My fear is that this sort of thing can be dangerous to the movement because it essentially operates as doublespeak, allowing folks to think that wearing something constitutes action, resistance, or revolution. It doesn’t. We already live in a world where marketers try to make buying potato chips seem “subversive,” “dangerous,” “radical,” and thus cool, when in fact these are nothing but the capitalist system taking the allure of revolutionaries and radicals and putting it into a product that can be bought. Similarly, when environmentalists do the same thing — package the allure of radicalism into do-nothing symbolic gestures, we create a frame that limits revolutionary possibilities. We shouldn’t make our framing conditions limit more radical actions by working with the same doublespeak of capitalists and politicians.

It’s fine to lasso folks into the No-Coal movement with soft gestures like wearing blue. Great. But don’t call it radical and don’t call it revolutionary because if wearing blue is “revolution” then we’ll never have an actual revolution.

Evan

Second, I agree (and have written about on this blog and been involved in) more direct action to take down King Coal. The big organizations need to hear this from students. Fossil Fools Day should make this stronger call to action clearer - but emails and phone calls don’t hurt either. Today, in San Francisco, youth are meeting with Earth Justice to talk with them about how to strengthen the fight against coal. If you want Earth Day or Architecture 2030 to do more, email them and tell them that. Call the organizers and say you can organize your campus or community to do a direct action if they provide you with resources and perhaps some funding.

It’ll take everything we’ve got to put the final nails in coal’s coffin. Boxing people out of the movement from the start doesn’t seem like the best move. Let them wear a blue-shirt at Earth Day. Who knows, in a few months maybe they’ll be wearing it at a sit-in next to you?

We must make clear to Congress is our demand to stop building polluting coal plants, and even clearer that if a politician doesn’t get with the program on this issue, their days in office are limited.