Birdgirl: Dr Mya-Rose Craig, Environmental Activist

Interview by Rosanna Harvey-Crawford

Mya-Rose Craig, aka Birdgirl, is an 18 year old environmental activist and passionate birder. When she was 14, she set up a charity, Black2Nature, that campaigns for equal access to nature and the countryside with a particular focus on minority ethnic communities. Since then, she has continued to work to encourage young people and families to enjoy the countryside through nature camps and trips as well as highlighting the importance of ethnic diversity in the conservation and environmental sectors. At 17, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Bristol in recognition of her activism, making her the youngest person in the UK to receive the award. In our conversation we spoke about Mya-Rose’s work, access to the outdoors and nature in the UK, conservation and her recent trip to the Arctic Circle.

Rosanna: Can you tell me a bit about your relationship to the natural world, and what prompted you to start your charity Black2 Nature?

Mya-Rose: I feel like I have quite an uninteresting story about how I got into nature, because my parents and older sister were massive birders, before I was even born. So, when I was born, it was already a massive part of my life; they took me bird watching for the first time when I was nine days old. It's always been something that's been really major - nature in general - but especially birds. In my opinion, I feel like birds are a really good connection point to nature, just because they're everywhere. You know, even if you start looking in the middle of the city, there are going to be birds - I love that.

My mum's family is Bangladeshi and as I got older, I started to realise that I just wasn't seeing anyone who looked like me out in nature, or anyone at all that was minority ethnic. I couldn't really understand why, as someone to whom nature was so important, other people weren't doing that, and getting that opportunity. I suppose the straw that broke the camel's back was in 2015, when I was 13. I was (for unrelated reasons), organising a nature camp because I wanted to hang out with other kids for a weekend, but also in nature. All of them were white teenage boys – and that was the last straw for me. I started this whole thing, trying to get some kids from inner city Bristol or minority ethnic communities out on this camp. It worked, we got five of them and they had a really good time. That first camp was a success, they're very different now but that camp morphed into the minority ethnic teenager camps that I do now.

After that, I wanted to see what was going on at a wider scale. I ended up writing to a lot of nature NGOs in the in the UK. Basically, they weren't doing a lot and through various things, I essentially ended up organising a conference in the summer of 2016, to raise awareness about equality in nature that was all about this massive diversity issue. We talked about what could be done to solve it and then nothing was done after that. So, I ended up setting up my organisation Black2Nature, essentially to both to give the assistance to these organisations that don't really know what they're doing in terms of diversity, but also to make sure this stays on the agenda. I suppose it was about not allowing it to fade into the background like they were wanting it to at the time, because it was quite uncomfortable for a lot of them. I've been doing stuff like that ever since.

Rosanna: In the UK, nature and the outdoors are thought of as 'belonging' to white, middle class people. As black and brown people around the world have historically shown a deeper connection to and respect for the natural world this seems an interesting contradiction - what are your thoughts and experiences of this phenomenon? 

Mya-Rose: Yeah, absolutely. Over the years, (I started out very much within the UK), I've slowly been coming into contact with more and more people from around the world. Something that I've noticed, even in other Western countries, is that access to the outdoors is much less of a privilege than it is in the UK. I think we have a real issue, in terms of class, in terms of disability, in terms of everything really, where access to nature and the countryside and the outdoors is a privilege that you can only have if you have enough time and energy and money. I think that's super historical, post-Industrial Revolution onwards, really when all the poor people essentially were living in the city and all the rich people evacuated out into the countryside to live in their lovely homes.

Basically, there has been this pattern for a really long time and that's extended to now, when it’s predominantly the middle class who get to enjoy spending a lot of time out in nature. But, I think that even if it's arguably more accessible than it once was (which I'm not sure I agree with) there's a real feeling around going out into the outdoors, going out into nature, where it feels like something very middle class to a lot of people - and that doesn't really appeal. So, I think that's one thing. But, I think also, in my opinion, there is a very specific reason why a lot of our minority ethnic communities aren't going out into nature. When you look at where their families are from, in different countries, their grandparents, or whoever, emigrated from these incredibly rural areas. Even my family, both my grandparents who came to the UK in the late 50s, early 60s, lived in super, super rural areas, but, all of my uncles and cousins would never go outdoors. I feel like that links back to when people first migrated over, wanting or needing to live in the middle of the city for jobs, needing to spend all of their time making money to support their family, establishing themselves in a new country, to the point where they don't really have that connection to nature anymore, because they just don't have the time. It's not a priority, which I think has led to a lot of minority ethnic people in the UK really feeling like urban people. When in reality, they're quite often generationally far less urban than a lot of the white people who live in urban areas, which I think you can see if you look at Bangladesh. There aren't really any Bangladeshi environmentalists in the UK, but if you go to Bangladesh, there are so, so many, and there's all these massive Facebook groups and loads of people that are doing loads of stuff - and I think that's very telling.

“I think we have a real issue, in terms of class, in terms of disability, in terms of everything really, where access to nature and the countryside and the outdoors is a privilege that you can only have if you have enough time and energy and money”.

Rosanna: How would you like to see the environment sector/movement become more aligned to principles of justice and equality? The example that I was thinking of is whose voices do we listen to the most on these topics?

Mya-Rose: I think I actually have a few different answers, depending on the hat I have on. Obviously, Black2Nature is absolutely about understanding that diversity is a key issue, not just for the people that you're trying to engage with, but for your organisation as an entity. It's not really sustainable if you're not engaging with massive slices of the population. I think giving more people the opportunity to engage with nature and therefore care about environmental issues is something massive that's being missed out at the moment. In terms of ways to engage those communities, a lot of the stuff I talk about is on making nature more relevant to the people that you're trying to engage with. The example I always use is that I'm a bird watcher, and I really enjoy going down to the local reserve with a pair of binoculars on and staring at the waders or whatever. But most people do not enjoy stuff like that. I think we have such a traditional view of what engaging with nature is in the UK. We really need to break those barriers down.

I also do a lot of stuff to do with indigenous peoples’ rights, I feel like there is a much wider issue to do with communication - basically, a lot of people would say that the conservation movement is essentially modern day colonialism. You're going and taking land from indigenous people, despite the fact that they have the expertise, and they're the ones who have been protecting it for millennia. I personally think it is rooted in this feeling of Western and white supremacy, and in 2020 people will still refuse to sit down and have those conversations with indigenous people that know the land so well. Despite the fact that there have been studies done on the importance of indigenous knowledge and they are the ones who are on the frontlines of conservation.

I think having those conversations is really important and acknowledging that in the West, we have a very certain image of what we want our conserved areas to look like. It includes them being separate from any human impact and being very idyllic and untouched, and when you ask people to think of very idyllic and untouched landscapes, they think of places like the depths of the Amazon rainforest and things like that. I think that there's still this lack of awareness or lack of acknowledgement, that literally everywhere that humans exist, we have shaped and farmed the landscape for our own benefit. That includes places that we consider wild, like the depths of the Amazon. I think going forward we have to acknowledge that removing indigenous people from the lands that they have shaped is super, super detrimental.

Rosanna: It really goes to show how powerful people like John Muir and the idea of national parks (with no people in them) have continued to be, to still affect our understanding of conservation even in the present day.

Mya-Rose: So many people don’t acknowledge that we are still copy and pasting that American model, which was shaped out of white supremacy and eugenics. Eugenics played so much into that – essentially, the indigenous people being seen as lazy by Western colonisers because they didn’t spend the whole day farming and searching for food, but that was because they knew the land so well. They were living on the land that is now the American national parks.

Rosanna: You recently travelled to the Arctic Circle with Greenpeace. Can you tell us how this trip came about, and how the journey to the Arctic Circle made you feel?

Mya-Rose: I've done bits and pieces of work for Greenpeace during the pandemic, a few panels and things like that. So I had a relationship with them, but they literally sent me an email out of the blue halfway through August, asking if I wanted to go on a trip to the Arctic with them on a boat for a month. Obviously I said yes, because that's insane. I had about two weeks to pack and we also had to quarantine in Germany for a few days. It was all very last minute, and it felt really exciting because of that. We got onto the boat on the 2nd of September and I was on there for a month straight. It was just incredible for so many different reasons. Firstly, I think being on a Greenpeace boat was amazing, because the crew was so interesting and exciting. There were also loads of campaigners, activists and scientists on board as well. I personally found that so inspirational to meet all of them, it was fantastic. Going up to the Arctic, and seeing the ice, I think that was both very exciting and very sad. It’s the one of the reasons I jumped so hard at going on the trip is because it really felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity, not just because it's the Arctic, but because, I suppose as a climax, I'm aware of how quickly it's disappearing.

So, I got to see the Arctic and it was so beautiful and so pristine. But, we also went up during the sea ice minimum, that's the period where the ice is the smallest, which they used to track climate change. It was the second worst it’s ever been, and we had to just sail and sail through open ocean for days to even get to the edge of the ice. I was so hyper aware that even a century ago, all of that would have been thick ice. It was sort of exciting and heart-breaking at the same time.

Rosanna: How has the current global pandemic influenced your activism and also your view of the climate crisis? Do you see it as an opportunity or a risk?

Mya-Rose: I think in terms of the pandemic, it's been very strange. For Black2Nature, we had managed to link up with the RSPB, and we were going to be running four camps this summer. That obviously never happened, which has been really disappointing. We ran a couple of day trips instead with the families, which were really successful, but it's not quite the same.

In terms of other activism, I really do feel like this pandemic has been used by a lot of leaders as an excuse to push environmental issues to the side in a very disingenuous way. Obviously, I acknowledge that the pandemic has to take precedence, but I feel like it's very much been used as a political tool which makes me extremely unhappy.

The UK is making all sorts of climate commitments at the moment, and I genuinely don't know what to think – whether we're finally going in the right direction, or if it's all, once again, just lip service. I think the main positive thing to have come out of the pandemic is that a lot of people's connection to nature has been formed or strengthened in a way that never would have happened otherwise. I saw a lot of people venturing out into the countryside that never would have done so, partially because all the parks were shut in the cities, they had nowhere else to go. But, also, because they did have the time and were able to get out to the countryside, which was key. I'm going to be really interested to see if post-pandemic, that continues. It will also be interesting to see if more people are talking about green issues because of more people engaging with their environment. I think there's a lot of really interesting potential there.

 You can follow Birdgirl on Twitter and Instagram, and like Black2Nature on Facebook.