The trouble with ‘activists’

I often ask myself why there aren’t more people on the streets over climate change. After all, there is a near scientific consensus that we’re on the path to destroying every single living thing on the planet, including ourselves. Seems a pretty worthwhile cause. Yet you’ll typically find more people attending an English Defence League demo or a bitcoin conference than trying to close a coal mine.

I’d like to propose an answer: ‘the activist’. I don’t mean the gran who donates each month to Greenpeace, or even Caroline Lucas. I mean the pros who roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. The people for whom being a climate activist is part of their identity and social circle. The soft moralisers for whom it is not just something they do, but something they are, like being a ‘hacker’ or a yoga person. These are the people you see at the demos, chaining themselves to coal diggers, etc.

Over the past couple of years, while writing my new