Teryn Norris just wrote an excellent post that I would like to echo.
Teryn writes,
It is high time for global warming activists to leave behind their focus on the “planetary crisis” and the regulatory-centered agenda, and embrace an energetic and inspiring vision that captures people’s minds, hearts and votes….
A powerful climate movement — one capable of capturing the public imagination, defining new political identities and fully unleashing our economy — should put forth an even stronger vision of American greatness than the neoconservatives once offered. It must tap the optimism and can-do spirit embedded in our nation’s history that has driven us to overcome the daunting crises of the past.
…
The opportunity for such a resounding vision couldn’t be greater. The failure of the Iraq War and the collapse of the Bush presidency have left the American public hungry for an inspiring message that gives us new direction. Redefining American greatness around our inventiveness can unite us behind a common purpose, invigorating us to unleash our forces of innovation.
Today the climate movement faces a choice. As it begins to emerge from the margins of the national debate, it can revitalize itself to become potent and expansive, or it can continue to define itself by an old-fashioned activism. Whether the movement will fully seize the moment is uncertain. But one thing is clear: Young people must begin advancing a new politics if we are to overcome this challenge and achieve a more secure and prosperous future.
I strongly agree with Teryn’s sentiment. We must recognize that in rising to the climate challenge, the politics of protest will be insufficient - critical to the cause, yet entirely insufficient.
We must not only protest what we do not want - no coal, no new fossil fuel infrastructure, no risky nukes - or cry out about what we want to avoid - the climate crisis, a global warming apocalypse, mass species extinction, biblical weather events, etc. These prohibitions and motivating nightmare future scenarios will help guide our solutions to the climate crisis, but they are insufficient to the task on their own.
We need more than just a frightening vision of the world we wish to avoid. Al Gore has done us a service in painting that picture and spreading the nightmare vision. We know we don’t want to let climate change run amok and descend into a global warming apocalypse. But we need more than that.
We need more than nightmares. We need dreams!
What we need is a compelling vision of where we want to go, the future we wish to inhabit.
Many of us caught a glimpse of that compelling future at Power Shift 2007 last weekend. Van Jones has a vision of that future. Green for All has a vision. Many of us young people have a vision.
It’s a vision of a sustainable, just, and prosperous future; an America - and indeed a world - unshackled from the chains of fossil fuel dependence, with an economy both prosperous and truly sustainable, re-invigorated by the creation of a booming green economy, and full of new pathways out of poverty and into the middle class, opportunities for all to live the American dream.
It is this vision that will ultimately form the backbone of the broad-based movement that will - that must - form to rise to the climate challenge and make that compelling vision a reality.
Friedman and Gore are both certainly wrong - we need to be more than just loud protesters and we need to do much more than simply encircle bulldozers. We need to be visionaries, innovators, thought leaders, and pioneers.
As Richard Graves wrote in response to Friedman’s op ed, to build a bright new future, we need to use our brains, not just our bodies.
Richard writes (check out the full post if you haven’t read it):
Friedman wants us to hit the streets, Gore wants us to encircle bulldozers. Sure, done that. Will, do more. But they value us for our passion, our bodies, our commitment. But they don’t value us for our ideas, our minds. That just makes us feel like exploited dates. The diversity of solutions launched by the Campus Climate Challenge, by our efforts to challenge the rest of society to act by building carbon neutral campuses and a clean energy economy, is awe inspiring.
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A word of caution, Big NGOs, talking heads, and others will want us to protest, to act, to support their ideas [Jesse: sound like anything you heard this weekend at Power Shift? From certain members of Congress or national green groups perhaps]. But policies like Cap and Auction or even a Big Federal Investment in Clean Energy RnD, while they have tremendous value, leave the job of innovation, launching the projects, ideas, businesses, and community efforts, to others. They want to light the spark of creative imagination, but they don’t always value those who have already lit it and and are showing it to the world.
Hold your head up high, whether you take an internship or a job where you aren’t valued because you are young, learn as much as you can but remember you can build a brilliant future, with the power of your ideas.”
So what’s your vision of a sustainable, just, and prosperous future? Time to start dreaming and visioning. Our futures depend on it.
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I will follow up on Jesse’s words with a reprint of my post to Teryn’s article on Alternet:
It is understandable to find that enthusiasm - at least for some - smacks of naivete. But even false ideals are poorly corrected by rejoinders of utter opposition: simple negativity. Or ‘realism’.
Let’s get a few things straight. Politics is process. It begins without coordination, it threatens entrenched political interest and practice, and it prevails only if it has that unconditional merit that escapes summary - or prophecy - in the words of one writer.
There is reason to be enthusiastic, because young people like Teryn and myself are expressly avoiding the polar pitfalls of unqualified advocacy and outlaw political positioning. These, we understand, are by themselves quite useless. The territory of engagement, not just with those of our age group, but with those who have behind them a resume of political and personal experience, is what we understand as process. It is not didactic. It does not swear upon imminant victory or solicit those who are MERELY able and willing, without first acknowledging the potential that each of us has, and what might be possible were we to combine this potential. Finally it is not literary or made for the blogs - which rather connect at a distance the various threads of political activism that do something more substantial than read, smirk, and complain about a faithless free market that, along with the government in fact, produced the very hardware and software that gives us all this voicing and publicity. Those too were people - not ‘government’ and ‘free market’, as some stranded categorical souls of the twentieth century will insist upon making these distinctions for political purposes/orientation, rather than separate them for the very simple fact that there are two spheres that jostle, bargain, entrench, leverage, but within the law, can do nothing about an offspring of challengers who possess a vision.
And it is not a vision that can be borne out according to the mock-clarity of dreams and aspirations alone. This becomes apparent with something so simple as recognition and humility: there are more than one or two or two million-PLUS pairs of eyes and personal histories in this world.
The “climate disaster” can make no sense and provide no value to young people like myself and Teryn. That is because it is doom, and we don’t want to mature for the sake of doom. As Jesse has said, what we oppose - those ‘material conditions of production’ (I smile) that have in part produced this political problem in the first place - we will continue to oppose. Vision is about more than identification and repitition of problems. It is about apprehending one’s own political, personal, social potential and integrity. These are not identities but qualities of life.
Nor can flat criticism of the neoconservative movement - the whole movement reinvigorated and enjoined from disparate parts by the Reagan polity - be worth a damn either. That is the stuff of private conversation and towering editorial force. At times it is appropriate. In fact it is needed. But Teryn and I did not vote for George W. Bush. We were in junior and senior high school. Finally, we are not going to be exclusive in our appeals for help, expertise, companionship, and common ground.
Let us fall flat if we are going to fall flat. We don’t believe we will because there is simply too much to be gained by trying to move ahead with the vision we are dimly, now more brightly charting.
This is exactly what we need: to begin visioning. I’ve been advocating for the elimination of “greenhouse gas targets” in our movement. What we really want is a world without more warming, where people can have a predictable climate and a fair shot at prospering. That’s the just world we need to envision. Let’s fight for what we envision, not for what some people are telling us. Who knows whether 80% by 2050 or even climate neutrality by 2030 is enough? Our goal should be make sure that we prevent further warming. We need to figure out how to stop further warming by bringing CO2 levels down. This is not impossible. We need “to unleash our economy,” like you point out very nicely. I love this point:
“It calls upon us to innovate, politically and economically, at an unprecedented scale. Our politics must be retooled, not only to achieve immediate policy changes but to create new and lasting political majorities. And instead of constraining our economy, we need to unleash it, driving our engineers, scientists and manufacturers to hone their skills and knowledge, and put these forces to work toward building the next energy economy.”
Please, please, please! Let’s get everybody in this movement to understand this well. At least our leaders should get this point and start messaging in this way. Thanks so much!
Thank you (all) for highlighting the importance of a vision.
I work for an organization, Our Task (www.ourtask.org) whose vision is “to create a world characterized by a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and the Earth”. To be more specific about our vision, and to hear what young people say about their vision, we worked with several hundred young people to create a vision of the world they would like to inherit. (http://www.ourtask.org/Pub_files/YouthEarthVision5.pdf) From their input, we created a survey that allows young people to rank their hopes and fears for the future and tell us how they would prioritize strategies for achieving their vision. If you have 20 minutes to spare, please contribute your vision to our poll and give us feedback. http://www.ourtask.org/poll/opinionpoll.asp.