Not so long ago, Americans witnessed the beginning of a mass democratic uprising. Thousands of average people, disgusted by greedy elites and corporate control of government, launched a movement that spread to almost every state in the nation. They did it to reject debt. They did it to fight foreclosures. They did it to topple a world where the 1 percent determined life for the other 99. And they did all of it against incredible odds, with a self-respect that stymied critics.

The year? 1877. The people? Dirt-poor farmers who would come to be known as Populists.

Now it’s 2011, and the People are stirring again. It’s been over two months since a few hundred dreamers pitched their tents in Zuccotti Park and stayed.

These people weren’t Populists, but they had the same complaints. They couldn’t make rent. They had no future. They lived in a nation with one price for the rich and another for the poor. And they knew that whatever anyone said that they didn’t have real democracy.

Okay, and so what? What do a bunch of century-dead farmers have to do with the Occupy movement? Well, quite a lot, actually.

You see, the Populists came within an inch of changing the entire corporate-capitalist system. They wanted a totally new world, and they had a plan to get it. But as you may have noticed, they didn’t. And now here we are, one hundred years later, occupying parks where fields once stood. We’re at a crucial phase in our movement, standing just now with the great Everything around us—everything to win or everything to lose. It’s our choice. And that’s good, because the choices we make next will echo, not just for scholars and bored kids in history class, but in the lives we do or don’t get to have. The good news is this: the Populists traveled in wagons and left us their wheels. We don’t have to reinvent them. We’re going in a new direction, but I have a feeling they can help us get there.

Occupy has done a lot of things right, and even more things beautifully. But strategy has not been our forte. That was okay at first, even good. We didn’t have one demand, because we wanted it all. So we let our anger grow, and our imagination with it. We were not partisan or monogamous to one creed. That ranging anger got 35,000 people on the Brooklyn Bridge after the Wall Street eviction, and hell if I’m not saying hallelujah. But winter is settling now, and cops are on the march. Each week we face new eviction orders, and wonder how to occupy limbo.

It’s time for a plan, then, some idea for going forward. This plan should in no way replace the rhizomatic-glorious, joyful-rip-roarious verve of the movement so far. It can occur in tandem. But we need a blueprint for the future, because strategy is the road resistance walks to freedom.

In that spirit, I sat down a few years ago and devoted myself to studying social movements of the past. I wanted to see what I could learn from them—where they went wrong, where they went right. I didn’t trust this exercise to random musings. No, like a good Type A kid, I made butcher paper lists of past movement features and mapped them onto current ones. I asked: What is the revolt of the guard for the climate movement? What’s the modern anti-corporate equivalent of the Boston Tea Party?

As I read, I learned a lot about the phases movements go through as they form, what common features they share, and what often breaks them apart.

I could name these phases myself, but it’s already been done. And no one has named them better than historian Lawrence Goodwyn, a thinking human if there ever was one and the author of The Populist Moment.

Goodwyn said that successful movements go through four stages:

1. First, the movement forms. This happens when people acknowledge oppression and defy it. They create physical and psychic spaces where they can cast off conventional modes of deferment, reject resignation and start acting with radical self-respect. This self-respect involves speaking with the tongue of truth, in the language of radical experience. Millions of people acting with self-respect become a body collective self-confidence, reordering what is politically possible.
2. Second, the movement recruits. It finds a way to attract masses of people while sharing its message of resistance. Radical recruitment is done systematically and strategically, and recruiters attract people in two ways: they promise tangible relief and provide a motive and blueprint for action.
3. Third, the movement educates. It articulates the ideology of the movement. It offers an analysis of power that liberates folks from past thinking patterns, renames what is possible, and unveils a plan to make the possible plausible. It names both the enemy in power and how to get power back. It’s a murder mystery: It gives folks a suspect, a motive, and a scheme for restoring justice.
4. Fourth, the movement politicizes. The movement politicizes when its alternative solutions run up against the powers that be. It admits that power must change for change to work, and it ousts old regimes through direct confrontations with power. Having created alternative economies, practices and paradigms, it creates an alternative political structure—laws, government, and process—to protect its brave new world.

Occupy Wall Street is by and large in phase one. Fair enough; it’s been only two months. Building a movement took the Populists ten or twenty years, so we could easily rest easily. But for most people I know, there is a deep, darkening sense that we do not have that kind of time. We’ve got to change it all, and we’ve got to do it before the ice caps melt, before that python, global finance, dies and squeezes its victims one last and lethal time. We are on the edge of history. We are urgency embodied.

And so we learn from that history. We must. We’ve got to get serious, and fast. We’ve got to make a plan. This plan has to give masses of Americans new paradigms, concrete alternatives, something to join, a way to join it, and a political insurgency to protect it. Along the way, we’ll have to keep a grip on the slippery soul of democracy, practicing consensus and conversation while developing a system of internal communication.

So I’m here to publish my lists. In what remains of this essay, I’ll chart a sample way forward. I’ll take you through each phase of movement building, and make suggestions and critiques. I’ll show how the Populists approached the stage; I’ll say what Occupy’s done well; I’ll dig into dangerous attitudes we should avoid; and I’ll offer suggestions for effective actions. Finally, I’ll close with questions we must answer as a movement whatever methods we decide to use.

But first, let me tell you where I’m coming from. I am not a pure -ism or -ist, but a mutt: part anarchist, part green, part interim socialist. This is no screed for a certain sect, or the fancy footwork of a shill tripping on a movement I don’t move to. This is an essay written by me, a complicated person who desperately wants a complicated movement to succeed in desperate times. Because I care, I critique. A movement is always a bag of new thinking, old thinking, dangerous and helpful ideas. In this mix I am a free agent. I tell the truth as an act of love. This truth-telling should not be confused with the snark of the bourgeois press, who use condescension as credentials and write dismissive missives to fall asleep at night. There is no snark here. I am no reporter, except in the basic sense: I report what I see, what I observe. Call me an embedded editor-anthropologist—someone who tries to understand the culture of a big idea, then challenges it to be bigger, bolder, more beautiful. And of course, I speak as an occupier, not for the occupation. My observations come from my limited experience and my limitless desire to experience more. It’s in that spirit I write today, straight from the hum of perpetual noticing.

So let’s begin.

In the late 19^th century, farmers everywhere lived on the brink of total poverty. All across the South and West, furnishing merchants gave them credit in exchange for exorbitant interest rates and the claims to their cotton harvest. These farmers were the ultimate throwaway people: poor, uneducated, desperate. And yet they built a mass insurgency movement that nearly transformed the agrarian system into a series of cooperatives. They did this by forming the Farmer’s Alliance, an institution that functioned on the state, county and local levels to benefit, radicalize and defend the poor. The Alliance experience let farmers use their own language to throw down on corporations, capitalism and false democracy. Within a few years, these same farmers were calling for a whole new economy based on new ideas that they had developed themselves. And for a movement that began with poor white southerners, they were astoundingly democratic, defying social censure to include Blacks, women, and immigrant workers in the movement. What’s more, the Alliance had style and knew how to occupy. When they called for mass education or decision-making camps, alarmed townspeople reported wagon trains stretching as far as the eye could see, festooned with signs, banners and evergreen boughs.

On my second day at Occupy DC/Freedom Plaza, I looked around me and thought, “Someone needs to do more outreach.” And then it hit me:  Someone else didn’t have to. I did. All I had to do was form a committee and decide a time to meet. So I did. It felt so good to act, to move instead of freezing in despair, to be a real human solving real problems. When I left the Plaza, I was a different person, too. I picked up trash instead of balking at the Entire Trash Problem. I spoke to homeless folks instead of retreating in overwhelm. I was that buzziest of activist buzzwords: I was empowered. And I had discussions, too. I talked to a woman who’d walked hundreds of miles to be with us. I talked to a kid who’d walked out of his movie theater job and never looked back. Some of those conversations were gorgeous, and some were the goddamned hardest, most frustrating talks I’ve ever had. Some had me waving my ego like a badge until finally, hours or weeks later, I’d drop it. I realized I was not nearly as democratic as I thought. But it was good to come alive, to see myself as I actually was: a human being amongst human beings, all capable of great goodness and great failure. And I knew this was what corporate reporters could not understand. They wanted our demands. But our first demand was simple. We wanted to come alive. We were there to be somewhere fully, maybe for the first time ever. The media wanted headlines, but we were starting from our toes. What they could not see was this: the dark, fungal growth of decomposing, of old things dying to nourish a new world.

Aesthetic Anarchism/Damn the Plan. I am all for mass democratic, non-hierarchical movements. I am in favor of taking down the system. I want to work from an outsider position of independence and autonomy. But I have noticed in many occupations a pernicious spirit of aesthetic anarchism. When I say aesthetic, I’m not talking about looks. I’m talking about image. I’m talking about when the form of an idea replaces its substance, or when the rituals of belief replace the point of believing. Aesthetic attitudes prevail when our motive is not to change power, but to be right, fashionable, or cool—a perfect -ism. And since aesthetic beliefs are more about approval than victory, aesthetic believers spend very little time thinking about what victory means or requires. Every movement has its aesthetics (think hippies) and that would be fine if they didn’t disrupt the entire point, which is to win. Because in order to win, you need a plan, and to plan you must consider an array of ideas, challenging conventional wisdom to get at effective action. Radicals say: 6,000 people lost their homes to banks today. Did we help them? What would it take to help them? Then they go from there, letting the need dictate the action. Aesthetic anarchists, however, are content to wait for the word from their chosen Sinai, saying, “If New York does it, we do, too,” or “so sayeth the man in punk-rock black.” They are inheritors of a received culture of ideas—a splinter culture, but a shallow one nonetheless. Their goals are purity and counter-cultural conformity, a strange form of leftist fundamentalism. One of the worst forms of aesthetic anarchism confuses having a plan with being The Man. Aesthetic anarchists equate all structure and strategy with fascism, defining ‘true’ actions as spontaneous and random. Similarly, they see radicalism in terms of approved actions rather than methods. But this Ivory Gutter Attitude gets us nowhere. So let’s be clear, then. Having a plan is not being The Man. It’s not selling out. It’s not fascist. Having a plan means deciding how to engage with power, and how to make power engage with you. Going forward, let’s do less Damning the Plan and more Damning the Man. Let’s decide what we want and create a plan to get there, choosing our actions to fit the problem, not the fashion. So far our movement’s a radical noun; let’s strategize to make it a radical verb.

• Practice democracy fairly. Hold ongoing teach-ins on racism, classism, and patriarchy developed by those most oppressed and supported by their allies.
• Practice democracy fully. Most of us weren’t taught how to make decisions together, so we need to learn. Invite professional facilitators to dotrainings on true consensus. Pinpoint places where democracy is breaking down and find solutions.
• Know your neighbor. Set up a storytelling tent by the info booth. Talk to people about why they are here, what they’re angry about, who they are, what solutions they have. Record the sessions and screen them for the camp at night.
• Heal. We’re all coming to this with emotion and history. Some of us are new, and impatient. Some of us are old, and can’t bear to fail again. A lot of infighting is the result of unspoken despair and disillusionment. The ‘real’ world silences those emotions, but Occupy is an opportunity for voice. Have a therapist or healer lead the group through grief work—for example, Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects.
• Strategize. Take Goodwyn’s four phases of movement building and brainstorm ways to make them flourish. Challenge cavalier assumptions about what does and doesn’t work. Merge this into a multi-day, consensus-based visioning session and come up with concrete goals and strategies for your local Occupy.

What inherited cultural assumptions am I bringing to the Occupy movement? How do dominant societal narratives on race, class, gender, resistance and revolution impair my organizing? How do fashionable resistance models inform my work, and do they help or harm? And finally: How bad is x problem, how long do we have to fix it, and what would it take to win?

The Populists did not confuse action with aimlessness; they were radicals with a plan. Being destitute, they understood the need to create economic alternatives that immediately relieved other poor people and brought them into broader struggle. They began by identifying their central problem: They needed credit to get farming supplies, but the furnishing merchant controlled credit and exploited them. So they created the Farmers Alliance Exchange, a cotton co-op that pooled resources to buy equipment, market the harvest, and sell in bulk to foreign and domestic buyers. This system allowed the farmers to depend less on the merchant for credit and to sell their crops at better prices. It also served as a powerful recruitment tool: the co-op attracted recruits and showed them through their own experience how and why the dominant economic system failed them. Two millions farmers joined in a matter of three years, forming thousands of sub-alliances—each with their own cotton buying agent and farmer-lecturer. The Alliance would eventually mobilize this massive and structured base to break up farming monopolies, push for a new financial system, and create a formidable third party. Participating in the co-ops gave average farmers a sense of dignity, greater economic independence, class consciousness, and experience solving complicated problems together.

My first day at Freedom Plaza, I lost my wallet. The weird thing is, it didn’t matter. The communal kitchen gave me breakfast, lunch and dinner. Concerned people offered money. The after-dinner dance party and discussion were way better than seeing a movie, and if I’d needed it, there were blankets, sleeping bags and tents for those without. That’s when I realized it: Right there in the capitol of capital, I was in a money-free zone, in a community that met both my physical and emotional needs. When I met an exile from Katrina-era New Orleans, I could invite him to the plaza. He got some pasta and a rousing discussion on the Fed; we heard from him on FEMA, poverty and homelessness. Occupy’s genius is combining what is normally separate. We were meeting our immediate needs while preparing for long-term resistance. We created alternatives that got people involved, then involved ourselves in creating alternatives.

The Rhizome Religion. Biologically, rhizomatic organisms send out roots underground that pop up as random shoots above. Each root, if cut in pieces, can regenerate the whole plant. Politically, a rhizomatic movement has no leader, no main branch, and can reproduce anywhere. The good thing about rhizomes is they’re essentially unstoppable (when was the last time you fought an aspen grove and won?). The problem is they’re random—bad for recruitment. Right now, Occupy may represent the 99 percent, but in reality we’re our least favorite number: the 1 percent. To really get people involved, we can’t ask people to come to us. We have to come to them. We have to diligently and deliberately reach out to those most affected by our rapacious financial system: people of color, the poor, immigrants and women. And we should do this by working with established community groups and individuals, radically listening to what folks really want and need. Some Occupies have done a great job reaching out to unions, community groups and regular folks, and the rest of us are trying. But by and large we’ve been practicing the rhizome religion, believing that good ideas will spread spontaneously and recruits will pop up accordingly. In ten years of organizing, though, I have learned one thing for certain: recruitment is not an accident. It takes planning and dogged determination. It takes humility and a high tolerance for discomfort. And it takes realizing that most people are busy trying to survive and need solutions that will tangibly improve their lives. There is magic to any movement, yes—that soul that makes it sing—but in organizing no rabbits pop out of hats. If you want to reach the people, you have to reach out, one hand in welcome and the other in offering. You do this door by door, neighborhood by neighborhood, church by church, until you’ve not just imagined the 99 percent: you’ve met them.

Occupy (your) neighborhoods! Find out where people in your Occupy live. Form neighborhood councils in those communities. Go door to door, meeting people you live by and asking them how the economy’s treating them. Talk to them to learn what skills, needs and interests they have. Ask what organizations are helping already, and talk to those folks, too. From these discussions, create a People’s Map of needs and assets for each neighborhood in the city. Form a spokescouncil of neighborhood representatives to discuss the map, then use this information to keep organizing those communities. Each neighborhood starts creating alternatives that meet their specific needs and the needs of the whole city, growing food, making clothing, or building shelters. Teams of emergency responders could fight foreclosures and feed the hungry. There could be neighborhood-level, worker-owned co-ops and health care clinics. We could disappear from the corporate economy and make wealth where we live.

What are the most pressing needs in my community? What tangible solution would address them? Do I know my neighbors, and if not, why not? What groups are already working on these problems, and what do they need from me? If the economy tanked tomorrow, what would my community need to survive? How can we start to meet those needs? What assets do people on my block have? What assets do I have?

Ironically, it was the failure of the cotton cooperative, the Populists’ economic alternative, that pushed them toward their radical ideology. As brilliant as it was, the co-op effort stalled on bare fact: they needed money to function, the farmers had none, and bankers had lots but hated co-ops. So try as they might—and they tried, raising thousands of dollars from penniless farmers and swaying small landowners to co-sign loans with landless tenants—farmers could not get the credit they needed. But instead of letting that daunt them, they let it move them from economic cooperation to social and political insurgency. They used the co-op failure to teach people about power. If bankers had power, and their power was political, no alternative would be safe until the People got enough power to change the law. This cold truth led to a fiery ideology: a whole new Treasury and currency system tied to a radical third party that called for land reform, socialization of major industry, and better conditions for millions of industrial laborers. But by far the most impressive thing about the ideology was the way the Populists spread it. In less than two short years, they democratically developed their power analysis and relevant solutions, trained 40,000 uneducated farmers to convey the message, then sent them fanning out across the South and West. These lecturers helped start thousands of new sub-alliances and cooperatives, radicalized rural America economically and politically, and paved the way for coalitions with labor, urban immigrants, and Black sharecroppers. They also formed the Reform Press Association, a massive network of radical agrarian presses that challenged the corporate political perspective and disseminated declarations and agreements.

At every Occupy I’ve been to, I’ve seen folks in the grip of democratic discussion. In one corner, a vet teaches military counter-recruitment tactics. A suited woman talks foreclosures and how to fight them. Paul-ites speak of fiat currency while a mohawked kid hands out ‘zines. After a whole lifetime of trusting experts, people are waking up to the value of their own experience. They are starting to believe in what they know. And they are sharing it with each other. They didn’t get us into this mess, but hell if they don’t believe we can get ourselves out. It’s like a light went on in one person’s head, and then another and another. All these problems, all these intractable problems we’ve suffered so long—well, they aren’t intractable! Capitalism is not inevitable. Poverty is not inevitable. In other words, they’re fallible. They can be fought, resisted. In that sense, Occupy is not an occupation, but a giant exercise in decolonization. It’s a battle to oust the false masters of our minds.

Raising Awareness, not Rising Up. For the last decade, I’ve had my awareness raised so many times my brain should have popped. And when each successive awareness-raising moment ended, a bunch of newly brain-pained people asked what to do next. The answer? Raise more awareness. Of course, Occupy has done much more than raise awareness—we have taken the streets and stayed despite rain, snow and fatigue. But our default stance on ideology is still quite liberal: people talk and their minds change; changed minds change society. More important is the thorny issue of demands. In the beginning, we had none, which was cunning. But the persistent refusal to create any highlights a mistake that democratic movements often make: that forming clear analyses and demands and agitating around them is necessarily presumptuous, invasive, and authoritarian. That’s not true, though. An ideology is, at its most basic level, a description of power and a plan for fighting it. An ideology sets goals and decides how to engage with the enemy. Ideologies can be developed democratically, with input from all affected parties. They flag common mistakes and build cohesion. They are the basis for radical demands. Without ideology, you can be highly aware but have no plan for political action. In other words, you’re easily co-opted. A rigorous ideology guards against co-optation by showing people why they’re acting and what they’re acting for. That’s why radical ideology must lead to radical recruitment. This process is not accidental and doesn’t remotely resemble awareness-raising. Raising awareness is a piecemeal act that does not provide people with an analysis for action. To illustrate the difference: a lot of people who opposed neoliberal nation-building voted for Barack Obama in 2008, despite the fact that he fully intended to continue the same. This occurred not because these people were stupid or needed one more teach-in on Afghanistan; it happened because the left did not offer clear reasons and means to do anything else. The Occupy movement needs demands, especially now that many Occupies are facing eviction. It needs to spread them systematically, giving everyone who is discontented a mandate and method for change. This is not presumptuous if we do it together. If we do it together, it’s called democracy. Let’s not raise awareness. That gives us grief but nothing to do. Let’s educate toward action. Let’s rise up.

This one’s going to be hard, but worth it. Let’s use our General Assemblies to develop an ideology, then federate to hammer out demands. Each occupation takes the next month to democratically develop their top three grievances and demands. (There are many consensus models available for developing ideas and solutions that go beyond the scope and format of a General Assembly.) After they’re done, they send two delegates to an Occupy convention, where we’d come up with a declaration (our grievances) and a new constitution (our demands and solutions). The process of coming up with these documents would itself be revolutionary and would deepen our understanding of each other and our fight, and the finished product could be used to educate, agitate and get started on a new world.

Who are our friends? Who are enemies? What do we want? What is the main obstacle that keeps us from getting it? How have we tried to fight that problem before? Did it work? Why or why not? What would it take to be successful? Even with diverse opinions, what are a few things we agree on? What solutions already exist, and what solutions do we need to invent? What is uniquely ours to give in the long fight against elitism? What are our weaknesses and how might they be exploited? What education do we need to act successfully? How do we get it to them? How do we come up with demands, and how will we disseminate them?

The Populists made every attempt to create a new world through non-cooperation—functioning as if the State didn’t exist. But the State did exist, and it combined with corporations to control everything the Populists needed: credit, land, a fair currency. The Populists realized they had no choice. In order to operate their co-ops and implement their new Treasury program, they had to change the law. And to change the law, they had to confront power. So radicals within the movement pushed a new plan. They urged the agrarian movement to form a political third party, a militant coalition of rural and urban workers that sought to transform the very foundations of government. The bulk of the movement responded in kind, and farmers met en masse in 1892 to fashion the Omaha Demands—the foundation of The People’s Party. These demands called for the abolition of national banks, reclamation of corporate land for use by the People, a graduated income tax and the prohibition of agricultural speculation. Populists once again mobilized their massive, educated and organized base to run third party and fusion candidates for every level of office in the land. In states like Kansas, they won straight tickets. Railroad magnates wrote letters to colleagues, invoking God to spare them a Populist legislature. In other states, the party did not fare as well. Rampant election fraud and vigilante action stymied campaigns in the South; two-party emotional appeals leveled the rest. Despite its real success, the People’s Party imploded for several reasons. First, it didn’t organize urban-rural coalitions soon enough. Second, Alliance members split over the politics, many preferring alternatives to confrontation. And third, the movement’s failure to create co-ops in key states led to lack of organization, recruitment and radical education. This, in turn, produced the shallow analysis and lack of self-respect that make movements ripe for accommodation. Within four years, the movement caved to the comfort of received culture and nominated William Jennings Bryan—a Democrat—as their presidential candidate. With that move, America lost one of the most inspiring democratic movements it has ever seen.

We’ve rejected the two-party system and refused to pander to politicians. Screaming fire couldn’t clear an Occupy faster than a Democratic operative, and that’s good. This time around, we’re insisting on autonomy first and demands second. This is the opposite of 2008, when so many auctioned off autonomy to buy futures in the grossly inflated hope and change market. But that bubble crashed, too, and promises are no longer worth what we’ve got to pay for them. Now we’re wiser. Now we’re the ones making promises—this time to ourselves.

The Complicity Complex. The politicization of the Populist movement appears to be a simple moral tale: the Populists got political and so got coopted. The solution is, of course, to not engage in conventional politics. But the real lesson is actually double-edged. Because it is just as true that the Populists failed because they didn’t engage enough, believing they could do radical economics without radical politics. In reality, though, noncooperation can’t work without transforming power at the level of government. The Populists didn’t fail because they got political; they failed because they didn’t organize enough before they did. This statement will be controversial to some Occupiers, many of whom reject conventional politics because the system has failed. And they’re right. The two-party capitalist system has failed. I am not advocating a return. But consider this: If we don’t confront political power directly—replace it, dismantle it, infiltrate it, whatever—then we actually depend more on it than if we did. Up until now, the Occupy movement has focused on reclaiming space, direct action, and noncooperation. But that doesn’t mean we’re politically independent; it simply means we depend on politics indirectly. That is being co-opted by default. As my friend likes to say: “You may not believe in the State, but the State believes in you.” You can ignore it and avoid it, and for some goals, that works. But any successful alternative will fail precisely by being successful unless it finds a way to confront and change the law. If, on the other hand, you say what you want and how you want it, then form an autonomous group to get it—and if what you want scares the powerful and improves material realities for millions of people—that’s independence. Now, there are lots of ways to build political power besides running for office, some of which I will list below. But we shouldn’t confuse a slicked-out politico pawning our movement with creating populist political force. Remember: radical change is not action-specific. Actions are radical when they challenge the balance of power. A strike could be totally symbolic if it’s not well-planned, while a legal strategy that questions the legal structure can be quite radical indeed. In other words,  an action is radical if it shifts power to the oppressed. The question should not be what appears most radical; the question should be what works most radically in a given situation. If, for example, your goal was ensuring food justice for millions of people, you could grow a vast network of gardens without anyone’s say-so. But if you are trying to stop a foreign war, there aren’t a lot of alternatives available. In the former case, you drop out. In the latter, you engage. This engagement can take the form of direct action. It can take the form of a third party. It can take the form of people’s laws. What it can’t do is confuse confrontation with complicity, or else it will fail. If we want to win, we must find a way to challenge political power without compromise.

• Delegates return from the national convention and use the demands and grievances to start an Occupy Party. This party wouldn’t join power, but confront it. It would exist to change the system, but also to recruit masses of people to the Occupy movement and get working for a new world. The candidates would not be leaders but conduits, wearing Everyone masks and refusing to reveal their identity. They could literally change with every debate, every interview, physically embodying the diversity they represent. Yard signs wouldn’t have names but manifestos: “I Am Everyone and I Want ______.” And the name on the ballot? The 99 percent.
• Engage in massive, coordinated direct action. Delegates at the Occupy convention could also decide priority targets for direct action, then organize local Occupies to coordinate simultaneous actions. With only a few thousand people well-organized people we could shut down, say, the banking system in the United States. We just need to pick a goal and get the numbers. (Direct action is an especially good tactic for people who don’t like to mess with electoral politics. But if it’s to be effective, it has to be massive and it has to be coordinated. Creative actions get publicity, raise awareness, intimidate the powerful, and make people feel empowered and important. Mass action stops the machine.)
• Create People’s Laws. This could be coordinated on a national level or done to suit each particular Occupy, but the idea’s the same. Come up with a law that dramatically shifts power (for example abolishing corporate personhood) and run it as a ballot initiative—a form of direct democracy. Use the ensuing organizing drive to educate and recruit people into the movement, then fight like hell to pass the law. Remember, though: This is municipal civil disobedience, so prepare to escalate in court.

You might not agree with my suggestions, but you’ve got to answer my questions. First, what kind of government do I want? (Because a government is, at its core, a decision-making process and body. Everyone has a government. They just have to say what kind it is.) For the Occupy movement, this will probably involve describing both an interim government and an ultimate government. What do we want while the current system exists, and what do we want when we’ve won? Then ask: Do I want to replace, transform, infiltrate or abolish the government? If I do not want to engage in conventional politics, then what is my plan for confronting existing power?

First, Goodwyn names four movement phases, but he also names a movement necessity: internal communication. Successful movements, no matter how far-flung and rhizomatic, find ways to communicate their ideas, their methods, their models and their plans. Movements that don’t do this form pockets of intensity or slump into irrelevance. The genius of the Occupy movement is leaderless, local autonomy, but that genius is also a pitfall if we can’t find a way to coordinate efforts. So far, individual Occupies can throw out ideas or even call for actions, but it’s very difficult to organize around something massive or share crucial information. In a leaderless movement, it can be difficult to know where to go to share or get a question answered. It is good to keep in mind that democratic movements often require more structure than hierarchical ones, since in hierarchies you ask the person in charge and in democracies you ask the structure itself—a committee whose membership is always in flux. This makes it more important than ever to identify a clear process of getting information, making decisions, and federating to make large decisions. The Populists had a system of sub-alliances that each had their own flavor and attitudes, but they coordinated through a system of trained lecturers and annual convergences. In between big events, they communicated through their own Reform Press Association, a collection of local, regional and national papers that communicated key ideas, agreements and perspectives to farmers all over the country.  Occupy Nashville has met this need by reviving the Revolutionary-era Committees of Correspondence, using these working groups to communicate throughout the state. Others have startedOccupy collaboration sites or suggested a kind of informational Pony Express where appointed people travel to share critical information. Whatever the solutions are, Occupy must create a centralized virtual and physical space to share and plan together or we will fight too much alone.

Second, as I finished this essay, the evictions started. One by one, Occupies faced police in riot gear solving ‘public health threats’ with tear gas and pepper spray. Some of us held our ground, some were routed but regrouped and reclaimed, and others are in limbo, wondering what to do next. There are signs at most evictions that say something simple and profound: You can’t evict an idea. That’s true, and the idea of an occupation is capable of outlasting a centralized physical occupation, going forward to occupy homes against foreclosure, occupy classrooms, occupy elections, whatever. But this is an uncomfortable stage because the magic of Occupy has been the centralized physical occupation, a place where so much more happens than the tasks at hand. As my friend bemoaned: “I don’t want us to go back indoors to meetings only ten people attend, only to go back out and find all the people who gathered once but then dispersed.” And that is a real concern. On the other hand, occupations can become mired in problems of self-defense, and the occupation itself can supersede the work that needs doing. We need to regroup our local Occupies and ask ourselves some serious questions. First, what are the pros and cons of a centralized, physical occupation? What are the most pressing needs in our community and are they met better by one occupation, many small and targeted occupations, or another route altogether? If our occupations went dark or indoors, would we lose a certain magic and swagger that we need? If yes, how can we best defend or reclaim an occupy space, and what skills do we need to do that? How can we get those skills, and how can we divvy up our energies to meet both the needs of the occupation and its purposes? What are our goals and how do we meet them in the style and spirit of the Occupy movement? And finally, how do we keep the magic alive? That last question might sound silly, but it’s the most important. Because the Occupy movement didn’t invent the grievances its making or the problems it’s fighting. Most of these problems have existed for decades or even centuries, and have been fought for just as long by devoted dissidents. What Occupy has brought to this mix is radical hope and the magic of gathered imagination, gathered rage, gathered force. It’s brought possibilities so fast and thick they feel like the new texture of reality. And that’s what we cannot afford to lose.

…………………..

Those are my lists. I’m done, and we’re just starting. I have only one brain, and this is just one way forward. Probably there are as many ways as hearts, and we’ll need every beating one. But there are two things for sure: All the ways are steep, and some of them are worth it. There’s another side to this mountain, and it’s lovely and shot with light. Like the bear, we’re going over to see what we can see. We’ll know when we arrive, because we’ve carried the idea of this place for lifetimes, centuries. Sometimes it’s whispered and sometimes, shouted. It’s been killed and resurrected, celebrated and spurned. It’s suffered with aplomb, and so it’s ragged-beautiful. Sometimes it seemed so far, and we were in the dark. And other times we were sure it was just around the corner, right up against our skin. Always it’s been a world we made with voices, heads, and hands.

This wagon train is long, and it doesn’t stop. It loses people, wheels—re-finds them. We die on the march, mostly, and often the point is marching. But there is always the mountain, and still the other side. We are pulling toward it, all of us. And we are pulled by one great question: What would it look like to win?

This is the question you must ask. You ask it for yourself, and for your children. You ask it alone, and we answer it together. But you must ask it, and not let anything get in the way of the answer—not your ego, not your assumptions, not your weary, tired heart.

Because democracy is not an idea, a monument or a building. Democracy is nothing short of being fully alive and defending the fully living.

So write your lists and make your map. Have a plan and damn The Man. Because populism isn’t dead, you see: it’s marching.

Originally published as a zine, which you can download and print (6 double-sided sheets folded into a 24 half-page booklet). Cross-post freely.

Toward Ecological and Social Revolution

This is a reconstruction from notes of a keynote address delivered to the Power Shift West Conference, Eugene, Oregon, November 5, 2011.

All of us here today, along with countless others around the world, are currently engaged in the collective struggle to save the planet as a place of habitation for humanity and innumerable other species.  The environmental movement has grown leaps and bounds in the last fifty years.  But we need to recognize that despite our increasing numbers we are losing the battle, if not the war, for the future of the earth.  Our worst enemy is denialism: not just the outright denial of climate-change skeptics, but also the far more dangerous denial — often found amongst environmentalists themselves — of capitalism’s role in the accumulation of ecological catastrophe.¹

Recently, climate scientists, writing in leading scientific journals, have developed a way of addressing the extreme nature of the climate crisis, focusing on irreversible change and the trillionth ton of carbon.  Central to the scientific consensus on climate change today is the finding that a rise in global temperature by 2° C (3.6° F), associated with an atmospheric carbon concentration of 450 parts per million (ppm), represents a critical tipping point, irreversible in anything like human-time frames.  Climate models show that if we were to reach that point feedback mechanisms would likely set in, and society would no longer be able to prevent the climate catastrophe from developing further out of our control.  Even if we were completely to cease burning fossil fuels when global average temperature had risen by 2° C, climate change and its catastrophic effects would still be present in the year 3000.  In other words, avoiding an increase in global average temperatures of 2° C, 450 ppm is crucial because it constitutes a point of no return.  Once we get to that point, we will no longer be able to return, even in a millennium, to the Holocene conditions under which human civilization developed over the last 12,000 years.  Many of you are aware that long-term stabilization of the climate requires that we target 350 ppm, not 450 ppm.  But 450 ppm remains significant, since it represents the planetary equivalent of cutting down the last palm tree on Easter Island.².

It is here that the trillionth ton enters in.  In the last couple of years, climate studies have determined that once we emit the trillionth metric ton of carbon — counting all the carbon put into the atmosphere since 1750 — we will have exhausted our cumulative carbon budget.  This means that if we burn no more than the trillion ton of carbon we will still have a reasonable chance (though this may not in fact be much more than 50-50) of not exceeding the 2° C, 450 ppm boundary.  The trillionth ton of carbon is thus viewed as an absolute cutoff.  Growing scientific evidence, however, suggests that it is essential to remain below the 2° C, 450 ppm level.  Consequently, some prominent climate scientists, such as Myles Allen at the University of Oxford, have stipulated that we need to target 750 billion tons of carbon as the limit, which will give us a 75 percent chance of staying below a 2° C increase in global average temperature.

How far are we from emitting the 750 billion — or even the trillionth — ton?  Since 1750, we have emitted 550 billion tons of carbon and the rate is accelerating.  If present emission trends continue, we will reach the 750 billionth ton of carbon in 2028, that is, in sixteen years.  In order to avoid emitting the 750 billionth ton by 2050 we will need to reduce our global carbon dioxide emissions by 5 percent annually.  In order not to emit the trillionth ton of carbon by 2050, carbon dioxide emissions would have to drop by 2.4 percent per year.  This is much greater than the 1.5 percent drop in global carbon dioxide emissions, resulting from the Great Recession in 2008-2009.  The longer we wait to make the reductions the steeper the decline required.

Another way of putting this is that if we burn even half of today’s proven, economically accessible reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal, we will almost certainly reach/exceed the irreversible 2° C, 450 ppm, boundary.  If we want a 75 percent chance of staying below a 2° C increase, we have to lock up all but a quarter of today’s proven economically accessible fossil-fuel resources.³

If all of this were not enough, climate change is only one of the rifts in planetary boundaries that scientists are now pointing to: the others include ocean acidification, ozone depletion, species extinction, disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, land cover loss, freshwater shortages, (less certainly at present) aerosol loading, and chemical proliferation.  Each of these has the potential of disrupting the global environmental order on catastrophic levels, and the trends for each (with the possible exception of ozone depletion) are presently a source of concern.  Already we have crossed three planetary boundaries: climate change, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and species extinction.⁴

Faced with such enormous environmental problems and the need for massive, urgent changes in society, our worst enemy, as I have indicated, is denialism.  Here it is useful to look at what I call the “three stages of denial” with respect to the global environmental crisis.⁵  The first stage of denial is straightforward.  It is the denial associated with Exxon-Mobil and climate skeptics — who say either that there is no such thing as climate change or that it is not caused by human actions.  Sometimes they contradict themselves and argue both at once.  This of course is the inevitable response of capital, which is invariably concerned, first and foremost, with protecting its bottom line — even at the expense of the earth itself.

The second stage of denial — often advanced by self-designated environmentalists themselves — is to admit that there is a problem, and even to factor in the proximate causes.  Most of you are no doubt familiar with the environmental impact or IPAT formula.  Environmental Impact = Population X Affluence X Technology.  This is a mere truism, where the drivers of environmental impacts are concerned.  It frequently leads to the notion that the solution is a simple matter of promoting sustainable population, sustainable consumption, and sustainable technology.  Nevertheless, this conception doesn’t actually take us very far, since we then need to explain what drives population, consumption, and technology themselves.  In fact, such multiple-factor analysis is all too often used as a way of denying the underlying background condition: the capitalist treadmill of production.⁶

The third stage of denial has the look and feel of greater realism, but actually constitutes a more desperate and dangerous response.  It admits that capitalism is the problem, but also contends that capitalism is the solution.  This general approach emphasizes what is variously referred to as “sustainable capitalism,” “natural capitalism,” “climate capitalism,” “green capitalism,” etc.⁷  In this view we can continue down the same road of capital accumulation, mounting profits, and exponential economic growth — while at the same time miraculously reducing our burdens on the planetary environment.  It is business as usual, but with greater efficiency and greater accounting of environmental costs.  No fundamental changes in social or property relations — in the structure of production and consumption — are required.  This is the magical world view advanced by such diverse figures as Al Gore, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken, and Jonathon Porritt — if not Thomas Friedman, Newt Gingrich, and the Breakthrough Institute, as well.

From a policy perspective, this normally divides into two streams, one state-centered and the other market-centered.  Green Keynesians like to think that we can ameliorate our environmental problems (and our economic problems too) by having the state promote economic growth through the creation of green jobs.  Green Schumpeterians, like Friedman, Gingrich, and the Breakthrough Institute, offer as a solution green technological innovations, supposedly a natural outgrowth of the market — but usually seen as requiring additional subsidies to corporations to harness its full strength.  Here too the promise is one of heightened economic growth on greener terms, equated simply with greater energy efficiency.

The main problem, which all of this denies, is the nature and logic of capitalism itself.  Capitalism, as its name suggests, is quite simply, thesystem of capital.  Its sole purpose is the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of human labor.  It is a grow-or-die system dominated by the 1% (the capitalist class) and giant corporations.  It is prone to periodic economic crises, and constant — and today deepening — unemployment.  Capital accumulation and economic expansion occur by means of gross inequality and monopolistic competition, generating a war of all against all and a world of waste.  The wider public/social/natural sphere is an object of theft — a realm in which to dump “externalities” or impose unpaid social costs, which then fall on nature and humanity in general.

Endless capitalism requires unlimited economic growth.  Economists generally consider a 3 percent average rate of economic growth over the long run as absolutely essential for the stability of the capitalist system.  Yet, if we were to have a continual 3 percent rate of economic growth, world output would expand exponentially by around sixteen times in a century, 250 times in two centuries, and 4000 times in three centuries.  Already we are overshooting planetary limits — consuming resources as if we had multiple planets at our disposal, undermining the very basis of our existence.⁸

What then is the alternative?  The answer is a cultural-power shift — opening up the world to the creative efforts of hundreds of millions, even billions of people, and unleashing a process of sustainable human development.  Today the world Occupy movement is showing the way.  It is time, as Noam Chomsky contends, not simply to Occupy Wall Street but to go on to “Occupy the Future.”⁹  As the 99%, we need to take direct action with respect to the environment: locking up the three-quarters of the proven, economically available oil, natural gas, and coal (remembering always that the poorest countries have to be allowed to develop while the richer countries need disproportionately to pay the cost); blocking the Canadian-U.S. tar sands pipeline; and imposing a carbon fee at the point of production (i.e. at the oil well, mine shaft, and point of entry) — the funds from which would be returned immediately to the population on a per capita basis, so that those with the largest carbon footprints, predominantly the corporate rich, would be the ones that paid.  (This is the proposal of U.S. climatologist James Hansen.)¹⁰  In the end we will need to go on and culturally Occupy the system itself through a long-term ecological and social revolution, opening the way to democratic planning at all levels of society from the local community on up.¹¹

Under twenty-first century capitalism the world is being buried in commodity waste.  We are compelled, simply in order to live and breathe in this society, to engage in useless and alienated labor directed at satisfying artificial wants through the production of mere “stuff,” the bulk of which ends up being disposed of soon after it is purchased.  This all takes places simply so that the whole process can start up again, more commodities can be generated, and more profits can be made by the 1%.  As radical economist Juliet Schor says, we have lost any sense of “true wealth.”¹²  In the United States today we spend about $1 trillion on the military spending each year, far more than all the rest of the world put together.¹³  U.S. corporations and businesses today spend more than $1 trillion on marketing annually, simply in order to persuade people to buy things that they don’t want or need.¹⁴  Our very cultural apparatus is shaped so as to conform to the imperative of marketing — not democratic communication.  If we are to save the earth, this gargantuan waste and destruction which dominates our lives needs to be brought to an end, so that we can focus on the real issues: making sure that everyone in every part of the world has enough of life’s basic needs; building community; promoting substantive equality; and creating the basis for sustainable human development.  Some have called this a socialism for the twenty-first century.

In a 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, Martin Luther King declared: “We are presiding over a dying order, one which has long deserved to die,” and he ended his speech with the words of the great American socialist Eugene Debs: “I can see the dawn of a better humanity.  The people are awakening.  In due course of time they will come into their own.”¹⁵  Now is the time of which Debs and King spoke, the time in which to create a new society where human beings no longer deny, but affirm, their connections to each other and to the earth.

Notes

1  On ecological denialism as a complex social construct see Kari Norgaard, Living With Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011).

2  Susan Solomon, et. al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 6 (February 10, 2009): 1704-1709; Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future(New York: Harpers, 2010), 264-71.

3  Myles Allen, et. al., “The Exit Strategy,” Nature Reports Climate Change, April 30, 2009, and “Warming Caused by Cumulative Carbon Emissions Towards the Trillionth Tonne,” Nature 458 (April 20, 2009): 1163-66; Malte Meinshausen, et. al., “Greenhouse-Gas Emission Targets for Limiting Global Warming to 2° C,” Nature 458 (April 30, 2009): 1158-62; TrillionthTonne.org; Catherine Brahic, “Humanity’s Carbon Budget Set at One Trillion Tons,” New Scientist, April 29, 2009; Cullen, The Weather of the Future, 264-71; International Economic Agency, CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion (Paris: IEA, 2011), 7.

4  Johan Rockström, et. al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,”Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472-75.

5  See John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” forthcoming Monthly Review63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1-17, where the three stages of denial are put in the context of an overall accumulation of catastrophe under capitalism.

6  Allan Schnaiberg introduced the treadmill of production critique in his book The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), based on earlier Marxian conceptions.

7  See Al Gore, Our Choice (New York: Rodale, 2009), 346; Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism(Boston: Little Brown, 1999); L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen, Climate Capitalism(New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Jonathon Porritt, Capitalism: As If the World Mattered(London: Earthscan, 2007); Thomas Friedman,Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008); New Gingrich, A Contract With the Earth(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

8  Charles Morse, “Environment, Economics and Socialism,” Monthly Review 30, no. 11 (April 1979): 15.

9  Noam Chomsky, “Occupy the Future,” November 2, 2011,NationOfChange.org.

10  James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren(New York: Bloomsbury, 2009),211-20.

11  For a more developed argument on short-term, radical ecological changes and long-term revolutionary ecological change see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 123-44.

12  Juliet Schor, True Wealth(London: Penguin, 2010).

13 For the data on military spending see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 9-13.

14 ”U.S. Marketing Spending Exceeded $1 Trillion in 2005,” Metrics Business and Market Intelligence, June 26, 2006, http://metrics2.com; Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1.

15 Martin Luther King, Jr., “All Labor Has Dignity” (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 71.

This article was originally published on  MRzine.

I spent the weekend at Midwest Powershift in Cleveland. Among the rallies, trainings, and speeches, I was able to catch some downtime with fellow Summer of Solutions program leaders and participants from around the Midwest. Especially valuable was a conversation I had with members of other Midwestern programs on Saturday night.

500 young people applaud Joshua Kahn Russell's keynote poem at Midwest Powershift in Cleveland. Photo credit Ben Hejkal.

This conversation helped me articulate two things: one, the “good environmentalists vs. the evil polluters” framing I saw a lot of other places during the conference makes me deeply uncomfortable, and two, if the green economy is going to work it needs to be the whole economy, not a side industry.

First: I heard a lot of people, excellent organizers and activists who I strongly respect, talking about how we need to stop them, the polluters and the fossil fuel barons. I fully believe that we urgently need to stop, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline. To me, the fundamental issue is that we don’t need to make them stop the pipeline, but we that need to stop us from building it. Our society is dependent on these fuels, and a “we” that includes every attendee of Midwest Powershift and President Obama and the CEO of TransCanada and every person that uses fossil fuels needs to do something different. Stopping them is, to me, deeply disempowering because I am not involved in the final decision. Finding something different for all of us to do is something I can be a part of.

Second: At that conversation, we talked about the realities of our own lives and financial situations. Many of us need to make money to cover needs we can’t meet in other ways. We talked about student debt traps and worries about health insurance. We talked about needing to work other jobs to meet our needs. I left the conversation with a strong need to find ways to support not only myself but my friends and people I have never met to live lives that sustain them and the planet and its people. To me, this means building businesses that generate their own revenue by providing needed services like energy, food, and transit. This may not sound new to my fellow solutionaries, but it felt realer to me leaving that conversation than it has in a while.

Third: (Surprise, there’s a third!) I could not have had this conversation without the three years and four programs I have spent with the Summer of Solutions. I have learned a sense of urgency and a deep-rooted narrative of my own power through my involvement in Summer of Solutions and from my fellow solutionaries in Grand Aspirations. I believe that I can move past the disempowering get-someone-else-to-do-it attitude I described in my first point. I believe that I have agency in moving us towards an economy where we don’t need to wait tables to support our farms or solar businesses — we work on our businesses to support our businesses.

If you want to join me and hundreds of other young people in this endeavor, consider starting a Summer of Solutions program in your community. You can also use that link to let us know if you want to be contacted when the application for participating goes up in the spring (just click the link to apply for a new program and it’s one of the options).

The Summer of Solutions is a program for young people who want to build just, sustainable economies in their communities.

We want to invite YOU to be one of those young people building those solutions. Apply here by October 22 to start a program in your community or to join an existing program leader team.

Running a program gives you the opportunity to create and support green economy projects that build power for people who currently don’t have as much access AND to empower young people from your community and beyond with the skills and strategies they need to do the same thing wherever they go next.

Past Summer of Solutions programs have:

• Built community gardens and farms on vacant lots
• Taught neighbors how to use bikes as an effective form of transit
• Run summer camps for children to help them learn about healthy eating and growing their own food
• Founded and partnered with energy businesses to create a community-based clean energy system
• Created community spaces, from mini-golf courses in the coal fields of West Virginia to a playground in Detroit, MI
• Designed and organized for green manufacturing at a closing car factory in Saint Paul, MN

You can read more about these and other stories at the Summer of Solutions blog. To learn more about the values, principles, and strategies of the program, check out the statement on our website.

Leading a program is a challenging, broadening experience that will help you grow your skills in organizing communities, innovating new solutions, planning with flexibility, telling your story, and raising the resources to support it all. Past program leaders have said about the experience:

• “Our program was a transformative and sometimes overwhelming experience that made several leaders and participants challenge their own destiny. The gratitude expressed by the groups we were working with, the fun we had together, and the bonds we formed will last a lifetime.” – Summer of Solutions/Build It Up West Virginia program leader team
• “This work fits my beliefs and passions so perfectly. I have learned so much from trying and failing and retrying to grow into this role and this movement. The people I’ve befriended through Grand Aspirations and activism are an incredible source of strength. Hey, we’re family.”– Jen Roach, Hartford Summer of Solutions
• “Leading a Summer of Solutions program was one of the most challenging and yet exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I would highly recommend the experience to anyone who has ever wanted to start their own organization to create positive change—this summer certainly had as much excitement as any start-up I’ve ever worked with.” — Lisa Curtis, Oakland Summer of Solutions
• “Participating in and then leading a Summer of Solutions program has been the literally the most transformational experience of my life. It has helped me to grow into becoming the person I want to be. This summer I felt like I was learning so quickly that I felt confident doing things that just the week before would have been totally beyond my skill-set.” — Elana Bulman, Twin Cities Summer of Solutions

If you want to start a new program, you can start something totally from scratch or partner with an existing organization (or something in between). Programs can be hosted either within Grand Aspirations, which runs Summer of Solutions nationally, or as part of a local organization. You can use the summer to start new projects or expand existing ones. You can bring together young people in your community and from outside your community to work together towards common goals. To see all the things program leaders accomplish, please check out the 2012 Program Guidelines.

If you want to join an existing program in Hartford, CT; the Twin Cities, MN; Oakland, CA; or Portland, OR, you can check out what those teams are looking for in new program leaders on their pages. These teams have more experience and direction already but are open to new ideas and innovation as well.

The deadline to apply is October 22.

However you choose to engage as a program leader, Grand Aspirations will support you! Each planning team has a Program Supporter who is an experienced program leader. Your Program Supporter will talk through challenges and connect you with the resources from the rest of the organization like the Media Team, the Resources Team, and the Leadership Development Team. You will have opportunities to connect and brainstorm with your peers at other programs through confluence calls and regional training events during the winter.

If you have any questions about what being a program leader entails, please get in touch with Ruby Levine (802-272-4140, ruby.levine@gmail.com) or Timothy DenHerder-Thomas (646-670-1682, timothydht@gmail.com) to talk through what being a program leader could look like for you!

Credit: Michael Drazdzinski

Solar panels adorning the tops of Harvard buildings. A bright, towering wind turbine on the St. Olaf campus. Libraries and dormitories chock full of blue recycling options and even composting bins inside the dining halls, at the University of Washington.

Campus sustainability has come into its own over the last decade, with renewable energy, tray-less dining, and sustainability director jobs popping up at campuses across the country. While many colleges and universities can implement some or all of these programs to reduce their carbon footprint, many projects are done piecemeal, without a regular source of funding or the institutional support to make it the first step in a larger commitment.

Being a sustainable campus can be so much more than just a green garden or showcase project. Sustainability projects can often reduce the overall operating costs for the campus, saving energy and money, keeping tuition low. But high upfront costs can be a barrier to administrators experiencing steep budget cuts and rising energy costs.

One way for any college or university to achieve these results is through a sustainability financing mechanism called the Green Revolving Fund.

On the main stage at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s national conference in Pittsburgh, PA, the Billion Dollar Green Challenge will be launched in front of the largest gathering, to date, on sustainability in higher education. The Challenge is inviting colleges to establish green revolving funds to invest in significant energy efficiency upgrades on campus.

At the time of the launch, 32 institutions have joined the Challenge’s Founding Circle. Founding Circle participants range in size from large institutions such as Arizona State, Harvard and Stanford, to small and innovative institutions such as Northland College, Green Mountain College and Unity College.

Green revolving fund projects are diverse and versatile, and can be easily adapted to a school’s priorities. Have an active student body? Consider operating a student-driven fund, like at Oberlin College’s EDGE Fund, where students work with faculty and staff to initiative sustainability projects. Want to retrofit your campus buildings? Take a page from the University of Pennsylvania’s Energy Reduction Fund, which reduces energy through building upgrades.

Existing green revolving funds prove that sustainability efforts can be profitable and even fund larger and more ambitious projects, as they have an average return on investment of 32 percent annually.

Clearly, the benefits of joining the Challenge and operating a green revolving fund are numerous. They are a bright spot in a rocky economy, helping to create green jobs in campus communities while substantially reducing operating costs. The Challenge is a broad network of like-minded institutions focused on improving campus sustainability throughout their operations.

For participating institutions, it will be a best practice forum for what kinds of projects have proven successful, what programs have had difficulties, and what programs you should consider on your own campus, based on real-life examples.

As energy prices rise and concerns about resource scarcity increase, it is a risky venture to not invest in environmental initiatives on campus. By joining the Billion Dollar Green Challenge, institutions can both save energy and grow money.

When I helped close the 2011 Twin Cities Summer of Solutions three weeks ago, I knew something amazing was happening, but in the flurry of it all I wasn’t really able to identify it. I started to get a sense of it when I first sat down at the Grand Aspirations August Gathering two weeks ago, when forty people from all over the country streamed in with wondrous stories of their work creating the green economy. By the end of the Gathering, last week, the full depth of the change was starting to dawn on me and was brought to the front of my attention when Ethan Buckner, a friend and Oakland Summer of Solutions Program Leader, said smiling at the end of a big group hug, ‘you know, we’ve created something really remarkable in the past few years’. Now, after a week of catching up and taking the next steps forward back in Minnesota, I’m finally seeing the view from four years out.

Four years ago was about 6 months after the events that got Cooperative Energy Futures and the Alliance to Reindustrialize for a Sustainable Economy off the ground – the seeds of my green economy work in the Twin Cities. It was about 6 months before the vision for the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations emerged. Four years ago, there had been no national gatherings of thousands of youth activists, candidate Barack Obama was barely a competitor, and the economy had not yet tanked. The dream of a green economy was barely starting to be voiced, and the idea that we could sustain ourselves, our communities, and the future of our world by creating new ways to feed, house, power, and transport our society was an exciting but utopian ideal.

So what has changed?

It wasn’t until I took the view from four years out that I really absorbed how much has changed. Here in the Twin Cities, and in so many of the other places where the leaders I’ve worked with are based, the idea of a green economy has rapidly become concrete and hundreds and thousands of people are all trying to figure out how to do it. It’s still an epic struggle with truly gargantuan economic competition, political obstacles, and cultural inertia, but suddenly, thousands – maybe millions nationally and tens of millions globally – of people are chugging away at the solutions. That indicates that a critical mass believe that it is a realistic possibility and they’re going for it. This wasn’t true four years ago.

The power structures that have managed our world for living memory are coming apart at the seams. The past fours years have seen a cascading collapse of many of the largest financial institutions on the planet, taking trust in the American economy and the jobs and homes of millions of people with them. Though we as a society may not have made the full connection between energy costs and their resulting effect on housing, food, and transportation and the connections of all those things with the housing and financial markets and the current recession, it is by now increasingly clear to the general public that the American Dream is not what it used to be. In the midst of this, the politics we have relied upon is failing. The promised wave of hope and change elected a president who has not been able to deliver in a national climate of hampered public participation and partisan deadlock. As climate organizers by the thousands, including many of my friends, go to protests at the White House and leave in handcuffs over the tar sands pipeline and repeated attacks on pollution controls, the inability of our political system to serve the needs of people in the face of economic chaos is becoming brilliantly clear.

The fallout from this chaos is tragic, but from a systems change perspective, it is a deeply promising sign. Public faith in the institutions that have propped up an unsustainable and unjust economy for living memory is breaking. As faith that the polluting economy that advances injustice and weakened communities erodes, it creates space for people to believe in emergent ways of supporting our communities that will actually sustain and uplift us. It is time to let go of the lie that was the old prosperity, recognize that it was founded on the abuse and destruction of people and places cross the planet as well as our own future, and move on. As long as this economy and politics continues to fail us, there is the opportunity for something better to win us.

En masse, distrust of the political process and disfunction in politics coupled with stark clarity of the challenges we face is driving people to innovate new ways to influence the world around them. Some of this is taking the not-very constructive form of building personal safety nets (buying gold, fighting taxation, etc.). Some of it is taking the positive form of collective support (finding community-based ways to provide the health, food, energy, finance etc. services that are evaporating in the current economy. And some of it is truly transformational – developing new models that outcompete business as usual, drawing money, people and resources out of the unsustainable economy and into the new one. We can work on doing more of the latter, but the point is, people are shifting from assuming that someone will take care of their problems for them to taking action (often because they are forced to by economic threats or other situational issues). Four years ago, efforts of this nature often had the feel of hobby projects or radical experiments. More and more, they are taking on the quality of emergent institutions.

Here in the Twin Cities, I’ve seen the transition from promising ideas to new realities happen before my eyes so smoothly that I almost didn’t notice it:

• Four years ago, our vision for green manufacturing at the 140 acre Ford Plant site was an intriguing research project. Now it has the City of St. Paul as a partner and Perkins and Will, a prominent green design firm, pulling together a development team for this multi-billion dollar project.
• Four years ago, our urban agriculture work was developing backyard gardens and learning how to grow things. Now there are new businesses employing people and feeding communities through urban farming.
• Four years ago, our energy efficiency models were cute ideas on paper and a lot of knowledge – now neighborhood associations are contracting for our services, a coalition of over a dozen organizations is working together to save energy and create green jobs in South Minneapolis, and I’ve created a job for myself while also supporting local youth helping the community save energy.

In the past four years, these nascent seeds of solutions have grown into the saplings of the new economy not just here in the Twin Cities, and not just in the 15+ places where Grand Aspirations has operated. They are growing in countless communities across the globe powered by communities and local businesses and forward-thinking public officials. These communities are starting to look towards each other and recognize in the solidarity and collaboration that will turns many small local things into transformation.

The view from four years out continues to remind me of this article by Sara Robinson that urges activists to remember history and act with patience and grounding. It describes the long and troubled process from business as usual to transformation that our society is now acting out on the grandest of scales.

The view from four years out makes this process visible – it even makes it look fast. It shows me how quickly the dreams that started the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations are becoming realities. It shows me how quickly the people I met at the August Gathering – over half of whom I did not even know 12 months ago, let alone 4 years ago – have become my fellow world-makers. And it whispers thrillingly all the things that this implies for the endless fountain of ideas that are only now emerging and the millions of people preparing to join in.

Which REALLY makes me look forward to the next four years … and the next … and the next.

Just in case our 5 years of swarming state capitals decked out in green hard hats, running campaigns calling for more jobs in clean energy, and vowing to only vote for candidates who support renewable energy companies hasn’t made it clear — youth really want more green jobs.

While young people have been some of the biggest advocates for green jobs, no one has really tried to answer the question of whether green jobs will be youth jobs? Will more green jobs mean more jobs for youth, or will young people miss out on the very green jobs we’ve worked so hard to create?

So far, the answer has been “we don’t know.” That’s because, despite all of the green jobs studies that have been done, none of them has really looked at the different kinds of people who actually get green jobs (one exception is for income and education level). This is especially true across different races, ethnicities, genders, and, yeah, ages. So, we set out to change that, writing the first study we know of to look at youth access to green jobs, and also the first written by youth.

Building on Kyle’s earlier research on green jobs demographics, we looked at the industries where the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (which finally has the resources to take green jobs seriously) says the most green jobs companies are, and compared that to data on the industries most young people work in. You can see the full results in our paper, but they’re not great:

Basically, industries with the most green jobs, like construction (doing energy efficient building retrofits, for example), don’t employ young people who have jobs (here BLS defines youth as ages 18-24). And the industries that do employ a lot of young people, like retail (and every young person’s favorite job, food service!), have some of the lowest rates of green jobs companies, less than a percent of all green jobs firms. Considering that youth unemployment is even higher than average unemployment, that’s pretty crappy news for all those youth looking to make a difference through a steady job.

To be fair, the data we have only tells us how many green jobs companies there are, not how many actual jobs there are (BLS is surveying total numbers of jobs now, hoping to finish by 2012), and the numbers probably look a little better for youth aged 25-29.

Does that mean more green jobs won’t create jobs for youth? No.

For one thing, tons of studies suggest that investments and policies that support renewable energy, energy efficiency, and solutions to climate change create more jobs overall, compared to equivalent support for fossil fuels and fossil fuel jobs. Just having more jobs total should mean at least some extra jobs for youth, even if most of those green jobs go to older workers. Youth are also not heavily employed in fossil fuel and mining sectors, meaning we will be less hurt by these shifts in investments.

For another, just having more older workers with green jobs (when they used to be unemployed) will create some jobs for youth. That’s because people who are getting paid, when they used to be out of work, also start spending money when they couldn’t before. And they spend that money at places like clothing stores and restaurants — places that employ a lot of young people — and those places start hiring more workers as their business picks up (these are called either indirect or induced jobs). These might not be green jobs directly, and they may not pay the kinds of wages youth need to prosper, but they’re at least an improvement over no job.

But lastly, and most importantly, pushing for green jobs today will mean more green jobs tomorrow. Even if our generation isn’t claiming the majority of green jobs today, you can bet we will soon, as we become the biggest generation in the workforce, becomes innovators helping to solve our energy and climate crises, and move into the age range with the most green employment.

Even putting aside other benefits, like fighting climate change and helping other people find decent work, that’s reason enough for youth to fight for more green jobs.

Michael Davidson was a SustainUS youth delegate to the Cancun climate negotiations in December 2010. He is the China Climate Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC, where he examines the dynamic U.S.-China energy and environment relationship and supports NRDC’s Earth Summit 2012 campaign. Previously, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing and holds degrees in Physics and Japanese Studies from Case Western Reserve University.

The study — “Green Jobs for Youth: A Preliminary Analysis of Youth in the Green Economy” — is our own work and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or endorsements of the places we work for.

Guest post from Matt Kazinka, leader with the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions. Cross posted from WeArePowerShift.org. 

Sometimes the quickest way to a clean energy economy is to get a little dirty. That’s right, it’s time to get our hands in the dirt and physically build the clean and just energy economy we want. And that’s exactly what young people across the country are doing this summer. We’re stepping up to get our hands dirty creating local clean energy solutions like community gardens, home weatherizations, and clean energy cooperatives.

This summer, youth leaders across the country are launching a host of community-based projects that will revitalize our economy in an environmentally sustainable and socially just manner. These projects range widely from building community gardens in Oakland to stopping the construction of a dirty coal plant in Georgia. But they all have one thing in common: DIY. Young people aren’t waiting for the government to act. We are stepping up to show our elected officials that we have the power in our own communities to create what we want and demand that they put dirty politics aside and follow our lead.

Changing the way our policies system works means changing our relationship with our communities. Through these projects, young people are working in partnership with diverse local organizations and coalitions to build the green economy from the ground up. With creativity, collaboration, and hard work, they are demonstrating that there is endless potential for prosperity at our fingertips. This summer, we will pilot ground-breaking strategies for energy efficiency, urban agriculture, renewable energy, sustainable transportation, waste reduction, and green industry.

We want a clean energy economy that supports everyone in a way the dirty energy economy never could. The era of segregated neighborhoods, polluted politics and economic apartheid has been played out. We have inherited deep-seated problems – climate change, political turmoil, social inequities, and economic disparities of mass proportions. Nothing about these challenges is simple, but nothing about them is inevitable, either. We have the power and are creating change.

Young people have a critical role to play in each of our communities. Rather than accepting the worn path into a broken, dirty energy economy, we can carve a new path into a clean energy economy. We can show that true prosperity is found in healthy communities that have thriving ecosystems, equitable relationships, and resilient economies. When we’ve begun to shift the power in all our communities across the country, the national Power Shift will be unstoppable.

It is up to us to prove that the green economy is not only vital, it’s absolutely viable. Join us as we build our future together – starting with this summer, and continuing for the rest of our lives.

Throughout the summer check back at WeArePowerShift.org to hear from the leaders making it happen. There’s already some great video’s from the GELT Project in Detroit and the Summer of Solutions Project in Oakland. Each week, we will feature a profile from each project, community members affected by each project, and a project’s special events or actions. Plus, you’ll get to hear the collective efforts of the effective local, community-based clean economy projects that are willing to get a little dirty to create a clean, just energy future.

Check out the 17 projects happening across the country:

• Ashland, OR (Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment): http://grandaspirations.org/inspire-ashland
• Atlanta, GA (Southern Energy Network): http://www.climateaction.net/jobs
• Chicago, IL (United Church of Rogers Park): http://grandaspirations.org/chicago
• Cleveland, OH (Ohio Student Environmental Coalition): http://grandaspirations.org/cleveland
• Corvallis, OR (Corvallis Environmental Center): http://grandaspirations.org/corvallis
• Detroit, MI (Global Exchange): http://www.distributedpower.org
• Eugene, OR (Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment): http://grandaspirations.org/eugene
• Fayetteville, AR (OMNI Center): http://grandaspirations.org/fayetteville
• Hartford, CT (Summer of Solutions): http://grandaspirations.org/hartford
• Iowa City, IA (Summer of Solutions): http://grandaspirations.org/iowacity
• New England (New England Climate Summer):http://www.newenglandclimatesummer.org/
• Oakland, CA (Summer of Solutions): http://grandaspirations.org/oakland
• Pioneer Valley, MA (Summer of Solutions): http://grandaspirations.org/pioneervalley
• Portland, OR (Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment): http://grandaspirations.org/portland
• Raleigh, NC (Full Circles Foundation): http://grandaspirations.org/raleigh
• Twin Cities, MN (Summer of Solutions):http://grandaspirations.org/twincities
• Washington, DC (WeatherizeDC):http://weatherizedc.org

Today I got to stand next to more than 50 Massachusetts mothers, children, workers, community leaders, and people of faith to kick off something truly unique – a “crowd-funded” citizen’s campaign to hold Senator Scott Brown accountable for voting to gut the Clean Air Act. At 12:00pm on the sidewalk in front of the JFK Federal Building in Boston, also known as Scott Brown’s district office, we held banners and puppets of Scott Brown and his fat cat supporters “Coal” and “Oil, signs, and a blow-up of the new ad our friends and neighbors funded.

The text of the ad read: “Senator Brown: On April 6th you voted to gut the Clean Air Act. Was it because dirty energy companies and their corporate front groups poured more than $1.9 million into your campaign last year? Are you working for people or Big Polluters?” Interested in joining us in funding the ad? Check it out here.

Right after the rally Marla took our message up the JFK elevators to Senator Brown’s office, delivering word of the rally along with 103 postcards and 240 letters from members of the Massachusetts Council of Churches and Mass Interfaith Power and Light. The messages called on Senator Brown to support the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide next time a vote comes up on the Clean Air Act and ensure low income people have access to weatherization and green jobs.

At 6:30pm tonight at a podium inside the Newton Marriott Hotel Scott Brown will host a “Women for Brown” fundraiser (with a $1000 minimum) alongside the brand new Women For Brown coalition, a group created to respond to the League of Women Voters’ ads calling Scott Brown out for his April 6th vote to gut the Clean Air Act. We know what Scott Brown is going to say at that podium tonight: “Today in front of my office the political attack machine was at it again, playing politics as usual with the public.” He’ll talk about the “special interest groups” who are attacking him for trying to defend jobs. Yes, he will raise some money tonight. But the more Scott Brown digs in his heels, the more votes he will lose.

Today’s rally was no “political attack machine,” as Brown calls people who criticize him. Today’s rally was everyday-Massachusetts – a state where you don’t get to draw a line between jobs and the environment, the economy and climate change. People here across the political spectrum and in all corners of the state understand the threat of climate change and know that the jobs of tomorrow and today are in clean energy.

If you have ever driven on most of the northern highways in northern Alberta you will be presented with a picture of a tame prairie terrain, with sprawling fields and farms holding cows and the occasional conventional oil pump jack. A few kilometers on any of the gravel access roads however and you will see a much more bleaker picture of out of control industrialization and poisoning of the land. This is unless of course you witness the tar sands machines of death on Highway 63 near Fort McMurray and Fort McKay, or the massive underground mining operations in the Peace River and Cold Lake regions disrupting and contaminating underground water. What most modern thinkers fail to understand is thousands years of history from the ancestors of Cree, Dene, Blackfoot, Nakoda and Metis people. Living nations of people who simply cannot afford the luxury of packing up and moving as settlers when there is no longer work. These lands are home to these nations and are not sacrifice zones. And like a deadly contagious all-consuming disease, what has been done to Alberta by the oil industry cannot be allowed to spread to other parts of the world killing indigenous ways of life and jeopardizing the future for all.

Enbridge, and the expansion of the Alberta Tar Sands Gigaproject, is attempting to retrace the steps taken by the Hudson’s Bay Company with classic colonial strategy. The Hudson’s Bay Company was the first corporation on Turtle Island, here in North America. The Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading forts also became the first settler governments for the British Empire. In Alberta, the first settlement and colonial government in Alberta was in Fort Chipewyan, which would today is seen as the international poster community for a Cree, Dene and Metis community directly impacted by 40 years of out of control open pit tar sands mining. The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline is renewing a pipeline proposal and expansions originally proposed nearly 10 years ago and is supported by the Stephen Harper Conservative Canadian Government.

Just one week after the largest oil pipeline spill in Alberta in 30 years in unceded Lubicon Cree Territory, a spill that took six days for the Alberta government to respond in a half-assed, indifferent manner, starting with faxing a one-page “fact sheet” update about the disaster, a large contingent from the Yinka Dene Alliance from the northwest interior of B.C. were arriving in Calgary to confront Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project and tanker traffic.

On May 11th, 2011, on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Calgary, Alberta, a historic solidarity statement of opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal was signed by leaders of the Blood Tribe, Alexander First Nation, Lubicon Lake Nation, Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation, Sai’kuz First Nation, Nadleh Whuten, Takla Lake First Nation and the Nakazdli First Nation.

The day after the Enbridge AGM a rally was held in Prince Rupert, B.C. on May 12th, outside a meeting sponsored by Enbridge for the Northern BC Municipalities Convention. With a historic turn-out of over 500 Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents of the island of Lach Kaien, known in the mainstream society as Prince Rupert, publicly and loudly demonstrating their opposition to the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline proposal as well as any tar sands tanker traffic that would support the industry of dirty crude oil and liquid condensate.

Lach Kaien, or Prince Rupert, is known to the Tsimshian as the “Cradle of Tsimshian Civilization,” according to a hereditary chief of the Gits’iis tribe, Sm’ooygit Nisyaganaat. The Prince Rupert Harbor contains the most dense archaelogical sites north of Mexico City and is the second deepest harbor in the world. Lach Kaien is surrounded by Tsimshian communities traditionally comprised of 11 Tsimshian villages, as well as neighboring nations from the Haida, Haisla, Heiltsuk, Gitksan, Nisga’a, Tahltan, and Tlingit. To this day the indigenous population of the town of Prince Rupert is still between 40-50%, with all industries heavily dependent upon the commerce, labor and resources of Indigenous coastal nations.

A few coastal communities however have not yet made a clear position on whether or not to support the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker project and any western tar sands crude oil expansion. These include among the largest of coastal communities of Lach hlgu K’alaams (Lax Kw’Alaams) or Port Simpson, and Gitkxaahla (Kitkatla), where the still active traditional laws and feasting systems of hereditary chiefs is still strong and holds much influence over the non-surrendered tribal territories in the region of Prince Rupert, Hecate Strait, and the Skeena and Nass Rivers.

These are nations still waiting to awaken to take their place and decide for themselves what is allowed into the lands and waters of nations that have lived and thrived on this edge of the world for thousands of years. To uphold the traditional laws and protocols of respect and responsibilities known as Ayaawk and Gugwiltx Yaans and not be steered by any settler government, environmental group, or any funding body with non-Indigenous agendas. Especially is true that Indigenous grassroots leaders are still fighting the oppression of the Indian Act system and the federal Canadian employees of many Band Councils maintaining the silencing of traditional hereditary leadership systems through which the sole jurisdiction of all territories flows through.

Indigenous lands and waters are to be spoken for and by Indigenous minds and communities. Enbridge Northern Gateway, and all tar sands pipelines and expansions such as the Kinder Morgan TMX Northern Leg Extension, the Pembina Pipeline, the PNG KSL Pipeline, the Kitimat and Prince Rupert Liquid Natural Gas Terminals, and the Prince Rupert “New World” Container Ports are just a few of the many modern obstacles in the path of standing up the original structures and ways of life with which to free Indigenous nations on this edge of the world.

Links to the rally and demonstration held in Lach Kaien and declarations of war against Enbridge -

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/enbridge-pipeline-faces-prospect-civil-disobedience-500-strong-crowd-rallies-outside-1514236.htm

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/greenpage/121784899.html

http://www.muskegnews.com/protest-enbridge0512

http://wcel.org/media-centre/media-releases/coastal-first-nations-tanker-ban-creates-new-legal-risks-and-uncertainty

http://savethefraser.ca/

Statement of Solidarity of Indigenous Nations opposed to Enbridge Northern Gateway -

May 10th, 2011 – Calgary, Alberta, territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy

WE THE UNDERSIGNED INDIGENOUS NATIONS STATE IN SOLIDARITY:
Our Nations are bound together by the water which is our lifeblood. We have protected our lands and waters since time immemorial, each according to our laws and traditions. The waters of Indigenous peoples throughout the lands known as western Canada are being threatened by fossil fuel exploitation and transportation.

We exercise our rights to sustain our cultural and economic well-being. The laws of each of our peoples are deeply embedded in our cultures and practices. These laws have never been extinguished and our authority continues in our lands. Our peoples continue to live by them today.

We have come together on May 10, 2011 in the city of Calgary, Alberta, in the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, to declare to the governments of Alberta, British Columbia, as well as Enbridge Inc., all of its subsidiary bodies, and the domestic and international financial institutions supporting Enbridge, THE FOLLOWING:

The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline and tankers project will expose Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities from the Pacific Coast across to Alberta to the risk of pipeline and supertanker oil spills, just as we have seen recently with Enbridge’s massive spill in Michigan, the recent devastating spill in Lubicon Cree territory, the recent TransCanada pipeline spill in North Dakota, as well as the effects of the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon disaster. Tar sands bitumen has been demonstrated to corrode pipelines more rapidly than conventional oil, increasing the likelihood of catastrophic spills. Given the seismic volatility of the region, the recent earthquake in Japan also underlies our grave concerns about the risk of oil spills.

The urgency of global climate change, and the fact that Indigenous peoples are among those most impacted by climate change, also compels us to act.

We have witnessed the Coastal First Nations Declaration banning crude oil tankers on the Pacific North Coast, and the Save the Fraser Declaration banning crude oil transportation through the Fraser River watershed. Each of these Declarations is based in Indigenous law and is an expression of Indigenous decision-making authority.

Enbridge states that it intends to proceed with its Northern Gateway pipeline and tankers, with or without First Nations consent. A decision by Canada to approve this project, without the free, prior and informed consent of affected Nations, will be a violation of our Treaties, our rights, and our laws, and will be in breach of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other international accords.

THEREFORE we stand in solidarity with the Coastal First Nations, and the Nations who have signed the Save the Fraser Declaration, and are united in stating that Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline and tanker project, as well as other fossil fuel development projects including Keystone XL, must not proceed without obtaining the free, prior and informed consent of all affected First Nations.

AND FURTHER if such consent is not obtained, no construction of such projects shall proceed.

SIGNED in the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, at the city of Calgary, May 10 2011

Sai’kuz First Nation

Nadleh Whut’en

Takla Lake First Nation

Nakazdli First Nation

Blood Tribe

Alexander First Nation

Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation

Lubicon Lake Nation