Good Enough: Hindsight Towards a Rethinking on Climate Activism
Tuesday's Child is Full of Grace
I was recently reading a forum where another pseudonymous participant wrote something that really struck me hard. We were all talking about climate change and climate activism and he interjected that the mistake that climate activism made from the 1990s onward was folding itself into the suite of activist strategies and claims that were about rights, personhood and identity, ascending out of the civil rights struggle.
The problem, he noted, was that it’s one thing to pressure political regimes that with roots in some form of liberalism towards the continuing extension of liberal frameworks of personhood and rights, or to call them to account for violating those commitments. It’s another thing to mobilize support for a globally coordinated regulatory framework that removes current levels of subsidy for fossil fuel production while shifting dramatically towards encouraging or mandating the use of renewables.
If you look at the long arc of environmental activism stretching back before climate change became the major agenda, its major thrust in terms of mass mobilization was two-fold. First, an extension of consumer rights, which I think has been an incredibly complicated and contradictory domain of activism over the 20th Century. This essentially positioned the environment as a commons that had to be maintained as healthy, safe and protected experience for all individuals to consume equally, which required government to step in as a regulatory protector of the commons (mostly only insofar as private interests visibly damaged or intruded on the commons, as a matter of restraint rather than dictate).
Second, as a property issue, including ownership of one’s own bodily integrity. E.g., inasmuch as environmental contamination emanating from one property specifically degraded or harmed the property of others, that was a claim that existing liberal states were willing to hear petitions about and to make policies and judgments upon and even that liberal and autocratic states could agree represented grounds for bilateral and multilateral agreements. That could be as expansive as the effects of acid rain or stewardship of major watersheds over territorial boundaries or as specific as one light industrial facility contaminating the groundwater of a residential property next door. As these kinds of specific property harms—including to human bodies, human health—proliferated, they drove increased mass activism and political action simply because many people directly experienced some form of harm of this kind.
The problem is that civil-rights activism in the US (and to some extent, its parallels in other nations) created a framework for mass politics and new social movements that has proven incredibly enticing for liberals and progressives. You can build coalitions that stretch from upper middle-class educated white suburbanites to multiracial lower middle-class communities in urban cores and deindustrializing regions to rural Black and Latino/a communities and a great deal in between.
These coalitions were keen to embrace pre-climate change environmental activism in the forms that were compatible with extensions of liberal rights, and these coalitions eventually succeeded in creating international regulatory pressure to tackle dangers to a global-scale commons like the thinning of the ozone layer or threats to charismatic endangered animals like whales. But this was something of a trap when it came to climate change.
The warning signs of the trap were visible in how pre-climate change activism was complicatedly stymied whenever it had to deal with competing property and rights claims that could not be happily reconciled through regulatory or judicial action. E.g., it’s one thing to regulate an industrial polluter who has provably and directly contaminated groundwater and soil in adjacent properties but another thing to constrain the rights of property owners on their own property for the sake of a commons—e.g., to restrict a business from cutting down trees (and thus employing many people) because people who live hundreds of miles away believe they have an abstract right to consume first-growth forests or believe there is an incremental relationship between the destruction of first-growth forests and generalized environmental harms they are experiencing.
Establishing in this framework that a cancer cluster in one place even exists, let alone that it is the direct result of a single culpable property owner’s contaminating actions, was monstrously difficult. Deciding how to handle environmental domains that were in effect a kind of commons to whom no one could establish serious property rights was another limit condition. Air rights might extend upwards to space, albeit with a government-dictated easement for air travel, but you can’t mark off a property boundary in the stratosphere and watch its edges for intruding atmospheric contaminants.
Climate change activism got stuck because it descended out of movement forms and tactics that were unsuitable for the scale, character and novelty of its aims and needs. It got stuck to the petitionary and statutory projects that characterized post-civil rights mass activism, to ideas of individual civic virtue and performative public action that had frequently been effective in changing hearts and minds, and to the civic and political institutions that had been in the forefront of social transformation between the 1970s and the early 2000s: the university, the school, the church, the community or neighborhood, the city, the region.
I’m not going to dwell on it yet again too much, but this is precisely why I’ve been so persistently annoyed about fossil fuel divestment that focused on college and university endowments—it has been a textbook demonstration of this grand strategic mistake, of getting stuck with tactics and pressure points that worked in other struggles but that were mistargeted and misconceived for this one. If you go back to Bill McKibben and other initial instigators of that campaign, their fundamental proposition was that by divesting, prestigious universities and colleges would bring political pressure on legislators to remove some of the subsidies and political protections that make fossil fuels cheap and relatively immune to regulatory oversight. Divestment was misinvestment of political effort and calculation. It’s not where the pressure points were or are and it’s not the kind of mobilization that helps.
Activism that brings pressure like divestment—or ‘cancellation’—works where it potentially hits businesses in their pocketbook: if a film company thinks their next film is going to be targeted for racism, if a fashion company thinks they’re going to be attacked for using sweatshops, etc., they may act because the decision to buy a different product or refuse to see a film is easy. In a broader sense, many groups with power, wealth and privilege figure they can allow other groups into wealth and privilege without losing much themselves. The people who kick hardest against more pluralism or inclusion are those who have felt their own social power was dependent on having someone’s neck permanently designated for being under their boot. As long as that’s not a majority, you can make headway towards change, even if it’s a real struggle.
Climate change activism, on the other hand, has to mobilize people based on generalized harms unfolding either in the guise of events inaccurately understood as “natural” or at scales of universal abstraction that are hard to grasp. It has to take something away from almost everybody—not just oil workers or people who want to sell rights to fracking on their land or Exxon executives, but in some sense it has to involve changes in practices, material circumstances and aspirational narratives that are global. You can’t build a coalition of the people who can afford change or who believe in change morally against a smaller coalition of people who feel they’re the only losers in that change. If we’re being straight with folks, it’s about losing some of the kinds of energy abundance and material culture that we’re used to in order to avoid vastly more uncontrollable and dramatic losses in the near-term and long-term human future.
If you’re thinking about a mass movement that either has real electoral power or that can mobilize to bring sustained pressure for change with all that in mind, you have to see that it’s got to have a very different character than the late 20th Century movements that we turn to as a model. And maybe it doesn’t have to be “socialist” in any doctrinaire sense, but neither can it be conventionally liberal either: it can’t just be about rights in person or rights to property, but instead it’s got to have a language of collective interest that is convincing and visceral and not limited to adding up a specific list of shared interests that reside in specific socialities or ideologies.
On the other side, however, maybe a mass movement isn’t something that can ever come into being until it’s too late. (Which it may already be.) Maybe the right thing to have done all the way back in the 1990s was to try and infiltrate capitalism itself and use it to push for renewables and sequestration, to make profit and market logics point the way to the changes needed to keep the world under 2C. Much has been made out of the fact that the big fossil fuel companies seem to have collected evidence documenting anthropogenic climate change before the world did, but the other thing they did is what monopoly capitalists often do when they perceive a potentially competing industry or interest forming in their future: they bought it out. In this case, that means they spent a lot of money to hire two generations of people who might have been the entrepreneurs to make renewable energy a dominant economic force at a far vaster scale than it is today and at a far earlier moment. At an earlier juncture—and perhaps even now—that move by fossil fuel companies was something that climate activism barely even noticed, because that also would have taken a different understanding of where the pressure points for transformation might be from the scripts we were familiar with.
It may honestly be too late, but climate change activists need to collectively rethink the strategic and tactical landscape they draw upon and do a new inventory of their assets and their enemies’ weaknesses. Maybe climate change activism just can’t be a democratic mass movement until it’s too late—maybe it’s always needed to be an inside play based less on persuading and pressuring institutions from without and more on being part of them and taking control of them to change their fundamentals, to create new social facts that people simply have to get used to—as they are going to get used to climate change if it’s not slowed or mitigated.
Maybe the only futureward strategy that has to take place at a mass scale is a fundamental change in how human beings understand their own interests in relationship to the interests of future humans—a point that contemporary activism generally avoids because it is so difficult and unsettling to engage. I’ll come back to that next week.
Image credit: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
So much of the environmentalist demand for change is still leveled on an individual, consumerist basis. These are great, sobering observations. I think it’s really telling that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future consigns the US to an ancillary role— we may very well be too enmeshed in neoliberal capitalism to have any real useful effect.