It’s Getting Hot In Here

Where is the soul of a movement? What is the history of environmentalism? What do race and class have to do with it? What can one organization do to overcome past failures and start winning the big fights? These are some of the questions that we asked ourselves when the members of Energy Action Coalition decided to read “Soul of Environmentalism” in the summer of 2007. In the spring, the Council of Energy Action had voted to enact a new Anti-Oppression plan for the coalition that would help to educate staff and organizations about vital issues of discrimination, privilege, and injustice. The plan was also intended to serve as a catalyst for challenging the dynamics that have built an environmental movement that often puts men in management positions more often than women and generally lacks representation from low-income communities and communities of color. The core elements of this new Anti-Oppression plan were a 2-day summer training on anti-oppression for all coalition staff and the institution of one reading per semester focused on a topic related to anti-oppression or social justice that would be combined with facilitated discussions with the staff of each organization and anyone else who’d like to participate.

We chose “Soul of Environmentalism” as the first anti-oppression reading for Energy Action Coalition because it exposes the root of one of the key questions we seek to answer as a coalition - how do we change the paradigm of whiteness and privilege in the environmental community in order to build a more powerful and unified movement? “Soul of Environmentalism” was written in the Spring of 2005 by nine economic, environmental, and social policy leaders as a response to the essay, “Death of Environmentalism,” written by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus a few months earlier. If “Death” was a critique of the mainstream environmentalism in a post-global-warming world, “Soul” was an attempt to carve out solutions by uncovering environmentalism’s forgotten history and examining theories of transformative politics.

Sixty people read the 30-page essay and participated in facilitated discussions in Washington, DC, San Francisco, Concord, NH and Portland as well as two teleconference discussions in June and July. The discussions ranged from one to two hours long. Each facilitator was given a set of 11 questions to choose from as well as a set of community agreements to share with the group to ensure a safe, non-threatening and productive space for everyone involved. The intention of each discussion was to challenge people on a personal level to consider what the readings meant for their own life and their own work and to consider what the coalition and the youth movement can do to address the topics at hand.

After engaging in four of these discussions as a facilitator or a participant, re-reading “Soul of Environmentalism” and looking back at the key takeaways from each of the seven discussions I came away with three important lessons for our movement:

1 - Tell human stories.
2 - Get real about the history of this movement and challenge privilege.
3 - Start from your own soul perspective and invest in deep change solutions.

1 - Tell Human Stories
“Death of Environmentalism” was written in late 2004 by two communications specialists at a point when President Bush’s defiance of global warming science and environmental regulation was at its peak. The authors made the argument that since the sweeping wave of environmental laws were passed in the 1970’s, the following three decades have been mired in failure after failure for the environmental movement. One of the key points co-authors, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus make in the essay is that environmental groups have chosen to focus their story on facts and technical solutions like florescent light bulbs and hybrid cars rather than drawing the link between hurricanes and global warming and telling the naked truth about the state of the world. In the forward to “Death”, Peter Teague asks, “At what point have we become Pollyana fearing that we might be called Chicken Little?” A key point of their critique is that we shouldn’t be coddling the public, but rather telling it like it is and “closing the gap between the problems we know and the solutions we propose.”

“Soul of Environmentalism” takes this argument a step further. The authors argue in “Soul” that while mainstream environmentalism has been losing the big fights like cleaning up grandfathered power plants and raising fuel economy standards, the environmental justice movement has been winning small fights all over the country. Local groups with little funding, few connections, and little support from Washington environmental groups have been stopping incinerators and power plants, winning toxic clean ups, and protecting their communities from industry for decades. One of the biggest reasons for this success is that these communities are often easily able to gain broad public support by connecting the issue to the human stories that people face in their everyday lives. Talking about polar bears and caribou may work for getting a monthly donation from someone, but can it inspire people to make a real sacrifice and support difficult solutions? The co-authors of “Soul” argue that in order to win the big fights and bring about the hard changes we need to have in order to protect our communities from environmental disaster, we must tell the human stories that lie at the heart of our economic system of pollution and exploitation.

“These roots, these rules, and this soul together hold the key to environmentalism’s new life.” - Soul of Environmentalism.

If we are in denial about race and class we are affirming a social norm that is rooted in racism and classism. When we fail to bring race and class into the discussion, we may understand the surface of important problems but fail to see their roots. If we talk about air pollution and global warming resulting from coal-fired power plants, we also ought to talk about the generations of workers killed in coal-mines and the families whose property values have sunk and health has deteriorated because a mining company decided to make a deal with their town. To stop global warming and restore our environment we have to shift the balance of power away from extractive industries. To do that, we have to connect with people most intimately tied to these industries - namely the workers they rely upon and the communities they exploit to create their product. When we do that; when we expose the ruthless, ugly side of industry, we are getting at the root of their power. By telling these human stories, connecting to those at the front lines, and reminding everyone about the abundance of safe, clean, and just alternatives to the current system, we are engaging in the kind of transformative politics that can win the big fights.

2 - Get Real About the History of This Movement and Challenge Privilege
When I spoke to him in May, Michael Gelobter, one of the authors of Soul of Environmentalism, asked me the question, “how is climate not always a justice issue?” He said to look at the problem. Too much of something has been used by too few people, which has ruined it for everyone. In “Soul”, the authors argue that the environmental movement must confront the ways in which the United States has reserved open space for the exclusive use of whites. The reason this is so important a task for environmentalists, over and above other people, is because our movement has traditionally gained advances for white communities at the expense of people of color and the economically disadvantaged. Now we live in a country where the source of extraction and pollution has so often not been eliminated, but rather moved to the poorest and most politically powerless communities.

The history of environmentalism is rich with inspiring renegades who rejected the notion that nature was created to be exploited for human purposes and fought to defend wilderness and conserve resources. Unfortunately the national parks, environmental regulations, and precedents won since the mid 19th century have disproportionately benefited privileged white people over people of color and the poor. Today, according to the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, 65 percent of African Americans and 80 percent of Latinos live in 437 counties with substandard air quality in the United States compared to 57 percent of whites. People of color are almost three times more likely than whites to be hospitalized or die from asthma and other respiratory illnesses linked to air pollution. And if you think the damages to people of color in the United States from coal and gas power plants are disturbing, the impacts are nothing compared to the havoc we have caused to indigenous communities around the planet as a result of our oil addiction.

One has to wonder whether the clean energy revolution would have been held at bay for so long if companies had to locate industrial facilities in affluent white communities instead of poor communities of color. Now that global warming is upon us, it is more clear than ever how much of a stake we really have in the fates of the people being exploited by the status quo of energy production. In the face of this growing crisis we would be wise to acknowledge the privilege many of us have grown up with of avoiding the direct consequences of the energy we have used. If we do not acknowledge this is an unearned privilege, but rather treat it as simply the way things are across the board, we are likely to continue to think that we can erase the problem of carbon pollution by sweeping it off onto someone else’s backyard. When it comes to the climate, there really is no “away” to throw our trash.

3 - Start from your own soul perspective and invest in deep change solutions
A key point that the authors of “Soul” make in the essay is that while it may seem more prudent in the short term to tailor our message to funders, policy-makers and moderates in order to get a bill passed or finance a new campaign, if we fail to talk about the big picture and communicate our values and vision, we will continue to fail to bring about transformative change for the environment. Everyone looks at the world through a different lens. The members of Energy Action Coalition have a story to tell that goes deeper than getting signatures on a petition or fighting for organic food in a college cafeteria.

Energy Action Coalition was founded by a group of young people who believed that the environmental community is stronger when it works together than when it is divided. Preceding the founding of our coalition in 2004, there were at least a dozen national organizations organizing students for environmental campaigns on college and high school campuses in the U.S. and Canada. Most of these groups were targeting the same students at privileged liberal arts colleges and large universities in concentrated regions around the U.S. There was no overall strategy, alliances for events and unified actions were few and far between, and the organizations were competing for the same small amount of foundation funding every year (estimated at $400,000 - $1 million). Compounding the issue was the fact that many of the mainstream environmental “parent” organizations to these student networks directed the little staff time and resources available to traditional “green” issues like organic food, clearcutting, and saving the caribou in the Arctic at the expense of transformational environmental issues like environmental justice, eco-feminism, indigenous rights, and oil wars that were arguably more popular on campuses. While some groups did break from the mold with campaigns that crossed issue-lines, the mainstream of student environmentalism remained protracted, underfunded, and focused on narrow “green” framing.

By focusing on coalition-building over individualism, Energy Action Coalition has begun to strengthen the power and influence of the entire environmental community, primarily through the organizations involved in the network. Similarly, by focusing on the big-picture vision of empowering local communities impacted by mountain-top removal coal-mining to speak with their own voice about the jobs and industry they would like to see, the coalition can help the environmental community to win one of its biggest fights yet, replacing coal. However, if a deeper vision is compromised and perspectives of privilege and exploitation are forgotten, it is likely that the changes we see in the coalfields will be piecemeal or create new problems in the wake of the old.