I went through a course from Pachamama Alliance called “Awakening the Dreamer,” a prerequisite for an activist training course I signed up for.
Near the end, I was asked, “Identify and write down the actions you will take to express your commitment to creating a thriving, just, and sustainable future.
And, for added effectiveness, include the date by which you will complete the action.”
My response has a lot to do with who I am, who I have been, who I hope to become, and why I do what I do. I’m sharing it in full:
Continue to work on immigration justice through Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice (ongoing since 2019).
Continue my career path of showing business that meaningfully addressing climate change, hunger/poverty, racism/otherism, war, etc. through core products, services, and mindset can be a success path (ongoing since 2003).
Continue to nurture democratic impulses in my own town/region and help some of them run for local office (ongoing since 1983).
Continue using my writing, speaking, and organizing skills to spotlight important issues locally, regionally, nationally, and globally (ongoing since 1972)–and strengthening these skills through continuous learning (which is why I signed up for this training).
Continue to be an activist who shows up to make a difference and be counted whenever practical (and sometimes when it’s not).
Continue to act on my belief that each of us can make a difference, and that difference is greatly amplified by working with others.
Continue to celebrate the victories I help achieve or passively support.
Continue to find ways to evolve as a person: to be more supportive of others, to recognize barriers others may face, and to face new experiences with gratitude and enjoyment.
None of these have completed-by dates. Most will not be completed in my lifetime.. I will do this work as long as I can.
<End of my response>
Three quick takeaways I want to leave you with:
Each of us can have an impact, especially if we go about our work with focus and determination
That work is amplified when we collaborate with others in an organized way
We are all growing and changing and evolving–ideally, into our best selves; that journey never stops
For the past few years, I’ve been doing Chris Brogan’s exercise of picking three words to guide my year. In 2020, they were Clarity (20/20 vision), Justice, and (perhaps presciently) Healing. Last year, Rethink, Pivot, Transform.
Lakey sees the increasing polarization of modern US society as a forge: a way of generating the heat necessary to create lasting social change (toward freedom and equality or toward authoritarianism—“the forge doesn’t care”).
This is not a new trend. The Scandinavian countries had their huge social revolution of the 1930s in times of great polarization (something he chronicled in his earlier book, Viking Economics). The trick is to harness that energy and channel it toward gaining mass support. He walks his talk, too; in the summer and fall of 2020, he led or co-led numerous workshops on what to do if the Trumpists tried to seize power after losing the election, training thousands of people.
He charges us to express our best concepts—not just what’s wrong with the system but the vision to make it better—in ways that feel like common sense to working-class people who want the system to work for them, too. After all, most of us actually do want a system that promotes equal access, a fair economy, and real democracy. We have to show them that our vision “has a spot for you,” even if that “you” finds the movement’s tactics disruptive and uncomfortable.
But he says progressives have largely lost that vision since the 1970s; we need to get it back. If we can get the diverse movements working together to confront their common opponents, we foster an intersectional “movement of movements” capable of creating real change—as the Scandinavians did then, with farmers, unionists, and students joining together to drive the moneyed elite from power. He warns us that polarization will get worse, because economic inequality is built so strongly into the culture. He says that we should consider organizing campaigns as “training for [nonviolent] combat.”
And we should expect those campaigns to take a while. Campaigns are well-planned (but adaptable) and sustained over time. It might take years, but you can win. One-offs (like the Women’s March at Trump’s inauguration) don’t typically accomplish change on their own. Traffic disruptions don’t make change; they just piss potential allies off. Disrupting banking operations is much more strategic because the bank is the perpetrator of the evil. How is the specific goal of the campaign advanced by this action? If it doesn’t advance the cause, don’t do it. A campaign he was involved with moved $5 million into credit unions and cooperative enterprises in one campaign that started in a living room and grew to encompass 13 states.
Oppression is only one lens we can look at things through—there are many others (he didn’t elaborate). The elite seeks to divide us (by color, gender, values, etc.)—but canny organizers look for the cracks in those divisions, and expand them. And stays optimistic, not getting stuck in “can’t be done” but figuring out how to do it.
Campaigns often start small. We can build our skills when the stakes are lower and make our mistakes then. Later, as the big challenges arise, we know how to handle them. You can lose a lot of battles and still win the campaign (eventually). And any tactic will be greeted with “this will never work” skepticism. But “Anyone who is arguing for impossibility” should remember the Mississippi Summer volunteers. When news got out of the abduction of Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney, Lakey (a trainer of volunteers for trhat movement) expected most of the next volunteer wave to abandon their commitments—but nearly all of them stayed, mentored by Black SNCC activists who had been living with the overt racism for decades.
The best-known antidote to terror is social solidarity. Get close to people. Organize campaigns not just with those who share your goals but those who are “willing to be human with you.” Make your peace with the personal risk, face it head-on. We risk by driving on the highway, we risk by NOT meaningfully addressing climate change. Accepting the possibility that you might die in service of the common good is liberating (and it’s not the worst way to die).
SNCC survived in the Deep South without guns; they would not have survived with them. Erica Chenoweth shows us that nonviolent movements have twice the success rate of violent ones.
If you want innovation, conflict helps to get you there. Yet, conflict resolution is a crucial skill, and it’s expanded enormously in recent decadesWe need those tools and people who will jump into the fray (to use them). But if our tools are too highly structured, you need to add interventions in informal settings.
Lakey expects surveillance and isn’t worried about it: “I think it’s a wonderful thing. We take that as pride: we are so important that they put staff time and energy into knowing what we’re up to—so we’re making a difference. Gandhi told India, if you gave up fear of them, the British would be gone. If people spread fears about Trump, invoice him for the hours because you’re doing his work.”
Most of the energy we use, whether it be coal, gas, or oil, is wasted, meaning the energy does no useful work. Energy, in its thermal or electrical form, powers systems that are badly designed and poorly engineered, including our buildings, cars, and factories. According to the National Academy of Engineering, the United States is approximately 2 percent efficient, which means that for every 100 units of energy employed, we accomplish two units of work.
Why? Because if we are wasting 98 percent of our energy that means all we have to do engage in a drastic campaign to increase efficiency and conservation. I’d guess that if we can get our efficiency up to 50 percent, we’d never have to drill for more oil and gas or mine for coal and uranium. If we can reach 80 percent, we’d be actively reversing catastrophic global heating. While the technological challenges are steep, they’re not insurmountable—and even if we can go from 2 to 10 percent efficient (and THAT I think we can do easily and relatively quickly, since other parts of the world, including Northern Europe, use far less energy per capita than we do in the US), the changes will be enormous. A lot of this can be done just by thinking different. For example, most of the fuel a car consumes is to move the car itself, not the passengers. If we can cut the weight of a car in half, or carry more people at a time, more of the fuel goes to moving the people and less to moving the vehicle.
Hawken says 82 percent of our carbon output is from burning coal, oil, and gas. So, since we’re wasting 98 percent of the energy those combustion reactions produce, being more efficient will lead directly to less carbon going into the air and sea.
He concludes with a clarion call to address social justice here and now, as a necessary step to cleaning up our energy act:
To reverse global warming, we need to address current human needs, not an imagined dystopian future.
If we want to get the attention of humanity, humanity needs to feel it is getting attention. If we are going to save the world from the threat of global warming, we need to create a world worth saving. If we are not serving our children, the poor, and the excluded, we are not addressing the climate crisis. If fundamental human rights and material needs are not met, efforts to stem the crisis will fail. If there are not timely and cumulative benefits for an individual or family, they will focus elsewhere. The needs of people and living systems are often presented as conflicting priorities—biodiversity versus poverty, or forests versus hunger—when in fact the destinies of human society and the natural world are inseparably intertwined, if not identical.
Social justice is not a sideshow to the emergency. Injustice is the cause. Giving every young child an education; providing renewable energy to all; erasing food waste and hunger; ensuring gender equity, economic justice, and shared opportunity; recognizing our responsibility and making amends to myriad communities of the world for past injustices—these and more are at the very heart of what can turn the tide for all of humanity, rich and poor, and everyone between. Reversing the climate crisis is an outcome. Regenerating human health, security and well-being, the living world, and justice is the purpose.
As Rebecca Harrington has pointed out, “In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.” Multiplying that hour by 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year, we learn that just from the sun, we have 8760 times as much energy coming in as we use. This doesn’t even count wind, hydro, geothermal, and many other promising, truly green technologies that can be designed and deployed in ways that minimize harmful impact (that’s another area where we need to work; not all alternative energy deployments are well-thought-out). I personally favor small-scale, decentralized installations that are designed with the particular site in mind and are easy and clean to install, service, and eventually disassemble–along with solar and wind on non-forest locations that have already been built upon. Building and vehicular rooftops, parking lots, and highway median strips are all very promising places for green energy deployment, to name a few possibilities.
In short, once we make the transition–and we absolutely need to–we can live perfectly well without the dirty and destabilizing fossil and nuclear technologies we currently rely on–and the first step is getting more work out of the energy we’re already using.
I love this post from the Changemaker Institute, How to Change The World By Meeting People Where They Care. I love it because it approaches social change through a marketing lens. It starts by revisiting the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967, which struck down longstanding bans on marrying across the color line. Pointing out how Richard and Mildred Loving got people to care, the post goes on to ask how to get people to care about what you’re doing–and answers with a business-oriented focus on outcomes of your social change action, which you arrive at through these questions (quoting directly from the post):
What does it take to get an investor to believe in your business and invest in your mission?
What does it take to get customers to believe in your product or service and invest in it?
What does it take to get your employees to believe in your company’s mission and invest time and energy in supporting it?
What does it take to get people to support your vision for a better world? [end of quote]
Shel’s inspirational posters describing his “sweet spot” institutional mission and his 2020 and 2021 sets of three words to inspire his year
To take it a step further: I see getting out of the silo, rubbing shoulders with people who are not like you and examining different ideas from different industries or different sectors of the same industry as crucial is testing your own ideas, sharpening them enough to really get inside someone’s head and cause enough discomfort with the status quo to embrace the brighter future you propose. Whether you’re marketing a business or a movement, that’s a pretty important thing to do.
It covers a lot of ground: optimism, hope, organizing mass movements, climate justice, the role of indigenous people in todays struggles, and much more. I found it well-worth the 15 minutes or so it took to read the whole thing.
Three short excerpts from this long article:
1] I have often met people who think the time I have spent around progressive movements was pure dutifulness or dues-paying, when in fact it was a reward in itself – because to find idealism amid indifference and cynicism is that good.
2] [Halting the Keystone XL pipeline] was not a gift from Biden; it was a debt being paid to the climate activists who had made it an important goal. Patience counts, and change is not linear. It radiates outward like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. It matters in ways no one anticipates. Indirect consequences can be some of the most important ones. [She goes on to trace the Standing Rock movement and AOC’s decision to run for Congress to earlier struggles that appeared, in the moment, to fail. These types of indirect sparks to deep change are something I’ve often written and spoken about, including this post about how one environmental justice action changed the world.]
3] We have victories. Some of them are very large, and are why your life is the shape it is. The victories are reminders that we are not powerless, and our work is not futile. The future is not yet written, but by reading the past, we see patterns that can help us shape that future.
One small quibble: while I agree with Solnit that individual lifestyle changes are far less consequential than mass organizing, and that the solutions have to really reinvent the entire worlds of business and government–I do think the lifestyle choices, the changes we make in the ways we are on this planet, should not be trivialized or dismissed.
Via Robert Hubbell’s always-optimistic Today’s Edition newsletter, which I read before breakfast every weekday morning. Hubbell is a champion of the Democrats and far more centrist than I am. But I love that he is always a cheerleader for what went right and a strong advocate of the need to keep organizing and working for change when things don’t go according to our wishes.
It is very unfortunate that the original developer didn’t get any guarantees that a buyer would maintain the fossil-free commitment written into the sale documents. Nonetheless, I think a creative and skilled attorney could make a number of different legal arguments that could force the developer to honor the agreement. Could the Environmental Defense Fund? perhaps take this on? It would be a great precedent to say that a community developed specifically as an eco-community could not then be put at the mercy of eco-hostile development.
As a non-lawyer, all I can do is speculate about the arguments a lawyer might use to block the conversion of the acquired parcels to fossil fuels (I have no idea if any of these would hold up in court and I am not presenting this as legal advice). Arguments could be made about such harms as
Introducing new health risks (especially to children)
Negative progress on climate that goes against International, US,Colorado, and neighborhood climate goals
Adverse possession (a doctrine that gives rights to squatters in certain circumstances)
The deliberate destruction of a cohesive intentional community
And of course, about consumers’ rights: this could clearly be seen as bait-and-switch: buying into a community with a stated purpose, and having that purpose violated, even shredded.
But the courts aren’t the only recourse. I do know something about organizing movements, and these neighbors should be organizing a movement. To list a few among many possibilities, they could be:
Organizing mass protests outside the developer’s office
Saturating the local paper with letters to the editor and op-eds
Enlisting allies in powerful environmental organizations, of which Colorado has no shortage
Protesting at the capital in Denver that their rights are being taken away
Contacting the press ahead of and after all of these events
Physically but nonviolently blocking attempts to connect the pipelines (note: this is illegal civil disobedience and participants might be subject to arrest)
Researching obscure laws that might provide tools that can successfully block the connection
Organizing boycotts and other public shamings of the developer
Plus, I really have to wonder what the developer is thinking. Eco-friendly homes are in high demand, can often sell for more than the price of comparable fossil-powered homes, and prove a skill set that many homeowners want. After all, people moved from other states just to participate in this community. And forcing eco-hostile housing development into an eco-friendly community is a recipe for public relations disaster and a bad, bad reputation.
Why not simply stop, think about the benefits of keeping this community identity, and use it as a marketing tool? That would make so much more sense than risking ongoing hostility, a ruined reputation and possibly much worse.
This is not a coincidence; Gil sent the link to Joel’s article around before the call to everyone who registered for it.
I found the article provocative enough that I posted this comment (and the Living Between Worlds open discussion was so fascinating that I plan to listen again once the video is available):
Good piece, Joel. You’ll be glad to know Gil Friend @gfriend kept his promise to discuss this topic in the monthly “Living Between Worlds” brain trust Zoom.
I come at systemic change through a lifetime of weaving together my two “split personalities” as both a marketer specializing in green and social change companies/products/services and as an environmental, social justice, and peace activist whose credits include starting the movement that saved a threatened local mountain.
Through the nonviolent social change lens of people like George Lakey and Erica Chenoweth, I look at institutional structures: how they prop up the system, create major barriers to change, and ultimately fail because they fail to change–and where they are weak and shaky and vulnerable. Sometimes they collapse with surprising speed (think about the Arab Spring a decade ago, or the government of Afghanistan just in the last ten days. Sometimes, it takes decades. The Quakers targeted slavery for about a century before it was illegalized.
But the marketer in me says systemic change is far more likely to succeed if the effort was made to change popular opinion first. The US civil rights movement created the opinion shift that made civil rights legislation not only possible but enforceable. Opposition to the Vietnam war was strong enough that LBJ felt a need to withdraw from his re-election campaign, years before the troops finally came home. And when we did Save the Mountain here in Western Massachusetts 21 years ago, our first task was to change the “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do” mentality. Once we shifted that, the victory was very quick.
The owner of the Step Into the Spotlight discussion group, Tsufit, asked what kind of marketing could help Canada go smoke-free by 2035. My answer doesn’t fit into LinkedIn’s comment space, so I’m sharing it here:
Ooooh, what a wonderful project! If I might make some cross-border observations that an actual Canadian might find lacking, I would, first of all, identify the key attributes of not just each province but each region of each province and target different themes and different platforms that will work will for each. I’d remember the wild successes on my side of the border of “Don’t Mess With Texas”–which started as an anti-littering campaign and became an unofficial state slogan and a core part of Texans’ identity–and the “I Love New York” campaign that helped the Big Apple find its way from near-depression in the 1970s to, once again, the happening place that “everyone” wants to be part of–and then the state successfully expanded the campaign to talk about all the other parts of New York State.
In libertarian rural Alberta, it might be about the personal freedom to enjoy clean, smoke-free air and the desire to keep out of the clutches of National Health Service doctors by staying healthy. For Quebec City, ads (in French, of course) that might make Anglophone Canadians choke but appeal to the sense of separate identity, e.g., “Oui, we are a beautiful capital city–but we also want to be the capital of good health and clean air.” In a more rural part of Quebec, such as the Gaspésie, they might tout the health benefits of the rural lifestyle, fresh food, and clean lungs.
In the Inuit areas, it might focus on communitarianism, tribal values, etc. For the Metro Toronto and Vancouver markets, perhaps an appeal to cosmopolitan sophistication. “Thinking of smoking as cool is SO 1950s. We’re too smart for that now.”
This national effort of a series of hyperlocal campaigns would need people on the ground in each area to really figure out the touchpoints for each audience slice. And it would be across many media, from traditional TV and print and radio to Instagram, TikTok, etc.
AND it would include a significant curriculum component starting around 3rd grade, to build the defenses of rising generations against tobacco industry hype, to inoculate students with the knowledge of health, economic, and pollution/carbon consequences, and to foster development of healthy lifestyles and a different set of pleasures.
Open letter to the government of the City of Northampton, Massachusetts
Context: Residents of a tiny one-block street called Warfield Place have been fighting to preserve a line of beautiful cherry trees planted several decades ago. The city (pop. 28,726) has claimed that the street needed to be redone and these trees are at the end of their useful life, while residents said the trees could easily survive for a few more years–and that many other streets with more traffic and worse infrastructure conditions deserved higher priority. Both sides have brought in arborists who support their positions. The residents recently brought in support from national leaders in the Buddhist community, and ordained the trees as Buddhist priests. Neighbors were actively negotiating with the city, as well as seeking help in the courts. Thursday morning, the city brought in heavy equipment and a large police presence and destroyed the trees.
For the numerous stories chronicling the controversy over the past several months, visit http://gazettenet.com and use the search tool at the top to look for “warfield place cherry trees” (nonsubscribers get five free articles per month). See more pictures of the trees in bloom taken by Shel Horowtiz (author of this open letter and owner of this blog) and protest signs at (20+) Facebook
A Warfield Place cherry tree in bloom, May 2, 2021. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
A Warfield Place cherry tree–close-up of flower, May 2, 2021. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
It was shocking to read in yesterday morning’s Daily Hampshire Gazette that the sacred cherry trees the community has fought so hard to preserve that it actually ordained them as Buddhist priests–the trees that hundreds of local residents and many others from farther afield, including several of national stature, signed petitions and joined protests and wrote letters to the editor to save–were torn down with no warning, even while the city was aware that a judge was considering a restraining order, and even while the city and the residents of the street were still negotiating.
The trees were murdered at 9:00 a.m. and the restraining order that would have prevented their untimely death was given at noon.
Why the rush? Why the need to act unilaterally when many people were willing to work out a solution that made sense for all parties: the city, the residents, and of course, the trees?
This is the legacy of Public Works Director Donna LaScaleia and Mayor David Narkewicz. All the considerable good work of the 10-year Narkewicz administration will not sustain its former reputation for progressive policies and fostering democracy. When people remember this adinistration, they will not remember how it stood against racism and for inclusion, how it was a champion of addressing climate change. Their memories will be rooted in this horrible and utterly avoidable incident.
It was an attack not only on these beloved trees, but an attack on democracy–on the ability of people to feel they have influence over their own lives, and their ability to have their concerns listened to, and, hopefully, acted on.
And it was also an attack on separation of powers in government; the city was aware that a judge was considering the injunction that was eventually granted (too late), but couldn’t be bothered to let that process play out.
And of course, removing living trees goes against the Narkewicz administration’s long-stated goals of mitigating climate change locally. Trees are far and away our most effective weapons against climate catastrophe.
I think what may have happened was a felt need to be right at all costs–not to admit that there could have been one of several other ways forward that would have had far more positive outcomes, such as:
Harnessing the neighbors’ considerable energy into a working committee that would actively participate WITH the Department of Public Works Director to develop solutions that worked for the city and the residents. Even if the ultimate outcome were the same, the residents would have owned it.
Moving Warfield Place off the calendar for a few more years until the trees died naturally, while adding plantings of newer trees so when that day came, the street would have a decent tree-canopy-in-process.
Redirecting the construction funds to a city block whose need for repair was undisputed.
This need to be right, to save face, culminated in an extreme wrong. The city engaged in a “process” that not only disenfranchised the Warfield Street residents, ending in a hostile unilateral action–it undermined Northampton’s reputation as a citadel of democracy, a place that values its citizens’ public discourse and involvement. This violation of residents’ real concerns makes it harder for the next administration to get people to even trust–let alone become involved in–city government. And the city has even created a construct where it faces accusations of a hate crime–even though Mayor Narkewicz spent so much of his decade as mayor creating a wonderful climate of acceptance and even embrace of diversity.
It’s very sad. It’s irreversible–the trees are gone, democracy was seriously weakened, and the city’s reputation is in tatters–and it was completely avoidable. I expected better of Northampton and am deeply disappointed.
While we can’t bring the trees back, and this action has done potentially permanent harm to Northampton’s civic virtue, it is still possible to atone. I ask in all seriousness: How, specifically, will the city make restitution? How will this administration restore confidence in the city? How will the city offset the negative climate impacts of the tree destruction? And how will the city make the residents and neighbors of Warfield Place whole again? It won’t be easy, especially this close to the end of this administration, but it has to be done, and done very soon. What exactly is the plan?
