Introducing Julia | Showcasing the Unheard
We have a vision of how the world should look like
Julia, a 19-year-old climate activist from Warsaw, Poland, has been involved in climate activism for four years and is currently part of the Bombelki Collective, which fights against fossil gas extraction projects in Poland. Julia and her group are involved in creative actions and disruptions. She believes that the climate crisis is caused by a small group of wealthy people who prioritise profit over the environment and people’s basic needs.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your work. Who is Julia?
I’m 19 and I’m from Warsaw, Poland. I’ve been a climate activist for four years now. Right now I’m involved in a group called the Bombelki Collective. Bombelki means bubble in Polish and we’re a group that fights against fossil gas. We focus on the extraction projects and the main companies that sponsor the use of gas in Poland. The name Bombelki refers to methane bubbles, but also to bombs and to how we can be unexpected and troublesome for the government and for the police. I’ve been in this project for about a year and before that, I was an activist at Fridays for Future.
How did you get involved with the Bombelki Collective?
I and a group of friends who also left Fridays for Future decided that the strategy of student marches wore out. It stopped working, the movement got weaker and we felt that the movement didn’t do what it was supposed to do anymore. We decided to establish our own group and felt like it was time to take up more radical tactics. We aim to politicise the climate, radicalise the discourse and also take more direct action. We are in an emergency situation that makes us do these kinds of things.
What kind of activities do you do?
We are a small group, so we don’t really have the mobilisation capacity to organise big blockades, sit-ins or strikes. We started off with small creative actions and disruptions. We would switch advertisements on bus stops or different places in town. We did guerilla projections, where we used a big projector and projected messages onto the most crowded places in Warsaw a few times. We organszed small blockades. We also see our role as a group that tries to coordinate other people in the movement, seeking to create alliances and train other people. We did a lot of work in making the climate movement focus more on gas. We raised awareness about the fact that gas is the problem as it is just rushing after phasing out of coal.
And it’s going to become an even bigger problem. We wish to establish connections with the labour movement and with the housing movement. And we’re trying to involve new people in the movement. We also see ourselves as a team that coordinates different struggles and tries to strategise about how the movement works in Poland.
Do you have a specific role in your group?
We are four people and all of us do everything. There’s always too much to do and not enough of us to do everything. So we just do whatever there is to do.
I have a tendency to take up certain roles. I’m a person who is not scared to make phone calls to strangers. So whenever we need to get something done, that involves calling someone, a journalist or whoever else I do that. I do a bit of media work.
Although I’m not sure I like it very much, I don’t mind doing it. It is needed if we want to represent what we fight for. So that is what I take up quite often. I also read a lot of theory. So do other members of the group. And apart from doing actions, we get really excited about different theories of how to make our strategy even better. Which gets quite frustrating, because we feel like we know more than we actually do. Our knowledge, our plans and our vision are more ambitious than what we are capable of doing. But we try as much as we can to do that. To organise our work so it is effective.
What is your motivation for this kind of activism?
I got into activism because when I was 14, I saw posts on Instagram talking about the climate crisis and that the planet is going to burn by 2030 and I got really scared and didn’t know what to do. So I obviously started drinking from bamboo straws and recycling trash and then I found out about Fridays for Future and joined that.
But right now, I just say that the climate crisis is caused by a tiny group of rich people who don’t care about the effects of their activities and are only focused on making a profit. So fossil fuel investors, people like Jeff Bezos and the leaders of the largest corporations in the world. This is just the result of the greed of those people. At the same time, it reveals all the inequalities in the world and how some people are denied access to the basic needs for life that would just provide them with a livable, affordable life.
And I see that the fight against the climate crisis is also just a fight for the things we all deserve.
And also a fight that would expropriate those evil people at some point.
And I don’t think I have much hope. I know that we’re going to pass most of the tipping points, that the temperatures are going to just keep getting hotter, and that we’re probably going to pass two degrees. But if the people are going to die, and are going to leave their homes, there are going to be more wars caused by that. But even if they still aren’t here, or while this is just starting to happen, we can expect that the social unrest will be great and there will be a big potential to stir up a revolt against the system. The situation will get worse and worse. And I just feel like we need to channel this anger into trying to bring at least a little bit of justice into this world.
What are you planning to do in the long term?
My collective has a vision of how the world should look like. And I believe we’re going to keep trying to get there together. But I wouldn’t be that attached to the form of a four-people collective, because it is just not sustainable. We won’t do it on our own and we probably need to transform into a mass movement.
What we need the most is to get as many people as we can on board, ready to take direct action against climate change and against those who are causing it. I want to be in this fight with the people in my collective because we understand what is happening and we are really concerned and ready to do something about it. It would be ideal to get as many people as we can into it.
How would you go about involving more diverse groups of people in the movement?
The climate movement has its own problems with diversity that come mainly from class backgrounds. We are all a group of middle-class young people who are concerned about the environment, mostly because of guilt from overconsumption. And so the language that we use and the tactics that we thought would be effective for a long time, are very specific, like educating people and degrowth and energy co-operatives and whatnot. I’m not saying that they are wrong, but they are the main focus. This just misses the main objective, which is combating climate change and creating a world for people that ensures a livable, affordable life free from climate catastrophe for everyone.
I believe that bigger class consciousness is what we need in the movement and a change of narrative from focusing on knowledge and lessening the impacts of our lifestyles to mobilising people to fight for a better life. This is the thing we were struggling with and so we are going to organise a cycle of workshops which are supposed to bring in people from the streets to do their action training and then to bring them into action. This is something new that we’re trying because we mainly brought people that we already knew into action and now we just really want to try to bring in these new people into the movement. Through leafleting, organising meetings and local community centres we will try to get more local people into the actions, different age groups and professions. In Poland, we have quite a homogeneous society. So I believe that the diversity that we’re looking for is mostly professional, income and age-based.
What are you most looking forward to in your activism?
I’m looking forward to carrying out the plans that we have, which I can’t reveal yet, because I want to surprise the authorities when we do them. But in a more abstract way, I can’t wait to stir up a lot of anger for a revolt in Poland. I know it’s going to happen at some point, and I just hope it happens for the reason that we all need it and not right-wing populism. And I’m really looking forward to a non-violent uprising of people who have had enough of being caught in the climate crisis.
If you could send a message out to these people that you would like to engage more, what would you tell them?
Come to a workshop, and get involved in the climate movement, because the climate is all that we have. Anyone can come. The evil people who work in the government and who own fossil fuel companies deserve to be overthrown.
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