MayDay Rooms holds one of the largest and most significant archival collections of Britain’s ecological movement. Eco-Action: Global Ecology not Global Economy is a 2-year project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, established to preserve, digitise and activate this material. The project will catalogue the collection; build an open-access online repository of the material under a Creative Commons license; conduct in-depth research into the collection; create guides and mapping connections between our collection and other archives; and incorporate oral histories and community-sourced content into an online resource. As part of the project, we are running a year-long youth engagement programme centred on histories of the ecological movement, research techniques and archival and digitisation methods.
Our collection documents national and international grassroots ecological movements from the 1960s to 2000s, holding in total over 3,000 items, including contributions from prominent groups such as Earth First, People’s Global Action, Friends of the Earth, Climate Action, and smaller grassroots organisations connected to anti-roads movements, camps for climate action, anti-trespass protests, farmers’ associations, anti-nuclear networks, and animal rights campaigns. The materials – chiefly produced by UK-based organisations – include reports, zines, flyers, press clippings, pamphlets, posters, journals, and magazines – capturing the ecological movement’s creativity, heterogeneity, and evolution from single-issue activism to systemic critiques of the global economy’s role in environmental degradation. The collection documents cooperation between the Global South and North, fostering cross-border dialogues, direct actions and campaigns.
In working to catalogue this material, we are asking how the collection may be engaged with to inform present environmental struggles. If you are involved in contemporary eco-action, please reach out and arrange a visit to access our collections.
Help us build our Eco-Action archive at MayDay Rooms!
Do you have any material relating to ecological direct action campaigns or the broader environmental movement? This could be anything from the 1960’s to the present day. If so, we’d love to hear from you.
We are collecting posters, pamphlets, reports, journals, press clippings, photography, audiovisual material, zines, flyers, manuals, tactical guides, and more! This material will be digitised and made accessible as an online resource.If the back of your closet, beneath your bed, or your garden shed is filled with eco-activist materials, please contact us at in-formation@maydayrooms.org.
