Tom Harrington is one of the Co-Head Facilitators of the Durham student environmental campaign group, EcoDU. Interview conducted by Tabith Lanyon, Editor of the EcoDU society newsletter.

Tell me about your journey with climate activism.

Well, I started in very early 2019 by going to a ‘Fridays for Future’ demonstration in Nottingham. After that first one I started joining the ‘Climate Strike Leicester’ ones in central Leicester, and I got more and more involved with that gradually until I started stewarding marches and helping out kind of organising them. That was kind of my launch into it, then Covid happened, and that kind of all died out. And then I had several years out and then I joined EcoDU in 2023! So, I was still reading about the climate crisis and doing campaigning online and stuff, but I had that long period of time out of society. So, when I came back I was like ‘Right, I gotta make up for lost time.’

Coming to Durham and joining EcoDU did help bring that back. It makes it worth the hassle of trying to do climate activism when you’ve got a nice little space with people who feel the same way, who care about the same things.

When you started out, what inspired you?

I’ve always been very interested in Geography and global inequality, poverty and destruction of the environment. My mum has been very focused on Palestine activism, and she’s been very environmentally conscious for my entire life. She’s been vegetarian for forty years because of the environment. She’s one of the drivers behind me doing Geography, studying climate change and capitalism and the Global South.

At A-levels and GCSE I was thinking about it already. So, when Greta Thunberg came around, that was the spark that made me say ‘Okay, I’m going to go out and start joining this stuff.’ So, I got some posters from the Climate Strike Leicester people and put them around my sixth form college. It was just me! Putting up my posters every month. I put a little sticker over the original dates each month so I wouldn’t have to get new laminated posters. You know, reduce, reuse, recycle. I think I got two other people to come one time? I did my best; I went there every month. I think there’s a picture of me in 2019 with my college principal talking about me going on the climate strikes on their Instagram! It was an interesting one. I’ve always been quite an independent person for various reasons, so I was like: ‘I don’t care if anyone else joins, I’m going to go to this thing.’ It was good fun. It was natural that I’d end up doing something activism-y, which has now fully blossomed into climate change, Palestine, all these different things.

Tell me about your experience with the Fossil Free Careers Campaign.

It’s been entertaining. I’ve always had quite a pessimistic view of campaigning within university institutions and the response to the campaign from the uni, including the VC not acknowledging or responding to our open letter for Fossil Free Careers, with 60 staff signatures, for six months and counting has been frustrating.

How do you manage that frustration?

I don’t know. I think I just kind of power through it, is the thing. Which is really bad! I think I’m very good at compartmentalising. I can just switch my brain off most of the time. I can just think, ‘right, I’ve done that, I’m going to just stop that now and just think about something inane and stupid and go to sleep.’ I think that’s a big part of why I’m able to do stuff and not completely burn out immediately. It’s taken me a long time to reach a point where I’m like ‘okay, I need to actually take a break.’

Also, I’m really grateful to have a group of friends here, beyond the activism stuff. Just like, friends in my college that I’ve known since first year that I just hang out with and have a beer and it’s really casual and fun, and I just kind of stop thinking about the depressing-ness of the world. So that really helps. It’s a mixture of things like that.

I’m also a Faculty Rep and a Course Rep, and doing those kinds of things, getting feedback from students and trying to help students – that stuff is very different from the activism stuff and my academic stuff, which I still find really fulfilling. That’s something else constructive. It’s little things like that that keep you going. You don’t get many wins in the climate movement, but you occasionally get like, the University will concede on something and change a policy, which is like ‘yay! We’ve slightly improved something for like ten students!’ It’s a tiny step which makes you feel slightly less awful about the world.

Do you think the student activism community has a big impact?

I think it does. I think it definitely does. Because obviously student movements over the years have had profound impacts on real issues like Apartheid, the Vietnam War, so many different things that student movements can do. It’s just when they’re organised well enough to have that impact.

I do think that keeping up that pressure is really important because having students lead the way – especially when it’s in collaboration with trade unions – having that together is the way we make change. It’s about keeping the bigger picture in mind and building the link between the community and the University. CAD (Climate Action Durham) and groups like that are much older than EcoDU and will outlast EcoDU, so it’s really important to put some of our resources into helping them develop and keep going. They are what will stay, whatever EcoDU becomes, or whatever replaces it, in the future. That’s always been very important to me, going beyond the ‘gown’ and to the ‘town’, to use the Durham lingo, to build that solidarity for a better world.

I really value the community-building we do in EcoDU. Building that cohesion between our little group and people who surround that group.

I’d like there to be a slightly larger number of students – not necessarily in EcoDU but just involved in social justice activism space to some degree. I reckon it’s probably 300-400 people across all the progressive societies. That’s just not that many people who are really involved compared to how many students there are. It’s a difficult one, but we do really well with the people we have.

What topics particularly interest you within environmentalism?

I want to protect the natural world and make sure it’s better, but for me it’s always been very much about the human spirit and preventing the profound amount of human suffering that’s coming as a result of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and the climate crisis.

Coming from a Geography background I’ve always liked thinking about the environment and its relation to people. That’s kind of been a natural progression for me to be like ‘okay, the environment’s being destroyed, people are in the environment, they’re not going to be doing super well if they can’t live in these places’, especially studying small island nations. Seeing people literally standing in water – it just really brings it home. You can picture yourself in those shoes, like ‘My house is underwater; this is none of my fault.’ It’s because of the historic disparity of carbon emissions and extraction of resources.

Yeah, I care deeply about protecting the environment, but it’s always been, for me, more about protecting people and making sure that the most vulnerable people are cared for as much as possible.

Is there anything you’ve studied in Geography that you think more people should know about?

Yes! There was a reading that we did in first year that has always stuck with me. It was about the materialities – like the physical composition – of the primary fuels used in certain eras.

It’s a piece about coal and coal mining; obviously the process of mining coal is very labour intensive, and you need lots of very skilled people to go down into the pits, very dangerous jobs. Dig up the coal, bring it out, all that. That takes so much physical human labour to do. So, it’s hard for companies that only use coal mines to have a lot of influence over their workers because these guys – if they decide ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to go on strike’, the companies can’t just hire new people because it’s an incredibly skilled, difficult job. So, the workers had so much power, which developed into so many really strong unions, particularly in this region, but across the world. So, capitalists started to think about like ‘We’ve got this one energy resource, which is very labour intensive and hard for us to crush with our money – what can we switch to instead?’ So they started exploring for oil, which has got a very different materiality. You just stick a thing in the ground and suck it out and it’s just a couple of guys with a pipe. That’s so much easier to control and there’s fewer people involved with the process, so you can just switch up if they go on strike. And then that shift from solid energy into liquid allowed for so much decimation of labour to make more money for capitalists essentially. That’s part of the rise of Middle Eastern oil fields and why there was so much money put into that, is to circumvent the coal.

Something I’d never thought about until I read that article was how the actual composition of the fuel physically has such a profound impact on society, especially somewhere like Durham. The power of the unions was just decimated by Thatcher in the 80s because they were able to get rid of coal and move to Middle Eastern or American or North Sea oil instead. Thinking about the world through that material lens was so interesting, and not something I’d ever come across before. It changed the way I see capitalism, the climate crisis, the world, basically, in one article.

You seem really interested in those areas where the politics side interacts with the material side.

Yes, absolutely. Something that’s always been important to me is the intersection between humans and nature, and the fact that you can’t separate people from the natural world. So much stuff in the Enlightenment is about ‘humans are above nature!’ and ‘screw nature!’ and being much higher than it, much better. But no, that’s bullshit. We are fundamentally tied, as we’re seeing now with the climate crisis. Nature is fighting back against that conception of ‘we can do whatever we want with the world, it’s fine.’ 

I think that a lot of climate policies don’t grasp the fact that we need to fully change this. And I wouldn’t say I’m a perfect ‘de-growther’, but I do recognise that we need to, particularly in the Global North, fundamentally reduce our consumption and what we conceptualise as normal life in order to have a liveable society. The natural world cannot uphold our standards of living for the whole planet. And I want everyone to have a baseline level. That’s going to have to be lower for some people. When you say that for billionaires, people say ‘oh yeah that makes sense.’ When you say that that might also mean that everyone in the Global North might have to have slightly fewer Starbucks plastic coffee cups – like you can’t buy seventeen in a week – I think people don’t recognise that we have to change the way we live.

What is the most pressing issue right now?

Broadly, capitalism. Environmentally, I think either the way we produce energy or overconsumption. Which are kind of related.

Overconsumption of both energy and resources, particularly in the Global North, is the leading reason why we have the climate crisis and why we have such profound global inequality. We need to stop emitting so much and consuming so much and try and respect our environment more, trying to be co-productive with the planet rather than trying to extract as much as possible. We need to just live with it – within its means and our means.

How could that mindset shift happen?

The thing is, I’m not sure it can. That’s the depressing thing. We have all the climate activists and scientists saying we need, in the Global North, to have this reckoning with the way we exist, and even the most empathetic person does not like hearing ‘your life has to get worse.’ Messaging around that, in a democratic sense, is never going to win elections. The people who message against that are going to win elections, as we’ve seen with Trump in the US. Trump won by a landslide. If we start seeing politicians saying, ‘Sorry Americans, you’re going to have to have slightly fewer McDonalds meals or slightly less meat’, it’s not going to be very popular. 

I honestly don’t know how we deal with that. It’s a depressing thought. I have thought: ‘is it actually possible to deal with the climate crisis within the democratic system?’ which is a horrifying thought to have to had, but the odds of the general populous agreeing to reduce their quality of life to protect the whole world, especially the Global South, is low in my opinion.

Do you feel hopeless about the future?

I don’t think I feel hopeless. I’m not overwhelmed with hope. I’m not like ‘yes, we’re going to solve this and it’s going to be incredible and perfect tomorrow.’  I think we have the capacity to solve it. I think it’s possible that we can fix it. I think we have that power now, and we still will for a while. Whether we’ll actually be able to exercise that power and implement it is another matter, which I think I am more pessimistic about.

But being an activist is about being radically hopeful. I like being radically hopeful. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be doing this stuff. Although I think it’s unlikely, I’m going to fight tooth and nail as much as I can to make that reality possible. Even if we fail, we tried our absolute best. I think that’s the only way to see it. We can’t give up at this point because there’s no other thing we can do. It’s whether we resign ourselves to the destruction of everything we hold dear or we try and stop that. I’d rather try.

What is the biggest misconception people have about climate activism?

I think that it’s all a bit cringe, possibly. I’ve heard a lot of people refer to climate activists as ‘you crazy, woke people going around gluing yourselves to paintings’ and all that. And we can have debates about JSO’s (Just Stop Oil) tactics till the cows come home but I think the thing I’ve always found is that it’s a really nice community. If you care about people, if you care about the environment, intersectionality, gender equality, trans rights, anti-racism, whatever it is, in the climate space you’re almost always going to find people that also care about all those intersectional issues all together. I think making people realise that climate change activists are just people who care a lot about other people is something we need to work on to humanise our movement a bit more.

What would you say to somebody who wants to get involved with the environment but might be daunted by the commitment?

I think the joy of a society like EcoDU is that there’s no expectation for you to give your entire life and energy to it. If you want to just come along and listen and go away it’s okay. No one is going to pretend this is fun, super easy, chill work. It is hard, and it’s something you have to think about a lot, but once you dip your toes in in little bits, it’s pretty easy really. It sounds quite daunting if you’ve never actually done something like that but breaking that initial idea that it’s so much of a bigger thing than it actually is is really important.

It makes it worth the hassle of trying to do climate activism when you’ve got a nice little space with people who feel the same way and care about the same things. If everyone, every University, every institution does a little bit of what we’re trying to do in EcoDU, that momentum eventually will build up into something. Being able to facilitate that is really nice. It’s not even about progress; it’s about building that space. It’s a team effort, as always.

What’s something we can change in our everyday lives?

The thing I did recently was go vegan. I did that gradually, over six months from the start of this year, so I went fully vegan about April, but I started cutting out dairy products in January. That’s number one. Also, just start thinking about it. Educate yourself a little bit and make sure you know what’s going on. Yeah. Educate yourself and go vegan.

If you could go back in time and give a message to yourself when you were at the start of your environmentalism journey, what would you say?

I think just keep being hopeful. Back in 2019, I had similar worries of ‘Are we just fucked? Is there no point to this?’ But that is such a bad mindset to have. Even through the pandemic I always kept hope that there were things we could do to make it better. I think what I would say to myself five years ago, and I hope my five years, ten years, twenty years future self will also be thinking is: you’ve got to keep hoping that you can make stuff better and keep fighting for it. Don’t despair.