye out at bath-time, put it by the sink and go to check the stove. He knew how to keep us under control: ‘I’m watching, y’know.’ Granny had her breast cut off, a mastectomy. When we went swimming in freezing waters off the north-west coast of Scotland, she would pull the plastic cup from where it lay against the gap in her chest. The gesture was so honest and so vulnerable. She would watch us all as we looked at her with embarrassment and with a shameful hint of disgust. Her gaze was straightforward – not proud, but definitely focused. She was dying, but she shrugged off the helplessness and futility of it. Instead she had a lust for life and an acceptance of all that meant.

My earliest memory of her is of a telling-off. I was sitting on the bottom step outside her house gnawing on my thumbnail. It’s a habit I still have. I was nervous: it was the night of my granddad’s seventieth birthday and we were going to perform a play about his life. My mum had written it and for one scene I was going to be Granny. I’d interrogate him and ask him where our lives were heading next… ‘I know, why don’t we turn our land into a charity for people with disabilities and their carers? We can call it “Holton Lee”.’ When I said this line I had to be as inspired and inspirational as my granny. I had to say it with such passion that my husband would believe that giving the best of his land away to create a charity was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I sat on the step, chewing my nail and wondering how she’d managed it. Then she found me and she told me off. Everyone inside was working hard, preparing food and washing cutlery. Why was I hiding outside and biting at my fingers? There was a lot to do and I was being no help at all. I remember feeling grumpy, upset that she hadn’t shown me her ‘inspirational’ side. But once I was in the kitchen I was soon distracted and stopped worrying about the play. Later I realised her rescuing me from the step where I had been alone and outside the family buzz showed just how well she knew me.

About twenty years before, Granny and Grandad had used their home as a base for a Christian community. By the time I could remember anything this had become ‘Post Green Camp’, a week of childhood bliss every spring, every year. This was when my brothers, cousins and I would vie for Granny’s attention. We could see the awe and respect other people felt for her. She bossed us about, telling us to chop vegetables, fetch water or simply get out of her way. She taught us that we were only as helpless as we were alone, and in a world so full, and so small, there was never good reason to feel at a loss. Later, the land where the camp was held was transformed into Holton Lee, the charity sprung from her vision. It exists still, growing year by year, a place where people with disabilities and the people who care for them can have a break from a world designed for ‘normal’ people.

As my gran’s cancer spread she eventually lost the part of her throat that gave her a voice. Instead she held something underneath her chin, which felt the vibrations of what she was trying to say and transformed her silent mouthing into a robotic buzz. We were told that it would not be long before she died. She had a special place in Scotland where she’d go each summer. The whole family would visit her at the same time. I wasn’t there for her last summer: a friend had invited me to go to Thailand. It seemed the opportunity of a lifetime and no-one could persuade me otherwise. Shortly after I returned, Granny died. I don’t think it would have occurred to her to be scared, helpless or lonely, but I do wish that she’d had all of her grandchildren around her for that holiday.

It’s tricky to explain how someone I find so hard to sum up in words can have had such an influence on everything that I have ever wanted to think, say or be. If there is a heaven then at its gate will be my Granny, Faith, no longer wracked with cancer, holding a key and waiting for me to explain my life.

But I had wandered from the church, and it took meeting Alice ten years later to bring me back. She did it in the simplest way possible, by giving me a weekly routine and a job to do. Every Sunday I just had to turn up ten minutes before the service, put on a cassock and a surplus, carry a cross to the altar, and help the priest prepare communion. After the service we would all go and eat breakfast. That was it. Alice’s minimal requirements made her seem very different to the other Christians I’d met when I first arrived. No praying out loud for people I did not know. No public confessions. Just a routine of worship and a quiet part for me to play.

On Sunday afternoons, Alice and I took walks together and talked about the future. We shared some similar ideas about the Church, ideas that I’d been thinking about on my own for ages. It didn’t seem all that complicated to either of us: love God, love your neighbour, make spirituality relevant, don’t exclude people. Sometimes on these walks we seemed to solve the world’s problems, starting with the church, and I began to feel like I would have a place in it, like my opinions mattered. Towards the end of university, a job opportunity came up, to shadow a priest in a North London parish. Since I had met Alice, the allure of the slick city women had diminished. The market stall was a dream from a time when I didn’t feel I had a purpose. Making money could wait. For three months I worked non-stop for my finals, pausing only to watch Neighbours and laugh at Paris Hilton’s jailbird antics, and then suddenly university was over. I had a calling. I’d work with a priest for a year and maybe, for that year, I’d do some good.

***

My job title was ‘Parish Administrator and Pastoral Assistant’. I had to type and fold three hundred service sheets a week, and at Easter, Christmas and other important church days I typed and folded thousands more. I filled in the baptism register, and every now and then, the ones for funerals and marriages too. I spent every morning from nine until noon in a church office built into the nave of the church. When I closed the doors I could see and hear the services and I had to remember to put my phone on silent. Nobody wants the moment when the bread becomes the body of Christ to be interrupted by a ringing phone, a muttered, ‘Oh shit!’ and a thud as it’s grabbed from its hiding place.

The fun side of my job was my pastoral duties, when I got to come out from behind my desk, walk through the dark cool of the nave, and step into the outside world. There are a lot of people who depend upon the church. Every week one of our priests would take communion at the local hospice, performing the ritual for the old and the sick, talking and listening for hours. The church where I was working was renowned for engaging with the local kids. The youth groups and people that led them were not at all evangelical. You didn’t have to be a Christian to come and hang out in the church, go to a recording studio with the youth team or spend a week outside London learning adventure sports. I really liked that. I’d never understood the division between the church and the rest of the world, and I was always cautious about churches that catered for Christians and Christians alone. I like to think that the visions written in small stories at the end of a very old book are about more than separate communities worshipping in isolation, judging the big bad world outside.

One week, I made a new friend after Tuesday Tea. She was sitting at the very back of church with her head down, exhausted. Tuesday Teas were monthly events held for the elderly of the community. We provided entertainment and a silver tea service for an afternoon. Doris, one of the more fragile church-goers, was leaning on her stick and waiting for a taxi to arrive to take her home. It had been a long afternoon and she was frustrated.

‘I called them. I’m sure I did. Oh, I don’t know.’

I knelt in front of her and asked if she had a number for the firm. I called and they had no record of the order, but said a taxi would be there in about fifteen minutes. By the time it arrived, Doris and I were friends. We’d been chatting about the previous week’s service, and about Easter, which was approaching fast. I knew something about her life, but didn’t want to pry. Instead I talked to her about climate change and we agreed that the weather was definitely not what it used to be. She made her way slowly to the street and into the taxi. I asked whether she wanted me to come along too but she said no.

‘Oh dear, I don’t want to trouble you.’

It was no trouble at all but I was embarrassed to push so I suggested that I visit her the following Tuesday afternoon.

The next week I made my way to Camden, wondering whether I should buy her some flowers, or perhaps a cake. But of course, I’d left my wallet at home. By the canal I found a lone daffodil. It was a pity to pick it, but I had a feeling it’d be appreciated and so I broke its stem and kept on walking.

Doris lived in a small flat on a council estate. I walked past a group of boys sitting on the gate. They were smoking something and generally taking the piss. As I went past they whistled and I shook my daffodil at them.

I knocked on her door and the net curtains went up. Doris peered at me through her kitchen window and so I lifted the letterbox and called inside:

‘Doris, it’s Tamsin, from the church.’ I felt like a Jehovah’s Witness.

Three minutes later she’d opened the door and was beckoning me in. She led me to her living room where several tarts had been laid out carefully on the table and a pot of tea was brewing. I felt my heart hit the back of my chest. The sunshine was pouring in through the window and she had a great view of London, laid out below. I wondered how often she made it out of this room and into the world outside. She was extremely fragile. I decided that I’d start bringing the world to her. I went to the kitchen, found a tall glass, filled it with water and put in the daffodil I’d brought. I put it on her mantelpiece and sat down.

‘Eat, eat,’ she said and so I did.

It’s hard to remember what we spoke about that day. She told me stories about her family, a daughter who had died from cancer, a grandson on a gap year in Australia, far away. He texted her from time to time (I grinned at the thought of her tapping out messages on her mobile phone) and his father printed off the email updates he sent. We talked for two hours, when I had thought I’d only want to stay for one. I loved telling her everything I’d been up to and hearing her life story.

I’m just one of many parishioners who has spent time with someone old, viewing it as a ‘Christian duty’, and been surprised by the friendship they have found. My visit resulted in a strange and special relationship built between two people from different generations, who found that they had more than a little in common, and who both appreciated each other’s kindness. Doris had lived a tough life, yet she was incredibly resilient. We set up a routine. Every fortnight I went to see Doris, ate the custard tarts that she bought for me, drank tea, chatted church politics, washed up and left. She was a little nervous, as if she thought it might be a hassle for me, and I was just the same, not wanting to tire her or put her out. We saw each other in church and felt conspiratorial, like we were having secret meetings, belonging to no-one else but us.

But as the months passed and I folded my service sheets, making any contribution I could to the lives of the parishioners around me, I watched the news and read the papers and became uneasy about the ever-growing threat of climate change. For some time I’d been wondering whether I was on the right path. In my final year at university, on the same weekends when I was taking long walks with Alice, I was also reading books on climate science, fed to me by the two activists I lived with. They were terrified about the future and pretty soon I started seeing their point of view. I guess I’d always known that change was coming, but I hadn’t realised how soon, or how bad it was going to be. Gradually I became aware that we were sitting on all these time bombs – the risks of a 2°C temperature rise, the shrinking ice of the arctic sea, the growth of aviation, massive deforestation – and that ticking clock started to inform everything about my life. I couldn’t stop thinking about these facts, I couldn’t shut up about the time bombs and I just couldn’t prioritise my job.

TIME BOMB: What’s with the 2°C?

On the floor of my sitting room, I read about a 2°C rise in world temperatures. This is what the International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) decided might be a ‘safe’ level of global warming, back in the early 1990s. They say that since the industrial revolution and our discovery that by burning fossil fuels we could create almost limitless energy, global temperatures have increased by 0.8°C. It’s crazy – less than two hundred years ago we discovered fossil fuels and now we’re all so hooked that our lives would be unimaginable without the option of jumping in the car for that trip to the shops, turning up the gas when the weather outside is cold, eating food that has been transported by plane to your supermarket. Everything that we do increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which creates further climate change and a higher global temperature: 0.8°C… Well, it might not sound like much, but I was shocked when I realised that we were already seeing its effects:

Glaciers retreating in the Himalayas and massive shrinking of the Arctic sea ice.Drought in Australia.$150 billion a year of damage from natural catastrophes.Floods in Bangladesh which put 80% of the country under 2m of water.Temperature rises of 3-4°C in Alaska.Sea-level rises of 3.1mm per year since 1993.300,000 extra deaths a year from higher temperatures, which cause the spread of disease.

As the temperature rises, the situation gets worse. These facts really scare me:

When we go over 1°C (that’s a ‘when’ not an ‘if’) there’ll be no ice on Mount Kilimanjaro, the ecosystem around the Great Barrier Reef will completely collapse and hundreds of island nations will be uninhabitable.If we reach 2°C the World Wildlife Fund thinks the Greenland ice sheet will go into meltdown. This would result in a 7m sea level rise, putting most coastal cities under water.3°C will see the Amazon ecosystem collapse, making it the greatest emitter of CO2 in the world, as trees die and forest fires rage through the landscape.

2°C is just a number that was picked out of the air. Some people point out that because of feedback loops (like the Arctic sea ice – a time bomb in itself) the 0.8°C rise we’ve already had may well already be past the ‘safe limit’ anyway. We might not be able to stop climate chaos now, but pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere is almost definitely going to make it worse. If we cut our emissions as much as we can, it won’t stop global warming, but it’s the only hope we have of avoiding a total climate catastrophe.

In church I was outspoken about the role that I felt Christians should play in the fight against climate change. The vicar, my boss, became concerned that environmental campaigning was dominating my parish work. He asked me to go and speak with him one evening in late February.