Thoughts on Hopelessness and Protest Fatigue

I’ve really been feeling rather useless lately. I’m pretty involved in my activism, with my fingers in a couple of different pies, and yet everything I do feels entirely futile. I suppose one of the factors that leads to this is that environmental activism requires such a quick turnaround in social change, as opposed to equality-based movements, for example.

I suppose, in reality, I have only been fully engaging with the green movement for a year now. I mean, I’ve been an ‘eco warrior’ (real quote from a year 4 teacher) for life, but I think we all find on our activist journeys that there is a point where we move from passive activism (there’s an oxymoron if you ever saw one) to positive panic, where you find yourself unable to think of anything else. Of course, this has to be handled carefully. I myself have had my fair experience of ‘negative panic’ (coined it), in which you just sit in your room, connecting figurative scary newspapers with figurative red string and deeming every moment that you don’t spend working on your activism ‘wasted time’. But I think it doesn’t take an expert to realise that listening to your ever-accelerating heartbeat in silence at 1am isn’t the most productive way to cause social change. However, in fact, this is the opposite of what I’m considering today - protest fatigue is a much more dangerous area.

As a young activist in the 21st century I could blather on for hours about how ‘things are even harder now’, and of course I would never know what being an activist in the 20th century, or even earlier, was like - but the political variation (or polarisation) in the public today is astounding. Here I am, wittering on to my little echo chamber of left-wing activists, and we do really forget how many people there are that never consider the climate crisis or minority rights in their everyday lives, or perhaps directly oppose these movements. When I’m not giggling at ‘eat the rich’ jokes on TikTok, I do really try to get into the Tories’ heads and comprehend what makes us different, because I believe that empathetic, fact-based discussion is truly the only way to enact social change. But I do goddamn struggle. The population just feels so big, and so far behind.

Now, when I put so much of my life into my political and apolitical activism, and receive absolutely nothing back, it is so hard to keep the fire in your belly alight. Luckily, I have a wonderful support network of amazing people with similar dampened fires, but it seems that just as anger is contagious, so is apathy. All of these movements are wonderful grassroots, one-brick-at-a-time kind of organisations - but when you have less than 10 years to move 7 billion bricks, that’s a pretty daunting task.

For this purpose, Extinction Rebellion talks of a ‘regenerative culture’, which, among many other brilliant things, emphasises the importance of wellbeing and the community to avoid burnout. We start every session with a ‘check-in’, to look after each other, as well as running other regenerative activities like yoga or stream-of-consciousness exercises, to help restore not only our fire, but our humanity as well.

However, as a self-consciously baby protester, I don’t struggle with burnout so much as with this looming threat of apathy - why should I bother if nothing is going to happen? Despite being a highly imaginative child, I physically cannot envisage a future in which the UK (and the US) put the correct measures in place, in time to

stop, or even reduce human extinction. It is unfathomable to me. I suppose because of that, subconsciously, the reason I do put the effort in, is to say ‘well, at least I tried’. And it does, just about, get me up in the morning - but this isn’t the way to go forwards. Obviously, we go through waves, and there are moments, like at the Greta march in Bristol, that I really do believe we can do this. We stand in the roads and sing, that the people have the power - but when the results roll in on the twelfth of December, our lives really do seem to be out of our hands.

But I can’t end this post on such a note. We can see real change being made - it’s much slower than we’d like, but it is so encouraging nonetheless. This year we saw the rejection of the Bristol and Heathrow airport expansions. The Green Party saw a vote increase of 60% in the December election. I just read the Wiki page for the XR October Rebellion as research for this, and shed a tear, because it was so empowering to read it in the past tense. To already be written into the history books. Grab yourself a cuppa. Brush your teeth, wash your face. Change is coming, soon. Whether you like it or not.