Since the 2016 presidential election, interest in socialism has hit an all-time high in the United States. As social movements seek to focus on intersectionality and the interactions between many societal issues, environmental causes are increasingly viewed through political and socioeconomic lenses. I review the relationship between socialist movements and environmental issues throughout history, then turn to the present day and look specifically at the policies, stances, and activist and organizing strategies of the Democratic Socialists of America with regard to environmental causes, with particular emphasis on their Climate and Environmental Justice Working Group. Finally, I address the broader implications of the growing eco-socialism movement for other political and environmental activists.
Author: Margaret Overton (Page 1 of 2)
Good art is hard. Meaningful art is harder. Provoking action and change through art? Nearly impossible. I’m someone who cares a great deal about environmental issues and is strongly dedicated to many different social causes, but when presented with impressive, beautiful art about these problems, even I tend to respond with a brief burst of emotion — sadness, anger, frustration, sometimes hope or excitement — before going back to my daily routine. Photographs of birds, dissected to reveal the plastics that killed them in their stomachs? Very sad, but I still use and throw away plastic several times a day. Paintings or photography of people suffering from climate change-induced drought, disease, or famine? Tragic and heartbreaking, but I continue to rely on fossil fuels for power nearly 24/7, and my American lifestyle remains centered around consumption and convenience, no matter how “green” I like to imagine I am.
Art has a powerful ability to evoke emotion and thoughtfulness, but for that reaction to persist for more than a few minutes, hours, or days requires extraordinary effort by the artist as well as the audience. In many cases, a nontraditional approach is needed; in particular, the audience must become participants rather than observers. Countless studies have demonstrated the importance of experiential education and the active involvement of students in order to learn effectively; it is not hard to see how this principle extends beyond the classroom and into the realm of art and activism. To not just see artwork, but to take part in its creation, existence, or destruction breaks down the barrier between bystanders and participants and brings art out of galleries and glass cases and into the real world, where emotions spark actions, and actions have consequences.
This is the aspect of monuments, as conceptualized, studied, and created by Dr. Paul Farber and Pedro Lasch, that I find particularly interesting and full of potential for environmentalists — and it has already been applied by activists across the globe. Monuments can memorialize losses, victories, or momentous events in society and culture across history, and as climate change marches relentlessly onward, it is imperative to expand our concepts of monuments to include natural and environmental losses, victories, and momentous events before they are irreversible.
The United States government as well as other countries around the world has already taken one approach to creating environmental monuments by setting aside particularly notable natural landforms and large swathes of “untouched” land as “national monuments,” perhaps as a memorial to a fictional time when the land was “untouched” by humans. In reality, no part of the world, no matter how remote, has been unable to escape the shadow of the Anthropocene. It is time to shift our mindset from an idealized concept of “wilderness” and start creating art that confronts, questions, and challenges the complex relationship between Homo sapiens and the vague concept of “nature” from which we have spent so many centuries and so much energy trying to escape. Monuments, as well as other forms of interactive, dynamic, and participatory art, have the ability to reinsert humans into the story of our planet and force us to confront what we have done to ourselves — and struggle with the question: what are we going to do about it?
In one of my other environmental classes, we started the semester by discussing where environmental science fits in terms of its academic field: is it a social science, a natural science, even humanities? But more and more, that seems like a pointless debate, because environmental science encompasses far more than any single field, and to restrict it to solely lab applications or policy proposals or a feature in stories and media is not only unrealistic, but also harmful to the field as a whole.
When I first started studying environmental science, we began with a very scientific foundation — the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, atmospheric chemistry. Then we moved on to ecology, and gradually as I came to college, I was exposed to more of the human side of environmental issues through climate change, agricultural processes, and human health issues. But after reading The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukoka and (re)watching Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective, I’ve come to hold a different view: permaculture principles and philosophy ought to be the foundation of studying environmental science. Only after first and foremost delving into its ideas and practices should any student continue on to take classes in biology, chemistry, ecology, the humanities public policy, or any other environmental topic.
There are several reasons for this, but I think that the most important one is: taking a holistic approach from the onset ensures that students will be able to apply and contextualize the information they learn later on without having to piece it together for themselves after the fact. When I learned about the nitrogen cycle back in high school, it was hard to muster up any enthusiasm, but if I had known about its importance with regard to soil health and sustainable farming, that extra context would have added a layer of depth and value to what I was learning (and I might have actually remembered it.)
But while it is important to be able to apply scientific principles in environmental contexts, I would argue that it is the human aspect that brings richness, urgency, relatability, and meaning to these topics. It is one thing to go one step further with the nitrogen cycle and understand what it means for soil and farming, but it is another thing entirely to be able to think about those topics in an even broader context through discussion of food security, history, agricultural practices, human health, socioeconomic disparities, and applications in rural, urban, and even suburban contexts. And in a sense, it becomes a loop — permaculture helps us learn to study the environment by looking at all of its parts together, but permaculture in itself is the practice of taking this holistic view of the world. Environmental causes are human causes, and they cannot be dealt with by compartmentalizing their causes and effects. In this way, environmentalism becomes a story not of individual pieces of the puzzle, but of a complete, vibrant picture that captures the complexity and interconnectivity of these issues.
As someone interested in environmental justice, I often see two types of discourse: academic and practical. Academics delve into abstract ideas and look at the big picture; they discuss countries, populations, the whole world as a unit. They theorize about what we — humans — must do, and they’re able to generate ideas and solutions at the scale of entire economies and cultures. And we need this sort of thinking because we have to dream big if we’re going to solve big problems; limiting our imaginations only limits what we’re able to create and accomplish.
But the danger of academic discourse is that it risks losing sight of the reality faced by the average person. I’m a highly educated individual with a vested interest in learning about these subjects, and even I have trouble getting through some of the dense, abstract writings I’ve encountered from environmental theorists. The problem isn’t that these writers are out of touch; it’s that they don’t realize that they need to present their ideas in ways that are accessible and relatable to non-academics.
On the other hand, practical discourse — by activists, nonprofits, teachers, community members — has the ability to cut through the noise and connect to individuals on a personal level. A good example of the benefits and drawbacks this is a politician giving a speech to their constituents: they speak directly to the people about problems and solutions that affect them directly, but they play it safe and avoid anything that would be perceived as drastic, extreme, radical, or otherwise too difficult and challenging to actually implement. Practical changemakers can sometimes be limited by realism — or, more often, fear. Radical change is difficult and frightening, and breaking out of one’s comfortable mindset and beginning to recognize and question the status quo is never easy. It’s fine to speak in hypotheticals, but when it comes to actually enacting change… it’s more easily said than done.
But we have to have both of these practices if we want to be able to actually take action on large-scale, status quo-altering problems. Our task must be to strike the right balance between big dreams and relatable, achievable actions. We have to be brave and ambitious enough to question institutions as absolute as capitalism, our system of government, societal expectations, and our cultural landscape — but we also have to approach these fixtures from an angle that unites people in hope and excitement rather than fear and visions of the apocalypse. Without the power of everyone acting together for a common cause, it is unlikely that anything meaningful will be accomplished before it is too late.
There is an important caveat to this vision: by the very nature of the structure of our society, there will be opposing clans in this struggle. China Miéville writes,
Rather than touting togetherness, we fight best by embracing our not-togetherness. The fact that there are sides. Famously, we approach a tipping point. Rather than hoping for cohesion, our best hope lies in conflict. Our aim, an aspect of our utopianism, should be this strategy of tension.
However, as Karl Marx has perhaps most famously discussed, those that are suffering and oppressed outnumber their oppressors by the hundreds — the people that will be at the forefront of the fight to stop climate change are more numerous than those that would cut down trees and destroy oceans and ecosystems if they thought they could make a profit. If these people — the downtrodden, the working class, the victims, the poor and forgotten, or even just those who care a great deal — can mobilize and realize the power of collectivity and solidarity, no oil company or real estate developer can stand in their way. This sentiment is everywhere in academic and activist circles, so I’ll close out with a few of my favorite examples:
To quote a popular (although incorrrect) paraphrase of the conclusion of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
And from Rebecca Solnit:
“… power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power. “
“Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have many times before.”
References:
Marx, K. and Engel, F. (1848). Communist Manifesto. Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp.14-27.
Miéville, C. (2015, August 1). The Limits of Utopia. Retrieved from http://salvage.zone/in-print/the-limits-of-utopia/
Solnit, R. (2017). Grounds for Hope. Tikkun 32(1), 30-39. doi: 10.1215/08879982-3769066
Several weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about wicked problems — challenges that are so complex and interconnected that they can seem impossible to unravel. Environmental problems tend to fall into this category, with numerous social, ecological, scientific, economic, and cultural factors competing and overlapping into one giant mess.
Our class discussion with Catherine Flowers reminded me of an important fact: if all of these problems seem connected, then the solutions can be connected too. If there’s a problem stemming from the intersection of race, poverty, and climate change, you can approach it from each of those angles in turn to see which tactics are most suited for your skill set, the available resources, and the overall sociopolitical context.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by an issue as huge as climate change, and that’s just one of many problems in the world that I sometimes think of as hopelessly insurmountable. But it’s comforting to know that you don’t have to spread yourself too thin and try to fix everything at once, and by focusing on one aspect of a larger issue, you don’t have to worry that you’re neglecting other important problems.
Catherine Flowers reminded us that you have to bring lots of people to the table when you’re trying to find solutions, even people that might otherwise have very different opinions and goals than you do. We can’t solve these huge, wicked problems on our own, and it will take many different people and groups chipping away from all sides to finally make a dent in things like climate change, poverty, discrimination, and inequality. But by focusing on what we’re passionate about, what we’re able to do, and what we’re able to build coalitions around, we might dismantle these different interconnected problems, piece by piece.
Our discussion last week about maps and their importance in setting and shifting paradigms had me thinking about where and how these might be used as communication and storytelling tools. The radical mapping people were focused on college campuses, and other presenters talked about community activism and websites, but as a child with four teachers as grandparents, my mind went immediately to museums.
The presenters noted that people trust maps: if it’s on a map, it’s probably true. The same is true with museums: if it’s in a display, of course it’s trustworthy. And museums, more than most other places, can use maps in enormously powerful ways to depict justice, history, inequality, and the thousands of ways that our world has changed over time, from demographics to geography to climate to our borders themselves. Mapmakers have the power to choose who is represented, where the lines go, which parts to emphasize and how to group areas together. And as museums increasingly become places to delve into the gray areas of history and explore the subjective ways that different people tell the same story, maps become important tools in developing and changing those narratives.
This isn’t just the case for history museums, although they may have more ground to cover than most in order to correct the whitewashing and sanitization of our past. I’ve seen plenty of maps in natural history museums and science centers, depicting biomes, habitats, weather patterns, shifting climate conditions, and even the stories of people and animals affected by climate change. Art museums, too, can use maps to provide context for different works, show how different regions influenced each other, and trace the intersections of art, culture, and history at scales as large as continents or as small as cities.
But as an environmental policymaker and activist, I was most interested in our discussion of how maps can be overlayed to provide a richer perspective on different data measures. Statistical analysis, p values, and even perfectly valid numerical data is easy to manipulate and difficult to communicate, especially in a way that connects with people’s hearts, minds, and consciences. But maps let audiences not only draw those same conclusions on their own in a more engaging way than just numbers on a page, but also connect on a more personal level to the information and the story it tells. If I see a map of data for the United States, the first thing I do is look to see what it says about Tennessee and North Carolina — immediately, I’m able to directly relate myself and my experiences to the information in the map, and this lends itself to a much more convincing and striking conclusion because it impacts me personally rather than being another statistic that I can turn around and immediately forget. So as museums seek to create compelling narratives that educate, challenge, and engage children and adults alike, maps can provide a powerful tool for making and breaking worldviews to fit our ever-evolving understanding of ourselves.
When I’ve looked at environmental issues in the past, it’s always seemed like the scientific research was pretty much finished — we know climate change is happening, what it’s doing, and why — and at this point, all that’s left to do is figure out how to convince policymakers and individuals to take action.
But looking at everything we’ve been talking about in class for the past few weeks, it’s clear that I’m wrong on both fronts. Science has a long way to go even if the evidence for climate change is indisputable, and the task of creating social and political change is hardly unfamiliar or new — we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The climate action movement doesn’t have to build strategies and actions from the ground up; there are hundreds of examples from other movements, periods in history, regions, and groups that can provide inspiration or a model for new causes. The idea of treating activism like a science that can be studied, analyzed, and refined took me entirely by surprise, which I feel a little silly about now. It makes sense that along the way, people would take note of what works and what doesn’t and take those deconstructed parts and turn them into guides and manuals like Rules for Radicals.
But at the same time, it’s still important to see how those ideas have worked in context so we can understand how they should be adapted in different combinations and for different situations. For me, a lot of things clicked when we talked to Robin Kirk and she explained how she’s seen and used various approaches along the way to encourage local action as well as policy change. I still think that one of the biggest challenges facing climate change activists is overcoming the inertia of apathy and detachment — how do you get people to care about something enough to do something about it?
For something like the environment, which many people feel very distant from, activists have to first create the conditions that enable engagement from communities. This means creating a sense of agency and inclusion in communities across all kinds of demographic divisions and building your movement in a way that is accessible — people who don’t know how they’ll pay rent next month don’t have the free time and energy to work on recycling or energy use. This also means that you have to make it personal and show how it directly affects their lives while empowering them to feel like they have the ability and freedom to make a difference. If people are just scared, they won’t do anything. But if they are scared but know what they can do about it, they’ll start solving the problem.
But perhaps one of the biggest activist challenges comes not from the work itself, but finding the motivation to get started and keep going. Climate change can feel overwhelming and impossible, and the current political climate can make a lot of solutions seem hopelessly out of reach. But staying plugged in to both activist circles as well as your local community can help overcome those problems by serving as a reminder that there are lots of enthusiastic and hardworking people out there who share your goals and desires, and it is always possible to make an impact locally. Even a small change is valuable, and as Robin Kirk said, “things are impossible until they’re not” — so keep trying.
Mission: Convince the Duke Administration and Board of Trustees to agree to make the Duke Endowment carbon-neutral and otherwise divest from investing in fossil fuel companies.
Realistic goal: Make enough noise to put the issue of divestment back on the radar for Duke students as well as prompt a response from the Duke Administration on this issue.
Roles:
- Kevin: Background research, specifically regarding our main arguments; drafting our letter to the Administration; seeking out support from professors and alumni
- Jake: Background research, specifically regarding how to articulate our demands with support from evidence and examples of other institutions that have already divested and how
- Kendall: Background research; making art for the protest; helping develop any petitions
- Sarah: Drafting our letter to the Administration; seeking out support from professors and alumni
- Colin: Drafting our letter to the Administration; seeking out support from professors and alumni
- Sophia: Drafting letters to various groups as well as the letter to the administration; email outreach and building popular support prior to the protest; making graphics for the protest
- Emily: Working on alumni outreach; applying for the Hear at Duke podcast; helping develop any petitions
- Matthew: Reaching out to other campus groups; helping develop petitions
- Margaret: Reaching out to other campus groups; looking into putting a letter or article in the Chronicle; working on alumni outreach; generally coordinating individual teams
Overall tactics:
- Rely on expertise, strategies, and methods of students at other schools that have successfully petitioned for divestment
- Have a clear and concise message
- Focus on the Board of Trustees and DUMAC staff since they will ultimately be making the decisions
- Involve alumni and prospective students since the Administration cares a lot about their views/values
Deliverables (Final Products):
- Compose a letter addressed to President Price and the Board of Trustees outlining our position and supported by research and examples based on other schools
- Deliver one or more petitions to President Price and the Board of Trustees as evidence of support for divestment among students as well as possibly faculty, alumni, and other influential groups
- Represent the perspectives of alumni and/or prospective students through either petitions, letters, or even interviews or a video that allows them to express their opinions in their own words
- Stage a physical, in-person protest in support of divestment alongside other campus organizations [tentative date is Friday, March 23]
Next Steps:
- Conduct background research on divestment and the Endowment
- How does the Endowment work, who runs it, etc. (technical, factual background information)
- What other schools have divested, and how?
- What steps were taken to prompt that decision by the school?
- How have the schools been able to divest – where did they shift their investments?
- What alternatives can we offer the Duke Administration now?
- Reach out to relevant campus organizations and other groups
- What has Duke Divest done in the past, and why was that successful/unsuccessful?
- Which organizations would want to help us either research and develop our demands/proposal or stage the protest?
- Find ways to involve Duke alumni and/or prospective students
- Produce petitions and work on getting signatures
- Tabling or social media outreach
- Begin to build popular support among students on social media and through other approaches
- Share information, history, and research in easily shareable ways
- Produce art, graphics, and even videos that catch people’s attention
- Publicize petitions
- Gain visibility by producing a letter/article to publish in the Chronicle
- Attempt to get endorsements from:
- DSG VP of Sustainability
- Duke Climate Coalition
- Duke Environmental Alliance
- Nicholas School Faculty
- Other organizations (according to our research)
- Start drafting our letter to President Price and the Board of Trustees
- Start planning our in-person protest
- To be continued…
I’ve been putting off writing this blog post because every time I start to think about ideas, I get caught up in the overwhelming complexity of everything we’ve talked about in class. I can’t solve one problem until this other thing gets changed, which won’t change unless these societal values change, and those aren’t going anywhere unless this other thing happens… forever. In another class, we referred to this type of problem as a “wicked problem” – characterized by the involvement of many different stakeholders as well as the fact that solving any single aspect of the problem ultimately results in the creation of one or many other problems. As one author wrote, these problems aren’t ever finished – work simply stops due to exhaustion, frustration, lack of resources, or simply boredom.
And so often, that’s how it feels to be someone heavily invested in issues surrounding climate change, inequality, prejudice, or discrimination. In my mere 20 years of existence, I have seen so few victories – and so, so many failures – on the part of politicians, businesses, and individuals in the face of dire threats to our planet and our society. In many ways, it has become a spiral downward, with each new challenge building on the divisions and problems introduced by the last.
Just in my lifetime, I’ve seen the aftermath of the Gulf Wars turn into 9/11 turn into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turn into more terrorist attacks turn into growing hatred and discrimination towards Muslims turn into white supremacy turn into two different narratives about the world encouraged by media and the Internet and our own stubborn unwillingness to change — and to what end? What lives have been saved? What beauty has been created out of this cycle of destruction and blind hatred? Have we really created a better world for anyone but those who profit from war?
And climate change – with a body count far less visible and root causes far more entrenched in our livelihoods and cultural identity – can at times feel like the cherry on top of a diseased, incurably mangled sundae. Our society seems incapable of coming together and agreeing on the simplest subjects – Nazis are bad, children’s lives are more important than guns, women and black people should be treated equally to white men – so how on earth are we going to do something about a problem that nobody can see and that will affect our poorest, most vulnerable brothers and sisters first?
I really, really hope that this sinking, hopeless feeling will pass and I’ll start to feel like our problems aren’t so impossible again. Maybe I’m just feeling this way because of the shooting in Florida, which has been in the back of my head ever since I saw the news alert, a constant reminder of the hundreds of lives that we have lost, mourned, and forgotten over the years in our neverending cycle of gun violence in America. Maybe this is just a manifestation of a common pattern in the mental health of environmental scientists (or the effects of climate change itself on the brain – once again, all problems are connected.)
In class, we discussed how to live “well or justly” in a world of different perspectives, and our of habitual optimism, I postulated that we should look for our shared values as a society and build upon those foundations. If we can agree on empathy, generosity, patience, peace, accountability, honesty, and cooperation, maybe we can remake ourselves into a civilization that puts its money where its mouth is. The way to begin to do this, I suggested, is through rethinking how we educate our children. Representation, celebration, and understanding of diversity and differences; thoughtful discussion of right, wrong, and the gray area between; questioning the status quo; encouraging creativity and autonomy rather than conformity and compliance — would this make a difference? Is it even possible?
All four of my grandparents were teachers, and in the room where I slept during visits, my grandmother had a poster of the famous poem, “Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” And as I think about that now, I have to agree. Humans are good at making things far more complicated than they have to be; we focus on extraneous detail, minute differences, specific nitpicking particulars, and we forget that we’re all only here on earth for a few decades – shouldn’t we focus on being kind and helpful while we’re here?
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All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
by Robert Fulghum
(Here’s a picture of the exact poster my grandparents have)
All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.
These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.
Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.
And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
Something about Bidder 70 rubbed me the wrong way, and I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out what it is. While I was watching the film, I was initially confused about why Tim DeChristopher’s actions were such a big deal. I wasn’t sure what he even did, or why it mattered, or how that was illegal at all after the auction was declared invalid. To me, it seemed like the only reason that it became such a big deal is the way that DeChristopher handled the aftermath. He was given an inch of attention and took a mile, and as he did so, it felt like he was missing the point. Maybe this was just how it seemed from the perspective of a documentary about him, but I was uncomfortable with the level of personal devotion to a single person rather than dedication to a cause or a set of principles. Yes, they staged environmental protests, but underlying all of those was the sense that DeChristopher was running the show according to his vision and his priorities rather than truly focusing on a community movement like he described. Even Peaceful Uprising’s murals, signs, posters, and protests used the image of “Bidder 70,” and while having a leader is certainly fine and good, turning DeChristopher into a martyr after a confusing and ultimately pretty useless “protest” seems like overkill.
But this strange focus on a single individual misses the mark on a larger scale, and it leaves both Peaceful Uprising and DeChristopher himself vulnerable to severe missteps as they try to build a community-based movement.
First, there was a rather obvious faux pas that made me cringe during the film, although I’m sure they meant no harm by it: their use of the raised fist symbol. Although it has taken on many forms and meanings throughout the years, it nearly always represents “unity or solidarity, generally with oppressed peoples.” Wikipedia further explains that in the United States, “the black fist, also known as the Black Power fist, is a logo generally associated with black nationalism and sometimes socialism. Its most widely known usage is by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.” This is also what came to my mind first – among activists today, a raised fist is synonymous with black and/or working class (socialist) solidarity. So when I first saw this symbolism being used in Bidder 70, I started paying attention to the context of the movement that accompanied the gesture. What did I see? One black person in the entire film, and no discussion whatsoever of the effects of climate change on people of color and low income or otherwise disadvantaged populations. Granted, the population of Utah is over 90% white, but this is no excuse for an environmental movement to not make an effort to be inclusive, accessible, and thoughtful about for whom it is advocating. Seeing a group of white people giving the raised-fist salute before getting arrested at a protest and then basically patting themselves on the back for their heroism and courage was simply cringeworthy, and I’m saying that as a white person. I can’t say how I would feel about it if I was black, but either way, they should have thought more carefully before co-opting a powerful symbol within the black community for their own purposes.
However, failing to create a more diverse and intersectional movement is only one way out of many that Peaceful Uprising and Tim DeChristopher’s actions seem disappointing to environmental advocates today. I was actually shocked at how outdated many aspects of their movement appeared despite taking place less than a decade ago. Much of their rhetoric focused on scientific and technical aspects of climate change — fossil fuels, emissions, pollution, carbon dioxide and parts per million. Today, although these are undoubtedly still huge problems facing the world, many environmentalists have shifted away from these big picture, apocalyptic scenes that seem to big to change, and are instead starting to tell stories about the more personal impacts that climate change and humans can have on each other. Instead of talking about parts per million or oil spills, which seem insurmountable and distant to ordinary citizens, climate change is becoming a story of water, health, biodiversity, food, and small actions that can add up to have a big impact. Certainly, there are numerous problems that will likely only change if approached on regulatory, governmental, industrial, or corporate levels, but there are far more actions worth taking — and imperative to take — on the individual level, and the environmental movement will fall short of its goals if it is not personal enough or targeted at the appropriate solutions for its audience. It is all well and good to be realistic, but it is also necessary to be optimistic.
To be fair, I will give credit to Peaceful Uprising and Tim DeChristopher for the things that they got right. It is absolutely necessary to hold governments, corporations, and industries responsible for the damage they have done and are doing to the environment, and they have worked extremely hard to expose corruption and shed light on the environmental damage being done at the institutional level. It can also be tremendously difficult to mobilize popular support for climate action due to the long-term, global nature of the problem, but they have clearly galvanized a large group of people that support holding these powerful entities accountable and creating change within their community. Although a short amount of research on both Peaceful Uprising and DeChristopher failed to turn up any significant publicity for either party following his incarceration, I hope that they are still working to create change in their communities, and I hope that in the years since Bidder 70 was produced, they have found ways to be more inclusive, diverse, thoughtful, relevant, and hopeful in their activism.
Information about the raised fist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_fist
Utah census data: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/UT
