This is a reminder that people power works. Direct Action works. Social movements work. Grassroots organizing works. Lets take some time today to celebrate another huge victory.

Every time we win, it builds our resolve for the next fight. We know the fossil fuel industry owns Congress, and so far the Keystone XL campaign has been like playing Whack-A-Mole, or kinda like going to battle with a zombie who just won’t die. There may yet be another stage of the fight, and there will definitely be other theaters of engagement heating up in the Tar Sands fights, like the Enbridge Northern Gateway. I’m confident we’ll be ready to take em on. Moments like this help us remember our power, and that its worth all the headaches and stress of movement building. So lets keep winning.

If you’re in DC, help build the momentum by joining 500 referees blowing the whistle on congress being soaked in big oil Jan 24th. Or this friday, you can join the J20 (January 20) #occupy actions all around the world mobilizing to take on dirty corporate interests. Here in the Bay Area we will be shutting down the SF financial district with nonviolent direct action (check out the hot Lady Gaga outreach flashmob video here).

Here’s a quick sampling of the breaking coverage of the Keystone XL victory from Bill McKibben, and on Globe and Mail, Washington Post, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, ThinkProgress, Grist, Daily Kos, and Politico.

Congratulations, climate movement. What a great way to kick off the new year, eh?

ORGANIZING COOLS THE PLANET: Tools and Reflections To Navigate the Climate Crisis
By Hilary Moore and Joshua Kahn Russell
PM Press 2011

Organizing Cools The Planet offers a challenge to all concerned about the ecological crisis: find your frontline. This booklet weaves together stories, analysis, organizing tools, and provocative questions, to offer a snapshot of the North American Climate Justice movement and provide pathways for readers to participate in it. Authors share hard lessons learned, reflect on strategy, and grapple with the challenges of their roles as organizers who do not come from “frontline communities” but work to build a movement big enough for everyone and led by the priorities and solutions of low-income people, communities of color, Indigenous, youth, and other constituencies most directly impacted by the crisis. Rooted in the authors’ experiences organizing in local, national, and international arenas, they challenge readers to look at the scale of ecological collapse with open eyes, without falling prey to disempowering doomsday narratives. This booklet is for anyone who wants to build a movement with the resiliency to navigate one of the most rapid transitions in human history.

Order copies from PM Press here

Free PDF download here

Praise:

“Joshua and Hilary’s manual will be useful to all who want to make change creatively and peacefully in our brutal times.”
—Dr. Vandana Shiva

“There is no task more urgent than to organize a mass popular movement to deal effectively with the looming environmental crisis. The barriers are high, the forces opposed powerful. All the more reason to dedicate ourselves to the kinds of efforts outlined Joshua Kahn Russell and Hilary Moore’s booklet.”
—Noam Chomsky

“In an atmosphere heavy with doomsday predictions and fear, this booklet is a breath of fresh air. Joshua Kahn Russell and Hilary Moore weave together stories and organizing tools to create a vision for practical transition amid the climate crisis. Organizing Cools the Planet confronts pressing questions of our time.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Founding Director, Indigenous World Association

“This booklet comes from people who do what they’re talking about, and do it well. If we’ve got a hope, it lies in organizing–in reaching ever broader circles of our civilization and getting people to take action in their common interest. If you want to be a part of that, this guide is a good place to start.”
— Bill McKibben

“As the climate crisis becomes increasingly unignorable, our movements must learn to navigate a rapidly changing and high-stakes political landscape. Our times demand we think bigger, push harder, and reimagine the possibilities for twenty-first-century movement building. This potent booklet is a great place to begin the conversation. Authored by two visionary young leaders who share their personal struggles and hard-earned lessons from organizing at the intersection of justice, ecology, and change, Organizing Cools the Planet is required reading for anyone who gives a damn about the future. Tune in for some indispensable analysis, provocative thinking and a healthy dose of people-powered optimism.”
—Patrick Reinsborough, cofounder, smartMeme Strategy & Training Project

“This is a rigorous and useful tool for teaching and learning the architecture of organizing, a valuable nourishment for climate justice activists and change agents.”
—Dorothy Guerrero, Focus on the Global South

“It is an erudite manual, spirited and consistently engaging.”
—Andrej Grubačić, author, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! and Wobblies and Zapatistas

“Still young and developing, the climate justice movement has already shaken up politics with its holistic perspective and fresh energy. Organizing Cools the Planet offers a set of tools to help this dynamic new movement sharpen its strategies, promote frontline leadership, and realize its tremendous potential.”
—Max Elbaum, cofounder, WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras; author

But until I write more I want to share an excellent resource from Beyond the Choir for the occupy movement. Its called @occupyWinning, which you can follow on twitter, or check out at www.occupywinning.com

Here are some recent posts, tools, and analysis:

- #OWS: Not “No Leaders”, but “We are All Leaders!”

- The Political Identity Paradox

- #OWS: Welcome New Visitors and Plug In Participants

- #Occupy Tactic Star

One of my favorite things about #OccupyWallStreet is that its turning everyone into a movement strategist. Everyone has advice or criticism. The fact that its a large-container has made everyone wanna talk about organizing, strategy, analysis, message, demands, direction, etc. Getting thousands to think critically about movement building is a gift.

Here are some great strategy pieces on the #occupytogether phenomenon by organizers contributing to building it:

Boston shows us how to #Occupy with purpose and political vision.

Three Reasons Why I Love Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street: Perfectly Coherent.

In Front and Center: Critical Voices in the 99%.

Base Building organizations in the Bay Area came together this week to shut down Wells Fargo world HQ. http://www.foreclosewallst.org/

This weekend marked the end of the Tar Sands Action in Washington DC, and the beginning of a renewed surge of civil disobedience and action against fossil fuel extraction in the United States. A coalition from across the continent came together to sustain 14 days of sit-ins in front of the White House to pressure President Obama to veto a proposal for the Keystone XL pipeline. The Keystone XL threatens to split the U.S. from Canada down to Texas, all to ship the dirtiest crude oil from the Alberta Tar Sands down to the Gulf Coast for export to international markets. It spells trillions of dollars for big oil, death for Indigenous communities in Canada, displacement and poisoned air, land, and water for those living along the pipeline route, and disaster for the climate. In fact, Dr. James Hansen said if the pipeline goes through, it is essentially “game over” for the planet.

Outcomes

In the last two weeks 1,252 people were arrested sitting-in at the White House, and thousands more came out to support, rally, and build connections across movements. The vast majority of participants had never taken action before. Delegations of frontline communities came on different days to speak their truth directly to the White House, including a large delegation of Native American and Canadian leaders with Indigenous Environmental Network & Indigenous Peoples Power Project (IP3), communities from Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, and along the proposed pipeline route from Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, and Texas. Climate scientists, teachers, mothers, farmers, senators, and celebrities participated. The action persisted through both an earthquake and a hurricane, highlighting the message that the earth is in crisis and extreme weather patterns will only increase if this goes through. There were over 4,500 media hits, including every major media outlet in the United States and Canada (Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters, CNN, NBC, Fox, CBC, NPR, Huffington Post, etc) and on the day of Hurricane Irene, we made the front page of the New York Times.

Through the process, nightly action briefings/trainings introduced thousands to Nonviolent Direct Action as a tool for change and as an orientation to movement strategy. The experience of these participants is one of the ways we measure success in the action.

The Tar Sands Action was thoroughly an intergenerational effort – on the first day the youngest person to be arrested was 17 and the oldest was 82. On the third day, an 84 year old woman greeted me as she was getting out of jail and said:

“When I saw all you young people leading trainings, I thought ‘yes! The youth will save us.’ But as I sat in with so many people in their 70s and beyond, I thought ‘no, we all have to do it together!”

Other participants shared insights like “It seems like this action was the training wheels I needed – and now I’m ready to ride the bike!”

The action was not just designed to pressure Obama and make a strong stand against the pipeline, but to offer a pathway into sustained organizing and action for people across the country.

Ruckus’ Involvement

The Ruckus Society’s network offered much of the training, facilitation, action coordination, and jail support. Our teams included Ruckus and Indigenous Peoples Power Project members: Rob C, Madeline G, Heather ML, Joshua KR, Hannah S, Jack D, Omi H, Gitz C, Adam T, Levana S; the art was coordinated by Cesàr M; and one of the action’s core coordinators was Matt L.

Mohawk activist and Ruckus member Ben P, took a photo of NASA’s Dr. James Hansen getting arrested, which Rolling Stone magazine called “Iconic” and the most important photo since the 1970’s “Blue Marble” photo, depicting Earth as a lonely sphere adrift in space.

Check out a video of Hansen’s statement at the White House.

It was an honor for Ruckus to support so many different groups and people from across the country, helping offer a pathway into movements for change.

Supporting Indigenous Leadership

One of the most powerful aspects of the action for a lot of the trainers was including testimonials and presentations from impacted peoples in each training. In addition to training, our organizational role was to help support Indigenous People’s Power Project (IP3) and Indigenous Environmental Network’s delegation to have a series of actions, including a statement at the Canadian Embassy, meetings with officials, public presentations, and of course, participating in the civil disobedience.

Strategic Questions

The scale and scope of this action raises many movement strategy questions for us that we’re excited to explore. While the “arrest count” was highly visible, we do not measure success in arrests, but in more qualitative measures such as:

1)   Of the thousands who participated in this action, did we prepare them enough and offer them clear next steps to take their organizing and action to the next level beyond this action? Was it truly a doorway into sustained action, or just a flash-in-the-pan?

2)   How much did the attention this action gave to frontline voices create capacity for their ongoing work?

3)   What new alliances were born out of this work between the environmental and other movement sectors? For example, Ben Jealous, the head of the NAACP came and spoke at one of the trainings – what are the next steps for us to build deeper relationships?

4)   How does the media success of this action open up space to popularize Nonviolent Direct Action not just as a pressure-tactic, but as a strategic approach to campaigning?

5)   How do we measure political success when the final week of the action saw a number of disappointing moves by the Obama administration, including his caving-in on Ozone standards. How do we understand this pipeline, whether its approved or not, as a piece of a larger puzzle of shifting the balance of forces in our society?

What’s next

In the wake of the action, communities around the country have a renewed sense of energy for their own local fights, and Ruckus is excited to support them though that. In Montana, a group of grandmothers, including Margot Kidder (who played Lois Lane in the Superman films), and Tantoo Cardinal (a Cree actress who grew up in Alberta and starred in Dances With Wolves, and many other Hollywood films) will be working with Ruckus trainers to engage in direct action to stop the pipeline from coming through their homes. This action has made a national issue of the Tar Sands, which previously few people in the United States knew much about. It has offered an opportunity for continued pressure on Obama around pipeline approval, which Ruckus will stay involved with. It is also an injection of new support for the longstanding and ongoing Tar Sands fights, including the Heavy Haul, which Rising Tide activists in the US have recently been laying their bodies in front of trucks to stop, Indigenous Tar Sands campaigning in Canada, and finance campaigns in Europe.

I’m here as a trainer and action coordinator, helping organize and prepare participants to commit an act of civil disobedience, and help navigate & facilitate the experience with them. Many are risking arrest for the first time. It’s an honor to support them through it, and even though we are just beginning, this action already feels historic. It’s particularly nourishing to me that so many of the participants are of an older generation – its a thrill getting to train people twice my age. On our first day, the youngest person arrested was 17, and the oldest was 71.

There is of course a lot more to say, but unfortunately we don’t get time to write much these days… though I am updating twitter regularly. In other brief news, my booklet/organizing manual Organizing Cools the Planet, co-authored with Hilary Moore, comes out in a couple weeks. I can’t wait.

Here’s a video from the first day of our action:

Outside the Courthouse, hundreds of supporters had gathered from the Salt Lake City community, singing, chanting, and speaking out as they bore witness to the sentencing. Immediately after the bang of the gavel Ashely Anderson and Ashley Sanders were hauled out of the courtroom for loudly rallying people inside saying, “this court has proven itself incapable of justice. So the people will take it back – it is now our court!” foreshadowing the civil disobedience to come outside. As Henia Belalia left the Courthouse, she made an official statement declaring, “If there was ever a day in history to take action, this is it.” And people took action. Peaceful Uprising activists did a sit-in to blockade the 2 front entrances of the Federal Courthouse, to tell the world “its ours” and emphasize that if Tim was going to jail, they were too, giving meaning to the slogan “we are all Bidder 70.” Taking their lead, members of the community began to join the blockade to show their love and outrage. 26 people were arrested.

A mother who joined the blockade was with her three children during the time of arrest, and said in tears “I need you to see this, its for your future.” Those participating in the sit-in chose to emphasize their point that business as usual is unacceptable by moving to blockade a major intersection in front of the courthouse during rush hour. As supporters continued to sing and support those who locked down, Tim DeChristopher was quickly rushed out the side door in chains and loaded into a police van. We can only hope he felt our support, and that that support is carried to all people of conscience who do what is right for people and the planet.

Today a true crime was committed in every federal courthouse in the United States. Why is Tim now in prison for protecting our future, while corporate CEOs walk free with millions of dollars for destroying it? We recognized today that our justice system has failed us. It, like our economy and other branches of government, are controlled by the fossil fuel industry. And today we affirm that we stand with millions actively taking it back. Please see our official response to the sentencing for action opportunities and links to all of the remarkable actions that are being taken around the country.

Act! The movement is with you.

Federal prosecutors asked for Tim to receive an extra harsh prison sentence in an effort to intimidate the movement that stands with him. They hoped that by condemning him to years behind bars, they would “make an example out of him” and deter all of us from taking meaningful action. But Tim is already an example. He’s an example of the courageous acts that people across our movements are taking to fight for justice and a liveable future. We support Tim by continuing to organize. Our response to this sentence is an affirmation: we will not be intimidated.  What’s your response?

The government’s statement is clear. Tim has been sentenced to 2 years as punishment for his politics; for the uncompromising content of his speeches and organizing in the two years sincehis act of civil disobedience protected 150,000 acres of land. Ironically, his principled views and motivations behind his actions he took were never allowed to enter a courtroom, due to their “irrelevance.” In a highly political trial, the jury was unjustly stripped of its right to be their community’s conscience and manipulated into making a political prisoner of a peaceful and concerned young man.

Author and activist Terry Tempest Williams said, “To think that a young man in an act of conscience might [do any amount of time] in a federal prison for raising a paddle in an already illegal sale of oil and gas leases, compared to the CEO of BP or the financial wizards on Wall Street who have pocketed millions of dollars at our expense  – and who will never step into a court of law to even get their hands slapped, let alone go to jail, is an assault on democracy.”

She’s right. But we have the power to turn this assault on democracy into a battle for democracy. Today the Salt Lake City community is expressing both their love and their outrage.

Fossil fuel lobbyists knew that Tim would be indicted the evening before it was officially filed, Jury members explained that they were intimidated throughout the process. The fossil fuel industry should not control our justice system.

Unless we decide to respond accordingly, as Tim serves his time, the real criminals — the fossil fuel industry wrecking our planet and our communities — will continue to run free, unaccountable for the countless oil spills, asthma attacks, contaminated waterways, cancer clusters, and carbon seeping into the air we breathe every day. If the justice system is intent on prosecuting the people protecting rather than pillaging the planet, we must confront the real criminals ourselves. With our heads held high, we continue to stand on the moral high-ground – and will do what’s right, despite the consequences. We know that mother nature’s consequences of inaction are far harsher than any imposed by a court system.

But we are not isolated individuals. We come together with our communities as groups of empowered agents of change who know our system is broken and does not represent us. Our communities represent us, and our vision of a resilient, just, and sustainable world that we are fighting for.

Tim’s sentence is a call to action.

For those of us who’ve been following his story fervently, our hearts were broken today. It is a sad moment. But we now have an opportunity and a responsibility to act on those feelings of hurt and outrage. For Tim’s sacrifice to truly mean something, for the spark it ignites in each of us to burn, we all must take action.

2011 has already become a year of peaceful uprisings around the country. As Tim once said, we were never promised that it would be easy. We know it will take courage, sacrifice and a willingness to sustain our resistance in our fight for real Justice. Tim has taken a step and we will take the next thousand.

Here are a few upcoming action opportunities to join:

• On Aug. 4, community members are calling for direct action at BP’s New Orleans offices in protest of the oil company’s continued lack of accountability for the devastating oil spill.
• On Aug. 12, Rising Tide North America and the environmental justice community is teaming up with economic justice and labor groups in St. Louis to fight corporations destroying jobs and homes with economic malfeasance and the climate with coal.
• In late August and early September, thousands are converging and risking arrest over 15 days at the White House in protest of the Keystone XL pipeline.

We’ll see you on the streets,

Peaceful Uprising and Tim’s community of courage.

cross-posted from Beyond the Choir

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the activist filter bubble, the reverberating echo-chamber of insular social media and political networks that keeps progressives marginal and talking to ourselves. Recently, I’ve had several different Tea Party twitter accounts follow me (at least four this week alone) and began talking to friends about whether or not this means they are 1) building lists of progressive activists for potential future smear-campaigns; 2) following their opposition so they can Retweet things out of context to scare/outrage their base; or 3) genuinely interested in hearing perspectives outside their own echo-chamber. Whatever their purposes, it reminded me that we can learn a lot from the way our opposition presents itself through social media forums (of course there is a lot of deception and other missteps that we don't  want to emulate, but there are some transferrable best practices mixed  in too – here’s some of both).

A few minutes ago I got an email notice that @TheTeaParty_net is following me.

1) Their twitter profile (which I see in the notification email) succinctly states the values they profess to hold: “Limited federal government • Individual freedoms • Personal responsibility • Free markets • Returning political power to the states and the people”

I already know what they stand for and I haven’t even looked at their twitter feed yet. In fact, their statement of values is likely the thing that will make me choose to look or not look.

And here’s what I notice from literally 5 minutes of browsing their twitter feed:

2) Constant creation of an “us vs. them” narrative, inviting people to identify as part of their group (“us”) and asking people to take a small action (retweeting) to signal their insiderness. A kinestetic action simple as pressing a button helps solidify the choice that was made by the tweeter. It asks them to take a stand, pick a side, and then reinforces that choice with a physical action that their peers can see. They ask their tweeps to do this on a regular basis.

3) Affirmations. Following their followers, retweeting their follower’s invitations to pick a side, constantly reinforcing that they’re on the same team.

4) Online to offline: responding to inquiries and connecting tweeps to on-the-ground groups. Even if these groups are astroturf or don’t exist, it creates the appearance of a genuine social movement and reinforces Tea Party mythology about being “grassroots”.

5) More on the appearance of grassroots decentralized organizing: there isn’t a centralized Tea Party twitter account. There are hundreds of them, each with a few hundred to a few thousand followers. They are constantly retweeting each other and referencing one another. From a 20 second glance at their feed I find: @GreaterBostonTP, @anchTeaParty, @wacoteaparty, @teapartyprotest, @teapartypodcast, @TPPatriots (there are many many more).

6) A right flank. Lots of posts attacking Republican politicians from the Right, pushing the “center” further and further to the right, forcing Republicans to take more and more extreme positions.

7) More inside/outside strategy. While pushing Republicans from the far-Right, they simultaneously identify their tweeps with the GOP, but as an insurgent force within the GOP. That means building voter allegiance to the party, but not allowing their politicians to compromise on their behalf.

8 ) Victim complex. Reinforcing the perception of being unfairly maligned to embolden their base to see themselves as activist agents-of-change instead of keepers of the status quo. The victim complex, like a cult, builds unity, cohesion, and side-steps critique.

…This post wasn’t based on expansive research, or even a particularly deep or thoughtful analysis. It was based on a cursory look at one twitter feed – and that’s the point. Within a quick glance, the Tea Party clearly communicates its values, articulates a worldview, asks people to pick sides, reinforces that decision, offers (at least the illusion of) real-life action opportunities, and offers a range of messages that reinforce those objectives. This is worth paying attention to and learning from. And not because the Tea Party are brilliant organizers or anything – most of their “movement” is smoke and mirrors reinforced by large media-megaphones, dominant narratives, and Fox News. But its clear that they know how to communicate an idea, and that’s very powerful.

I was among many progressives making fun of the rapture all day yesterday, but ultimately the joke might be on us. When it comes to global warming and climate chaos, the script is a bit too familiar. According to a recent poll, 44% of Americans believe increased severity of “natural” disasters is “evidence of biblical end times. ” That’s nearly half the people in the most powerful country on Earth. 38% believe God uses Nature to dispense justice. It’s an important poll that climate change activists and sensible people everywhere should take seriously.

The #rapture meme picked up remarkably fast. While some have seen billboards declaring May 21^st, 2011 to be Judgment Day for a while now, it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that it started getting into the media and many Americans learned that a small fundamentalist sect believed they uncovered the true date of the Beginning of The End. Within a few days over a million people joined multiple “post rapture looting” facebook events, pranks were being played across the country, it was all over the news, and people were cracking jokes on twitter like there’s no tomorrow.

So why did that meme spread so quickly? Unfortunately biblical notions of the coming Apocalypse are not just entrenched in our culture, but are also rearing their ugly heads in our political landscape. And they’re shaping policy.

John Shimkus, The Republican Congressman who hoped to chair the House Energy Committee told reporters this Autumn that we didn’t need to take action to reduce greenhouse gasses because he knows the planet won’t be destroyed. How does he know? God told Noah that it wouldn’t happen again after the Great Flood. Obviously. Shimkus went on to clarify that “The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over.” And its not just Shimkus – the November election saw a wave of new Republican leadership hell-bent on scriptural justifications for inaction on global warming.

In his excellent article Apocalyptic beliefs hasten the end of the world, Jason Mark discusses the depth of biblical explanations used to explain the recent Mississippi river flooding and tornado in Alabama. He cites “two surveys by the Pew Center [that] reveal what climate campaigners are up against. According to a 2010 Pew poll, 41 percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return by 2050. A roughly similar number — 36 percent — disagree that human activity is causing global temperatures to rise.” Jason points out that while causality between these two stats is dubious, worldview clearly plays a significant role in the public’s response to climate science.

Climate organizers should take this seriously. I’m not an eco-doomsday monger, but its clear that as the impacts of climate chaos deepen in North America, most reasoned predictions make it look increasingly like the End Of Days – poison raining from the sky, acidifying oceans, swarms of locusts (or invasive insects), boils (or other rampant disease), increased seismic activity – it’s all foretold. Indeed, droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes, resource scarcity, world wars over water, millions of climate migrants and refugees, all paint a vivid picture.

Of course, real-life ecological collapse isn’t as neat and tidy as the Bible depicts. It doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t go from birds singing one day, to ECOPOCALYPSE the next. The transition is already here. But as weather patterns become more severe, so does our challenge. The battle over which story the U.S. public uses to interpret our changing planet may determine the future of human life on Earth.

Just as the have a narrative, we have one too. Organizers often put it as: you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. We got in this crisis by corporations acting in their own self interest at the expense of the rest of us, and that we can navigate this crisis by embracing a saner economy.

Which narrative is more resonant and powerful in capturing the public imagination? Which one is activating (requiring some form of collective organized response), and which one is pacifying (requiring you to do what you are told)?  We have an uphill battle.

As Jason points out, “close to half of Americans are immune to the warnings about climate chaos because, in their worldview, it’s a prelude to heaven.” Indeed, there may be a large constituency in our country eagerly anticipating catastrophic weather change. There are many ways for climate campaigners to think about this challenge. Do we appeal to them? Do we ignore them and appeal to other audiences to push policy? How do we do enough groundwork so that as the changes become more and more difficult for U.S. politicians to ignore, our narrative gains traction? One way to think about the challenge is to embrace the real meaning of the word Apocalypse.

Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning from SmartMeme’s strategy manual Re:Imagining Change has a small section entitled the Slow Motion Apocalypse which I’d like to quote in full:

Our lifetimes are witness to a slow motion apocalypse—the gradual unraveling of the routines, expectations, and institutions that comfort the privileged and define the status quo.

But the word apocalypse does not mean the end of the world. The Greek word apokalypsis combines the verb “kalypto” meaning to “cover or to hide,” with the prefix “apo” meaning “away.” Apocalypse literally means to “take the cover away,” or to “lift the veil” and reveal something that has not been seen.

And thus these are indeed apocalyptic times. A 2008 poll reveals that 62% of Americans already agree with the statement “The earth is headed for an environmental catastrophe unless we change.” As the veil lifts, the assumptions and narratives that rationalize the status quo are shifting. What has been made invisible (by propaganda and privilege alike) has become a glaring truth: global corporate capitalism is on a collision course with the planet’s ecological limits.

As activists, we often dare not speak this whole truth for fear of self-marginalizing, terrifying people, or worse—dousing the essential fires of hope with a paralyzing despair.

Indeed, to face the scale and implications of the ecological crisis requires a degree of psychological courage. The lifting of the veil can release an emotional rollercoaster of anxiety, anger, grief, and despair. When we take it all in—all of the suffering, all of the destruction, all that is at risk—added onto our ongoing daily struggles, it is difficult not to be over- whelmed. Denial is a common response and an effective poultice, however temporary.

A narrative power analysis helps us understand denial as a dynamic that shapes the terms of the debate around the ecological crisis. The assumption that the United States can ‘go green’ on its current path, rather than fundamentally change our systems to operate within ecological limits, is one such manifestation. Denial is one of the key psychological undercurrents in the dominant culture that is preventing widespread acknowledgement of the scope of the ecological crisis, and keeping the apocalypse suspended in surreal slow motion. Denial is a more comfortable alternative to despair, but its impact on the collective political imagination is equally corrosive.

We also see this dynamic inside of progressive movements. Among many dedicated activist groups, there is an unstated culture of self-preserving denial. We see it expressed in various ways: rigid boundaries around an issue or constituency, an exclusive focus on short-term “wins,” and a suspension of disbelief about the limits of current strategies to face the crisis. The underlying assumption is that if we just keep doing what we’ve been doing, and just work harder at it, it will be enough.

Stagnation is the prevailing creative tendency in too many of our organizations. While some tactics are improved, innovation of strategies is perennially postponed. The undertow of denial can keep our movements trapped in a crisis of imagination. The consequences are a policy paradigm incapable of dealing with the scope of the overlapping problems. The sector plods on while an increasingly unnerved public is left vulnerable to fear-mongering, corporate greenwashing and phony quick-fix techno solutions.

The crisis of imagination that smartMeme refers to can also be thought of as a crisis of Vision. It’s often pointed out in activist circles that it’s easier for most people to imagine the End Of The World than it is to envision a meaningful revolution in the way our global economy functions. Think about how many movies depict the apocalypse (in whatever form), and how many movies depict a socially-just ecologically-balanced future. Human beings are able to organize and manifest visions that they can actually see. That’s one of the reasons why religion is such a powerful organizing tool – it shapes perceptions the past (through canonical scripture) in order to lend credibility to a moral or political vision of a society that can be built. Our society is filled with visions of The End (religious or not). Let’s fill it with visions of life and balance and interdependence and justice and sustainability, instead.

This shifting landscape unveils a lot of opportunity for us to tell it like it is. While some may find comfort in a passive wait for Jesus to return and wipe away the evil in the world, I’m willing to bet that there are a lot more people willing to fight like hell for a livable future. That’s the story I want to build. The solace is that we’re living amidst the most rapid transition in human history. It’s all up for grabs. And if King Jesus doesn’t judge us for our actions, Mother Nature certainly will.

Most chapters are personal stories of overcoming difficult odds in service of protecting Mother Earth. The challenge, as I saw it, was to write a personal story that could be accessible and digestible to the (likely older, white, middle class) audience, many of whom have an existing political frame of a “conservation movement.” The task was to then shift that story by underscoring concepts of economic and racial justice, privilege, solidarity, movement building, and collective organizing. I chose to write about my experience helping organize the Capitol Climate Action (CCA). While I have written reflections on this complicated action for other organizers before (here and then here), most of these accounts were analytical; they didn’t actually tell the story at all, they just explained outcomes. Even those accounts felt a little too celebratory – they didn’t fully get into the behind the scenes coalition drama, the challenges around community accountability, or ways the action itself could have better embodied climate justice. I was hesitant to write another “victory” account that didn’t interrogate these real concerns, even though its mostly “insider” debate amongst organizers. I was even more hesitant about writing a first-person narrative about a group effort – a common challenge for organizers writing about collective process to an audience who has a default framework of honoring individual efforts.

And yet, because the Capitol Climate Action was designed to mobilize thousands of “passive allies” – people who agree with us but aren’t yet organizing alongside us – the story of CCA itself seemed a useful narrative to communicate those ideas. No one had simply told the story – and used it as an opportunity to highlight and explain key justice-based concepts to the very audience that was the key demographic CCA tried to mobilize. Despite all the way I might organize the action differently next time, it was a beautiful story that was well positioned to teach some of these lessons.

So here was my attempt at it, direct from the book (also check out chapters by my friends Ben Powless and Enei Begaye):

We Shut Them Down: Ending Coal at the Capitol Power Plant

Joshua Kahn Russell

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, betray it or fulfill it.

—Frantz Fanon

There were thousands of us. The snow was four and a half inches deep and it was minus seven degrees Celsius outside. We could already hear the Fox News commentators and their usual absurdities: “A global warming protest in the snow? Maybe this climate change stuff isn’t real after all. Ha ha ha!” But by the end of the day, even Fox gave positive coverage to the largest civil disobedience to solve the climate crisis in U.S. history.

On March 2, 2009, around four thousand people came to the Capitol Power Plant in Washington DC, a coal plant that powers the Capitol building. More than two thousand of them risked arrest in a sit-in. The vast majority had never been to a demonstration of any kind before, let alone engaged in a form of nonviolent direct action. People from communities most directly impacted by coal’s life cycle—from Navajo reservations in the Southwest to Appalachian towns in the Southeast—led the march. With vibrant, multicolored flags depicting windmills, people planting gardens, waves crashing, and captions like community, security, change, and power, we sat-in to blockade five entrances to the power plant that literally fuels Congress. We called the whole thing the Capitol Climate Action. I was one of the lead organizers. And I was exhausted.

We had been organizing for ten months. Watching the idea grow and take a life of its own was almost like raising a child—complete with snotty temper tantrums and sleepless nights among the awe of bringing a light into this world. And the action scenario was actually pretty simple.

The belching smokestacks just two blocks from the Capitol building made a fitting target for a national flash point. They symbolize the stranglehold that the dirty fossil fuel industry—and coal industry in particular—has on our government, economy, and future. Democrats on the Hill had spent nearly three decades “trying” to get the plant off coal, only to be blocked by coal-state legislators in their own party. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had made feel-good statements about cleaning up Washington before, but we had yet to see any action. She enters our story later though. Here’s the point: burning coal is the single biggest contributor to global warming. We won’t be able to solve the climate crisis without breaking its hold.

***

The action conversation started in the summer of 2008 while walking down a dirt road. It’s brown dust arced around boundless fields and dense Virginia trees and fed into an encampment of tents interspersed with banners and slogans like “Leave it in the ground!” hand-stitched in cloth. The ridge of trees sheltered makeshift clearings intended for workshops and strategy sessions and opened like a mouth into a wooded area with even more tents hiding in the underbrush. The Southeast Convergence for Climate Action brought together activists from across the region and was coordinated by a grassroots network called Rising Tide. I went as part of a facilitation team to run trainings.

We spent our nights listening to panels of retired union coal miners, talking about their thirty-year struggle to protect their families from a reckless and parasitic industry. Their communities were impoverished. Their tap water was so contaminated with heavy metals that it ran orange. That’s what happens when you blow tops off entire mountain ranges in order to feed America’s fossil fuel addiction. And almost nobody paid attention to their struggle—they were poor.

Their families were on the frontline. I considered how when I flip on my light switch, it’s like a trigger, blowing up a mountain thousands of miles away. My stomach still hurts when I think about how my convenience comes from the pain of communities like these. I will never have to cry over my child poisoned from resource extraction. But others will. We have a word to describe the act of flipping that light switch: privilege.

At that camp, we heard grandmothers tell of their lifetimes of activism. I found myself captivated by stories told by aging antinuclear activists. Wrinkled faces were lit up around a campfire as the shared tales of the historic occupation of the Seabrook nuclear facility, an action that helped shift and inspire a mass movement and resulted in a de facto moratorium on new nuclear power plants.

We all agreed: our generation needed our Seabrook.

Rising Tide had made arrangements for a Navajo activist named Enei Begaye to come from across the country to speak. Enei works with the Black Mesa Water Coalition and Indigenous Environmental Network. I drove to pick her up from the airport. On our way back, we rolled across the Virginia hills and spent hours talking about our work. Enei told me about one of the biggest strip-mining companies in the country, Peabody Coal. “Our people have maintained a lifestyle that is in line with Mother Earth and the caretaking of all things, well before 1492.” Peabody’s operations were devastating Black Mesa in a Native reservation in Arizona. But her community was resisting. She chuckled, “Indigenous communities have been green way before it was hip.”

Black Mesa is a sacred mountain. Many families on the reservation do not have running water or electricity. Yet the company steals 3.3 million gallons of pristine fresh water to mix it into a coal slurry so it can be shipped to provide power to cities in my state of California. Enei’s face hardened.

“The Indian wars are not over. We are still fighting to protect our lands and territories.” We talked about colonization most of the way home. I thought more about my light switch.

The next day, Enei sat before a hundred activists and declared, “We are all connected through the bloodlines of energy. Through the grid lines of power plants. And in realizing our interconnectedness, we need to unlearn the individualism we’re taught in this country. We need to relearn the responsibility of community.”

She was right. The light-switch flippers are inextricably bound to those who live in places where resources are stolen. I was caught in that web, just like everyone else. But I have dedicated my life to transforming it.

That night, after facilitating back-to-back trainings, a few friends and I sat down to chat about the big picture. The mosquitoes were biting. I had spent the day talking myself hoarse to young activists about the organizing lessons of Ella Baker, an unsung civil rights heroine who helped build the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a black-led civil rights group helping register Southern black voters in the early 1960s. I had become obsessed with her methods of building mass movements. Mass, as I had learned from Ella, meant millions. Our task was daunting. I swatted a mosquito and scratched my skin till I bled.

A friend named Matt mentioned an idea that had been on the backburner, something activist Bill McKibben had proposed to him a year earlier—a small civil disobedience at the Capitol coal plant. The idea was inspired by images of civil rights protestors half a century earlier, dressed in suits, prefiguring the world they wanted to see by sitting-in and integrating in the lunch counters. One key piece of Ella Baker’s organizing was moving beyond inspiring a committed core of righteous do-gooders, to a mass-action model. Unlike mass actions some of us had been a part of, we didn’t want to mobilize just activists, but also lots of people who had never done activism before. We picked the Capitol Power Plant as our target. We called it a generational act of civil disobedience.

***

Bill McKibben was enthusiastic about the way the idea had evolved. With Bill as a key spokesperson who could connect to large groups of passive allies and light-switch flippers, we proceeded to build a coalition of national groups.

That’s where the challenges started.

Three months later, we had about sixty groups endorsing the action. We tried to collaborate with another coalition called Energy Action. I had been on Energy Action’s steering committee at the time, but we were mired from the start in coalition challenges.

It was time for another conference call. The debate was the same: coalition representative after coalition representative voiced their support for the action. And then one or two people would “block” the proposal. I had a certain ritual for these calls by now. I sat on the floor in the corner of my office so that I could repeatedly bang my head into the wall. I tore my hair out, literally. We were running out of time. I thought about Ella Baker’s slow work of building consensus among people with different perspectives. Despite coalition differences, we had gotten more than 120 groups to endorse, and we reached the point where we needed to launch. I emailed Bill. He wrote the call-out letter with poet Wendell Berry. It went public. They opened with this:

There are moments in a nation’s—and a planet’s—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington, DC, on Monday, March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

And then the floodgates burst.

Dr. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who first publicly articulated the phenomenon of global warming, endorsed our action and did a public service announcement. So did Susan Sarandon and other celebrities. Former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson called to say he wanted to get involved. Soon we had an ever-expanding list of scientists, celebrities, politicians, and other “legitimizers.”

The action was viral. Endorsements were flooding in from organizations across the political spectrum. There were calls between rabbis, pastors, and preachers about a faith-based march contingent. Will.I.Am, Goapele, Michael Franti, and other famous musicians endorsed. Racial and economic justice groups, public health organizations, and green businesses wanted to sign up to be part of our action. We trained more than two thousand people in nonviolence. Hundreds of first-time activists were getting trained daily. The action was showing up on Internet message boards, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and across the web. Guerilla wheat paste, graffiti, and stencils promoting the action began to appear in iconic places across the country. People were registering to participate on our website daily. None of this was magic—it was the result of slow work of dozens of people in our organizing core. Volunteers were phone banking, making hundreds of calls to recruit people. We held teleconference mass meetings where hundreds could call in and get updates. And I got to facilitate them.

There was no turning back now.

The action had become its own organic being. We struggled to keep it all together. The twice-weekly conference calls between convening organizations, various working groups, and action teams were barreling forward. We had lined up interviews with our major spokespeople, and they started to appear in national papers. Capitol Climate Action was a beautiful beast that we were racing to keep up with and shape.

***

It was a couple weeks until the big day. We were in Washington, DC. The slush sloshed. The ice cracked. We could see our breath in the cold. Gales of wind cracked our faces as we emerged from the subway, across the lawn in front of the Capitol building. Five other organizers and I trudged down the tundra that had become downtown Washington, DC. The Capitol dome looked almost majestic as it offered itself to the rays of sun peeking through the clouds. It was short-lived. A haze of emissions pumping out of the smokestacks would soon obscure its view. That was the image we wanted plastered on newspapers across the country.

We looped around the coal plant and measured out each entrance. Come the day, we didn’t want anyone to get in or out. We needed to clarify how many people were required to block each gate. And which march routes were the most visually compelling, so a camera can see the Capitol building, the marchers, and the smokestack. And what would be the most fun; marching in circles is simply boring. And what would be tactically effective, so that each team could deploy at each gate while secure with a crowd of people around them.

This was our third time scouting the area. Everything needed to be perfect. There would be grandmothers and children at the action. All the organizers felt a responsibility on our shoulders to make sure it was a safe and well-coordinated event for all.

By the time we were back at the subway, there was a small huddle of beefy cops. They were there for us. Actually, we had planned a meeting with them. I wasn’t our police negotiator. But one approached me, asking, “So you’re going to have a few people down here to protest the plant, eh? You don’t have a permit.”

“Actually, a few thousand are coming.”

“You’re definitely going to need a permit.”

“We’re not getting one.”

While one organizer went to negotiate with the police, another organizer was hanging out back at the coal plant. It was the shift change. We had met with the union who supported the workers at the plant, to clarify that we had no problems with them. We supported workers. The union was supportive of our action, but we needed to make sure that there wouldn’t be a conflict on the day of. So we leafleted during the shift changes. Gone are the days when we’ll allow the media to frame our issues as “environment vs. jobs.” We wanted a just transition to good, sustainable jobs for all.

***

One week left. I woke up to Nell Greenberg’s frantic typing. Nell is a communications genius and had been conspiring about the Capitol Climate Action from the beginning. “Joshjoshjosh!” she called to me in a blur of fingers slamming on keys. “You’ll never guess what just happened!” Nancy Pelosi had just made a proclamation on Capitol Hill. They were going to phase coal out of the power plant.

We were caught between moments of shock and the compulsion to react as fast as possible. Did we win? What did it mean?

We had been talking to Pelosi for a while, and she had not been pleased with our action. The Capitol plant had been a bit of a black eye for a well-intentioned set of eco-initiatives. She didn’t want us to shine a light on the Democratic Congress’s inaction.

We called up people like Bill. We called up our frontline allies and consulted with the community group that had been fighting that plant. “How could we march on a plant with a demand that had already been met?” we asked. “Let’s turn the action into a victory party in the streets,” Bill suggested.

“No. Pelosi is just trying to take the wind out of our sails . . . ” Nell interjected. The Capitol plant was indeed switching away from coal . . . to natural gas. We knew that this action was supposed to be a flash point for a larger commentary on coal—it wasn’t about this specific plant as much as about an entire industry. And while natural gas is an improvement, climate justice activists across the country were opposing natural gas pipelines, hydrolic fracturing (fracking), and the community devastation it causes. “…a victory party would be premature,” I finished. By now, Nell and I were completing each other’s sentences.

But Pelosi did give us the gift of validation. We put out a press release stating our intention to continue the protest—that this proves the efficacy of grassroots people power—and we’re gonna keep pushing. The New York Times and a number of other national papers picked up the story. Pelosi’s announcement backfired: it put our action into the spotlight. It underscored the careful dance between radical activists and the mainstream—how bold demands create more space for what is “politically possible” in Washington. It proved to those who would disparage civil disobedience that our tactics work.

We were rolling.

***

T minus four days.

I navigated a labyrinth of several hundred flags being painted bright green, yellow, blue, and red. We had converted a Greenpeace warehouse space into an art factory. Art is beautiful and carries the message of our actions, but ours was also tactically functional. The different-colored flags were set up to designate different “blocs” in the march. Each set of colors would have a mass of people behind it, deployed at different times down the march route, and occupying a different entrance. It was just one way we were able to direct and organize mass action in a fluid and clear way.

The hum of sewing machines stitching fabric together competed with hip-hop and reggae. Butts were shaking in tune with spray cans shaking. Stencils with “power“, “community“, “change“, and “justice” were churned out faster than we could hang them to dry. Young people with circular saws cut hundreds of bamboo shafts, while others strung cloth across them. Banners were painted. “Power past coal” placards were stained. German playwright Bertolt Brecht once said, “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, it is a hammer with which to shape it.” By making all our art ourselves, we were reshaping new clean energy economies.

While we strung together our protest signs, organizers were meeting down the hall to plan out the direction they’d offer participants. At this point, hundreds of people were pulling all-nighters to make the action possible.

Finally, it was the big weekend.

We converted a second warehouse into a Capitol Climate Action convergence space. The broken beams, dusty walls, cracked bricks, and holes in the floor seemed fitting. It hosted more art parties and continuous nonviolence trainings all weekend. The Ruckus Society brought a crew of trainers of color to teach civil disobedience to hundreds of mostly white students. They joked about their role, “We’re here to put some chocolate chips on this cookie!” Race was front and center in a lot of conversations about how we would build a new world together. Legions of light-switch flippers were beginning to understand their role in our power lines of relations. I wished to myself that we had the time and space to go deeper with people about movement strategy and making change. I was proud of our nonviolence training factory but nervous that it was too much of a surface introduction. “The real victory for this action,” I told a friend, “is whether or not all these people go back home and roll up their sleeves and do community organizing.” I decided to say the same thing to kick off our first mass meeting that night.

Nearly four hundred packed into our dusty warehouse. The walls were coated in cracking brick and giant colorful banners. Pressing the megaphone to my lips I shouted, “Who here is from the Northeast?” Cheers thundered across the room. “What about the Southwest?” “Yeahhh!” activists boomed. As I called out each section of the country, the noise was deafening. Everyone was in tha house. Part infosession and part pep rally, that meeting brought a catharsis that reminded me why those endless hours of organizing were worth it. Crews of youth from Oakland taught everyone chants. Mass-action veterans and elders like Lisa Fithian broke down the plan, with giant maps papering the walls. We were organized. Later that night, youth from across the country danced and celebrated the birth of a new era.

***

Then it was the big day. Energy Action Coalition had a rally in front of the Capitol building, mobilizing some thousands of youth. I was encouraged by their turnout. The so-called apathetic youth didn’t exist here that day. When their rally was over, we had teams in place to direct people three blocks away to our convergence spot.

May and Will from 350.org helped set up the sound system. Like bees buzzing around a hive, friends were setting up the banners and flags I spotted my childhood hero Dr. Vandana Shiva. Her snuggly embrace made me feel like an old friend. It was our first time meeting in person, though we had spoken many times about us kicking off the rally together. Dr. Shiva’s work had inspired me for years. I was giddy.

“Are you ready to start?” I asked.

“Lets do it.” She smiled.

The bullhorn was back on my lips. In kicking off the rally, I think I said something cheesy about how the warmth of our bodies and action were going to heat up the cold day. After a few minutes of leading some chants, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by thousands of people, already moving in unison. Dr. Shiva took the mic.

Vandana talked about the Global Justice Movement confronting the World Trade Organization ten years earlier in Seattle, grounding us in the streams of movement that swirled around us, helping us stand on the shoulders of organizers before us.

Dr. Shiva has a presence that is calm and grounded but loud. She didn’t yell into the microphone as much as hummed, “your protest, your rally, your action today is definitely the signal to the world that the rule of injustice and the rule of oxymorons is over. We will tell the governments of the world, don’t hide behind each other! We will challenge their false solutions, we have the real stuff. And we are gonna build it!“

In handing me back the bullhorn, I felt as if she was passing the torch. I was humbled. “Lets go!” We shouted, and we were off.

It was like clockwork. Action teams deployed to each gate, locking them down. I thought about the brave crews of activists who were blockading the back gates, out of the view of the cameras and all the fanfare. Less concerned with the spectacle of it all, they were there to do a job. Many affiliated with Rising Tide, they wanted to lock down the back, to ensure that the Indigenous groups and Appalachians could lead the march and be in the spotlight. Solidarity. A Piikani and Dené Native named Gitz Crazyboy yelled into the bullhorn with an Indigenous contingent. He had come down from northern Canada to talk about how Tar Sands oil extraction was industrial genocide killing Indigenous communities and their way of life. As he talked about the cancer rates in his community, I looked at the army marching behind him and smiled.

We had a full program. And the clock was ticking—if we didn’t surround our sound stage with people quick, the police were going to overwhelm us and tow it away.

I stepped on stage to emcee our main event. The sea of people swallowed the power plant in front of me. Insulated with cheering bodies, we had claimed our space. The cops couldn’t move our stage now.

The Internet was streaming with real-time photos of beautiful images of young people blocking gates with banners reading “closed: for climate justice!” Red, yellow, green, and blue banners swept around the DC streets like estuaries forming a river of endless faces yelling and singing.

I had to find some way to keep energy up and keep rolling through our tight program that featured hip-hop artists, scientists, politicians, community members, and folk singers. It was a blur. Amid the constant legal updates being barked over our radios, hot chocolate and blankets being distributed to participants, and speakers, we needed to keep people informed of the changing level of risk. Police negotiators were trying to make sure that those who were risking arrest were in the right places and that everyone was safe. I led chants and helped move us through our barrage of speakers. Bobby Kennedy Jr. , Eleanor Holmes Norton, Dr. James Hansen, Gus Speth. The list went on. Then Enei took the mic.

“We’re not environmentalists! We’re here because our people are dying.” She was so precise with her analysis the seas of people in front of her were captivated. Without a doubt, the stories from the frontline community members, like Enei, energized the masses of people who sat-in for hours upon hours—all day in the cold. Nobody was getting in or out of that plant.

Then Bill addressed the crowd, “I’ve waited twenty years to see what the global warming movement was gonna look like, and boy does it look beautiful!” He motioned to the power plant that was now swarmed. “One down, six hundred more to go!”

The day was wearing on. We had reached the end of our speakers list. And we got word from our police negotiator that the cops had no intention of arresting anyone today. And we didn’t have any other cards up our sleeves.

We had already achieved our goal—the plant was shut down for the day. But we were all worried that it would feel like an anticlimax.

Even in the eleventh hour, even after we won, we were still debating the exit strategy. We could have escalated. “What about scaling the fences?” someone suggested. Anyone trying to enter the actual facility would definitely get arrested. I smiled at the thought of Dr. Hansen climbing over barbed wire. Wasn’t gonna happen. And the more radical activists who would be gung ho for such an endeavor would take the spotlight off of the frontline folks and spokespeople. We wanted to make sure that as much as possible the messengers in the media were people most directly impacted by the issue.

We needed to end on a high note. I got the go-ahead from the tactical team and stepped onto the stage.

“Well, I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some better news . . . ” I joked. Cheers erupted. “The good news is that we shut them down. Operations have stopped. We’ve won!” When the yelling died down, I continued, “And the better news is that they didn’t even need to arrest us for it to happen!” It was my somewhat ungraceful attempt at a reframe. People were too excited to care much. “Lets see a show of hands of who has shut down a coal-fired power plant before today?” One or two people put their hands in the air, a bit confused. “And who is now gonna go home after today and do it again, and again, and again?” The thunder had returned.

The crowd marched back up the street, singing. The action was over. Mostly.

A few stragglers were unimpressed. They wanted to stay locked down till the bitter end. “We were promised that there would be arrests. This isn’t a real civil disobedience, this was a choreographed photo op.” They had a point. We did much more hand-holding with this action than I had ever seen in any other mass mobilization. It was part of the terrain with the goal of engaging so many new folks. And I still think we made the right choice in the end. Escalation for its own sake is never the goal. Instead, we were able to meet a large number of new people “where they were at,” and compel them to newer levels of engagement they had never done before.

***

The Capitol Climate Action hoped to change the national conversation on climate. Within a single media cycle, we had positive pieces about a mass climate action in the Associated Press, Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, New York Times, Democracy Now!, the Nation, and a host of others. The action generated more than seven hundred media stories.

In doing so, we wanted to open a doorway into the movement for lots of new people and legitimize nonviolent direct action as a tactic. The breadth of endorsing organizations is one indicator of success. More than a hundred groups publicly endorsed the action, ranging from public health organizations, religious groups, and clean energy businesses to grassroots environmental networks, labor groups, and racial justice organizations.

I feel proud of how the Capitol Climate Action served to supercharge the movement against coal in the United States. Just three days after our action, there was another civil disobedience action at Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. Six days later, there was a mass action in Belgium blockading European Union Finance Ministers, with more than 350 arrests, citing our Capitol action as a big inspiration for their recruitment. On March 14, there was an action in Knoxville protesting the Tennessee Valley Authority around a recent coal ash sludge spill. The same day, eighty activists inspired by our action marched in Palm Springs, California, as part of the Power Past Coal campaign. Three inspired actions happened that week in Massachusetts. Decentralized actions targeting coal happened across the continent on April 1. A month later, there was a mass action called the Cliffside Climate Action in North Carolina to stop Duke Energy’s proposed coal plant.

And that’s just the beginning. Our generation is entering a profound time of transition and crisis. That much is certain. But the future is unwritten. Our work together will determine whether or not, on the other side of things, there will be justice for people and the planet.

Animals strategizing at the Highlander Folk School

Whew! What a whirlwind it’s been. I’ve been doing a collaborative tour with the Beehive Design Collective for the last month! We’ve been in West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and North Carolina so far. We’re so grateful to so many people in the coal fields sharing their stories with us. We’ve stood on top of mountains where we could see 3 mountaintop removal moonscapes at once; given workshops for a middle school girls afterschool program; presented alongside frontline coal community advocates; facilitated interactive organizing trainings at community spaces; given keynote talks at conferences; hung out at community colleges; and had so many generous people open up their homes to us and share with us raw and painful accounts of the challenges they’re up against in their fights for justice.

It has been absolutely exhausting, but deeply politically fulfilling.

We’re leaving coal-affected regions now, and excited to come to Pensylvania, Washington DC, New York, Connecticut, Massachussets, New Hampshire and more. You can check out some of our upcoming dates at Aid and Abet’s site.

It’s been exciting experiment so far that I hope I’ll have more time to reflect on in the near future: mixing beehive style storytelling and graphic presentations with interactive training content on organizing, social movement strategy, campaign strategy, action design, and more. In some cases we’ve been tag-teaming trainings with an organization during the day, and a public beehive presentation at night, but mostly we have been mixing the two somewhat fluidly. It’s felt engaging and a much more accessible format than your standard training OR your standard lecture-style presentation.

For a full listing of our dates (some have info forthcoming), click below:

3/4/11 – Firestorm Café,  8pm. Asheville NC

3/11, 3/12, 3/13 –  Appalachian Studies Association conference in Richmond KY

3/14 – Marshall University, 7pm. Huntington KY. Sponsored by Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, SEAC

3/15 –  Pellissippi State College, 9am, Knoxville TN

3/17 – Tennessee Tech University, 6pm, Cookeville TN

3/18; 3/19 – United Students for Fair Trade conference, Bowling Green KY

3/20 – Lower Price Community School, 5:30pm, Cincinnati Ohio

3/21 – Xavier University, 7pm, Conaton Learning Commons, Room 406, Cincinnati Ohio

3/22 –  Broke Spoke community bike shop, Lexington KY

3/23 – University of Kentucky, 7pm, Lexington KY

3/24 – Al’s Bar, Lexington KY, Sponsored by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

3/25 – COALFIELDS – Coal River Mountain Watch meeting

3/26 – COALFIELDS – Kayford Mountain

3/27 – 2pm Covenant House, Charleston KY, Sponsored by Keepers of the Mountains

3/28 – Trimble Middle School, w/ GIRL POWER! afterschool program 2pm – 3:15 Athens, Ohio

3/29 – Ohio State University, 7pm, Columbus Ohio

3/30 – Ohio State University, 7pm, Columbus Ohio

4/1 – Juniata College, Huntingdon PA

4/3 Moose Exchange, evening, Bloomsburg PA

4/4 Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg PA,

4/4 Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg PA

4/5 Bard University, Annandale NY

4/6 Yale University, 4:30pm New Haven CT

4/6 Yale University, 8:00pm New Haven C

4/7 Manhattanville College, 12:00pm, Purchase NY

4/7 SUNY Purchase, 7pm, Purchase NY

4/8 Hunter College, Queens NY

4/9 Latin American Solidarity Conference, Washington DC

4/10 Latin American Solidarity Conference, Washington DC

4/10 w/ Rising Tide (location TBA), Washington DC

4/11 w/ Dream Collective (location TBA), Washington – DC

4/12 JMU Harrisonburg, VA

4/13 Busboys and Poets, Washington DC, sponsored by Friends of the Earth

4/14 – University of Maryland, Washington DC

4/16 – Powershift, DC

4/17 – Powershift, DC

4/18 – American University. DC

4/19 – North Hartford High School, Philadelphia PA

4/20 – Earth Quaker Action team training (not a public event), Philadelphia PA

4/21 – CUNY Law, NYC

4/22 – Innovation High School, NYC

4/25 – US Coast Guard Academy, New London CT

4/25-  Connecticut College, CT [TENTATIVE]

4/26 – UCONN, 7pm Dodd Center, Storrs CT

4/27- Brookline High, Boston MA

4/28- UMass Lowell, MA

4/29 – Brandeis University – Waltham MA

4/29 – Regional Center for Healthy Communities, Boston MA

4/30 – Brandeis University – Waltham MA

5/1 – University of New Hampshire Durham, New Hampshire

5/2 – Boston College, 7pm, Boston MA

In this series I explore how evolutionary theory might help to explain the origins and logic of collective action, and how it might inform the thinking and strategies of progressive change agents.

This is the landing page for the series. You can bookmark it and check back for new posts, which I’ll be linking to from this page.

1. Humans: not just selfish
2. War, xenophobia and other downsides to group selection
3. The Political Identity Paradox
4. Immigration: anatomy of a progressive narrative

‘Oh what’s that? Sorry its hard to hear you with all these flags flapping in my ear.’ — David Cross

On another note, it has been fascinating to watch the political divides in the Right Wing in the previous week. Many conservatives were ready to see Mubarak go, and liked the idea of the military taking over. Many others (including Fox News) threw their hats in with the Islamophobes, creating a fantasy of an Islamic fundamentalist overthrow a-la-Iran. Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theories, as always, were the most entertaining – that U.S. Communists were forming an alliance with Middle Eastern “Islamic Terrorists,” and engineering a revolution in Egypt to create a haven and base-of-operations for the coming revolution in the U.S. While its fun to laugh at his lunacy, the political fracturing among the Right is important, and will likely increase with time. Another blog on that soon…

The tone inside the conference center at the U.N. Climate Negotiations in Cancun has been a bit dismal this past week. Yet despite the reduced expectations inside, this morning the international peasant movement La Via Campesina gave us a new injection of hope and vision with a vibrant march of thousands of small farmers, Indigenous peoples and community activists through the streets in Mexico. It kicked off today’s international day of action – “1,000 Cancuns” – where grassroots organizations across the world demonstrated local resiliency and real solutions to the climate crisis. 30 coordinated events took place in the U.S. and Canada today, anchored by the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance.

Here in San Francisco, more than a dozen local community organizations joined forces to help convert a Mission District parking lot into a community garden and park with affordable housing units. Click here for photos.

“This action demonstrates a tangible solution to the climate crisis by promoting local food production, challenging our dependence on automobiles and strengthening bonds within the community,” explained Teresa Almaguer of People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER) “The climate crisis requires community-based solutions and an end to corporate influence within the UN climate negotiations.” In addition to planting vegetables, participants enjoyed live music, theatrical performances and speakers all focusing on solutions to the climate crisis. A common theme at the event was increasing local food production in the fight against climate change, in contrast to the corporate-driven false solutions being put forth inside the U.N. negotiations.

“Industrial agriculture is one of the top three sources of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan of Movement Generation. “Agribusiness corporations profit from everything from fertilizer and pesticide sales to control of what goes onto supermarket shelves. The people are left paying the true costs in polluted water, depleted soil, diet-related diseases, and climate disruption. Meanwhile, U.S. agribusiness harms small farmers, farm workers and consumers – in the U.S. and around the world.”

The Mission District parking lot at 17th and Folsom streets has been the target of an ongoing campaign by community organizations to legally reclaim publicly-owned land to meet community needs. Similar efforts have been successful in other parts of San Francisco and the Bay Area largely for the creation of community gardens.

“At the UN Climate negotiations, the US government – highly influenced by corporate polluters – has pushed for an accord that would lock us in to catastrophic impacts from disrupting the earth’s climate systems,” explained Xochitl Bernadette Moreno of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER). “The Obama Administration needs to drop the Copenhagen Accord and uphold the Cochabamba Agreement which the world’s people’s movements have put forth as a real solution to solving the climate crisis.”

Click here to sign a message to Obama to stop obstructing a real climate deal in Cancun!

Event cosponsors included: Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Center for Political Education, Communities for a Better Environment, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Mobilization for Climate Justice West, Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER), People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), Richmond Progressive Alliance, Urban Tilth, West County Toxics Coalition.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo of the Lubicon Cree comes from a community impacted by tar sands. “We have seen the destruction of our lands happen right before our eyes. Our water is being contaminated and we are seeing droughts throughout the region. My family used to be able to drink from our watershed, and now within my lifetime we can no longer do so. Young and old people alike have developed respiratory illnesses as neighboring plants emit noxious gases into the air. First Nations and farming communities have reported health effects to the wildlife and livestock. The area is drastically changing – I fear for the future of my homeland.”

The tar sands are the fastest growing source of GHG emissions in Canada. Unless Canada changes track emissions from the tar sands industry are set to triple to over 120 millions tonnes. Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Indigenous Environmental Network said, “Our communities demand real solutions to address the climate crisis and that means shutting down the tar sands and a moratorium on new fossil fuel development.”

Indigenous communities are not only being impacted in the tar sands region, but are feeling the effects of tar sands infrastructure spreading throughout North America such as the Keystone and pending Keystone XL pipelines. “Our traditional way of life has been devastated by oil refineries. There is already a web of pipelines under the ground, and now the Keystone has plowed through our territory bringing further spills,” explains Casey Camp-Horinek of the Oklahoma Ponca Nation. “No amount of money can replace the destruction of our land, water and air. The Keystone XL pipeline is not needed or wanted.”

Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) is a network of Indigenous Peoples empowering Indigenous Nations and communities towards sustainable livelihoods, demanding environmental justice and maintaining the Sacred Fire of our traditions. IEN has brought 17 indigenous leaders to Cancun as part of the Grassroots Climate Justice Solutions North America Delegation uniting representatives from fossil fuel impacted communities who are on the frontlines of solving the climate crisis. To book interviews or get background on North American climate justice organizing, contact the IEN Media Hotline: +52 998 108 0748.

Depending on the campaign, we often must confront our opposition, but this usually means targeting power-holders; for example, when fighting to end Mountaintop Removal, we need to deal with Massey Energy and other coal companies directly. That’s not exactly the same thing as being over-consumed by focusing on our ideological-opposition – the loudmouths who happen to have a different world-view than we do.

But with the rise of the “populist” Right wing backlash that has gotten so much attention in the last year, I have been more and more drawn to studying some of our most vocal (and often ideologically fanatic) opponents. They’re effective at fear-mongering for sure, but their rhetoric is powerful – even when wildly inaccurate – because they have a well-organized base that is rooted in institutional relationships. Talking points aren’t just repeated on Fox News and the message-disciplined Right Wing noise machine, but also every week in churches across our country and other institutions that offer meaning to people’s lives in a holistic way.

It is in that context that I want to share this video, which is being viewed across our country by churches who are reinforcing its anti-poor, anti-environmental, anti-earth message. Its a short clip of a 12 part DVD series.

Their website says: “One of the greatest threats to society and the church today is the multifaceted environmentalist movement,” says Cornwall Alliance founder and national spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. “There isn’t an aspect of life that it doesn’t seek to force into its own mold.” Whew!

As Dangerous Minds noted, this is so ridiculous that it may be the “Reefer Madness” of our generation…but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. As long as the Environmental movement fails to speak to the concerns of faith-based people, poor and working people, and the needs of communities hurting, dominant narratives like this will continue to compel people.

There has been much hand-wringing about the dramatic poll drop in the U.S. public’s belief in climate change, and how “environmentalists” are losing the battle of the story on climate science. A lot of this shift, I think, is not exactly that we’re losing this specific battle of public opinion. It’s that climate denial is just a small part of a broader “populist-Right” platform that has swept the country; people who used to default on the side of real climate science, are now defaulting on the side of the denial-fantasy because its built into a larger world view that makes meaning in their lives. In that context, it makes sense that now we are seeing a much stronger issue-based conspiracy-theory oriented push from our opposition on climate, because their ideas fit in with a broader orientation of the Tea Party platform.

Its clear by now that policy progress won’t happen on a national level until climate is just one element of a broader progressive platform that gains momentum (led primarily by other concerns, like the economy and health care). So where are the national spokespeople articulating such a platform in a compelling way? Until climate advocates are unafraid to speak boldly and directly to other progressive issues, we will be stuck in issue-based silos that the progressive movement desperately wants to move beyond, but is still struggling to figure out how to do it. That “how” has to go beyond media-saavy messaging and must be rooted in organizing the institutions that people belong to that give our lives meaning – church groups, unions, schools, base-building political organizations, etc.

This video is one example of how people aren’t compelled by facts, but by meaning. On the Left we still seem to think that because what we’re saying is true, that it will automatically be meaningful. The Christian Right proves that the opposite tends to be the case: if something is meaningful to people, they believe it to be true. The old axiom of the “truth will set you free” is only one part of the story. Meaningful stories set us free, if they happen to also be true. That’s our task.

To the Board and Staff of 1 Sky,

We are grassroots and allied organizations representing racial justice, indigenous rights, economic justice, immigrant rights, youth organizing and environmental justice communities actively engaged in Climate Justice organizing.

Given the very necessary discussion spurred by your recent public letter (August 8, 2010), we wanted to share with you some of the work we have been doing to protect people and planet, as well as our reflections on a forward-thinking movement strategy. Your honest reflections on the political moment in which we find ourselves, alongside the open invitation to join in this discussion, are heartening.

Organizing a Powerful Climate Justice Movement

Like you, we recognize Climate Disruption as a central issue of our time. With the right set of strategies and coordinated efforts we can mobilize diverse communities to powerful action. Our organizing strategy for climate justice is to: 1) Organize in, network with and support communities who have found their frontlines[1] of climate justice; 2) Organize with communities to identify their frontlines of climate justice, and 3) Coalesce these communities towards a common agenda that is manifested from locally defined strategies to state and national policy objectives through to international solidarity agreements.

Community-Led Climate Justice has been Winning

In assessing the broader landscape of climate activism it is critical to recognize that despite the failure of DC policy-led campaigns, there have also been significant successes on the part of grassroots climate justice campaigns across the U.S.

Frontline communities, using grassroots, network-based and actions-led strategies around the country have had considerable success fighting climate-polluting industries in recent years, with far less resources than the large environmental groups in DC. These initiatives have prevented a massive amount of new industrial carbon from coming on board – here are just a few examples:

Stopping King Coal with Community Organizing: The Navajo Nation, led by a Dine’ (Navajo) and Hopi grassroots youth movement, forced the cancellation of a Life of Mine permit on Black Mesa, AZ, for the world’s largest coal company – Peabody Energy. Elsewhere in the U.S. community-based groups in Appalachia galvanized the youth climate movement in their campaigns to stop mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining, and similar groups in the Powder River Basin have united farmers and ranchers against the expansion of some of the world’s largest coal deposits.

Derailing the Build-out of Coal Power: Nearly two thirds of the 151 new coal power plant proposals from the Bush Energy Plan have been cancelled, abandoned or stalled since 2007 – largely due to community-led opposition.  A recent example of this success is the grassroots campaign of Dine’ grassroots and local citizen groups in the Burnham area of eastern Navajo Nation, NM that have prevented the creation of the Desert Rock coal plant, which would have been the third such polluting monolith in this small, rural community.  Community-based networks such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Energy Justice Network and the Western Mining Action Network have played a major role in supporting these efforts to keep the world’s most climate polluting industry at bay.

Preventing the Proliferation of Incinerators: In the last 12 years, no new waste incinerators (which are more carbon-intensive than coal and one of the leading sources of cancer-causing dioxins) have been built in the US, and hundreds of proposals have been defeated by community organizing. In 2009 alone, members of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives prevented dozens of municipal waste incinerators, toxic waste incinerators, tire incinerators and biomass incinerators from being built, and forced Massachusetts to adopt a moratorium on incineration.

Defeating Big Oil In Our Own Backyards: A community-led coalition in Richmond, CA, has, stopped the permitting of Chevron’s refinery expansion in local courts. This expansion of the largest oil refinery on the west coast is part of a massive oil and gas sector expansion focused on importing heavy, high-carbon intensive crude oil from places like the Canada’s Tar Sands. This victory demonstrates that with limited resources, community-led campaigns can prevail over multi-million dollar PR and lobby campaigns deployed by oil companies like Chevron, when these strategies are rooted in organizing resistance in our own backyards.

REDOIL, (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands) an Alaska Native grassroots network, has been effective at ensuring the Native community-based voice is in the forefront of protecting the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Together with allies, REDOIL has also prevented Shell from leasing the Alaska outer continental shelf for offshore oil exploration and drilling. Advancing recognition of culture, subsistence and food sovereignty rights of Alaska Natives within a diverse and threatened aquatic ecosystem has been at the heart of their strategy.

Stopping False Solutions like Mega Hydro: Indigenous communities along the Klamath River forced Pacificorp Power company to agree to “Undam the Klamath” by the year 2020, in order to restore the river’s natural ecosystems, salmon runs and traditional land-use capacity. For decades, Indigenous communities have been calling out false solutions – pointing to the fact that energy technologies that compromise traditional land-use, public health and local economies cannot be considered climate solutions.

Building Resilient Communities through Local Action: In communities all over the US, frontline communities are successfully winning campaigns linking climate justice to basic survival:

• In San Antonio, Texas, the Southwest Workers Union led the fight to divert $20billion dollars from nuclear energy into renewable energy and energy efficiency. In addition, they launched a free weatherization program for low-income families and a community run organic farm.
• In Oakland, California, the Oakland Climate Action Coalition is leading the fight for an aggressive Climate Energy and Action Plan that both addresses climate disruption and local equity issues.

Lessons from the Beltway Strategy

Our analysis of mainstream climate advocacy’s failure to win in the federal arena echoes yours, but differs in key areas.  We agree there was insufficient investment in movement building, and a “beltway strategy” was prioritized without clarity on what the bottom lines were. “Anything is better than nothing,” will always lead to nothing, because it is a declaration of our intention to compromise. As a result, a decade of advocacy work, however well intentioned, migrated towards false solutions that hurt communities and compromised on key issues such as carbon markets and giveaways to polluters.

These compromises sold out poor communities in exchange for weak targets and more smokestacks that actually prevent us from getting anywhere close to what the science – and common sense – tells us is required. We encapsulate the lessons learned as follows:

Access was confused for Influence. We do not have influence in DC, regardless of how much face-time we get with legislators, or their staffers. To start from a place of power – you must first figure out where you have power, and build from there. We have power in our communities where we have relationships and can hold politicians and corporations accountable. In DC, corporate power rules because they can concentrate energy, resources and relationships there – in ways we cannot. However, when confronting these same corporations in our tribes, cities, and towns, we reveal that they are not nimble or powerful enough to defeat our communities.

Density was confused for Depth; and Mobilizing for Organizing. Since we are calling for a redoubling of grassroots organizing efforts, we should be clear what we mean. Grassroots Organizing is the process by which people in communities rally around a common cause, acting on their own behalf with allies and networks – often against powerful interests, often building new institutions needed to win a lasting change. The material conditions in communities have to change for the material conditions in DC to change. Anyone looking to support real and effective solutions would do well to look outside the beltway.

Targets were confused for Solutions. We will never win by centering our principal energy on CO₂ targets alone. Real Solutions must move past carbon targets, whether it is parts per million or percentages of emissions. Here is why:

1) Targets reinforce the “carbon fundamentalism” frame that hides the root causes of climate change. By not talking about root causes, we miss opportunities to connect climate disruption with failures of economic systems, resource wars and forced migration, for example. Targets also serve to reduce discussion on climate to arenas where corporations have greater access.

2) How we get to the targets is more important than the targets. By staking our claim solely around a target, we leave the political space for false solutions wide open. From technology solutions such as “clean coal”, “safe nuclear” and “renewable biomass” to market solutions such as offsets – these so-called solutions serve to line the pockets of those who got us into this mess in the first place, without dealing with the root cause. The targets we do articulate along with our solutions should be extremely aggressive and aligned with call from international social movements, such as those coming from the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

Flipping the Script: Leading with the Grassroots

Given the significant gains we have had with community-led strategies for Climate Justice, and the failure of resource-intensive, beltway policy campaigns, we need to re-prioritize building power from the bottom up. The strategy we emphasize includes:

1) Investing in grassroots action at frontline struggles to win the victories that build our power, improve our communities and stop the corporations causing climate disruption;

2) Prioritizing local organizing to build the resilient communities, economic alternatives, and political infrastructure that we need to weather the climate crisis; and,

3) Supporting solidarity with grassroots movements around the world, to link our struggles, and to craft policies and structures we need internationally to support solutions determined locally.

International Solidarity for a Stronger Movement – Beyond Cancún

As grassroots forces, we have been building with social movements from around the world. Our groups were well represented at the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in April 2010. The Peoples’ Conference modeled what a more democratic, transparent policy-making process could look like and resulted in proposals that were formally submitted to the UNFCCC, Conference of Parties 16, in Cancun. These submissions are in the negotiating text, being championed by several southern nations. The demands in these submissions are clear and strong – No Offsets, No (Carbon) Markets, No Commodification of our Atmosphere or of Life.

While “offsets” are often cloaked as opportunities for “clean development”, this claim fails on two counts. First, offsets do not lead to clean development but to greater destruction, displacement and disempowerment. Second, the very premise of offsets is that it is allowable to continue polluting in poor communities and communities of color in the U.S. to justify over-industrialization of communities and their resources elsewhere.

As communities fighting climate pollution in our own backyards, we link our struggles with social movements worldwide to stand against offsets and other false solutions and to build real solutions based in our communities. We call on you to stand with us. If there is anything you can take away from this letter, we reiterate:  The equation of power in our movement, just as in our country, must be inverted.

The leadership is coming from the grassroots everyday.

We will win Climate Justice by supporting the hundreds of communities around the country who are targeting the climate polluters in their communities, whether that is an energy source, a toxic industry, a dirty port, a big box chain, a freeway or a developer driving gentrification. Resources should be deployed to win those fights in those communities – for their own sake.

Grassroots Organizing Cools the Planet.

In power,

Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project
Indigenous Environmental Network
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
Southwest Workers Union
Southwest Organizing Project
Black Mesa Water Coalition
Resisting Environmental Destruction On Indigenous Lands
Communities for a Better Environment
Just Transition Alliance
Asian Pacific Environmental Network
Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
Alaska Community Action on Toxics
Direct Action for Rights and Equality
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization
People Organized to Win Employment Rights
Youth For Justice
Save Our Sacred Earth
Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development
Alternatives for Community and Environment
Justice in Nigeria Now
Ironbound Community Corporation
Don’t Waste Massachusetts Coalition
Berthold Environmental Awareness Committee
Grassroots International
Global Justice Ecology Project
smartMeme
Ruckus Society
Rising Tide North America
Energy Justice Network
Stand Up / Save Lives Campaign
Earth Circle Conservation & Recycling
Biofuelwatch
Climate Ground Zero

(Partial List of Signatures)

You can sign onto this letter as an individual at Change.org.

Some friends and I were concerned about Chevron’s attempts to evade both the law and the company’s moral responsibility to clean up the 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste it deliberately dumped in the Amazon, killing 1,400 people and poisoning thousands of others. So we paid him a visit.

Chevron CEO John Watson flees up a staircase (Watson is on the top left) while we hold banners.

Dressed business casual, we came in early and each took seats in different parts of the room. We listened to John Watson distance Chevron from the BP oil disaster. He reassured us all that Chevron is a thoughtful oil company. He went on to say that, above all other objectives, “No goal is more important than operating in a safe and responsible manner.”

On that note, Debra Michaud, a University of Chicago alumna, jumped up to express her dismay that a fellow graduate would be involved in poisoning the communities of 30,000 people. She asked Watson to speak to Chevron’s toxic legacy in Ecuador.

Watson was quick to evade the question, claiming that the damage was not Chevron’s responsibility. He seemed relieved at the end, as if he was thinking, “Phew, glad that’s over.” But it wasn’t.

A couple minutes later I took the mic and pointed out the irony in Watson’s allegations of “deception and conspiracy” on the part of the Indigenous plaintiffs in the court case, as his comments themselves were the real deception. After pointing out his false claims of remediation, he asked that we all just wait and “see how it all plays out.” After waiting through 17 years of Chevron’s delay-deceive-and-distort tactics, I kept pushing and went on to challenge his arguments.

The students in the room were engaged. Our respectful tone and figures presented from scientific case studies played well with the Business School crowd. One person near me glanced to the podium and murmured to her neighbor, “Why isn’t he answering the question?” Watson’s eyes darted around nervously as he realized that his presentation was being hijacked.

Watson’s entourage from the Business school looked panicked. The moderator escorted me off the microphone. A few minutes later, Abigail Singer went up to the mic to speak, and the alarmed moderator declared the Q&A over, after seeing Abigail’s paper, fearing she too would ask about Ecuador. She was escorted to her seat, and the event was declared over.

It was clear that the one thing people would remember from the event was the controversy about Chevron’s role in poisoning Ecuadorean Amazon communities.

We went up to shake Watson’s hand, and were immediately blocked by security guards who ushered him away. We persistently followed him out, holding up a banner reading “Energy shouldn’t cost lives” all the way out of the building. Two people from the crowd cheered us on, saying “Way to stand up!” and “Keep going!” We did, until the moderator, furious, saw to it that we were escorted from the building.

John Watson needs to know that this issue won’t simply go away. It is going to stay in his face until he addresses it head on — even on his home turf and alma mater.

Video forthcoming!

The Tar Sands have been a focal point this year; in the UK Climate Camp brought together activists challenging the Royal Bank of Scottland’s investments in the Canadian gigaproject. Here in Dunham, Quebec, climate camp was set up to challenge a pipeline coming through this community. The proposed pipeline is called the Enbridge Trailbreaker project, and would bring dirty tar sands bitumen to Montreal and then down to Maine, eventually ending on tankers heading to refineries in the Gulf Coast.

The camp brought together activists from across Quebec, Ontario, the Northeastern US, and beyond, to learn about the intersections of climate and social justice issues, and plan out how to best work together in the coming year. Participants cooked, fed, and set up camp outside and were able to build lasting relationships between various communities to talk about how to build a climate movement.

Resistance to tar sands projects has been growing in Canada and people are taking action locally to end the addiction to fossil fuels and the injustices facing communities because of the dirty industry.

The two-week climate camp ended with a march to the proposed pumping station for the pipeline. Local community member and climate camp participants rallied at the proposed site. “Our objective is to unite in order to act on the root causes of climate change. It is the right time to denounce and block the Trailbreaker project. Local communities and ecosystems cannot afford more oil spills, like that in the Gulf of Mexico.” says Pierre-Olivier Parent, a Climate Action Camp organizer.

Check out some of the media stories about the camp here, and stay up on Quebec action from Climate Justice Montreal

Moments like this are just another signal of increasingly mobilized action-oriented groups who are supporting communities resisting point-source fossil fuel destruction. A couple days ago in the Bay Area, 150 people took action on BP, Chevron, and the EPA, with 26 participating in civil disobedience. Its an exciting moment – lets keep building.