David’s Comments (group member since May 22, 2013)

David’s comments from the The Transition Movement group.

Interesting. I certainly hope more of this movement spreads.

There was a Native American tribe that stated that "seven generations" - which has been appropriated by a corporation--was the amount of time into the future one should imagine before making any decision that influenced the tribe. What would be the effect of this choice seven generations ahead? We barely can look as far as one generation because it's so hard to save enough for retirement now with pensions gone and the stock market a gamble.

Capitalism has young people in a vice. Whether it be debts from college, which are vast now, or just the lack of jobs, they don't have so many options when it comes to attempting to pay rent. Most jobs now require so many hours of overtime...and so little vacation or sick time...that people just don't have the luxury of being able to go out and protest. And there is no doubt that racism in the job market and racism in police enforcement and criminal sentencing puts up issues that are much "hotter" in the short term than environmental issues for people of color, making it hard to organize a united environmental movement.

Cool!

Part 2

The strategy must take up the challenge of rebuilding the basic institutional substructure of the local economy in ways that are efficient, effective, stable, redistributive and ongoing. This will include:

§ Expanded use of city, school, hospital, university and other purchasing power to help stabilize jobs in a manner that democratizes ownership and benefits for both low-income communities and small- and midsize businesses;

§ Expanded use of public and quasi-public land trusts (both for housing and commercial use) to capture development profits for the community and to prevent gentrification;

§ An all-out attack on the absurdly wasteful giveaways corporations extract from local governments;

§ Coordination with labor unions and community activists to build and sustain momentum.

A strategic plan that emerges from such efforts can also help to increase the tax base, partly offsetting taxpayer pressures and weakening the opposing coalition. Perhaps most important, it can help forge an alliance of public service workers, teachers, hospital workers and blue-collar laborers; community groups and local activists; small-business groups that benefit from a revival of local economic health; and local government officials.

Obviously, none of this is easy, especially when you look at the current makeup of national politics. On the other hand, the local economic situation in many parts of the country is getting worse. It is only a matter of time before another community’s square on the checkerboard becomes receptive to a democratizing flip.

* * *

Systemic change will require decades, not weeks or months, of work—and a long-term focus on the larger scale. What happens when the next financial crisis hits and we again face the impossibility of regulating banks too big to fail? Even if we break the big ones up, history suggests they will simply regroup and reconcentrate, as AT&T and elements of the old Standard Oil did in earlier eras. Ultimately, the big banks will have to be taken over. In the meantime, we should familiarize ourselves with—and develop local capacity for—public banks. The idea is already gaining ground: at this writing, twenty states have introduced legislation to establish state-owned banks modeled after the enormously successful Bank of North Dakota.

A similar strategy can help tackle the national healthcare crisis. As costs keep rising and burdens increase (despite Obamacare), we can expect mounting frustration and anger, followed by increasing demands for a real alternative. Most likely, the first breakthroughs will come at the state level. More than fifteen states have already seen legislation proposing some form of a single-payer public system. Vermont is likely to establish one in 2014; California passed such legislation twice, only to have it vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The move to a national single-payer system will be long and difficult, but it is possible—and with it will come the democratization of a sector that currently represents almost a fifth of the US economy.

Any ecologically serious strategy will confront the basic truth that large corporations must grow or die. This imperative undermines solutions to many national (and increasingly global) challenges. In addition to the overriding problem of global warming, countless studies show that limits to growth are fast approaching in such areas as energy, minerals, water and arable land, among others. The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, accounts for 21 percent of the world’s consumption of oil, 12 percent of coal and 20.5 percent of natural gas—and the projections heading toward 2050 are not promising.

At some point we will have to say, Enough is enough. Former presidential adviser James Gustave Speth puts it bluntly: “For the most part, we have worked within this current system of political economy, but working within the system will not succeed in the end when what is needed is transformative change.” The large-scale institutions we build to support a more democratic and sustainable future must transcend the Wall Street–driven growth imperative. Ultimately, they must be public.

History has a way of surprising us, especially in times when serious change seems impossible. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement—even the Arab Spring revolutions—all emerged without the benefit of pundit prediction. How many people anticipated in 1989 that the Berlin Wall would fall, or that within two years the Soviet Union would dissolve, or that within five years apartheid would finally end in South Africa?

I am no utopian; I am a historian and political economist. I am cautious about predictions of inevitability—including the assumed inevitability, dictated from on high, that nothing fundamental about the American social fabric can ever change. It is possible that the decay will simply continue. It is also possible, however, that the pain, anger and loss of confidence in Washington will lead to something far more explosive than business-as-usual politics or even a modest renewal of liberal reform. It is our responsibility to consider how a distinctly American system based on democratized ownership might be organized. Like a picture slowly developing in a photographer’s darkroom, the elements of that “next system” are beginning to emerge.

Efforts to reduce unemployment and curb inequality must be considered alongside urgent threats to the environment and democracy, write John Cavanagh and Robin Broad, in “It's the New Economy, Stupid [2]” (Nov. 28, 2012).

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/1765...

I thought this was very relevant to this movement.

Part 1

How to Democratize the US Economy

Gar Alperovitz | October 8, 2013
The Nation

Everyone knows the United States faces enormous challenges: unemployment, poverty, global warming, environmental decay—to say nothing of whole cities that have essentially been thrown away. We know the economic system is dominated by powerful corporate institutions. And we know the political system is dominated by those same institutions. Elections occur and major fiscal debates ensue, but most of the problems are only marginally affected (and often in ways that increase the burdens).
 
The issue is not simply that our situation is worrisome. It is that the nation’s most pressing problems are built into the structure of the system. They are not unique to the current economic slump or the result of partisan bickering, something passing in the night that will go away when we elect forward-looking leaders and pressure them to move in a different direction.

Not only has the economy been stagnating for a long time, but for the average family, things have been bad for a very long time. Real wages for 80 percent of workers have not gone up more than a trivial amount for at least three decades. At the same time, income for the top 1 percent has jumped from roughly 10 percent of all income to more than 20 percent. A recent estimate is that a mere 400 individuals in the United States own more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans taken together.

Unfortunately, what we call traditional politics no longer has much capacity to alter most of the negative trends. To be clear: I think projects, organizing, demonstrations and related efforts are important. But deep down, most people sense—rightly, in my view—that unless we develop a more powerful long-term strategy, those efforts aren’t going to make much of a dent.

In 2007, people got excited about federal legislation raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. This was obviously good, but the long-term negative trend continued nonetheless. The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was more than $2 higher in 1968. Clearly, when great victories don’t even get us back to where we were more than forty years ago, we need to pay close attention. I support such efforts, but it appears unlikely that strategies aimed at reviving the politics that produced the New Deal and Great Society programs are going to alter the big trends, even if those strategies are intensified by movement building—especially given the decline of labor unions, the power base of traditional progressive politics.

There is, however, a little-noticed twist to this otherwise bleak narrative. Deepening economic and social pain are producing the kinds of conditions from which various new forms of democratization—of ownership, wealth and institutions—are beginning to emerge. The challenge is to develop a broad strategy that not only ends the downward spiral but also gives rise to something different: steadily changing who actually owns the system, beginning at the bottom and working up.

* * *

Consider the evolutionary change developing in that rustiest of Rust Belt states, Ohio. On one unhappy day in September 1977, 5,000 steelworkers lost their jobs, their livelihoods and their futures when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed down. Such large-scale layoffs were not common in the United States up to that point. The story made the front page of newspapers and led television news across the country. The workers called it Black Monday, and I remember all too well reports of desperate men committing suicide after concluding they could no longer support their families.

A young steelworker named Gerald Dickey had a different idea: Why couldn’t the workers run the facility themselves? Dickey and a group of activist friends teamed up with an ecumenical coalition in Youngstown to demand that the mill be put back to work under worker-community ownership. After a huge organizing effort, they got support from Washington—including the Carter administration, which agreed to allocate $100 million in loan guarantees.

When the administration reneged after the midterm elections of 1978, the plan fell apart. But the story did not end there. And what happened next is of even greater significance.

The inspiring example of the workers and religious leaders—and the sophisticated educational and political work they did to spread the word—had lasting impact. They knew they were up against some of the most powerful corporate (and union) players in the country. They were fully aware they might lose the battle. They also knew they had discovered an important idea with great promise. Accordingly, they made it their business to educate the public, the press and politicians in the state and around the country about what they were trying to do, and why.

The idea took root in Ohio, and over time the practices and strategies of worker-owned businesses grew more sophisticated and innovative. Today, the state is home to half a million worker-owners, and the support system for building such businesses is one of the most advanced in the nation. The simple idea that workers can and should own their businesses is now conventional in many parts of the state, not only among workers but also businessmen, many of whom (aided by certain tax benefits) sell their businesses to their employees when they retire.

The current goal is not simply worker ownership, but worker ownership linked to a community-building strategy. In Cleveland, a group of worker-owned companies are connected through a community-building nonprofit corporation and a revolving fund designed to help such businesses thrive. Part of the design involves getting hospitals and universities in the area (like the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals) to purchase supplies, goods and services from these companies. Everything in the network is green by design. One of the cooperatives, for example, is an industrial-scale laundry that uses two-thirds less energy and water than conventional ones.

Similar networks are developing in many other cities, and big unions are lending their support as well. Working with the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain—an exemplary integrated model involving numerous cooperatives and more than 80,000 people—the United Steelworkers, whose national leadership once opposed the Youngstown effort, has announced a campaign to help build “union co-op” worker-owned companies here. The Service Employees International Union, the Steelworkers and Mondragon are involved with a worker-owned laundry in Pittsburgh. SEIU has also joined in a groundbreaking partnership with the largest worker cooperative in the United States: New York City’s Cooperative Home Care Associates, which provides home services to the elderly, disabled and chronically ill.

For more than three decades, Ohio has been experiencing the kind of economic pain that other parts of the country are just beginning to experience. Precisely because traditional solutions offer few answers, many other cities are exploring paths like the one that led from Youngstown to Cleveland.

As the number of institutions directly concerned with the democratization of productive wealth continues to expand, innovations are occurring left and right. More than 130 million Americans—40 percent of the population—are members of cooperatives; more than 10 million participate in other forms of worker-owned companies. Predominant among the older co-ops are credit unions—essentially democratized, “one person, one vote” banks. More than 95 million Americans are involved; total assets are approximately $1 trillion. Activists have begun electing credit union board members and have long participated in “move your money” efforts, which shifted hundreds of millions of dollars away from Wall Street to credit unions and small banks in 2011 and 2012.

* * *

There are also thousands of “social enterprises” that use democratized ownership to make money and achieve a broader social purpose. One of the most impressive is Pioneer Human Services, an organization based in Seattle that provides employment, job training, counseling, education and housing to people with criminal histories and issues of substance abuse. PHS now employs over 1,000 people and uses its $76 million in revenues from the businesses it created to fund social programs across the state. Among other things, PHS runs a full-service precision sheet-metal fabrication shop and produces millions of aerospace parts for companies like Boeing. Its kitchen prepares more than 1,500 meals a day for its work-release facilities and residential treatment centers.

At the other end of the continent is Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York. Founded in 1982 by a Buddhist teacher with the modest goal of employing his students, the organization expanded its mission to provide jobs for inner-city residents. An early contract with Ben & Jerry’s opened the way to much larger development. Greyston now inhabits a modern 23,000-square-foot facility and operates several businesses and services, including a daycare center, a housing development for low-income residents with HIV/AIDS, six community gardens, counseling and support services, and a computer literacy program.

By far the most common social enterprise is the traditional community development corporation. There are nearly 5,000 CDCs operating around the country. For the most part, they serve as low-income housing developers and incubators for small business. One of the most ambitious is the New Community Corporation, based in Newark, New Jersey. This large-scale neighborhood nonprofit employs roughly 600 residents and manages more than 2,000 housing units and a shopping center anchored by a major supermarket. It has $200 million in assets and an operating budget of approximately $70 million. Proceeds help support early learning centers and after-school programs, job training, a 180-bed nursing home with an adult medical daycare program and on-site delivery of medical care in several of its eight senior buildings.

I could go on, but you get the idea. In a profound sense, the struggle is about changing the dominant ideological patterns. New forms of ownership are important not only on their own, but because they offer ideas about democratization that can help form the basis of a different political-economic system consistent with American ideals and experience.

* * *

How far the process of “evolutionary reconstruction” will proceed—and whether it can extend to higher levels—will likely depend on the degree to which problems and pain continue to deepen, on whether folks embrace a broad institution-building strategic approach, and on whether those who do embrace it make it part of a more comprehensive new politics.

The political game is beginning to resemble a checkerboard strategy: some of the squares on the board are clearly blocked, but others are open. The goal, of course, is to expand the number of squares that are receptive to democratization efforts—not just to restore economic health and sustainability in struggling communities, but to demonstrate viable alternatives to strategies that are faltering elsewhere. A key goal is to overtake the opposition by surrounding the decaying, failing states in a long-term pincer movement.

Part 3

“If the climate movement is ever going to win in a really robust way, it’s gotta come to Texas, the belly of the beast,” Ron told me. “Houston, and the Texas Gulf, is the lion’s den—the largest petrochemical complex on planet Earth. If the base isn’t there, if the communities there aren’t organized and informed, empowered to take action, the movement isn’t going to be successful when it needs to be.”

“The industry,” Ron said, “has shown every intention of escalating the climate crisis beyond certain tipping points, and people in these communities are affected by the industry right now, in desperate ways.” In a situation like this, he said, “we need to ask ourselves as organizers, ‘What does escalation look like? What could possibly be too escalated?’ Physically blockading infrastructure is a great place to start that conversation.” They may have failed to stop the construction of the southern pipeline, “but we can still build and cultivate a culture of resistance and action, capable of escalating to the point of shutting this stuff down in the future.”

I asked him what happens if Obama approves the Keystone XL and construction of the northern segment begins. Will Tar Sands Blockade still be committed to Texas? “I can guarantee you that if that segment is approved, and our friends and allies in Montana and South Dakota and Nebraska give us a call, there will be physical blockades in those areas as well, by local folks interested in that kind of resistance. But that doesn’t mean abandoning our base in Houston and East Texas. These are not mutually exclusive things.”

“There are two distinct lines of work that need to be done simultaneously,” he said. “One is to smash these systems that are oppressing us and destroying the world. The other is to build up the world that we want to see.”

“It’s a long-term commitment that we are making,” Ron said.

* * *

Before I left Nacogdoches, the blockaders gave me directions to their camp outside town. I arrived mid-morning, and the four I’d interviewed at the church were the only ones there. Murtaza showed me around. There was the small, ramshackle house that was used as a makeshift HQ and the communal outdoor kitchen under a blue plastic tarp, which had served fifty or more at one time. There was the outhouse that one of the Austin Heights members had built for them. As we walked a footpath into the woods in back, I saw the few remaining tents and an ingeniously rigged (if less than private) shower. Some climbing tackle still hung from a large tree. Nearby was a big pile of buckets and containers once used for hauling water. Murtaza thought the camp now had a vaguely post-apocalyptic look to it—or perhaps, I thought, like a guerrilla encampment after the battle shifts to new ground.

After my tour, I sat down with Fitzgerald at the picnic table by the kitchen, next to a campfire he was tending. I asked him if the “blockade,” as such, was over.

“It’s hard to define ‘over,’” he replied. “When I got here, blockading was as direct action as direct action can get. That part of TSB in Texas, I think, is done.”

What about building a deeper resistance that can go forward?

“TSB didn’t come here to create a resistance,” he said. “That resistance already existed. We partnered in that resistance, and we’re still partnering in it.”

Had Tar Sands Blockade strengthened that resistance? “Without a doubt,” he answered. “As far as resistance is concerned, we are far from done.”

Since we spoke, Fitzgerald has moved to the Beaumont–Port Arthur area, engaging in environmental justice work with the African-American communities there. But he told me that he and the others want to remain engaged with Nacogdoches. He feels close to the Austin Heights community, and he’s been reaching out to the Zion Hill congregation. “I’m trying to get the African-American community more involved,” he said, “because that’s just where I come from.”

The next weekend in Nacogdoches, I sat down again with Kyle Childress, this time in his office at the church. A portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. hangs on the wall. I told him, only half joking, that it was a little intimidating to sit there under Dr. King’s gaze.

“There’s a line in the old King James,” Childress told me, “that says the prayers of a faithful person ‘availeth much.’ One person, one small community, acting in faithfulness, can bring healing, hope, change.”

“Some of these blockaders,” he said, “were risking their lives up there in a tree trying to block that pipeline. And TransCanada has billions of dollars and says, ‘We’ll just go around you. You slowed us down for a day.’ Well, if that’s all there is, by sheer mathematics they win. But I think the prayers of a faithful person availeth much—and those blockaders are acting in fidelity to the goodness, the rightness, of God’s earth. That keeps me going. That’s my hope. And if I didn’t have hope, well, I’d probably just cash it in and go do something else for a living. I mean, you know, I’m not going to be pastor of a church without any hope.”

Wen Stephenson October 8, 2013 | This article appeared in the October 28, 2013 edition of The Nation.

Part 2

For Matt, a veteran of Occupy Tampa who grew up working-class in urban New Jersey before his family moved to a “gated suburban thing” in south Florida, the lasting impact of Tar Sands Blockade “was to show ‘ordinary people’ that it’s absolutely vital to take direct action, and that even in a community like East Texas, people are rising against the fossil fuel industry.” He emphasized that trainings and actions are being networked out across the country, in South Dakota, Oklahoma, and elsewhere along the northern pipeline route and beyond—“places that don’t typically see a lot of environmental resistance.” Matt seemed impatient for more escalated direct action, the kind that was no longer happening along the southern Keystone XL route. Shortly after we talked, he and another member of Tar Sands Blockade decided to move on.

By the time I arrived in Nacogdoches, the blockaders’ numbers had dwindled—some who had come from out of state had returned home or drifted off to join other direct-action campaigns, against Keystone and extraction projects—and the group was at something of a crossroads. Indeed, they were wrestling not only with tactics and strategy but with the very nature of the campaign, now that there was essentially nothing left, in the near term, to blockade.

But a solid core of about twenty organizers, many of them young native Texans, had regrouped in Houston and were shifting into something more like community organizing, engaging with environmental justice efforts on the city’s hard-hit, largely Latino east side. As several told me, they wanted their campaign not only to carry on the fight against Keystone and tar sands but to build a base of grassroots resistance to the fossil fuel industry right there in Texas, especially in the frontline communities—most often communities of color—that are most affected by fossil fuel pollution. The kind of places, they point out, where the climate movement has established little, if any, foothold.

Back in Houston, I sat down with several members of Tar Sands Blockade, who talked with me openly about the campaign at this pivotal moment. Kim Huynh, 26, was born in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Indonesia and immigrated with her family to Florida, where she went to the University of Florida and studied political science and sociology. A year ago, she left a job with Friends of the Earth in Washington, DC, where she’d focused on Keystone and climate, and came to Texas to join the blockade. I asked Kim if she has any trouble reconciling the urgency of climate action, as seen in the pipeline fight, with the kind of long-term commitment required for movement-building.

“I certainly feel that tension,” she told me. “A lot of folks that I’ve worked with feel that tension very strongly, feel it in their bodies. It’s an anxiety.” At the same time, she said, she also feels “a commitment to the idea that we need systemic change, like actually hacking at the roots of what climate change is and what’s created climate change.” That kind of change is a long-term thing, she acknowledged. “It isn’t going to come just from stopping the pipeline. Stopping the pipeline is a good start.”

“The challenge and struggle for TSB,” Kim said, “is to figure out how we define escalation, as a campaign that started from this extremely escalated place.”

“Personally,” she said, “I draw a lot of inspiration and lessons from the black freedom movement, the civil rights movement, thinking about groups like SNCC and the way they defined escalation as going into the most deeply segregated areas in the South and doing voter registration.” That’s a whole other kind of escalation, Kim said, “doing the organizing in the areas where it’s possibly most important to do. Maybe that strategy is less like direct action as we know it—lockdowns—and more like community organizing. But that doesn’t mean it’s any de-escalation.”

“The communities that are most impacted by these industries,” she said, “the people who are living and breathing it every day—they need to be leading the fight.”

That idea—the disproportionate impact not only of climate change but of the fossil fuel industry on hard-pressed communities that can least afford it—is at the heart of what Tar Sands Blockade means by climate justice. They want a radical movement, one that grasps the problem whole, at the roots of the system, and fights alongside those who are already on the front lines—and always have been.

* * *

When I first met Ron Seifert, we were standing outside on a sweltering early evening at Hartman Park in Houston’s Manchester neighborhood, just east of the 610 Loop along the Houston Ship Channel, across the street from a massive Valero refinery. Ron is a founding member of Tar Sands Blockade—and, at 32, also among the oldest, with the first early flecks of gray showing in his trim black beard. Having trained for years in long-distance endurance racing, his slender frame seems to conceal a reservoir of stamina. Ron grew up in Wisconsin and South Carolina and came to Texas in late 2011 from Montana, where he’d been exploring grad school in environmental science and law. He had joined the historic sit-ins at the White House in August 2011 and was one of the 1,253 people arrested protesting the Keystone XL. Later that fall, along with another activist named Tom Weis, Ron biked the full length of the pipeline route, from Montana to Texas. In the spring and summer of 2012, after Obama fast-tracked the southern leg, he helped launch Tar Sands Blockade, together with members of Rising Tide North Texas, on landowner David Daniel’s property near Winnsboro, in northeast Texas, site of the storied eighty-five-day tree blockade.

Rural and small-town East Texas is a world away from Manchester. Overwhelmingly Latino, the community is surrounded by oil refineries and other heavily polluting industrial facilities—a chemical plant, a tire plant, a car-crushing facility, a train yard and a sewage treatment plant—and sits at the intersection of two major expressways. The people who live there already breathe some of the country’s most toxic air, and they have the health statistics to prove it. Not just asthma and other respiratory problems—a recent investigation by researchers at the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within two miles of the Ship Channel have a 56 percent higher risk of acute lymphocytic leukemia than those living only ten miles away. Yudith Nieto, a local environmental justice organizer who grew up in Manchester, told me of her family’s health struggles, including her own childhood asthma, which improved when she moved out of the neighborhood to attend art school.

The Ship Channel and nearby refineries—along with the refineries near the poor and African-American communities of Port Arthur—are also a prime destination for the vast majority of tar sands crude that will flow from Alberta to the Texas Gulf via the Keystone XL if it’s approved, only increasing the toxic emissions in these fence-line neighborhoods.

I was there in Manchester that evening to tag along with members of Tar Sands Blockade as they canvassed the community door to door, conducting a health survey in collaboration with the local Houston group TEJAS (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services) and letting residents know about the upcoming Healthy Manchester Festival there at the park. Later, TEJAS co-founders Juan Parras, a longtime labor and environmental justice organizer, and his son Bryan talked with me about the challenges the climate movement faces in places like Manchester, or anyplace where immediate health, economic and social pressures are paramount. Broadly speaking, Bryan Parras told me, most efforts at climate action “tend to leave the same folks that are already in bad situations in bad situations. There’s no incentive for them to get involved.” (He expanded on this and other ideas in an interview posted on my blog at TheNation.com.)

Robert Bullard, dean of the Barbara Jordan–Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, is widely acknowledged as the father of the environmental justice movement, thanks to his pioneering work on the disproportionate impacts of pollution in African-American communities, documented in his landmark 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. “We could stop every pipeline being built from Canada to Texas, we could stop every fracking operation, and still not deal with the justice question—what happens in these communities,” Bullard told me. “What we’re trying to drive home with our friends and colleagues in our larger environmental movement, our larger climate movement, is to talk about these communities that are at greatest risk, put a real face on this. Make it real.”

Tar Sands Blockade is listening to what those like Parras and Bullard are saying. “Disproportionate impact is very real,” Ron said. “And what the communities that are most disproportionately affected actually look like—we need to acknowledge the reality of that, and to understand that climate justice is tied in with racial justice, with environmental justice, with class struggle.”

Ron told me that Tar Sands Blockade wants to support and amplify the work of TEJAS and other environmental justice groups in Texas, not try to commandeer it. He and his Tar Sands Blockade colleagues are highly conscious of what might be called the “parachuter syndrome,” in which outside activist groups, however well intentioned, are perceived to be pursuing their own agendas. Given that apparent tension, I asked Ron if there’s not a disconnect of sorts between the kind of urgent climate action that Tar Sands Blockade has embodied (literally) in its direct action campaign and the slower, and in some ways more difficult, work of environmental justice organizing in these communities.

Maybe, he said. But, ultimately, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Pipelines and refineries and droughts—those are not different things,” Ron continued. “That is climate change. The refineries are climate change. Keystone XL is climate change. Tar sands exploitation is climate change. It’s all the same thing. And we understand that these communities are bearing the brunt of this industry—which is one and the same as climate change. And it’s in their backyards.”

“We’re not there to tell them what the problem is and what to do about it,” Ron said. “It’s the same as organizing with landowners in East Texas. We’re not salespeople coming to these communities saying, ‘Time to rise up!’ People have cancer, leukemia. They have children in the neighborhood die. They understand this industry will kill you for profits.”

Over the course of multiple conversations, Ron told me that a core group of Tar Sands Blockade organizers are dedicating themselves to the kind of climate justice organizing that national environmental groups aren’t doing in Texas. From the start, Ron said, Tar Sands Blockade has shown a willingness to defy a status quo within the larger movement, in which only “winnable campaigns” are taken on—and funded. With the fight in East Texas, and by digging in now for the longer, even harder fight in Houston, “we’ve been able to say, ‘This is worth fighting no matter what, even if it looks like we can’t win.’”

“That type of real investment and commitment,” Ron said, “the idea that you have to go into where the problem is worst—like Mississippi during the civil rights era—you have to get in there and get a foothold. We hope we can empower local-led action and resistance. In Houston itself, there are literally millions of people who are being poisoned. We should be able to empower folks here to rise up and defend their own homes.”

Part 1

The Grassroots Battle Against Big Oil
Activists in Texas are connecting the fight against the Keystone pipeline with the struggle for environmental justice.

Wen Stephenson October 8, 2013 | This article appeared in the October 28, 2013 edition of The Nation.

[IMAGE: Activists with Tar Sands Blockade lock themselves to equipment used to build the Keystone XL pipeline, near Nacogdoches, Texas, November 19, 2012.]
 
One morning in mid-July, I drove north out of Houston at the crack of dawn, three hours up Highway 59 into the cleaner air and dense, piney woods of deep East Texas. It was Sunday, and I was on my way to church.
 
I’d been up that way before: my father was born and raised in northeast Texas—in fact, my whole family is from Texas—and I’m no stranger to Bible Belt Christianity. But I’d never been to a church like the one where I was headed that morning: the small, progressive Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, which meets in an unassuming building on the edge of town.

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Wen Stephenson
Austin Heights was formed as a breakaway congregation in the charged atmosphere of 1968, when its founders could no longer accept the dominant Southern Baptist line on issues of race and war, and it established a lasting fellowship with the leading African-American church in Nacogdoches, Zion Hill First Baptist. The first morning I was there, the Rev. Kyle Childress, Austin Heights’ pastor since 1989 (and the only white member of the local black ministers’ alliance), preached on the Old Testament prophet Amos, who, he noted, was among the favorites of Martin Luther King Jr. Childress began his sermon by reminding us that this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the protests in Bull Connor’s Birmingham in the spring of 1963 and the March on Washington later that summer, and that one of King’s most-used lines (found, for example, in his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech) was a verse from that morning’s Scripture reading in Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

The prophet Amos, Childress told us, was called to be a fierce advocate—among the Bible’s fiercest—on behalf of justice for the poor and oppressed. “Amos’s strong preaching was hard then, and it’s hard today,” Childress said. Just as in Amos’s day, when the wealthy trampled on the poor while worshiping piously in the temples, so today our “programs of care for the poor and needy” are dismantled “with a religious zeal.” Meanwhile, “giant corporations get a free ride. They can diminish people, destroy the earth, pour out climate-changing carbon, all in the interest of short-term profit, and no one can do anything about it.” But Amos knew, Childress assured us, that God is the spring of justice—and that without God, “we are unable to keep up the struggle for justice and goodness and love over the long haul.”

“God calls us to justice, to be a people who embody justice,” said Childress, himself a longtime activist on issues of race, poverty and peace. And yet, as King and all those who fought for civil rights knew, “serving and battling for justice is a long-haul kind of calling.”

Childress—deeply influenced by the likes of Wendell Berry, the late Will D. Campbell and, of course, King—is not a Bible-thumper. He doesn’t shout. Heavyset and ruddy-faced, with a whitening, close-cropped beard, he speaks with a soft, flat West Texas accent. But his voice carries real power and conviction. I would have been impressed with his sermon even if I didn’t know that his words that Sunday morning held a heightened significance for his congregation—not just because of the civil rights history, but because this little East Texas church, which can count perhaps 100 souls in its pews on a typical Sunday, is involved in a new battle. I wasn’t there just to hear the preaching.

In the past year, the Austin Heights congregation has found itself in the thick of the intense fight over the Keystone XL pipeline, specifically the southern leg of it—running from Cushing, Oklahoma, through East Texas (within twenty miles of Nacogdoches) to Gulf Coast refineries in Port Arthur and Houston—which was fast-tracked by President Obama in March 2012 and is now nearing completion, according to TransCanada, the Canadian corporation building it.

I’d reached out to Childress, and following the morning service I was scheduled to meet and interview, there at the church, several members of Tar Sands Blockade, the diverse group of mostly young, radical climate and social-justice activists (many of them Occupy veterans) who one year earlier had mounted a high-stakes, headline-grabbing campaign of nonviolent direct action—including a dramatic, eighty-five-day aerial tree blockade and numerous lockdowns at construction sites—to stop or slow the pipeline’s construction in Texas. In the process, they’ve worked with everyone from local environmentalists raising the alarm on the dangers of tar sands leaks and spills (as seen in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Mayflower, Arkansas) to conservative landowners fighting TransCanada’s use (and, they will tell you, abuse) of eminent domain. Most of those who have engaged in and supported the direct action campaign—a true grassroots uprising—have been Texans, young and old, twentysomethings and grandparents.

Last fall, a number of the young blockaders, living at an encampment on private property just outside Nacogdoches, started coming to church at Austin Heights. And though they came from all sorts of cultural and religious backgrounds, and often had no religion at all, they formed a close bond with many members of the mostly white, middle-class congregation—who welcomed them into their homes like family—and had been working with the local grassroots anti-pipeline group Nacogdoches STOP (Stop Tar-Sands Oil Permanently), co-founded by members of Austin Heights.

Since the blockaders began showing up at his church, Childress told me as we drank coffee on his back porch the next morning, people have noticed a change in his preaching. “There’s an urgency that maybe I didn’t have before. They’re reminding us that climate change is not something we’re going to fiddle-faddle around with. I mean, you’ve got to step up now.”

But there’s more to it, Childress continued: “I’m preaching to young people who are putting their lives on the line. They didn’t come down here driving a Mercedes Benz, sitting around under a shade tree eating grapes. They hitchhiked. They rode buses. And they get arrested, they get pepper-sprayed, they get some stiff penalties thrown against them.” (In January, Tar Sands Blockade and allied groups settled a lawsuit brought by TransCanada seeking $5 million in damages for construction delays, forcing them to stay off the pipeline easement and any TransCanada property.)

Childress noted that some of the blockaders, especially the Occupy veterans, refer to the corporate capitalist system as “the Machine.” “And they’re exactly right, using that kind of language,” he said. “They’re going up against the Machine in a real, clearly defined way. Not subtle—really upfront. And I’m trying to help them realize what it’s going to take to sustain the struggle.”

* * *

When it exploded onto the scene last summer and fall, Tar Sands Blockade galvanized a climate movement that was ready for escalated direct action to stop the Keystone XL and build resistance to extreme fossil fuel extraction: everything from the exploitation of tar sands, to shale oil and gas fracking, to mountaintop-removal coal mining. As several climate organizers engaged at the national level have told me, the East Texas blockade showed the movement what it looks like to stand up and fight against seemingly insurmountable odds. Now, a full year since it launched, and with the southern leg of the pipeline all but in the ground, I wanted to find out how—and even if—Tar Sands Blockade would go forward.

In some ways, the challenges it faces reflect those facing the climate movement writ large. There’s a tension, which many in the movement feel, between the sheer urgency of climate action—the kind of urgency that leads one to blockade a pipeline—and the slower, more patient work required for organizing and movement building over the long haul. I wanted to know what it will take for Tar Sands Blockade to sustain its struggle—not only what it took to get into the fight, in such dramatic fashion, but what it takes to stay in the fight.

That first Sunday at Austin Heights, I talked for several hours with four blockaders who were still living at the camp outside town. All of them had been arrested while participating in various direct actions on the southern pipeline route. One of them, a young woman in her early 20s who asked not to be identified, was an Occupy veteran who’d engaged in a high-risk tree-sit on the pipeline easement and whose legal case was still unresolved. Another, a recent MIT grad named Murtaza Nek, whose family is Pakistani-American and whose Muslim faith is central to his climate-justice activism, told me he finds a lot of common ground with Childress and the Austin Heights congregation. He was arrested while serving as support for an action near Diboll, south of Nacogdoches.

A third blockader, 42-year-old Fitzgerald Scott, also an Occupy veteran (Tampa, DC, Denver), is a former Marine who was born in Trinidad, grew up in Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, and has a master’s in urban planning from the University of Illinois at Chicago. The only African-American blockader I met, he’d recently been arrested, not once but twice, for locking down at Keystone construction sites in Oklahoma. He told me that he’d joined the blockade out of solidarity with other activists and with people in frontline communities fighting the industry, not out of any deep environmental commitment. “To me, the environmental movement was far removed from blacks,” he said.

The fourth blockader was 22-year-old Matt Almonte. In December, he and another activist named Glen Collins locked themselves to each other and two 600-pound barrels filled with concrete inside part of the pipeline that was under construction—and came close to being gravely injured when police used machinery to pull the pipe sections apart by force. Though he was charged only with misdemeanors, his bail was set at $65,000, and he spent a month in jail.

Traveller wrote: "David wrote: "...we'd likely also need to end our dependence on oil .."

We're going to have to some time or another, and the sooner we start working on it, the better... but tell that to those who..."

Yep.

Agreed on the last point, but i think it does need to go away.

Small business behavior can be addressed in a personal way, getting business owners to recognize what is morally right (and in their own and their family's self interest), and programs such as Big History could potentially effect individuals who run businesses. However, the system of the stock market that drives profit requirements cannot be educated. And well-meaning CEOs will simply be deposed if they don't keep increasing profits. It literally is "the machine."

Just like we have such a big trend in "local foods" becoming mainstream, I think businesses need to become local only. That is privately held based on personal investment. Small businesses not big corporate ones. Not driven by the demands of the stock market. Small businesses aren't necessarily perfect but they are run by individuals who can be effected by concern for the future. Corporations are sometimes effected by bad PR but clearly not nearly enough. If they can off-load pollution costs to the public sector, they will because it is in their interest. If they can take the cheapest route, they will. Because they must.

Of course, to do away with corporations, we'd likely also need to end our dependence on oil so it's tied in to other big issues. To have hope is great, but I think hope in the right direction is more likely to have a chance. That is, I do not see how we can have hope that corporations will reform themselves for the good of the world before it is too late. But to have hope that enough people might wake up and someone how overthrow the corporate control of our government and then smash the corporations into submission...that would work even if it is far-fetched. This is all just my opinion, of course! I'm not very optimistic about reform.

Exactly, Trav. Business has the grip on government and the media making even basic reforms difficult let alone radical change. I'm not sure what can break the cycle...and quickly. A movement like Occupy was an opportunity but how to make something like that "sustainable" is the hardest part.

Ted wrote: "Another possible one is the simple argument that constantly rising profits are really no more possible than constantly increasing population or consumption. "

A valid argument that unfortunately the mechanics of the stock market obviates. Morality doesn't come into mathematics and the stock market turns individuals and systems into numbers.

What you say about recent developments in corporate demands may very well be true, but they won't change behavior (whether that is reverting or evolving) unless it is forced upon them. I don't see that happening without a radical change like abolishing the stock market. Reforms are weakened and un-enforced over time due to lobbying, change of administration, etc. Our social safety net is in the process of being gutted under a Democrat!

Hey Ted/Trav,

Haven't had a chance to post much here (sorry!), but I read this thread. Interesting stuff, Ted. I really like this premise of Big History. I think the biggest issue for me is that there is one huge gorilla that prevents sustainability from being taken seriously by the business community, primarily the corporate world, which is why teaching Big History as part of an MBA program seems kind of pointless, is the stock market. I've always felt the stock market needs to be abolished before sustainability can be meaningfully implemented. A corporation can be run by sustainable minded people, but if it doesn't show increased profits to the stock market on a quarterly basis, then they will eventually be deposed for a business leader who will drive profits. And that drive for short-term profits will always ruin sustainability practices.

Sure, Ted! I thought these articles were quite apropos. How radical...what is required to induce change...these are essential questions. How to wake the world up to the desperate need for change?

Note: I don't agree with Hansen's comments about "making government bigger" being bad - I think that phrase has been abused by the right and turned into something that it doesn't mean, but the rest of the speech seems valid.

The Courage to Fight Climate Change {ARTICLE]
James Hansen and Joseph Romm | May 27, 2013
 
The annual Ridenhour Prizes, which memorialize the spirit of whistleblower and investigative journalist Ron Ridenhour, recognize acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society. (For more on the prizes, which are awarded annually by the Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, go to ridenhour.org [1].) This year’s Courage Prize went to James Hansen, who as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies bravely told the truth about climate change even when the Bush administration tried to silence and penalize him. Introducing Hansen at the awards ceremony in Washington, DC, was Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and founding editor of ClimateProgress.org [2]. Their speeches are printed below.
 
Introduction by Joseph Romm
 
Dr. James Hansen is being honored today in part because he told Congress: “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.”
 
The courageous part isn’t what he said, it’s when he said it—twenty-five years ago, during the sweltering summer of 1988. It was the first high-profile public statement by a US government scientist alerting the country to this grave threat.

Jim embodies the Ridenhour Courage Prize. When he was still NASA’s top climate scientist, he blew the whistle on government efforts to silence him—and others—on climate change. Jim is a modern-day Paul Revere…if Paul Revere’s midnight ride had taken place in 1750 and the message was, “The British are coming, the British are coming—in twenty-five years.”

Yes, climate change is a challenging story to tell. And Jim has actually been telling it publicly since 1981, when he published his first warning that led to a major New York Times story, headlined “Study Finds Warming Trend That Could Raise Sea Levels.”

And yet carbon pollution has kept rising. We live in a spineless world, where being scientifically right for over thirty years gives you no more credit with the national media than being a professional disinformer funded by the fossil fuel industry.

How spineless is this world? If a doctor used the best
science to diagnose a smoker as having early-stage emphysema and the doctor did not urge the patient to quit cigarettes, he’d be charged with malpractice. But if a climatologist uses the best science to diagnose an entire planet as having early-stage climate change, and he urges the world to start quitting fossil fuels, well, then he is labeled an alarmist by industry-backed groups.

The truth is that we should all be alarmed by this great moral crisis of our time. By destroying a livable climate, we are stealing the future from our children and grandchildren and countless future generations.

To save this spineless world from itself, supplying the truth isn’t enough. You need to supply the spine, too. You need to be courageous. And so Jim has been forced by the times—and by his moral convictions—to become an activist.

There is a saying that applies to Jim: “One man with courage makes a majority.” How many scientists have spawned an entire movement?

Five years ago, Jim explained that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” we need to return carbon dioxide levels back to 350 parts per million. That led to Bill McKibben founding the group 350.org.

Then Jim said that burning the tar sands would be “game over for the climate”—and that led to the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the biggest protests and civil disobedience the climate movement had ever seen.

And because Jim has the courage of his convictions, he has had the courage to be convicted himself—he’s been arrested five times at peaceful protests.

Fifty years ago, another great moral crusader was arrested for protesting—and he wrote a letter from his jail cell in Birmingham explaining why. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. on April 16, 1963. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Now more than ever, we are tied in a single garment of destiny, cloaked as a species in a protective climate that we are in the process of unraveling. And so the need for activism, the need for courage, the need to speak out, is as great as ever. As King put it, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

It is my singular honor to give you a man who will not have to repent, a man for all seasons, literally—the winner of the 2013 Ridenhour Courage Prize, Dr. James Hansen.

* * *

Acceptance Speech by James Hansen
 
Thanks, Joe, for your kind words and especially for the huge amount of important and effective work that you have done in informing the public about climate change. And thanks to the Ridenhour organization for their persistence in offering me this prestigious award.

I would like to use my several minutes here to summarize the truth about our current predicament with human-made climate change and the opportunity that this presents for dealing with fundamental problems faced by people in the United States and the rest of the world.

I must emphasize the threat posed by our current energy pathway and the fact that we are rapidly running out of time for changing our course. Yet I should emphasize equally that a sensible course toward abundant clean energy is not only possible, but could yield stronger economies with more equitable opportunities for all. Such a course is needed if we are to preserve and enjoy the remarkable life on our planet.

The carbon dioxide, CO2, that we put in the air by burning fossil fuels will stay in the climate system for millennia. We have only felt part of the climate response from the CO2 already in the air—the climate responding only slowly because of the great inertia of the massive global ocean and ice sheets.

The irrefutable scientific conclusion is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without handing our children, grandchildren and future generations a situation that is out of their control, with enormous consequences for their well-being and for the very existence of many of the other species on our planet. We must leave most of the remaining coal in the ground, as well as the carbon-intensive, highly polluting unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands and tar shale.

The task of leaving these dirty fuels in the ground and moving on to a bright future for today’s young people cannot be accomplished by trickery and gimmicks, such as carbon cap-and-trade and offsets, with their inevitable horse-trading and lobbying.

We must have a simple, honest, across-the-board carbon fee collected from the fossil fuel companies at the small number of domestic mines and ports of entry. All of that money should be distributed to the public—100 percent of it—with equal amounts going to all legal residents. The fee must continue to rise gradually, so the public, businesses and entrepreneurs have the incentive to make choices and develop products that reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use.

This will stimulate the economy as we develop more carbon-efficient products and energy sources. About 60 percent of the people will get more money in their monthly dividend than they pay in increased prices, but to stay on the positive side, they must make wise choices. Yes, this implies some wealth redistribution. Low-income people, if they try, can gain somewhat. Rich people who have multiple houses and fly around the world will pay more than they receive in their dividend, but they can afford it.

This approach can be made international via an agreement between the United States and China. China has many reasons to join, as climate disruption will hit the Chinese hard, and they need to solve their severe pollution problems. Other nations will then join in order to avoid border duties on their products and in order to gain the clean energy benefits.

The United States must exercise leadership. This is the last chance for the liberal left and the conservative right to cooperate for the good of the nation and the world, for the good of young people, future generations and nature.

What I have described is a progressive conservative approach. It puts an honest price on fossil fuels, making them pay their costs to society. It allows all alternatives to compete on a level playing field.

We must demand that the liberal left keep their hands off of our wallets. Not one dime of the carbon fee should be used to make the government bigger. One hundred percent of the money must go to the public. Nor should any of this money be used for subsidizing research on specific government-selected industries. The government is not competent to choose the best technologies—let them all compete. There are existing government resources and departments for research, development and demonstration, which can assist early development of candidate technologies.

The public is fed up with self-indulgent partisanship. If today’s parties cannot cooperate on such a simple, honest approach that would stimulate our economy, provide millions of good jobs, a clean environment and a stable climate, then in 2016 there should be a new party—not a fringe party on the left or right, but a centrist party, an American Party, a party that will take Washington back from the lobbyists and give it to the American people.

Thoreau's Radicalism and the Fight Against the Fossil-Fuel Industry (PART 2)

The speech itself is stunning. What Thoreau was saying in his “Plea” for Brown was the same thing he’d said a decade earlier in “Civil Disobedience”—“action from principle…is essentially revolutionary”—only in far stronger terms, and with real skin in the game. What was once a kind of philosophical exercise was now in deadly earnest: Brown’s raid and certain execution—not to mention the risk of publicly aligning oneself with him—made Thoreau’s night in jail look like child’s play. (The day after Brown’s hanging in early December, Thoreau became an accomplice in the escape of a desperate Harper’s Ferry conspirator, spiriting him out of Concord to a train for Canada.)

But what I find most striking about Thoreau’s “Plea” isn’t the fact that he championed the violent and fanatical Brown; it’s the rhetorical strategy he chose. Thoreau explicitly sets out to defend him not in the court of conventional opinion, nor of any state or constitution, but in the court of conscience. “I plead not for his life,” Thoreau tells his audience, “but for his character—his immortal life.” Most of all, and most profoundly, it becomes clear, this means pleading for Brown’s sanity.

Nothing offends Thoreau more than the knee-jerk reaction among his neighbors, and even many abolitionists, to write Brown off as a madman. “Even the Liberator called it ‘a misguided, wild, and apparently insane…effort,’” he writes. “Republican editors…express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men ‘deluded fanatics’—‘mistaken men’—‘insane,’ or ‘crazed.’” This pushes Thoreau over the edge: “Insane!… while the sane tyrant holds with a firmer gripe [sic] than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon!… Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane.” Far from insane, Thoreau argues, Brown was the “superior man,” even Christ-like—an explicit, if rather strained, comparison throughout the speech.

In defending not only Brown’s actions but his sanity against the moderate opinion of what we might call the “center” and “center-left,” Thoreau was pushing hard on the boundaries of acceptable discourse. He was, as the saying goes, moving the center. He forced his listeners to consider what was truly “sane” and “insane” in the face of slavery. For Thoreau, Brown’s was a “saner sanity,” recognizing the fact that slavery, intolerable on every level, would never be abolished in the United States without bloodshed. This is what it meant, Thoreau was saying, to be sane in America in 1859.

“In my walks, I would fain return to my senses,” Thoreau wrote (with characteristic wordplay) in the great essay “Walking”—first delivered as a lecture in April 1851, in the midst of the uproar over another escaped slave, Thomas Simms, who had been seized in Boston and returned to the South. It’s the same essay in which Thoreau wrote the line most quoted by conservationists: “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” In John Brown, Thoreau would encounter a human force of nature, a kind of wildness, that he hoped would bring the country to its senses, its sanity, on the question of slavery—the kind of sanity Thoreau had expressed in “Civil Disobedience”: “This people must cease to hold slaves…though it cost them their existence as a people.”

* * *

Fortunately, Thoreau—with his explicit endorsement of violence—didn’t get the last word on civil disobedience. Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others (including some environmentalists) transformed resistance to intolerable injustice in ways Thoreau never imagined—demonstrating the power of a steadfast, principled, radical nonviolence. Gandhi and King were the best kind of radicals. So was Jesus (whose nonviolence Thoreau conveniently omits from his “Plea”).

And yet today we face a human crisis as extreme in its way as the one faced by Thoreau. What is the “sane”—and appropriately radical—response to the urgent human crisis of global warming? Is anyone willing to say, “This people must cease to extract fossil fuels, and to unjustly rob today’s children and future generations of a livable planet, whatever the cost”?

It sounds crazy. But just as Thoreau and other radical abolitionists were willing to push the boundaries, so climate activists must be willing to say and do “crazy” and “radical” things—like put their bodies in the way of coal shipments, or demand that universities divest from fossil fuel companies—not because it’s politically expedient, but because it’s morally imperative. When the truly sane courses of action—putting a heavy price on carbon, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, massively scaling up clean energy, urgently seeking the necessary global commitments—lie outside the limits of political “realism” and “reasonable” debate, it’s time to ask who has the firmer grip on reality and reason.

And it’s time to take the strongest nonviolent action. As climate radicals, we need to be true to our understanding of the facts, and to our principles, our perception of right, even as conscience compels us to act—to be, crazy as it may sound, revolutionaries.

Thoreau's Radicalism and the Fight Against the Fossil-Fuel Industry (PART 1)

Wen Stephenson | May 27, 2013

On a clear and seasonably cold Sunday morning in March, I made my way through the streets of an old neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, and entered a large, converted brick building from some other century. Inside, in a cavernous room with worn floors and south-facing windows lit by the sun, a group of seventy or more young climate activists—mostly college students and recent graduates from the Boston area, along with a few veterans of the Occupy and global justice movements—were gathering for a full day and night of final preparations before carrying out a dramatic peaceful protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. The company building the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, has its US Northeast office down the road in Westborough, and there, the next morning, twenty-five of these activists—accompanied by more than eighty others, young and old—would be arrested for conscientious, nonviolent civil disobedience.

These people, and those like me who support them, might with some fairness be called “radical”—not just because of their willingness to go to jail to express their principles, but because what they demand lies well outside the limits of mainstream partisan politics and conventional media wisdom.

How radical are they? They insist that those in power take seriously the international scientific consensus that says global greenhouse emissions must be cut at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and that two-thirds to three-fifths of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, if today’s young people and future generations are to have any reasonable hope of a livable climate. They insist, given this reality, that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry heed what leading scientists are telling them: that massive new long-term investments in fossil fuel infrastructure like the Keystone XL—which will only accelerate and prolong the extraction of carbon-heavy crude from the Alberta tar sands, one of the largest carbon pools on the planet—are unconscionable.

Those activists in Worcester and Westborough weren’t alone. As the battle over Keystone moves toward a climax this summer or fall, when Obama is expected to make a final decision, it has become the central rallying point for a broad and diverse climate movement at what looks like a pivotal, and “radicalizing,” moment. More and more, what Bill McKibben recently dubbed the “Fossil Fuel Resistance” is turning to nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to make its demands seen and heard.

The resistance has spread across the country. The fights are intensifying against mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia, coal exports from the West Coast and shale-gas fracking in the Northeast, with waves of civil disobedience actions. Most dramatically, along the Keystone’s southern leg from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast in Texas (greenlighted by Obama last year during his re-election campaign), members of the Tar Sands Blockade—including climate activists, property owners, indigenous groups and people from frontline communities—have put their bodies in the way of the pipeline’s construction, often at great risk, both physical and legal. In early March, CREDO Action issued a call to activists to resist the pipeline, and more than 59,000 people have now pledged to engage in peaceful civil disobedience if Obama approves it. Even the Sierra Club officially decided in February to participate in civil disobedience for the first time in its 120-year history. Its executive director, Michael Brune, was among forty-eight protesters arrested at the White House on February 13, three days before some 50,000 people rallied and marched in Washington to oppose Keystone and call for serious action on climate change—the kind of action that science, and conscience, demand.

* * *

When Brune announced the Sierra Club’s decision in January, in a short, eloquent piece titled “From Walden to the White House,” he explicitly invoked the legacy of Henry David Thoreau and, of course, Thoreau’s most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience.” For Brune, as for many other activists, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience is a sacred American tradition. “We’ll be following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau,” he wrote, “who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.”

And yet, as the climate movement embraces the legacy of “Civil Disobedience,” perhaps it’s worth taking a step back and remembering just how radical Thoreau really was—and why. We should remember what it was, exactly, that made him so. Not his night in the Concord jail—that was the easy part—but something else: a readiness to speak the truth, forcefully and without compromise, no matter how fanciful or extreme it may have sounded to jaded ears or what risks it might have entailed. What’s more, if we’re going to invoke Thoreau, we should remember that he was less an environmentalist (a term that would have made no sense to him) than a radical abolitionist—and that the logic of “Civil Disobedience” led directly, a decade later, to “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

If that thought doesn’t make you pause, it should. We might want to ask ourselves if we’re really ready to walk in Thoreau’s footsteps, and what it might mean, at this radical moment, if we did.

Despite its global reputation for greatness, I have to admit that I’ve never much liked “Civil Disobedience,” the essay Thoreau began drafting in his cabin at Walden Pond in the fall of 1846. The tone is a little too arch, his performance somewhat preening. “I was not born to be forced,” he writes. “I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” Regardless of such posturing (or perhaps because of it?), you can’t help feeling that there’s not a whole lot at stake for him personally—that he was, in a way, slumming it there in jail for a night—so that it takes on the air of a privileged intellectual exercise, a kind of abstract thought experiment to be conducted, after a good dinner, in Mr. Emerson’s parlor.

Still, for all the mannered poses, there’s a reason the essay has lasted, that its influence extends across continents and centuries. So it’s worth reminding ourselves what Thoreau is really saying in “Civil Disobedience.” From a relatively minor incident, now wrapped in legend, in the last week of July 1846—he was stopped on his way into town to get a shoe repaired and asked to pay his poll tax, which he refused to do, though it meant jail—Thoreau gets down to first principles. The country was engulfed in controversy over the Mexican War, a flagrant act of aggression to expand slave territory to the west, and there was even secession talk in the North. But why, Thoreau wants to know, should he wait for a vote in the State House? “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?”

The moral equation, Thoreau is saying, isn’t terribly complicated. There are expedient reasons to recognize the authority of a government, as he admits. But he insists that we recognize those situations “in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.” He goes on, in the very next lines, to offer a stark analogy: “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself…. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

From this straight-up, no-nonsense formulation, Thoreau lays down a marker, a point from which he’ll navigate. “Action from principle,” he tells us, “the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”

This is strong stuff—and prophetic, in more ways than one. What we have here is a kind of working definition of Thoreau’s radicalism: call it the willingness to face the “essential facts” (as he put it in Walden), and then to act as both facts and conscience require. Doing so, he assures us, “is essentially revolutionary”—the only real way to change the world.

* * *

Thoreau’s image as a kind of misanthropic recluse, an apolitical hermit, has always been a caricature; what we know about his active involvement in the Underground Railroad, and his resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, puts the lie to it. Whether or not, as he hinted in Walden, Thoreau sheltered a runaway slave in his cabin at the pond—which seems unlikely, based on the evidence—we know that he helped multiple fugitives on their way to Canada, guarding over them in his family’s house (the Thoreaus were committed abolitionists, especially his mother and sisters), even escorting them onto the trains, not without personal risk.

In May of 1854, a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston. Radical abolitionists made a dramatic attempt to free him from the courthouse by force, and only with the intervention of state and federal troops on the streets of Boston was Burns sent back into slavery. On July 4, Thoreau took an unprecedented personal step into activism and mounted a platform at Harmony Grove in Framingham—alongside William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth and other prominent abolitionists—to address a boisterous anti-slavery rally. The speech, known as “Slavery in Massachusetts,” is merciless in its contempt for the Commonwealth. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” he told his audience. “Nature,” he proclaimed, “has been partner to no Missouri Compromise.” The plight of Anthony Burns, and so many other fugitives, had reminded him of his own uncompromising principle. Five years later, in the fall of 1859, it would be put to the test.

Henry Thoreau met John Brown in March 1857. Already famous, or infamous, for his bloody exploits in Kansas—today we would call them war crimes—Brown came through Concord on a speaking and fundraising tour of the Northeast. Thoreau and Emerson spent hours talking with him, sizing him up, and came away greatly impressed.

But not everyone in Concord was so taken with Brown—far from it—and when the news arrived in October 1859 of Brown’s deadly raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, reactions were sharply divided. The whole country was in an uproar. Even Brown’s erstwhile supporters quickly distanced themselves. Most of his co-conspirators—many with close ties to Concord—went into hiding, several fleeing to Canada. The atmosphere was tense, even dangerous, for those voicing solidarity with Brown.

Into this picture steps 42-year-old Henry Thoreau, now a leading intellectual. Incensed by the timid and hypocritical reactions of his neighbors, and of the press, Thoreau let it be known that he would speak in support of Brown at Concord’s First Church on October 30. The address he gave was “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

That fall of 1859 was Thoreau’s most radical moment. He was the first in Concord, and among the first and most prominent in the country, to come to Brown’s defense. Within days he would repeat the speech to large audiences in Boston—where he stood in at the last moment for Frederick Douglass, who had been chased into Canada by federal marshals despite having played no part in the Harper’s Ferry raid—and in Worcester.

Hi everyone! I thought the most recent issue of The Nation had some relevant articles worth reading. If you haven't heard of The Nation, I do recommend checking it out. I have subscribed for going on 25 years--I find it to be the best source for news from a Progressive/Liberal/Radical perspective. You can check out the website at: http://www.thenation.com.

Here's the issue:

Greetings -

I have long time interest in environmental issues but have not heard of the Transition movement before. I'm interested in learning about environmental movements in general. I live in the Chicagoland area.

Since I'm not a moderator, I don't think I can create Folders for this group. I recently read a few interesting articles about environmentalism and environmental movements that I thought would be interesting to share. Could someone create a folder for other environmental resources or articles? Perhaps there could also be another thread somewhere for other group suggestions?

Cheers!
- David