Manu Maunganidze is a rare person: a black man working in environmental conservation in the UK. The founder of NYCE (Nature Youth Connection Education), which takes city kids into natural spaces, he has worked as an educator, community organiser, environmental campaigner and adviser to environmental organisations for the past 10 years.
“Black people, Asian people and other minorities have been excluded from natural environments for a long time,” says Maunganidze.
“And so if you take the environmental sector as having been historically mostly concerned with conservation of natural spaces, the logic of saying ‘you don’t belong here’ to saying ‘oh, but will you save our local green park?’, you don’t need to be a nuclear scientist to know that people are not going to take part in that.”
The researchers behind the Race Report began working two years ago to get a clearer picture of diversity within the environment sector. It asks environmental charities to volunteer their diversity information – a nerve-wracking proposition for some. This year, it received returns from about 150 organisations, up from 91 a year earlier. It’s still fewer than Maunganidze would like, but he says it’s still fairly representative of the sector.
The numbers are disappointing. Just 6% of employees identify as people of colour, compared to 15% in the UK at large. But even that small proportion is an improvement, says Maunganidze. Similar research in 2017 found just 3% of workers in the environment sector were POC.
More promising is, at least, a growth in awareness. Ten years ago nobody seemed to really care about representation, Maunganidze says. “Now you’ve got entire rooms of people filled up trying to figure out how to move the dial. There’s a greater visibility for looking at both climate and ecological issues through a social justice lens, through an environmental justice lens, through a reparations lens [and] through a decolonisation lens. So I think that conversation has become a lot more normalised, at least at the grassroots.”
When I reported the Race Report’s findings for the Guardian this week, workers in the environment sector spoke of a disconnect between their organisations’ desire to hire more POC staff, and their willingness to take up the issues that were important to them. Maunganidze sees similar issues at play.
“Organisations have gone for the easiest thing, which is is pay somebody to come and do something or, if you’re a big organisation, create a new role for diversity and inclusion,” he says.
“What I haven’t seen happening is genuine empowerment of communities to speak with their own voice and their own experiences on environmental issues.” As a result, the narrative around environment continues to orbit around privilege.
Ultimately, in order for the environment movement to become genuinely inclusive, its priorities and approach need to shift, and it needs to take lessons from people it had previously regarded as almost incidental.
“An environmental movement that is really inclusive and diverse recognises that our lived experiences right now are ones in which a big part of our population find it a lot harder to live fulfilling lives,” says Maunganidze. “And so there’s already an underlying injustice, there’s already an underlying set of inequalities.
“And for there to be an inclusive movement, it has to start with looking at what those inequalities are.”
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