It’s Getting Hot In Here

This is a great essay written by the incredibly dedicated climate activist - Ted Glick. Many readers have likely heard of his ongoing fast for the climate and amazing organizing - and this is his latest.

Thanks Ted, for all you do!

-Matt

100 Days and 3 Arrests

by Ted Glick

I was reminded about why I began this fast 100 days ago when I read a column last night about midnight by my good friend Ross Gelbspan, Beyond the Point of No Return . It was very sobering, at its root a heart-felt cry by this great man, this hero of our generation, for the world, for those of us who know what is going on, to face up to the truth about climate change. In Ross’ words:

“The truth is that we may already be witnessing the early stages of runaway climate change in the melting of the Arctic, the increase in storm intensity, the accelerating extinctions of species, and the prolonged nature of recurring droughts.”

After a brilliant and incisive, no-punches-pulled elaboration of the evidence for this assessment and the implications of it, Ross’ conclusion about what this means for human society is right on target:

“To keep ourselves afloat, we need to change the economic and political structures that determine how we behave. In this case, we need to elevate the ethic of cooperation over the deeply ingrained reflex of competition. We need to elevate our biological similarities over our geographical differences. We need, in the face of this oncoming onslaught, to reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations.”

I was talking with another hero of the climate movement, Mike Tidwell, two days ago and I said to Mike that as I saw it there were two major obstacles in the way of our turning around our desperate reality. One is the power of the oil and coal industries in the U.S. and internationally. The other is the need, as Ross writes, for us as a movement, for us as a nation and a world, to move beyond the competitive, money-and-power-first bottom line of the dominant culture to one in which collaboration and working-well-with-others is the cultural attribute most practiced, most upheld as the personal and societal objective to strive for.

These 100 days of not eating on this soon-to-end fast have only deepened this understanding and this personal commitment on my own part to do everything I can each day to help us get to this point.

And I’ve re-learned something else on this fast. It’s that you become more human, more alive, a more positive human being when you are willing to risk something for what you believe.

On this fast I’ve risked damage to my health. I’ve also risked spending long hours in jail by my participation in three acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, yesterday being the latest when Jane Califf, my wife, and I were arrested in the office of Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell while demanding that Republican Senators support the inclusion of renewable energy in the energy bill currently being negotiated. The other two were on September 27th, at the U.S. State Department protesting the Bush administration’s sham climate conference of the world’s major carbon polluting nations, and on October 22nd up on Capitol Hill as part of the first No War No Warming action.

I sometimes wonder why more climate activists, and activists within other progressive movements, aren’t getting arrested. I know that many of us are deeply troubled by what we see happening to the earth’s ecosystem. I know that many of us work hard in our own ways to bring about change. But it’s just a relative handful, a paltry percentage of our movement, really, who have been willing to participate in nonviolent direct action over the last couple of years. My guess is that there can’t be more than a few hundred people at most who have done so over that period of time.

Maybe it’s the influence of an environmental movement culture whose base historically has been overwhelmingly not just white and middle-class but white and upper-middle- and upper-class. For the young people who have come into the movement in just the last few years–and there are thankfully a huge number of them–maybe it’s the fact that there continue to be a growing number of victories on college campuses to get schools to institutionally commit to switching over to clean energy, or the fact that since Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the climate issue has become a major “in issue” within the media and culture. Maybe this is giving those young people, on the one hand, a sense of hope in the possibilities of change, which is a good thing, but also almost a false misunderstanding about the limitations of those positive developments given the great urgency of the crisis.

Maybe conditions just haven’t ripened enough yet to the point where there’s the kind of explosive upsurge that, all of a sudden, makes revolutionary change seem very real, very possible. History shows, without a doubt, that sooner or later these kind of qualitative leaps forward do happen.

Maybe 2008 will be the year that this upsurge happens. In these last few days, however many more it turns out to be, of this climate emergency fast, I pray with all my heart that it will be so.

(More information on the fast and the energy bill struggle can be found at www.climateemergency.org)