Launched in 2017 against European fossil gas industry, the Gastivists Collective ended their activities in 2026 with a goodbye note to allies and friends. This was a time that the argument against coal was being won in Europe but this victory was coupled with the false propaganda of gas as a green alternative, locking in fossil fuels into several decades to come.

The Gastivists Collective (www.gastivists.org) was a small team of motivated people, active in a variety of climate and oppression-related struggles in several different countries. While opposition to gas infrastructure was their starting point, the struggles they were involved in intersected with issues like militarisation, land rights, geopolitical conflicts and energy democracy. These intersecting struggles informed their work and goals.

Gastivists weaved struggles transnationally and transversally. They produced resources, gatherings and trainings. They maintained their creativity, nurturing vision-oriented creativity and situating their agency at the movement level.

They agreed to get their goodbye letter published here. We wanted to have it as an application article of All In because 

– we wanted it to be accessible to the networks we reached out to,

– many of the lessons they draw can be applied to other networks and other back-end organizations working on any topic, and

– they are describing an evolutionary process of the collective which we can copy (as attitude, not as specific practice) to avoid rigidifying into our organizational DNAs in changing contexts.

Goodbye, Gastivists

Dear allies and friends,

It’s time for us to let you know that the Gastivists collective, as you know it, will close in March 2026. Or how we prefer to look at it: the Gastivists collective is transforming in ways that fit our members best, while the Gastivists name will be left behind.

We reached this decision a couple of months ago, and some of you may already know. For us it is sad and welcome at the same time. We want to thank you for being part of our journey, for supporting us all these years and being part of our legacy that we hope will continue to serve the movement in these turbulent times.

Some of us will continue to work together on initiatives that were brought to life by the Gastivists collective (see below), and we encourage you to stay in contact with them. We see these initiatives as plants grown from the seeds that Gastivists nurtured.

But firstly: We wouldn’t be the Gastivists you know and love if we didn’t share our learnings, and what led us to this decision.

OUR LEARNINGS 

Learning 1: We tried to contain too much under the “Gastivists” banner, and lost focus.

We were trying to hold tight to one story that says everything all at once while each of us individually were pulling in different directions (in very different contexts) until we found that we lacked enough cohesion to stay together. This also meant a lot of pressure on each one of us to hold urgency and complexity within our own contexts.

We have been struggling internally since our priorities moved away from a specific focus on fighting fossil gas specifically, to a more nuanced and complex approach towards energy transition, militarisation and growth of authoritarianism.

At the same time, we also struggled individually with the challenges of life under capitalism and imperialism (broadly speaking). Nuance and complexity was not an issue in themselves, but we found ourselves led towards many diverse workplans in the last year. These workplans neither focused enough on gas to deserve the name of “Gas”tivists, nor did they easily fit under a unifying theory of change.

Learning 2: We spread ourselves too thin

We worked over the years in a few local contexts (Poland, Romania, Italy, Greece, Spain etc.), a few regions (East Mediterranean, CEE, Balkans, Western Europe), and by the nature of our collective, that work was always held by 1 or 2 people at a time. Despite our best equipped members to network in their contexts, grow a movement (see bombelki in Poland, or the environmental movement in Greece), or bring the nuances of the local perspectives into a European wide context, we’ve learned that this format was not sustainable in the long run. Even less so when the war in Ukraine started or thegenocide of the Palestinian people was unfolding before our eyes. We did try and at times managed to be important actors for many of these crises. Your solidarity also showed that to us many times.

Learning 3: We struggled with staying ‘fundable’ without compromising our values

Our priorities started to be less aligned with funders’ priorities, and in a tough funding landscape, our opportunities are shrinking. We asked ourselves: are the Gastivists in the position to still be financed, and twist their narratives in order to be so, or are the Gastivists in the position to address the most urgent topics we have to face, like liberation of Palestinian people or fighting against increased militarisation? Should we, this exact group of people, stay together to respond to these challenges?

We want to make space for other initiatives and groups of people who are better suited to these challenges, and we don’t see this as a failure. We recognised that what once worked under this format, doesn’t work any more, and forcing it further might do more harm than good.

Learning 4: We struggled balancing ‘internal care,’ impact, and accountability

We created a caring work environment unlike any we’d experienced before (we’ll share our policies 😉), and we truly loved that. It was both a privilege and a creative challenge to put care at the centre of everything we did — to offer sick days, paid resting days, ensure salary equity across countries, and design internal policies that reflected our values of solidarity and justice.

And most importantly, part of this care culture was that we prioritized people over productivity, particularly in times of crisis. When some of us were in burn out or contexts of war, family crisis or personal breakdowns, our work was even less put first. We didn’t impose productivity in absolute terms, but built resilience through unconditional support. We each have our own learnings and conclusions about how this approach served us, and how it didn’t serve us at times.

We had issues with accountability, and we struggled when we realized we didn’t have a structure for it to be held. By the nature of our care culture it felt hard at times to keep people accountable. We had questions like: Where do you draw the line between supporting people through hardship and letting them go—especially when the world is burning, and that very reality is central to the group’s purpose? But if your own world is indeed burning should you be fired? Which world is prioritised?

Which burn is prioritised? Can you put a boundary to how much recovery time each is allowed?

While we enjoyed a creative anti-capitalistic flexibility that allowed our work to flow in such unexpected places and thrive, giving the name of Gastivists be associated with this cool creative approach to climate justice, we also felt that flexibility backfiring at us.

Lesson 5: No regrets 🤘

Nevertheless, we do believe that the strength of our movement is the strength of our relationships. We built connections with people that will not end with the Gastivists name and we know for sure that these relations will bring the change we fight for. We’ve learnt that building relationships with time, patience and trust created more amazing projects with longer-lasting effects. We’ve all seen past collectives that seem to just disappear when things don’t work anymore. Or we hear gossip about their internal affairs or we stop seeing their projects as relevant. That’s not the end we want for what we created together. We are intentionally closing the Gastivists Collective as you know it, so that we can bring it to an end on our own terms, aligned until the last moment with our values. That our connections matter and how we tell our stories matter, so we all grow.

We hope this is a fail-further, as so nicely worded by Mariana Rodrigues and Sinan Eden in their book All in: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse:

“We suggest that each successful revolutionary movement failed forward: learning from previous experience, they took new risks, explored new terrains and made brand new mistakes. Currently we need to learn from the mistakes already made, so we can do new ones. So, we need to share our failures publicly, we need to draw lessons from them and propose new avenues to explore. All this knowledge needs to be shared inside the movement, so that we can grow.

We are taught to believe that the opposite of failure is success. The proposal of this book is that the opposite of failure is conformism and alienation.”“Now, in a state of climate emergency, we need to take risks – a lot of them: political, strategic, organizational, tactical, personal and emotional risks. We cannot afford to lose everything without having really risked to win. We need to fail forward, we need to be intentional and attentive in our failures.”

all-in.now 🙂

And now, looking forward:

THE NEW INITIATIVES

Some members of our collective will continue to work together in the field of climate and energy justice and you might already be aware of some of their projects. But here we are: the Gastivists Collective splits in these beautiful and creative directions. In the following months we will be announcing more about these projects that were born from Gastivists and will hopefully continue to carry the Gastivists spirit forward.

RADISH RADIO

On 25 April 2025, along with our comrades at the Artivist Network, we launched Radish Radio, the online community radio station from the movement, for the movement. Music is world-building, and Radish Radio is a creative and future-building space, where people might come for the DJ sets and stay for the political content. By building a more truly democratic communication infrastructure for our movements, and deepening collaborations and relationships with and between frontline communities and grassroots collectives, we want to counter some of the polarising, reductive and divisive influences of social media, and foster meaningful connection and dialogue among and between our movements. Long-form audio is a powerful medium – that’s why the far right invests so much in podcasters and influencers. We think that investing in this medium is essential for reclaiming the online audio space and building power.

Our small team of dedicated Radishes have big plans for Radish Radio. Want to be part of it? Contact them at hello@radishradio.org

Know a cool podcast or wanna make one? Take a look at our guides to audio gathering or podcasting, read our rolebook, or get in touch at hello@radishradio.org.

Please follow us on Instagram (@radish.radio), listen live here, or listen again on SoundCloud.

ENERGY FUTURES

In recent years, Gastivists have been actively researching the inequalities within the energy transition. We’ve highlighted issues that are rarely addressed in mainstream climate spaces – from mining for renewable energy and industrial-scale deployment of renewables to the conflicts these processes create. Following this, we have opened up an uncomfortable, yet essential, conversation on the need to drastically reduce our energy demand, rather than promoting the endless growth of green energy. This is the issue we aim to tackle through our next phase of work. We’re looking for new voices and diverse perspectives, and we’d love for anyone interested to get involved in shaping this upcoming campaign. Interested? Get in touch with Zivile at zivile@gastivists.org or Ermi at ermi@gastivists.org

GREEK AND BALKAN COMMON NETWORK

For the last five years the Gastivists members in Greece have been working in campaigns against fossil fuels, for climate justice and a just energy transition. We supported grassroots and local movements, by providing information, sharing knowledge and supporting capacity building on topics such as the expansion of LNG infrastructure, fossil fuels extractions etc. Along with local activists, we initiated the Climate Justice Camp in Greece. The Camp assembly actually consists of an autonomous space, where activists and movements from all over Greece can connect and support each other and in 2026 the 5th edition of the camp will be organised. If you would like to find out more or get involved contact Manoli or Ermi at: manouil.savvakis@gmail.com, e.frezouli@gmail.com.

Meanwhile something exciting is growing in the Balkans. In 2024, a coalition of activists from the Balkan region and beyond initiated the Balkan Common Network. The network’s goal is to interconnect the various movements and grassroots active in the region, bringing climate justice, energy transition, militarisation and oppression issues in the agenda of the different struggles. The second gathering of the network will be held in Skopje (N. Macedonia) in March 2025. Don’t hesitate to contact the coordination group at balkancommonsnetwork@riseup.net.

UNTIL MARCH 

We would love to hear from you. Is there any feedback, good memories, fun projects you want to share with us? Send us your thoughts. And to be honest, we would love to hear what our allies think of our work after all these years.

We gathered here a list of resources we want to leave behind for the movement to use. Please share them anytime with your allies, use them as you see fit. We really hope that this offering is something the movement can benefit from as long as possible. You can find there templates we used, internal policies, zines and videos on content work we did. Likewise, our website gastivists.org will be up for the next 5 years so we don’t feel our work is completely vanishing.

Besides this material resourceful library, part of our more intangible legacy is the way we were working. That, we hope, was something felt through our relationship with you and the way we conducted our projects, the way we implemented our vision and values. We can share nevertheless, the documents that best describe this (who we are, our vision and values), but we know that this might live only in our shared memories.

And lastly, we want to mention that few of us are also undertaking different paths (but as we know they are all linked). So if you are into:

• Veganism, contact Nawi at naw.ciborska@gmail.com
• Conflict transformation workshops, contact Mari’s new collective on their fresh new website Platibus.be
• Feminist self-defense workshops for women and queers (and how to work with men that are using violence) contact Ani at aniclujro@gmail.com
• Radical climate podcast, listen and support The Last Fireflies, follow them here

 

Some of us are looking for jobs too! Do get in touch 🙂

Is there anything else you think we should do before we close?

Thank you again for staying all the way with us and see you soon along the road. Until we win, a luta continua!

—

Solidarity forever,

Ani, Bu, Zivile, Nawojka, Manolis, Mari, Ermi, and Lucy The Gastivists Collective