Anna Hyde from the Islington Climate Centre

A CLIMATE change campaigner wants to help breakdown that feeling of despair so many people feel when thinking about the climate emergency.

Anna Hyde has spent 10 years at the forefront of the challenge, designing projects aimed at engaging, informing and connecting with people to create resilience.

“My journey began after the Brexit vote,” she said.

“I was involved with the People’s Vote campaign and I would hand out leaflets in the streets. My son, aged nine at the time, was rather angelic and no one would refuse a leaflet from him.

“He turned to me one day and said: ‘mum  there’s more to life than Brexit – what about saving the planet?’

I said to him: ‘You help me get rid of these leaflets and I’ll do something for the planet’.”

Ms Hyde was a governor at Canonbury primary school during the period when Greta Thunberg’s school strikes were in the headlines and in 2018, Fridays for Future saw thousands of school age students quit lessons for the day to join mass demonstrations.

Ms Hyde said: “I spoke to the headteacher and said it would be terrible for their attendance record if the pupils all bunked off – so instead, let’s do something that can be local and educational.”

Canonbury School teamed up with other primaries to hold an event at Highbury Fields on the day of the school strike. Her journey saw her become involved with the Extinction Rebellion movement.

She had attended a rally in Parliament Square with her family and was handed an eye-catching XR sticker with the logo imposed over a skull.

It struck home.

At the time Ms Hyde was working for the world renowned rock music magazine Kerrang – and showed the XR sticker to her colleagues.

There was space at the back of an edition, so she persuaded the editor they should print the XR Skull logo.

“It looked quite cool and quite rock-ish and fitted with the ethos,” she said.

From here, she became involved in helping organize Citizen Assemblies, groups which could come together to work out solutions to common problems.

Anna Hyde was asked by her son what she was doing to campaign against climate change

Having assemblies remains a key plank of her work.

She said: “I had campaigned for deliberative democracy post-Brexit and so I said to XR I’d help them organise their own. It was all pretty high octane at that point. It felt like things were happening – XR were riding high, raising the alarm and being noticed. For example, they wanted to occupy, Trafalgar Square – and somehow they managed that. It was a magic and exciting thing to be part of, but there was a big backlash on its way.”

One XR action at Canning Town tube station saw protesters try to stop commuter trains and it caused a huge backlash.

She recalls: “It gave the chance for the media – for the tabloids – to say XR do not understand the needs of the man in the street. They said ‘Oh look, typical, trying to stop people getting to work’.  They said ‘Oh XR, they are too posh, or oh, they are too crusty. One columnist stated that he knew an XR action was on because there would not be a queue in Waitrose.”

Undeterred, Ms Hyde began work on a campaign to get a private members bill into parliament.

“We put together a team and started doing a grassroots campaign,” she said.

“It became the Zero Hour movement and in 2020 we began the process of setting up a citizens assembly, with the aim of discussing how we can get the UK to net zero by 2050 and the answer was a public education campaign.”

During the Covid lock-down, there were seven empty units in the Angel Centre on Upper Street.

Ms Hyde met the owners, who offered space to set up a Climate Centre.

They are now in process of looking for new premises to follow up its success.

It has everything ranging from sessions to fix electrical goods and textile repairs through to workshops on biodiversity, flood resilience, future proofing your home, food, and emergency planning.

“We want to educate – it is good to be ready, and if disaster does not strike, that’s ok – you are prepared,” she said.

“Our democracy could do with a good dose of common sense,” she says.

“We need to ensure our politicians are making decisions based on the common good and not for vested interests.

“There are forces gunning for net zero and that makes our challenge harder, but by getting people working together for the common good we can fight back. It is a war of attrition between these vested interests and the future of our planet.”