Hilary Farey is many things: a retired GP, a mother of three, a grandma, a practising Roman Catholic. Now another possible descriptor looms: convict.
The 64-year-old, who lives in Bristol, is due to appear in court next year after being arrested while taking part in a Just Stop Oil climate protest on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 2023.
She is part of a growing movement of older women playing a vocal and visible role in climate activism globally.
Last year, four Swiss women, the so-called “Swiss grannies”, won their case at the European Court of Human Rights after claiming Switzerland’s efforts to tackle climate change were “woefully inadequate” and put them at risk.
In the UK, older women such as Gaie Delap, a retired teacher in her 70s, and Theresa Norton, a former Labour councillor in her late 60s, have been jailed for non-violent climate protests.
Dana Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University, said that until recently men and women were typically involved in the climate movement in similar numbers. But, “at this point we really do see more leadership from women”.
Many of the women she refers to are older. Fisher said the people most likely to engage in “radical tactics” are at stage of life “where they have the freedom to get arrested and the freedom that their jobs aren’t going to fire them”.
Or as Gail Bradbrook, the 53-year-old co-founder of climate group Extinction Rebellion (XR), puts it: “We [older women] have zero fucks left to give.”
Society has disempowered older women and often views them suspiciously, she says, and this comes at a time when “our oestrogen levels drop” alongside “our willingness and capacity to keep the peace”.
Many older women also feel a “fierce protection for life” that is “not going to be silenced easily”.
Partially in jest, she calls the rise in activism among women who are older, neurodivergent or “feel connected to the earth”, the “return of the witches”. “They are the women who would have been burnt as witches.”
While women are more likely to take part in non-confrontational climate actions, according to research, the XR campaigns that emerged six years ago were dominated by female activists — many of whom had little prior experience of protest.
Farey took part in XR’s first “uprising” in April 2019. But her route to activism started at a young age when she appeared in the media alongside her siblings after her GP mother, Iris Tempowski, took a stand against the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception.
Later Farey got involved in anti-poverty campaigning often linked to her Catholic faith. The Pope’s 2015 missive — where he called for urgent action to save the planet from environmental ruin — was a “big wake-up call”.
She describes carrying out the “six-week checks”, the routine health examinations of young babies, and thinking “what does their future hold for them?”.
Still, she took a more cautious approach to climate activism until she retired in 2021. “As a working GP, I didn’t really want to do anything that was arrestable . . . Maybe I retired a bit earlier as part of my wanting to do more for the climate.”
In November 2023, she was arrested and charged under the newly introduced offence of interference with key national infrastructure, which carries a maximum sentence of 12 months imprisonment, for taking part in a so-called slow march on Waterloo Bridge.
“I have been a very, very law-abiding citizen forever . . . I’m a very honest person and I never thought I could be in prison,” she says.
Valerie Brown, a 73-year-old grandmother of 12, went to see the XR protests in 2019, although she did not initially take part. She came to “knowing about climate change very late”, citing watching documentaries such as Before the Flood alongside her grandson as awakening an interest.
She started taking part in direct actions as she struggled with the juxtaposition of the government declaring a climate emergency as it supported the expansion of Heathrow airport.
Brown, who was born in Ghana and moved to the UK aged 10, has since been acquitted at three separate trials for three different protests, including over the breaking of windows at HSBC’s headquarters in Canary Wharf.
“We are the generation that grew up with an ideal and vision of love and peace. We rebelled, we protested, we believed that the world needed to change, and we did great things,” she says about her younger years.
Now, that generation is protesting again. “We have to do something for our children and grandchildren. We’ve woken up and it’s our duty.”
Ali Rowe, a 50-year-old psychiatric nurse and child and adolescent mental health specialist, was accused of breaking windows at JPMorgan in 2022 — the protest took place just days before the UK registered its hottest day on record. She faces a retrial after a jury failed to reach a verdict last year.
Rowe sees the climate emergency as a health emergency. “If we don’t have the health of the nation, what do we have? If it is so hot that people can’t work, it is not going to grow the economy,” she says.
Protest is just one of the tools the women are using. Brown ran in the London mayoral elections to try to raise awareness of global warming, among other issues. Farey has turned to the law, taking legal action against companies over their green claims. She is also part of the Climate Choir, a peaceful protest movement.
Rowe has helped organise briefings for MPs and peers on the science and health impact of a warming world. She also works as campaign director for Lawyers Are Responsible, a group of climate-focused legal professionals.
But the women argue that protest is necessary because governments, businesses and society have been too slow to act.
Last year was the hottest on record, with the world on course for a temperature rise of about 2.9C above the pre-industrial level by 2100, which scientists say would have far-reaching, devastating effects on the planet.
But direct action protests are unpopular, causing disruption on roads and at sporting events, key landmarks and institutions. Research led by the University of Bristol found that while about eight in 10 Britons believed climate change to be important, more than two-thirds disapproved of Just Stop Oil.
Farey says she “hates” the impact protests can have. “I can understand why people’s hearts would sink as they approached a blockage. It is horrible. But look at the distribution caused by the floods in Valencia . . . or the fires in Los Angeles.
“The disruption we are hoping to try and prevent is on a scale completely beyond any disruption we might cause.”