Natasha Pavey

Recorded 05.06.19 by Carmen Talbot.

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

I’ve kind of, always wanted to do, kind of, more… and, kind of like… cos I thought I’ve always been quite like a… I don’t know, like passionate person I guess and I do have a lot of beliefs on like feminism and animal rights and stuff like that and obviously the climate crisis, and… yeah… I was kind of actually before the strikes, thinking of, like, what can I do though as a young person… what more can I do and this kind of came of came along at the right time and I was like I can finally actually do that and… well basically yeah, Soph, um… messaged the extinction rebellion page mentioning that like she’s heard about strikes being set up like in London and stuff and that Exeter should get on board with this. And then, umm… somebody through that told me (laughs) about… about this and thought that, you know, I’d be really into that cos like, previously um I’ve known people involved with extinction rebellion but I’ve never really… done much myself, so… cos it was kind of like there wasn’t many other young people and we were trying to get actually, set up an extinction rebellion kind of youth group, um but that didn’t really take off cos they were like not really my age and then um.. I heard about… cos obviously I didn’t hear … I haven’t heard about these strikes before that and then someone mentioned it to me and said that this girl who actually goes to the same college as me, um… was thinking about doing this but obviously she needs more people and I was like ‘yeah, I’m totally, totally up for that, like…’. And then so I got in contact with Soph through that and we basically started it and kind of went from there really and then more people kind of joined us and then… we obviously set up our social media pages and then some uni students contacted us and wanted to get involved, and now there’s quite a big group of us now. And… um… well my role mainly was… mainly kinda social media and putting it all on social media so that then more people find…find out about it and joined us for the next one. We do get like a lot of banners and personally for me, I’ve only got my phone out (laughs) with the recording everything and um… I mean we’ve got this thing now where all the organisers and the stewards are wearing hi-vises so everybody can see us, but uhh… yeah, I mean we’ve got… there’s some amazing pictures of all the banners that… that come out. It’s crazy. Obviously, the government and… Devon County Council have declared the climate emergency now and I think some people thought that we weren’t going to carry on after that but just because they’ve declared a climate emergency, doesn’t mean the planets’ stopping dying (laughs) and they haven’t acted much on that, you know, as far as we know. So we’re going to keep striking until, you know, reports say that we’re not… you know… cos obviously there are reports are saying now that we have like… the IPCC – the International Panel on Climate Change have stated that we have less than 11 years now until the effects of climate change become irreversible and they haven’t stopped saying that… that hasn’t changed cos we haven’t changed. And… I don’t… I don’t know… I think we’re just going to keep going until… someone… I don’t… no one… I don’t know if anybody’s going to say that’s not… not a thing anymore but we’re going to keep going cos the climates’ still in a terrible, terrible state and… yeah, we’re not stopping anytime soon it doesn’t look like.

Notes:

Find out more about Extinction Rebellion – https://extinctionrebellion.uk/
Find out more about the International Panel on Climate Change – https://www.ipcc.ch/