The view from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where atmospheric research has been conducted since the 1950s. (WNV/Bryan Farrell)

Standing atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii, with this gorgeous view in front of me, it was hard to imagine that the air I was breathing carried a deadly message. Then again, as the largest volcano on Earth, Mauna Loa is not exactly home to the most welcoming of climates. Ancient Hawaiians only went there to make offerings. Tourists seldom visit. The only reason to drive away from the tropical beaches below, up a poorly maintained road that has potholes within potholes, through several climate zones each colder and less hospitable than the last, is to study, well, the climate.

Since the 1950s, scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory have been monitoring changes in the atmosphere — most prominently, the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas emitted by humans). When I was there in January 2012, CO2 was measured at 397 parts per million. That’s nearly 120 ppm above pre-industrial levels, about 80 ppm above the first measurement in 1958 and 47 ppm above what’s considered the safe upper limit.

Last week, for the first time in several million years, we reached the milestone figure of 400 ppm. As a result, this generally overlooked beacon of climate science, administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found itself in the news. But in many ways, the news can frequently be traced back to this remote peak in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. From extreme weather to political debate to massive protests like the ones against the Keystone XL pipeline, the research from Mauna Loa is one of the main reasons we talk about climate change and understand that it is the result of humans altering the composition of the atmosphere.

As someone who has been writing about climate change for the better part of a decade, I was primed to visit Mauna Loa when a family vacation led me to Hawaii (woah is my carbon footprint!). But I was also eager to find out what the scientists thought of their research fueling something like an actual climate movement. Station Chief John Barnes, however, was typically scientific in his response, saying, “If NOAA says this is what we predict for climate change, whether you want to do anything about it is a decision for society, not NOAA.”

Of course, not all scientists can remain so neutral after so many years of waiting for society to do anything with their research. NASA climate scientist James Hansen recently announced his retirement to pursue activism full time. After being the first scientist to testify before Congress about the threat of climate change in 1988, then seeing two decades of inaction — not to mention his research being subverted by the Bush administration — Hansen has become increasingly more outspoken, and he has been arrested at several civil disobedience actions in recent years targeting the fossil fuel industry.

Meanwhile, journalist Bill McKibben, who wrote the first widely-read book on climate change in 1989, has followed a similar path, leading major protests — such as the one against the Keystone XL — through his group 350.org (which is a reference to the safe upper limit of atmospheric CO2 in parts per million). After the announcement of the 400 ppm milestone last week, McKibben said, “The only question now is whether the relentless rise in carbon can be matched by a relentless rise in the activism necessary to stop it.”

With that in mind, he and 350.org just announced the next phase in the struggle — something they are calling “Summer Heat.” As noted in the press release:

The last two weeks of July are, statistically, the hottest stretch of the year. This year we want to make them politically hot too. Which means we need you, out on the front line. We need some of you to risk going to jail, and all of you to show up and speak out.

Of course, it won’t just be the end of July when climate actions start heating up. In June, climate justice groups across the country are launching something called “Fearless Summer,” focused on mining and drilling sites. Meanwhile, indigenous groups organizing around land rights issues are calling for a “Sovereignty Summer” and student-led fossil fuel divestment campaigns will look to continue building momentum heading into the fall.

A plaque dedicated to Charles Keeling’s research into increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, as depicted by the famous “Keeling curve.” (Waging Nonviolence/Bryan Farrell)

All this would likely be appreciated by Charles Keeling, the man who began the observations on Mauna Loa and first noticed the rise in CO2 concentrations. Although he was cautious to make pronouncements about his research, he became less so in his later years. In 1998, he published an essay rebutting claims that global warming was a myth, stating that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.” But Keeling passed away in 2005, just as the political battle lines were beginning to harden — something his wife later told The New York Times would have dismayed him.

If there is any antidote for such dismay, however, it has to be this burst of activism — a burst that has emanated from the top of a volcano in Hawaii, has reached the mainland, and is now poised to push for change that preserves and sustains human life. Maybe that’s the real message in the air above Mauna Loa. If that’s the case, it’s not so deadly after all.

Witness Against Torture activists during a “die-in” on the steps of the Federal Courthouse at Manhattan’s Foley Square earlier this week. (Witness Against Torture)

We Are Many – Episode 1

Remember Guantánamo — the ugly poster-child of the post 9/11 American extrajudicial detention system? Along with Abu Ghraib, it was the most in-your-face example of the terrible, absolutely inhumane pit-of-revenge this country would stoop to during its War on Terror. If not for the more than 100 prisoners currently on hunger strike and in the headlines, Guantánamo might actually seem like a distant memory. After all, for his first act as president in 2009, Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the detention facility. It was a symbolic, yet decisive end to an era. Except it wasn’t. That era continued, under new leadership, and with new weaponry. And the prison stayed open.

While most Americans have learned to forget, or simply give up on the Guantánamo chapter ever ending, a small band of activists have kept the issue alive. Known for donning orange jumpsuits and black hoods, and parading around the nation’s capital, these activists are the only form of domestic resistance continually raising this issue. But why do they do it? Why, when there are so many other injustices to confront — injustices that involve more than 166 people on some distant strip of land in Cuba?

Luke Hansen speaking to Witness Against Torture about his trip to Guantánamo. (Flickr/Justin Norman)

These are questions that I put to my first guest on We Are Many, the new podcast by Waging Nonviolence. His name is Luke Hansen and he’s an active member of Witness Against Torture — the campaign to shut down Guantánamo. Over the past several years, Luke has managed to meet former detainees exiled in Bermuda, as well as travel to Guantánamo itself as a journalist for the weekly Catholic magazine America. If anyone can explain why this issue is of utmost importance, it’s Luke.

But beyond making sense of the Guantánamo issue, this episode, and the ones to come, will examine what it is that makes an activist. Because, after all, no activist was born caring about an issue. There’s always some reason or event that guides them. And once you realize that, you realize that anybody can be an activist. It’s just a matter of circumstance. But once you do become an activist — and maybe this is why non-activists have a hard time relating — the work changes you. It provides a new outlook. And that kind of transformation is the key ingredient to any good story.

So, with that explanation, I present the first episode of We Are Many. Listen. Learn. Enjoy. And remember Guantánamo.

We Are Many – Episode 1

WNV contributor Jens Erik Gould was on Sarasota’s WSLR Florida Caribe program last week to talk about his work reporting on stories of ordinary Mexicans who are peacefully resisting the violence of the drug war. Read Gould’s WNV story “Looking for Gandhis in Mexico” published earlier this month, and then hear more about his work at the 21:40 mark in the above audio player.

With polls showing public support for the Keystone XL pipeline — including 54 percent of Democrats — should climate activists start preparing for a loss? After all, it seems President Obama may have what one insider calls a “political environment that minimizes the cost to him politically of signing on to this.”

Well, not so fast. There’s actually another way to look at the situation that is far more promising for the future of climate activism. As I argue in an article published by Slate today: Win or lose, an important shift has taken place within the broader environmental movement as a result of this pipeline struggle.

It was never about just a pipeline. McKibben and a handful of others had another, less talked about goal—to remake the environmental movement into something far more active, creative, and formidable for years to come. The gap that once existed between mainstream environmental groups and grass-roots activists has now largely dissolved, resulting in widespread action that has not been seen in the United States for decades—perhaps even since the first Earth Day in April 1970.

The story of how this came to be is one we’ve been tracking on Waging Nonviolence since before the landmark White House sit-ins in August 2011. It’s also one that I spent the past year putting together in the form of a master’s thesis. But lucky for you, this Slate story is the abridged version.

On Saturday, Tar Sands Blockade will launch a national week of action against tar sands profiteers. Drawing from a list of over a hundred offices around the country, actions in more than 20 cities are already being planned. Here in New York City, Occupy the Pipeline, 350.org and Sane Energy Project will call on customers of TD Bank — provider of the largest corporate loans for the Keystone XL pipeline project — to move their money at a rally in Union Square on March 23.

One of the largest actions of the week, however, will be in Ponca City, Okla., during a mass action camp organized by a coalition of Great Plains residents against the tar sands. As their website notes, “Long a stronghold of the oil empire we must ignite a fire of resistance in the belly of the beast.”

To learn more about what activists in this region are doing to oppose tar sands and why resistance is spreading across the country, check out this hour-long documentary released by Tar Sands Blockade last month.

Blockadia Rising: Voices of the Tar Sands Blockade from Garrett Graham on Vimeo.

In activist circles, it’s common to refer to major protests by their dates. The anti-war movement has Feb. 15 (which refers to the global protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003). More recently, the indignados of Spain went so far as to call their movement 15-M (a reference to May 15, 2011 — the day their anti-austerity protests began). And just earlier this month, some were calling the Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C. F-17.

None of these dates are particularly meaningful to anyone outside the movement — a point I was discussing with several longtime activists while marching on, well, F-17. I believe it was John Sellers, co-founder of The Other 98%, who then pointed out that there are actually some dates worth using. For instance, March 4. It’s not just a date, it’s also a command: March forth!

I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of this before or seen it used. Of course, a quick Google search shows that many have taken advantage of this calendrical pun in recent years — from public education workers in California to immigration justice activists in Cincinnati. But still, far more could be done to exploit this built-in call for action that comes every year on this date.

As it turns out, while I was formulating this very argument a couple weeks ago, students from around the country were planning something for this year’s March 4. While gathered at the Power Up! Divest Fossil Fuels Student Convergence in Swarthmore, Pa., the idea arose for a national day of action. Organizers are calling on student fossil fuels divestment campaigns across the country to engage in “a day of direct actions, demonstrations, teach-ins, rallies, dance parties, and whatever other creative actions your group wants to use to propel the movement forward.”

While much of the organizing seems to be coming together last minute (via a Facebook page and a Google group), hundreds have signed up to participate. Students at Syracuse University and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry are holding a rally while representatives meet with administration officials about divestment. Meanwhile, students at Yale are gathering for a photo and video op, which will be compiled into a larger nationwide divestment video that 350.org is helping produce.

Despite the hurried nature, it will be interesting to see if this burgeoning fossil fuels divestment movement can make waves with a creatively titled action like March Forth on Climate Justice. If not, there’s another chance for calendar fun coming up soon: May 4, as in May the fourth be with you. Can’t you just see climate protesters doing battle with the Death Star that is the fossil fuel industry?

Bill McKibben address the crowd gathered near the Washington Monument during Sunday’s Forward on Climate rally. (Flickr/Josh Lopez, 350.org)

You can’t build a movement without numbers. If anyone understands that, it’s 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben.

Standing in front of an estimated crowd of 50,000 people gathered for the Forward on Climate rally yesterday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. he said, “All I ever wanted to see was a movement of people to stop climate change, and now I’ve seen it.”

Billed as “the largest climate rally in U.S. history,” the event was intended as one final push to convince President Obama that his environmental legacy hinges on whether he rejects the Keystone XL pipeline — a conduit to what has been called by NASA scientist James Hansen “the world’s largest carbon bomb.” To underscore this point, 350.org has consistently made an effort to quantify its achievements into superlatives, ready-made for headlines.

Yet, had they not put so much effort into creating the perception of a powerful movement, they might not have ever built one. According to political scientist Erica Chenoweth, co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works, “There is power in numbers, and the more people participate, the more likely the movement is to effect real change. Interestingly, this may lead more people to participate because they want to join a movement that will ultimately be successful.”

Patrick Reinsborough of the Center for Story-Based Strategy (formerly smartMeme), which trains activists to use narrative as a tool, agrees. “The most important thing to communicate is that this movement is growing, and that everyday citizens are willing to step out of their comfort zone in order to be seen and heard,” he said.

For more than six years, McKibben has been at the forefront of efforts to create a broad-based movement that can create the pressure for policies that would bring carbon emissions to a safe upper limit. According to James Hansen, that limit, which was long ago surpassed, is 350 parts per million — a number so important to McKibben, he named his group after it.

While this decision has led some to criticize 350.org for having a name that’s too ambiguous or scientific for the average person, McKibben has long argued, “Arabic numerals are the one thing that cross globally.” This fact seems to be guiding his broader belief in the power of numbers as well.

“The hardest thing about climate change is the sense that one is too small to make a difference,” McKibben told Waging Nonviolence. “So we’ve helped people to understand that they’re part of something large, maybe large enough to matter. That helps them feel engaged, I think, and has the advantage of being the truth.” McKibben’s feature article for Rolling Stone last summer — one of the most-read in the magazine’s history — and his recent 21-city sold-out speaking tour had the word “math” in the title.

Even before the debate over its name, when 350.org was just six students and a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, the focus was on numbers — numbers that set records, showed the scale of an action or quantified an achievement.

For instance, in 2006, the group successfully pressured Middlebury to commit to carbon neutrality by 2015. Soon after that, it organized a five-day march across Vermont to demand action on global warming. Nearly a thousand people took part, and many newspapers called it the largest climate change demonstration in America. Then, in 2007, with a campaign called Step It Up, which sought to visually depict the concept of an 80 percent carbon reduction by 2050, 350.org organized a day of action that netted 1,400 demonstrations across all 50 states, calling it, “the first open source, web-based day of action dedicated to stopping climate change.”

Since becoming 350.org a year later, the group has had a string of even more impressive achievements. In 2009, it organized 5,200 actions in 181 countries for “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” The following year saw two other landmark actions: the Global Work Party and 350 EARTH. The former generated more than 7,000 climate solutions projects in 188 countries and has been called the most widespread day of climate action in history. Meanwhile, 350 EARTH, which took place a month later, managed to gather tens of thousands of people for several of the biggest art projects ever seen — so big they could only be seen from space.

If there was any criticism of 350.org at this point, it was that the organizers were having too much fun. During those two years of dramatic actions, Congress and the United Nations failed to pass binding climate legislation. Many activists were beginning to wonder whether the impressive showing by 350.org was anything more than just a show.

Leading voices within the climate movement, such as Tim DeChristopher — who famously disrupted an oil and gas lease auction in 2008 and spent the last two years in prison as a result — wanted to see the group leverage the power of its growing base by engaging in civil disobedience. McKibben eventually heeded the call and in August and September of 2011, 350.org — under the guise of Tar Sands Action — held two weeks of sit-ins outside the White House, calling on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Despite some initial uncertainty about whether arrests would scare people away, the campaign proved to be yet another historic moment for the climate movement. Over 1,200 people were arrested and McKibben called it “the largest civil disobedience action on any issue in 30 years.”

Since then, there has been a boom in civil disobedience and nonviolent direct actions against the pipeline, from grassroots activists in Texas and Oklahoma to mainstream environmentalists like Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. McKibben has also recently hinted at another mass civil disobedience, possibly this summer, telling a crowd of students in New York City a couple weeks ago to “keep an eye on 350.org and save up bail money.”

In order to get to this point, 350.org has had to slowly build upon action after action, finding the right way to frame its accomplishments for maximum effect. Other successful movements have done the same, such as the Serbian student movement Otpor!, which started with just 11 people and used graffiti and small, clever actions that never revealed their numbers until they had grown enough to topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

More recently, in Egypt, says Erica Chenoweth, “groups of activists would deliberately make their way down small alleyways to give the impression that there were many more people participating. It created something of an optical illusion — a small number in a small space looks bigger than a small number in a big space.”

While the climate movement may be close to toppling a pipeline, it’s far from toppling the dictatorship of the fossil-fuels industry. Chenoweth has a number of her own for what major systemic change requires. “If you buy the 5 percent rule — that if 5 percent of the population mobilizes, it’s impossible for the government to ignore them — then in the U.S. context it would mean mobilizing well over 15 million people in a sustained way,” she surmises.

When asked what he thought winning would require, McKibben said, “I’ve got no idea. It will take more than any of us can imagine.” That might be surprising coming from a man so concerned with numbers and so good at making them compelling. But right now, the only math that seems to matter to him is how long it has taken to get to this point. And for that reason, he’s savoring the moment.

“I waited a quarter century since I wrote the first book about all this stuff to see if we were going to fight,” McKibben told yesterday’s crowd. “And today, I know we are going to fight. The most fateful battle in human history is finally joined, and we will fight it together.”

In an effort to raise awareness of what he calls the “catastrophic worldwide lack of clean water and sanitation,” Matt Damon has announced that he is going on strike — a toilet strike that is. The actor known for playing CIA assassin Jason Bourne has made his own ultimatum: “Until everybody has access to clean water and sanitation, I will not go to the bathroom.” That’s right, The Talented Mr. Ripley has just added a new trick to his arsenal. Nothing will have Departed his system, until justice is served to the 2.5 billion people around the world who lack such basic amenities. Only then, will Damon have Happy Feet.

Of course, Damon is just kidding. He is obviously not going to stop using the toilet. He’d have to go on a hunger strike first, and he made no mention of that. The announcement comes as part of a faked (but very funny) video press conference produced by Damon’s Water.org. To learn more about his anti-bowel movement check out StrikeWithMe.org.

From left to right: Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, El Puente President Luis Garden Acosta and Hip Hop Caucus President Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr.

What happens when people from the nation’s largest and oldest environmental organization — the kind that sends cute nature calendars to its well-meaning supporters every year — get arrested in front of the White House? Don’t worry; it wasn’t for anything lewd, like a drunk and disorderly (although ecological collapse should be enough to send anyone on a bender). They were engaging in civil disobedience to protest the fossil fuel industry, and they had more than a century to get ready for it.

After the Sierra Club announced last month plans to commit civil disobedience for the first time in its 120-year history, Executive Director Michael Brune and Board of Directors President Allison Chin were arrested this morning at the White House in an attempt to pressure the president, the day after his State of the Union speech, to obstruct the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. They did so with a group of nearly 50 others, including big names from other environmental groups — such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Phil Radford of Greenpeace and Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth. They were joined by landowners and other representatives of pipeline-affected communities, as well as climate protest mainstays like NASA scientist James Hansen, Reverend Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, actress Daryl Hannah and, of course, Bill McKibben, whose 350.org has long pushed for this moment.

“I’m very glad to see leaders and celebrities standing up to Keystone, but I don’t forget for a moment that it was 1,253 ordinary Americans going to jail who built this momentum in the first place,” McKibben said before the action, referring to the two weeks of sit-ins outside the White House in August and September of 2011. At the time, the most that the Sierra Club could offer was its vocal support, which in itself was a stretch for the large and cautious organization. But McKibben’s choice of the Keystone XL as a focal point for climate organizing has proved an effective one.

“On an issue as complicated as climate, there will often be disagreements over tactics and goals,” he was quoted as saying in a 2011 Tar Sands Action press release. “But there are some projects so obviously dangerous that they unify everyone, and the Keystone XL pipeline is the best example yet.”

Today’s action marks a new unity between the “Big Green” environmental organizations and more grassroots efforts like McKibben’s 350.org — in action, not just in word. For years, many of the Big Greens have relied on their large but disengaged member-base — whose role is mainly to fund experts, lawyers and lobbyists. Yet, as a 2012 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy noted, “we have not experienced significant policy changes [on environmental issues] at the federal level in the United States since the 1980s.” The author of the study attributes this to a lack of support for grassroots infrastructure.

350.org, in contrast, has devoted its resources to helping ordinary people take action on climate issues, usually by supporting organizers and trainings. As such, it has served as a bridge between the grassroots and the mainstream, picking up the pieces where the latter has failed — particularly in terms of getting climate legislation passed through traditional channels. Now, a consensus is emerging that the best hope for preventing the worst of climate change is no longer a matter for a few specialists, but rather a broad-based movement. This new image of environmental action will be in force on Sunday, when tens of thousands of people are expected to gather on the National Mall for the #ForwardOnClimate Rally.

In some ways, this synergy between on-the-ground activists and Beltway advocates mirrors a crucial moment in the civil rights movement. As Waging Nonviolence columnist George Lakey has explained, in 1955, the NAACP — then the largest civil rights organization in the country — was cold to the idea of direct action as advocated by labor leader A. Philip Randolph and radical pacifist Bayard Rustin. It took the right kind of person to bridge the gap and convince the organization’s huge member-base to participate in the major actions and marches that came to define the movement. That person was of course Martin Luther King, Jr.

While such comparisons may be a bit premature for the climate movement, the fact that civil rights veteran and former NAACP executive director Julian Bond was among today’s arrestees certainly added an element of historical drama. Nevertheless, only so much can be expected of a single action — especially one as routine as briefly blocking the East Gate of the White House. Longtime activist Mike Roselle, writing for Counterpunch, reminds us that “a well-orchestrated photo-op under the controlled conditions of DC Metro Police is not Selma.” Despite the rather dull scene, though, Roselle still thinks “the symbolism is large.” He goes on: “Brune is now standing toe-to-toe with the President of the United States of America, a man who has entertained him in the White House, on one of the most important issues we face. No Sierra Club Executive since David Brower [over a half-century ago] has been so bold. But if this tactic does not work, if the President doesn’t back down, then the next move is up to Mr. Brune.”

It’s hard to imagine what that move will be. The Sierra Club still has a policy in place that precludes civil disobedience, and today’s one-off action required an unprecedented bureaucratic ruling to temporarily lift it. That undoubtedly means the burden to keep pushing hard against the pipeline remains on grassroots groups that are less risk-averse.

Where they lead, the Big Greens are finally beginning to follow.

Four activists locked down to construction equipment on a recently clearcut easement leased by Keystone XL pipeline builders TransCanada. (WNV/Bryan Farrell)

“CLOSED. Happy Thanksgiving,” read a handwritten plywood sign propped against a makeshift tire barrier outside a work site for the Keystone XL pipeline in rural East Texas. For those who had come to protest and engage in civil disobedience against the pipeline’s construction, the message made clear that their visit was expected. It was still just the Monday before Thanksgiving, making for a surprisingly early break for a project that has been fast-tracked at practically every level of government. Such enthusiasm for a U.S. holiday hardly seemed right for TransCanada, the Calgary-based energy corporation building the pipeline.

Not that the activists’ presence was any kind of secret. Tar Sands Blockade, the campaign seeking to stop the pipeline connecting Alberta’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries and shipping ports, had announced the day’s mass action a week earlier. The only real surprises were the two locations that the campaign would be targeting, which the organizers kept hidden — even to fellow participants — right up until the last minute.

Their goal was to shut down construction for a day. The real imperative, however, was directing media attention to a pipeline that poses a significant danger to the health of the local community, as well as to the global climate.

Four activists came prepared to lock themselves to construction equipment, and despite the closure of the site by TransCanada, they went ahead as planned. Another dozen or so supporters — including photographers, videographers, live-bloggers, medics and spokespeople — waited nearby for the police. Having arrived shortly after 5 a.m. in order to preempt the workers who never came, they ended up waiting for a long time.

Among these supporters was an elderly couple from Iowa. Two days earlier, in time to take part in Sunday’s direct action training, they had driven nearly 16 hours to Nacogdoches — a small town in the Texas Forest Country that advertises itself as “the oldest town in Texas.” Having already been arrested outside the White House at last year’s Tar Sands Action, they were ready to do it again. But five hours of waiting wore their patience thin.

“We want some action!” said 76-year-old Ann Christenson as she leaned on a cane, which she admitted was more for show than for balance.

Although she and her husband did not end up getting arrested, plenty of action followed. The local police just needed time to come up with a plan of attack. First, they pepper-sprayed the four people locked to the construction equipment, hoping the discomfort would force them to disconnect themselves. When that didn’t work, they set about dismantling the lockboxes made of PVC pipes and a bolt in the middle by which the protesters were linked to one another in pairs. I cringed as I saw them do this to the one I’d gotten to know the night before, a 23-year-old named Gill. Before arriving at the Tar Sands Blockade, he had been backpacking around the country, hitching rides on freight trains.

The activists locked down in pairs using homemade lockboxes, which took police several hours to pry open. (WNV / Bryan Farrell)

Once broken apart, the four protesters were immediately cuffed and dragged into a police van. Onlookers pleaded with the police to give the arrestees water, as they were not only nearing dehydration from being out in the hot Texas sun, but the pepper spray had also left their faces a mucousy mess. The police, however, remained indifferent, which only further angered the onlookers, who began shouting and cursing.

Meanwhile, a few Texans belted out the University of Texas alma mater; “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” they sang.

More reporters and TV news cameras started arriving. Local preachers came to watch. For them it was an opportunity to save souls — although they seemed far more worried about those of the activists than those of the police.

—

At a different work site several miles away, three other Tar Sands Blockade activists had deployed into the trees. This was the result of a long night’s work that involved rigging platforms in the tall pines with support lines connecting them to the heavy equipment below. The contraptions forced workers to choose between halting construction or risking the activists’ lives.

Seattle-based filmmaker Rebecca Rodriguez, who is working on a project that involves walking the entire 1,700-mile length of the pipeline, spent the night in the woods documenting their efforts. “They were so organized, so disciplined,” she said. “I have such a newfound respect for tree-sitting.”

Tree-sitters were secured about midway up the 50-foot pine trees abutting another clearcut easement. (WNV / Bryan Farrell)

Rodriguez described how they spent hours in the cold, dark woods getting everything set up. The tree-sitters would slowly make their way up, securing their positions with rope, and sometimes slipping down along the way. By daybreak they were all in place, and in this case TransCanada was taken by surprise. A worker showed up and quickly called the county sheriff, whose officers arrived and threatened to cut the activists’ life-lines before retreating to plan their response.

When I asked Alex Lundberg, a longtime Earth First! activist and trainer who helped set up the tree-sit, how much planning went into it, a smile showed out from under his bushy beard. “None,” he said. His answer, however, spoke not to a lack of preparation but to just how well they knew what they were doing. For two months already, Tar Sands Blockade had been conducting an extended tree-sit against the pipeline in another part of the state.

Tar Sands Blockade, Lundberg explained to me two days earlier, was initially conceived of as just a one-off day of action in August to show solidarity with the pipeline’s local opponents and the broader climate justice movement. But then organizers reached out to direct action trainers like him for advice. “We don’t just do things for one day” was how he more or less put it. With their invitation, the organizers opened their fight to a whole network of environmental activists, who came and didn’t leave. Lundberg, for instance, had been camping out for three months before spending his first night indoors a week earlier.

About a dozen local residents came to support the tree-sitters and protesters as they faced arrest. (WNV / Bryan Farrell)

For locals like Vicki Baggett, who was among the founders of Nacogdoches STOP Tar Sands Oil Pipeline, the prospect of working with these activists from outside was not appealing at first, even as someone who had devoted years to environmental issues. “I wasn’t really sure that I could support them,” she said. “They seemed a little far out for me, but the more I spoke with them and got to understand what they were doing and understand how it fits into what we’ve done, it is the logical next step. Now I’m like their biggest supporter.”

The main core of blockaders have done their best to reach out to locals by attending church services and speaking in classrooms. But many still dismiss them, according to Baggett, as “just those crazy kids who don’t have anything else to do.” She blames the media for preventing her neighbors from seeing what she sees, that “they’re the most passionate, committed people I’ve ever met.”

As the sheriff’s deputies finally moved in on the tree-sitters, you could hear them referring to their targets — as opposed to the Canadian corporation on whose behalf they were interceding — as “the foreigners.” But one of the tree-sitters was 21-year-old Austin-native Lizzy Alvarado, who attends the state university in Nacogdoches. As protesters tried to block a truck carrying a cherry picker that would eventually remove the sitters from their perch, the deputies pepper-sprayed two local residents: 75-year-old great grandmother Jeanette Singleton and 22-year-old Jordan Johnson, whose family has been raising chickens in East Texas for generations.

The Texans, in particular, who choose to resist the pipeline do it at great risk. Many landowners who were forced into leasing parts of their property to TransCanada through eminent domain have been threatened with lawsuits and effectively silenced as a result. Others fear being ostracized by their communities. They have to choose their moments of dissension carefully, and they’re thankful for the outside support to help them do so.

Over the last week, also, there have been more than 40 solidarity actions worldwide, with the largest being led by 350.org in Washington, D.C. Several thousand people rallied outside the White House and called on President Obama to reject the permit for the Keystone XL’s northern segment, which would run from Alberta to Nebraska. Even this show of support, however, feels to some in Texas like abandonment.

“The North gets all the press,” said Vicki Baggett. “This is where the fight is, and 350 has left us. They should be here, not in D.C.”

Baggett was particularly stung by 350.org founder Bill McKibben’s recent cancellation of a speaking event that would have taken place in Nacogdoches this week. “He could have been here. This could have been the convergence. It was meant to be and it was just very disappointing. I think we just get written off because this is a very rural, poor area, and it’s real conservative.”

Rally against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, D.C., on November 18. (WNV/Anna Robinson)

McKibben cancelled the event in order to launch a national tour called Do the Math, designed to foster a fossil fuel divestment campaign on college campuses. While there is little question that McKibben and 350.org mean to support the Tar Sands Blockade, it upsets critics further that there are only two Southern cities on the entire 21-date tour. Atlanta is the closest they get to the southern segment of the pipeline that runs from from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

While the rest of the national climate movement may have written off the South, the 100 or so locals and visitors who took a stand in East Texas this past weekend — including the 11 who were arrested — plan to continue. “I know it’s not looking good,” Vicki Bagget said. “But it’s not done, and I think what is happening here will continue to resonate for years.”

Tim Gee, © Justin Tallis.

Any activist who stays an activist long enough must confront the question of effectiveness. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Of course, such a maxim is only useful to those willing to recognize when they are just hacking away among the thousand. Most activists would rather think of themselves as the ones striking at the root.

In recent years, however, a growing body of literature has emerged to challenge stubborn perceptions about how change is made — each with its own unique insight. With Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen demonstrate that mass participation is everything. In Join The Club, Tina Rosenberg makes a case for peer pressure. John Jackson and Steve Crawshaw show the importance of humor and creativity in Small Acts of Resistance. And smartMeme co-founders Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning explain why story-telling is an integral component to organizing in Re:Imagining Change.

The latest of these is a book by British activist Tim Gee called Counterpower: Making Change Happen. In the introduction, Gee says, “This book began as an inquiry into how campaigning might be more effective.” But as he dove into the archives — specifically the Working Class Movement Library near Manchester with memorabilia dating back to the 1790s — Gee noticed that “all the successful campaigns appeared to have followed a fairly similar path.” The one thing missing from a lot of the writings on these campaigns, however, was an understanding of power as coming from the “have-nots.”

For students of Gene Sharp and other thinkers on strategic nonviolence, this may not seem like a particularly new revelation. But Gee is from a newer generation of activists baptized in the global justice movement. He cut his teeth opposing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with student groups before moving on to fighting climate change with Britain’s anarchist-guided Camp for Climate Action.

It is this background that not only informs his unique perspective but also makes the history of resistance and the strategy behind it accessible to a whole new audience. And not a minute too soon; the Occupy movement began the same week Counterpower was released.

I recently spoke with Gee about his use of an old and largely forgotten term, whether the climate movement can win, and how true democracy exists within movements and the spaces they create.

Click to buy Tim Gee’s Counterpower, published by New Internationalist Books

Did you anticipate the Occupy movement in any way when you were completing Counterpower? And what was the effect of the release coinciding with Occupy London’s launch?

The book finishes with the Indignados. The last lines of the book were, “I hope you will be part of the next chapter.” And then before it was published this wonderful, though flawed, mass movement did just that. The story of the tour became interlinked with Occupy. I was visiting different cities and their Occupy camps. It was quite useful. It was a great excuse to meet people who were doing great stuff and discuss, debate and run workshops. I didn’t see all of the ingredients of a successful campaign in Occupy, but it was still such an exciting outburst of energy and anger that it was a thrill to be a part of.

That kind of mass sustained action had been absent from American activism for quite some time. But in other parts of the world, such as Europe and the U.K., it doesn’t seem quite so uncommon. Would you agree?

The grass is always greener. The sense that I got in the U.S. was that the radical movement was very wise and got it — perhaps proportionately small to the population at large — but people engaged in it seem to be doing something that we haven’t managed to do properly here in Britain, which is to turn the movement from media stunts and city center occupations to actual frontline solidarity with affected communities. All of the Occupy activists I met in the States were telling me about it, while at the same time saying how exhausting it was and how things looked better in Britain.

Someone I know once said, “The trouble with British NGOs is that they engage in great moments instead of great movements, which start small and take a long time.” And I think he was spot on. That was someone who was becoming disillusioned with mainstream British NGOs at the time and then became one of the key organizers within Occupy London. So that was an interesting trajectory to follow.

Tell us about your background and what led you to become so interested in people power.

I come from a political family. I come from a Quaker family. So being around peace demonstrations and nonviolence is always something that’s been there. But I was never particularly interested in it until I was about 15 or 16 and I was at a Quaker summer school for teenagers. Peter Tatchell — better known in the U.K. than the U.S. as a high profile gay rights activist — spoke about the civil disobedience that he had been involved with, which was to get rid of Section 28, a horrible piece of homophobic legislation that said you couldn’t talk about homosexuality as if it was normal within schools. So I got involved in the very tail end of that campaign and I’d had some homophobic bullying at school. It was personal.

The campaign eventually won. It had absolutely nothing to do with my involvement, but it was an early reminder that change can happen through people power. If you look at that change in legislation and values in the ongoing struggle for homosexual equality, that’s a nice thing to remind ourselves of, especially as I went from then into the antiwar movement and School Students Against the War. I was also very involved in Climate Camp, including some relatively confrontational stuff. I got my arm broken by some cops in Copenhagen and got arrested whilst I was writing the book at Climate Camp, which didn’t help with the writing.

Especially with the war and climate change we faced a lot of setbacks. I wanted to look backwards at some of the campaigns that had been successful. I wrote in the introduction about the Working Class Movement Library, of which my stepdad was the librarian for the last 20 years. So I knew where to get these stories. In the socialist movement that my parents are more associated with, particularly the trade union movement, people are told stories in a structured way, of the movement and what’s gone before. In the non-hierarchical movement that I’m more a part of, that’s not there unless someone decides that they’re going to play that role. So that’s the role I decided to play.

Why do you use the term “counterpower” as opposed to nonviolence, nonviolent action, civil resistance or any of the many other terms that have been used to describe the type of power average people possess?

In lots of languages there is a word for struggle from below, and in English there isn’t really. I mentioned a few attempts at it in the introduction, such as black power, worker power and sisterhood is powerful, and all of these ideas. But that word counterpower is there. It’s there in the anarchist discourse. If we want reformist ends then we have to engage in revolutionary tactics. That’s why I used a word from the revolutionary discourse, even though, when I started out, my only intention was to ask how we can win campaigns. There’s a lot more I could have said about dual power and power vacuums and, the more I read, the more convinced I get that it’s when countries get to a stage of power vacuums with no one in control that the big transitions happen. I’m more and more interested in how we can extend those periods of power vacuums. I wish I had written more about that.

Given your background as a Quaker, it’s surprising you don’t use the word “nonviolence” much in the book. Is there a reason for that?

There were a few intentional reasons for that. The first is that I knew what I had been brought up to believe, and I only wanted to argue things that I could back up rather than stuff I just had a hunch about. Secondly, nonviolence in itself is not a form of power or counterpower. It’s just a thing. By itself, it’s not nonviolent resistance or nonviolent coercion from below or nonviolent counterpower. So that’s why I spent two chapters talking about counterpower before talking about nonviolence. And then I tried to explain why nonviolence is superior to violence, and I speak about that especially in the conclusion.

I also didn’t want to gloss over the fact that violence can be successful. But I wanted to show that violence leads to a different kind of social change than nonviolence, one in which power is a lot more dispersed. For all of those reasons I wanted to show pragmatic and practical reasons for nonviolence, rather than just my own morality that I’d been brought up with about nonviolence, which wouldn’t necessarily convince anyone.

What types of counterpower do you see most in effective campaigns?

Every book I read about theories of power seemed to argue pretty much the same thing. They seemed to argue that there were three kinds of power and they mostly had fairly long names for them. So I decided to simplify that and use the shortest or most obvious words I could find. One form of power is idea power, which is the ability to persuade someone of something through the media or discussions or songs. Another kind is economic power, which is the ability to pay someone to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. And the third one is physical power or coercion, the ability to force someone to do something. What I’m interested in is power from below, counterpower. I think all of these can be turned on their heads. Idea counterpower, economic counterpower and physical counterpower.

You identify four stages of a successful campaign: consciousness, coordination, confrontation and consolidation. But you also discuss stages that other theorists and organizers have identified. What did you learn from them in developing your own four stages?

Almost everything in the book is a synthesis of stuff that’s already out there, because one of my objectives was to write in as simple a way as possible, to get it out to activists who wouldn’t necessarily find the really specialist stuff. As I see it, I don’t contradict those other theories. The book lays out a series of stages which seems to be there in all past campaigns. The most quoted stage theory of all, which isn’t really a stage theory, is Gandhi’s “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

On that note, you observe, “The power to ignore movements is possibly the most important and least understood aspect of idea power.” As an example of where this is the case you cite the U.S. climate movement. 

In 2009, at least, it did feel like the global climate movement was getting to a stage where it couldn’t be ignored. It was getting beyond that. It was on the front pages of all of the newspapers. We would have tens of thousands on the streets, the biggest climate demonstrations the world had ever seen, which haven’t been repeated since. We had an ability to move from that first stage of consciousness raising into that second stage of coordinating a mass movement beyond the NGOs, into the grassroots. And then there were these wonderful climate actions that took place. But the movement as a whole isn’t getting to the third stage, the confrontation stage. And by that I mean a mass withdrawal of consent large enough to nonviolently coerce the powers that be into giving enough concessions to solve the problem. We focused too much attention on Copenhagen. Even people who knew that the Copenhagen negotiations were incapable of coming up with an answer able to deal with the problem still focused their attention on it, myself included. We were still in that asking-nicely stage, rather than the withdrawal of consent.

The other problem we face in the climate movement is that we’ve been quite good at idea counterpower — at convincing lots of people of the problem — although that’s now being fought back against. We’ve been relatively good at physical counterpower; we’ve had some brilliant, although relatively diffuse actions and blockades. But we’ve not even touched economic counterpower. The people that can close down a coal-fired power station are the workers inside it. I don’t know if it’s the same in the United States, but people would offer the same criticism of the Climate Camp movement in the U.K. Our engagement of the workers in the places we were targeting would be last minute and slapdash if it was anything.

There were some examples of building solidarity with workers. There was an occupation at a wind turbine factory when it got closed down. It’s an interesting case, because prior to it being closed down, it wasn’t a strongly unionized workplace. That was one action at one factory that the U.K. climate movement actually managed. If we reengage with that next time, and we get to a point of being able to move from movement building to confrontation, then we’ll be in a better position.

How do you think that can be done? The environment has long been pitted against the economy as a means of keeping the working class uninterested.

We’re actually doing relatively well, because we started again and we started with a different tack. Now the movement is more about transformation and challenging the economic system. The climate stuff has been folded into this bigger narrative. Through Occupy and other things we’ve been building a first stage and we’re moving into a second stage with the house occupations and the broad grassroots movement that’s being built at the moment. Wider systemic struggle has the ability to solve climate problems if it manages to see it through in a way that a climate movement based entirely around climate as the main thing proved unable to do.

A similarity that I sometimes like to draw with the anti-slavery movement in the U.K. — which is obviously only part of the global anti-slavery movement — is that activists didn’t get the first legislation against slavery through the British Parliament until I think it was 1834. They’d been plugging away at it, but before they could do it, they had to win changes to the Parliament itself. They had to win the reform act of 1832. At least for a few years, many people in the anti-slavery movement, not all of them, put their attention toward redistributing power through another route, which was the vote. Only then could they begin chipping away at slavery. That’s what we’re trying to do with the climate movement. We’re trying to redistribute power, and we’re going through a different route at the moment. Now it’s jobs and public services. If we manage to chip away at the power of the 1 percent, who are also the same people screwing with the planet, then we can reengage with climate issues on the frontline as part of this bigger campaign. But we’re doing okay. I’m more optimistic than most.

One of the major challenges facing practitioners of this kind of work is corporate power. Gene Sharp has very humbly said that he leaves that work to the next generation to figure out. Can we adapt the principles of fighting authoritarian regimes to fighting corporations?

A lot can be pulled across from anti-dictatorship struggles to anti-corporate struggles. A great number of the things we think of as dictatorships have the illusion of democracy and claimed to be democratic. The Burmese regime has claimed it’s moving toward multi-party democracy for the last 20 years, and the Soviet Union called itself a democracy, although not a multiparty one. From the study I’ve managed to do so far, I find that all forms of hierarchical organization, from a country to maybe even patriarchy, have these three pillars of economic power, physical power and idea power. If we chip away at them, that can contribute to weakening any form of regime.

And what about movements against dictators that become capitalist so-called democracies and don’t improve things too much? That certainly does happen. But a revolution isn’t just an event, it’s an ongoing process. The definition of democracy is when people have power, and they can only have power through counterpower, so I suppose the struggle always needs to continue. It’s not in the regime that we find democracy, but in the movement, those beautiful moments of power vacuums when people are able to think for themselves. I was reading Peter Popham’s autobiography of Aung Sang Suu Kyi today, and it was talking about the power vacuum that happened in 1988 and how it coincided with people thinking freely and debating freely for the first time in many years, just as has happened in Egypt. Freedom and democracy come from the spaces we create inside the struggle, and that has to go on forever. There’s not a perfect end that we’re working toward, just possibilities of extending those moments of freedom and people power.

Protesters walking onto Patriot Coal’s Hobet mine in West Virginia’s Lincoln County. Photo via Mountain Mobilization.

A new chapter was added to the storied history of resistance against the coal industry on Saturday with not only the largest direct action against mountaintop removal, but also one of the harshest crackdowns that anti-strip-mining activists have ever faced.

More than 50 people taking part in the Mountain Mobilization in West Virginia — a week-long regional gathering meant to unite affiliated groups and allies — shut down Appalachia’s largest mountaintop removal site for three hours. Meanwhile, West Virginia State Police made 20 arrests, set bail at $25,000 per person and allegedly beat 20-year-old West Virginia native Dustin Steele while he was in custody. Police also forced those who didn’t get arrested to walk for four hours down a public road rather than let their arranged transportation pick them up, thereby subjecting them to harassment from pro-coal demonstrators.

Waging Nonviolence spoke with Mathew Louis-Rosenberg, an organizer with the RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival) Campaign, which put together the Mountain Mobilization. Louis-Rosenberg discussed the situation of the jailed activists, whether the crackdown is a sign of the movement’s strength and how it will affect actions in the future.

What charges are activists being held on right now?

As far as we can discern, their only charges are trespassing and obstruction of an officer.

How long can they be held?

They can legally hold people for as long as it takes them to get around to holding status hearings. Theoretically, they try — according to the magistrate — to hold them within 10 days. At that point, people would have the opportunity to take a plea agreement. But if the plea agreement was very unfavorable or they choose not to take it for some reason, they could be held until their trial, and that often takes months.

To what extent can the charges be fought collectively, and how will the action continue through jail solidarity?

In West Virginia you don’t have the option. We have never been granted a request to combine our cases into a single trial. Every person is tried individually, and we have tried on numerous occasions to request that that be different, and it has always been denied by the court. So the possibility of everyone going together in one big solidarity trial is not really on the table.

That being said, our campaign has never really tried to impose a uniform legal strategy or encourage people to impose upon themselves a unified legal strategy. Some people want to get out of jail as soon as possible. Other people are comfortable staying longer. We just try to do our best to honor each individual’s request the best we can within our capacity.

We always tell people that the West Virginia legal system is extremely chaotic and unpredictable. There’s really no way to know what’s going to happen. But this was definitely on the harsh end of what we expected.

Can you explain the bail situation?

On top of hitting them with $25,000 bails, they set bonds that were surety bonds only. What that means in West Virginia is that it can only be paid by putting up $25,000 worth of West Virginia property. Until we get a bail reduction hearing, it would take half a million dollars of West Virginia property to get everyone out. Nevertheless, we’re continuing to raise legal support money should we win a change in the bail conditions in court.

Why was it set so high?

One of the reasons, we think, is because we have several individuals who are victims of police violence. A common strategy is to hold the victims of police violence for long enough so that their injuries heal and are no longer documentable to protect the police from lawsuits. None of our people have been to see the medical staff — including Dustin, who is fairly seriously injured, complaining of walking and severe back pain. We got reports from other arrestees that not only did they hear Dustin being beaten, but they were also able to get a look inside the room, where they observed a significant amount of blood on the floor. As far as we know, no one has received any medical treatment whatsoever. If they aren’t going to be released, we at the very least want them to be transferred to a hospital as soon as possible so they can receive proper medical treatment and have their injuries documented by a neutral third party.

Are law enforcement officers in West Virginia typically opposed to anti-coal activists?

Frankly, we’re deeply surprised by this incident and by the response of the state police to this action. Prior to this weekend, we had never had any of our activists subject to police violence. We used to brag a little bit about how we operated in this really unique context because a lot of the state police were actually on our side. Not that they’re so nice to us or anything. But we never really saw the degree of police violence and intimidation that most people doing this kind of work face. We thought ourselves privileged to be working in this environment where we had never faced police violence, chemical weapons or pain compliance. We had a number of experiences where officers were quite friendly and let us know in variously coded ways that they agreed with us on the issues. So this really came out of left field for us, and we have any number of speculations about why things may have changed.

Can you elaborate?

We certainly took a more confrontational attitude in this action, in the sense that we announced publicly that we were going to take this action and called for as many people as possible to come. We refused to speak to the police at all before this action — I think for fairly obvious reasons — and this was the first time that non-compliance, by going limp, has been used on a large scale. I don’t know how many of our arrestees went limp this time, but it was a tactic that a number of people used, including Dustin. This is also the first time we’ve had a large, somewhat more public action since Governor Tomblin has taken office, and obviously the state police report directly to the governor. It doesn’t matter what individual state police officers think. If there was a chain of command coming down from on high to put the boot to the tree huggers, then that’s what was going to happen.

Do you also see this crackdown as a sign of your movement’s growing strength?

Absolutely. We’ve seen a number of strip mines close; we’ve had success in tightening down regulations and we’ve been building power. This is by far the most people who have participated in a direct action against mountaintop removal — and I mean direct action in the true sense of the word, as in acting directly to stop the thing from happening. There have been larger symbolic actions and demonstrations, but this is by far the largest number of people — by four times — that has ever gone on and certainly the most bold and public announcement of any such action.

We got a great response, and people came from all over the place, including quite a number of people who had not come before and had not worked on this issue, but felt moved to respond to the call. The folks who came were primarily working on other issues, such as fracking, and coal export and the Powder River Basin issues in Montana. A bunch of people working with the Pennsylvania and Ohio anti-fracking movements were involved. We had people from Occupy D.C. and Wall Street. There was also one person working with the tar sands blockade in Texas. So it really demonstrates the growing power of our movement and the growing unity within the movement against extraction. The opposition is scared of us.

This is what happens when you’re effective. We’ve seen this time and time again. You can look at parallels in the labor movement and civil rights movement. In addition to the scare tactics used against us at the action, there has also been constant harassment at base camp. A couple of nights ago there were shots fired, but not at anyone. They’ve been felling trees across the driveway from the property and laid down a spike strip at one point — a piece of rubber with spikes sticking out. It’s really been a very intense situation, and I hope people through all this can understand that it’s because what they did was so important and so effective. I hope that people who came here and had legitimately traumatic experiences aren’t discouraged from participating in this fight.

Do you think that will happen?

There’s a wide range of experiences, to be honest. A lot of people are walking out of this feeling empowered, but there’s also a lot of people — and most of those folks have left already — who did not have a positive experience. It’s been a really mixed bag, and what we really hope is that we can continue to reach out to the wider movement and explain and contextualize those experiences for people, and that ultimately it will build the movement. But it’s a dangerous time. They use these [scare] tactics because they can work. So we’re looking at various ways to hit back of course. We’ve been frantically on the phone with any number of lawyers all day long trying to arrange bail reduction hearings. We’re studying our options. We’re not going to take this lying down. We’re communicating with the contacts we have that are connected to powerful people at various levels of government to see if we can get a response there. It’s going to be interesting to see what evolves over the next week or two, but certainly organizers are doing anything but putting our heads down and our tails between our legs and going home. We’re working as hard as we can to figure out how to make sure that Saturday is a day they regret, and we’re committed to that.

Will you be training people differently in the future?

I think this is most certainly going to change the way we train people to take direct action. As always, we try to make our trainings as specific to the context we operate in as possible in order to prepare people as well as possible. All we can do is base that on our prior experience, and our prior experience and context has changed. And that has certainly changed the way we train people. We have not emphasized tactics responding to police violence both physically and in other ways because it has been so completely outside of our experience until now. And I think there’s going to be some interesting conversations among the organizing body about how we do this in the future, how we prepare in the future and how we talk about the environment that people are walking into.

Would you say the main goal of this action was to build broader support and solidarity?

This is what we would call a movement-building action. I tend to think that there are two kinds of actions. One is a very targeted pressure campaign, like the one Greenpeace recently ran against Apple to get them to move their cloud computing off of coal-fired power. There was a very clear target, a very clear ask and a very clear series of actions directed at messaging and achieving that goal. And that method can be very successful — a sort of tactical pressure campaign. But this is a different kind of action. This is the kind of action that grows movements, and that’s a big part of our goal.

We began doing aggressive, on-site direct action because we were asked to by local leaders. It wasn’t our idea. But after years of folks largely from the outside taking these kinds of direct actions, we see more and more Appalachians gaining the courage to step up and use more confrontational tactics like we just saw at the end of the week in Washington D.C.

There are individuals that are really strong participants in this movement who say they always thought mountaintop removal was bad but had never taken the next step of getting out there and doing something about it. Oftentimes, they just don’t have that luxury due to circumstances in their lives. They have to take care of their health and poverty. We’ve really seen over the years just how much hope and energy that this gives to local folks fighting mountaintop removal. And we hope that, by taking more radical actions, we open up space behind us. If we can do things like what we’re doing now then maybe it won’t be as scary for folks to write a letter to the editor, to speak out in their community, to file a complaint, to go to D.C. and do a safer action like sitting in at a congressional representative’s office, which just happened.

What are the types of next steps you are foreseeing, as part of a larger strategy building off of this weekend?

My hope is that we have the fortitude both within our own organizing crew here and in the broader movement to continue to push for large public actions and for building sustained resistance. I think we all agree that where direct action needs to go in this movement is toward longer and more disruptive actions — obviously, keeping within our strict code of nonviolence. We don’t even accept verbal violence within our movement. Our nonviolence code includes not screaming at miners. But within that context we need to find ways to continue to push the envelope and have more sustained disruption. In a perfect world, we would have the people to pull off Tim DeChristopher’s vision of sending 30 people into a mountaintop removal site every day. Clearly we have not reached that scale in the movement yet. But that’s a dream to shoot for. And we felt that this action was the first step along that path. I hope we can find ways to continue toward that vision as safely and effectively as possible.

Presidents have not fared well in the Maldives, a tiny archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean. The first president was lynched by a mob. The second president had to flee to Singapore. Even before it became a republic in 1968, very few sultans ended their reign peacefully. Some were deposed, forced to abdicate, go into exile, or even assassinated. The point is, transitions of power in the Maldives are usually violent.

The latest incident occurred February 7, 2012, when President Mohamed Nasheed, by his own account, was forced to resign at gunpoint in a coup organized by loyalists of the previous regime. What’s particularly noteworthy, however, is that Nasheed came to power four years earlier in a rare instance of peaceful transition.

It was for this reason that he found himself in Boston last week to receive this year’s James Lawson Award for Achievement in the Practice of Nonviolent Action. Amidst the turmoil that has befallen his country as of late, Nasheed is in large part responsible for democracy even coming to the Maldives in the first place.

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom had ruled for 30 years and became Asia’s longest-serving dictator. But Nasheed — a long-time opposition activist, who had been jailed three times, exiled and even named an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience — led a nonviolent movement that ultimately forced free and fair elections in 2008. So, it is not without exaggeration that Nasheed is called “the Mandela of the Maldives.”

As a president he received his fare share of criticisms, particularly for selling off some of the country’s assets to foreign corporations, such as the only hospital and international airport. But he also managed to implement an impressive series of social programs, including universal health coverage for all.

Perhaps more than anything, though, Nasheed became known as a leading figure in the climate movement. To underscore his nation’s vulnerability to sea-level rise, Nasheed famously held an underwater cabinet meeting, pledged to become the first carbon-neutral country and personally installed solar panels on his home.

While the new president is trying to legitimize the coup, Nasheed has been traveling the United States — which has backed the junta that ousted him — to not only support the new documentary The Island President, but also to push for international support of early elections. Once again his skill at forcing the peaceful transfer of power is being summoned, as he calls upon tourists to boycott the Maldives and his people to return to the tactics of “agitation and street protests.”

In an interview with Waging Nonviolence after his award reception, the former president discussed the difference between being the leader of a movement and the leader of a nation, how he was influenced more by satirical author Tom Sharpe than political theorist Gene Sharp and how little he has been impressed by the U.S. climate movement.

What was your strategy for building the movement that brought down the Gayoom regime in 2008?

First to take membership and to organize ourselves into cells, branches, parts and bits and just arrange a jigsaw out of it — and how to disseminate information and pass information from one another and to understand what is the information you want to pass. We might think one thing is very important for the public, but when you go into a household, she’s not worried about it at all. But there’s something else that she’s very very worried about that she would go to any length in trying to change it. So what is important for people is not necessarily always what’s important to me or important to the rest of the population. So on the one hand, asking them “What’s wrong with you?” “What do you want?” “How can life be better?” and get that information and write what we want to do based on that. So it’s a two way conversation that we have to have with the people.

How quickly did the movement grow when you returned to the Maldives from political exile in 2005?

When I started it was just me. No, it wasn’t very big. When I came back it wouldn’t have been more than 200 of us. On the day that I came back, we got 7,000 people joining us. We are now 49,000. The Maldives is just 350,000 and we are the biggest political group. It took a while, but when it started going, when 7,000 people joined, Gayoom had to allow that to be legal. Otherwise, he knew that this organization was going to function even if it were illegal and so on. So he had to legitimize it.

What were the key tactics that you found to be most successful?

Not to be afraid. When a policeman raises a baton, keep looking at the baton. Make sure you know. Don’t lose your focus from the baton until it hits you. I feel if you do that, the pain is much much more bearable. If you start running from it and you cover from it, it’s very very difficult.

Did you find people were able to summon that courage easily?

People were able to watch others do it and then I found that a lot of them were able to do it. Running away doesn’t help. When the police charge, don’t run away, hold your ground, and then, very often, they pass you by and go after those who are running and you are easily able to walk away.

Who inspired you the most and what were you reading as you organized this movement?

What I always read has nothing to do with the politics of this movement or anything. I love reading novels. So that’s all that I read. I flip through Gene Sharp’s things and I get someone else to read it and I kind of flip through them. I’m very bad at it. But I like reading Tom Sharpe for instance. Have you read Writer’s Assembly? Tom Sharpe depicts the South African regime with Writer’s Assembly and for me, it’s comical, it had a lot of material in it on how silly the whole thing was. So I like comedy. I like to make it light. The theory that Jack [DuVall, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which presented the Jim Lawson Award] and Gene Sharp and everyone else was writing about is important. But if you ask me, I think it would be a lie if I told you I had his book at my bedside all the time. That’s not true. I had Tom Sharpe. I am always reading other things. I like that.

Did any of the skills you picked up as an organizer remain useful when you became president?

It was always useful because it gave me some skills on the ability to speak to the people, to talk to them. And then, very often, high powered economics is good and if you’ve read for instance Niall Ferguson or any of the economics texts, it’s good. But you have to relate that to the people and you have to be able to talk to them about it. Direct action and peaceful political activity is also very necessary if you want to become a statesman or you want to become a country.

The underwater cabinet meeting sure seemed like a sign of your activist past. Where did that idea come from?

We asked someone how much they would charge to promote climate change issues in the Maldives and they said $100,000 to $150,000 a month. So I thought this is silly. The idea is to get the message across and impress upon the people the gravity of the issue. So you kind of go into a Tom Sharpe extent of it which is so comical that it is underwater. Exaggeration helps. The ultimate end of it is fun.

Were there many differences you found between being the leader of a social movement and the leader of a nation?

Yes, I like walking and I always walk, and I don’t like all the guards, and I don’t like all the military, and I don’t like all the pomp and ceremony. So that was difficult. People would tell me, “President, you be a president now.” And they would come and say, “There’s a little bit on your hair.” That was always kind of nagging, but I suppose that’s part of the deal. So you had to do that. You had to be polished. You had to be proper. Not that ordinary most people are not polished, but as a president you had to do things in a certain manner.

Were you able to carry over your role as a movement leader to the international stage, advocating on behalf of a small nation?

I was just trying to be me. Meeting Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao is very difficult — all that regimentation and brass and the military around. When you go to other countries and meet the other presidents, everyone kind of judges the strength of your country by how pompous you can become, how many military parades that you can have, how proper your commanders are shouting it out. You kind of had to tolerate that. And I did that. In meeting other leaders you also soon find out that they are also fairly human and they have a very soft side to it as well. And I think they like it when you cut the ice and start talking normally.

Were there compromises you had to make as the leader of a state that would have been much more difficult to make as the leader of a movement?

One of the difficulties was that every day and every thing was a compromise. There was nothing that I could do according to what I thought had to be done. I’d sit and think this was a brilliant idea and someone would say, “No president, this is how you do it.” They wouldn’t say no, but they would find 10,000 reasons to not be able to do it and just make sure that it’s not done. So there’s very little that as a leader you yourself could do. It’s always a compromise.

What do you think of the American environmental movement?

I’m very disappointed by the slow pace of the social movement. 350.org is a good group, but I’m very disappointed by the slowness. It’s not gathering. I was hoping that there would be a million people out on the streets in the United States this summer, but then no, it’s not happening.

What about the Tar Sands Action campaign in which more than 1,200 people were arrested in front of the White House last year?

This is a country of 350 million people. There will be 1,200 arrests in the Maldives today. So I’m not impressed. We have to have the numbers out and more people need to be active at it. If you want to make a difference, you don’t make this difference staying at home.

An article published by CounterPunch yesterday, “Inconvenient Truths about Tar Sands Action,” argues that the grassroots campaign targeting the Keystone XL pipeline was nothing more than “a manipulated charade, funded and run with loads of money from pro-Obama Democrats through non-transparent organizations like the Tides Foundation.” It follows, then, according to the article, that the real goal of Tar Sands Action “was to manufacture Obama a ‘green victory’ during his first term in the run up to the 2012 election.”

In short, for those thousands of you who participated in the White House sit-ins or encirclement and became “True Believers in the mission,” you were duped. What you took part in “was not social change, nor was it grassroots empowerment.” You became nothing more than a name on an email list. You were “converted into clicktivists who will hopefully contribute money to the Obama ‘I’m In’ 2012 Presidential campaign, ecological landscape be damned.”

I’d ask you how it feels, but I should know. I’m one of you. The article mentions Waging Nonviolence along with the socialist group Solidarity and author Naomi Klein as being among the “principled radicals” who “drank the kool-aid.” So how do I feel? Well, for someone who has supposedly been drugged, I feel remarkably sober and unconvinced.

To believe that the Democrats mobilized thousands of people to get arrested as part of an effort to manufacture an environmental win for Obama is to ignore the fact that he rejected this gift-wrapped, hand-delivered win. He never fully acknowledged the claims of the campaign, and has recently spoken positively of the pipeline, thereby ensuring neither an environmental win nor the support of environmentalists.

Despite the joyous rhetoric  (“BIG NEWS: We won. You won.”) that emerged from the campaign after Obama’s November announcement that he would be delaying a decision on the pipeline until 2013, excitement has waned in the months since. More recent emails from organizer Bill McKibben have focused on the hard realities of the pipeline — for instance, Obama’s recent trip to Oklahoma, where he “lauded his administration’s fast-tracking of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like a campaign or a president working in cahoots. Yet, according to the author of the CounterPunch article who goes by the pseudonym The Insider, the two have been in lock-step, tricking environmentalists into doing the Democrat’s bidding. Never mind that the president hasn’t kept up his end of the bargain; the evidence of deception is clear to The Insider. For starters, there’s the fact that tar sands oil will be flowing into this country with or without the Keystone XL. So, since Tar Sands Action (TSA) is not targeting all entry points at once or trying to smash the whole industry at once, it is clearly just a sham. From The Insider’s perspective, TSA’s effort to build a mass movement from scratch through a series of concrete victories is irrelevant. What’s important is ideological purity.

This is where the Tides Foundation conspiracy comes in to play — which is where the article starts sounding like a Glenn Beck rant. While neither TSA nor its organizational affiliate 350.org received any Tides money (at least according to the document cited by The Insider), many of the groups that supported it did — for instance, the Sierra Club, NRDC and Friends of the Earth. Why does that matter? It boils down to Tides having “Democratic allied funders.” That’s the smoking gun. And apparently we can just take it on good faith that anyone who accepts money from Tides is actively working to reelect Obama. The proof is in the fact that some people showed up at the White House sit-ins and encirclement wearing Obama pins and shirts.

The Insider draws out this idea of co-optation further. “Tar Sands Action was a sophisticated, extremely well-funded model for creating the illusion of movement building, complete with mass civil disobedience,” the article contends, “but the real goal, mirroring its cousin, ‘The 99 Spring,’ was (and is) to hammer Republicans and fire up grassroots enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.”

Co-optation is always a legitimate and serious concern, but as Nathan Schneider noted in regards to the 99% Spring, it’s important to ask, “Who’s co-opting whom?”

The logic of a civil resistance movement is always to co-opt the existing structures of the society around it, to radicalize them, to drive them away from the status quo and into doing something truly revolutionary. And it is precisely by co-opting these institutions that the movement is generally able to build enough capacity to make real change.

That’s how I’ve always seen Tar Sands Action: as a campaign that recognized the power of grassroots action but knew it needed the reach of the big green NGOs to be effective. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, point out, “The tactical and strategic advantages of high levels of diverse participation explain — in large part — the historical success of nonviolent campaigns.” So, to ignore the big greens and their massive base of supporters is to make your job as an organizer much harder. But to co-opt them, their email lists and their political influence is to give your campaign a huge boost.

Of course, doing so is not easy, despite what The Insider thinks about the Tides money that somehow made all the pieces fall into place. I recently spoke with Linda Capato, who handled recruitment for TSA, and she explained just how much the big green groups had to move outside their comfort zone to support the two weeks of civil disobedience.

We’ve always been told don’t do something that’s too nuts. Mass civil disobedience in front of the White House gates for two weeks, that’s crazy. Sierra Club isn’t going to sign on because of course they can’t. They have those mandates. NRDC isn’t going to be supportive. All these big greens are not going to come to the table and it was like okay, we can do it without them. And so it was this moment of let’s try. And then, as it was happening and as we were organizing, everyone was jumping onboard because it was a smart idea, it was the time to do it, it was the right target, the right strategy, and the right tactic.

That, ultimately, is what The Insider is overlooking. The Keystone XL was a strategic target which had a major leverage point in the president, since the decision was his alone to approve or reject. It was not meant to bring down the tar sands industry. To fault it for not doing so is like faulting the lunch counter sit-ins for not ending segregation. Furthermore, to say that “Martin Luther King must be turning in his grave,” is to deny that King not only appealed to the moral rhetoric of Lyndon Johnson but also met with him.

The TSA sit-ins and encirclement of the White House were hardly Obama campaign rallies. They were strategic actions meant to draw in a diverse crowd. A few radicals on tripods or in armlocks are wonderful, but to succeed, the effort needed a much broader coalition. Make no mistake, though, most of the organizers who helped guide TSA come from radical organizing backgrounds; for them, using the Obama rhetoric was a way to underscore the gap between the president’s lackluster record and his inspiring rhetoric.

That kind of messaging has far more potential to stimulate a mass movement than the kind of angry screaming that often takes place at protest and is why McKibben at one point said, “We are not going to do President Obama the favor of attacking him. We are going to hold the Obama campaign to the standard it set in 2008. Denying this pipeline would send a jolt of electricity through the people that elected this president.” That, to me, sounds like an attempt by TSA to co-opt one of the largest political movements in recent years and galvanize it into acting for the environment. But all The Insider hears is “well-funded, political theater and public relations.”

The problem with conspiracy theories in general is that they dismiss the contributions of ordinary people. Instead of giving credit to the participants in TSA for shaping their own campaign, which involved significant sacrifices both of time and body, the conspiracy theorist disparages those who took part as “rank-and-file day-to-day worker-bees.”

That’s simply not the case for Tar Sands Action. The reality is that as much as the campaign was about bringing thousands of people to the White House, it was also about empowering local communities to take their own action against the pipeline. ”A lot of the communities along the pipeline route are working together that haven’t before,” Linda Capato told me. “Folks in Nebraska who have been dealing with imminent domain are working with folks in Texas on the same issue. If the zombie pipeline does come back, at least we’ll have a lot more power and part of that power is these communities are talking to each other.”

The Insider concludes by quoting activist John Stauber, another skeptic of TSA, who says, “I would love to see the real people who have bought the hype and taken these civil disobedience trainings, and who have gone through the arrests, rise up and seize control of their own movement.” Perhaps he just needs to open his eyes.

Photo by Alex Fradkin.

Sometimes justice requires a little imagination. On Saturday, when much of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York was loudly denouncing police violence against minorities and protesters, a small group of environmentalists dreamed up a way to get the police to focus on the crimes of the 1 percent, to the point of arresting five corporate suits on United Nations property.

Granted, those five were actually members of the OWS affinity group Disrupt Dirty Power, which used Saturday’s action (billed as a “mock’upation”) to launch a month of actions targeting the “corrupt partnership between Wall Street, politicians and the business of pollution.” Police officers seemed thrown for a loop as they tore down tents bearing corporate logos and cuffed people who claimed to be from Bank of America and ExxonMobil. Compared to the rowdy anti-NYPD march earlier that afternoon, this time, the cops had more of a chance to think about what side they’re really on.

As the action began around 5 p.m., the police presence was focused on the small group of OWS protesters gathered in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a few blocks away from U.N. headquarters. The officers must have noticed the signs and banners, heard the people’s mic, observed the silly improv performance skewering corporate polluters and thought they were in the right place. But if they had paid closer attention, they might have seen where things were going.

At one point, a couple of “representatives” from Bank of America addressed the crowd, satirizing the bank’s all too real connection to the U.N. and its upcoming Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro this June. One of them announced:

The most exciting news of the day is that we have accepted U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s invitation to permanently occupy the U.N. climate conference. Our hats go off to the Occupy movement for this concept of occupation, and we feel that we at Bank of America are well-equipped to realize the full free-market potential.

After wrapping up their discussion of the many ways Bank of America metaphorically occupies the U.N. to build a consensus around deregulation as the main vehicle for international development, the “representatives” invited the crowd to visit their physical occupation. As if that wasn’t quite enough to tip off the police, an OWS organizer then belted out the day’s objective:

Today when we march, we are not going to get arrested. We want the 1 percent to get arrested. We’re going to have fun and we’re going to put pressure upon this great institution. … And we’re going to be peaceful and jubilant to show just how peaceful we can be as opposed to this violent system.

Police officers then processed along with the protesters toward United Nations Plaza. But as soon as the march turned the corner, and the corporate tents came into full view, the officers took off, leaving the protesters in the dust. Within minutes the suit-wearing culprits were arrested beside their tents. Not having planned for this, however, the police had nowhere to put them. So while they waited for a van to arrive, the handcuffed 1 percenters stood and shouted to the protesters still marching peacefully across the street.

Bloomberg is in our pocket! … We control everything! … We have PR companies, the media, Obama, Congress! … I just invested $5 million in a Super PAC, I’m good! … We will be released soon, don’t worry! … Those are the occupiers you should be arresting!

Rebecca Manski, who helped organize the action and was among the five arrested, said the police really didn’t get that she and the others were just pretending to be corporate executives. “They were totally fooled by 1-percent appearance,” Manski explained. “They thought we were of a different class — maybe not the 1 percent exactly — but their perception was challenged of what a protester looks like.”

Rebecca Manski. Photo by Jim Lafferty.

Seeing the protesters in different clothes seemed to make a big difference. Some of the officers had just come from Union Square, where the situation was tense after a long, angry march from Zuccotti Park. Manski actually overheard her arresting officer talk about being called “a goon” earlier in the day. The officer could hardly believe that Manski and the other suits were from the same protest movement.

OWS legal consul typically advises protesters not to speak with police officers once they’ve been arrested, but Manski decided to bend the rules. She apologized for the name-calling and was treated so gently that she wasn’t even sure where she was supposed to go. Eventually, she found her way into the police van, where an officer actually told her, “I’m sorry we had to arrest you today. We support what you are doing.”

Once at the station, the arrestees continued to be treated well. Manski reports that when one officer began complaining that they were to blame for him having to work overtime on a Saturday night, another corrected him, saying, “No, it’s the banks’ fault.” The first officer ended up agreeing, and he added, “It’s the banks’ fault and the 1 percent’s fault.” Both officers then worked to get everyone released that day, when originally it seemed that some were going to have to spend the night in jail.

“They were getting the connection between the banks and abusive power,” says Manski. Much to her relief, the day’s action had brought attention back to the issues and those who need to be held accountable. She couldn’t help but wonder about possible next steps: “Wouldn’t it be great to have a whole march on Wall Street with everyone dressed as bankers?”

Photo by Jim Lafferty.