Kumi Naidoo has been trying to create a better world for 45 years.

He began by fighting for education equality in his native South Africa as a teen and against the apartheid regime as a young adult. He helped rebuild civil society after the apartheid government fell in 1990, and dove into adult-literacy work to address “one of the worst legacies of apartheid.” He served as the executive director of Greenpeace International between 2009 and 2015, and he helped set up Africans Rising for Unity, Justice, Peace, and Dignity in 2017. He then spent two years as the secretary general of Amnesty International. Recently, he established the Riky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artivism to push for the use of art as an entry to activism, to support mental health among artists, and to honor his late son, musician Rikhado Makhado.

Today, he is the president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, a project of Earth Island Institute. The initiative is taking a new tack at the climate crisis by seeking a binding agreement to end the expansion of the oil, coal, and gas industry, phase out existing production, and equitably transition away from fossil fuels. The proposed treaty is meant to complement the Paris Agreement, which focuses on curbing emissions rather than fossil fuel production. As Naidoo puts it, “We would be foolish to ignore what Albert Einstein once said, The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results.”

Naidoo spoke with me in January, just after his 60^th birthday, about his journey to intersectional activism, why he rejects pessimism, and the need for creativity at this critical juncture in human history.

Can you tell me more about your path from human-rights focused activism into environmental and climate activism, and how you came to see your work in an interconnected way?

There was a national student uprising when I was 15 years old. It was focused on the inequality in the education system, the fact that the government was investing about 10 times what they were on an education of an African child on a White kid. And at the age of 15, one doesn’t understand too much, but we understood enough. The interesting thing is, sometimes the commitment of people gets consolidated as a result of disproportionate repression. I was expelled from school at the age of 15, and that almost cemented my activism.

Growing up in apartheid South Africa, environmental efforts were seen as what White people and rich people did. You know, we had the reality that most White people treated their animals better than they treated Black people. And to be honest, there weren’t that many of us in my early activism — with the exception of one of my best friend who was murdered by the apartheid regime, Lenny Naidu — who understood the intersection between environmental justice and racial justice. Most of us didn’t get it then.

When I was the volunteer chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty … I began to see more and more clearly that even advances that we were making to address certain elements of poverty [had an environmental dimension]. Say you did projects on the Bangladeshi coastline to address poverty, and the water table was becoming salty as a result of the sea coming closer and closer. So even if one didn’t want to think about the environment, the environment was forcing itself onto the agenda.

The journey, if I’m brutally honest, was a bit slow. I should have understood the urgency of climate change much earlier than I did.

When I started at Greenpeace, I had to do a lot of interviews with different country officers, because I was the first, and sadly, the last person from the Global South to lead Greenpeace. And the question everybody was asking me was, So you’ve been a human rights, gender equality, and development activist, and now you’re abandoning that for the environment? And I said, No. The struggle to address poverty, inequality, gender equity and so on, and the struggle to address environmental and climate justice can, must, and should be seen as two sides of the same coin. If anything, one of the weaknesses of Western activism was framing climate change as an environmental issue. That, I think history will record as a grievous error.

The journey, if I’m brutally honest, was a bit slow. I should have understood the urgency of climate change much earlier than I did.

You’re currently president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. What drew you to that work?

When I stepped down from Amnesty, I began to ask myself this question: Recognizing that our collective activism on climate, on poverty, on addressing inequality and so on, was winning battles but losing the war, and that we were not winning big enough or fast enough, what will it take for activism to win bigger and win faster?

And then I also had a personal tragedy where our son, who was a very prominent musician in South Africa, committed suicide in 2022 at the age of 34. The last face-to-face conversation he had with his mom and me, he basically said, You guys are not really good at what you do, because you have been fighting for human rights, democracy, and so on, from a very young age. And if I look at the world, everything’s going in the wrong direction right now. And when I asked, Why is it you think we’re failing? He said, You all think you can move people by aiming all your narratives and messages at the brain, and you ignore the heart, the body, and the soul.

At the time that he told me this, I had already started working on the question of bringing the worlds of arts, culture, and activism together. So we’ve been building this global artivism movement.

And within the fossil fuel treaty, they were beginning to see that if we are going to move people in the numbers that we need to [on climate change], we can’t rely on complicated scientific messaging on degrees and parts per million. [And we were] having a conversation about whether we could bring those two movements together. I was very tempted to do that, to be honest. But there was a problem, because most of the folks involved in the artivism movement, even though they all are very sensitive to climate justice, climate justice isn’t the starting point for all of them.

[When I was asked to join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative], it very much was for me that this is the most optimistic thing on the table right now. And my gut feeling about it before joining has been confirmed by the momentum that is building up on a daily basis. You know, new cities, new civil society organizations, some national governments, have endorsed it. So I said yes because I think this is the last hope we have of bringing urgency to reversing things.

Within the United Nations’ climate negotiating process, it has been hard to get buy-in from petrostates and to get past all the lobbying that happens there. How are you tackling those challenges with the fossil fuel treaty?

Assume for a moment that the burning of fossil fuels was not the cause of climate change. Even if it was not, does it make sense as a human species for us to build our entire energy system on three finite resources that will run out?

Those of us who are engaged in climate justice activism must ... be saying it cannot be activism as usual.

But given that it causes the devastations that we are seeing — the loss of life, loss of infrastructure, extreme weather events, which are spiking and becoming more frequent, more ferocious, more devastating — then we have to follow the root cause of the problem, which is fossil fuels. And we cannot do what we have been doing for so long, which is we go to climate negotiations, and the fossil fuel lobby is so strong that even the term “fossil fuels” only got mentioned for the first time two years ago in a climate negotiation. That’s like Alcoholics Anonymous holding two-week conferences for 30 years, and at the end of each of those conferences, they haven’t mentioned alcohol.

We have to recognize that we have to address the problem with the urgency that it constitutes. And just as you’re saying to government and business that it cannot be business as usual or government as usual, those of us who are engaged in climate justice activism must also be saying it cannot be activism as usual.

Could you share a bit more about your views on the power of art and other modes of communication to reach people and bring them into the movement at this critical juncture?

I was very inspired by one of the most brilliant people I’ve met in my life, Olafur Eliasson, who’s a friend and Icelandic artist. When I was head of Amnesty International, he invited me to come to Iceland for an event. And I said, What’s happening there? He said, We’re having a funeral. And I said, Oh, I’m sorry, who passed away? And he said, An iceberg. This was in September 2019. And on an early Saturday morning, Mary Robinson, the prime minister, and myself said a few words at the bottom of this dead iceberg. We climbed up the iceberg, and there was a plaque there that said something like: This is the first iceberg to die and disappear, and it’s never coming back, and humanity knows what we need to do. Let’s hope if you’re reading this now that we did what we needed.

What struck me was the impact that that event had. I would say it was more effective than 95 percent of the actions that happened under my leadership when I was at Greenpeace. And I reflected on Why was it? Why was there so much media pickup? Why were people crying on this dead iceberg?

And it’s because everybody understands loss, right? We weren’t telling them about degrees and parts per million and complicated scientific concepts. But we were saying, there was an iceberg that’s been with us for centuries and centuries, and as a result of burning fossil fuels, it’s gone, and it’s never coming back. And I think, you know, people could connect with that.

The climate movement has struggled with intersectionality, especially over how and to what extent to become involved with other issues, from the Black Lives Matter movement to the suffering in Palestine. I’d love to hear your perspective on the potential for greater intersectionality and solidarity.

I think one of the most powerful conceptual ideas we were given by the feminist movement decades ago was the idea of intersectionality, and we have ignored it at our own peril. People don’t live their lives as though one part of the body is about economic issues, and another part is about social issues, and another part of the body is worried about housing, and so on. People live integrated lives. And unless our activism can speak to everything in an interconnected way, we are never going to move people on the scale that we need to.

Over the last decade there’ve been significantly more efforts at forging intersectionality. It is happening. [But] it’s not happening on the scale that it needs to happen. And part of the problem is the whole architecture of the organizations that have evolved over time to address various issues. When you build these very calcified bureaucracies, it’s actually quite hard to get people to shift. And so there are some tough, tough calls we need to make.

You’ve mentioned the power of art, but is there anything else you’d like to add about how you think we get this bold action in the small window of time that we have?

There has to be an honest assessment of where we are. And where we are is a very scary place right now. So we have to look at a scale of popular mobilization that our planet has never seen before. Unless we have significantly more pressure, including civil disobedience, including artivism, including conventional approaches of lobbying and advocacy and so on, we don’t stand a chance to begin to reverse [climate change].

I don’t remember any moment in my history of activism where the appetite for structural and systemic change is as high as it is now.

We have to recognize that in this moment of history that we find ourselves in, pessimism is a luxury we simply cannot afford. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was one of my heroes from South Africa, used to always say he’s a prisoner of hope. And that’s what I’m saying to everybody who I interact with. We are in a deep crisis. But, if we tell ourselves, Oh my god, it’s so difficult, it’s too late, we don’t stand a chance to find the best creativity in ourselves to respond. And I refuse to accept that the world that we live in right now is the best that humanity can create for itself. Anybody who says this is the best has absolutely no ambition.

So thankfully, the moment we find ourselves in, even though it’s scary, there’s one optimistic reality that we face, and that is: I don’t remember any moment in my history of activism where the appetite for structural and systemic change is as high as it is now.

You’ve been doing this work for 45 years. It can be exhausting. The task is monumental. Where do you turn for renewal and joy?

Let me first say that I’m a very bad person to ask this question to, in the sense that I’ve suffered burnout multiple times over the years. [But] what I say to people when they ask me what advice I have for them, I say, Find your own inspiration. How do people enter activism? Sometimes it’s a book they read. Sometimes it’s a movie they see. Sometimes it’s something horrible that they’ve witnessed. Sometimes it’s a family member who inspires, or friend who inspires.

And here’s the thing: What is the struggle about? The struggle is not about saving the planet. Sometimes people say I’m controversial for saying this. I say, The planet does not need saving. Because if you continue on this trajectory that we are on with our addiction to fossil fuels … the end result is, we will be gone. The planet will still be here. And the good news for everybody who’s concerned about saving the planet is, once we become extinct as a species, the forests will recover, the oceans will replenish, and so on.

So we need to understand the struggle to avert catastrophic climate change is nothing more and nothing less than protecting our children and their children’s futures. And one thing that binds humanity, irrespective of religion, culture, language, region, continent, country, is that in every society around the world, we all value and hold our children as precious. We need to understand that we are renting this planet from our children.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.