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Surviving the Ups and Downs of Social Movements
Certainly, activists fighting around issues of inequality and economic justice have seen this pattern in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. Many working to combat climate change have encountered their own periods of dejection after large protests in recent years. And even members of movements that have been very successful -- such as the immigrant students who compelled the Obama administration to implement a de facto version of the Dream Act -- have gone through periods of deflation despite making great advances. Further back in history, a sense of failure and frustration could be seen among civil rights activists following the landmark 1964 Freedom Summer campaign.
After intensive uprisings have cooled, many participants simply give up and move on to other pursuits. Even those committed to ongoing activism wonder how they can keep more people involved over the long haul.
Unfortunately, the fluctuating cycles of popular movements cannot be avoided. Unlike community organizing, which focuses on the slow and steady building of organizational structures, a boom-and-bust pattern is inherent in mass protest movements. Wide-scale uprisings can make a major impact on public consciousness, but they can never be sustained for long. The fact that they fade from view does not mean they lack value -- the civil rights movement, for one, scored many of its biggest wins as a result of mass mobilization and the innovative use of nonviolent direct action. But it does present a challenge: Without an understanding of movement cycles, it is difficult to combat despondency.
So how, then, do we know when movements have died -- and when are they primed to revive? And how do activists translate periods of peak activity into substantive and enduring social change?
For Bill Moyer, a trainer and strategist who experienced first hand some of the landmark movement cycles of the 1960s and '70s, grappling with these questions became a life's work. Moyer's legacy is an eight-stage model for how movements can overcome despair and marginality to change society -- a framework known as the Movement Action Plan, or MAP. Nearly three decades after it was first developed, the MAP continues to offer insights into problems that, while new to fresh generations of activists, in fact have a long lineage.
The Moyer map
Moyer was born in 1933 and grew up as the son of a TV repairman in northeast Philadelphia. As a child, he aspired to one day become a Presbyterian missionary in Africa. But a trouble-making spirit would ultimately get in the way. As he told it, "In March 1959 I was voted out of the Presbyterian Church because I invited a Catholic and a Jew to talk to the youth group."
The expulsion led him into the arms of the Quakers. At the time, Moyer was just three years out of PennState, working as a management systems engineer and searching for more "meaning." Through Philadelphia's active Quaker meetinghouse, Moyer came in contact with a vibrant circle of socially engaged peers, and an elder couple tutored him in theories of nonviolence. These encounters forever altered his life. "I had no idea that it was the start of 'the sixties,'" Moyer later wrote, "and never suspected that I was beginning my new profession as a full-time activist."
In the 1960s, Moyer would take a job with the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago, helping to convince Martin Luther King to launch an open housing campaign in the city. Moyer then worked on King's last drive, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. In the decade that followed, he spent his energies protesting the Vietnam War, supporting American Indian Movement activists at Wounded Knee, and promoting the newly emerging movement against nuclear power.
As he increasing began training other activists, Moyer saw a gap. "How-to-do-it models and manuals provide step-by-step guidelines for most human activity," he wrote in 1987, "from baking a cake and playing tennis to having a relationship and winning a war." Within the world of activism, however, such material was harder to come by.
Saul Alinsky and his followers had created training manuals for their specific brand of community organizing. Likewise, materials drawing from Gandhi and King were available for instructing people in how to create individual nonviolent confrontations. But Moyer believed that there was a lack of models that looked at the long arc of protest movements, materials that accounted for the highs and lows experienced by participants. The result, he contended, was that activists became stuck in their thinking, always repeating the past tactics and failing to strategize for how to effectively move their campaigns forward.
Moyer's MAP aimed to address this need. It was initially printed in 1986 in the movement journal Dandelion, with 12,000 newsprint copies distributed through grassroots channels. Subsequently, it became an underground hit. The plan would continue to be circulated by hand, translated into other languages, and shared at trainings for well over a decade, before taking its final form in the 2002 book Doing Democracy, published shortly before Moyer's death.
'Every good movement'
Within the academic field of social movement theory, which experienced significant growth in the 1970s and '80s, scholars were increasingly appreciating how social change happens through what sociologist Sidney Tarrow calls "cycles of contention." Drawing on the work of theorists including Herbert Blumer and Charles Tilly, the standard academic account holds that movements pass through four stages: emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline. The last stage is not necessarily negative: movements sometimes are defeated or repressed, but other times they fade away because they have won their key demands.
Outside of academia, a variety of activists have offered thoughts of their own. In the March 9, 1921 edition of Young India, Mohandas Gandhi wrote, "Every good movement passes through five stages: indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect." Because Gandhi's take highlights the likelihood that resistance will be met with a crackdown by authorities, the prospect of progressing through his stages seems less inviting than riding out the academics' model. But Gandhi believed that dissidents are strengthened by the trials they endure. "Every movement that survives repression, mild or severe, invariably commands respect," he contended, "which is another name for success."
In recent years British author and activist Tim Gee has gone so far to propose a four-stage model based on a popular maxim that mirrors Gandhi's sentiment (and is often misattributed to him). This version states, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
All of these different models have some value, but they also present problems. One problem, which Gee notes, is that various proposals for sequential stages for movements carry a sense of "implied inevitability." The academic theories, in particular, suggest a sort of linear progression that does not reflect the experience of those living through boom-and-bust movement cycles. As removed instruments of analysis, they can leave real-world participants feeling cold. As Moyer puts it, "While there is much useful information in social movement theories, most do not help us under the ebb and flow of living, breathing social movements as they grow and change over time."
Moyer's MAP model is a different animal. It, too, proposes a progression through which successful movements pass: Over the course of his eight stages, activists raise initial awareness of a grievance, then become more organized in their efforts, engage in confrontation, and finally work to consolidate their gains. However, Moyer is much more attuned to the psychology of those who must struggle to push a cause forward. The MAP captures of the exhilaration of times when -- following a dramatic "trigger event" -- protests explode and "overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue that everyone is talking about." (The Occupy encampments stand out as a prominent recent trigger, just as the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle fit the bill for the global justice movement.) And the model grapples in detail with the often-challenging aftermath of such peak moments.
Rooted in hard-won experience, Moyer's work is attentive to the different roles and personalities that can help or hinder an effort at any given stage in its development, and it is careful to warn of the common pitfalls that keep some movements from ever realizing their goals. These factors helped earn the MAP its cult popularity. Moyer was proud when trainers using his materials reported that participants would nearly gasp in recognition when his model explained patterns which they had thought were unique to their own experience. Moyer called these "Aha!" moments, and his goal was to create as many of them as possible.
The perception of failure
For those encountering the MAP model for the first time, the biggest "Aha" usually comes with Moyer's stage five. The previous stage -- stage four -- is when protest movements take off, holding attention-grabbing demonstrations and experiencing rapid growth. But what comes next is not a smooth stroll to success. Instead, according to Moyer, the flurry of activity is followed by "Perception of Failure."
With this stage, Moyer highlights a paradox: activists commonly feel let down after a spike in activity subsides. Yet, it is just at this moment when they may be poised to reap significant gains. Moyer writes, "After a year or two, the high hopes of instant victory in the movement take-off stage inevitably turn into despair as some activists begin to believe that their movement is failing. It has not achieved its goals and, in their eyes, it has not had any 'real' victories."
At this point many people "burn out or drop out because of the exhaustion caused by overwork and long meetings." Moreover, the mainstream media reinforces an air of negativity by reporting that, since protests have dropped off, the movement is dead and has accomplished nothing. All of this, Moyer writes, combines to create "a self-fulfilling prophecy that prevents or limits [movement] success."
Bill Moyer's Movement Action Plan. (WNV/Doing Democracy)
By identifying the perception of failure as a normal part of social movement cycles, Moyer hoped to blunt the negative force of this stage. He argued that activists who look to history will see that they are not alone in experiencing letdown. And they will also notice that past movements that were able to overcome despondency ended up seeing many of their once-distant demands realized. The key is to step back and prepare for the next stage -- in which activists benefit from the increase of public awareness created by their past protests, and in which their proposals for alternative solutions are more likely to find receptive audiences.
Because feelings of failure within movements are so rarely acknowledged in other sources -- far less considered thoughtfully -- stage five invariably becomes a focal point when Moyer's work is discussed. Waging Nonviolence editor Nathan Schneider applied the "perception of failure" in analyzing the Occupy movement on its second anniversary for The Nation. And none other than far-right guru and ex-Fox News titan Glenn Beck considered Moyer's stage five in some detail in contemplating the future prospects of the Tea Party.
But, we might ask, are perceptions of failure necessarily irrational and misguided?
Clearly, there is a danger here. While everyone likes to be told that they are winning, blase reassurances are no substitute for real analysis. It is possible to misinterpret Moyer's model as a guarantee that, if you feel that your movement is faltering, you simply need to wait a little longer and things will work out. This is a comforting idea, and also a false one. The fate of some movements, Moyer acknowledges on the first page of Doing Democracy, is simply to fail miserably. Yours could be one of them.
The question, then, is: How does one determine when pessimism is misplaced -- and how do you gauge genuine progress?
Hearts and minds
The answer is at once straightforward and counter-intuitive: Movements succeed when they win over ever-greater levels of public support for their cause. This is a point that Moyers repeats constantly and consistently. "Social movements involve a long-term struggle between the movement and the powerholders for the hearts, minds and support of the majority of the population," he argues. Therefore, the job of activists is to "alert, educate, and win over an ever-increasing majority of the public." Without a preponderance of public sympathy, a popular movement cannot prevail. "Because it is the people who ultimately hold the power," Moyers concludes, "they will either preserve the status quo or create change."
These proposals sound reasonable -- perhaps even obvious -- on their face. But in fact they present a serious challenge to the way in which most people think about political life. In conventional politics, the focus is not on winning over the majority of the public or transforming the climate of debate on an issue. Rather, negotiations take place in the realms of the possible and the expedient. Interest groups spend the great bulk of their energy pressuring power-holding elites to grant favors or make concessions. Success is measured by their ability to leverage power in order to secure incremental gains on the issues they care about. Social change, in this paradigm, comes about through the slow accumulation of these calculated, instrumental victories.
Moyer's theory of change, based on the idea of winning majority support, rests on a different set of suppositions. In the MAP model, long stretches of time can pass where little seems to change. Even as they slowly accumulate popular sympathy, movements may lack any real traction in the halls of power. But once public opinion tips, the floodgates of change can open.
"Over the years... the weight of massive public opposition, along with the defection of many elites, takes its toll," Moyer explains. Movement activists may have been told for as long as they could remember that their demands were naive and politically impractical. But once majority support for their position is firmly established, this starts to change, sometimes abruptly. The limits of the possible can be redefined -- as they were with civil rights in the 1960s, or with the call to phase out nuclear power in 1980s, or with gay marriage in recent years.
"The long-term impact of social movements," Moyer contends in a sentence that would be heretical in conventional political circles, "is more important than their immediate material success."
The idea of winning over majority public support creates a metric by which activists can judge where they stand in the MAP model -- and this sets Moyer's framework apart from other, more amorphous accounts of movement cycles. In the MAP's early stages, during the initial ripening of conditions around an issue, less than 30 percent of the population might agree with a movement's insistence that the status quo must change. As activists ramp up protest, greater segments of the public become aware of the problem at hand, and successful movements push levels of sympathy toward the 50 percent mark. Only after they pass this threshold does the endgame of a movement begin. At that point, change agents can shift their focus from demonstrating that a problem exists to advocating for alternatives -- and they can start seeing these alternatives adopted in mainstream politics.
And then you win
A focus on "hearts and minds" provides the key to unraveling the mystery of stage five. When advocates for social change recognize that their core objective is winning over the public, they are equipped to judge whether or not pessimism about their progress is legitimate.
Perceptions of failure are warranted when movements alienate potential supporters. When periods of peak protest activity fizzle, there is a danger that some activists -- a group Moyer calls the "negative rebels" -- will resort to insular vanguardism. Focusing solely on building a radical core rather than on persuading the outside world, these actors advocate for increasing dramatic tactics that appeal to disgruntled activists' militant sensibilities, but that hold little appeal for observers who are not already among the converted. When this happens, a movement becomes more and more marginal, and fears of irrelevancy are not misplaced.
On the other hand, movements that are building popular support need not worry if their initial moment in the spotlight passes and the fickle news media turns its attention elsewhere. Although they may miss the enthusiasm and energy of the earlier period, they should not accept the notion that they have become irrelevant. As long as a movement has gained a larger share of public sympathy as a result of its efforts, its activists are well positioned to push for greater change. This push will typically involve continued public education, advocacy for movement solutions, and readiness to ignite fresh waves of protest when the opportunities arise.
Moyer tells the story of when he first presented the MAP model: In February 1978, he was set to give a presentation at a strategy conference to 45 organizers from the Clamshell Alliance. This anti-nuclear group had conducted a landmark series of direct action protests against the Seabrook power plant in New England. At its peak, the previous spring, the alliance carried out an occupation of Seabrook in which 1,414 people were arrested and spent 12 days in jail. As Moyer writes, "During those two weeks, nuclear energy became a worldwide public issue as the mass media spotlight focused on the activists locked in armories throughout New Hampshire."
In the wake of the Clamshell actions, hundreds of new grassroots groups formed around the country. The Seabrook protest would inspire further occupations in places such as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. Moreover, the organization's methods -- its affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus process, and focus on militant, nonviolent blockades -- would ultimately become an influential model for direct action in the United States.
Because of all they had accomplished, Moyer expected that the group at the conference would be upbeat and celebratory. Instead, he encountered something quite different. "I was shocked when the Clamshell activists arrived with heads bowed, dispirited and depressed, saying their efforts had been in vain," Moyer writes. Because protests had died down and construction on the specific plant they had targeted still continued, they felt defeated.
In his presentation, a sketchy version of what would become his eight stages of social movements, Moyer scrambled to demonstrate how the activists had made considerable gains. By galvanizing national opposition to the industry, the movement already reversed the near-universal acceptance of nuclear power that prevailed during the 1960s and early 1970s. Activists were well on there way to establishing majority support for their position -- and seeing tangible changes as a result.
Moyer believes that the framework he presented helped many of the activists to better understand their predicament and plan for future stages of activity. Whether or not this is the case, anti-nuclear campaigns ultimately achieved a resounding victory. By making the safety, cost and ecological impact of nuclear power into concerns shared by a majority of Americans, they created a situation in which orders for new nuclear power plants ceased, the government was forced to abandon its goal of having 1,000 facilities in operation by the end of the millennium, and the number of working plants was set on a path of steady decline -- a path on which it continues to this day.
Among the majority
Social movement activists are notoriously poor at celebrating their victories. Stage five is not the only point in Moyer's model when they are often inclined toward despair. Ironically, near the end of MAP's eight stages, when movements begin to see concrete wins, it is again common to see participants again experience depression. At this point, with a firm majority of the population in support of an issue, opportunists flourish. Mainstream politicians, centrist organizations, former critics, and once-recalcitrant power brokers all scramble to take credit for gains that have been achieved. Notwithstanding years of stonewalling, silence and timidity, these people insist they, too, are repulsed by segregation; that they are truly committed to environmental protections; that they strongly believe in marriage equality; and that the war they once had endorsed was actually the mistaken folly of their political opponents.
Often, movements receive scant credit for bringing about such changes of heart. Those who have done the most are likely to be missing from the victory parties, and they are also the most likely to have a pained awareness of the work that still remains to be done.
Yet activists who were pioneers in highlighting the injustice of an issue -- and who may well have felt themselves failures at many points along the road -- can take pleasure in seeing society come to regard their once-incendiary views as little more than common sense. These one-time rebels may no longer stand out as much as they did when they were marginal and embattled. But from the new majority they helped create, they can command at least a small measure of begrudging respect. Which is another name for success.
Sam Lovejoy, the No Nukes Movement, and the Tower that Toppled a Terrible Technology
Lovejoy lived at the old Liberation News Service farm, four miles from the site. Montague's population of about 7500 included a growing number of "hippie communes." As documented in Ray Mungo's Famous Long Ago, this one was born of a radical news service that had been infiltrated by the FBI, promoting a legendary split that led the founding faction to flee to rural Massachusetts.
And thus J. Edgar Hoover--may he spin in his grave over this one--became an inadvertent godfather to the movement against nuclear power.
When the local utility announced it would build atomic reactors on the eastern shore of the Connecticut River, 180 miles north of New York City, they thought they were waltzing into a docile rural community. But many of the local communes were pioneering a new generation's movement for organic farming, and were well-stocked with seasoned activists still working in the peace and civil rights movements. Radioactive fallout was not in synch with our new-found aversion to chemical sprays and fertilizers. Over the next three decades, this reborn organic ethos would help spawn a major on-going shift in the public view toward holistic food that continues today.
For those of us at Montague Farm, the idea of two gargantuan reactors four miles from our lovely young children, Eben and Sequoyah, our pristine one-acre garden and glorious maple sugar bush... all this and more prompted two clear, uncompromising words: NO NUKES!
We printed the first bumper stickers, drafted pamphlets and began organizing.
Nobody believed we could beat a massive corporation with more money than Lucifer. An initial poll showed three-quarters of the town in favor of the jobs, tax breaks and excitement the reactors would bring. For us, one out of four of our neighbors was a pretty good start.
But nationwide, when Richard Nixon said there'd be 1000 US reactors by the year 2000, nobody doubted him. Nuclear power was a popular assumption, a given supported by a large majority of the world's population. We needed a jolt to get our movement off the ground.
That would be the tower. All day and night it blinked on and off, ostensibly in warning to small planes flying in and out of the Turners Falls Airport. But it also stood as a symbol of arrogance and oppression, a steel calling card from a corporation that could not care less about our health, safety or organic well-being.
So at 4 am on Washington's Birthday (which back then was still February 22), Sam knocked it down. In a feat of mechanical daring many of us still find daunting, he carefully used a crow bar to unfasten one...then two...then a third turnbuckle. The wires on the other two sides of the triangulated support system then pulled down six of the tower's seven segments, leaving just one 70-foot stump still standing. It was so loud, Sam said, he was "amazed the whole town didn't wake up."
But this was the Montague Plains, the middle of nowhere. Sam ran to the road and flagged down the first car--it happened to be a police cruiser--and asked for a ride to the Turners Falls station. Atomic energy, said his typed statement, was dangerous, dirty, expensive, unneeded and, above all, a threat to our children. Tearing down the tower was a legitimate means of protecting the community.
This being Massachusetts, Sam was freed later that morning on his personal promise to return for trial. Facing a felony charge in September, he was acquitted on a technicality. A jury poll showed he would have been let go anyway.
The legendary historian Howard Zinn testified on Sam's behalf. So did Dr. John Gofman, first health director of the Atomic Energy Commission, who flew from California to warn this small-town jury that the atomic reactors he helped invent were instruments of what he called "mass murder."
The tower toppling and subsequent trial were pure, picturesque reborn Henry Thoreau, whose beloved Walden Pond is just 50 miles down wind.
Sam was the perfect hero. Brilliant, charismatic, funny and unaffected, his combination of rural roots and an Amherst College degree made him an irresistible spokesperson for the nascent No Nukes campaign.
Backed by a community packed with activists, organizers, writers and journalists, the word spread like wildfire. Filmmaker Dan Keller, an Amherst classmate, made Green Mountain Post's award-winning Lovejoy's Nuclear War, produced on a shoe string, seen by millions on public television, at rallies, speeches, library gatherings, classrooms and more throughout the US, Europe and Japan. For a critical mass of citizen-activists, it was the first introduction to an issue on which the fate of the Earth had quietly hinged.
In 1975, Montague Farmer Fran Koster helped organize a "Toward Tomorrow" Fair in Amherst that featured green energy pioneer Amory Lovins and early wind advocate William Heronemus. A vision emerged of a Solartopian energy future, built entirely around renewables and efficiency, free of "King CONG"--coal, oil, nukes and gas.
Then the Clamshell Alliance took root in coastal New Hampshire. Dedicated to mass non-violent civil disobedience, the Clam began organizing the first mass protests against twin reactors proposed for Seabrook. In 1977, 1414 were arrested at the site. More than a thousand were locked up in National Guard armories, with some 550 protestors still there two weeks later.
Global saturation media coverage helped the Clam spawn dozens of sibling alliances. A truly national No Nukes movement was born.
On June 24, 1978, the Clam drew 20,000 citizens to a legal rally on the Seabrook site that featured Pete Seeger, Jackson Browne, John Hall and others. Nine months prior to Three Mile Island, it was the biggest US No Nukes gathering to that time.
So when the 1979 melt-down at TMI did occur, there was a feature film--The China Syndrome--and a critical mass of opposition firmly in place. As the entire northeast shuddered in fear, public opinion definitively shifted away from atomic energy.
That September, "No Nukes" concerts in New York featured Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor and many more. Some 200,000 people rallied at Battery Park City (now the site of a pioneer solar housing development). The "No Nukes" feature film and platinum album helped certify mainstream opposition to atomic energy.
Today, in the wake of Chernobyl, Fukushima and decades of organizing, atomic energy is in steep decline. Nixon's promised 1000 reactors became 104, with at least two more to shut this year. New construction is virtually dead in Europe, with Germany rapidly converting to the Solartopian future promised so clearly in Amherst back in 1975.
Sam Lovejoy has kept the faith over the years, working for the state of Massachusetts to preserve environmentally sensitive land--including the Montague Plains, once targeted for a massive reactor complex, now an undisturbed piece of pristine parkland.
Dan Keller still farms organically, and still makes films, including a recent "Solartopia" YouTube starring Pete Seeger. Nina Keller, Francis Crowe, Randy Kehler, Betsy Corner, Deb Katz, Claire Chang, Janice Frey and other Montague Farmers and local activists are in their 40th year of No Nukes activism, aimed largely at shutting nearby Vermont Yankee--a victory that soon may be won. Anna Gyorgy, author of the 1979 "No Nukes" sourcebook, writes from Bonn on Germany's epic shift away from atomic power and toward renewables.
Rare amongst the era's communes, Montague Farm has survived intact. In an evolutionary leap, it became the base for the Zen Peacemaker organization of Roshi Bernie Glassman and Eve Marko. They preserved the land, saved the farmhouse, converted the ancient barn to an astonishing meditation center, and culminated their stay with a landmark gathering on Socially Engaged Buddhism. A new generation of owners is now making the place into a green conference center.
Like Montague Farm, the No Nukes movement still sustains its fair share of diverse opinions. But its commitment to non-violence has deepened, as has its impact on the nuclear industry. Among other things, it's forced open the financial and demand space for an epic expansion of Solartopian technologies--especially solar and wind, which are now significantly cheaper than nukes.
In the wake of that, and of Fukushima, new reactor construction is largely on the ropes in Europe and the US. But President Obama may now nominate a pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy. More than 400 deteriorating reactors still run worldwide, with escalating danger to us all. China, Russia, and South Korea still seem committed to new ones, as does India, where grassroots resistance is fierce.
There's also talk of a new generation of smaller reactors which are unproven, untested, and unlikely to succeed. The decades have taught us that money spent on any form of atomic energy (except for clean-up) means vital resources stripped from the Solartopian technologies we need to survive.
We've also learned that a single act of courage, in concert with a community of dedicated organizers, can change the world. The No Nukes movement continues to succeed with an epic commitment to creative non-violence.
In terms of technology, cost and do-ability, Solartopia is within our grasp. Politically, our ultimate challenge comes with the demand to sustain the daring, wisdom and organic zeal needed to win a green-powered Earth.
For that, we'll do well to remember the sound of one tower crashing.
Making Green A Threat Again
Over 15,000 youth, students and climate activists had gathered at Powershift for weekend of education, networking and keynote speakers. There were keynote speeches by Al Gore and Bill McKibben, yet little was offered in the way of taking action against Big Oil and Big Coal. We are faced with the greatest crisis in the history of the world, so we were told, yet the Beltway green groups had only produced failure in Copenhagen and Washington.
Globally, we had watched the Arab Spring throw out dictators; anti-austerity movements in Iceland and Greece rise up against corrupted regimes and massive protests in the Wisconsin state house fighting for labor rights. We were only a few months away from Occupy Wall Street.
Needless to say, the North American climate movements wanted in on the action.
As the morning march ended that day at Lafayette Park, the unofficial march, spearheaded by Rising Tide North America, formed and headed into the streets of Washington D.C. Tim DeChristopher of Salt Lake City, who had become something of a folk hero to climate activists after derailing a federal land auction and protecting thousands of acres of southern Utah wilderness, announced on the microphone that it was time for more drastic action. Anyone that wanted to take that step should join the Rising Tide march that was heading down 17th St NW to the Dept. of Interior.
The crowd quickly swelled to over a thousand, both singing "We Shall Overcome" and chanting "Keep It in the Ground" and "Our Climate is Under Attack, What'll We Do? Act Up, Fight Back!"
As we approached the Dept. of Interior, the small group of twenty that had been pre-organized to occupy the lobby began to more towards the doors. Then to much our surprise and shock, a crowd of over 300 stormed in after them and joined the sit-in. As they sat in, they chanted "We've got power! We've got power!" It was scary. It was exhilarating. It was powerful.
Direct action is supposed to push a person's comfort zone, but even veteran direct action organizers felt their comfort zones pushed when many in the march joined the occupation.
In the end, 21 were arrested as part of the sit-in. The Dept. of Interior action began a shift for the youth and grassroots activists with the North American climate movements. Soon, they would become a force to be reckoned with.
Corporations and Politicians Stall, Nature Doesn't
The clock is ticking and the science is not just a theory, its science. Yet, corporate and political decision-makers continue to ignore these warnings for short term profit.
A new scientific report put out by the United Nations on the second day of the 18th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP18) in Doha this week reports that thawing of the Arctic permafrost will "significantly amplify global warming." Permafrost emission spurred by rising global temperature will contribute up to 39% of global emissions. On the third day of COP18 negotiations, the World Meteorological Organization warned the delegates that the Arctic ice melt had reached an alarming rate and that "far-reaching changes" would from climate change would impact the Earth.
Despite these dire warnings from the scientific community, wealthy industrialized nations continue to stall any sort of climate progress in Doha. The top topic at COP18 has been an extension of the Kyoto Protocol -up for renewal this year--to 2020. The Associated Press reports, a number of wealthy nations including Japan, Russia and Canada have joined the ranks of the U.S. and "refused to endorse the extension." The U.S. has never endorsed Kyoto and continues to block any progress on agreements to reduce global emissions or pass legislation to regulate its own emissions.
Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel holds a chokehold on the American political system. In 2012, oil and gas industries combined with Big Coal to spend over $150 million elections to both parties.
U.S. deputy climate envoy Jonathan Pershing told the media in Doha that the Obama administration plans to stick to its 2009 goal of reducing emissions by 17% by 2020. Pershing went on to say that U.S. efforts to curb emissions are "enormous."
Yet, Obama recently signed into law a bipartisan bill to shield the U.S. airline industry from a European Union carbon tax. Furthermore, Obama's top candidate to replace Hillary Clinton at the State Dept., UN Ambassador Susan Rice, has been revealed to be a major investor in companies developing Canadian tar sands and building the Keystone XL pipeline.
While the politicians in Doha and Washington stall, Mother Nature has thoughts of her own. Global warming is no longer an abstract notion. Rising temperatures and extreme weather are spreading at unprecedented levels. 11 of the past 12 years are among the hottest since 1850. This summer in Colorado, wildfires brought on by scorching heat, high winds and drought conditions killed four people, displaced thousands and destroyed hundreds of homes.
In late Oct., Hurricane Sandy battered the Atlantic seaboard from the Caribbean to New England. It took over 100 lives and cost tens of billions of dollars in damage. Millions were displaced while politicians scrambled for photo ops and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's finance network declared "It's Global Warming, Stupid."
Harnessing Rebel Energy
Presented with these stark facts, it begs the question: Why haven't governments and corporations been forced to act on climate change?
To begin with, the mainstream strategy, which controls large portions of resources to fight climate change, is too rooted in working within the existing political and economic system. In 2009, the environmental establishment comprised of small grouping of donors and environmental non-profits primarily based in Washington D.C. (aka the Beltway Greens) placed its faith in the Obama administration. They hoped that his ability to regulate emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency, combined with lobbing Congress to pass meaningful climate legislation in 2010 and pressuring world governments to secure a unilateral agreement on climate at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP15) in Copenhagen would turn the tide on global emissions. These strategies are fraught with compromise on a global crisis that pays no heed to politics as usual.
Second, the environmental establishment was completely unprepared for the power that Corporate America, particularly Big Oil and Big Coal, wielded in Washington D.C. In 2009, oil and gas companies spent $121 million to dispatch 745 lobbyists to Congress in 2009 to influence the climate bill. Before the 2010 election, Big Oil put $19,588,091 into the U.S. election cycle. Big Coal put in $10,423,347. The Beltway Greens were outgunned, outspent and outmatched.
Finally, turning the tide on the most powerful industry in history requires more than lobbyists and policy people. It requires rebel energy fueling people power and non-violent direct action. In the 1970's when activists were doing battle to end the war in Vietnam and stop the proliferation of nuclear power, author and activist George Lakey wrote in the pamphlet "The Sword that Heals:"
"You can't pull off powerful nonviolent direct action without rebel energy. You've run this campaign as a conventional lobbying operation and you can't -- at the last minute -- switch gears and become a nonviolent protest movement!"
Political parties and non-profits did not drive the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia or Iceland; it was People Power that had been organized for decades. In Egypt, the established opposition groups only joined in after the masses took over the streets in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez calling for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster. In North America, Corporate America, the political establishment and the media has convinced us that national politicians and well paid non-profit staff are the change agents we've been waiting for. Thus far, they've only delivered epic failures in Copenhagen and Washington D.C. We mustn't let the priorities of big well-resourced institutions trump planetary or community survival.
The momentum to stop climate change is going to come from the rebel energy that challenges not only the established order, but the established opposition as well.
Know Your History
As daunting as it sounds, climate rebels wouldn't be re-inventing the environmental movement's wheel in building a grassroots mass climate movement. Far from it, in fact, greens have threatened corporate power with non-violent direct action and people power for decades.
During the 1970's and early 1980's, emerging from the anti-war and burgeoning environmental movement, the anti-nuclear, or "No Nukes," movement rose up to challenge the Nixon administration's plant to build 100 new nuclear power plants by the year 2000. In 1976 and 1977, thousands with the Clamshell Alliance used non-violent direct action to occupy the site of a proposed nuclear plant in Seabook, NH. Similar mass actions followed Seabrook. The Three Mile Island disaster was a watershed event that by the early 1980's put millions into the streets against U.S. nuclear power. While Seabrook and few other plants were built, the vast majority of plants proposed remain halted.
Similarly, in the early 1980's, a group of disgruntled redneck tree-huggers fed up with constant compromise on wilderness protection in western states by the Beltway Greens formed the radical ecological movement known as "Earth First!" Their politics of "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth" manifested into the direct action tactics of road blockades and tree-sits that strengthened and emboldened the environmental movement. Their campaigns and tactics targeted corporate logging and development companies, but also created much needed political space for grassroots activists on environmental issues
Former Sierra Club director and Friends of the Earth founder David Brower remarked "I thank God for the arrival of Earth First!, they make me look moderate."
A third movement that challenged corporate power for the betterment of the environment was the global justice movement. This grassroots street wing of anti-austerity, human rights and environmental movements emerged from the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999. Rooted in direct action, direct democracy and anti-capitalism of movements both in the U.S. and abroad, the global justice movement undermined global trade talks set to privatize labor, environmental and human rights protections across the globe.
In the laboratory of resistance we call "social change," the "No Nukes" movement, Earth First! and the global justice movement all had at least one strategy that set them apart from the establishment: they did their most important work out of Washington D.C. The anti-nuclear movement didn't organize their massive rallies in Washington until they had built power on the highways and byways of the country. Likewise Earth First! and the organizers coming out of the WTO protests rejected Beltway politics as usual to build and embolden their own anti-establishment movements.
Hope & Climate Change
Fortunately, the rebel energy is alive and well in today's climate movement. Outside of Washington D.C., grassroots activists, direct action organizers, smaller environmental, faith-based and student groups, rank and file Sierra Club members and environmental and climate justice groups have mobilized a very different climate movement from the air conditioned offices of the Beltway Greens.
Climate activists, the youth climate movement in particular, are fed up and hungry to make some real change and take real action. Just this summer, numerous actions from a mass civil disobedience in West Virginia at the Hobet Mine to a week of civil disobediences opposing the western coal exports in the Montana state capitol to community-led direct actions against fracking in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania have created space for groups to make meaningful progress both on their issues and internally within the movement. While this work has been complimentary and cumulative, it's not always necessarily collaborative, nor should it be.
The fight over tar sands development and the Keystone XL pipeline has galvanized climate activists of all ages. Over the past year, we have witnessed people from the Lakota nation in South Dakota and from Moscow, Idaho putting their bodies in roads and highways blocking large transport trucks carrying oil refining equipment to develop further tar sands extraction.
In Texas a young marine veteran named Ben Kessler returned from the war in Afghanistan to witness oil and gas companies ravaging North and East Texas with fracking and the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. He got involved in environmental and climate organizing, and with friends, formed a student environmental group at the University of North Texas. In April 2011, some of them attended Powershift in Washington D.C. At the Dept. of Interior, Kessler took his first civil disobedience arrest. But more importantly the group went back to Denton, TX and transformed their group into an anchor for a grassroots direct action campaign called the Tar Sands Blockade. The Tar Sands Blockade joined with Texas landowners to form the Tar Sands Blockade which has organized dozens of actions and a two month old tree blockade to stop the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.
People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new anti-establishment movement has broken with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks and, in the words of Naomi Klein to make "one hell of a comeback."
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