In Conversation With Ashish Ghadiali
On Sensing the Planet
On March 28, Olivia Blocker sat down with Ashish Ghadiali, the Founder and Director of Radical Ecology - an organisation that works across art, research, and policy to advance environmental justice. The discussion centred on the intersections of climate and racial justice, the role of art in movement, and his new exhibit Sensing the Planet, currently open at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in East Devon.
Olivia: I would love to hear a little bit about your work and Radical Ecology. How did it all start?
Ashish: I have been a racial justice activist for as long as I can remember. In my mid-20s, I did a lot of work in Palestine and I was involved in setting up a project called the Freedom Theatre, whilst working as a university lecturer. In 2014-16, I made a feature documentary about the war on terror through the testimony of a former Guantanamo detainee. So that’s just a little bit of background.
I think there has always been a kind of anti- or de-colonial basis to what I do, but in the last 10 years that became really explicit in my work. If our movements aren't rooted in anti-colonial solidarity between racialized peoples then we are contained within a kind of ethnic nationalism and we will struggle to move forward and create something new.
By about 2019, I was a member of a grassroots collective called Wretched of the Earth, focusing on engaging communities of colour and young people around the climate crisis. This is around the time when there was a sudden, global mainstream interest in climate change precipitated by Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg and also by big capitalist organizations like BlackRock and investment banks where all these entities were coming forward with their net-zero pledges. I found myself holding a ball at that time that was much in demand: climate justice.
Radical Ecology emerged out of the aftermath of all that. As I was doing more work on climate justice, I recognised that infrastructures for a kind of white environmentalism were being developed very fast, while there was relatively little infrastructure for climate justice. It became harder to keep advocating for the role of racial justice within that, so Radical Ecology is what came next for me and the hope that it could become a kind of house for climate justice, which I felt was and still feel is very much needed.
Olivia: I'm curious about your relationship with the existing environmentalist infrastructures in the UK. How do you work with or navigate those very white environmentalist spaces you reference?
Ashish: There always has to be a diversity of tactics, and there has to be an element of collaboration too. Radical Ecology was established in December 2021 and, in a lot of ways, it was about collaboration from the outset.
I instigated a research project with one of the UK's leading climate scientists at the University of Exeter. We did great research that also became a project of participatory public engagement with questions coming out of the climate science that we had been working on together, where we had been utilising a racial justice lens to look at the extent to which models around climate economics had been historically devaluing the lives of black and brown people.
We were able to offer alternative models that pointed to very different kinds of data. Shocking data that revealed the likelihood of 2 billion people - 1/5 of the human population - being displaced outside of a zone on the earth that humans have historically been able to survive in. These are people who are, by and large, black and brown, racialized people.
Those numbers ended up being reported in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, The Times of India and about 160 publications around the world.
So, that process of collaboration… I really believe in it, but it is exhausting. There's always a point when you realize, even in spite of success, that the community you're collaborating with - the climate science sector, museums, heritage organisations… They do have different priorities. They’re dipping their toes in racial justice, but it’s not what drives them and you pull apart. It makes you want to walk away. And sometimes you have to. Like in a relationship. But there has to be an openness; you've got to be ready to come back, even if that’s at risk of being hurt again. It’s the price you pay for commitment to creating something new. Then as you do come back into it, you have to stand for something more. There has to be strategy for increased autonomy, increased independence. Your goal has got to be systemic transformation, the creation of a new world, nothing less. Right?
Olivia: Can you say a little bit more about the role of art or the practice of storytelling in bringing people into these complicated, nuanced conversations of politics?
Ashish: My work's always been about self expression as a tool for the self empowerment of marginalized communities. It has always been about a form of advocacy: voice, witness, representation. But then I think that something new has started too.
I think we’re often encouraged to think of the climate crisis as a technical problem as opposed to a political problem. There’s been a lot of distrust in the mainstream climate movements about the climate justice movement - that we're making it all about race when it's all about carbon. But I think that it's useful to understand both the climate crisis - and the failure of all human beings today to do anything effective about the climate crisis - as outcomes of culture.
They are the outcomes of hundreds and thousands of years of culture evolving in a particular way. And you get to a point where you're stuck, because, actually, you embody that culture. You inhabit that culture. It's all of our lives; it's what holds it all together. There's no such thing as a technical problem or a political problem that is not, fundamentally, also a cultural problem.
So, for me, I think one of the discoveries of Radical Ecology, in terms of practice and methodology, has been that realization that actually it's only through culture that we can address these issues.
It's only at the point that an alternative culture - one that knows a different way of living in relation to global warming & racial inequality - emerges that we can become unstuck. A big part of my process or reflection or research has been to consider that question: Where did this culture come from? How does a culture emerge?
And it becomes really clear to me that in this process artists are such crucial actors. And it might not always be very apparent, and it might not appear to be the solution that is required by this particular problem at this particular moment, but I really believe in the place of artists as these key instigators of world-making. I think artists are already, in lots of ways, creating new worlds that are the response to these inherited histories of empire and industrialized, carbon-intensive civilization.
I believe that, actually, if we were able to better understand the possibility of our artistic infrastructure for making new worlds, then we could create the structures that allow artists to recognize that impulse in themselves. We can shift away from this capitalist inclination to create art because it sells, and instead evolve and develop these alternative infrastructures.
I think that's what Radical Ecology is attempting. In a tiny way, because we're tiny, but it's the case that we're constantly trying to make. We attempt to create these treasured spaces where you can actually be yourself in alignment with a kind of sustainable and liveable future. We’re always thinking strategically about the conditions for growth, like gardeners: how do we bring these things together and allow them to grow and survive? I always imagine what we’re doing as a decolonial model that stands in contrast to this dominant, white supremacist culture. If we plant a seed and leave it, then it will just be subsumed within the greater cultural ecosystem that surrounds it, but if we nurture it over time, it might actually become the stronger ecosystem.
Olivia: You said so many good things. I don't know where to start. It feels like we're in this moment where art and the role of art is so at risk. I feel like there is this presumed supremacy of science and statistics, and we see this devaluing of arts and humanities and culture everywhere. It's just so refreshing to hear this deep consideration of how we need to reinvest in art and different ways of knowing. I would love to hear about your exhibition, Sensing the Planet, that explores these intersections of climate and racial justice you’ve been talking about.
Ashish: If Radical Ecology has been one pole, then Sensing the Planet reflects the other twin pole of my engagement over the last 3-4 years in response to these questions of What is Art? and How do we do it in ways that will lead us towards sustainable and liveable futures? There's a very personal journey that is revealed through the works in the exhibition.
So back in 2021, I co-curated a symposium in South Devon, also called Sensing the Planet, in response to COP26. At Wretched of the Earth, I had been working as a political strategy lead for the Civil Society Coalition for COP26, but in the end I decided not to go; it felt like we were amplifying the circus of a big intergovernmental pageant. I didn’t think we were asking let alone answering the right question. The symposium was my response to that. The estate where the symposium was hosted was owned in the 16th century by the uncle of Walter Raleigh. From nearby Plymouth, the first slave ship was commissioned by John Hawkins, and the first plantations in North America were established from boats that went out from this region of Southwest England.
This current exhibition has emerged from this ongoing reflection of England’s colonization of the new world and its shaping of place, this place - southwest England. It explores questions of decolonization, these questions of seed and cultivation and the possibility of nurturing a new ecosystem from here, in the historic heartland of European empire, of white supremacy, and of climate breakdown.
Back in 2021, we brought together activists, artists and thinkers to really dig into that and ask the question: how does a new world come into being? The community that we've cultivated since - the artists that we work with in Radical Ecology - are now so much a part of the fabric of the work and the place.
Seeing it all together in one place, there was a real sense of achievement, and I think there was also the realisation that this is all very, very personal. I hadn't quite realized that. My voice is in a lot of it: it narrates. My grandmother's portrait is in it; the secrets of her Gujarati dal recipe, which I was taught by my father, is in it. The death of my father is a story that's told there.
But it dovetails with histories like the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, and the arrival of refugees from Uganda in the 1970s, and stories of villages subsiding into the sea on the South Devon coast in 1917. Some people that know me quite well mentioned that the exhibition also features a photo-diary of my daily walk - pictures I’ve taken, on that loop that I do every day. Those works - pictures of Himalayan Balsam ripped out of the ground - are about that walk, and on seeing the exhibition I suddenly had this real sense of the topography that informs the exhibition. The immediate topography that I open my front door out onto looks up towards the granite tors of Dartmoor, which were once connected to the landmass of Africa on the equator. They were these volcanic eruptions that were just oozing lava for hundreds of millions of years, and eventually disconnected from the African continent and started to drift. I see it every day. That story offers this real connection that we have to geological time and a scale that we inhabit that's very, very different from our daily timeline.
Olivia: I have a question about the local and the global, and the personal and the public. Your use of local archival footage, your community work, your deeply personal experiences in the region, even your daily walk is represented in this exhibition. You take these highly localised pieces and expand them outward to the world and the climate. I think this is always a question in the work of any social movement regarding scale: Is the local work more impactful? Should we work on the regional scale? These aren’t isolated systems, they are all interconnected, but I'm curious if you can reflect a little bit on the role of art in being able to connect the local and the global?
Ashish: This is such a good question. Both within Radical Ecology and my personal practice, this has been a central question that has driven the work. I believe that the great obstacle to climate justice, or environmental justice, is that we perceive the local and the global to be opposed, and a lot of my work really picks up on that perceived tension.
Years ago, before his death, I had the opportunity to speak with James Lovelock - a theorist that formulated the Gaia hypothesis. We discussed this. That one of the problems around climate action right now is that we perceive the planet in the abstract, as though its totality is something that only astronauts and satellites could ever interact with. So, how do we culturally move beyond the idea of this distinction between the planetary and the local?
I feel like I've been sitting on that question for four years. I think the first stage is the realization that the planet is all around us, above us, underneath us. But what is the difference between the planet that we perceive locally and the local that provincializes? In my piece, Can You Tell the Time of a Running River?, the action was as simple as me getting into a river, but it's framed in a way that's designed to give you a sense that the river is a being in itself, that it’s existing on an entirely different temporality from the temporality of a human body.
Olivia: I love that. I think we, as a culture, need to be more humbled by what we're surrounded by every day. This idea that I will never be as old as this mountain; this river will run long after I’m gone. I think the world would be better if more people felt that. And artists play a critical role in determining how we can shift away from a dominant culture of exploitation and extraction.
Ashish: I think it's one of the arguments of the exhibition. If we can start to perceive the planet as all around us, as embedded in the local, we can then start to perceive geographical distance in ways that are part of this great unity. We're actually very connected.
Sensing the Planet is currently open and runs until 26 April 2025 at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in East Devon.