My friends in Malawi designed the logo shown above for ‘Poems for Parliament’. They use it in their Degrowth days which are funded by my private income.
My name is Barbara Williams. My Medium articles reflect much of the progress of my ideas over time. My self-published book appeared in 2020 – ‘Saving Us From Ourselves – Can we repair 50 years of ecological overshoot?‘. It provides my initial perspective when I first began working to promote the mindset shift to Degrowth. The book is free to download here. The book was intended to help people in affluent countries understand the extent to which we can change our behaviour to salvage our eco-systems; it includes the climate crisis Poems which were sent to every UK MP in September 2020.
After writing the book I came to realise that we needed something global to inspire the necessary behavioural changes. I worked as lead-editor on the paper published by the UN Commons Cluster (part of the UN NGOs Major Group) for the High-level Political Forum in July 2022. The paper suggests that the SDGs be refined to earn the revised title ‘Sustainable Degrowth Goals’, and recommends the ‘UN Charter for Eco-Justice‘ to inspire the emotional maturity and humility required to face up to the escalating existential threats from global ecological overshoot. The wording for the Charter is provided in the Framework for Maximum Mitigation which was submitted to the High-level Advisory Board on Effective Mulitilaterlism. There was a further paper submitted in another name for which I was the lead-author: The Ego to Eco Journey in Leadership and Governance.
I have been a climate and environmental activist since April 2019, I own and maintain this website. In September 2021 my activism was recognised by the Stable Planet Alliance and they added me to their list of Voices on GirlPlanet.Earth. In October 2022, after Liz Truss created the concept of the Anti-growth Coalition, for a while I adopted the nom de plume ‘Voice of the Antigrowth Alliance‘.
In 2023 I had a paper accepted in the UNFCCC global stocktake for the Paris climate agreement; it claims that peer-pressure to overconsume and overpopulate are preventing any genuine mitigation from climate and ecological collapse.
- Contact by email bw@poemsforparliament.uk
- Follow me on Medium
- Follow me on YouTube
- Follow me on Twitter
