The Power of Listening
It's time to stop the single narrative
Well, what a week. A fragile ceasefire, an historic inauguration, and global social media sites putting their hands around the neck of the scales of sanity in the US. Even a hat had much to say to the world.
With such fiery global developments come smaller ripples that flow into our own lives. Questions of equality, extremism, justice and safety are prevalent in our increasingly polarised thinking. But while we may feel unable to change the nature or direction of geopolitics, we can all do our individual best to work towards a fairer and safer world.
If you are reading this and asking yourself whether anything you think or do will make the slightest difference, I’m here to tell you it does. You just have to look at the Arab Spring where local communities spoke out, or the stories of women in Afghanistan still battling tremendous risks to have their voice heard, to see how the smallest seeds of change can be planted and take root. A different story can emerge that is more nuanced. Think about Walthamstow in North London where residents quietly took to the streets after the anti migrant riots last year. Just this week I read of a new grassroots initiative to support refugees. Or you could listen again to the Bishop of Washington for her dignified simple and clear message to Trump. The power of silence, listening, carefully chosen words, communities speaking out and action.
As I have said before, it is not about a fancy programme, lots of buzz words, acronyms or job titles. Look at what Trump has achieved by repeating four words over and over. Make America Great Again. It might be like nails on a blackboard to many of us, particularly when set to Village People (a clear example that Trump doesn’t do irony) but it is clever for its simplicity in creating a new ideology. Although I do draw the line at “Drill Baby Drill”, that is just creepy, childish and daft as well as stomping all over decades of climate science.
After my own turbulent 20 months or so it is with a little trepidation but some excitement that I turn the page to open up a new chapter that starts with some small seeds that can grow. A lover of books, goodness knows what a biographer would make of my life. There may be no predictable structure, my career has veered from one cause to the next over the past 30 years, but there have been the consistent threads of social justice, law and science running through every twist and turn. Equality at the core. I’ve made mistakes - some enormous howlers - and I still smile at my first “campaign”, a rather naïve attempt to get a local abattoir closed for environmental, health and animal welfare reasons. It was doomed to failure and not one to dine out on, but aged 15, at least I had a go.
Now, 40 years later, my new work with the Environmental Law Foundation, an organisation that occupies an important place in helping us all to protect the environment, promises a little more success. As does my chairing of an Engineering Council initiative to support refugees into engineering jobs. It feels like I’ve been handed a colourful bow to gently tie around all the threads of my career and what I think - and feel - about the world. That doesn’t come from a job description, but from the ethics of an organisation to promote change that can ripple out beyond their own boundaries.
If you don’t know - and I really want everyone to know! - the Environmental Law Foundation is an organisation that shows how much hard work is being done behind the scenes to support those who often lack the voice due to financial, societal constrictions or simply subject to a confusing, opaque system. Wherever we are in the world, when we look at the environmental damage on our doorsteps, the LA fires, the incoming global-warming science denier of a US President, the displacements of thousands following the Tibet earthquake, we are reminded that it is not just our right, but our duty, to protect the fragile planet we live on. I hope that I can play a small part to empower people to use the law to challenge what they see as poor environmental practice.
Access to justice is a fundamental part of democracy, making sure there equality before the law. Whether we like people, agree with them or not, it is as much their right to have access to our justice system. In the UK, our scales of justice wears a blindfold to show impartiality. It doesn’t matter who you are. Stamp on equal access to justice at your peril and we’ve seen what happens in countries that allow the stampede. It leaves people powerless with no voice, without the right to be heard and without their freedom. Frustrated and a fracturing society. Instead of harmony, it preaches discord as we are seeing today in so many parts of the world.
The damage and impact from these fractures is what I, and many I’ve worked with, have rallied against by helping people who have felt marginalised to be the very best of themselves with fulfilling lives. To be accepted and included as part of society. That isn’t a political position to take, it’s a human right. All humans. The fact that some people find this concept of inclusion so alien is no more than the threat it brings to their power, control and money. It might destabilise them, and their firm grip on wider society, so they push hard on a nativism movement with all its fragmented parts still intact. The last thing we need as a global society is one country saying do as we say, live as we live and if you don’t there will be economic or military consequences. A Trump hot air balloon maybe, but it was interesting to read some of the responses to the Executive Orders. NASA was rather hot off the press to dismantle DEI work and the people who have led that, using the word consequences.
So what is on the agenda when it comes to equality and justice on a larger scale?
There does need to be a reset. Following the visceral power of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd almost five years ago now, the issue of inequality was brought to our TVs every day, and woven into mainstream conversations. Far more people were willing to seize the opportunity to call for change and in the social media era it gave way to a new phase for EDI. But as with many a great idea, pushing EDI into the fore can too easily turns into something of a professional and expensive bandwagon. It leaves organisations playing catch up on being clear about the why, how and what EDI means for them. The language is confusing, rhetoric is used to drown out rhetoric. We saw this happen with CSR, now EDI and I’m sure the next will be ESG. I still hold the firm belief that a good starting point is to avoid corporate acronyms and think about the language for our nuanced and far more inclusive conversation.
We need a quieter and kinder conversation, one that draws together the sustainability of an organisation and the environment, putting all people and the next generations at its heart. Exclude a group of people, and you create division. Any conversation needs to find the connection between human beings and the environment, to give space for listening, cultural learning and building collective change.
As we face the challenge of the noisy single narrative without nuance - or evidence - try to slice into noisy single narrative EDI “programmes”, we have a responsibility to be part of a movement of change so people whoever they are and wherever they live, can be heard. For me, for now, this will include the rights of people’s local environment, the impact on biodiversity and growing challenges of climate change, supporting people who are displaced. I could not be more delighted to be working alongside talented and passionate groups of people with a strong shared vision of what the world should and can look like.
After an incredibly fraught and intense week in global politics, I’m sure we will watch with interest at what unfolds. But we can also put our faith in all those who are working in so many different ways to sow the small seeds of change where new voices will emerge, without title or fuss, just as they have done throughout history.