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"When this stuff gets in your blood, you feel like you should dedicate your life to it. And if you don’t… there’s always a part of me that feels like I’m a fraud and a part-timer, but I want to be a good parent, I want to be a good husband,” says UK based Jehangir Mark Engineer (better known by his second name Mark). He refers to being torn between his loyalties as a family man and as a local organizer for XR (Extinction Rebellion), launched in 2018, which started out using non-violent civil disobedience to compel government action to minimize global warming. 

But beginning last year XR announced they would no longer cause disruption by occupying roads and bridges, which had led to hostility from politicians, some sections of the general public and the media, most of which he says is owned by people with vested interests in the status quo. Mark considers this change in XR’s policy a good move knowing that "most people don’t want to get arrested. That doesn’t mean they’re not worried… or they wouldn’t want to do something.” For Mark, working in human relations in the higher education sector at the University College, London, his concerns about social and ecological collapse, biodiversity loss, and climate justice for those most affected by climate change are the driving force behind his activism and his writing. 

Mark’s activism was inspired by his father, Meher, who was involved in various social and environmental movements in India. Mark says of his scientist father, "He was quite rebellious… an eccentric outlier in the Parsi community.” Despite opposition from both the families he married Sue Norris, an English woman who had come visiting India. The couple moved to the US and then travelled to Malaysia, where Mark was born, before settling for a time in India where their daughter was born. When Mark was five or six, his parents decided to move to Hertfordshire, but his father couldn’t settle there and his mother refused to return to India, so eventually they separated. Initially Meher remained in London, visiting the children on weekends but returned to India when Mark was eight. He visited his children a couple of times while they were growing up and Mark went to India to visit him after university in 1998 and then again in 2008.

At the time of Mark’s 1998 visit, his father was a senior scientist at the Bose Institute in Calcutta where he subsequently became a director. When Mark revisited him 10 years later he had retired and was campaigning for human rights for Adivasis and the urban poor, and especially for women. He set up a school for poor children in Calcutta and became involved in environmental activism. Mark accompanied him on marches and volunteered with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Calcutta and some environmental NGOs in coastal areas. They spent some time with Medha Patkar, a high profile activist and founder member of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), and of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) which supported mass struggles against inequality, non-sustainability, displacement and injustice in the name of development. Meher subsequently served as chairperson of the All India Forum for the Right to Education (AIFRTE) which supports a free and compulsory state-funded national system of education. He was also a member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, the anti-Nuclear and Environment movements, and the Singur and Nandigram movements in West Bengal. "The guy just never stopped,” Mark mentions.

Mark says his experiences in India "sowed a seed, but I don’t think that seed really sprouted till my children came along.” When his son and daughter were born in 2014 and 2016, he started to think about what kind of future they were going to have and by the summer of 2018 he was really worried. His wife Sarah who works in human relations at Sussex University felt the same way. The couple began to wonder what to do. Could they start an activist movement themselves? It was a daunting thought. 

"I always feel that what I do is not real (as compared to)...what Dad and others did… I mean, there are environmental activists being killed all over the world. It’s awful. The courage it must take to do that… it’s quite amazing.”

Mark was in full support of XR’s major action which took place in April 2023. Over 60,000 people from 200 charities, NGOs and organizations like trade unions, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, took part in the four days of peaceful demonstrations, making it the biggest joint environmental protest in the UK after the 2019 climate strike. The idea was to try to gather a critical mass around Parliament. "No locks, no glue, no sitting down on roads, just something that people felt they could take part in and that was safe. And where they could make their voices heard,” Mark says. "Just a peaceful protest involving other high profile organizations and charities with shared interests. It was very successful in building bridges and alliances. We’ve talked for years about groups working together rather than in their own little bubble. It feels like this might be the start of it. We discussed the responsibilities of individuals, corporations and governments in the battle against climate change.”

When XR expanded to America they added a demand for a just transition that prioritized the most vulnerable communities affected by years of environmental injustice. Noticing the unreasonable demands now being made on poorer countries that are blamed for their consumption and for pollution, he cites the instance of China. "A lot of their emissions come from manufacturing stuff which we import, so effectively we’re outsourcing our emissions to China. Around two trillion dollars (nearly Rs 166 lakh crore) worth of resources a year are channelled from the global south to financial institutions in the global north. And if that’s not colonialism I don’t know what it is.”

 Mark believes we have been fed a myth by large organizations with vested interests that it’s down to the individual to solve the problem. He points out that the phrase "carbon footprint” was used by a public relations company in a campaign for British Petroleum, one of the largest oil and gas companies. This was done "with a view to shifting the responsibility for the climate emergency on to the individual, and making us feel like we have to make sacrifices to get our carbon footprint down while at the same time we’re being bombarded with ads about new cars and flying to Barbados for the weekend.” 

He maintains that what individuals can do, while useful, is limited. A transition to alternative energy, at a household level, involves new technology that most people can’t afford: solar panels, heat pumps, electric cars, which wouldn’t solve the problem anyway because those cars still come with an embedded carbon price and there are environmental implications for mining and transporting the rare earth materials for batteries. Explains Mark, "You don’t have to be a genius to work out that a constantly growing economy in a world where we’re already over-stretched on resources just doesn’t add up. So systemic change is what’s required. Without systemic change, we can all do whatever we are able to on an individual level and it won’t make any difference.”

Clash of cultures

Alongside his activism, Mark’s writing has always been important to him. 

His novel Desh, based in Calcutta of the 1960s, and yet to be published, draws on many themes from his own story: a mixed race marriage and the couple’s struggle to find a place where they can both belong. It’s a tale of "a clash of cultures, of the complex relationships and missed connections that exist between one-time colonizers and the ones they colonized, and of a family torn apart by ignorance, prejudice, mental illness and, ultimately, murder. Desh is a novel about searching for a home.” His second novel, also as yet unpublished, is a political one, a "state of the nation” novel about Britain. He is now enjoying working on a new comic novel.