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Each school day, students from Asian families in this Lancashire town would meet up before making their way to school. It was the seventies, an era when the National Front were actively organizing, and they were the sons and daughters of immigrant laborers who had moved to Britain in the previous decade to work in understaffed industries.

Included in this group was Asad Rehman, who had relocated to the Lancashire town with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We traveled as one,” he explains, “because it was dangerous to walk alone. The little ones in the middle, older children forming a perimeter, since we faced assaults on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Pupils would perform Nazi salutes and hurl racial epithets at them. A few distributed extremist publications publicly in corridors. Students of color regularly, when the lunch bell rang, we had to lock ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“So I started talking to everybody,” Rehman states. Together, they decided to defy the teachers who had ignored their safety by as a group declining to attend. “and we will say that the reason was the schools didn't provide security for us.” This became Rehman’s initial experience of organising. When he became part of broader anti-racist campaigns developing across the country, it defined his views on society.

“We took steps to safeguard our community which taught me that crucial insight which I've carried: collective action is stronger as a united group compared to acting alone. Groups are necessary to organise you along with a shared goal to hold you together.”

In the past few months, Rehman became CEO of the conservation group this major campaigning network. Over many years, the symbolic image of global warming was arctic wildlife drifting on an ice floe. Today, addressing global heating while ignoring systemic unfairness is now almost impossible. And Rehman has been at the forefront of this transformation.

“I took this job due to the enormous challenge out there,” he explained to journalists during a climate justice protest outside Downing Street recently. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, [of] inequality, of financial structures designed to favor elite interests. Essentially a crisis of justice.

“Just one group has consistently focused on fairness – ecological equity and climate justice – namely this charity.”

With more than numerous backers and 233 local action groups, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland (operates separately in Scotland) is the most extensive conservation movement. Recently, it invested over ten million pounds on campaigns ranging from courtroom challenges on official regulations grassroots efforts against councils’ use of pesticides in public spaces.

However, the organization has – perhaps unfairly – gained a profile as not extremely activist compared with its peers. Focusing on awareness campaigns than road blockades and occupations.

The selection of someone focused on inequality like Rehman might signal the organisation’s attempt to redefine itself.

This isn't the beginning he's been involved with the organization.

Post-education, he persisted fighting discrimination, collaborating with a community organization during a period when the far right had influence in east London.

“It was running campaigns, supporting victims, and it was rooted in the community,” he says. “I gained experience in local mobilization.”

But not content beyond addressing public discrimination and institutional bias collaborating with activists, aimed to elevate the fight against racism on a human rights level. That brought him to the advocacy group, where over the next decade he collaborated alongside developing world advocates to advocate for a new approach in the understanding of human rights. “Back then, the organization didn't focus on economic and social rights. their work was limited to individual liberties,” he notes.

As the conclusion of the nineties, his activism with Amnesty had brought him into contact with multiple worldwide activist networks. At that time they united into the counter-globalisation movement resisting corporate dominance. The insights he gained through this experience shaped his ongoing activism.

“I was going and working with these people, all those mentioned the climate crisis, how farming was becoming impossible, creating refugees,” he explains. “It struck me! Everything we have fought for and won might be lost because of environmental collapse. This issue we're facing, termed environmental crisis – and yet few addressed it in those terms.”

This led Rehman to an initial position within the organization during the mid-2000s. At the time, many activists were talking about climate change as a distant threat.

“The organization represented the unique green group that separated from typical conservation groups. pioneering creating environmental justice campaigning,” he declares.

He focused to include perspectives of affected communities to the table. It did not always earn him friends. In a particular instance, he recalls, post-negotiations between UK government representatives with activist organizations, an official called his chief executive demanding he call off his assertive tactics. He would not be drawn on which minister it was.

“There was a sense: ‘Who is this person operate differently?’ Consider, the environment is a nice thing, there's common ground. [But] I viewed it as combating discrimination, advocating for freedoms … about power structures.”

Equity frameworks found acceptance in climate and environmental campaigning. But the converse occurred. rights-based campaigns increasingly tackling ecological challenges.

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