Green Conversations – May 2025 (Our Future Commons, with GND Rising and Badvertising)

We are gearing up for our next talk in this year’s series of Green Conversations – as always at the upstairs room at The Brookmill pub, starting at 7:30pm on Monday 19th May.  We are thrilled to welcome James Ward of Badvertising travelling all the way across from Bristol, and Hannah Martin, Founding Director of Green New Deal Rising.  We’re really looking forward to hearing how their work challenges government policies on fossil fuels, pollution and the climate crisis.  A little more about the talks themselves and the speakers themselves:

Carmageddon: challenging SUVs for a politics beyond the private motor vehicle, James Ward

Transport is always about more than getting from A to B, it lies at the heart of our politics and our culture. The surging use of SUVs now presents a choice: do we follow a US model towards total carmageddon, or do we u-turn towards an alternative future? In this talk, James will examine the SUV as the epitome of car dominance, how advertising has reinvented vehicles invented for military use as suitable for school runs and shopping trips, and the policy failures that have enabled this shift.

James works at Adfree Cities where his work focuses on greenwash in car advertising. He has a background in journalism and activism, and has been involved in many campaigns for a safer and less polluted public realm in his hometown of Bristol.

Hannah Martin is an organiser and campaigner. She has campaigned with Greenpeace UK leading their energy and climate team and ran campaigns and actions as part of the successful UK anti fracking movement. In 2019 she helped the UK Student Climate Network and the Youth Strikes for Climate to mobilise, including towards the September Climate Strikes which was the biggest climate protest in UK history and led to the passing of new net zero legislation that year. In 2020 she founded Green New Deal Rising with Fatima Ibrahim. Since then, they have trained and organised thousands of young people to act on climate, elected several green champions to Parliament and changed the narrative around how green policy can build a stronger economy. She is an Obama Leader in Europe and before working as a campaigner, she had a career in the children’s services sector, helped found a successful social enterprise in Oxford and set up a community festival in her home city of Wakefield.

Green New Deal Rising is a movement of young people from every part of the UK, and on a mission to take power out of the hands of the billionaires and the oil executives, and put it in the hands of our generation. We’re fighting for the green new deal – a game-changing plan to transform the economy and tackle climate change at the speed and scale that is needed.  Hannah will talk about the following:

• Understanding climate justice: Exploring the principles of climate justice and the necessity of addressing both environmental sustainability and social equity.
• The UK political landscape: Examining current UK climate policies, recent governmental shifts, and the key players influencing climate action.
• Effective advocacy strategies: Learning from Green New Deal Rising’s initiatives, including their recent efforts to counteract governmental climate policy reversals and their call to action for public participation.

We hope you can join us and hear what Hannah and James have to say.  It helps us greatly if you can sign up to the event on Eventbrite – please follow this link for your free tickets!