This is my attempt to explain how I became an activist. How my activism, my standing up to be counted, was instilled in me by my parents’ actions. My passion for history and its discipline, allowing one to think deeply and critically, is also there in the mix.
There was one acutely personal pull-push that propelled me to march, to peacefully agitate. Skimming over my awakening to the catastrophe of the climate crisis, I’ve come to realise that my focus now is not on large-scale activism but on a community level – in my job and my personal life. It keeps me sane.
Public displays
I was motivated early in life to try and make society better by a trade unionist father. He was not frightened of standing up to “them”, “the authorities” – the managers of the North Wales Hospital here in Denbigh (or “the mental”, as described by us locals, in a very different era). He foresaw what so many didn’t: the impact of Thatcherism and her holy creed of privatisation on the health service.
His most famous act of peaceful protest was to lock himself up in the clock tower of the hospital for two days. The first my mother heard of it was when she saw the coverage on the ITV news. While she held her head in her hands in despair at some of his actions, she stood firmly alongside him in their battle – alongside Dr Kate Roberts, the then-Minister of Capel Mawr, Parch J H Griffiths, and others – to establish a Welsh school in Denbigh.
I’ve been reading about that campaign in the County Archives, and it’s torturing me that I didn’t question them about it when I could. But my sister Ann recalls one story our parents told her. At the time of the campaign, in the early 1960s, there were people in Denbigh who crossed the road when meeting them, to publicly display disgust at their ‘extremism’ in wanting a Welsh-medium education for their children.
Finding purpose
By the mid 1990s, though I loved my career, not becoming a mother myself pressed me hard. What was my life’s purpose? I found solace within peace and justice activism, tackling the big stuff! Marching alongside 1.5 million souls in London on 15 February 2003, to the drum beat of people determined to stop the wolves of war in their thirst for oil.
“The outpouring of rage from people was so beautiful”, the actor Mark Rylance said at the time. It was joyful on the streets – there was an ecstatic sense of power and belief that ‘we’ could stop ‘them’.
But we didn’t, of course. On the morning of the illegal invasion of Iraq, I chained myself to an airplane hangar at RAF Valley with seven other activists, watching in amusement as the security staff struggled to deal with our consensus decision-making. Our response to any question was to huddle closer together, our chains clanking, before spreading out again and politely refusing to budge.
Then my intense reading into the history of the causes of strife in the world, and the British Empire’s involvement in a great deal of it, led me to the Palestinian cause. The Nakba in 1948 and the illegal occupation of Palestinian land since 1967. In October 2003 I joined a peace and justice group to visit the West Bank, in the guise of Christians visiting the Holy Land.
There was nothing holy in what we witnessed, an apartheid occupation in all its ugly, dehumanising forms, including complete control of the water supply of the Palestinians. The image of water jets soaking the lawns and farmland of the illegal settlements while, immediately over the wall, the remnants of land given to the Palestinians lay utterly parched, is one of many I will never forget.
Climate, the biggest stuff of all
I had grasped, at some superficial level, that global conflicts were motivated by the desperate exploitation of the earth’s diminishing resources. But despite there being a clear connection historically to me, they were somehow still ‘other’ and not immediately relevant. I was late to the ‘party’ in terms of understanding the unfolding climate calamity.
I heard the truth of it in a lecture at Bangor University by Professor Kevin Anderson. The random intellectual dots that had been floating around in my mind for years suddenly clicked together firmly, dreadfully. I was stunned by the awful realisation of it. I walked out in silence with a young woman I knew, whose facial expression reflected my inner turmoil, stunned with the reckoning of the future.
I catalogued this truth in the depths of me, as I was preoccupied with more immediate issues in my life. The fact that my own body clock, loudly ticking for years, had been blown to bits by an early menopause diagnosis. No ticking anymore, just an eternal emptiness. In cruel synchronicity, my mother was being gradually sucked away by vascular dementia. The end of the world coming sooner down the line than expected felt insignificant, I’m embarrassed to admit, compared to my wretched losses.
My public peace and justice activities ceased with my decision to move back to my childhood home in Denbigh in 2005. My activism became more personal and hidden. It now focused on battling the professional systems for a care package to keep my parents together at home. I had also become increasingly isolated in Caernarfon, due to my caring role and another personal battle to secure my employment rights at work. My father, at his most vulnerable, became my stalwart and only trade union representative.
Climate activism at local level
Only years later did my world become more aligned with Kevin Anderson’s challenging message. I sat on my parent’s bed a few weeks before my father died, the morning sun cruelly revealing the absence of my mother. “How do I rebuild, Dad? How do I start again when everything in my life is lost?” Ti’n dechre wrth dy draed, yn dy filltir sgwar. “You start by your feet, Mair”, he said.
It took yet more time to get here, but now I believe that ‘by my feet’ is the most important activism of all – activism at community level. This includes my involvement in campaigning to protect the Crest woods and fields from a quarry extension, and facilitating community assemblies here in Denbigh.
I now work as a facilitator with the EGIN project, which aims to unlock the collective power of communities. This draws on all my life’s experiences and enables me to reach out and support those least involved and most affected by climate change in our communities. It reinforces my lifelong belief that – given adequate information and support – individuals, families, and community groups can create solutions that best fit their circumstances.
In deep contrast to the increasing horror of natural disasters flooding our screens, and the seeming impotence of those in power to act, it’s a joy for me to meet people each week who are genuinely making a difference, and just getting on with it. This job and what I witness weekly is so good for my mental health.
It also chimes with what is, for me, an essential truth. Whatever happens at the ‘big stuff’ level, it will be active communities who have connected and built more robust relationships that are best equipped to deal with the impacts of the climate crisis.
