A couple of months ago, we decided that all co-op members should move to a four-day week at no loss of pay. We think it’s a really important demand, an idea whose time has come, and we wanted to try it out for ourselves. So far, it’s been super successful. We all feel happier and like we have a better work-life balance, yet we’re just as—if not more—productive. I’ve written a bit more about why we did this over on the Common Knowledge blog.

For myself, I wanted to have a day off for my own practice, to write and to relax. I also thought that I could use the time to get more involved in the climate justice movement. I immediately went along to a few different remote organising meetings, but they just made me feel even more burnt out. It was too close to my day-to-day work, and I just didn’t have the energy to spend my free time sitting on the dreaded Zoom.

I started looking for an alternative way to spend my day off. I’ve always loved growing plants, and for a while I’ve been trying to learn more about regenerative farming, foraging and food sovereignty. I looked for a community garden near me and found the Golden Hill Community Garden. Luckily, their volunteer day falls on a Wednesday, which I’d already decided would be my day off.

Spending some time helping in the garden has been so restorative for me. I joined in late summer so I got to share in the abundant harvest: each week we harvest some of the veggies and take them home afterwards. They taste so much better than anything you can buy. I (really) love weeding, I love being outside all day, I love learning about all the different plants and how to care for them.

One day Lucy, the community project worker, was talking about how much she likes to flip through the daily log from the previous decade, because she can read about her and the volunteers doing the same activities they do every year: harvesting this plant, maintaining this part of the garden. There’s something reassuring and beautiful about having deep roots in one place, knowing that the same cycle will repeat year after year. It probably seems obvious, but as someone who moves around a lot, I’m really starting to see the appeal in this.

There was actually an article about Golden Hill in The Guardian the other day, about the rise of community gardens. Lucy describes community gardens as “revolutionary in a quiet way”. Lately I’ve been thinking about this a lot — how important it is to find the right type of activism.

I spend everyday at work thinking about grassroots activism (or organising or social change or whatever you want to call it) in some form. Yet for some reason, I always feel guilty, I worry that I’m not doing enough or that I’m a fraud… all that good stuff. I have a lot of eco-anxiety. And I’ve read about how eco-anxiety is problematic and white, so now I have guilt about my my anxiety too. Unsurprisingly, this is exhausting and completely unsustainable. At best, it’s silly, and at worst, it’s counterproductive. You can’t contribute to a movement if you’re burnt out.

Helping out a community garden helps me recalibrate, slow down, spend time away from my computer and see things from a different perspective. In some ways, it feels like an antidote to thinking and reading and talking and worrying about climate change on a daily basis. Rather than thinking about global crises, economic levers, parts per million, I’m thinking on a hyperlocal scale, about the soil and plants right in front of me.

There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.

— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

With something as unimaginably huge as climate change, the only viable response is through collective action. However, this can take so many different forms, not just direct action or lobbying. This isn’t to say those things aren’t vital – they are. But everyone can find a role that suits their own particular skills, interests, capacity and strengths. Each role is just as important as the next.

Lots of people have made different attempts at categorising these different roles. In The Shock Doctrine of the Left, Graham Jones describes a four-part framework of mutually reinforcing organising strategies: Smashing, Building, Healing and Taming. Similarly, Bill Moyer identifies four roles in his Movement Action Plan: Helper, Organiser, Rebel, Advocate. I think I’ve always been most interested in contributing by “building” viable alternatives like cooperatives and community groups.

We can do, be, and create whatever we want to see, knowing ours is one effort in the midst of many, and the multitude is where our power lies.

— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly, too. All types of animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson in just not.
— No by Anne Boyer

Strike!

It’s a hot strike summer in the UK. Last week’s edition of The Week in Work was the longest ever. Transport workers, postal workers, barristers, lawyers, gravediggers, journalists – all on strike. Withdrawing our labour is the most powerful way for workers to say NO to exploitation.

Don’t!

Meanwhile, the energy crisis keeps getting worse. Now they’re predicting that energy bills will pass £5000 in January, while energy companies are reporting record profits. Two movements based on mass refusal have emerged in response – Don’t Pay and Enough is Enough.

The theory of change for Don’t Pay takes its inspiration from the Poll Tax protests in early 1990. They’re aiming to get a million people to pledge that they won’t pay their energy bills on 1 October, then use this bargaining power to get the government to intervene and reduce the bills to an affordable level.

Enough is Enough is led by MPs like Zarah Sultana and trade unionists like Mick Lynch. They’re planning to hold rallies, support picket lines and form community groups to deal with the crisis.

No!

No, the 2012 film by Pablo Larrain, is based on the story of the plebescite in Chile that ended 15 years of Pinochet’s authoritarian rule. In it, an advertising professional and many other creatives support the campaign by creating joyful propaganda focused on how liberating and positive it would be to vote NO.

Smash!

The Luddites were early nineteenth-century weavers who smashed the machines that were ruining their working conditions. Luddism is not about being scared of new technology (in the sense that the term is used today), it’s about being critical of any progress that makes life worse for people.

Though the Luddites are often only glibly referenced in modern debates, the truth is that they were directly concerned with conditions of labour, rather than mindless machine-breaking or some reactionary desire to turn back time. They sought to redefine their relationship with technology in a way that resisted dehumanisation.
— Lizzie O’Shea, Future Histories

Degrow!

Luddism might also link with the politics of degrowth, a movement that originated in the Global South and shares with Luddism an acknowledgement that liberation is not tied up with the endless accumulation of capital, and further, that well-being cannot be reduced to economic statistics.
— Gavin Mueller, Decelerate Now!

In Degrowth: No, let’s not call it something else, the authors argue again a common criticism of degrowth: that it’s too negative. That’s the point! Unlike net zero or green capitalism, degrowth doesn’t pretend that we can continue our current way of life with a few added solar panels.

It’s not going to be easy, but we must rapidly downscale our consumption in order to wrench ourselves away from our current trajectory. The potential, however, is that in leaping from this runaway train of constant growth and exploitation, we land somewhere much more abundant.

As adrienne maree brown says in Pleasure Activism:

Your no makes way for your yes.