Angie Zelter: After 40 years of climate activism, I feel a surge of hope
I am now 68 years of age
but when I was 21, in my final year at university, I became aware of major
problems then facing the world: war, poverty, acid rain, ozonedepletion, desertification, deforestation,
species loss, civil and military uses and abuses of nuclear power,
pollution, population growth, consumerism and the climate crisis. I was
determined to devote my life to helping solve these problems.
After spending
three years in Cameroon, learning about deforestation for timber and cash crops
such as palm oil, and the exploitation of the rich resources of Africa to
the detriment of locals and enrichment of corporations and western societies, I
returned home to the nuclear weapons crisis of the cold war. I joined the Greenham Common protests, founded the Snowball civil disobedience
campaign and then later the anti-nuclear weapons group Trident Ploughshares. I
also became involved in work on the climate crisis.
I learned that everything
is connected and that it all has an impact on the climate, on biodiversity and
on the sustainability of life on Earth. I discovered more about how our reliance on fossil fuels was causing the greenhouse effect
and soon joined with climate scientists and local environmentalists to start a
group in Norwich that tried to educate the public. We put up maps showing
how much of East Anglia and London would be under water as temperatures soared
and the sea levels rose.
This was in the early 1980s. We concentrated on what
individuals could do to lower their carbon footprints – by putting up solar
panels, changing lightbulbs, practising recycling and re-use, eating less meat, using public transport, shopping carefully and
locally, and consuming less... read more:
