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Each school day, students from Asian families in Burnley would gather prior to going to school. It was the 1970s, a time when far-right groups were actively organizing, and these children were the offspring of immigrant laborers who had been invited to Britain ten years before to address employment gaps.

Included in this group was the young Asad, who had moved to the community with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We would all walk together,” he recalls, “because it was dangerous to walk alone. Younger children in the middle, teenagers forming a perimeter, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Other children would perform Nazi salutes and yell abusive language at them. A few distributed extremist publications publicly in corridors. Minority children “every day, as soon as the dinner bell would go, we had to lock ourselves into a classroom, because we would be attacked.”

“I began discussing to everybody,” Rehman states. As a group, they decided to defy the teachers who had not kept them safe by as a group declining to attend. “declaring it was due to the schools didn't provide security for us.” That marked Rehman’s initial experience of mobilizing. As he joined broader anti-racist campaigns developing across the country, it influenced his views on society.

“We took steps to safeguard our community helping me understand that lasting principle which I've carried: collective action is stronger acting together than when we’re individual. You need organisations to organise you and a common purpose to hold you together.”

In the past few months, he took on the role of head of the conservation group Friends of the Earth. Over many years, the poster child of climate breakdown was arctic wildlife drifting on an ice floe. Today, discussing environmental issues while ignoring social, racial and economic injustice is widely considered almost impossible. And Rehman has been in the vanguard of this shift.

“I accepted this position because of the scale of the crisis out there,” he explained to reporters during a climate justice protest outside Downing Street weeks ago. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, [of] inequality, of economic systems designed to favor elite interests. It’s ultimately about fairness.

“And there is only one organisation that has always centred equity – environmental justice and environmental equality – namely this charity.”

With more than 250,000 supporters and 233 local action groups, The organization (operates separately in Scotland) represents Britain's largest green activist community. Over the past year, it allocated over ten million pounds on advocacy from courtroom challenges against state decisions to local campaigns opposing chemical use in public spaces.

However, the organization has – perhaps unfairly – been perceived as relatively moderate versus other groups. More bake sales and petitions rather than direct action.

The appointment of an advocate for economic justice like Rehman might signal an effort to shed that image.

And it is not the beginning he's been involved with the charity.

Following university, he persisted advocating for equality, collaborating with the Newham Monitoring Project in the era as nationalist movements had influence locally.

“We organized protests, and it was doing casework, and it was rooted in the community,” he explains. “This taught me grassroots activism.”

However, unsatisfied with simply reactively countering racism on the streets and institutional bias together with peers, worked to frame antiracism within a rights framework. Which guided him to Amnesty UK, where over the next decade he collaborated alongside international campaigners to demand a new approach in the understanding of basic rights. “At that time, Amnesty didn’t campaign on financial and community issues. they concentrated solely on political freedoms,” he notes.

As the conclusion of the 1990s, his activism with Amnesty had brought him into contact with a range of international social justice organisations. Then they had coalesced into the counter-globalisation movement against neoliberalism. What he was to learn from them influenced his ongoing activism.

“I was going collaborating with activists, and each person discussed the severity of environmental issues, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he explains. “And I was like! Every gain and secured might be lost due to climate change. This issue that is happening, it’s called climate – and yet nobody’s talking about it in those terms.”

This led Rehman to begin working at the environmental charity in 2006. At the time, most environmental organisations framed global warming as tomorrow's challenge.

“Friends of the Earth stood out as the sole activist body that then officially broke from typical conservation groups. pioneering of the emerging environmental justice campaigning,” he states.

Rehman worked to include perspectives of affected communities during negotiations. This approach wasn't gain widespread approval. Once, he recalls, after a meeting with officials with activist organizations, an official phoned the leadership demanding he call off his “climate Taliban”. He would not be drawn the individual's identity.

“There was a sense: ‘What gives him authority who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ You know, the environment is a nice thing, we can all agree and talk. [But] I viewed it as addressing inequality, advocating for freedoms … about power structures.”

Justice narratives found acceptance in climate and environmental campaigning. However, the opposite occurred. with justice-oriented groups increasingly tackling climate and environmental issues.

And so it was that War On Want supported by unions {