by
Melanie Jae Martin,Yes! magazine:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/sierra-club-in-handcuffs-implications-for-climate-justice?utm_source=wkly20130322&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=titleMartin
Melanie Jae Martin wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.
Melanie writes on environmental justice and transitioning into a sustainable future. Follow her on Twitter at @MJaeMartin.
On January 22, the Sierra Club announced that it would engage in
civil disobedience for the first time in its 121-year history.
It did
this in an effort to stop the expanding extraction of fossil fuels
that threatens our world with catastrophic climate change.
On February
13, the group followed through on this promise when members of the
group, including Sierra Club President Michael Brune, cuffed themselves
to the gates of the White House in a protest demanding that
President Obama reject the Keystone XL Pipeline.
As the group wrote in its press release for the action, “Climate
change threatens the health and security of all Americans, and
action proportional to the problem is required - now.”
For decades, the Sierra Club has represented the essence of moderate,
establishment environmentalism. Traditionally, its tactics stopped at
strictly legal methods of winning support for its causes, such as
writing letters to elected representatives, petitioning, and holding
permitted rallies.
Suddenly, the urgency of climate change has led
the group to tactics that approach those of more militant groups, such
as Rising Tide or RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountain People’s
Survival).
Its tactics remain entirely nonviolent, which is a strategic
as well as moral decision for many groups, as nonviolent movements
tend to gather more widespread involvement rather than scaring people
away from participating.
While the Sierra Club’s single action doesn’t yet place it in the
same league of activism as these groups, it does help to normalize
breaking the law for justice, which has important implications for
groups that have long counted civil disobedience among their tactics.
Looking at how radical and moderate factions interact within
movements will help to explain why.
A symbiotic relationship
Imagine for a moment that you are an organizer with what we might
call the “Sierra Club 1.0” - the old organization that had a standing rule
against civil disobedience. Now imagine that you are trying to
negotiate with a local government to protect a certain forest.
You limit
your actions to calling meetings with local officials, pressing
your members to call and write to their representatives, and running
publicity campaigns to inform the public.
Meanwhile, you’re aware of a more radical group fighting for the
protection of the same forest. This group has no ban on nonviolent civil
disobedience; in fact, it makes up much of what they do.
While your
members are writing letters, this group’s members are locking
themselves to logging equipment. They are camping out on platforms
high up in the forest. They are blocking traffic in front of the local
officials’ offices.
What does this mean for you, as a Sierra Club organizer? You may find
the members of that group strange or hard to understand. But from a
strategic point of view, they are an enormous help because they make
you seem reasonable and moderate.
Local officials don’t want to talk to
the tree-sitters, so they’re happy to come and speak with you
instead. This is what sociologists have called the “radical flank
effect.”
It occurs when the presence of a movement’s radical wing
causes moderates to gain credibility and leverage because the movement’s
opponents see them as better negotiating partners.
Sociologist Herbert Haines argues that the radical flank benefits the
whole movement because “radicals can provide a militant foil against
which moderate strategies and demands are refined and normalized - in
other words treated as ‘reasonable.’
Or, the radicals can create crises
which are resolved to the moderate’s advantage,” meaning that
radicals focus attention on the situations that most urgently require
action. Radicals may also push the movement to escalate in certain
ways or lead the way into new territory.
In short, moderates and radicals work together in a symbiotic relationship,
and
the perceived distance between them gives the movement power.
The
radical flank had a positive effect in the feminist movement during the
late sixties and early seventies when its strong critiques of gender
roles made tougher laws against sexual violence and harassment of
women seem reasonable, on the labor movement in the early 20th century
when the “threat” of socialism made its demands seem realistic, and
in the Civil Rights movement when the actions of the Black Panther Party
made Martin Luther King Jr. a desirable negotiator from the U.S.
government’s point of view.
But when the moderates take up more radical methods themselves, as
the Sierra Club did last month, that shifts the center around which
“moderate” and “radical” are defined, so that actions once seen as
extreme become normalized in the public eye.
This means that more
radical groups must decide how to keep pace with the moving center,
and increase the movement’s impetus by escalating their own tactics. Escalating actions is necessary for the climate justice movement
because, as it stands, we’re not winning.
The Keystone XL Pipeline would
represent a major setback for climate justice - as NASA climate
scientist James Hansen says, it would act as “the fuse to the largest
carbon bomb on the planet,” eradicating our chance of ever
mitigating the effects of climate change.
Fracking operations, legally
exempt from the Clean Water Act, have spread throughout the country.
Mountaintop removal is poisoning watersheds with toxins like arsenic
and mercury.
If the climate justice movement is to succeed, then, it
must do more than it is currently doing and escalate its tactics.
What should this “escalation” look like for nonviolent groups? At
certain points in history, this question has led some groups to adopt
tactics that carried harsher penalties, like the attacks on logging
equipment pursued by the Earth Liberation Front.
However, groups that
publicly claim responsibility for their actions and in which the
identity of participants is known could not engage in such tactics in a
sustained way, even if they felt they were beneficial.
Lengthy jail
sentences would make it impossible for public activists to continue
their efforts, and would scare people away from the struggle. How,
then, can the radical, above-board front of the environmental movement
respond to the Sierra Club policy change?
The ideas below don’t form a comprehensive list, of course. Rather,
they’re intended to catalyze serious dialogue about which tactics will
be most effective in a movement whose center has just taken a giant
leap toward radicalism.
Merge resilience and resistance
Escalation does not necessarily mean devising new tactics - it can also
mean enhancing and deepening the ones that are already working.
Occupation, one of the most direct tactics in the radical’s toolkit,
can be deepened until one’s life becomes indistinguishable from one’s
political work.
At this point, a campaign will have become more
truly sustainable because people will be less likely to grow exhausted
by the struggle to support themselves with jobs outside of their
political work - their political work itself will help to support them.
Moreover, that work will bring their desired world more clearly into
focus for observers as well as participants, drawing more people into
the movement by embodying the desired change.
Compare the Zapatistas’ successful reclamation of land with the
Occupy movement’s tent encampments. Both used the tactic of occupation,
but in different ways.
During the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas,
Mexico, in 1994, the indigenous Zapatistas reclaimed traditional lands
that had been stolen from them in colonial times and occupied by
wealthy ranchers.
They began to farm and live on these lands. They also
created community-based governmental systems autonomous from the
federal government.
Occupy’s physical encampments, meanwhile, were
largely symbolic, keeping the movement’s message in the public
spotlight but not necessarily aiming to create a world in which the
movement forms permanent outdoor villages.
The Zapatistas used the same
tactic in a more direct and effective way by permanently reclaiming
something fundamental to their existence. This does not mean that Occupy
didn’t use the tactic effectively; it simply shows how the same
tactic can be used in a dramatically escalated way.
How could we take one of our tactics - say, standing in the way of a
tar sands pipeline - and deepen it like the Zapatistas did? One
possibility is to merge protest activities with resilience-based
efforts, like community-based ways of providing food, housing, and
social interaction.
Recent examples of resilience projects include
the urban gardens movement, Transition Towns where communities seek to
wean themselves off fossil-fuels, and free schools in which people
gather to share knowledge and skills.
Some of this resilience-based resistance is already happening in camps organized by indigenous peoples, like the
Unis’tot’en clan
of the Wet’suwet’en nation in British Columbia and the Red Lake nation
in Minnesota, which are each defending their land against Enbridge
pipelines.
The Unis’tot’en camp plans to build permaculture gardens and
pithouses - dwellings dug into the earth and covered with a roof—this
spring to stop seven potential tar sands and chemical pipelines from
traversing their land.
Red Lake is building permanent structures
like houses over an existing pipeline for the purpose of shutting the
pipeline down, due to safety requirements that prevent these
structures from being built over it.
These structures will likely serve
as community spaces where people congregate as well, building energy and
resolve.
Radicals around the country need to take their lead and
figure out how to turn daily living into part of their resistance, so
they can build a more energized and effective movement.
Imagine if, when blockading a pipeline construction site, radicals
invited the whole community to a festival on the site?
Instead of a few
people locking down, what if the community barricaded the area and
held a dance party or a carnival, reclaiming it as a community space for
direct democracy, food growing, and celebration?
When resilience
becomes a key characteristic of the space, joining together to defend it
will become less scary and more joyful. People could use the space
to construct their own cooperative forms of alternative energy, like
community-owned wind power systems.
As the movement nourishes the
souls of participants more fully, its passion, energy, and numbers will
grow, just as the round dance protests of the indigenous rights
movement Idle No More have caught on like wildfire throughout the
continent and beyond.
And in the process, we’ll be forging the
alternatives that are absolutely crucial for subverting corporate
attacks on the land, air, and water.
To do this, we need to unite with all the people leading radical
resilience-building efforts, who may be deterred by a negative
perception of protests. There are vast numbers of people working to
construct alternative systems who don’t join in such things as marches,
sit-ins, and direct actions.
We need to change our rhetoric along
with our actions - instead speaking about “resisting,” we need to speak
about “reclaiming” and “rebuilding.”
Adding community-building elements to our work would not only help provide for the needs of daily life, they’d forge
stronger feelings of solidarity,
a sensation of togetherness that gives identity and confidence to a
group.
As Palestinian exile Mubarak Awad says, the “tactile experience
of solidarity” - the feeling imparted only by vibrant communal
experiences - gives a movement passion and vitality. It helps drive mass
actions and reclamation of community control over resources and
laws.
By combining resilience and confrontational activities, radicals will
make their movement irresistible. In doing so, they’ll also make it
self-sustaining because it will draw in more people, while igniting
increasingly effective actions that build morale and heighten vitality.
Creating beautiful (yet militant) trouble
The more radical groups have often been the ones most willing to make
a spectacle of themselves in the public eye.
In the past, this has
included holding public filibusters of private meetings, holding
“search and seizures” of official documents, or posing as corporate
representatives and saying the things we wish they would say.
These
tactics take guts, artistry, and the willingness to risk making a fool
of oneself in public. By engaging in the unexpected through what
a recent book called “acts of beautiful trouble,” radical groups have been undermining powerful people by catching them off guard.
But now, the Sierra Club - and the somewhat-more-edgy 350.org - have
embraced this “beautiful trouble” with their arrests in front of the
White House.
Thus, radical groups are being cued to ramp up their
trouble making, engage in riskier artistic stunts, and to encourage more
moderate groups to up their game with noisier, more spectacular
symbolic actions - or even spectacles that confront power directly.
Activists who engage in such actions should be aware that they
include risk, just as lock-downs would. Art is not necessarily safe just
because it’s not a traditional form of “serious” action. But if the
number of people participating in such actions grows, everyone involved
may be safer.
And art by nature adds an element of safety - if only
an element - by making the opposition look foolish if it strikes back at
something as seemingly innocuous as a Santa Claus army, or a flash
mob armed only with ukuleles.
What if, instead of interrupting high-profile meetings from the
crowd, radicals took them over, joyously rushing the stage in song? What
if a rebel clown brigade actually joined hands and encircled a
building in which officials were meeting until they made a much-needed
decision?
While a small group might quickly get arrested, that would
be less likely if hundreds of clowns surrounded a building, perhaps
accompanied by protestors who did not come in costume on the inside
of the circle.
The clowns’ colorful appearance and humorous antics would
communicate that they were set on being completely peaceful, which
would be likely to stall and soften any backlash against them.
By using art to intervene with and enforce power, instead of just
symbolizing or ridiculing powerful people and institutions, the radical
flank of the environmental movement will maximize the potential of art
to create real change.
Take leadership from those most affected
Groups seeking radical change must also work to keep environmental
justice in the spotlight of the broader environmental movement and take
leadership from those most affected - frequently minorities and poor
people.
Because many groups striving for radical change operate at the
grassroots level, with less hierarchy than larger organizations,
it’s natural that front-line communities already form an intrinsic part
of many radical groups.
However, radical groups should strive to
become more inclusive of people from all backgrounds. That means
continuously confronting the prejudices we all have.
Many groups already strive for inclusiveness, but the radical
community has much work to do in this regard. A traditional criticism of
the environmental movement is that it’s composed primarily of
privileged white people with the luxury of having time and energy for
environmental concerns.
As Lewis Williams, Alastair McIntosh, and
Rose Alene Roberts write in
Radical Human Ecology, “There is a
growing emphasis on increasing diversity and inclusion, and also of
learning from communities that have built resilience through living
through and with hardship. But these efforts will need to be
increased in order to mitigate the risk of a new green elite emerging.”
By undergoing continued trainings in radical inclusiveness, striving
to take leadership from those most affected, confronting prejudices on a
daily basis, and pushing the rhetoric of inclusiveness further into
the public discourse, radical groups can bring crucial insights and
broader participation to the greater movement.
Leadership from those
most affected will guide the movement’s efforts by showing which issues
are most pressing.
How, though, can radicals who come from privileged backgrounds absorb
these lessons in a transformative way?
It’s easy to listen to the
lessons of a one-day or weekend-long training and then, stepping
back into a leadership role, fall back into the same old patterns like
talking more than listening when working with marginalized
communities.
More privileged radicals who want to be inclusive need to
immerse themselves in situations under the leadership of
marginalized individuals over an extended period of time - say, several
months.
Learning to see and contest racism wherever it exists may take
even more effort than learning to speak a different language, and
it’s an ongoing process.
You wouldn’t consider one or two weeks a
substantial immersion experience for a language, so why should you
expect to modify your way of relating to others without putting some
serious time into the effort?
Black Mesa Indigenous Support, for instance, has put out a call for
activists to assist indigenous people with daily living tasks, such as
herding sheep.
Those willing to help for several weeks or months
have the opportunity to live with an indigenous family and experience
daily life in this community.
In doing so, they must learn to
refrain from asking about painful details of history that families might
be tired of talking about. They must strive to learn by observing,
rather than expecting a series of lessons in indigenous history or
spirituality. They must listen more than they talk.
Learning to listen and take leadership from marginalized groups is
more important than any particular nugget of history.
Activists who take
part in such an immersion experience - in response to direction from
marginalized groups rather than by imposing their own social-justice
program on them - are likely to become more respectful, observant, and
collaborative in their relationships with marginalized communities.
The
experience might make them more capable of confronting their privilege
in their work and
understanding race and class issues on a deeper level.
White organizers will learn to lead
with people of color rather than
for them.
In doing so, white organizers will become better allies, enabling
stronger cooperation and stronger bonds between people of diverse
backgrounds.
White activists should undergo training in inclusiveness before
seeking out such immersion experiences. This will keep marginalized
communities from having to bear the full burden of helping white
activists to learn new ways of relating to less privileged people.
The
Whole Movements
program provides this type of training to help white activists become
allies to marginalized groups, providing long-term mentoring as well
as on-site workshops. Such training will also help privileged activists
to learn and integrate the lessons from immersion experiences.
Radical groups must also work to address the fact that many of the
people most affected by practices like mining and fracking - the ones who
understand environmental justice issues better than anyone - may not
have the time or energy to participate in the environmental movement.
Parents in impoverished communities often struggle just to provide
for their families, and have little free time to organize a campaign.
This is where the incorporation of community resilience projects
comes in.
If radical groups can provide low-cost housing and food to
local people who want to get involved, more people will have the
opportunity to become active. Their knowledge and ability to organize
their own friends, family, and neighbors will then benefit the movement,
and the planet.
Keeping the movement in motion
As moderate groups like the Sierra Club take a step toward the place
where radicals have long stood, radicals owe it to the movement - and to
the moderates - to follow their lead and escalate our actions.
This
does not mean changing our principles, like a commitment to nonviolence.
Rather, our principles can guide us into more boundary-pushing
action that helps the movement to enact greater political change.
As we
shift into more radical territory, the moderates can more fully
occupy the space we left behind, which will become the new moderate.
Because a larger distance between the moderate and radical flanks
tends to help the movement, radicals don’t want to see that distance
closed up as the increasing urgency around climate change brings the
moderates ever closer.
The radical flank of the environmental movement can heed this call by
combining resilience and resistance, escalating its troublemaking, and
getting serious about inclusiveness.
Through this work, radicals
will continue to provide strong leadership and direction to the
environmental justice movement, so that the next time a moderate
group like the Sierra Club feels the need to step it up, they’ll be able
to crib from the radicals’ notes - just like they did in front of the
White House last month.
The political territory is shifting because of climate change. If
radicals respond by opening new possibilities that align with their
principles, the government will find itself under increasing
pressure to adopt and enforce more environmentally sound policies, and
to end the most harmful projects.
Local communities will take on
more responsibility for enacting and enforcing the policy changes
they’ve been pushing for through direct action, which will give
people a more direct say in the issues that affect them.
By pioneering new tactics that inch toward these changes, radicals
keep the movement in motion, and expand the possibilities for what it
can accomplish.
The National Park Service (NPS), like
most Americans these days, is broke.
