ANNA ROSE SEEKS CLIMATE JUSTICE
SUBJECT Anna Rose
OCCUPATION Climate activist
INTERVIEWER Nathan Scolaro
PHOTOGRAPHER Jo Yeldham
LOCATION Sydney, Australia
DATE February, 2019
ANTIDOTE TO Staying in the comfort zone
UNEXPECTED Took on BHP as a teenager
Two years ago, Anna Rose and I worked on a climate change issue of Dumbo Feather together. I was completely impressed by the chord she struck between intellectual rigour, unrelenting activism and genuine, welcoming embrace on the issue. There were solutions, there was hope and there was an accessible, energising and constructive way for everyone to rise to the challenge. That’s not to say she didn’t get despondent. In the face of the science, the rising sea levels, the increase in fires and flooding, she was real. “I understand why people wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning,” she told me. “We need courage to confront all of this.”
Anna is one of Australia’s foremost climate activists. In 2006, she co-founded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which today sees more than 150,000 young people building movements for a safe climate. As a campaign and communications strategist, she has worked for the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Independent councillor Clover Moore, and been involved in the “Make History Melbourne” campaign, which saw Australia’s first Greens member, Adam Bandt, elected to the lower house. For Anna, there are four parts to making progress on climate change: building the movement, changing the story, changing the politics and shifting the money. She works with everyone from artists to philanthropists to farmers, empowering them with skills and knowledge to use the platforms they have to contribute to a healthier planet.
Last year, Anna came to me with the suggestion of doing an entire issue of Dumbo Feather on courage. As she observed, we have everything we need to tackle climate change and mitigate its effects. We have the science, the solutions; we have the technology and know-how to get the job done. So why haven’t we? Anna says it’s because most of us haven’t learned to move out of our comfort zones—that we’re staying safe out of fear and complacency. What we need, in fact, is courage. We need to act on the impulses in us to move into our challenge zones—where we’re doing things we might not have done before, where we’re getting creative and feeling into our unique power to create change. Once we’ve had a taste of that, Anna says, and seen that we can shape our surroundings for the better, the comfort zone starts to seem less and less appealing.
“A community can decide it’s time to change and make it impossible for their political leaders to keep the status quo going.”
NATHAN SCOLARO: So this issue, about courage, evolved out of a conversation you and I had last year. And I remember you saying that courage, more than anything, is what we need in the climate change movement. I thought we could start there, with why you see courage as so important in bringing about action?
ANNA ROSE: Oh man where to start? For me having been involved in the climate movement for over two decades and seeing a lot of the public discussion being around technical solutions like renewable energy or changing urban design or transport—all that stuff’s really important and absolutely what we need to be doing, but it already exists. The ideas and plans are out there. We already have all the technical solutions to stop damaging our climate. So why haven’t we solved this crisis? And it comes down to the fact that we haven’t had political leaders and business leaders with the courage to stand up to the vested interests making money out of fossil fuels, and enough ordinary people to take risks and challenge the status quo. So yeah, I have been thinking about courage a lot because people ask me all the time when I do speeches or workshops or sometimes people email
