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PEOPLE of colour do not have the same access to green spaces, an activist rapper says.

Louis VI told audiences in the London Irish Centre at our London COP climate conference last month that racism is a barrier to accessing green spaces.

“I took two of my boys that had never really been in nature before out into the British countryside, and we were hiking through Dartmoor, and we had a full-blown, classic, to the tee, Karen moment where this white American woman ran out of the one house for miles, screaming that we disturbed her yoga. This is honestly all absolutely true – I swear it.” The musician and his friends were working on his upcoming film, Nature Ain’t a Luxury.

He added: “She was squealing that we’d disturbed her yoga, that she’d already called the police and the park rangers, did we have permission from Prince Whoever – I don’t know which prince it is that owns that land – and that we had no right to be there.

“She was screaming at us for about 30 minutes, and she only calmed down when she found out two of us were zoologists, and another was a wildlife filmmaker and that we were actually really, really, scientifically trained to be there. But that’s kind of beside the point.” The rapper says he wants his music to reconnect communities with nature.

“I do feel that particularly the diaspora and young black and brown people from inner-city suburban areas in the UK, but across the West, have been purposefully alienated. There’s a long description as to why, but the short answer is that when you have ancestors that are taken from their land and culture, and their link to that culture removed, that’s the first part – transatlantic slavery. Then you get colonialism furthering that extraction and removing that connection to nature and the land more and more.

“Then you jump to World War II, when Indian, Caribbean and African people were brought in to rebuild, but they were only brought into the cities. It’s this constant story of being fed that we are ‘urban,’ even to the point where our art that we produce is always called urban.

“It’s one of those things, it’s been following us, whether we know it or not, for so long that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy of us having a fear of nature or feeling alienated from it.”