It’s Getting Hot In Here

@UNFCCC #COP15 #FAIL. You could have tweeted it before any arriving delegates strolled from their jets to their waiting limos. All that sign waving (and wow was there a lot of it!) inspired millions waving their own banners at home, but the windowless plenary wasn’t paying attention. A significant number of anarchists got beat up and gave the mainstream media their cover story. In the end we observed a handful of rich countries smoking cigars in a backroom, playing dice with human life. The UN, of course, did “take note.” So did we, and clearly we’re not clicking any “Like” buttons on this one.

What are we going to do? Shout louder? Damn straight. Sign 365 new petitions before COP16? Hell yes. Consolidate our resources into the most powerful lobbying organization in the world? YE… um, what?

Not kidding. There are limits to non-violence. We’ve reached them. It’s time to enter the ring, line the gloves with brass knuckles and bloody the opposition. I mean that figuratively. Put the brass knuckles down.

In concrete terms, we must, right now, consolidate our movement, enlist the best of the best lobbyists, persuade middle-America into a sustainability frenzy and get ourselves elected to local government where we can be most effective. Our united campaign must start immediately. We’ve got until the elections next November.

That’s the general vision. Details after the jump.

The Pragmatic Lobby
When Tom Daschle exited congress, he didn’t even take a day off. He carried his nameplate to a new mahogany desk, pivoted and returned to congress to rub elbows with his old colleagues. The guy worked for us one day, for the health-care industry the next.

Some of you see Mr. Daschle as scummy. You’re probably right. But he’s effective. We need to be as effective.

Hiring lobbyists may be horribly unprincipled, but if no one’s alive in 200 years, ethics won’t be all that important.

We needn’t lobby unethically, nor manipulate scientific data or even use alarmist rhetoric — we merely need more powerful, connected lobbyists petitioning politicians for us. Refusing to get our hands dirty now will mean a lot of blood later.

There’s support for the idea of professionally lobbying our federal and state governments.

A recent Rolling Stone article applied this reasoning to finance reform:

… actual people are not really part of the calculus when it comes to finance reform. According to those close to the markup process, Frank’s committee inserted loopholes under pressure from “constituents” — by which they mean anyone “who can afford a lobbyist,” says Michael Greenberger, the former head of trading at the CFTC under Clinton.

We need to be constituents who can afford lobbyists. How can we raise that kind of money? I want to discuss this in a later post, but briefly, we can raise that kind of money by imitating the organizing model of the Christian church: expand the constituency, distribute the costs and offer products and services in return for donations.

The Pragmatic Marketers
An expanding constituency provides a firm base for fundraising, and it provides another asset: word-of-mouth marketing. The past few years of internet activity showed that individuals are not only the greatest source of content, but they’re also the fastest way to spread cheers or jeers for a product or idea.

But there’s an inherent weakness in social-network based marketing: social-networks preach to the choir. So while social-networking will let us reach out to people with similar vision (and thus mobilize a large mass), we must use alternative channels to reach middle-America and the opposition.

Churches are experts at this, and we can use their model of evangelists and missionaries — in fact the sustainability movement has relied on this model for years, but we need to redouble such efforts and augment them by persuading outliers and moderates that our cause is their cause.

There are benefits to joining us. We offer a great reward: an inclusive community, where all are welcome. Further, we can offer a salvation of sorts — however temporal it may be — from rising seas, economic instability, starvation, water poisoning, etc.

However, we face the urgency of seas that are rising NOW, fisheries and aquifers that are exhausted NOW. How can we quickly attract the support of Tea Partiers, West Virginia coal miners, the Religious Right and the rest of Rush Limbaugh’s Republicans?

The answer: the same way BP or Exxon does.

There’s an article on the DailyKos that explains this concept in-depth, but here’s the punchline:

We must persuade. We need marketing campaigns that makes anyone who doesn’t Green up look unfuckable, that makes living sustainably as desirable as Cribs makes Escalades.

We must persuade skeptics in the Religious Right that humans sustainably stewarding the earth isn’t human hubris. In fact, caring for our resources is less arrogant than exploiting them.

We must persuade moderate Christians — a base arguably larger than the Religious Right — to take up this cause as passionately as they have argued against abortion.

This persuasion is entirely ethical, because it’s true. Living sustainably actually is sexy, healthy and fulfilling. Living well and simply, forming communities that eradicate loneliness, is perhaps the highest calling of humans, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut. Raising the quality of life for all without sacrificing a single life to rising seas or poisoned water is Humane, possible and profitable.

What we’re proposing and fighting for is win-win-win-win-win, only the Right makes it sound like we’re the Sheriff of Nottingham, and makes itself Robin Hood. It’s time for our movement to write its own biography.

As our movement portrays itself accurately, our constituency will swell, and we’ll afford our campaign. In the meantime, the campaign can be crowdfunded entirely democratically, in the method of Threadless, Kickstarter and Kiva. The grasshoppers may have handfuls of greasy cash, but the ants have a few dollars each, and we are billions.

A [Green] New World
Further, marketing is more than TV-spots and Facebook ads. We do need citizen-reporting and snazzy ad campaigns. However, we also need visionary writers, producers and musicians to ditch the dystopian trend of the past century and write, film and sing an image of the future we can all pine for in that lull before we fall asleep.

I’m talking about the most exquisite, non-dystopian sci-fi ever written. We must give the world a vision of what the earth could look like if we got on our horse and rode towards sustainable efficiency.

A world where class-conflict is unnecessary, where Africa is not the podium for our pity because it can feed itself, where the oceans teem with life, where we ride on bullet trains from our backyard gardens to vibrant jungles, where we are friends with our neighbors, where we work 30 hours a week and take month-long holidays, where no one mentions “sustainability” as an abstract concept, because we live it concretely, unconsciously, without special effort.

We must translate the vision we see, the possibility we understand, and the dangers and obstacles that impede our progress from Newspeak to common language so the vision can be spread by every tongue, regardless of race, gender, orientation, religion or philosophy.

Further, since there are already success stories, we need to broadcast those widely, to establish the feasibility of our vision.

The Jewish faith and Kabbalah calls this process “tikkun olam”: the perfecting of the earth. It’s something every human wants, but wonders how to achieve. It’s our role to conceive the goal, discern the process and explain it to the world.

And who are we? We are any one who believes in justice, the rights of humans and the sustainable persistence of life on earth.

The Pragmatic Candidates
And now to get pragmatic. On top of lobbying the federal governments, reaching out to our opponents and the undecided, and presenting a message of hope to the world, we must also act as members of our governments, to execute the vision, to substantiate it on earth, from dream to reality.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, housing developers run around like bunnies on crack reproducing the same lame housing developments — paving paradise, Joni Mitchell once said.

Click to read the rest

It’s heart-rending to watch the hordes of dozers and woodchoppers setting up shop. They can scrape twenty acres in a day. All those hundred-acre woods, converted to five-car garages. I once saw a development where residents used lawn ornaments to tell their homes apart.

You can tell the reapers are coming because new signs appear on the off ramps. “Golden Glen — Homes starting in the low $200′s.” The signs are the flags of a coming army, one which will scar the foothills of Mt. Rainier, and the battle is unwinnable once begun. You’ve got to stop the saws before they start.

For years I shook my fist at the loggers’ trucks. Then my neighboring city acted substantially: they put a moratorium on developments like these.

The City Council voted and just like that, no more permits issued, no more trees felled, no more cookie-cutter houses as phantom echoes of American Dreams.

There’s something in that: cities (and counties/townships) are mini-hegemonies. Cities don’t need to draft legislation, run it through multiple committees, debate it endlessly among 100 or 435 people, revise and adapt, and then redact it into a single Bill. City Councils vote and that’s it. You can vote them out if you don’t like it.

And we can vote ourselves in.

Imagine if cities and counties across the country were counciled by pragmatic youth, the Pragmatic Party. We’d guide the development of our hometowns to ensure equality and sustainability. We’d be able to give small-businesses equal opportunity to compete with large businesses. We could make speeding tickets proportional to income. We could reform our school boards to educate students soundly, instead of teaching to the test and kissing up to No Child Left Behind.

We could modernize communications between residents and civil government, making city councils accessible to all voices. We could cut the fat out of our cities to remove unnecessary tax burdens. We could develop smart power grids that use energy efficiently by localizing demand. We could improve aesthetics, improve the quality of daily life, protect the environment and do it all with a mind to the future, and not merely current budgets and re-election. We could be the change we wish to see, finally.

Here’s to a Pragmatic Party, rising from a pragmatic movement, a tsunami of pragmatic citizens changing the social and political landscape by out-lobbying, out-advertising, out-voting and recruiting our opponents — human barriers who act only for themselves, and not as we act, for humanity.