As part of our “re-imaging activism” work, we have been looking at the ways issues such as race, gender and age play out in the climate change movement in Manchester. We’ve had some interesting insights from various campaigners about the distinct advantages of getting older, the lack of mothers in the movement ,and why climate change meetings are still so white.
The upcoming (October) print edition will be looking at the way class shapes the climate change movement. To get the conversation going I want to ask our readers about their views on class and climate change. Do they think that class still matters? Is the climate change movement doing enough to engage with the working class – who, after all, will be worst hit by the impacts of climate change and the least able/prepared to deal with it? Can we really expect poorer people to make the drastic changes to their lifestyles that we want? Should we be trying to learn from those with smaller carbon footprint (i.e the working class)? Do middle-class campaigners really represent the ideal green lifestyle? What about the richest in our society – what role do that have to play?
Your thoughts and ideas please! The most interesting will even make it to our October print edition.
You can put them in the comments box below, or email them to me at mcmonthly@gmail.com
Arwa Aburawa
Freelance Journalist
Freelance Journalist
manchester climate monthly 
I wonder if the labels “working class” and “middle class” are now somewhat obsolete and in need of revision? So many of my contemporaries (I’m 64) were born into conventional “working class” families and took advantage of the educational opportunities available in the 1960s and 70s and ended up in conventional “middle class” jobs (teaching, middle management etc.). My father, for example, was a sheet-metal worker in a factory in Peterborough. I went to a rather indifferent Secondary Modern school – but after leaving school took the opportunity to improve my qualifications, started work as a laboratory assistant and ended my career as a manager. There was much more social mobility in my time – and, of course, many more jobs available. I suspect that, for sometime now, the dichotomy has not been between “middle class” and “working class” but between “skilled” and “unskilled” and in the very near future will be between “waged” and “unwaged”.
I’ll end by asking the following question: Why do so many, mainly middle class people, use the term “middle class” as a pejorative?
So many issues are mixed in with social impact , I have often felt that it wasn’t my place to engage with “the working class” for fear of sounding rather like a condescending so-and-so (or worse). Is it fair for me to deliver a speech on eating local /organic/ fairtrade ( translate: expensive) to people who try to feed a family of four on under £50 a week? Isn’t there a bit of the High and Mighty in declaring that flying and driving are terrible sins to people who are desperate to have safe good public transport at ungodly hours to work shifts? Ditto with the virtues of retrofitting or state of the art PV panels when the landlord won’t even sort the damp mould patches in your bathroom? I don’t need to tell mum to reduce her carbon footprint when she’s got to top-up the gas meter everyday, and can’t be sure there’ll be enough beyond the 20th of the month… It’s all right for you they’d say…
Searching for lifestyle changes leads you straight to the well-offs, overspending, over traveling, over not-concerned . So, turning round the other side you try to reach the middle to higher classes, and introduce the idea that well, at that rate, soon it’s “everyone living a more precarious state without guaranteed gas-elec-food-petrol”. Who are you, you stupid so-and-so (or worse) they’d say, I’ve worked hard to get what I have, so I deserve my trip to Barbados tomorrow and I do what I want…
Right now, I find reaching anybody more and more of a problem: educated white middle class = can’t lecture anybody …
Hi Dave,
my answer to your question “Why do so many, mainly middle class people, use the term “middle class” as a pejorative?” is that they are reacting to the smugness and self-satisfaction (alluded to in Laurence’s reply) AND they have imbibed the Marxian notion that the Working Classes are the true engine of history (Hegelian dialectic, proletarian revolution yadder yadder yadder). There is a notion that somehow the Western working classes are innocent of any complicity whatsoever in the rape of the planet and the looting of the future, and are more “authentic”.
Class is indeed a far messier concept than back in the day of “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”, but just because it’s a messier tool doesn’t mean, imho, that it’s a useless one.
And I have a little ritual here – every time I write about class, I link to this.
My impression is that where activism receives public funding, this most often involves projects in less affluent areas. It is easier for councils or other agencies to justify spending public money in those areas. In that sense, activism is engaging more working class people.
If what you want to do is tackle carbon emissions, this is a bit odd, because people on low incomes have lower emissions. It’s difficult to get public money for a project that will lower the emissions of the rich, even though, from a mitigation perspective, this is where the largest carbon reductions could be achieved.
There is a similar tension where climate change funding is spent overseas. In DFID especially, low carbon development money ought to be pro-poor, so it benefits poor people more than it does others. But obviously the poorest people abroad have extremely low carbon footprints in the first place.
I witnessed an agricultural development project in rural Tanzania, where new techniques were being introduced because they were low carbon. It was truly absurd. There were practically zero carbon reductions to be made there, but it still sounds good to those with money to spend, because you are supposedly tackling poverty and climate change in one go.
Obviously it’s a different story for adaptation.
To respond to this question: Can we really expect poorer people to make the drastic changes to their lifestyles that we want?
I suspect this is being framed as an ethical question (is it acceptable to expect…?). I am answering it in a more practical way (is it realistic to expect….?). I think it’s not realistic. Very few people will make drastic changes to their lifestyle for climate reasons. And many will resent environmentalists who tell or expect them to change (back to ethics then).
This is why the footprint language is problematic more generally. It shoves responsibility on to the individual, but the individual doesn’t want to change behaviour. For reducing emissions, systems need targeting. This has bigger impact.
People walk down the streets designed for them. Footprint language gets us walking on tip-toes. Systems language gets us re-designing the street.
“Can we really expect poorer people to make the drastic changes to their lifestyles that we want?” Other repliers show it doesn’t work – “morally” or “realistically”. That’s if the contact is about preaching dos and don’ts: we tell you what to do. Better to engage via more relevant issues that are about getting organised/support now? Perhaps the Steady State launch is an opportunity. Can we find an empty shop in or near Market Street/Arndale? That’s eloquent about how trad. economic growth is unachievable/sustainable. We might like to do our duty as consumers to keep business in profit but we just can’t manage/afford it. So we turn things round by handing out “money” (flyers) that plugs people into the organisations in the report cited as positive alternatives/providing useful stuff. And explains in a few sentences what SSM is all about. And asks for other examples of what’s going on and what else is needed? We may not get a load of people staying for a thorough launch event but we use a gimmick to focus on explaining why the alternatives on offer are relevant and there for the asking. A launch in a 20/30 something coffee/bar in the N Quarter won’t reach out.
People in adversity do get organised. Can’t we help that happen a bit? No, SSM/MCF shouldn’t campaign against poverty but it should make the connections with why unsustainble growth makes people poor now.
I agree with Robbie that to tackle carbon emissions by trying to engage people on low incomes/ different races etc is perhaps not the best approach. I think that the low carbon movement often consists of fairly privileged people simply because we are lucky enough to have the luxury of being able to stop and think about the issues and then feel empowered enough to act. Although people on lower incomes by and large have lower carbon footprints, they also have less power to act and because of their relative lack of power are more likely to suffer worst from the impacts of climate change as the years roll on. The reasons why they might have less power to act could be that they feel less comfortable in more formal surroundings, have less formal education so feel less skilled or simply that they’re running so hard to just exist that there isn’t any time for anything else. All of these things are generalisations of course but I believe hold truth nonetheless.
Therefore, for me, working with a diversity of people requires a diversity of responses and a tailored approach that one day might be working with someone who owns their own home to help them get a loan out on the green deal and another day might be about helping someone on a lower income to grow their own food both as a means to mitigate climate change but more importantly for that person to build resilience for the future of climate change impacts and perhaps help them combat food poverty in the present.
A few resources you might find useful:
A climate change, diversity and social justice toolkit that I wrote for the Transition Network (Transition Towns movement): http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/Diversity-and-Social-Justice-Resource-Final.pdf
An action research project looking at diversity in Transition Town Stoke Newington (Hackney, London): http://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/default/files/DanielleCohen-MSc-HE-Thesis%282%29.pdf