🔗 Share this article

Every weekday morning, children from the local Asian population in Burnley would gather before making their way to school. It was the 1970s, a period when the National Front were gaining strength, and these children were the sons and daughters of south Asian workers who had come to Britain a decade earlier to address employment gaps.

One of these children was Asad Rehman, who had moved to the community with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We traveled as one,” he remembers, “since it wasn't safe to walk alone. The little ones at the center, the bigger kids on the outside, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

The situation was equally bad at school. Pupils would give fascist salutes and shout racist insults at them. A few distributed the National Front newspaper openly in the halls. The black and brown pupils “every day, when the lunch bell rang, we secured ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I initiated conversations to everybody,” Rehman states. Collectively, they resolved to oppose the teachers who had not kept them safe by jointly deciding not to attend. “declaring this is because the schools aren’t safe for us.” This became Rehman’s early introduction of organising. As he joined wider antiracism movements emerging across the country, it influenced his activist perspective.

“We took steps to safeguard our community which taught me that crucial insight which I've carried: we are much more powerful acting together compared to acting alone. You need organisations to bring people together along with a shared goal that binds you.”

In the past few months, Rehman became CEO of the conservation group the well-known activist organization. Over many years, the familiar face of environmental crisis was the polar bear drifting on an ice floe. Now, addressing the climate crisis without mentioning inequality and discrimination has become highly inappropriate. He has stood as a leader of this transformation.

“This role appealed to me given the severity of the situation out there,” he explained to reporters during a climate justice protest near government offices weeks ago. “These issues are linked of climate, economic disparity, of capitalist models designed to favor elite interests. At its core a crisis of justice.

“Just one group has consistently focused on fairness – green rights and global climate fairness – that’s Friends of the Earth.”

With more than 250,000 supporters and community teams, The organization (operates separately in Scotland) is the most extensive conservation movement. Recently, it invested over ten million pounds on advocacy from courtroom challenges to government policy grassroots efforts changing municipal practices in public spaces.

Yet it – perhaps unfairly – earned a reputation as a less radical organisation versus other groups. Focusing on awareness campaigns than road blockades and occupations.

The hiring of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner like Rehman might signal an effort to change perceptions.

It's not his initial stint he collaborated with the organization.

Post-education, he persisted fighting discrimination, engaged with an anti-racism group in the era when the far right remained active in east London.

“It was running campaigns, handling individual cases, and it was rooted in the community,” he says. “And I learned local mobilization.”

But not content with simply reactively countering racism on the streets and from the state together with peers, sought to place antiracism as a fundamental right. This led him to the human rights organization, where over the next decade he collaborated alongside global south activists to demand significant change regarding the interpretation of basic rights. “Back then, they weren't active on inequality matters. they only campaigned individual liberties,” he says.

By the end of the 1990s, his activism at the organization connected him to various international social justice organisations. At that time they came together in opposition to neoliberalism resisting corporate dominance. The knowledge he acquired through this experience influenced the rest of his career.

“I traveled and working with these people, all those discussed how bad climate was, agricultural challenges, how it was displacing people,” he explains. “I thought! Everything we have fought for and won is going to be unravelled due to climate change. This issue occurring, it’s called climate – and yet nobody’s talking about it in those terms.”

That guided him to begin working at the environmental charity in 2006. At the time, many activists discussed global warming as a distant threat.

“This network stood out as the sole environmental organisation which diverged from other green organizations. pioneering creating climate equity activism,” he states.

Rehman worked to amplify concerns of affected communities to the table. This approach wasn't earn him friends. On one occasion, he shares, after a meeting with officials and environmental NGOs, a politician called his chief executive insisting he stop his “climate Taliban”. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“People just felt: ‘What gives him authority who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ Understand, ecology matters, we can all agree and talk. [But] I saw it as a fight against racism, defending rights … fundamentally political.”

Equity frameworks found acceptance within green movements. However, the opposite took place. rights-based campaigns increasingly tackling sustainability concerns.

This led to the anti-poverty campaign supported by unions {