Twilight West Virginia, Kent England, Hay Point Australia, Richmond California, Wise Virginia…. the lists go on and the names are many. Former VP Al Gore has challenged us, climatologist James Hansen has joined us and now all over the world people are taking direct action at the point of climate destruction.
Mark Engler has written a new article which is now making the rounds on Grist, TomDispatch, Mother Jones and elsewhere talking about the rise of the “Climate Disobedience” movement and it’s comparison to the global justice movement that culminated in Seattle ten years ago.
As someone who cut their organizing teeth in those days, what really fascinates me about the history is how disparate issues and activists were merged into a “movement of movements” to take on seemingly all-powerful transnational institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and IMF/World Bank and made such progress that the WTO is almost dead and the IMF/World Bank is severely weakened. (So much that the “Shock of Victory” through the movement into a bit of a tailspin.)
“Before Seattle, localized activity by global justice advocates had similarly swelled—with a wave of student anti-sweatshop drives, environmental boot camps, organic food gatherings, corporate ad spoofs, indigenous rights battles, and cross-border labor campaigns already simmering. Seattle united these into a recognized “movement of movements” more potent than the sum of its parts.“
I travel and work with local activists working on climate and fossil fuel campaigns across the country. Bits and pieces are beginning to come together and form a larger movement of movements around climate change and climate justice.
Right now, I’m organizing a mass action with a large diverse coalition (known as the Mobilization for Climate Justice-West) this weekend at Chevron’s oil refinery in Richmond California which includes a climate disobedience component.
This is the first action in a series of actions aimed at flexing some climate movement muscle at the talks in Copenhagen. This is an important series of battles because much is riding on what comes out of those talks.
On a final note I want to say that I have hope because last year I worked with a group of activists that took direct action at a coal plant construction site in southwest Virginia and yesterday that plant’s construction was halted after years of hard campaign work by many in the local community and from afar.
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