[This is a guest post from Lewis and Clark College professor and Focus the Nation founder and project director, Eban Goodstein.]
Dear Friends of Focus the Nation,
Last week, we met with an inspiring Focus organizing team from Queen’s College. They are thinking very big: building a 1/31/08 Focus event in NYC large enough to engage the Presidential candidates in a serious discussion of clean energy solutions for America. This is clearly one of those times in history when people across the country—including the team at Queens—are setting aside their normal lives, and devoting themselves to changing the future.
Here is the civil rights analogy: 1955 was the Montgomery Bus Boycott; 1960, the Greensboro Sit-ins; 1963, the March on Washington. And then in 1964, the Civil Rights Act.
Katrina was the Montgomery moment for the global warming solutions movement. The hurricane brought global warming into America’s living rooms, highlighted human vulnerability, and framed global warming as an overarching issue of social justice.
The faith community and student leaders gave us our Greensboro, with their national showings of Inconvenient Truth, at thousands of locations across the country.
And now we need to get from 1960 to 1964 in sixteen months. That is how long we have to build an educated and mobilized public powerful enough to put a serious clean energy agenda at the forefront of American political dialogue in 2008.
American social movements culminate in national legislation that fundamentally changes the direction of the country. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. We need—in 2009—a Climate Act strong enough to do the job.
While in New York, we spoke with a research scientist who works in Antarctica . He reiterated Jim Hansen’s point: we are likely very close to crossing an emissions threshold that could lock in partial if not total collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
Here is what you can do to change that future. Over the next month, commit to getting five people who care about global warming —colleagues, friends, faith leaders, community leaders—involved in Focus the Nation. (www.focusthenation.org) Ask them out for coffee, tell them that this is a critical time in human history, and get them engaged.
You can also help with dollars, if you are able. Visit Donate today, and donate $500, or $200, or $30 to Focus the Nation. If we can raise $10,000 in donations soon, we can hire a full time organizer for the next few critical months, working to recruit more and more and more people—from America’s high schools, and colleges, from the faith community and civic organizations—to join Focus the Nation.
Unlike our civil rights forbears, no one is threatening us with dogs or firehoses, or beatings or bombings as we work to organize a nation. But our commitment needs to rise to that level. We have a year to change the future.
Thanks for the work you are doing.
Eban Goodstein, Project Director
Chungin Chung, Communications Director
Focus Phone-In! Join us for a half-an-hour conference call to share information and respond to questions. March 7th, at 9 am Pacific Time. Calls will be the first and third Wednesday of every month, at that time, so mark your calendars! Call in to 1-641-297-5333, passcode 36287. And also don’t forget our organizing conference at UN Las Vegas, April 6th and 7th, with keynote speaker David Orr.
It’s really quite a pity to be looking at the board not looking at the city. Coal has tainted our environment, chapping the caps if you will. Ironically, enough of it has settled in the upper stratosphere to deter the suns beams. Perhaps for lack of data in mapping plate tectonics, with carbon dating showing an intricate dance between CO2 levels, temperature, and sea level. According to the MIT nerds( http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/ ) issue on energy (Nov, 2006), they say there’s still hope, if heavy reforms are implemented, but the amount of CO2 has increased 32 percent in 150 years an act that typically take 20,000 years, and has taken us to uncharted territory regarding our home planet. I look forward to calling in.
Don’t let George here get you guys down. He’s the pathetic one.
gotta say friends, this constant likening of our efforts to the civil rights movement bugs me. i feel like we need a little more self awareness here. coordinated showings of an inconvenient truth are hardly a parallel action to the lunch counter sit-ins that Eban is referring to.
on that same note, and i’ve said this before – yes global warming does pretty much mean the end of the world as we know it if it’s not fixed, but it’s arrogant and disrespectful to contsantly proclaim this as “the greatest issue of our generation.” to my friends in the coalfields, the MTR mine above their home remains the most urgent issue of their day-to-day, or that the union got busted and now the bread-winner of the household doesn’t have a medical plan but does have black-lung, or that they can’t drink the water. they can’t. it’s poisonous from the coal sludge disposal. they can’t drink it. but they have to bath in it and wash with it and all. their children are regularly exposed to toxic material right now, today, tomorrow, yesterday and i’m somehow able to define what the most urgent issue of our time is? again, let’s just pursue a little more self-awareness.
i have a lot of thoughts on this that i can’t seem to articualte right now but hopefully this has made somebody think about the whole thing.
willie
Willie,
You make a compelling point that there are still many other issues more immediately pressing for many folks around the world. As you say, your friends in the coal fields have more pressing environmental and personal health threats to address, and we should not ignore or begrudge them those concerns. It’s important not to forget these struggles and to aid our friends and fellow human beings whenever possible.
However, the scale and scope of global climate change is such that I think it is appropriate to call it “the greatest issue of our generation.” While many people still face more pressing day-to-day struggles, these challenges do not have the global nature that makes climate change an animal of a different character.
Climate change is an emblematic problem of a global nature: it is a clear symptom of a way of life that has ignored the scale of humanity’s cumulative effects on the global environment, on it’s delicate systems, and on future generations. It is not only a pressing threat that may, as you say it, “pretty much mean the end of the world as we know it if it’s not fixed,” but also an opportunity for our generation to stride forward into a sustainable future.
The kind of changes in thinking and lifestyle that will be necessary to address and mitigate the threat of climate change are also an opportunity to not only address this issue, but also to address many other environmental and justice issues that plague our planet. Many issues, including those that may be more pressing for local communities, like the pollution and health effects of coal mining, are the result of a flawed mindset that human beings can mine resources from the planet, process them, and dump their waste back into the environment – and do so on an exponentially increasing scale – without having serious detrimental effects both locally and globally to the planet and ourselves.
We must change our thinking, change ‘business-as-usual’, and begin to operate in a manner that is more consistent with environmental systems. There is no ‘waste’ in nature. Everything is a closed loop, with one process’ waste being the raw materials for another process. We must begin to model our production and industry on these natural systems and transition to a sustainable future.
The threat of climate change presents an opportunity to begin this shift and in so doing, address many other environmental issues. It will be both a tremendous challenge and an incredible opportunity. If we, as a generation, take up this challenge with all our effort and strive to move forward into a sustainable future, I truly believe that we will have accomplished something great.
There are two very different futures out there for us: one quite bleak, and another in which we have put ourselves on a path to a sustainable future. The way we choose to tackle the challenge of climate change will to a large degree determine which future we will end up with. And for that reason, I don’t think it is inappropriate to characterize global climate change as ‘the greatest challenge, and opportunity, of our generation.‘
Cheers,
Jesse
my condolences willie. systems that require blood are not good systems.
is 9 am over there 6 am est? i miss the west coast warmth.
salaam/shalom
In any social movement there will be parallels to other movements and we can both learn from and improve our work by thinking and talking about these parallels. But comparisons demand caution and respect for the integrity and the sacrifice of other movements both past and present. We might do better to think about how a global warming movement ‘connects’ with other social movements, rather than try to ‘compare’ them. By exploring those ‘connections’ we open up possibilities for a broader and more powerful movement, by ‘comparing’ we risk closing doors and limiting our potential to create change.
Well said Arthur. A very good distinction and a level of nuance we should heed in our discussions of social movements. Thanks for the insight.
word y’all. very good points, very well articulated. i don’t even really disagree with that climate change is the greatest issue of our generation as jesse articulated. i just feel that self-awarenss is key. and i feel that if we consider all the issues that we’ve been discussing here, i feel that folks will generally just choose to drop such lines a bit less. but word to jesse and word to arthur. y’all are smart great people and your points and sentiments (and actions) are right on.
ben i don’t really understand. and what’s this about east coast west coast? i’m from the south-frickin-east!
w
I’m not speaking for Eban here, but what I think he was trying to get at by drawing comparisons or exploring connections between the current ‘climate solutions movement’ and the civil rights movement of the past was not to say that ‘the two are the same’ but rather to communicate a sense of the monumental task that we have before us, as a movement.
We must progress to the point of the passage of a comprehensive piece of public policy designed to address the problem of climate change in a few short years, and this task is sufficiently analogous to the civil rights movement’s efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act that we may learn from exploring connections between our movement and the civil rights movement and other past social movements. It would be foolish to assume that the social movements of the past have no lessons to offer us, just as it would be foolish to assume that our movements will follow the exact same course.
As I said before, Arthur does a good job of articulating the nuance and difference between a limiting comparison of social movements as “the same” and an empowering, motivation and enlightening exploration of the connections between current and past movements.
Thanks to Willie and Arthur for a great discussion here! Self-awareness is truly key. May we learn from the past as we become more self-aware of our current position, strength and task as a social movement!
was curious when that aforementioned call line would be open est (i forget if they are 2 or 3 hours before eastern standard time) but nm i guess i can look that up
nm. freakin bodies of water