• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

Minnesota winters can be brutally cold, full of ice and snow, and drearily bleak come this time of year. And while this year’s winter has been unexpectedly mild and inconsistent, with temperatures fluctuating from well-below freezing to the high 40s—likely due to the instability of climate change—we still look for ways to escape cabin fever. The Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF), on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, was just the break I needed. But it was also an inspiring weekend full of hopeful films, cinematic social critique, information tables, and workshops on the environment and activism.

The festival, which began in Winona in 2006, shows films from Mountainfilm—a film festival held in Telluride, Colorado in May that takes its films on tour throughout the rest of the year. Mountainfilm “is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.” Likewise, the FRFF—whose films are a combination of the Mountainfilm Tour and locally or regionally-submitted films—has a similar mission:

The Frozen River Film Festival identifies and offers programs that engage, educate and activate viewers to become involved in the world. These programs provide a unique perspective on environmental issues, sustainable communities and extreme sports.

For Winona, the festival is also a time to learn and celebrate the unique landscapes and fertile soils of the Mississippi driftless area that was carved out during the last glacial age. FRFF Director, Crystal Hegge, highlighted the new film about regional legend Aldo Leopold, Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time, that capture’s the conservationist character of the festival: “(Viewers) will be able to ask questions about what’s going on here in Winona, and how they’re utilizing [Leopold's] message and creating a great landscape for the Winona community.” In a small community like Winona, the festival really brings the community together for important conversations that are sparked by the common experiences of viewing a film and hearing rarely-told stories.

One of those rarely told stories, and winner of the FRFF People’s Choice Award, is Dakota 38. The film is a moving re-telling of the mass execution of 38 Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 by the order of President Lincoln in Mankato, Minnesota. The film is a stark reminder of the ugly and often unjust history of how the Dakota were forcibly and violently removed from their ancestral lands, including Winona, and how little of that history most Minnesotans actually know. Nonetheless, the film retraces a healing journey for Jim Miller—whose vivid dream of the execution sparked the journey—and others who decided to ride 330 miles on horseback to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution.

David Holbrooke, Festival Director for Mountainfilm, spoke with me over the phone about the role film and festivals can have in positive social change. “The documentarian is one of the last of the truth tellers,” Holbrooke said, “and we celebrate those filmmakers and storytellers who bring issues to light in untarnished ways.” Mountainfilm’s origins, telling the stories of climbers and mountaineers, were about doing things that haven’t been done. At its core, Holbrooke sees Mountainfilm as being about pushing the limits about what is possible and going places where others have not gone.

The intersection of sports, culture, and the environment appeals to a large swath of people—some of whom are already engaged in issues of social change, but many who are not. Each block of film sessions contains anywhere between two to six films that vary in length from as short as a couple of minutes to as long as a feature-length film that is guaranteed to pique one’s imagination and raise the consciousness to a new level.

The films are an eclectic mix that really do inspire, educate, awe, and touch the viewer in many different ways; some do so very deeply, such as The Economics of Happiness which reveals the serious social, economic, political, and environment challenges humanity faces. But when the film, which tells about the ills of globalization, ends on a hopeful note about the positive and successful potential of “localization,” the viewer is inspired to hook up with one of the many practical alternatives or organizations documented in the film. The Economics of Happiness was also paired up with two other films: Mr. Happy Man and Yelp. There was a unique pedagogical process at work in that Saturday evening film session. In Mr. Happy Man, we meet Bermudan Johnny Barnes who spends his days standing on a busy intersection spreading his love to all who pass by. It is a simple, genuinely love-filled gesture that spills out even across the silver screen. Following that uplifting exposé, Yelp‘s rant against technology causes the viewer to ponder the distraction and disruption that technology may be causing in our lives. The film ends with a climatic crescendo, urging us to “UNPLUG!” After having been calmed by Johnny Barnes and willfully considering our relationship to technology, The Economics of Happiness gives a coherent and digestible debunking of capitalism’s growth at all costs and how it is effecting the planet, communities, and individuals while modestly presenting viable alternatives. The filmmakers are even hosting a conference featuring the film’s interviewees in March.

“The world can be a better place than it is now and our filmmakers and guests [speakers] help us get there” said Holbrooke, who first saw the now Academy Award-nominated film Gasland at the Sundance festival and then played it at the Mountainfilm in 2010. “I had never heard of fracking until Gasland,” admitted Holbrooke. “And it’s happening miles from us in Telluride. It’s happening miles from my home in Brooklyn.” Past guests at Mountainfilm have included Tim DeChristopher and Port Arthur, Texas community organizer and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Hilton Kelley, who is featured in this year’s tour film My Toxic Reality.

“We look for people who are out changing the world. We need hope and solutions and we want to tell the stories of those who are fighting for what they believe in. We are in extraordinary times and we need extraordinary people taking extraordinary measures. Mountainfilm celebrates those people.” At the FRFF, one of those people is Jim Tittle. Clips from his forth-coming documentary on silica-sand mining (a key ingredient needed for fracking), The Price of Sand, debuted for the Mississippi River community that is facing the growing threat of such mining that creates open pit mines along the river and in nearby farm country. The film screening was accompanied by a panel discussion and also included opportunities for folks to get involved with organizing against the mining companies to pass town and country ordinances in favor of protecting the river bluffs.

In a testament to the role arts and film have in organizing and training activists, Peaceful Uprising, the organization co-founded by the now-imprisoned climate activist DeChristopher, had a powerful presence over the weekend by leading a workshop on civil disobedience—attended by about twenty people—and presenting the film-in-the-making Bidder 70. Hegge met Peaceful Uprising in Telluride at Mountainfilm’s 2011 festival and invited them to the FRFF.

When Ken Butigan writes about “mainstreaming nonviolence,” I think workshops on civil disobedience and nonviolence at film festivals (and well attended, for a small town like Winona) may just be what he had in mind. It is exciting to see the tools and awareness needed for nonviolent social change becoming more commonplace and celebrated.

• Just after the National Park Service’s noon deadline Monday, by which protesters in Washington’s two Occupy D.C. camps were required to decamp, protesters fought back by stringing up a giant blue tarp in the middle of McPherson Square, which they called the “tent of dreams.”

• Belgium’s first general strike in almost two decades brought parts of the country to a halt on Monday in an anti-austerity protest aimed at the new government and at EU leaders meeting in Brussels.

• Hundreds of Romanians protested on Saturday against a plan to set up Europe’s biggest open-cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town, joining a wave of anti-government rallies.

• Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world’s poor.

• Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• Argentina’s powerful truck drivers’ union blocked postal distribution centers in several cities on Monday to protest the firing of 200 workers.

• About 200 Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to re-open their church and stop intimidation by Muslim hardliners.

• Last Sunday, dozens of Detroit’s undertakers drove a motorcade of hearses through the city’s most violent neighborhoods to protest the high murder rate.

A couple weeks ago, a group of activists working with Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance campaign hit the streets of San Francisco to bring a little truth about Bank of America’s misdeeds to its customers—not in the lobbies of the bank’s local branches, but at its ATMs throughout the city.

The group designed special non-adhesive stickers that looked exactly like Bank of America’s ATM screen, but with a few important differences, that were then put on all 85 of the bank’s ATMs in San Francisco.

Rather that offering the standard options, the sticker’s new menu options allowed customers to select whether they wanted their money to be invested in coal-fired power plants, foreclosures on homes, bankrolling climate change or padding executive bonuses. At the bottom, there was also a button that said, “Stop doing business with Bank of America until they start behaving responsibly,” and offered the URL of a new blog, Bankrupting America, that is targeting the bank.

Given the positive response to the action, RAN online organizer Mike Gaworecki wrote on The Understory that they have now “made the design available as a high-res PDF. It’s available here. We ARE NOT suggesting you do anything with it.”

A view of Alberta's tar sands, which were once covered by lush boreal forests

In a statement released this afternoon, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would have linked Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s refineries. Obama had already effectively rejected the pipeline in early November, when he put off a ruling until after the 2013 elections. But the fossil fuel lobby and their allies in Congress pushed through legislation in mid December that forced the president to make a decision within 60 days. The White House seems to have taken such bullying as an opportunity to reiterate its earlier point: a decision will not be made this year.

While environmentalists should be excited that their efforts played a clear role in making the pipeline a complex campaign issue, there is no indication that Obama won’t eventually allow a tar sands pipeline, if reelected. Congress gave the Obama administration a huge out by allowing him to  reject the pipeline on procedural grounds, which he more-or-less noted in his statement today:

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil.”

Had he been forced to reject the pipeline on the sole basis of environmental concerns, the news today might be very different. Obama can’t be seen as too anti-pipeline these days–even though it has been proven to be a jobs bust.

The 234 Congress members who voted to expedite the pipeline, however, won’t be so generous (or shortsighted) in the future, which is why tar sands activists have made them their next target. On January 24, the day after Congress returns to Washington, tar sands opponents will be converging on Capitol Hill and processing to the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s #1 lobby, dressed as referees.

As organizer Bill McKibben explained in an email earlier this week:

We’re going to call penalties—forget facemasking, this is vote-buying. Forget unsportsmanlike conduct—this is undemocratic conduct.

This time we plan to get up close and personal with some of the worst folks on Capitol Hill. Not only will we be sending an unavoidable message (I don’t think a gaggle of refs is a common sight in DC), we also hope to make a media stir that will be a counterbalance to the flood of ads and propaganda unleashed by the industry over the past two weeks.

Warning: it won’t work right away. These guys have been having their way for so long that it won’t dawn on them quickly that the game is us. We’ll have to fight them all spring long to prevent Keystone, and to take away the billions in subsidies that they present each year to the oil industry (with our money). But if we’re going to take back our country we’ve got to start somewhere, and January 24 is the day.

For more information on the action visit 350.org.

The short-term issue which birthed the network now being called Occupy Nigeria was the hastily-announced January 1, 2012 end of the federal fuel subsidies which had enabled average Nigerians to afford gas pumped from oil reserves on their own land. This resulted in an overnight 120 percent price increase, and an outburst of fury at decades of governmental collusion with the multi-billion dollar oil industry. The initial demands of the movement—to simply return to the status quo before 2012—were quickly followed up with calls for an end to the nepotism of politicians and an improvement in infrastructure. By the end of the first week of local protests, Nigerian police had killed at least ten activists, and a call went out for a nationwide, indefinite strike which would halt the Nigerian economy. Many mainstream professional associations joined the call, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association. Ongoing and intensified shut-downs promise to paralyze international oil supplies.

The fact is, for many long-term observers, there are no surprises here; Nigerian society may be crippled by the violence of multinational greed but has long been a staging ground for peaceful resistance to the neocolonialism of oil companies and their foreign profiteers. Nigerian educator Judith Atiri, in our recently published Seeds Bearing Fruit: Pan African Peace Action for the 21st Century, testified to the “fertile soil and inspiring possibilities” deep in the history of Africa’s most populated nation. Early examples of creative anti-colonial challenges included a popular tax resistance campaign in the 1920s, and a series of general strikes throughout the 1940s. After independence in 1960, protests became more localized and region-specific with the discovery of oil and movements for secession taking center stage. It was quickly evident that direct British colonization had been replaced by the all-consuming power of the empire-building multinationals. The 1990 coming together of nine separate associations of the indigenous Ogoni peoples of the southeast set the stage for modern Nigerian resistance.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), it should be remembered, was a coalition demanding both control over natural resources as well as general self-determination. Their Ogoni Bill of Rights gave a detailed set of demands for a greater share of the oil revenues amongst all the people of Nigeria, greater national attention to environmental clean-up, and greater political participation and transparency. Though the multinational oil companies and the Nigerian federal government ignored these demands, protests continued with intensified issues raised: that the Ogoni people have a right to refuse further oil production on their land, and that reparations be paid to make up for centuries of colonial theft. By 1995, MOSOP and their supporters were able to successfully shut down several plants, an act now being repeated by the Occupy movement. Nigeria’s infamous response was swift: MOSOP leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the state. Though Ogoni leaders noted that MOSOP and all the peoples of the Niger Delta region were “barricaded by excessive violence” throughout society, and even tempted by violence, they remained a movement committed to nonviolent social change.

Though conflict and violence has been characteristic amongst many competing groupings in the Niger Delta, with disputes over political representation, work contracts, land issues, and personal rivalries, the overall struggle for unity against corruption and greed continues to take peaceful forms. Women have always been active and leading participants in Nigeria’s freedom campaigns, but the initiatives of the past decade have seen more specifically women-led campaigns than ever before. Nigerian legal scholar and conflict resolution practitioner Ifeoma Ngozi Malo wrote poignantly about the 2002 waves of protest against Chevron-Texaco, where women seized control of several oil terminals, with no ensuing violence. “Armed with only food and their voices,” Ngozi Malo explained, “these village women carrying their children on their back occupied the various oil facilities and the terminals for weeks. They barricaded a storage depot, thus blocking docks, helicopter pads and an airstrip, which covered all the entry points to their facility. Their presence prevented well over 700 workers from working or leaving the premises until the company agreed to certain conditions.”

Part of the successes of these campaigns can be explained by the “shaming” aspect of women’s power in Nigerian society. With strong social bonds in a society where cultural traditions are taken very seriously and honored, a simple dance can have greater impact than an apparently militant protest with angry placards. During many occupations of the past several years, dances were specifically developed to ridicule the unjust practices of local, regional and international businessmen. Using embarrassing songs with satirical and sardonic lyrics, these women-led actions have had lasting effects on their communities. Even in cases where corporate promises were quickly broken, the power and possibility of nonviolent direct action and occupation was fused into the consciousness of civil society.

Perhaps the most unique and ingenious tactic of the modern Nigerian women-led movement has been the threat of nakedness. With its roots in traditional protest amongst the peoples of eastern Nigeria, public nudity symbolized a “permanent curse” of political, economic and physical impotence for the men before whom women were provoked to disrobe. Never taken lightly, contemporary instances of the threat are carefully woven into strategic thinking about escalating campaigns. Warnings are always given by the women, and negotiations often take place before a public disrobing is deemed necessary. It could be said that the idea of public nudity and shaming still strikes fear into Nigeria’s body politic. In any case, clothed or not, it is clear that nonviolent tactics are far from new to Nigeria’s large, heterogeneous, neocolonial society.

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

But is that what a tree hugger really is? Just some dazed hippie who goes around giving hugs to trees as way to connect with nature. You might be shocked to learn the real origin of the term.

The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. And now those villages are virtual wooded oases amidst an otherwise desert landscape. Not only that, the Bishnois inspired the Chipko movement (which means “to cling”) that started in the 1970s, when a group of peasant women in Northeast India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down. Within a few years, this tactic, also known as tree satyagraha, had spread across India, ultimately forcing reforms in forestry and a moratorium on tree felling in Himalayan regions.

Despite this powerful history of nonviolent resistance, we still consider tree hugger a derogatory term. Meanwhile, a current example of forest protection in Brazil, where the country’s environmental agency has a special ops team that hunts down illegal loggers, gets all kinds of glory. Not that it shouldn’t, considering Brazil has cut deforestation by nearly 80 percent since 2004. But do environmental heroes need to, as the BBC recently described Brazil’s forest agents, “wear military fatigues, with heavy black pistols slung casually on their thighs” in order to get any respect?

In Africa, there are several conservation organizations that have a shoot-to-kill policy when they see a suspected poacher. Private security firms in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi provide military-style protection for the iconic animals that Western tourists flock to see. While some have argued in support of these desperate measures–pointing to the dramatic rise in poaching in recent years–the “shoot first and ask questions later” approach has led to the deaths of locals, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. These incidents of course lead to resentment toward conservation, which has been shown to be most effective when local communities are involved in the process.

Not surprisingly, people want to protect the land they live on. And like the Bisnhois and people of the Chipko movement, they are often willing to lay down their lives for it–armed only with their own two arms.

• Several hundred anti-Wall Street protesters marched in a “human float” behind the 123rd Tournament of Roses parade on Monday, unfurling a 250-foot banner of the constitution and also displayed an approximately 70-foot octopus made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

• More than 950 relatives of inmates are refusing to leave a Venezuelan prison in a protest to demand faster trial for inmates.

• Troops in Indian-controlled Kashmir have opened fire on hundreds of villagers who were protesting against frequent power cuts, killing one person and injuring two others.

• Thousands of Indiana workers rallied outside, and inside, their state capitol on Wednesday to speak out against Governor Mitch Daniels‘ renewed effort to force through so-called “right to work” legislation designed to undermine labor unions and workers’ rights protected by collective bargaining.

• Skipping New Year Eve celebration parties, hundreds of people in Guy Fawkes masks gathered in downtown Kuala Lumpur last weekend in a peaceful protest to demand greater democratic freedom in Malaysia.

• Indonesians have dropped thousands of old flip-flops and other footwear at police stations and a child protection group to protest the heavy-handed treatment of a 15-year-old boy accused of stealing a policeman’s sandals in the northern state of Central Sulawesi.

• About 2,000 Peruvians marched in the northern city of Cajamarca on Monday, resuming protests that started in November against plans to develop a gold mine that would harm their water supplies.

• Thousands of people in Bangladesh’s northwest gathered over the new year period to demand government action to save a dying river which they said is vital to their livelihoods.

• A group of Nigerian protesters marched in the Niger Delta on Saturday calling on Royal Dutch Shell to do more to clean up last month’s massive oil spill.

• The mayor of a remote Armenian village joined on Thursday more than 100 environmental activists in a protest against a German-owned company’s plans to expand open-pit mining in the southeastern Syunik region.

While Gladwell’s work has been greatly debated, scientists working far from the literary spotlight have produced complex, but no less compelling, findings in the realm of tipping points. The latest came out this summer when scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York published a paper with findings that truly trump Gladwell’s assertions. They found that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, the majority of the society will eventually adopt it.

Here’s their prophetic equation in all its mathematical glory:

p<p_c, T_c~exp[α(p)N], whereas for p>p_c, T_c~lnN

That, in a very calculated nutshell, is what explains the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other such global phenomenons. Don’t ask me to explain it, though. I can only assume it means what they say it means.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

Gladwell might be wrong about the 20 percent figure, but he’s probably right about the types of people who make “the law of the few” possible. You need connectors, mavens and salesmen to spread the idea. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me six months to even hear about this fascinating new study. After all, scientists aren’t exactly socialistas in the Gladwell sense.

It was Grist columnist David Roberts who alerted me to this fascinating 10 percent figure in a recent piece where he argues for being a climate hawk.

There’s long been an obsession among climate/energy folks with finding a message that appeals to to the “middle” (about which myths abound, but that’s a subject for another time) or the climate undecided/uncommitted/skeptical. Since honest (read: terrifying) talk about the severity of climate change doesn’t win over the uncommitted or disinterested, it is deemed unhelpful to that effort and scolded whenever it pops up.

As I’ve said so many times, though, what drives social change and shifts politics is not broad-based support but intensity. An intensely committed minority can act as a lever that moves larger populations.

According to a Yale study, 12 percent of Americans are “alarmed” by climate change. If that’s the case, why hasn’t it invoked a tipping point?

What complicates matters, of course, is that there’s a roughly equally sized (but vastly better funded and organized) cadre of people who are passionately intense about spreading doubt and blocking action. I’m not sure what the Rensselaer researchers would say about the spread of ideas in the face of concerted opposition, but I imagine it requires clearing a higher hurdle.

Roberts goes on to argue that because of these “two opposing camps battling it out,” the vast majority of “Normal People” don’t know what to think. This, he says, “explains why public opinion is shallow and fickle on the subject.”

Ironically, the right wing once stood in this position of trying to push its views through to the mainstream.

Forty years ago, supply-side economics and opposition to basic social safety net protections were crank, extremist views held by a small minority of hardcore conservatives — the folks who rallied behind Goldwater in 1964 and lost. But as historian Rick Perlstein recounts in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, they didn’t stop. They kept organizing and pushing, organizing and pushing. Then came Nixon, Reagan, GW Bush, Sarah Palin. Now extremist conservative views are part of the mainstream fabric.

What if they’d given up after 1964? What if they’d looked at surveys, concluded the American middle didn’t favor their views, and spent the next decades trying to tone down and soften those views?

Are you starting to see the potential for climate activists?

That’s where climate hawks are — their own 1964. Surely one of their most important tasks is to grow and support the committed minority of people who have absorbed and understood the severity of the climate crisis. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if climate truth initially fails to reach the mushy middle. What matters is that the committed minority grows.

There are plenty of signs of that happening, from 350.org to Tar Sands Action to the grassroots movements against mountaintop mining and fracking. Action–particularly that which is honest and unmediated in regards to the threats we face–is the key ingredient.

There’s no reason that intensity, activism, protest, and agitation — “alarmism,” as they’re snottily called by Very Serious People — need to be seen an alternative to pragmatic, incremental process pushed by moderate insiders. They are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they ought to be mutually reinforcing. At the very least, less infighting would be nice.

But everyone, it seems to me, no matter what role they play, could stand to push the edge a little bit occasionally, reminding their audience, whatever audience, that climate change is some genuinely dire sh*t and that now is the time for ambition and courage.

Among the films shortlisted for an Academy Award next month is the powerful documentary If a Tree Falls. It chronicles the house arrest of Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist facing life in prison for the arson of an Oregon lumber company, and the movement to which he belonged, the Earth Liberation Front.

Far from taking sides, the film explores the middle and complex ground between martyrdom and terrorism–the latter being how the United States government saw McGowan’s actions. No matter how one feels about such volatile property destruction, it would be difficult, however, to leave the film without feeling some sympathy for McGowan. Perhaps it’s his own self-reflection and ultimate remorse that does it. But credit the filmmakers for creating an atmosphere conducive to humanization.

As director Marshall Curry noted in a recent interview, “It took a lot of time just explaining to people we were honestly interested in their point of view, and the film wasn’t going to be their point of view but it would reflect their point of view. That we were interested in having the best arguments from different sides bang against each other, rather than setting up straw men to knock down.”

Even the police are given their moment of self-reflection, where they’re able to transcend the black and white, good guy, bad guy mentality that’s so core to their profession. They seem to get that McGowan is not a terrorist and that on some deeply human level, his actions, which arose out of anger toward the destruction of nature and the urgency to see immediate results, as well as the alienation such beliefs often bring, are wholly understandable.

Nevertheless, for those who have studied nonviolence and know its success rates are far higher than violent uprisings–or simply witnessed the major events of the last year–the film will make you anxious to spread the Gospel, so to speak. It is so clear that the Earth Liberation Front, which rose in the mid 1990s as a response to the abuse of peaceful protesters, lacked a basic understanding of the dynamics of nonviolence. They saw young people getting pepper-sprayed at sit-ins and beat up by police and thought something bolder needed to be done. And so they did exactly what you shouldn’t do: alienate everyone who doesn’t share your point of view.

What they failed to consider, despite their efforts to ensure no one was ever hurt in an arson, was that their actions did hurt people, emotionally. As the film reveals, timber company owners feared for their lives and those of their family–something that only rallied the community and media against their environmental message.

Rebecca Solnit spoke to this kind of situation in her recent and widely praised essay on tactics and Occupy Wall Street.

So when episodes of violence break out as part of our side in a demonstration, an uprising, a movement, I think of it as a sabotage, a corruption, a coercion, a misunderstanding, or a mistake, whether it’s a paid infiltrator or a clueless dude. Here I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.

It’s hard to ignore comparisons to Occupy Wall Street these days, but to be fair, it’s probably more than just coincidence that a film like this would come out now, this so-called “Year of the Protester.” Things have been building in this direction for quite a while and now ideas about activism are being discussed like never before, and the work of prominent nonviolent theorists has emerged to recognition on the global scale.

Curry himself is excited about the current relevance of his film and potential of a timeless message:

It has overlapped with the emergence of the Occupy movement, and that has been very interesting. The pepper spray stuff you see on the news could have been lifted from the movie. The frustration with the system is something we’re seeing now. I feel like the film is a cautionary tale for activists to think about the tactics they take and the ethics and effectiveness and legality of tactics.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
Resistance was in the streets and occupations in city squares. A resounding “no” echoed around the world–what Bernard Harcourt has perceptively termed “political disobedience”–signifying contempt, dissatisfaction, and rejection of entrenched governments and status quo economics. Dictators were ousted in Egypt and Tunisia. Revolutionary fervor was sparked by nonviolent action in Libya, Syria and Yemen. South Korean activists are poised to possibly shutter the building of a controversial US naval base with profound geopolitical implications. Afghan youth are getting organized–an incredible feat considering all the challenges they face. Palestinian nonviolent resistance and the Free Gaza movement is growing as are Israeli protests for social justice. In the US, activists and organizers in Wisconsin and Ohio occupied their state capitals to protest budget cuts and GOP anti-unionism. Undocumented students–DREAMers–took it to the streets and Senators’ offices. Environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, students and citizens staged sit-ins at the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline–whose fate is still TBD but the resistance is growing. And then there was Occupy Wall Street. The movement propelled American activism back into public purview and is proving to be the era where a generation of young people–equipped with the tools, knowledge and experience of the civil rights and anti-war generations–are cutting their teeth in nonviolent social change. We are telling ourselves that there is reason to hope because we incarnate it.

The protests of 2011 are the harbinger of what we’ve already known–what we’ve been waiting and working for–that neoliberalism’s carte blanche as signed by the Washington Consensus is on the way out. The days of political regimes that are not truly democratic (and, apparently, equitable) are–at the very least in ideological terms–numbered. In the 00s, there was an explosion of social commentary on globalization: Thomas Freidman, Naomi Klein, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva. Paul Kingsnorth, a British journalist, penned a book whose title has stayed with me: One No, Many Yeses. The catchy, chant-like title offers a simple way to reflect on the the historical moment we are experiencing. As symbolized by Time‘s “Person of the Year,” there is a global “no!” to anti-democratic governments and unfettered capitalism. But at the same time, that singular no of protest is united by the multitude of “yeses” whose global resonance signifies the arrival of a comprehensive vision of nonviolence.

This yes to nonviolence signals the awakening consciousness that summarily connects us to that which is most important in our lives and our communities: the desire to be connected, to live without fear, to be healthy and be in healthy relationships, to be free to have self-determining and mutually-supporting ways of living, working, parenting, learning, teaching, creating, and, yes, even dying. Never before have we witnessed the acute, raw, powerful desire for life in such a way that so many diverse peoples are willingly struggling for that way of being.

Nonviolence–however broadly we choose to define it, whether that be strategically, principally, as a communication technique, as a tactic, as a religious commitment, as a process–has inspired hope, awakened creativity, and substantially changed, once again, the world. Gandhi’s term, “satyagraha,” contains a meaning so varied yet concrete and so distinct yet common that “nonviolence” left lacking. Satyagraha is means and ends. It is an effective tactic of protest, a viable social program and an eternal, utopian hope. The nonviolence in 2012 is shoving the nonviolence of protest into the “constructive program” that rejects the there-is-no-alternative to global capitalism. The nonviolence of 2012 will continue to hold up the alternatives to violence, oppression, and injustice by being the vision it seeks. Democratic participation, consensus-based decision-making, decentralized leadership models, shared responsibility, and economics of common wealth and individual affirmation of uniqueness are being experimented with across the world in thousands of different contexts–and with success! “General assembly” being a household word, the lack of charismatic leadership and establishment confusion over what protesters demand all confirm that nonviolence is more than just protest.

Despairingly, I don’t have much hope in protest alone any more; many of us do not. The record-breaking millions who protested the 2003 Iraq War and the continued political impotence on climate change–like in Copenhagen, 2009, and Durban, 2011–show that the “system” is incapable of responding to genuine democratic sentiments. But the hope of nonviolence, besides having some ability to shake the system into response, is in its birthing new paradigms that are more about praxis and participation than they are about ideology. Through these protests, power is in the process of being fundamentally redefined as something to be shared. Political systems and social relationships–having been more or less stagnant since political liberalism first appeared on the Enlightenment scene and later re-affirmed post-Cold War–are showing early signs of social evolution, an indicator that we are not yet at the end of history. Nonviolence, then, as a common denominator in politics, economics, relationships, and resistance movements can be a guiding–and deciding–force for local and global solutions that are democratically-directed and people-powered. I have hope in 2012!

• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

As complex as this unraveling chain of events may seem, it’s not nature, but politicians–particularly those in Washington–who have made it so. Although they exhale the same amount of carbon dioxide as the average human being, theirs is just as potent and polluting as the gas bubbling out of that lake. The latest example of this can be seen in the Senate’s passage of a bill that requires the president to make a decision within 60 days on the Keystone XL pipeline–which would link Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries or, more accurately, the dangerous melting of Arctic permafrost.

The bill is a rather duplicitous effort by Republicans to link an issue the president would prefer not to deal with (Keystone XL) to one that’s close to his heart: payroll tax breaks. As Grist explained, “They have nothing to do with tar sands. But the president wants them, so the House [and now the Senate] is taking them hostage and using them to bargain for the pipeline.”

What does this mean for Tar Sands Action, the campaign that raised the pipeline issue to a national level and pushed the president to initially delay a decision until after the election? It means the gears are churning among the organizers. They’ve been on a week-long retreat to figure out the next moves for this campaign–after a month of local and regional brainstorming–but were no doubt caught by surprise with the quick emergence and passage of this bill.

In an email to Tar Sands Action campaigners yesterday, Bill McKibben did his best to outline immediate steps to be taken:

Our hope — and what you should ask the President for when you write him — is that when he signs the bill he will say the obvious thing:

“Two months is not long enough to review the pipeline. The Canadians themselves have just delayed review of their tar sands pipelines over safety concerns, and we’ve just come through a year that set a record for billion-dollar climate-related disasters; I’m not going to do a rush job just to please the oil industry lobbyists. So this pipeline is dead.”

Since the State Department has already, in essence, said two months is not enough time, this should be straightforward.

We should know how it’s going to play out within 48 hours or so. We’re of course ready to fight like heck.

But for this weekend? If you haven’t gotten through to the White House, or you think you can round up some friends, you can send them a message here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments (the switchboard is now closed for the weekend) – and click here to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter.

Even if the president says the right thing, it seems inevitable that TSA will have to get back out on the streets. If discussions over the past month from the local level on up are any indication of what’s to come, possible courses of action include targeting Obama campaign centers as sites for protest and civil disobedience, starting divestment campaigns against the banks that finance the pipeline project, and occupying the pipeline’s endpoints in Texas and Alberta.

Washington may be far removed from the chain of events it’s facilitating up in the Arctic, but climate activists and the broad range of other folks opposed to this pipeline–including Nebraska farmers and Texas ranchers–are already catalyzing another chain of events that politicians will have a much harder time ignoring.