A Nervous System: Decolonising the Environmental Movement

How did we get here? What broken connections keep us from addressing the climate crisis fully and in the radical ways so urgently needed?

There is no climate justice without fully reckoning with our collective, yet very different, pasts, without addressing the exploitations that gave rise to it. However, within the environmental movement itself - and in wider stories about environmental peril - protection of the non-human world, anti-racism and anti-colonialism often continue to be addressed as separate struggles.

Authors and activists Daniel Macmillen Vosoboynik, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson and Nish Doshi gather to discuss how we continually decolonise the environmental movement, lifting up the stories and histories that were always there, whilst learning to feel more deeply and honestly connected to the world, and to each other.

Our speakers:

Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik is a researcher, poet, and musician. His work focuses on the fertile encounters between climate justice, historical memory, reparative economics, and intersectionality. Passionate about ecological and systems thinking, Daniel has worked as an organiser and facilitator for various organisations such as 350.org and Oxfam, and is a co-coordinator of the Post-Extractive Futures initiative. His environmental journalism has featured in Pacific Standard and Open Democracy, among others. He is the author of The Memory We Could Be (2018), a book exploring the origin and unraveling of the climate crisis, and the poetry collection Sheet Music for the Wind (2016). His musical practice, in collaboration with Olec Mün, centers on the recovery and recomposition of traditional Jewish music from Ukraine and Belarus. He is nourished and held by his family, ancestors, friends and surrounding ecologies. https://danielvoskoboynik.com/

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson is a Swedish/Colombian writer and climate justice activist based in Edinburgh, whose work focuses on the multiplicity of identity and belonging. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Witness Magazine, Wasafiri, Gutter and The Scotsman among other publications. Her debut novel How We Are Translated (2021) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and her essay collection The Nerves and Their Endings: essays on crisis and response is published in August 2022. She was Wasafiri Magazine’s Writer-in-Residence for 2021-22, delivering workshops on writing and climate justice. She works as Digital Campaigns Manager for Lighthouse Books.