About the Blogs

Why “Ramblinactivist”?

It wasn’t my idea. It was a label given to me in the peace movement during the middle-1980s, and it sort of stuck. I use it because, more than anything else, it very succinctly describes what it is I do.

I’ve been working with community groups for almost 40 years. 2021 marks thirty years since I left my ‘conventional’ job in engineering to become a ‘researcher & activist for hire’ – working first all around Britain. Then, due to my IT skills, with development, education, and human rights projects in different countries. In all honesty though, what working with people from other countries taught me was how badly ‘over-developed’ people in Britain have become.

In all that time my focus on ecological issues has not changed from where it started out: Learning to live simply as a child; in a family generations of whom had lived that way; growing food at home and on allotments; keeping chickens; and foraging in the countryside. It made me an environmentalist.

Of course, at that time, this lifestyle wasn’t about being ‘ecological’ or ‘green’. It’s simply the reality of growing up at the poor end of the traditional ‘semi-rural working class’ in Britain at that time. Before consumerism came along and sought to eradicate that kind of lifestyle.

In part, these blogs document my experiences within the ecology movement, to pass on what I have learned from others

Curiously, I later found that my early deeply ecological perspective was not welcomed in the movement who professed to represent that view point. I’ve been exploring that disconnect ever since; in part because it provides an excellent guide to why – of all the ‘radical’ social movements that arose in the 1950s and 1960s – the environmental movement has failed to make major political change.

I ‘was there’ (associated at the time with The Green Party, Greenpeace, and especially Friends of the Earth) when the UK environment movement went mainstream around 1989-1996. I fought those battles; and lost. As the corporate take-over of environmentalism slowly eradicated any sense of needing ‘radical’ change to the consumer lifestyle in order to halt ecological destruction.

Thirty years later the growing body of research evidence shows that the concept of ‘green’, trumpeted as the means to secure ecological change thirty years ago, is truly bankrupt. Unfortunately, having nailed themselves to ‘green consumerism’, the leaders of the mainstream eco-corporations are having problems unravelling those commitments now.

It’s how we move on from that situation, towards something truly progressive in terms of humans and their future relationship to the environment, which drives my work today.

In different ways all my blogs, like my work for the past thirty years, focus on the same thing. The demonstrable reality that the route to solving the ecological crisis is based upon “Less”. And, albeit unwelcome for today’s ‘affluent consumer society’, that the complex, metasticising impacts of modern technology require us to abandon highly material lifestyles, and live more simply.

Each blog represents a different facet of the same issue. Practical experience has shown me that people are more easily switched-on to change through different mechanisms which appeal to their personal outlook; and certainly these blogs look at ecological issues from outside the mainstream ecological perspective. More importantly though, as Jung emphasised a century ago, any process of change has to be routed in both ‘intellectual’ and ‘experiential’ perceptions; neither alone is able to convince people that change is required.