How to Improve Climate Organizing
What’s going well, what’s going wrong, and what is to be done
All too often, progressive movements fail to assess and reassess our actions in a strategic way. This piece is aimed at doing that, focusing on the attempts at building a mass movement for climate justice in the industrialized global north. It is not in any way meant to imply that the climate justice movement here is more important than, or indeed separate from, that of the global south. On the contrary, making improvements in our organizing here will help us be in more meaningful solidarity with our companions across the rest of the world.
The Climate Justice Movement in the Developed Nations
For a long time, the mainstream environmental movement has been dominated by the “middle class” and suffered from a lack of mass participation. More recently, this has been consciously recognized as a problem, and environmental groups such as Fridays for a Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Sunrise have been created to facilitate climate-related mass actions with widespread participation. Each of them have met with mixed results. The lack of mass public participation in climate action remains only partially solved.
Extinction Rebellion (also known as XR) seems to have sputtered out more quickly than it arose. In late 2019, just months before COVID-19 began to make headlines, XR activists stood on top of public transit trains in London, preventing workers from getting to work on time in the morning. If the action was meant to help catalyze mass participation in a movement to stop climate catastrophe, it could hardly have been more out-of-touch. Infuriated London commuters threw objects at the activists and eventually dragged them off the trains. The inability of mostly well-to-do XR activists to connect and organize successfully with everyday working people has not been remedied since. Their lack of recognition that issues of racism, imperialism, class, and climate disaster are interconnected has also contributed massively to their downfall.
With a longer history and deeper organizing practices than XR, the group 350.org has been one of the most effective forces for local-to-global climate justice action and advocacy for the last decade. As of 2014, they adopted a pro-immigrant stance, since the issues of immigration and climate are deeply interrelated. As basic as this may seem, it was a good step forward in a movement that’s been stuck in the “single-issue” mindset mud for decades. The name of 350 comes from the ideal concentration of carbon ppm in the atmosphere for human survival: 350 ppm. We are currently at almost 415 ppm. With hundreds of local chapters across the world, 350 has proven one of the most resilient and dynamic groups fighting for climate justice. They are well-positioned to make further advances in making the climate movement into a mass movement by deepening their engagement and solidarity with other causes and struggles.
Meanwhile, in the US, the youth-led, election-focused Sunrise Movement catapulted itself into the mainstream politics with its sit-in at House Speaker Pelosi’s office that was joined in on by newly elected progressive rockstar politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is also known as AOC). Since then, AOC and several other members of the US Congress have gone on to draft the kind of legislation favored by Sunrise. Sunrise works very closely with 350 across the US. Although more savvy than the hapless XR activists, Sunrise has nonetheless struggled to attract participation outside of college students, college graduates, and college-bound high schoolers. According to the most recent government statistics, only 41% of 18 to 24-year-olds enroll in college, and that group is less racially diverse than the overall population. This disconnect from most young people of poor and working-class background has, in part and recently, led to a pattern of racial tokenization that has become a source of discontent within Sunrise. Meanwhile, the bold legislation Sunrise is seeking remains stalled, with a slim margin for victory in Congress. How the Sunrise Movement will move forward from its current challenges remains to be seen.
One of the most dynamic youth-led groups organizing for climate justice in the developed nations is Fridays for a Future. It was started by now-famous Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who skipped school to protest outside Swedish Parliament in August of 2018. Just over a year later, over 4 million schoolchildren walked out of school in 150 countries to demand action on the climate crisis. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and virtual schooling seemed to upend the group’s dynamic ascent. The group may be making a comeback, but it’s too soon to say.
This is not a complete breakdown of all groups fighting for climate justice; it’s a look at efforts to foster mass involvement in the fight for climate justice in the most developed countries, which are also the countries with the highest per capita emissions. Honorable mentions also for Mom’s Clean Air Force, Sierra Club, and Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).
Whose Mass Movement?
Those seeking to address the climate crisis by building a mass movement are right to do so, but many of us still have core assumptions that need to be challenged and re-thought. The diversity issues faced by Sunrise and others is, in part, an accessibility issue. Climate organizers are still not making their efforts as accessible — and relevant — to average working people as they need to be for true mass involvement to take place.
We need a strategy that includes everyday working people in our movement in concrete ways. This also means directly addressing the not-so-separate issues of racism, sexism, and exploitation that working people face.
Organizing and taking action for small but tangible victories is one of the time-tested ways to build a powerful movement. If people are only taking action on “one issue” then that effectively limits the reach of the movement to people who don’t experience many other issues in their daily lives. So when people try to build a “single-issue” climate movement, it should be no surprise that it comes out looking middle-class and disproportionately white.
The movement is also facing an internal crisis around the question of how to fight for victories. Right now, the focus of all the groups mentioned above is winning reforms from elected governments. This approach is doing what we learn to do in civics class: vote and contact our public officials. However, there are problems with applying this model in our existing circumstances.
The biggest problem is that we are not (yet) wielding enough power to offset our opposition. In order to do so, we will need deeper levels of organization and relationships that allow for more powerful tactics to be used by more people.
The Kind of Power We Need
One-day school strikes have been a good start, but we need to be able to strike for weeks and months if necessary.
When corrupt officials threaten to derail climate action, we need to be able to shut down industry and profit until they buckle. Heckling them when they appear in public is not nearly as effective; and it is telling that such displays of near-total impotence are being celebrated as if they are demonstrations of power.
When teachers across Arizona struck for one week in 2018 and won concessions from a conservative legislature that had been refusing them days before, that was power.
Can we imagine what it would be like to wield power like that for climate justice?
Actually, we don’t need to rely completely on our imaginations. Janitors organized into SEIU local 26 have already won climate-related demands after their February 2020 strike. Here is an analysis of how they formed a coalition with climate groups and won.
In another inspiring action, miners in a remote area of Canada released a statement in solidarity with indigenous land defense actions that prevented them from mining in a certain area. The whole crew of miners did not sign onto the statement, but a “significant minority” did. This example, and others, should show us the folly of writing off swaths of workers as “too conservative” to organize.
Instead of trying to get compromised governments to pass laws regulating “reasonable limits” to the destruction of the livable environment, we could cut out the (corrupt) middlemen and organize to exert direct worker-community control over key industries.
The Path Forward
For years, people have gaslit us by saying that we can “vote with our dollars” to stop the destruction of our ecosystem. Fossil fuel companies devoted funds to spread the narrative of the personal/household “carbon footprint.” Luckily, it seems this form of denialism has mostly run its course. It’s now more widely understood that industry, supported by states, makes power moves that directly result in ecological destruction. Blaming ecocide on workers’ personal spending habits was, and is, blaming the victims.
Yet, there could be an actual use for the idea of measuring environmental impact of certain choices. What if we began to organize as workers to force our bosses to reverse ecologically irresponsible business decisions?
Actually, its already been happening. Winning environmental demands as workers has more potential to rapidly reduce emissions than governments who’ve already shown us they don’t really intend to meet the challenge. Plus, we can win better pay and benefits through the same collective organizing.
Even for those who still believe in state action, labor organizing should be embraced as a strategy to build power and help bring it about.
If this sounds difficult, that’s because it will be. However, it offers us a way to tackle more winnable fights, and build power while doing so, than current strategies narrowly focused on state action.
Previously, climate and environmental groups have sought to lobby unions to be more in solidarity with the “green movement.” This approach has limited potential. Rather than seeking to influence union officials and staff who are (more often than not) out-of-touch with their members, we should cut out the middlemen and look to influence and organize our fellow workers directly.
Organizing against ecocidal bosses for labor and climate wins would be a great way to help rebuild the labor movement from the bottom up. We will know we are really on the way to winning when the climate movement and the worker’s movement are no longer seen as separate (much less opposed) social forces.
To those thinking that there’s nothing to change at your workplace that would help protect the environment, you probably just aren’t looking in the right places.
Retail and logistics workers can look to remove the most deadly and unethical products from store shelves while fighting for better conditions and pay.
Food service workers can organize to implement composting and water-saving methods while fighting for better treatment, wages, and benefits.
Farm workers can fight against the use of extinction-causing pesticides and fossil-fuel-based fertilizer and for regenerative agriculture and their own economic self-determination.
Teachers can teach young people to demand freedom, to organize for it, and present climate in a robust, nuanced, and motivating way.
Workers in fossil fuel industries can fight for health and safety improvements as well as re-investment in green energy capacity, including new training for themselves and others.
Construction and building trades workers can fight to make that sector sustainable, safe, well-paid, and for robust public housing.
Office and financial industry workers can fight to make their corporate policies and portfolios as genuinely sustainable as possible.
Imagine how much more empowering it would be to win cuts in emissions and pollution ourselves, with our own action, rather than through political representation.
The more we build collective power in our own lives and communities, the more we can fight for and win all kinds of social gains for everyone.
