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Birth of a New Climate Movement 19 September 2019

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Birth of a New Climate Movement 19 September 2019 To mark the start of a week of major climate protests across the world, Robert Blood, founder of SIGWATCH, looks at the emergence of a new force in environmentalism. Birth of a new climate movement 19 September 2019 Tens of millions of people protesting, thousands of colleges and schools participating, city centres shut down, leading politicians addressing crowds… We’re talking about Friday’s global climate protests, right? Wrong. I am describing what happened almost exactly 50 years ago, during America’s first ‘Earth Day’ in 1970. Mass protests were called to respond to a decade of visibly mounting industrial pollution, bookended by Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring on the effect of DDT pesticide in 1962, and a major oil well blowout off the coast of California in 1969 which killed over 10,000 seabirds and marine mammals. Across America in almost every community, individuals, couples, families, turned out to mark that chilly but sunny April 22 day. Within a few months President Nixon (a Republican – different times) created the US Environmental Protection Agency, one of the world’s first government departments dedicated to looking after the environment (Germany did not get theirs for another four years; in Britain, it took 25 years). The following year Congress passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Nixon vetoed both measures, but a Democrat-controlled Senate overturned them, with the help of Republican votes. As I said, different times. It is doubtful that that legislative outburst of 1970 will be repeated today on climate change, and certainly not in the US. Something just as important has already reoccurred though. A new generation of environmental groups, with new ideas and strategies, has been birthed. Climate groups Extinction Rebellion (XR), Fridays for the Future, and Sunrise are the leading lights, able to put tens of thousands of people onto the streets, yet two years ago, none of them existed. They are the New Climate Movement. They are already transforming modern environmental activism, just as groups like Environmental Defense Fund (founded 1967), Natural Resources Defense Council (1970), Friends of the Earth (1971), and Greenpeace (1971) did to America’s moribund environmental scene in the late sixties. As with the New Climate Movement, those four US groups were born out of frustration. Groups like Sierra Club and Audubon Society were the face of environmental concern (as were bird, wildlife and landscape conservation groups in Europe) but while well-funded and well-meaning, they were largely ineffective. By the end of the 1960s activists young and old, radicalised by a succession of pollution disasters and inspired by the first-ever photographs of planet Earth taken by Apollo 8, felt new organisations had to be created to really make a difference. (Similar ideas must have been permeating capitalism. It is surely no coincidence that only a few years separates the creation of FoE and Greenpeace, and Apple and Microsoft. Early photographs of these four organisations show their long-haired nerdy-looking staff could have been interchangeable.) Today, a similar urge for rebirth has infected the environmental activist movement both in Europe and the US. Mainstream groups, including the one-time newcomers like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, are perceived as no longer effective enough to wake up the world to the climate emergency. Radical old activists and virgin campaigners alike decided they needed new organisations to make an impact, even if the tactics adopted were copied from the old ones. XR, founded by campaigners who cut their teeth in the Occupy movement and subsequently airport protests such as Plane Stupid, is not the first activist group to mobilise supporters on a large scale. Britain and many other countries have had several big climate marches before. But XR is the first to use this approach to disrupt city centres to get the media’s and politicians’ attention. Nor is it the first to interrupt public events, but it is possibly the first since Gandhi to set out intentionally to cause trouble and get as many people arrested as possible. Fridays for the Future is similarly not the first to mobilize children, but it is the first to be inspired by a child (Greta Thunberg) and to be run by children and older teens. Organised at a local level but coordinated regionally and nationally, this allows it to generate its own energy when adult-led efforts have so often run out of steam. Sunrise’s skill is mobilizing college students. Again this is not new. 350.org did this very successfully to build its campus carbon divestment campaign. However Sunrise’s strategy of using rallies and sit-ins at Democrat offices to get the attention of politicians and party officials helped pushed climate onto the 2020 presidential election agenda when the Dems would rather have side-lined the issue. It is striking that one of the first actions of XR was to storm the London offices of Greenpeace. They demanded Greenpeace divert its ample resources to join them in raising the political temperature on climate change. Apparently they thought Greenpeace had agreed, but its plastics and other campaigns rolled on unabated. Greenpeace would be foolish to continue to ignore XR and the other groups for long. The lesson learnt by Sierra Club in the 1970s and 80s was, adopt the tactics of the upstarts that work. Today Sierra Club is one of America’s most effective national environmental groups. It has been responsible singlehandedly (helped by a big bag of Bloomberg money) for harrying over a hundred coal-fired power plants into early retirement. Audubon though hardly changed at all. It remains respectable but irrelevant, allowing more aggressive conservation groups like National Wildlife Federation to take the lead. Business can learn its own lesson from the environmental battles of the 1970s. Some companies then, particularly in the extractives sector, tried to resist pressure for environmental protection by turning the argument into a culture war, and mobilising their unionised blue collar employees: ‘workers against tree- huggers’. This worked until the unions were dispensed with, and anyway, today, it is NGOs like Sierra Club and Sunrise, not business, that are successfully co-opting organised labour. Employees have also got smarter and a lot more independently minded. As likely as not, the tree-huggers today are inside your organisation. Look at how staff have so vigorously resisted corporate reaction at Google and Amazon. For companies across a wide range of issues, not just climate and sustainability, the effective strategy must be not to fight change, but to determine where the activist movement is flowing, and how practicably you can travel in the same direction. For if nothing else, this is where many of your customers, investors, and staff, are likely already heading. .
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