Writing Climate Change (36)
The Fight for the Climate – Climate Activism
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
In a democracy, the deal is that if the leaders screw up, our savior is supposed to be The People. Civil society. Citizens. The little folk. Climate activists have been doing their best to live up to that expectation for the past ~40 years. If you are writing about climate change, chances are your outlook has been strongly influenced by the ideas and actions of the climate activist movement.
Therefore, you need to understand who these people are, and what the climate movement has been getting up to. We’re not interested in who is right or wrong, polemics or advocacy. You simply need to understand what has been happening. The same will be true when we look at the other side. This gets messy. This is what climate change politics looks like in the gritty details. To understand climate as an issue, you absolutely must know about this fight. Love them or hate. Regardless of which side you are on.
Some Caveats
This subject is inherently messy and poorly documented. We will be focusing on activism in the Western democracies. They do play a leadership role globally, just keep in mind that in places like China and Africa things are rather different.
This is going to be a very rough sketch. A lot of the time, you just had to be there. As a limited mortal, I was not there. Some of you may have far deeper knowledge about certain corners than I do.
What I’m laying out here is a primer to the subject. Our focus is on fiction writing. Think of this as a bunch of character studies, roughly sketched, rather than a comprehensive history (and these are the most crude biographies from the most easily found material - dive deeper if you need to!). My aim is to give you a feel for things. These are the kinds of people who show up. This is the kinds of things they do and believe. These are characters you might bring into a story.
A Brief History
The best I can make it out, this is what has happened.
Climate activism has gone through roughly three phases. We are transitioning into a fourth phase right now. Each phase has been dominated by different players. Each phase has built on the previous one. The work of the previous phase continues, lingering in the background, while the energy shifts to the new phase.
Each phase has involved a general trend towards increasing scale, radicalization, and interconnection with other issues. The possible fourth phase might be so large and so radical that it starts to raise serious questions about where this is all going.
Here we’ll look at some representative movements and characters for each phase. This is by no means complete, but it should give you the general feel.
PHASE ZERO - Setting the Scene
The climate movement is the outgrowth of multiple different traditions re-combining into something new. Each tradition has strengths and weakness. People often start in one tradition, then discover the others. Because these voices are loud, chances are one or more of these traditions has influenced how you view climate change.
Here’s a rough summary of the main traditions that I’ve come across (maybe you can think of others too).
Environmentalism and Conservation
This tradition is built out of the institutions and thinking that was applied to past environmental issues since the 19th Century. All the big name NGOs come out of this history. This broader environmental movement has itself gone through phases. We started with fairly conservative nature protection. Later this got more radical with things like Greenpeace and Silent Spring. The climate movement has emerged in the most recent phase of this tradition. This is the most highly institutionalized area of activism.
Civil Rights
This tradition draws inspiration from various identity groups’ fight for rights: feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ, etc. Many of these people are themselves marginalized people. Alternatively, some people may equate activism with civil rights struggles simply because they lack awareness of anything else. Cultural memory of protest tends to be of civil rights protests.
Certain corners of climate activism are essentially feminist and queer spaces due to the overlap here. The climate movement has drawn much of its tactics of non-violent civil disobedience from this history. Ideas like “climate justice” also feed into civil rights concerns.
Socialism and Anarchism
This tradition draws from things such as Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War. They tend to be anti-fascists and want a revolution. Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology is popular (and by extension the Rojava revolution). For many here climate activism is an extension of their long running struggle for revolution.
This tradition tends to have the most developed views of politics and economics. Climate activist organizing is often dominated by anarchist thinking, as are many of the solutions they put forward. This tradition also tends to be the most likely to recognize a darker side that goes along with revolutionary aims.
Counter-culture and Spirituality
This tradition draws from things such as Eastern spirituality, Indigenous cultures, permaculture, Deep Ecology, and anything the Hippies would’ve done. Dig under common phrases like “Regenerative Cultures” and you’ll often find pantheistic spirituality.
This tradition is the most sensitive to the deepest levels of cultural and psychological work. They speak to a level of human experience that the other traditions tends to neglect. Gandhi is the archetypal activist for many here – a non-violent political leader and holy man. This also tends to be where the most apocalyptic activists show up, along with communes, and an obsession with homegrown vegetables.
Professionals
Because climate change is a scientific and economic issue, it has involved many scientists and other professionals (e.g. journalists, policy wonks, tech-geeks, etc). These are people who typically discovered climate change professionally. Alternatively, they may have entered a profession to do climate work. They bring with them the attitudes from their professions. That often means liberal values, middle class lifestyles, corporate structures, professional standards, and a bias towards reform rather than revolution.
These people often have very high technical skills in their niche. Climate activism is often strongly influenced by these people. Saying, “Listen to the science” requires bringing out a scientist to listen to. The presence of these people is also one reason why climate activism tends towards being highly educated and white.
The Combo
Merge all these traditions together and you get the cliché climate activist. An educated queer white woman, with an interest in Buddhism, left-leaning, who works for an environmental NGO. Environmental spaces have a disproportionate number of people who fit that description.
Real people, however, are much more complicated. So let’s get into that. Phase Zero provided us the raw material. The real work began in Phase One.
PHASE ONE
Climate change started as an obscure scientific issue. It was a distant and uncertain problem, handled by scientists and technocrats. That’s how we got started. Activism here focused strongly on working within the system, especially the United Nations process.
An Example: The Climate Action Network
In 1989 a group of mostly European and American NGOs joined together to coordinate their responses to climate change. The membership now includes essentially all the big established names such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, WWF, Amnesty International, Sierra Club, plus plenty of much smaller groups.
In the 1990s their actions were focused on the United Nations process. We had the very first Conference of Parties (COP1) and the Kyoto protocol. This was business as usual style activism. Lobbying politicians. Writing policy proposals. Having a presence where the decisions are made. Drawing attention to bad behavior. They even had a “Fossil of the Day Award”.
Some Characters
To help flesh this out here are two people to stand as examples of Phase One.
They represent what is now becoming an older generation of activism. They give a snapshot of the kinds of people who began the climate movement as we now know it.
James Hansen
In 1988 climate scientist James Hansen famously testified before the US congress. That testimony was typical of what we’ve seen from climate scientists: dry, technical, full of uncertainties and caveats, and yet latent with dangerous implications.
I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.
- Statement of Dr. James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 1988 Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate
The climate science from those days has held up well. We are bang on where they predicted we would be (given the margins of error).
[the Business-as-Usual Scenario] will result in a likely increase in global-mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025 and 3° C before the end of the next century.
- IPCC, First Assessment Report, 1990, Summary for Policy Makers.
In those days climate change was legitimately uncertain regarding how fast and how much was happening. Guys like Hansen were taking a stand on their reading of the evidence. He was right, but he had an outside chance of being wrong.
The size of this warming [100 yrs of warming, and the 1980s having the hottest years ever] is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. ... The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.
- IPCC, First Assessment Report, 1990, Summary for Policy Makers.
James Hansen was born in the USA in 1941. When he grew up he became a physicist. He started out studying Venus back in the 1970s. By the 1980s he was researching Earth. By 2003 he was warning about the global warming “Time Bomb”, trying to explain science with graphs, debunking misinformation, and laying out humanity’s options. By 2009 he was writing books for the public, urging the world to take real action rather than bullshit green-washing, and getting himself arrested protesting coal mines. He has continued in that style ever since.
This is how climate change as an issue began. Guys like Hansen shifted climate change from an obscure scientific question into a political question. Scientists set the foundations for everything else.
And yet...
Scientists are not political activists by nature.
Knowing the question is not the same as knowing the answer. If you’ve managed to become a scientist in the 1980s, you’re probably a well-off member of the middle-class, and you think like an engineer.
I realize that it will not be easy to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, but I am optimistic because I expect empirical evidence for climate change and its impacts to continue to accumulate, and that this will influence the public, public interest groups, industry, and governments at various levels. The question is: will we act soon enough. It is a matter of time.
- James Hansen, 2003, Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben started out as an activist writer and journalist back in the 1980s. His life has been spent writing books, doing journalism, and organizing the kind of climate activism which makes headlines written by journalists.
Bill McKibben was born in California in 1960. He grew up as a middle-class white suburban American. He’s coming out of a tradition of American liberalism, Christianity, pacifism, and a nostalgia for wilderness and the rural life. These ideas lead to a very particular vision and strategy.
The ultimate answer does include a spiritual dimension, but the daily grind comes first. You need to speak truth to power. You need to mobilize masses of people. You need to get out the vote. You need to make a scene and get arrested. You need to change the cultural zeitgeist. The inspiration is civil rights and the gospel.
In the ideal outcome, disasters will make Americans recognize the problem. Technology will provide the means. Journalists, lawyers, and protestors will deal to the political barriers. The good folk will win the election. A Green New Deal will pass. Green Capitalism will do its job. A cultural shift will happen towards a more virtuous world, living the home-grown good life. That’s what winning looks like.
Al Gore
Al Gore was born in 1948, in Washington DC, to a politician and a lawyer. I’m tempted to stop here (what else do you need to know?). He went to Harvard. While at university he learned about Global Warming from Roger Revelle, one of the earlier scientists to study the issue.
After a brief spell in the Vietnam war, divinity school, journalism, and law, he found his place in 1970s politics. Al Gore became one of the “Atari Democrats” (i.e. tech nerds). Global warming was one of the nerd issues. He has been speaking on the issue for his entire political career. This has also included publishing books and documentaries, plus involvement in venture capital and NGOs.
In 2000 Al Gore failed to become president on a technicality. Instead of a possible transition to Green Capitalist tech utopia, the USA got George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq. In 2006 Al Gore released his famous documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. For some people of a certain age, Al Gore and Global Warming are the same thing.
If there’s ever been a more archetypal establishment climate activist, I’ve yet to hear of them. Al Gore is a powerful communicator, knowledgeable, and knows the political game. His strength and his weakness is that he’s on the inside. He’s still going, even as his form of politics can seem ever more antiquated, swept aside by events. He’s starting to sound a wee bit angry.
PHASE TWO
Did any of the above save the world? Well... no. It was not enough, obviously.
People saw this. People were not happy. People started turning to more extreme measures. Different kinds of people. The rhetoric shifts. The action shifts.
Examples: Climate Camps and Global Days of Action
By the mid 2000s the UN process had been going for over a decade. The big news was the Kyoto Protocol, due to come into effect in 2005. George W Bush pulled the USA out.
People were getting a sense that maybe climate change was not going to be dealt with very well.
Instead of climate action we’d just had the neoliberal revolution and the War on Terror. Hurricane Katrina had just devastated New Orleans. Within a few years the global economy would crash. The fight between climate science and climate denial was ramping up. Those big NGOs didn’t have much to show for a decade’s worth of work.
In this context the climate movement shifted to mass protests. Energy was still focused on the UN agreements. The aim was to apply pressure so the politicians would do the right thing.
In 2005 we had the first Global Day of Action, timed to coincide with the UN meetings. This started with Campaign against Climate Change, itself started by a tiny group of obscure everyday people who were upset with George W Bush. The climate movement was changing.
And thus began the tradition of global mass protests for the UN climate negotiations. Every year. Mass protest was becoming a popular tactic. Make a lot of noise. Get a lot of attention. Make sure those in power listen.
You could get on the news. By 2009 this form of activism was able to put between 25,000 and 100,000 people on the streets to protest the Copenhagen climate summit.
At the same time as Global Days of Action got started another form of protest kicked off: Camp for Climate Action.
This would foreshadow things to come. A little more radical. A little more illegal. Anarchist organizing principles. The camps were set up as temporary eco-villages. From those camps other activities were organized.
In 2006 a camp was set up near the Drax power station in England. 600 protestors sallied forth from the camp in an attempt to shut down the power station. They were met by a far larger number of police. The encounter seems to have been somewhat underwhelming, more farce than fight.
A number of camps were held in various countries over the space of a few years. Various now familiar tactics showed up, including people gluing themselves to things. We saw more anarchist ideas like affinity groups and Direct Democracy. We also saw the expensive and disproportionate policing, involving undercover cops, mass arrests, and riot cops. The climate camps fizzled out about the same time Occupy Wall Street got going, which used similar tactics.
In Phase Two climate change hit the grassroots. Mass protest and direct action would later become the battering ram of Phase Three. This is when those tactics were developed. Climate change became a systemic issue, disillusioned with those in power. Climate change was attracting people with more radical views and getting them to train people how to do activism.
These people made a lot of noise. They raised awareness. They set the foundations for the next wave of the same tactics, lifted to a higher level. This is the time when kids like Greta Thunberg first heard about climate change.
Some Characters
This shift to mass protest brought in a new set of people. They were not scientists or journalists or politicians. They were more ordinary, and more strange – most people don’t do this. These are the kinds of people who show up at protests with only five other people. The vast majority of these people are not famous. We’ll have to take the examples we can get.
Phil Thornhill
Phil made a living washing windows on skyscrapers, fixing gutters, and making rope harnesses. He also volunteered with Friends of the Earth, in East London. He helped spark the core protest group which then grew into Campaign against Climate Change, which in turn helped spark the now constant global mass protests about climate change. This started with what sounds like a fairly pathetic vigil outside the US embassy by Phil during the George W Bush years.
Not being particularly famous, it’s hard to find too many details about his life, his views, and influences. He seems a fairly ordinary British chap. Well spoken. Well educated on the subject. Somewhat pessimistic. Aware that we’re all in for a gigantic fight.
He was correct on that one.
David Graeber
I had wanted to include someone from the climate camps. Because the regular folk are difficult to research, we’ll look at a public figure, who was involved in something similar.
David Graeber’s involvement in climate issues properly belongs to the next phase (to the extent he was involved at all). However, he was more notably involved with related protests which overlap with the people here. He was also fairly influential as an anarchist academic, so his thinking is somewhat representative of that strand of activism.
David Graeber was born in 1961, in New York, to a radical working-class Jewish family. His father had fought in the Spanish Civil War. David attended his first protest at age seven. He was calling himself an anarchist by age sixteen. He went into academia to escape regular society, and done his anthropology PhD thesis in Madagascar. He described his adult life as bohemian.
He became a professor at Yale, but failed to get tenure (possibly due to his political activism). Getting re-hired in the USA proved impossible, so he ended up exiled in London. As an activist he turned up most notably in Occupy Wall Street (among various others). Occupy continued tactics that had been used in the climate camps. Guys like David Graeber represents the intellectual side of these types of movements, and their anarchist heart.
The thinking and action of guys like Graeber is very different to our examples from Phase One. He sees the establishment as a joke. He is an alien to the establishment, actively excluded from it. He has little to say about technology or science. He talks about power and culture. He finds inspiration in places like Rojava – a call-back to his father’s own fight against the fascists in Spain.
PHASE THREE
Did the protests succeed? Well... no. Therefore people done the obvious thing. Get a bigger protest.
Climate protests exploded globally.
Example: Extinction Rebellion & Fridays For Future
In 2018 the ongoing tactic of protests and direct action got a significant boost thanks to two new movements.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) kicked off in the UK, soon spreading worldwide. They combined much of what had come before: anarchist organizing, journalists’ and scientists’ faith in “just speaking the truth”, Gandhian non-violence and spirituality, the tactics of disruption and spectacle, the drive for mass numbers (now embodied in the “3.5% rule”). Sprinkle on top lashings of apocalyptic doom, some snazzy branding, plus some debatable theories about social change, and you have the exciting mess that was XR.
These people walked out onto the streets in a deliberate attempt to get themselves arrested. They succeeded. XR generated a lot of publicity.
Also in 2018 we got a Swedish school girl, who sparked off Fridays For Future. Again, this was a tactic of mass protests, only now by children and teenagers. It too rapidly spread across the globe. Greta Thunberg in particular was catapulted to stardom as the face of climate change, managing to embody both the idea of “future generations” and “speaking truth to power” in one person.
All these years of building mass protests gave the climate movement a significant power to put people on the streets. In 2019 climate activists launched the largest climate protests in world history. Millions of people marched in about 185 countries. They timed the protest with the UN climate summit.
These groups, and more, helped put climate change on the top of the political agenda. Protests naturally go in cycles. With the Covid pandemic, mass protest suddenly became a difficult tactic. Much of Phase Three’s energy seems to have peaked. The influences of these efforts remains, feeding energy into whatever will come next.
Some Characters
Unlike the previous round of protest, this one did produce celebrities. Everyone knows Greta, so here’s some other people. The intensity level does go up a notch from Phase Two.
Roger Hallam
Roger was born in the 1960s. He was involved in activism, communal living, and organic agriculture, before launching himself on his mission around 2017. I’m just going to let him describe himself in his own words:
Something needed to be done; I gave up everything I had and left for Kings College where I spent the next 4 years sleeping in my car in order to complete my studies in the science of mass mobilization in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
....
I’ve been accused of many things, most of them are true.
Some of them however are carefully crafted media propaganda, which even my own movement has used against me.
This is something that you can expect unfortunately when you use your voice and stand out from the crowd.
....
We need a revolution.
In 2018 I co-founded Extinction Rebellion. I have lost count of the number of times I have been arrested.
....
The global economic system will collapse and impoverishment will hit billions of people. Revolutions are now inevitable. Functional human extinction – only around a billion people located about the polar regions – is not.
....
Preparing for the revolution means two things: first to give up our jobs and “go to the people”, working 60-70 hours a week – leafleting, setting up stalls, door knocking, .... Second, a growing alliance of the willing needs to shut down “the economy” .... Absolute nonviolent discipline will need to be maintained .... or it will turn into civil war and fascism.
He then outlines what this revolution will look like: giving Citizen’s Assemblies legislative power then carrying out a fairly extreme program of rapid change. Because he sees climate change as risking literal human extinction this puts climate change “Beyond Politics”. Therefore a program of this scale can be justified, and logically everyone should go with it if they want to live.
So that’s Roger. He’s occasionally controversial.
Rupert Read
Rupert Read was one of the intellectuals of XR. Like with Hallam the doom laden urgency is pretty thick. The collapse of civilization is coming. We need a deep renewal of humanity.
Rupert Read was born in 1966. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. He became a big fan of Wittgenstein. He done his PhD in the USA, pursuing Wittgenstein’s philosophy. To simplify, this area of philosophy is concerned with how we know what words mean, and hence, how do we know anything at all.
After his PhD he became a professor, and applied this thinking to sociology and beyond. He gained an interest in Zen Buddhism, mental health, and political ideology. He seems to be seeking to escape from illusion and delusion. In this view, climate change comes out of confusions of the human mind, and the solution therefore is therapeutic and spiritual. Individualist materialism and anthropocentric humanism is the root confusion. Therefore his aim is to take down Liberalism, in favor of pantheistic ecological spirituality. (At least, this seems to be his thinking – I’m unfamiliar with his work. He is an academic philosopher with a large output).
His view of climate change appears to be fairly pessimistic – a common theme among spiritual environmentalists. He co-authored a book on Deep Adaptation with Jem Bendell. Deep adaptation is arguably one of the more apocalyptic views on climate change out there.
Academia alone was not enough. In 2004 Rupert Read entered politics with the UK Green party. When XR emerged, he joined in, becoming one of the public faces of the movement. The aim is the eco-spiritual renewal of humanity in the face of global collapse.
Varshini Prakash
Not all climate activists are boomer white guys. The co-founder of The Sunrise Movement was a second-generation Indian-American woman born in the 1990s.
She first learned about climate change as a child. She saw Al Gore’s an Inconvenient Truth as a teenager. She hated the film, because it left out people like her family in India. Growing up, she wanted to be a doctor so she could help people.
While at university, she entered climate activism. An organizer of a divestment campaign recruited her, and seeing her talent empowered her. Their divestment campaign got some wins, but she became disillusioned over time.
Eight of them founded The Sunrise Movement. That was it. Eight college kids. They got some seed money from the Sierra Club, and Bill McKibben’s 350.org. Eventually they gathered together enough people to do a headline grabbing stunt: a couple of hundred of them occupied Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office, also picking up support from congress-woman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Varshini Prakash moved from doing communications to being the movement’s executive director. Suddenly she was a public figure.
With The Sunrise Movement, they wanted to correct the failures of previous activism. They wanted to be inclusive, large, gain access to power, and produce systemic change. They trained new recruits, lived in communal houses, and borrowed tactics from the civil rights movement. Their vision of a Green New Deal is also borrowed from American history, updated for environmentalism and social justice. They are educated youth, for whom the traditional life plan seems unachievable and absurd. Instead they’ve dedicated their lives to the fight.
They’ve focused on power, politics, and economics. In doing so they forced the Democratic party to have a stance on climate change. In doing so they got a small number of real wins, but only when the Democrats were in power. Like every part of the climate movement, they have ultimately failed to win their end goal.
PHASE FOUR?
Climate activism is shifting again. The issue has been put on the agenda, but the goals are nowhere near in sight. Once again a new wave is likely. What will it be?
A few things seem to be brewing:
A Generational shift. Baby Boomers are giving way to Millennials and Gen-Z. The youth see little future for themselves without systemic change.
Further globalization of the movement. Activism has always been globally networked, especially with the big NGOs. That tendency is likely to increase over time. Phase Three was notable for spontaneously going global.
Debates over strategy. Some want to go bigger and more mainstream. Others want more aggressive tactics. This is a moderates vs radical flank debate, which happens repeatedly in history.
The emergence of more action about adaptation, not just mitigation. Most action so far has been trying to stop emissions. But climate change is here now.
The potential for unity. Each group has been dominated by particular traditions, be it spirituality, civil rights, or anarchism. The more these groups overlap, the more likely these traditions will get worked into a coherent synthesis, which becomes a shared vision across a more united movement.
The potential for division. These groups could also fracture. Radicals vs moderates. Anarchists vs spiritualists vs liberals. As climate becomes a mainstream subject where even Neo-Nazis have an opinion, simply caring about the climate might not be enough to unify people. Perhaps no synthesis is possible.
Growing scale and scope. The climate movement’s greatest success has been in awareness raising. The movement has already mobilized millions. Just how big can this get? And mobilized in what form?
Growing intensity of conflict. The opposition to climate action has been going through these same phases too (just in a different way - more on that in future). Both sides are feeding off each other in a spiral of escalation.
The emergence of violent forms of activism. So far the climate movement has been overwhelmingly dedicated to non-violence. At some point that might break. New groups may emerge.
A deeper grappling with what systemic change actually means. If climate action is incompatible with the institutional and economic order of the world, what exactly do you do?
Climate change could be absorbed into the emergence of a more general movement. With the end of the Cold War, politics has lacked a competing vision beyond neoliberalism. We’ve seen populist push-back, but that also has lacked vision. A synthesis of climate activism with various other struggles is likely.
Events, dear boy, events. Pandemics, wars, and elections have all shaped activist history so far. We don’t yet know what the next big thing will be. But it is coming.
Example: The Climate Majority Project
Following on from XR, Rupert Read’s plan is to go big. The aim is to get regular people to find their role in climate action. Actions like XR have made a majority of people “climate concerned”. The aim is to shift them to actual climate action. Less focus on publicity stunts, more focus on the accumulated small actions of regular people – at massive scale.
People need to be told the hard truths. The Powers that Be have already failed. We need to change. It’s going to cost. People know about climate, now they need to be filled with resolve to value action above the price of cheese. Neoliberal attitudes need to be popularly swept aside. Faith is placed in a reinvigorated electorate. Democracy must be made to work by mobilizing more people than ever before.
One aspect of the work is to be psychological and therapeutic. Reaching people with the truth, means reaching people with compassion. Anxiety needs dealing with. Values need changing. Polarization needs to give way to mutual respect. Acceptance. Joy. Coalitions. Patience.
When regular people step up, and ask, “What can I do?” they need an answer. They need to see what they can do, for them. They need to see how this fits into the bigger picture, why it matters. They need to find their people. We can’t wait for the government. Pragmatism, not utopianism. Real successes today, as the foundation for transformation tomorrow.
The dream is everyone working together in solidarity.
Example: Eco-Leninism and Blowing Up Pipelines
Now for the opposite view.
The world is in conflict. Irresolvable conflict. You cannot succeed by avoiding conflict. Embrace the conflict.
The key challenge in climate change is to overcome the fossil fuel industry. The fight against the fossil fuel industry risks becoming a fight against authoritarianism. The fossil fuel industry may attempt to maintain power by force. If democracy requires an end to fossil fuels, then democracy will be dropped in favor of fossil fuels.
What becomes of the climate movement in such times?
Climate activists have been protesting in the manner of Gandhi for decades. They have been working backroom deals and elections for decades. They have been calling like prophets in the desert for decades.
The fundamentals remain in place. Failure escalates the political options. In this view, violence is coming if you want it or not. We already have angry young men assassinating people. Non-violent protest is already being criminalized, countered by violence. The choice is whether to let violence happen as sheer chaos, or to act as the guide to the energy underneath – being strategically focused and preventing foolishness.
A prominent thinker here is Andreas Malm.
My climate action debut was in 1995, at COP1 in Berlin, the very first in the interminable series of UN climate negotiations... But after that, I had ten years of activism in the Swedish extra-parliamentary ultra-left, during which I held climate and environmental politics in contempt: I considered these issues luxury, hippie, petty-bourgeois distractions from the class struggle,.... Unfortunately, this is the left's own version of business-as-usual... As for myself, people around me dragged me into full climate awakening in 2005.
....
Ecological Marxism has a tendency to cripple itself by staying inside academia. It needs to engage with and reach out to the actual movements in the field. Anarchist ideas should be combatted; they will take us nowhere. I think it’s time to start experimenting with things like ecological Leninism or Luxemburgism or Blanquism.
Leninism and Blanquism involve a disciplined vanguard party using the power of the state to implement their vision (similar to what Hallam is advocating above - although I suspect Malm would consider Hallam misguided). I hope the risks involved in such a strategy are obvious. Look up “Life of Stalin” if it’s not.
At present, Rupert Read’s approach seems far more palatable and popular. How much popularity this more radical approach gains remains to be seen.
CONCLUSION
As a writer you have three tasks here.
1) Self-awareness:
Chances are you have been influenced by these movements (it’s their aim). Think: which traditions have influenced you the most? How has this shaped your thinking, your biases, your feelings, the narratives you place around climate change? Each tradition of climate activism has strengths and weaknesses in their perspective. If you agree or disagree with this or that, ask yourself why.
Combine the strengths, discard the weaknesses. Be prepared to move beyond these traditions entirely. Climate change is neither Civil Rights nor the Spanish Civil War. Also keep in mind that you will be living in Phase Four and beyond. You will be writing for the future, not the past.
2) Artistic Choices:
Resist the urge to do a Mary-Sue and only have characters that come from your preferred tradition, or to pour scorn on those you dislike. The world is diverse. Understand why people choose what they choose.
Consider the examples above (adjusting for the fact it’s biased towards public figures!). Who stands out to you? How can you portray a sense of those values, identities, and actions? How can you do this fairly, while also maintaining your own values and goals?
3) Audience:
Consider which traditions are likely to be important to your readers. Are you trying to reach people beyond these default traditions? If so you will need to adjust. Straight men might struggle with work about queer feminists. Religious conservatives might struggle with work about eco-spiritual anarchists. Also consider which phase your readers are still in. Many people are stuck with Phase One thinking. They will need to be updated to Phase Four+ thinking. That could be a shock for them. How are you going to handle that?
In summary:
You need to know where you fit into this story. Think about how your work fits. If you choose to write about climate change, you become part of this history. We’ve gone through three phases. The technocratic origin, the shift to grassroots, then the explosion of mass movements. You are living in whatever comes next.
Next time we’ll look at the other side of the fight. Get ready for the spin-doctors.
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