b'THE REST OF US STORIESHow do you navigate apredominantly white discourse as a person of colour?Submitted for the third-year optional module Wild PerformancesThis is the question Ive been asking myself upon encountering environmentalism. I will be drawing on my own lived experience, as a South Asian British Woman as an attempt to assert autonomy in a field where people of colour are under-represented and cast out. Integrating the personal, situate[s] people within power relations, and [lets] people speak for themselves [by] connecting to the larger structures (Erdmans 2007: 7-14) which I will do in hope of better understanding my position of discomfort.Environmentalismisamovementconcernedwithprotectingthe environment and is rooted in Romanticism- an intellectual and artistic movement in the late 18th century (Oosthoek 2015). Heise describes them to have the same story template that: modern society has degraded a natural world that used to be beautiful, harmonious, and self-sustaining (2016:7) with an increasingly mechanised society, humans need to reconnect with nature in order to save it. Upon first encountering Romantic ideas, a lot of my own thoughts on nature aligned with theirs. However, in realising this discourse to be dominated by white men (Pearce 2019), I felt ostracised from these ideas; echoing the disengagement ofAfricanAmericanswithenvironmentalismbeingfurthercomplicatedby resistance to ideas seen as white in an effort to construct a black identity (Finney 2014: 3-4).This underpins the broader issue of Whiteness, as a way of knowing [and] understanding our environment (Finney 2014: 3), and what that does to POC. My discomfort compelled me to further investigate this.I was intrigued by the image of nature that Romantics were so enticed byandhowthisformedawhitewashedlandscapewhichbecameintegralto Britishness. When we, the British, think of saving nature, the image that comes to most minds is one of serene landscapes such as the Lake District: green rolling hills, trees, water, light. Deluca and Demo argue that this fixation on preserving pristine places is indicative of a narrow, class- and race- based perspective of what counts as nature [that] leads the environmental movement to neglect people andtheplacestheyinhabit,consequentlybecomingvulnerabletocharges of elitism and misanthropism (2001: 542) which I will later discuss in relation toenvironmentalactivistgroup,ExtinctionRebellion(XR).First,wemust acknowledge this assessment of what nature we value enough to save and how societys value systems are tied up in whiteness, which then permeates through the language with which we talk about landscapes. Reflecting on my trip to Dawlish Warren Nature Reserve: what stood out to me was the extent of human intervention going into maintaining a desirable image of nature.This image is embedded 14'