How to keep the Climate Movement alive?

2019-03-07

Dear George,

my name is Riccardo, I'm writing from Milan.

I was invited and taken to one of your talks by Polly Higgins when I was in Stroud, almost exactly one year ago. The idea of creating a narrative makes good sense, I very much liked the idea.
There is a small chain of events that brought me to write you now.

The short version is that I am trying to put Greta Thunberg and FFF on the track of Polly. As I see it, from the awareness that Fridays For Future has and creates, the next logical step for them is to do something tangible with this awareness. What better than to support Polly's Mission LifeForce which aims to turn Ecocide into an international crime? It is fully operative supported. FFF in itself could mean a vast source of additional supporters already, but they can also carry along and distribute Polly's intention to create this Ecocide law even further.

In my own 'mission' for a better Europe (www.EurOpinion.is), the original idea was first to achieve a better Europe and then get to better environmental and climate politics. However now I think it might actually be the other way around, that a better Europe can start from this movement and momentum for a better climate/future and as such be a reference/example for the rest of the world. It seems in fact very well timed. If the current awareness for climate can be turned into, or rather be expanded with, the awareness of this better Europe (which they themselves could be the start of) then the coming European elections might even bring hope and be yet another step further towards protecting nature and climate and towards a better society in general.
This is roughly my personal narrative.

In your article you talk about how to keep the momentum of the Climate movement alive. “The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by fossil fuel companies, the billionaires who profit from them and the politicians they have bought..." Maybe climate alone is not enough. EurOpinion aims to discover interactively with the participants what other great issues are suffering in the same way as climate/nature does, basically from the same people, those billionaires -in fact the binding issue for all- and bring them together, on a European scale to start with and considering five selected main attention points (categories):

1. Nature First (for now put as home page)
2. Freedom of Speech
3. Gender equiity
4. Go non-profit (alternative economies, commons!)
5. Abolish Bank Secrecy

Aditionally there is also Education, Health, Science and Spirituality amongst others. More details can be found on the site itself. I have worked on EurOpinion alone and with limited resources. The project is on stand-by for now. It should be considered a scale-model only representing the basic initial elements. The full concept goes much further than meets the eye.

In any case the elements could make up a structure for or be part of a useful narrative.

----------------------------

2019-03-26 - adding...

After just seeing the introductions of Ecosocialism or ecocide and of Democratic Socialism Explained, a thought struck me. Again, because this isn't the first time. But following your philosophy it suddenly seems more crucial than I had thought until now. Shouldn't this new narrative also have or maybe even start with some new terminology?

Continuing to use the terms "left" or "right" at this point in global and human history, doesn't seem to make sense anymore. Besides being worn out and boring, there is also too many possible interpretations that makes it confusing. Particularly regarding the "left", due to (its openess to) the many different and apparently non-related starting points: protection of nature, solidaritty, human rights, non-discrimination, (alternative) health, (alternative) education, (alternative) spirtiuality, etc.The "right" is more specific, easy and clear, because it's actually mono-thematic: profit, industry, production, consumption, GNP, employment, "prosperity", investment, speculation, finance, economy... at the end it's all about the same: money! This is very easy to understand by everybody and, unfortunately, also very easy to just blindly follow. Moreover, it's practically the only thing that people know, because global(ized) society has been (non)functioning for ages based on this narrative, as you say, since colonization.

continued in a new chapter: People and Planet

*copied from the Guardian for translation purposes

Courage and conviction may not be enough – that’s something I learned from other movements’ failures.

This one has to succeed. It is not just that the youth climate strike, now building worldwide with tremendous speed, is our best (and possibly our last) hope of avoiding catastrophe. It is also that the impacts on the young people themselves, if their mobilisation and hopes collapse so early in their lives, could be devastating.

To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for instance, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact. We should wonder why the global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, despite the numbers involved, their courage and determination, has not changed the world. We should consider why Podemos, the Spanish party that rose so high on the optimism of the indignados movement, now seems to be spiralling into recriminatory collapse.

Those of us who witnessed these disappointments have, I feel, a painful duty to be as honest about them as possible, to help ensure their failures are not repeated. Much of what I propose here is controversial, and I can’t promise I’ve got it right. So my first advice is this: don’t listen only to me.

A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go. Using the narrative structure common to almost all successful political and religious transformations, the restoration story, it might go something like this. “The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by fossil fuel companies, the billionaires who profit from them and the politicians they have bought. But we, the young heroes, will confront these oligarchs, using our moral authority to create a movement so big and politically dangerous that our governments are forced to shut down the fossil economy and restore the benign conditions in which humans and other species can thrive.”
I can’t wait for the striking schoolchildren to grab the reins of power
Suzanne Moore
Suzanne Moore
Read more

This restoration narrative, I think, could be greatly strengthened by recent findings suggesting that ecological recovery – restoring forests, salt marshes, peat bogs, the seabed and other crucial ecosystems – could, by drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, make a massive contribution towards preventing climate breakdown. (I’ll write about that when I finish my research on the subject, in a few weeks). A successful movement should also define a clear and tangible objective, perhaps a date by which nations achieve a zero-carbon economy. It could recommend a pathway, such as a ramped-up version of the green new deal proposed by the most progressive Democrats. If so, it will need to set a series of waymarks, by which it can judge whether or not governments are on track. This ensures that the activists, rather than the government, keep setting the agenda.
Advertisement

This objective should be supported by a set of irreducible principles that can be explained and spread with pride and conviction. Here are a couple of possible examples. “Human life is not negotiable, it cannot be exchanged for money.” “Those generations that are yet to be born have the same rights as those already alive.”

Clear principles appear to be essential to the long-running success of a campaign. A fascinating report in the online magazine Truthout explains how indigenous people living around Lake Texcoco in Mexico confronted a $13bn international airport – one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Latin America – and, across 17 years, and despite all predictions, won. The campaign was built on the principle that their land and community were not for sale, however much money might be offered. This ensured that the Mexican government’s only remaining strategy was force. But the people had created such strong community organisations and attracted so much support from other Mexicans that force ceased to be an option.

This suggests another crucial element: a protest community strong enough to resist all attempts at division and co-option. Such communities do not arise by accident but are consciously and carefully constructed, often with the help of training, music and fun. They must be strong enough to support people threatened by despair, burnout or breakdown, especially when the response gets nasty. Already, conspiracy theories are being spread by politicians and the media, suggesting that the young people have been organised by unknown sinister forces: after all, how could children possibly organise themselves?

Greta Thunberg, whose school strike sparked this movement, has written a response far more dignified and mature than the articles attacking her. But the nastiness has only just begun. As some of us can testify, the viciousness of the lobby groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, and the publications that amplify their message, knows no limits. As we have already seen, they treat even children as fair game.
Advertisement

I would suggest that the climate strikers develop clear rules of engagement, in order to give their opponents no ammunition. In my view, the global justice movement was gravely damaged by its failure to exclude or contain the black bloc: people dressed in black, some of whom came to protests tooled up for a fight and often smashed up random local businesses, denting support for the mobilisation with every blow. Some people in the movement believed that everyone had a right to join it on whatever terms they wished. I see this as an unaffordable indulgence.
'It is our future': children call time on climate inaction in UK
Read more

A good exercise is to ask yourself what the police and authorities would most like to happen, then do the opposite. They would love a violent faction to emerge that would erode the young strikers’ credibility and provide an excuse to send in the riot police and break up the protests. Never give them this excuse.

Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing. One promising approach is Big Organizing, through which campaigners create proliferating networks, each branch of which trains the branches that grow from it. It helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take her seat in the United States Congress. They need clever, funny and innovative tactics, which take opponents by surprise and create a sense of forward momentum. Designing such tactics, narratives and principles is, I believe, best done by a small number of people, then put to the wider group for approval. I saw how Occupy became bogged down in the impossible process of developing complex policies through consensus.

All this is a lot to dump on young people. But there are plenty of veterans, many of whom have far more experience than I do, who are ready to offer advice and help. Any support must come on the young strikers’ terms: they lead, we follow. But they carry a terrible burden: this is a struggle they cannot afford to lose. We will help them lift it if they wish.

• Young climate strikers can win their fight. We must all help - the Guardian, George Monbiot
• https://www.monbiot.com/
• Waarom slaat het klimaatprotest in België wel aan? - Trouw
• Stroud, the gentle Cotswold town that spawned a radical protest