An Oral History of the Environmental Movement in the UK, 1970 - 2020

Influencing and mobilising public opinion in order to achieve change in attitudes, policies and behaviours have long been key goals of environmental organisations in the UK. Whether through grassroots initiatives, national campaigns, popular protests or policy briefings, they have sought to harness the energies of activists and communities to address the environmental challenges of our time, from climate change and biodiversity loss to pollution, sustainable food production and transport. The experience of participating in such campaigns has led generations of activists into diverse realms of politics and policy-making, shaping lives, careers and world views. That relationship between the environmental movement in the public sphere and the personal experience of generations of activists provides the starting point for the project.

The project's core objective is to create an accessible and high-quality national archive of environmental activism over the last fifty years through the methods of oral history. By so doing we seek to create a valuable resource for the future, documenting the history of environmental campaigns through the words of those most intimately involved, including those whose contributions have been overlooked. The project will draw on the strengths of oral history as a research practice, especially in long-form life stories which situate the experience of activism in its biographical and social contexts, highlighting links between family, region, class, ethnicity, gender and generation. By creating a new, freely accessible national archive, the project seeks to contribute to a greater awareness of the diverse forms of engagement with environmental issues in the past, to enrich the collective memory of contemporary environmental activism and to create a lasting resource for new thinking and new forms of action in the times to come.

Working closely with the British Library Sound Archive, the project will record life story interviews with 100 people involved in environmental protests, policies and practical action since the early 1970s, from direct actions at power stations, through parliamentary work, the Climate Act and UN agreements, to the promotion of city farms, cycle ways and community-owned wind farms. Interviewees will be selected after extensive consultation and will include grassroots activists and social entrepreneurs as well as radical campaigners and pioneers of major environmental groups - forgotten voices as well as leading lights. Some of these activists worked for national and global change, while others focussed on the local level. Some fought to protect their environment from destruction, others created something quite new. All have worked for what they believed in. This is a heritage that matters.

The project will be delivered by a research team combining academic expertise in the study of grassroots movements with high-level professional experience in environmental organisations. Key partners include National Life Stories at the British Library, Friends of the Earth and the Royal Geographical Society. In addition to creating an entirely new archive, freely available and searchable in both audio and transcript form via the British Library website, we will convene a series of witness seminars and workshops in collaboration with our partners in England, Wales and Scotland. A freely-downloadable, Open Access book telling the story of environmental activism through the words of campaigners themselves will be produced on the basis of the research. Teaching and learning resources based on the real-world experience of environmental activists will be made available in order to inspire and inform the active citizens of the future, at both school and university levels. We will also work with partners and media organisations such as the Guardian and the BBC to make project material widely available in a variety of forms, including podcasts, blogs, profile articles and feature stories.