Interview Feature The pause the coronavirus pandemic put on our polluting and destructive habits has highlighted how quickly a better environment can be achieved. But as people get back in their cars and factories again start belching out their fumes, educators are coming together to demand a better way forward.
Climate change activists THE NEU’s Climate Change Network has been busy for many years pushing the green agenda. There were campaigns on clean air, opposition to the expansion of Heathrow Airport, and a push for changes in the school curriculum to encourage an understanding of the climate breakdown. But the network convenor, Paul Atkin, says it was the summer of 2018, with the student strikes and the direct action taken by concerned members of Extinction Rebellion (XR), when more people began to realise we are “freewheeling to disaster”. “Suddenly, members up and down the country, often not active in the union but animated by this issue, were pushing their 26
schools to change aspects of the curriculum and setting up environment clubs. Students too were organising with verve and imagination,” explains Paul (see Educate, November/December 2019). “Local union branches started inviting some of these activists to speak and the network pushed for a link-up between the new activists and union districts, so that the strengths of both could become more than the sum of their parts.” A green recovery from Covid-19 Then Covid-19 struck, a disease Paul describes as “another manifestation of the human impact on the environment and the blowback from it”. He says it is now important that recovery from the pandemic moves forward with a green and sustainable agenda.
educate Your magazine from the National Education Union (NEU)
“This is a crucial issue because we know that what the Government has in store for us is an attempt to ‘recover’ using the same austerity methods that gave us a wasted decade from 2010. Because the Government’s handling of the crisis has been so appalling and it is trying to open up the economy too soon, this could coincide with a second spike in infections too,” says Paul, a retired primary school teacher who used to work in Islington, London. The union is putting its weight behind the Build Back Better (BBB) campaign, which is calling for a coronavirus recovery plan that puts public services, inequality and an economy to tackle the climate crisis at the top of the political agenda. BBB is supported by more than 80 organisations – from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to faith groups and
