10.26.2007

Do you think this is a movement?

Like many of you, I've had a lot of conversations recently about 'the movement'. It takes on a certain inflection when you say it. Talking to so many people who work deeply on this thing makes us forget that some people don't quite understand the special inflection.

Jeremy Doochin is an amazing leader. Growing up in Tennessee with parents in the Sierra Club, Jeremy started a student group in high school that grew to 80 members. As a teenager he was elected to the state Sierra Club board of directors and by all means is a well respected and accomplished activist. When we first started talking Jeremy didn't quite see this as a movement.

We talked about the divide between youth and adults in the types of campaigns they take on and how they approach their work. He talked about how there was so much room for collaboration, saying youth should be throwing events every year that adults can go to, and vice versa to establish an ongoing relationship. While I am all for working with and involving adults, I asked why we should run the same events every year. Why aren't we looking for an broad escalation of tactics? Why are we still thinking in terms of 'throwing events' for environmental issues? He didn't quite know.

A movement escalates until it wins. It may do a lot of other things, but it will not accept half-way measures, it will not accept stagnation and it will expand at an ever-increasing rate. The climate movement is very young. We're growing really fast, but we're also still figuring a lot of stuff out.

Here's a book recommendation: Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for POWER in your Community by Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos. It says engaging in movement-building “provides a space for intensive political education.” Investing in the political education of all our members not only spurs activists to greater levels of commitment, it also empowers them to guide and change the direction of the movement. We've already challenged established leaders of environmentalism, and this bottom up ground-swell is going to challenge every leader out there to listen harder to what the people are saying will get the job done.

Americans are generally pretty poorly informed about social movements. High school history class tends to teach the 'great leaders' version of events, and imply that only extraordinary citizens have an impact. More from the book:


“Your work is rooted in the history of social change. Your day-to-day organizing may give you some opportunities to educate members, leaders, and staff about this history, but in movement activities, this political education can occur at a deeper level. Members learn about the history of struggle in a place they are visiting and about other people they need to work with but may not understand.”


But there are a lot of youth like Jeremy out there who don't see it yet. So far we haven't reached a critical mass of youth. Why do you think we're bringing 4,000 people to DC for Power Shift? Is it going to shift the balance of power? Is every one of us going to come away with a crystal clear vision of where we need to go? Or is this a huge drumbeat in the increasingly rapid rhythm of a movement which might falter or stall, but which will be so democratic, so well planned, so inspired that we will not only win without compromise, but we will win before its too late. I'm in it for the Long Haul, and I want to be smart. I want to win more than anything in the world, but I know we're not going to win until we're ready.

We must internalize the need to escalate tactics until we win. We must lose the notion that we'll only work on climate change for a few years until we get a real job, or until we pass the legislation we need. If you think that the next president is going to fix this, you've been dreaming. They'll pass some legislation, and it won't be nearly as good as we need it to be. Old style environmentalists, and the American public, will call that a success. Hey, compromise is always better than nothing, right? That's the mentality the climate cannot afford.

Our work right now is to invest in the political awareness of ourselves and other youth. With political awareness comes more strategic campaigns, and with really good strategic campaigns, we're going to win. Do you think this is a movement? Do the people you work with?

This essay is the third of a six part series this fall looking at organizing for power in the youth movement. All comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

10.23.2007

A Greener Eph: We're Flying

Holy shit, its hard to keep track of the multitude of events. Here's a little help!

Check out John Edwards and the New Orleans Step it UP event. Check out any post on Its Getting Hot in Here to see everything that's going on. Thousands of youth are going to converge on DC to slingshot our energy forward at Power Shift, including 17 from Williams and tons from other schools in Western Mass.

Bill McKibbon's posting on the Daily Kos and CNN's investigation 'A Planet in Peril'. (Although note CNN's action center, which tells you to save the world by donating money. Apparently there's no other way.) Why not post a Green Finger video or invite a presidential candidate to a step if up rally?



Coal power plants are being denied in Kansas. Check out the dedicated citizens who got themselves arrested last weekend for disrupting the daily flow of Washington.

The earth is on fire, from the parched fields in Atlanta to the literal flames lapping at the hills of Holywood. This summer's sea-ice loss shocked scientists and the great lakes are shrinking.

"Social movements are a type of group action. They are a large scale informal groupings of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out a social change."
--Wkipedia, "Social Movement"


We are becoming the change we wish to see in the world. When do we call upon ourselves to step it up? At what point do we start missing class to fight for global justice? When do we forgoe (or at least postpone) income and career to work day and night on a cause? When do we use the tools available to us, our minds and our bodies, to speak truth to power, stand up to destruction and be braver than has ever been asked of us before?

A Greener Eph: Ready for Power Shift 2007

Power Shift is coming. Here's the update from Williams, and for Mass Youth Climate Action.

We're taking 17 students from Williams to the 3 day conference at the University of MD. About 19 students from MCLA and another 18 from Simons Rock in Great Barrington round out the Berkshire country squad.

We had a good conference call tonight to work on an agenda for the state break-out session. We're planning on getting the roughly 200 MA students excited to work on state campaign type stuff, and share what we've done so far, and plug them into specific committees - all in an hour! I hope its a good agenda.

Things are flying.

10.17.2007

A Greener Eph: Ella Baker on Organizing

For Ella Baker, the increased reliance on the press and th need of leaders for public recognition was a common element in the degeneration of social movement, a part of the pattern by which initially progressive American movements have traditionally been
rendered ineffective. She contended that the labor movement had succumbed to what she called the American weakness of receiving some recognition from the powers that be and then taking on some of the characteristics and values of their former enemies. Similarly, in the NAACP of the forties and fifties, she thought that the thirst for
recognition was one of the factors leading to accommodationist politics at a time when many of the members were ready for a more militant program. Too many leaders thought that as long as they were getting some attention from the press, as long as they could call important whites on the phone, the Race was making progress. In the
1960s, she thought that some Black Power spokespersons became so enamored of the coverage they were receiving from the press as to begin performing for the press. ...

The substance of Black Power didn't trouble her; the lack of organizing did. She noted that she had seen Carmichael explain Black Power in ways that should have made sense to any person willing to look at the facts.

"But this began to be taken up, you see, by youngsters who had not gone through any experiences of any steps of thinking and it did become a slogan, much more of a slogan, and the rhetoric was far in advance of the organization for achieving that which you say you're out to achieve. What was needed was a greater
degree of real concentration on organizing people. I keep bringing this up. I'm sorry, but it's part of me. I just don't see anything to be substituted for having people understand their position and understand their potential power and how to use it. This can only be done, as I see it, through the long route, almost, of actually
organizing people in small groups and parlaying those groups into larger groups."


I've Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne

10.10.2007

A greener Eph: Power Shift 2007


If you haven't checked out the website, there's tons of info about the schedule,
talks, trainings and generally how awesome it will be. http://www.powershift2007.org You can also see who else from Williams is interested in going so far on the facebook group Power Shift - Williamstown.

As a climate activist here, a big priority for the year is getting a lot of students to DC for this event. Of course its important nationally for this conference to have a huge turnout, because that shows the strength of our movement, but there are also a lot of reasons why Williams students will get a lot out of this.

First, we live in the purple bubble. Its often hard to feel like we're doing anything significant when we don't see what's going on at other schools or what other students like us are working on. We're not the only ones, but we don't always see our peers.

Second, conferences get people excited. I come away from every conference even more excited about the possibilities for work, connections to be made, new arguments to talk about and a greater sense of the urgency of the climate crisis. Its often not the key-note speakers, but the random conversations in hallways, friends of friends, or hearing the questions/frustrations/experiences of other attendees. I thrive off that kind of excitement, and I think a lot of other people can get into this that way.

Third: trainings. It takes lots of skills to be an effective activist. No one wants to be an ineffective activist, but without the how-to knowledge of leadership, organizations, press, budgets, lobbying, recruitment, etc, a lot of people just get really frustrated. A lot of this weekend will be this type of skills training. We pay a lot for a Williams education, but you'll be shocked to find out how much you can learn in a weekend (and things taught by other students or recent students, too!).

Fourth, this weekend is going to be historic. I have a feeling that you'll be able to tell your grand-kids that you were at one of the major tipping points in the battle for citizens to have a voice in how the world is run, when we finally started to take power into our own hands the way a democracy should be run. There's a feeling that I'm getting from people that its time for a change.

So that was probably more intense than you were looking for. It'll mostly be really fun.

10.09.2007

Hamburgers



Winning a campus victory is nothing more than a hamburger.

"More Than a Hamburger" went a speech by Ella Baker at the founding conference of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. The organization went on to lead the most radical, militant and successful non-violent protests to break the back of the Jim Crow south, but in April of 1960 the participants at this conference were rookies, fresh with the pride of victory. They had started doing sit-ins only three months before, and the wave of spontaneous protest had spread across the south. Now they assembled at the first conference many had ever been to, and had to decide what to do. Baker desperately wanted the students to see their recent victories as a wedge to pry open much broader and more difficult problems for Blacks.

In the hind-sight of history, we often forget that great things have auspicious, even uncertain beginnings. The chance that these students would succeed in creating a strong and dynamic organization with enough independence to actually be radical was not good. Older civil rights activists schemed about how to co opt the students. The students themselves didn't have a focus or a direction. Julian Bond remembered, "to our mind, lunch-counter segregation was the greatest evil facing black people in the country."

Young people in SNCC saw two kinds of goals. First was the final goal of equality and freedom. Equal protection under the law, safety from discrimination and intimidation, respect, opportunity, etc. I can only speculate that even the students who had recently desegregated their lunch-counters didn't imagine all these things as immediate goals, or even ones they would see in their life-times, but I bet for the first time in their lives they were considering these to be possible. Nonetheless, the end goals were fairly established, barring somewhat fringe debates over returning to Africa or specific retaliations against whites.

The second goal that most of these students saw clearly was desegregation. They had seen the problem, they had a ready made goal (to be able to sit in some place) and they had shown bravery in reaching that goal. Unfortunately, they were quickly realizing desegregated lunch counters were only a little bit closer to an end of racism than before.

The climate movement is stuffed full of "hamburger" actions. We've heard the list of personal actions time and time again. If you're reading this, you already have the good lights, your probably a vegetarian and you don't go joyriding in your 4x4 truck. There is another kind of hamburger out there. Campus Climate Challenge victories, signatures on the President Climate Commitment and clean energy purchasing fees are also just lunch-counters. Very important, but definitely not intermediate goals.

There is a huge disconnect between the big, giant problem of climate change, and the tiny solutions we offer to individuals or small groups. Of course we need small actions to hook people into taking bigger ones. Whether its switching to a high-fuel economy car or getting a group together to lobby your administration, these are still just steps that get more involved and invested experienced so we can take on bigger things.

The other reason we're afraid of intermediate goals is their complexity. Intermediate goals require collaboration with other organizations. They require us to trust groups that we haven't worked with before, and they require us to ask much harder questions about strategy - what will be most effective? Does a march do more for the climate than signing up 10,000 customers for clean energy?

I applaud efforts in several states to establish action-oriented state networks. I am fascinated by where some schools have gone after achieving a significant victory - expanding the activism and vitality out into the community like in MaCalister and Middlebury. But I feel that this is a key time for our movement because we do need to shift from primarily working with student groups on campuses to engaging a much broader and more diverse society, but doing so in a way that brings more focus on ambitious but achievable goals.

We're moving beyond hamburgers. They're important, we're earned them, but don't kid yourself for a moment into thinking that was the easy part...or the tipping point.

Sources: I've Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne

Note: This essay is the second in a six part exploration into campus organizing. The study will focus on applying organizing theory and experience to the day-to-day challenges of building the youth climate movement at Williams College, in Berkshire County and in the state of Massachusetts.

10.08.2007

A Green Eph: Visit to Middlebury


SUNDAY NIGHT GROUP is the climate activism group at Middlebury. Only about 3 years old, SNG has transformed the campus into a hotbed of national climate action. One year ago SNG was the inspiration for Williams TNG - we even copied the name. Having heard about SNG for so long, and spent loads of energy for the past year trying to emulate it, I finally had a chance to attend a meeting.

Being reading period, we don't have class on Monday or Tuesday. Three of us drove up last night and met Sierra, a junior and leader of the group. We had dinner and then headed up to the gathering. About 55 people filled a big living room, with some beer in the middle of the circle and chatted for a while. The meeting started with rhythmic clapping which spread and quieted the conversation. Everyone went around saying their name and the answer to a random question they had thought of in their head. I said Ella Baker.

There was a period of announcements about events, news, and fun facts, including one from a community member. Then project groups were announced and things split up. Groups consisted of a 'kick the bottle' campaign against bottled water, a mock-presidential debate on the climate, a group working on campus lighting, and another on solar heating for dorms.

I sat in the presidential debate group, which was in its second week, planning an event 2 1/2 weeks out. They divided up roles and brainstormed actors who could fill the roles. The campus improv group was decided upon. Publicity, scripts, location and logistics were all taken care of in a few minutes each.

Then clapping brought everyone back together again, and the circle reformed, standing, to do a quick 'shake-it-to-the-left' dance/song.

I liked clapping as a means of bringing the group in, as opposed to one person shouting (communal vs. individual), and consequently there wasn't nearly as much feel of someone facilitating the meeting. I was most impressed by how readily people volunteered for roles. The expectation of doing work on projects independently, outside of meetings was very strong. And I loved how accepted the song was at the end.

Lots of thoughts here for TNG, but at the same time I don't feel we need to copy it even more - every campus is different. Sierra felt that Middlebury students really respond to the chill atmosphere and the non-hierarchical nature of the group. My feeling is that Williams students respond to a more professional atmosphere, even if it seems chill and relaxed on the surface.

The bottom line: both groups major strength is an emphasis on getting things done and promoting leadership in every member. A bunch of them are coming down on Thursday to see Michael Pollen, and then staying for TNG. It'll be sweet to compare notes.

10.06.2007

A Greener Eph: Names are important

TNG is now officially Thursday Night Grassroots. After a brainstorming session, the co-chairs talked about what we need in a name.

We need something that is not off-putting, or assigns us some automatic identity. But we also need something that has some description of what we do - grassroots activism. Its cumbersome to recruit new members or make connections with the greater community when we have to explain who we are and why we have such a unique name. On the other hand, TNG is a strong identity on campus already, and we definitely didn't want to change that.

Thus, we arrive at Thursday Night Grassroots. Comments are welcome, but it looks like the name will slowly come into usage. Unfortunately, I can't change the name of the facebook group without having to create a new one. That might be around for a while.

10.03.2007

A Greener Eph: Localize it!

Local economies are sweet. I've been biking three miles out to a farm one morning a week to harvest vegetables. I get paid in produce. I don't consume fossil fuels, I get freakin' sweet tasting food, and I get to know a farmer who has a 35 year living relationship with this place.


Zoe and Farmer Bill peeling squash in the barn

Normally I don't get too worked up about food. If it tastes good, sweet, if not, then I eat it anyway because I'm hungry. But this food really tastes good! Maybe it has something to do with picking it myself and knowing where it comes from? Any psychology majors out there want to comment?

Normally this blog does not advocate personal reduction in carbon footprints. It is more important to lobby your senator or organize a political event than bring a cloth bag to the store. I'm sorry, but there are enough people out there encouraging personal savings and that's only half the equation. The other half gets left out because its harder, because its bolder, because it is less tangible and feels less self-righteous. We will never have a sustainable society without a much more active and political citizenry.

BUT... It feels really damn good to work on the farm. Maybe its partly mental health, maybe its a meditative kind of manual labor that helps me think. Or maybe there's some deeper instinct within us that needs to be close to where our food comes from, that feels the things we pick, the landscape we live in, the cycles of weather and the fresh air.

After Thursday Night Group gatherings, working on the farm is often my most satisfying time of the week. That's a pretty good reason to do it. A carbon-free source of food is a nice bonus.

10.01.2007

A Greener Eph: Powershift and Step it UP

A day is looming on the near horizon of the climate movement. November 3rd will be the biggest day of action we have ever seen, but it will be big because we will be split.

Step it UP Berkshires is going to be held at some combination of Jiminy Peak and Williams. Powershift , the first ever national youth climate conference is at the University of MD for that weekend.

I had a lot of trouble deciding what to do about this weekend, since both are really awesome. But now that Thursday Night Group has swelled to a much larger membership, we see a much stronger group, one that can split its energies into making two events happen. I don't think it will be that hard to get 15 students down to MD for a long weekend (Friday morning to Monday night), and still have enough organizers and interested students in town to get a big turnout for Step it up.

So Williams is sending a team to Powershift.