Asad Rehman's Remarkable Path from Antiracism Campaigning in Lancashire to Leading a Major Environmental Charity

Each school day, youngsters from Asian families in Burnley would meet up before heading to school. It was the seventies, an era when far-right groups were gaining strength, and they were the offspring of Asian migrants who had come to Britain a decade earlier to work in understaffed industries.

Included in this group was the young Asad, who had moved to the northern town with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We would all walk together,” he explains, “since it wasn't safe to walk alone. The little ones at the center, older children on the outside, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Students would make offensive gestures and shout racist insults at them. A few distributed the National Front newspaper openly in the halls. Minority children “every day, at break times, we secured ourselves into a classroom, because we would be attacked.”

“I began discussing to everybody,” he notes. Collectively, they decided to defy the teachers who had not kept them safe by jointly deciding not to attend. “declaring it was due to the schools were unsafe for us.” It was Rehman’s early introduction of activism. When he became part of wider antiracism movements that were formed across the country, it influenced his activist perspective.

“We began defending our community which taught me that crucial insight remaining with me: our strength multiplies when we are a ‘we’ rather than individually. Groups are necessary to organise you along with a shared goal to maintain unity.”

Recently, Rehman became chief executive of the green organization Friends of the Earth. For decades, the poster child of global warming was the polar bear drifting on an ice floe. Now, to speak of environmental issues and not including social, racial and economic injustice is now almost impossible. And Rehman has been as a leader of this transformation.

“I took this job due to the enormous challenge out there,” he told reporters at a climate justice protest outside Downing Street weeks ago. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, social injustice, of capitalist models which are biased elite interests. It’s ultimately an equity issue.

“A single organization prioritizing justice – ecological equity and global climate fairness – namely this charity.”

Having numerous backers and community teams, This environmental network (operates separately in Scotland) represents Britain's largest environmental campaigning network. Over the past year, it invested over ten million pounds on advocacy ranging from judicial reviews to government policy grassroots efforts opposing chemical use across urban areas.

However, the organization has – albeit undeservedly – been perceived as not extremely activist compared with its peers. Focusing on awareness campaigns rather than direct action.

The appointment of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner such as him might signal an effort to shed that image.

And it is not his initial stint he collaborated with the organization.

Following university, he persisted advocating for equality, collaborating with the Newham Monitoring Project at a time as nationalist movements had influence in east London.

“We organized protests, handling individual cases, deeply connected locally,” he says. “I gained experience in local mobilization.”

Yet seeking more beyond addressing public discrimination and government policies he, along with many others, sought to place the fight against racism within a rights framework. This led him to Amnesty UK, during ten years he collaborated alongside developing world advocates to advocate for a fundamental shift in the understanding of basic rights. “At that time, they weren't active on inequality matters. they only campaigned political freedoms,” he states.

As the conclusion of the nineties, his activism at the organization had brought him into contact with a range of international social justice organisations. At that time they united into the counter-globalisation movement challenging free-market policies. What he was to learn from them would affect the rest of his career.

“I traveled meeting campaigners, all those mentioned the severity of environmental issues, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he recalls. “And I was like! Every gain through activism is going to be unravelled because of environmental collapse. This issue we're facing, known as global warming – however few addressed it in those terms.”

This led Rehman to begin working with Friends of the Earth during the mid-2000s. Then, many activists discussed global warming as a problem for the future.

“This network stood out as the sole activist body that then officially broke from other green organizations. pioneering of what we now call environmental justice campaigning,” he says.

Rehman worked to include perspectives of affected communities to the table. These efforts rarely make him popular. In a particular instance, he recalls, following discussions with officials with activist organizations, a politician phoned the leadership demanding he call off his assertive tactics. He didn't reveal on which minister it was.

“There was a sense: ‘Who is this person who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ You know, ecology matters, there's common ground. [But] For me it represented a fight against racism, a fight for human rights … a deeply political fight.”

Fairness perspectives were increasingly becoming accepted in climate and environmental campaigning. However, the opposite was also happening. rights-based campaigns increasingly tackling sustainability concerns.

And so it was that War On Want supported by unions {