The words revolution and revelation are only separated by a difference in two individual letters, but they could not be further apart definition-wise. Saul D. Alinksy, in his book Rules for Radicals, argues that people’s minds need to be fundamentally changed before any effective revolution can happen – in other words, revelation precedes revolution. Robin Kirk drove this home with one quote that especially stuck with me – “10,000 deaths is a statistic; 1 is a tragedy.” She talked about this in reference to how likely people are to act after a horrific event like a school shooting. This realization makes me heartbroken, but I have come to accept it – if we expect people to change, we have to tell them a story that really hits hard. If we manage to affect people so deeply that they have a revelation, then we can start a truly large revolution.

With our sustainability project — trying to dissuade West Union vendors from wrapping utensils in plastic and from using non-compostable utensils — we know that we might not succeed because vendors have (and will continue to have) a monetary incentive to order plastic-wrapped, non-compostable utensils. However, if we can cause fellow students to have some sort of revelation, we can succeed in dissuading them from using the plastic wrapped utensils. To achieve this, we will be trying to encourage others to live plastic free for a whole day, and we will call the event April three plastic free (it rhymes!) We want to educate people on how easy it is to live plastic free – they just have to make conscious, self-aware decisions at every meal. We will provide them with a (infographical) guide on what to do in difficult situations, like when the only option is something plastic-wrapped. We will also try to educate them on how bad non-compostable utensils are for the environment and how to compost better. Hopefully, we can tell them a gruesome enough story about environmental damanger that will cause them to want to change. This is the driving force behind a personal revelation that will lead to a less plasticized Duke.

Dr. Robin Kirk brought up many interesting and salient points in her discussion with our class, but I particularly enjoyed what she told us about the history of activism and campaign strategy. Learning that the fundamentals of campaign strategy originated with such a large scale, long lasting, and historically significant and successful campaign to end slavery really puts the act of campaigning and being an activist on a historical timeline that I had not really considered before. Learning about how the campaign to end slavery developed a strategy, that continues to be used and successful today, by trial and error makes me think about how every activist action and movement is rooted in a deep history of activism that should be understood, utilized, and more on the forefront of activism than it seems to be now. It is too easy to forget that activist history and act as many movements independent from others who are campaigning for something different.

Another aspect of Dr. Kirk’s talk that I found salient to our most recent class discussions and readings is when she was discussing her career path. In the face of humanitarian injustice, she mentioned that she was frustrated with “just writing”. As a journalist she saw and wrote about many issues in South America, but felt that writing about these issues to a limited audience was not as effective as she wanted to be. After having just read Oil on Water by Helon Habila, I think I understood why she felt that “just writing” wasn’t enough. While I think that both the journalist depicted in the novel and Helon Habila himself are activists, I felt that the book represented a more effective activism than the journalists in the book could muster. While journalism has the potential to be very global and effective, the problem arises when a journalist is writing to a limited audience and an audience who might not then create change. For the journalists in Oil on Water they were writing to Nigerians who are living with these pipelines and their pollution in their own country, while the foreign oil companies work to make sure that on an international level the harms they are creating are largely ignored. Journalism seems to be dependent on the audience it can reach, and what the audience chooses to do with the information they read about. This dependence on others for even the possibility of change is why I can see how Dr. Kirk was frustrated with “just writing”.

As I mentioned in discussion the other day, the main takeaway I got from Doctor Robin Kirk was the fact that if we really want to make change and be “successful” activists, we need to frame our issue as an issue regarding human inequality and injustice. The fact of the matter is that at this point, the problems relating to climate change, pollution, etc. is more than just an environmental issue. People are not only losing their land, but they’re losing their lives as well.

Take for example hog farming in our lovely state of North Carolina. Hog farming is the process of creating large plots of land for pigs to live on so Americans can consume their daily dosage of bacon, ham, sausage, etc. As a result of these farms, methane emissions are through the roof, deforestation rates and water usage is sky-rocketing and pools of waste are being created on our land by the day. While all of those environmental factors are detrimental to our conservationist and preservationist ideals, the one thing that most people don’t consider is the acts of racial inequality and injustice happening here. What I mean by this is that the majority of these hog farms are built on or near the property of poor minorities and people of color. The runoff and effects of these hog farms causes drinking water to be undrinkable, air to be unbreathable, and lives to be unviable. This in hand causes life-threatening health issues, inability to work, and being unable to support a family. On top of that, corporate corruption has led to these victims being threatened with violence and fines whenever they try to speak out or act against the issue.

This is just one example of the inequality and injustice issues we have at hand. It’s time to take action. No longer can we preach about the polar bears, the trees, and the ocean, it’s time to address the elephant in the room and that happens to be human lives. As Doctor Robin Kirk said, “Once we begin to shape our issue into being about people rather than nature, you will start seeing change.” It’s time to do just that and start saving lives.

My key takeaway from this week’s guest speaker, readings, and discussion, is the importance of leading by example, including when addressing environmental issues. For instance, Robin Kirk mentioned how being a persuasive American human rights advocates intervening in foreign affairs is incredibly challenging, not only because countries have their own values, beliefs, and interests, but also due to the valid perception that human rights are violated in the United States as well. This is particularly exemplified through “enhanced interrogation”, also known as torture. As John Oliver put it: “There is no proof that torture does any good, but there is real proof that it does serious harm to America’s image overseas. References to American torture show up everywhere; from terrorist recruiting tools to statements from North Korea who have called out techniques ‘brutal medieval’”. With the rest of the world viewing the United States as a nation who has significant human rights issues, there is no wonder that other countries such as Colombia and Peru in the 1980s and 1990s referenced by Kirk interpreted America’s advice as ironic.

The same principal can be applied to combatting climate change. The United States is the second largest emitter of CO2, releasing 15 % of the world’s total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. However, despite being one of the main contributors, the United States have taken several steps back when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with the most publicized one being Trump’s announcement of pulling out of the Paris Agreement. Not only has the U.S. lost a lot of influence in international policy regarding climate change, America has lost respect and influence in general. Countries such as China have seized the opportunity to win the hearts and minds of the world, declaring combatting climate change “an international responsibility”. Thus, an authoritarian government run by the Communist Party for 68 years has come on top as the moral champion.

Fortunately, cities, states, companies, and universities have also lead by example through pushing back on Trump’s statement. In fact, a group of 30 mayors, three governors, more than 80 universities, and more than 100 businesses have pledged to meet the greenhouse gas emission targets under the Paris Agreement.

The latter illustrates how leading by example, although done by a smaller entity, can still have a significant positive impact in the grand scheme of things. And this boils down to the individual; we must look at how we can take measures ourselves to fight climate change. Because as we stated in class; combatting climate change starts locally.

This week in class we spent a lot of time thinking about the ways that activism can have as big of an impact as possible. One of the ideas I loved the most from this was when Dr. Kirk was talking about learning from our history. While we have spent a lot of time discussing the history of activism in this class (Bidder 70 and Monkey Wrench Gang among other examples), I loved her idea of looking outside of only environmental activists for our inspiration. She spoke extensively of the lessons that we can learn from the activists who worked to end slave trade, and I found this incredibly powerful. Remembering how interconnected all the injustices facing our world truly are may seem overwhelming at first, but it brings with it a powerful opportunity for change. If everyone who cares deeply about any of those issues comes together to fight against them all, we have an incredible opportunity for change.

Another point that Dr. Kirk discussed that really stuck with me was the importance of remembering that change happens slowly. This was also mentioned in Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, but I found it to be more impactful when listening to someone who had been fighting for change her whole life. When she discussed the shift in the human rights conversation after 9/11 this point really came to life for me. It had been a moment where the human rights community had thought that progress was being made, only to be rudely thrown back. I think that this example really illustrates the importance of continuing to fight for the things that you believe in, even when that fight gets really difficult. It also showed how we cannot allow ourselves to become complicit. We have to use the times that we fail, or that things don’t happen the way that we had imagined, to learn and to adapt. Although clearly this lesson is impossible to learn in a classroom, I think you really have to experience it before fully understanding, it was enlightening to have someone who had experienced it speak to the ways that those experiences can be used as a learning opportunity.

While published in 1971, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is ever so relevant to modern community organizing. While reading the prologue and chapter one, I had no idea that the book was written over 47 years ago. The tone and points made by Alinsky are highly perceptive, honest, and relatable to today.

Beginning in his introduction, he speaks about his audience. To a group of people trying to “make some sense out of their lives and out of this world.” A group of people that do not wish to follow the their parents’ path to find a well-paying job and end up with some type of addiction, a divorce, or the “disillusioned good life.” This seems like my generation. People deciding between the open directed path to finance, medicine, law, or consulting but also can steer left. Going left is affiliated with being radical. Becoming an activist and veering away from the structures of our system.

Further, Alinsky describes the exact circumstances we observe before us. Where “the young have seen their activists participatory democracy turn into its antithesis – nihilistic bombing and murder.” Whether it be the mass shootings taking place directed at innocent children attending academic institutions or good humans attending their church, or  larger global threats from ISIS or North Korea, the antithesis of a activist democracy surrounds us. It even spams to the undermining of our democracy by the Russian government in the 2017 Presidential election. Fighting for what is right and searching for meaning in our society is difficult when confronted with daily threats to freedom. With all this in the back of my head and on the front page of our popular news, it’s sensible that Alinsky’s words feel ever so prevalent.

His words of advice are empowering but hard to put into action. He suggests that the revolution we are waiting for will only come about after reformation. Asking for our revolution is asking for “the impossible in politics.” Instead of jumping 10 immediate steps forward to a foreign island, we must create a “bridge” to connect our old understandings and values to a new “way.” But how exactly do we create this reformation in a political climate so extreme? Robin Kirk noted that today’s political climate is so different due to the fact that there is so much to be done and people are enraged in a new way because of the extreme climate. She explains “extreme” as the immense division on several issues and little bi-partisanship. Alinsky’s bridge that we must create from the old to the new seems far too fetched. Perhaps multiple bridges must be constructed first between the divisions in our community.

His most compelling point that I hope to carry with me in our developing activism project is that the individual in a free democratic society who wants to see change happen must be willing to give up their own interests to see hope and freedom for others. In this way, we are fully accountable for lack of progress due to self interest.

While we cherish the Duke endowment for its commitment to provide new educational endeavors, more scholarship opportunities, pivotal research, and attracting highly acclaimed academic professionals, if we are not willing to exchange these interest momentarily to divest in big oil companies, then we fail to allow the change. This is change in our climate and the change needed to provide freedom to vulnerable populations exploited by foreign oil extraction.

Citations:

Alinsky, S. D. (1971). Prologue and The Purpose. In Rules for Radicals: A practical primer for realistic radicals (pp. Xiii-24). New York: Random House.

Over the past few weeks, we have discussed story-telling as activism. I talked about Obama’s perspective on great leadership, we watched Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk about the importance of diverse stories, and we read Oil on Water by Helon Habila. In the novel, Habila talks of villages in the Delta that fall victim to oil colonization – that is, when oil corporations invade a village and effect change in the community. Following something like this, the story that is so often told is one of wealth and prosperity. We hear that the villages see economic booms and that without the oil companies, they would have lived in poverty forever. We even hear stories of how initially happy the villagers become.

However, we have to remember Adichie’s warning of a single story and ask ourselves, “what other stories need to be told here?” Habila tactfully delineates the slow but sure decline of a community after oil invasion. At one point, the doctor reveals that the oil causes levels of contamination never-before-seen. The pollution levels disease the humans and the ecosystem, resulting in worse conditions overall. We also often hear the story of how oil invasions provide jobs to blue-collar workers, so people make more money and generally are happier. However, Habila tells of the ways that the oil companies exploit workers, by forcing them to believe certain truths and shielding them from the real world. Using the doctor as an example again, Habila tells of how the oil companies pay the doctor to hide the truth from the real world – what kind of work is that?

In class, we questioned why this book does not ever explicitly mention climate change – I think this was a deliberate way to get us to identify what makes this book some form of activism. Like I spoke about in my blog post about our 44th president, not every act  of leadership and social change has to be concrete – sometimes, inspiring and informing others does the trick. Habila tells us a tale that most of us did not know before – one of struggle and pain due to oil. He paints a gruesome picture to get us to cringe and weep about the current state of affairs. By doing so, he motivates a previously ignorant population to act.

I learned through this book that “environmental activism” — at least as we talk about it in this class — is not solely about saving the environment. After reading Habila’s novel, I know that environmental activism means rectifying the environmental wrongs that corporations and governments create. This means not only saving the environment itself, but also the people that the pollution hurts the most. These are the people that Habila talks about so much, and the people that we need to keep in the back of our minds when thinking about environmental activism.

     In Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story”, she discovers the U.S. perspective of Africans as “incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars, unable to speak for themselves waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner”, a mindset widely portrayed through western literature. In Helon Habila’s African novel Oil on Water, however, we gain a new perspective on the relationship between westerners and Africans, or to put it frankly, wealthy, White people and the collateral damage around oil sites. Fiction as a genre allows us to conduct thought experiments, build connections, and read literature with a critical mind. It also allows readers to enter an imaginary world or into the mind of people with completely different backgrounds than their own. Sadly the perspectives and descriptions in Oil on Water directly reflect a reality that many people, especially Americans, cannot fathom or only think of distantly. I rarely think of where exactly the oil we use comes from and its destructive impacts on both local landscape and the humans who live there.

     Nnedi Okorafor also claims that “science fiction is one of the most effective forms of political writing” and revolves around the question of “what if” in her TED Talk “Sci-Fi Stories that Imagine a Future Africa”. Habila tackles not an imagined “what if”, but a current, real-life narrative through the incredibly descriptive scenes of oil damage as Zaq and Rufus attempt to navigate the black water. From the dead animals to the foul stench of the swamp, Rufus even says the village “looked like a setting for a sci-fi movie” (37). This novel, a necessary exposé of oil extraction, uses fiction to enlighten a greater audience on the reality and gravity of the situation for modern day Africans.

Habila, Helon. Oil on Water. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

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…