With the end of 2010 approaching, one thing’s clearer to me than anything else: we climate activists still have our work cut out for us. Now seems like a good time to talk about something I’ve put a lot of thought into lately: namely, how those of us in the United States are going to build the type of mass movement really needed to avert a climate catastrophe.
The US youth climate movement has done amazing things these past few years. Under a government system less beholden to big corporations, I truly think our efforts would have been enough to transform the economy. But the fact is we live in a country where corporations hold more sway over politics than in probably any other major world power. As a result 2010 was in many (though certainly not all) ways a disappointing year. So what’s next for our movement?
Mainly, I think we need to grow bigger. To do that we need to think bigger. I agree with Bill McKibben that for the next couple years climate activists need to focus on movement building. We’re unlikely to see a federal climate bill until at least 2013—and then only if President Obama and a healthy number of Democrats in Congress win the 2012 election. But when we have a chance at passing such a bill, our movement needs to be much, much larger. Only then will a climate bill be able to not only make it through the US Senate, but actually do so in a form strong enough to do some good.
On that note, below the fold are a few of things I think the US movement must consider moving forward:
• It’s time to grow our numbers. Up to this point climate rallies in the US have consisted of dozens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of people—and while this is a great start, it isn’t enough. I have conflicting feelings about focusing on mass rallies: after all there are lots of other components to a successful movement, and a mass gathering of bodies won’t always be the best tactic for winning every campaign. Yet I’ve come to believe strategic gatherings of thousands of people are needed to drive our point home to policymakers. From ten or twelve thousand gathered in DC, we must expand to be able to rally hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in cities across the US.
• We must involve more non-youth activists. So far the grassroots US climate movement has been largely youth-driven, and I believe it will to remain so for some time. However while many of our best organizers are young people, we must do everything possible to include others in this struggle. If Congress and state legislatures see the climate as an issue only young people care about, we simply aren’t going to win. In planning our strategy for the next couple years, we must find ways to build intergenerational partnerships with older activists already engaged in fighting the fossil fuel industries, and seek to include non-students in everything we do.
• Finally, we must build our movement at the regional level with an eye to the national. If the next two years are about movement building, and we’re unlikely to have major federal legislation to rally around, we’ll need to focus on regional victories. There are many advantages to this: regional decision-makers are often less beholden to corporations than their federal counterparts. At the same time every regional victory we win will make national success more likely. The more coal plants are on their way to being shut down by 2013, the weaker King Coal will be and the more easily we can make our case for clean energy. A regional focus is also necessary to show how broad-based our movement is. It’s one thing to gather thousands of individuals in Washington, DC. It’s another to rally a hundred thousand people in each of ten major cities across the US.
In short we should focus on the regional level for the next couple of years, growing our movement to include many more people until in 2013—assuming a good outcome from the 2012 elections—we’re ready to mobilize hundreds of thousands in support of a federal climate policy.
There are at least three regions in the US where I believe the kind of movement we need is already taking shape. One is the Pacific Northwest where my own organizing is based, where youth activists are coordinating with groups like the Sierra Club to shut down our region’s coal plants, prevent the Northwest becoming a fossil fuel export/import zone, and greatly increase the numbers of people involved in energy struggles. Similarly in New England, Students for a Just and Stable Future are organizing to close coal plants near their Northeastern schools. Finally in California, a remarkable student coalition helped soundly defeat the oil company-backed Prop 23, setting a precedent organizers across the country would do well to strive to meet.
Other regional movements I haven’t heard about probably exist already—we certainly will need many more to be truly successful. The job ahead of us is to think big, expand what we’re doing, and include thousands more people in our efforts. From involving hundreds of people at a time in regional energy campaigns, our movement must grow to include thousands and then hundreds of thousands. If we’re to reach this goal by 2013, weeks, months, and years of work remain.
I’ll be spending the next several months working with others to build a movement to eliminate fossil fuels from the Pacific Northwest. At the same time I hope to increase communication with people in other parts of the country who are working on similar issues there, and find ways we can learn from each other and simultaneously grow stronger. The prize of a carbon neutral future won’t be easy to reach, but I’m going to do everything I can to get there. How about you?
Thanks for this offering, Nick.
We definitely need to think bigger, increase in numbers and diversify – both in terms of age as you mention, but also in terms of race and socio-economic privilege. On the diversification point I think it’s more a matter of deepening connections to work already being done in affected communities than of organizing them into ‘our’ movement (not that you said it that way).
The thing that I think is missing from all the movement-building and big picture discussions I’m overhearing is the idea of sacrifice. What are we in the U.S. willing to sacrifice to win the necessary changes?
I ask in the context of speedily encroaching climate and environmental disasters that are already devastating many parts of the globe. If we understand that extremely powerful interests are more than willing to kill and allow millions to die for their short term profits, we are kidding ourselves to think that we can stop them with only a commitment to work for justice. We will need struggle and sacrifice to achieve it.
No great movement has ever been built or made gains without great sacrifice, be it of a mere lack of comfort and expenditure of energy, or by risking freedom and serving real jail time.
I do not suggest we all go do anything rash. We need strategy and appropriate organizing memes, campaigns and tactics for times and out challenges. But we do need to question ourselves. If we aren’t willing to think big and risk big for this cause, we’ll never stop those who will literally stop at nothing to make a buck – even destroying the planet and its people.
Thanks Nick.
One question that I’m wrestling with at the moment is – what does ‘movement building’ really mean? How do we ‘do’ it? I think it’s a term that is often thrown around too easily and misunderstood by many.
I can tell by your article that you understand the term deeply, but would love to hear some examples of the tactics that you are using to ‘build’ a movement. HOW do you get more people involved? What do we need to do between now and getting 1 million people in the streets?
For me, to ‘build’ a movement means three internal elements, parallel to the external campaigning work that movements do. *Expanding* it (getting more people involved – eg forums with different groups, easy/first-action opportunities for new activists, outreach, education), *Celebrating* and sustaining it (parties, solidarity and support, days of action/celebration, creating the ‘feeling’ of a movement), and also *Strengthening* it (strengthening relationships between people and groups, and undertaking solid training to build activist skills and commitment).
“Movement building” will not succeed unless that movement has an element around which people can genuinely rally. In the case of climate catastrophe, it’s already an uphill battle against corporate mis/disinformation.
With that in mind, it needs to be acknowledged, organized and rallied around for what it is: a HUMAN RIGHTS issue. Abstract issues don’t attract people. All framing research suggests that people have to have an emotional nucleus upon which to build the intellectual arguments. It’s the same with climate catastrophe.
As an example, let’s discuss the issue in which I’m passionately involved: mountaintop removal coal extraction. It’s a horror. A genuine Appalachian environmental holocaust. But we’ve learned that the environmental ramifications of it don’t engage people away from the actual destruction. What engages is the fact that communities are being destroyed and people from all walks of life are being poisoned and killed. That’s not abstract or esoteric.
Taken together, climate catastrophe MUST be tied to its human costs. Note that resistance to climate legislation HAS been tied to human issues (spurious claims like “prices will go up,” “jobs will be lost,” etc.) and they had success. We, too, must show human impacts. Given the energy youung people can bring to the issue, we should be able to really build momentum.
Thanks everyone for the comments so far! I really appreciate you weighing in on the discussion, and I’ll do my best to respond to some of the great points raised above.
James, I think you bring up an important point about sacrifice. In trying to make our movement seem “fun” and “hip” (legitimate and important goals that can help draw in the new people we need) I sometimes worry we lose sight of the true urgency and seriousness of what’s going on. Since we do need to draw in new people without scaring them away, I’m not exactly sure what the solution here is. Probably it’s a matter of striking the right balance. I think you’re absolutely right that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the forces we’re up against; as you point out, the fossil fuel corporations are already killing real people and communities.
Anna, I’m glad you brought up the definition of movement building, since it’s something I neglected to include in my post. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert, but to me movement building means growing the numbers or commitment of people who are engaged in the fight against fossil fuels and willing to take action. I think successful movement building depends on forging trust and interpersonal relationships between movement participants: and since that’s difficult to do at a national level, a lot of our movement building will happen regionally. My own work in the Northwest focuses on engaging people (mainly students) in regional fossil fuel campaigns. Last school year I started working on this particular project with a committed group of organizers, and we got ten schools in Oregon to take a specific action that gave students a voice in the debate around the Boardman Coal Plant. This fall, again working with other great organizers in the region, I’ve been able to engage students at about fifteen schools in the Northwest to some degree or another. This spring I’ll be working to again slightly increase the number of schools involved, while more deeply engaging students at campuses where we have existing contacts. I think the key thing about movement building is it isn’t going to happen overnight. If our goal is to rally a million people, we need to start with a thousand, use the personal connections forged during that process to expand to ten thousand, and keep on going from there. That’s why making the best possible use of the next couple years is so important.
Finally Bob, you also make a very good point about the need to put a human face on what’s happening to the world around us. Those of us working in the Northwest have learned that though many of us are concerned first and foremost about global warming, it’s often more effective to talk to people about the immediate health impacts of fossil fuel pollution in their communities. There does seem to be something about a planetary crisis that ironically is a little too abstract to always make a good message.
Hi again Nick.
You said “engaging people in regional fossil fuel campaigns” and “we got ten schools in Oregon to take a specific action that gave students a voice in the debate”. I’m really interested in drawing out the details here – what does ‘engaging people’ mean. I see a lot of words about ‘movement building’ all over the global climate movement’s literature, but few stories sharing how it is currently being done.
What did the ‘engaged people’ do? How did they engage? What was the specific action that they did? How did the students get a voice in the debate? Where they heard? Are they now acting and organizing independently of the initial organizer (i.e. you), or are they still seeking leadership/guidance?
And to Bob’s point – amen brother. The key thing to recognise is that different communities (and different individuals) are motivated by different things – for some, global humanitarian concerns are very ‘real’, for others, its the sulphur dioxide emissions from the coal plant across the highway that is destroying the vegetation in their backyard. For others, it’s polar bears and whales and fluffy cute animals. Or energy independence. Or care for future generations. Or jobs. And for still others, it’s economic or social injustice. I don’t think there is one single ‘motivator’ that will find resonance with everyone – we have to use many messages, for many audiences, and help them to recognise their solidarity and cooperation with groups who share the same goals, even if those goals are motivated by different underlying concerns.
Anna, the “specific action” I referred to students at ten schools in Oregon taking last school year was persuading their student governments to pass a resolution in favor of closing the Boardman Coal Plant by 2014. I’ve got a post about this statewide project at http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2010/06/01/in-oregon-student-governments-call-for-a-future-beyond-coal/ – basically, we used this initiative to start getting students involved in the hope it would demonstrate widespread support for moving beyond coal while eventually leading to other things at the participating campuses. So far it seems to be working for many of the schools that participated: student groups there now feel invested in the issue, and in late spring and fall many turned out to testify at public hearings on the Boardman Plant. I don’t think this would have happened if a small group of organizers from the Cascade Climate Network, Sierra Student Coalition, and OSPIRG hadn’t first gotten students engaged through the resolution project. Now many of the students who helped pass resolutions are taking the initiative themselves and are the ones figuring out how to get more people on their campuses involved.
Yet I’ll be the first to admit we have a long way to go in the Northwest. Passing resolutions was just a start, turning students out to hearings was another step, and we still have lots of work to do. So far thanks partly to student efforts, state regulators have decided to close the Boardman Plant no later than 2020, while admitting it may need to close earlier and leaving open the pathway to do so. We’ll continue pushing to get an earlier closure date set in stone, and our chances of success increase as each tactic we employ engages more people who then feel invested to continue working on the issue.
Glad to see this discussion.
In terms of framing, I think Bob and Anna make excellent points. People will identify with the issue that most acutely impacts them. Some have the privilege of choosing our issue, while oppressed people have their issues thrust upon them. As organizers, it is our job to listen to the people we intend to organize and organize those people to address their common issues. As AnnaK says, those issues will be different depending on whether you are close to a coal plant, strip mine, gas well, or live in a county ravaged by prescription drug abuse. The common thread through any issue an organizer will work on is building community power, or for a quick and dirty definition – the capacity of the community in which they organize to address problems and work towards solutions.
I like the focus on regional organizing, I think that is key towards building a strong grassroots movement that can mitigate climate change and transition our economy. However, the idea of these regional movements converging with a goal of federal climate legislation I think will again be a misdirection of our movements’ energies. This last round of climate policy battling was tremendously well funded, and failed to produce a movement capable of winning a climate policy. Why would a mobilization for federal climate legislation in 2013 be any more effective at winning climate policy, and why should we expect a climate policy that does pass to A. actually reduce carbon emissions B. be enforced and C. not get tied up in courts for a decade?
All of this is to say, lets not count on something that we don’t control (policy), and lets get our movement out of the boom and bust that is inherent to policy and election centric movements. So what do we control, and what do we as organizers bring to the table? We need to build a movement (and are building a movement) that is enables a large segment of society to enact the world we wish to create. This means entrepreneurship from the neighborhood to the national scale, and at times it means putting our bodies on the line in civil disobedience and direct action. Much of this community organizing is already happening, or models are being tested in Appalachia, the north west, Minnesota, and other places. Our job as organizers on the local level (everywhere) is to facilitate communities meeting their own energy and material needs whenever possible, and on the regional and national level is to federate local and regional sustainability movements so that we can support one another and act strategically on the national stage. At times this will mean a policy push, but a movement cannot be built around policy.
Movement building for sustainability and justice will be a lifelong venture for all of us. We often refer to 2050 as the point at which we will have reduced carbon emissions to 20% of current levels. That’s giving us 40 years, and I think that we have a better shot of meeting that target through sustained grassroots organizing, entrepreneurship, and vigorous resistance (litigation, direct action, duking it out at the county and state political level) than we do through federal policy.
It might be easier to construct a platform first (what exactly do we want?), organize events (large and small) tailored to achieving these issues and determining exactly where and when we need an active “movement” and who should be there. This is a big task and we need to target people’s energies. We need to act and think like one big corporation, be willing to get into congressional offices and have candid discussions. You don’t always need a million people to get something done, you need the right people doing the right things at the right time. Having a million people at your back of course does no harm, and I’m not suggesting we should divert efforts from building a larger movement.
Let me suggest one very important platform issue (my number one priority):
*Capping carbon in the US. I think it’s a mistake to walk away from this point after the midterms. Just because it’s very unlikely to happen in the next few (6?) years does not mean we should stop pressing our Democratic senators/representatives to keep talking about it and putting the legislation forward. The rest of the world is waiting for us to cap carbon and START BUYING OFFSETS. It’s irresponsible of us to walk away from this issue. Otherwise what have we learned through our UNFCCC involvement and our commitment to our international colleagues?
A new energy policy is not climate policy. Yes we need to ramp up support for renewable, sustainable energy RD&D but that is not a replacement for climate policy. The administration is mistaken in its thinking on this. We, as a movement, should be clear on this point.
Hey Nick,
Hurrah! You’re right on target. We’re organizing around the idea of “intergenerational justice” … tho avoiding using that word in public because what it’s really about is the lives of our own children. I know that’s STILL difficult to build a movement around…something that will happen in the future. You can debate it and deny it and just get busy again with your own survival. But, the nagging feeling that by doing so, you’re impacting your children….THAT is a compassion we can certainly awaken.
We’re organizing (with many partners) a “million kid march” on Mother’s Day 2011 with this angst in mind. Youth (we work with under-17s) feel the burden, but aren’t sure that they can make any kind of difference outside of maybe their own homes or schools (which is, as you all have mentioned, not insignificant…simply not-enough). The “iMatter march” is a platform for all youth, in their local areas, to rally around a unified, moral message (I matter…live as if our future matters…do i matter to you) but focus on local changes needed to bring about a more sustainable and just world. www.
iMatterMarch.org
Organized by youth and people who love them, the march is one cog in the wheel this year. We need to see every effort as part of the movement. And highlight every action as part of our own movement. Collaboration is the way forward.
Hurrah to all of you who are working so hard…may the movement toward real change happen before the pain that usually ignites real movement is felt. If we wait that long, it will be too late.
Victoria
A couple more:
“From ten or twelve thousand gathered in DC, we must expand to be able to rally hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in cities across the US.”
I think the key here is that we need to focus on QUANTITY as well as size. Not just more marches/rallies/etc. but more of them and more often in the same places (well, all places I guess). I remember a conversation right after the G20 march in Pittsburgh last year. Thousands and thousands of people turned out. Afterward, another member of the youth climate movement asked me, “What would it take to get us to cut our pollution as much as the science demands, not just some?” My answer: “This [meaning the march] – every week.” That is, it wasn’t that the march didn’t have enough people (although we had lots of causes to promote, not just about climate). It shut down the whole downtown. The problem was that it happened once that year and never again. Planning lots of these events in the same cities and towns over and over is logistically tough, I realize, but it needs to happen, even if the numbers are smaller (just so long as it’s not the same 3 people every time…)
More diverse youth. Bob and AnnaK kind of get to this. It’s not true that the U.S. climate movement’s efforts have been led mostly by youth. I wish. It’s more like they’ve been led by youth who are motivated by health, the environment, animals, environmental justice, community development, indigenous rights, etc. I know I am leaving out plenty of groups, but THE MOVEMENT is leaving out plenty more. What would it take to get more young veterans, more young conservatives, more business students and clean tech entrepreneurs out in the streets with the youth who already are there?
“and then only if President Obama and a healthy number of Democrats in Congress win the 2012 election.” – Which isn’t going to happen by magic (not that I’m suggesting your post assumes it will). So, considering that a lot of 2012 elections are pretty much starting now, a whole bunch of us need to invest time not just in movement building, but also in getting the best people possible elected at all levels of government. And more of us need to run for office ourselves. But neither electoral politics nor running for office can come at the expense of building a bigger, better movement that will push whoever is in office in a better direction. So yeah…we need more people.
More peaceful civil disobedience. We say this every year, but no, really. We’re doing OK in terms of coal plant and mountaintop removal mining shutdowns, maybe the occasional legislator’s office occupation, but there are plenty of other targets to get creative with. I don’t know what those are, but someone out there does.
Loving this discussion, just what I need to take me into the new year.
I agree with a lot of what’s been said and would encourage us to start getting more specific.
Specifically how do we go “from ten or twelve thousand gathered in DC, we must expand to be able to rally hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in cities across the US.”
And how do we build a movement that can engage in all of the critical work Andrew outlines: community-driven solutions, grassroots opposition to injustice, building political power, etc.
These questions are ones we must struggle with in the run up to Power Shift 2011. I don’t think anyone has all the answers, and it will be critical discussion and collaboration that moves us closer to our goals. An incredible group of people were just selected for the Power Shift 2011 Steering Committee and they’re going to work in conjunction with working groups, Energy Action Coalition partners, friends and allies to make it as powerful as it needs to be.
Lastly, I think it’s important for all of us, and particularly this community to think about how to ramp things up online. The internet, blogs, social networks, etc have given us unprecedented ability to communicate. How can this help us build the mass movement were calling for, and how can we engage all the new people in this conversation.
This is a very good and useful discussion. Thanks, Nick, for initiating it.
As we think about rallies, protests, marches and the like, let’s keep in mind that these things are VERY expensive and resource-intensive. Having observed a number of them in development and execution, I would like to suggest that they are of limited efficacy without almost obsessive follow-up and downstream development.
It’s a sorry fact, but a fact nonetheless that the people we want to influence by mass gatherings know one thing: we’ll go away. We won’t be there for a week, a month, a year. As such, we’re ignorable. In D.C., for instance, it’s difficult to get media coverage for anything that doesn’t garner 75,000 people.
As a paradigm for consideration, I’d like to suggest we examine the possiblity of day-in-day-out smaller gatherings over a longer period of time. As compared to a one-and-done rally, we might have much more success by showing the long-term tenacity of our effort. A thousand people in front of the White House is a profound statement, as Appalachia Rising showed. Multiply that by a month and it becomes un-ignorable.
Ultimately, one of our greatest challenges is the lethargy of the political class in Washington, D.C. Such a strategy as I’m suggesting we examine might be a way to challenge that ennui.
I wanted to take up Emily’s point:
“You don’t always need a million people to get something done, you need the right people doing the right things at the right time. Having a million people at your back of course does no harm, and I’m not suggesting we should divert efforts from building a larger movement.”
Here, I want to make the distinction between ‘mobilisation’ and ‘movement building’. To me, ‘big rallies’ and other tactics (ie, the right people doing the right thing at the right time) are ‘mobilisation’.
‘Movement-building’ on the other hand means sustaining the engagement of all these people over time, getting them emotionally connected and committed to the issue, and developing them as activists – whether they are ‘personal lifestyle’ activists and they help others to change their lifestyles, or whether they are ‘political’ activists like most of us, or activists within their career/business/education community – or some combination of all these.
To me, ‘movement building’ is absolutely necessary because we CAN NOT solve the climate crisis without deep social change – changes in our lifestyles, changes in the amount of ‘stuff’ that we all buy, raised consciousness in our use of energy, changes in our business, energy, education systems, etc. It is far more than mobilising (right place, right time) to change legislation or to shut down a single coal-plant.
One can draw a parallel between our struggle and previous struggles – one does not achieve women’s liberation by only mobilising to change legislation and get women the vote, or rights to maternity leave, etc – though this is DEFINITELY necessary. Women’s liberation comes when every man and woman in a society truly consider women and men as equals – albeit with different and equally valid needs – and start to treat each other (and themselves) that way – from the kitchen to the factory floor, to the boardroom to the parliament.
Thanks again everyone for weighing in! I think this has been a really productive discussion, and it has certainly given me a lot to think about. Several of the comments above make points that I had frankly never thought of before, but which make a lot of sense now I’ve heard them. Here’s to a productive year of movement building in 2011!