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Day after day, children from the local Asian population in Burnley would assemble before heading to school. It was the seventies, an era when the National Front were mobilising, and these youngsters were the sons and daughters of immigrant laborers who had come to Britain ten years before to fill labour shortages.

Included in this group was Asad Rehman, who had moved to the Lancashire town with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We traveled as one,” he recalls, “as there were risks to walk alone. Smaller kids in the middle, teenagers on the outside, since we faced assaults on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Pupils would make offensive gestures and shout racist insults at them. Some exchanged Bulldog publicly in corridors. Minority children “every day, as soon as the dinner bell would go, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I initiated conversations to everybody,” Rehman states. As a group, they decided to defy the teachers who had ignored their safety by as a group declining to attend. “declaring that the reason was the schools were unsafe for us.” This became Rehman’s first taste of mobilizing. When he became part of broader anti-racist campaigns emerging across the country, it influenced his political outlook.

“We began defending our community which taught me that lasting principle remaining with me: collective action is stronger when we are a ‘we’ than when we’re individual. Groups are necessary to coordinate efforts along with a shared goal to hold you together.”

Recently, Rehman was appointed chief executive of the green organization Friends of the Earth. For decades, the familiar face of environmental crisis was the polar bear on melting ice. Currently, addressing global heating without mentioning inequality and discrimination has become almost impossible. Rehman positioned himself at the forefront of this transformation.

“I took this job due to the scale of the crisis out there,” he shared with journalists on the sidelines an environmental protest outside Downing Street recently. “These issues are linked of climate, economic disparity, of financial structures designed to favor elite interests. It’s ultimately a crisis of justice.

“Just one group has consistently focused on equity – environmental justice and climate justice – that’s Friends of the Earth.”

Boasting over numerous backers plus hundreds of local branches, The organization (with an independent Scottish branch) is the UK’s biggest conservation movement. In the year to summer 2024, it spent over ten million pounds on advocacy including courtroom challenges against state decisions community initiatives changing municipal practices in park playgrounds.

Yet it – possibly mistakenly – gained a profile as a less radical organisation in the activist community. Focusing on awareness campaigns rather than direct action.

The selection of an advocate for economic justice with his background might signal an effort to shed that image.

And it is not the first time he has worked there with the organization.

After graduating, he persisted advocating for equality, collaborating with a community organization at a time when the far right had influence in east London.

“There were initiatives, handling individual cases, and it was rooted in the community,” he says. “This taught me being a community organiser.”

But not content than just responding to everyday prejudice and institutional bias together with peers, aimed to elevate the fight against racism as a fundamental right. That brought him to the human rights organization, for a long period he collaborated alongside developing world advocates to advocate for a new approach in the understanding of basic rights. “At that time, they weren't active on economic and social rights. they concentrated solely on political freedoms,” he notes.

By the end of that decade, Rehman’s work with Amnesty had brought him into contact with multiple international social justice organisations. During that period they came together as anti-globalization activists challenging free-market policies. What he was to learn from them would affect his future work.

“I was going collaborating with activists, all those discussed how bad climate was, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he recalls. “And I was like! All our achievements through activism might be lost by this thing. This challenge that is happening, it’s called climate – and yet few addressed it in those terms.”

That guided him to an initial position with Friends of the Earth years ago. Back then, the majority of green groups framed climate change as a distant threat.

“This network was the only mainstream green group that then officially broke away from typical conservation groups. and was one of the founders of the emerging climate equity activism,” he says.

He focused to bring the voices of affected communities to the table. These efforts rarely make him popular. Once, he recalls, post-negotiations involving ministers and green groups, a politician called his chief executive requesting he control his assertive tactics. He declined to specify who made the call.

“There was a sense: ‘Who is this person operate differently?’ Consider, green issues are important, we can all agree and talk. [But] I viewed it as a fight against racism, advocating for freedoms … fundamentally political.”

Equity frameworks were increasingly becoming accepted in climate and environmental campaigning. However, the opposite was also happening. organizations focused on equality starting to address climate and environmental issues.

And so it was the anti-poverty campaign the trade union-backed {