I suppose it wasn’t really until I was standing on the west side of Hoboken, N.J., in water and oil up to my thigh, that climate change really made sense. And it wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy that I understood my sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change denial.
It seems like everywhere we turn, we’re being fed the same old climate Armageddon story. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: If we continue to be dependent on fossil fuels, hundreds of gigatons of CO2 will continue to pour into the atmosphere, the temperature will rise above 2 degrees Celsius, and we’re done. There will be a biblical cocktail of hurricanes, floods, famines, wars. It will be terrifying, awful, epic and, yes, as far as any reputable scientist is concerned, those projections are for real.
I call this narrative the Armageddon Complex, and my own denial was a product of it. I spun all sorts of stories to keep the climate crisis out of my life, ranging anywhere from “it can’t be that bad” to “if it is that bad, there’s nothing I can do about it,” and “it’s not my role. That’s for climate activists; I’m a different kind of activist.”
I did not act alone, but rather as part of a culture of climate denial among activists, who are already plagued by a tendency to see our work as separate issues vying for attention. The Armageddon Complex tells us that climate activism is about some far-off date, not about the pressing and time-sensitive needs that people around us experience in their day-to-day struggles. It pounds into us the idea that the crisis is more titanic than any other, so if we’re going to do anything about it, we have to do everything. Most of us won’t put off the pressing needs of our families and communities for something we abstractly understand is going to happen later, and most of us aren’t willing to drop the other pieces of our lives and our movement to do everything, because we already feel like we’re doing everything and barely scraping by as it is. So we deny.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this story: The crisis is gargantuan, and it’s getting worse. Ultimately only a fundamental social, political, economic and personal transformation is going to get us out of this mess.
But that’s not the whole story. Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate change is already here: Hurricanes that land on families, rising tides that flood homes, oil spills that drown communities and countless other disasters. These are caused by the same economic and political systems responsible for all the other crises we face — crises in which people are displaced from land, families are ripped out of homes, people lose their jobs, students sink into debt, and on and on.
Defeating climate change doesn’t have to mean dropping everything to become climate activists or ignoring the whole thing altogether. The truth is exactly the opposite: We have to re-learn the climate crisis as one that ties our struggles together and opens up potential for the world we’re already busy fighting for.
Climate moment, not climate movement
In addition to the hurricane were important voices that forced me to confront my denial. Naomi Klein has argued that resisting climate change is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win the world we’ve wanted all along; the proponents of climate change are the same enemies that the Occupy movement and its counterparts around the world have already marked. Vandana Shiva pushes us to see that the intersecting crises of food, climate and economy are all based on a common theme of debt, while George Monbiot reminds us that the oil profiteering that ruins our climate would be impossible were it not for the insidious relationship between money and politics. These connections mean that the homeowners and activists around the United States putting their bodies on the line to fight foreclosure, the students occupying their universities to fight tuition hikes, the activists fighting for campaign finance reform, the countless who stand up to war — these struggles are our best shot at a climate movement that can really win.
But I learned those same lessons, too, from people in struggle. Farmers in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement fighting for their land are not so different from the Lubicon Cree in Northern Alberta, Canada, standing in the way of the Keystone XL pipeline that poisons their water, or the residents in Atlanta, Ga., trying to win their homes back from the banks. The working-class white West Virginians resisting fracking are in the same boat as the families in Far Rockaway whose kids’ lungs are infected from living in moldy homes after Hurricane Sandy. They have a lot in common with those in the South Bronx who have been fighting against pollution caused by big business for decades, or the mothers in Detroit who are building urban gardens to cope with food deserts. They’re not so different from the Indian women fighting Monsanto, or those resisting wars fought for oil, and on and on the connections go. We’re all connected by the climate crisis, and the opportunities it opens for us.
The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don’t need to become climate activists, we are climate activists. We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment. Ultimately, our task is to create moments for our various movements that allow us to continue our different battles while also working in solidarity to strike at the roots of the systems beneath the symptoms.
Think Turkey and Brazil. Think Arab Spring, and the uprisings against austerity all over Europe. Think the student movements from Quebec to Chile. Think Occupy. These were collective uprisings that drew lines and demanded that people decide which side they were on. It’s our role to prepare for these kinds of “which side are you on?” moments for the climate by training and practicing, by re-focusing on the issues that connect us, by building institutions that can support us in long-term struggle. We don’t stop our other organizing or drop the many other pieces of our lives; we organize the people with whom we already stand in order to seize these moments when they come — to tell stories, take spaces, and challenge enemies of the climate.
Learning from hurricanes
In the New York City neighborhood of Far Rockaway, climate justice is common sense. What I had only read articles and books about before, I learned a thousand times over from people on the front lines of climate crisis after Hurricane Sandy.
As part of Occupy Sandy and the Wildfire Project, I joined the relief effort, which quickly became an organizing project — training, political education, and supporting the growth of a group that is now active across the Rockaways. Between contesting the city’s vision for a recovery, fighting against stop-and-frisk, and organizing against gentrification, the working-class, multiracial Far Rockaway Wildfire group knows that their task is about more than relief from a hurricane — it is also to deal with the crises that existed before the hurricane, and the systems underlying them.
The fight is about winning back the social safety net that has been slashed by the same economic and political elite that profits from fossil fuels. It’s about the wages that have shrunk as elites have profited, about the jobs working people have lost as the bosses have been bailed out. It’s about ensuring sustainable mass transit so people can get to work. It’s about affordable housing, a need that existed before the storm, made worse now by the threat of disaster capitalist schemes to knock down projects and replace them with beach-front condos. It’s about contesting a political system that uses moments of crisis to further disenfranchise working people and people of color. It’s about overturning an economic system that is wrecking the planet while turning a profit for the most powerful, putting 40 percent of the wealth of this country into the hands of 1 percent of the population. It’s about creating alternatives in our communities, while fighting to make those alternatives the norm.
When you’re out on those beaches in Far Rockaway it’s clear that there isn’t any far-off climate Armageddon to wait for. The hurricanes are already smashing down around us, and they’re the same hurricanes as the ones we have fought all along — systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that shape one another and all the values and institutions that govern our lives. By fighting those systems, we’re already the seeds of the climate movement we’ve been dreaming of. We only need to overcome our denial, find points of intersection in our struggles, and prepare for those moments in which people finally sit down or stand up in the critical intersections of human history. It won’t be long now.
I find it very hard to believe that you were once a climate change denier. Those people don’t read Waging Nonviolence and have never heard of Vandana Shiva or Naomi Klein. Why do you adopt a false identity and then preach to the choir? Why not post this article on some climate change denial sites?
Hey Paul,
I definitely understand what you’re saying. But I think what Yotam was trying to communicate (or at least what I read from the piece) wasn’t that he was someone who literally denied the existence of climate change. Rather, that he was one of the many left activists (including myself I might have to admit!) who acknowledges the scientific reality of climate change, but is so daunted by that reality that he or she tries to shut it out and ignore it while pursuing a different course of activism. For example: I have written a lot about housing activism and the anti-foreclosure movement, but it is only very recently that I began to understand how this movement could also contribute to battling climate change because both demand a shift in the laws about property ownership and land relations. So, if we were to destabilize the this-is-mine-and-not-yours understanding of land ownership, we could also move towards a more sustainable energy policy for the planet. But many activists still don’t seek to establish these connections between their particular movements and the climate justice movement. I think THAT’S what Yotam was trying to advocate for in this piece, and in that sense, I actually think it’s really well suited to the audience of Waging Nonviolence. Just my thoughts.
Thank you for the clarification, Laura. I’m a little bit different, I suppose. I could see the validity of the climate change argument a number of years ago, well before I had traveled to where I am now. In those days, I was an environmental activist, a believer in the democratic process, and believed what I read coming from the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and The New York Times. That was then. Now, I see the critical importance of understanding and refuting the mantra that technology will save us. Yes, Ted Rees is correct when he says “in the case of global warming, the problem is in us.” But it goes much, much further. Much further than 99% of liberal activists are willing to go or to think. As an aside, my definition of a “liberal” is one who thinks that capitalism can be fixed. I am most assuredly not a liberal. I was, once, but not any longer. I voted for Obama in 2008 and he has done more than any other living person to radicalize me. Once you get past the blockage of thinking that capitalism can be fixed, things get much, much clearer. Then you begin to see how everything is connected to capitalism. It isn’t just a matter of buying solar panels or getting an electric car – it is a matter of intensively questioning the justice (there is none) of capitalism. Only when these questions begin to be asked will the problem start to come into focus and solutions begin to be visible. Capitalism as an economic system is dragging us to our extinction – it must be replaced with something more fair. Looking at the concept of property is a good start. Take it further and look into the anthropological literature about the circulation of wealth. Proudhon had some good ideas about property, as did Henry George. Wake up, folks! It is probably too late, but stop frittering the available time away by thinking that “fixes” to the current arrangement will solve the problem. They won’t.
Protesting is asking someone else to fix the problem we are in. In the case of global warming, the problem is in us. We drive cars. We heat and cool heat leaking houses. We cook, clean, and entertain with fossil fuel energy. We have our busy lives, and we depend on this energy intensive lifestyle.
Start at home in your own life. Get an electric car. Add solar panels. Insulate your roof, and ventilate your attic. Then see if you can influence your workplace. It should be easy when everyone that works knows the drill.
While I think there is a certain truth to this point, I also suspect there’s something very false about it. Americans drive their cars so much in large part because the government, compelled by auto and oil lobbies has invested far more heavily in highways than public transit. (To say nothing of killing electric car development.) We depend on fossil fuels because our society has failed to invest in alternatives, and because the prices of these fuels have been kept artificially low by industry-friendly policies. And, as Yotam makes clear, the worst burdens of these policies have been carried by the most vulnerable among us.
Turning a corner on climate change will not happen with merely a collection of consumer choices. It requires truly collective, coordinated action. It requires recognizing the extent to which the most powerful people and institutions have set policies that doom us to self-destruction, starting with the poor and marginalized.
It’s all well and good for those of us who can to try to reduce our individual dependence on exploitative systems. But, especially for those who are most vulnerable in our society, this can be too much to ask, because they have no other choice, and the effect would be tiny anyway. Change needs to start by reshaping the powerful forces that are contributing by far the most to the disaster upon us.