Category: Shel’s Personal Life

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
In the run-up to the enormous Boston counter-rally against white racism, someone complained that nonviolence is ineffective and passive—and mentioned his desire to go out and slug a few Nazis. This provoked an extended discussion with several people participating. By the time I saw the thread, he had actually said he’d welcome the chance to get trained in nonviolent action.
That thread sparked a desire in me to do some education about the history and power of nonviolence (I wish it were taught in schools!):
First, I totally support this activist’s decision to get nonviolence training. Every person should have nonviolent conflict AND nonviolent de-escalation in their toolkit, and especially every activist.
 
Second, it’s important to understand the enormous difference between active nonviolent resistance and passivity. Nonviolent resistance has been a successful tactic for centuries, and even Forbes noted that it’s typically twice as effective as violent tactics. It’s been used to great effect by:
  • Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement
  • Activists of the Arab Spring
  • The safe energy/no nukes movement in the United States, Britain, and Germany
  • The students who mass-rallied in Tiananmen Square, Beijing
  • A large majority of the South African freedom fighters who reclaimed their country, and the many Eastern European movements who reclaimed theirs

The first recorded example I’m aware of goes all the way back to the Old Testament Book of Exodus: the midwives Shifrah and Pu’ah refused to carry out the Pharaoh’s order to murder all the newborn Hebrew boys. Nothing passive about this! Those two women risked their lives to create resistance to a murderous dictator’s “ethnic cleansing” plan.

Yes, there are some who practice nonviolence in ways that do nothing more than mildly irritate the power structure. But Gene Sharp has documented something like 193 active nonviolence tactics that are actually effective in creating social change, and he was writing in the pre-Internet era. I recommend his From Dictatorship to Democracy as a very readable introduction. It talks about how to get rid of dictators, nonviolently.
 
Sharp and many others have documented effective nonviolent resistance to the most oppressive totalitarian governments, including the Nazis, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the extremely repressive British colonial government in India…
 
Third, I have personally participated (and sometimes organized) numerous effective nonviolent actions with a vast range of scope, tactics, and goals. In one case, I was the only person doing the action on Day 1, and I watched the tide turn by Day 3.
 
The single most effective of all the actions I’ve been part of was probably the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site of 1977. The state was forced to feed and house 1414 incarcerated protestors, most of whom did “bail solidarity,” refusing to post bail and becoming an enormous financial burden on the state, which also had to pay the salaries of the National Guard reservists who guarded us in their armories. They finally released everyone after 13 days.
 
Not only did we bring both the NH government and the power company to their knees, but by the time we all got out, a national safe energy/no nukes movement had sprung up, copying our structure, tactics, and goals.
And this movement managed to essentially freeze out nuclear power as an option in the US. Richard Nixon had called for 1000 nukes in the US, but I don’t think the number ever got past 104, nearly all of which got their permits before the Seabrook occupation—and all before the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident two years later.
 
Directly and indirectly, that movement can take credit for:
1) media coverage of TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima accidents while earlier accidents had been ignored;
2) a national and global shift toward safe energy consciousness, leading to much wider development of solar, deep conservation, and other clean energy technologies;
3) numerous new methods of organizing that were used by other active nonviolent movements such as Occupy and Standing Rock (both of which managed to last for many months despite enormous pressure)
Nonviolent occupiers approach the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant, April 30, 1977. Unattributed photo found at https://josna.wordpress.com/tag/anti-nuclear-movement/
Nonviolent occupiers approach the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant, April 30, 1977. Unattributed photo found at https://josna.wordpress.com/tag/anti-nuclear-movement/
 
I write in more detail about some of this in part 4 of the four-part series I did this spring, reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the Seabrook action: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/ (if you want to read the whole thing, Part 1 is at https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-1/ , and each part has a link at the bottom to the next one)
 
And fourth, nonviolent resistance works better than violent resistance. If we engage in violence, we play to the strengths of the opposition. The government has highly trained military and police forces able to inflict extreme violence on us. The fascisti have less to lose in attacking a violent mob and of course the police will be far less interested in protecting us from violent attackers if we ourselves are violent. The public loses sympathy for us and supports the repression.
But if we maintain nonviolent discipline in the face of violent attacks, the public swings rapidly to our side, and some even start thinking about how they can help the resistance. They may not put their bodies on the line, but they can be powerful allies in 1000 ways, if not chased away by political purity hawks who want all or nothing and forget that they, too, evolved their commitments over time.
 
Change happens when we reach a tipping point, when these folks have enough voice that they cannot be silenced, and enough influence that mainstream populations start to support them. And as noted above, throughout history, history, far more struggles for justice have been won in this way than through physical violence.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Environment, Events, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

This Facebook Live video by Brené Brown, “We need to keep talking about Charlottesville,” posted August 15, might be the best thing I’ve ever come across on how to combat oppressive language without heaping guilt and shame on the other person, building bridges instead. I’d known her name but not her work. This video made me a fan. Strongly recommended.

She has an unusual perspective: a white anti-racist raised in the South, often mistaken for black by people who hadn’t met her, on the basis of her full legal name.

Can we create a world where these girls will be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"? Photo by Anissa Thompson, freeimages.com
Can we create a world where these girls will be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”? Photo by Anissa Thompson, freeimages.com

I’ve been saying for many years that guilt and shame are not effective in making change (and in my work to create social change in the business world, I do my best to harness other motives, like enlightened self-interest). The example she gives of the young man confronting his father shows exactly why they don’t work. Not to confront racism or other isms, and not to protect the planet.

Brené is a better communicator than I am. As I engage in dialogue with “the other side,” I will do my best to remember her communications lessons, and those of Van Jones, whose wonderful riff on how to talk to Tea Partiers I wrote about several years ago.

For more of Brené Brown, visit her website.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, language, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the aftermath of the Charlottesville Massacre (a massacre that kills one person is still a massacre in my opinion, if deliberately intending to harm many—19 were injured by the madman’s car), an activist friend posted a cry for help. This is a piece of it:

…how can I fight this if I’m scared? And if I’m scared and it immobilizes me then who else will be able to face that fear and take action? And we must take action. We white people must take action. We must be at the forefront of this fight. With our sisters and brothers of color.

All my life I have fought for justice, for people, for equity. How do I step up to this fight with my full self and do what has to be done? How are you doing it?

Here’s what I wrote (slightly edited):

Singer, actor, activist and athlete Paul Robeson. Courtesy NY Public Library Digital Collections.
Singer, actor, activist and athlete Paul Robeson. Courtesy NY Public Library Digital Collections.
It’s OK to be scared, and then do the work anyway—that’s what courage is. I know you already know this, but maybe others reading here will take inspiration.
The times in my life when I’ve done this, and there have been several, have been among the most meaningful moments of my life. But I’m no great hero—and the times when I failed to step up and do the right but scary thing are some of my few regrets. Here are two successes and one failure that I’m thinking about in particular.
1. In 1975 and 1976, I ran the Gay Center (that’s what we called it back then) at Antioch College. I left when the semester was over and began a summer-long hitchhiking trip. A few weeks later, on July 5, 1976, I stopped by for a short visit. I still had the Gay Center key and was crashing there. During that visit, some creep threw a rock through the center’s window, wrapped in a vile hate-speech note with a swastika drawn on it. I not only went to the police [and the campus authorities], but I wrote a letter to the school paper, including the full text of the foul note, and called out the perpetrator. Nobody offered any protection [nor did I request any] and I kept sleeping there until I pushed west.
2. When the US bombed Libya in the early 1990s, I called up [local peace activist] Frances Crowe and asked her where and when the demonstration would be. She said she didn’t know of one. I said “noon at the courthouse.” I was out there by myself the first day, and the passers-by were hostile enough that I was worried for my safety. But I was back the next day with a handful of others, and the day after that with about 20 folks, and I watched the tide turn. By that third day, supporters passing by far outnumbered hostiles. I felt my actions had made a real difference.
The regrets are mostly about not having the strength to verbally interrupt oppression. I’ve gotten better at this over the years. Many of the incidents were when I was a child or teen and didn’t have the strength or the skills to do this in a positive way. But I particularly regret one incident in 1986 when I should have been able to think and act differently: I failed to interrupt a neighbor’s racist comment. We had just moved in next door and I was in his living room at that moment, getting acquainted. I let the comment go by as if I hadn’t heard it. 31 years later, I still feel shame about that.
As an activist for more than 40 years, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve really only risked my life or serious injury a dozen times or so. I’ve never had to spend time in a real jail; my one and only arrest (Seabrook, NH, 1977) was part of a movement too big for the state’s corrections system, so I spent a week in a large National Guard Armory room with 700 other comrades and we made it a school of nonviolence theory and practice.

But my greatest successes bore no personal risk. I faced no serious repercussions when I started the movement that saved our local mountain, or when I set the wheels in motion for the first nonsmokers rights regulations in the city where I was living. Nobody was going to crack a nightstick over my head while I was being paid to organize the Gray Panther chapter in Brooklyn, NY.

I realize just how privileged my place of activism has been when I think of the nonviolent warriors who fought for their rights in places like Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. I think of my long-dead friends and comrades Dave Dellinger and Wally Nelson, who served had time in prison for refusing to fight in World War II. I think of another dead friend, Adele Lerner, who came to the US to escape the Nazis and who was present at the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York that when the Klan attacked—and who was responsible for a lot of my political and cultural awareness in the early 1970s.She turned me on to Leadbelly (who’d been a friend of hers), Malvina Reynolds, and real cheese, to name three among many. I think of labor organizers, LGBT activists, and so many others who gave their lives so that my generation could have our freedom to protest. Their actions give me the courage to continue to work for a better world.
And I think about the power of ordinary people to step through the door that cracks open for a moment, to step into their greatness and change the world. The seamstress, Rosa Parks. The shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa. The activist serving a life sentence, Nelson Mandela. The humble priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who spent so many years in jail for direct action against the military. These and many other heroes put their lives on the line in a way I never had to.
Mind, I’m not beating myself up. I’ve chosen a path of “easeful activism” (as my yoga teacher might call it). I’ve found plenty of ways to be an effective agent of social change without getting beaten, killed, or thrown in jail. I haven’t found it necessary to be a martyr, but I deeply respect those who do. And I am prepared if the day comes where I am called to do as much or more. I will not allow fear of my own death to keep me from doing the right thing. I will continue to follow the path of nonviolent action for deep social change.
impact in the world? Please post your comments below.
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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, General Commentary, Green Business, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

Someone asked on Quora whether 40 was too old to start a business. Once I was done laughing, this is how I answered:

Fireboard decorated by Grandma Moses, 1918. Courtesy Wikipedia.
Fireboard decorated by Grandma Moses, 1918. Courtesy Wikipedia.

One of the US’s most famous painters, Grandma Moses, started painting at 77 and made it her career at 78. I’ve known dozens of people who started a business after working in the corporate world for decade. And when I was a paid organizer for the Gray Panthers in my early 20s, my chapter leader was a 75-year-old fireball who had taken up yoga and become a vegetarian at age 70. It is only your own thinking that is holding you back.

But start small, keep another income stream, and test the waters. Make your business viable—and make sure you like it—before you saw off the bridge. Expect to flounder for a year or two as you figure out the intersections of your skills and interests with what the market wants.

I stated my business at 24 after several failures over the previous several years, expecting it to be a part-time thing until I could find a job. Instead, my business kept morphing and getting both more interesting and more successful. I’m now 60 and in the midst of yet another business reinvention. What I do today looks almost nothing like what I did 20 years ago, but the seeds were always there. My latest incarnation is helping businesses turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—not through guilt and shame but by creating and marketing profitable products and services that address these enormous challenges.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Democracy, Diversity, Politics, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

If you’ve been walking around in shock and depression since the election, and you’re anywhere near Minneapolis, get thee to Brave New Workshop, 824 Hennepin Avenue, and buy tickets to “Guardians of the Fallacy: Executive Disorder.” Bring a bunch of liberal and progressive friends.

You need at least one good laugh per day right now. At this show, you’ll make your quota for many weeks.

Founded in 1958, the US’s oldest live political satire troupe may also be its funniest. This show had all four of us roaring with laughter, even if we missed some of the pop-culture references. Only one skit had me scratching my head and saying “huh?” (But a few of them had me asking “what did she just say?”; the enunciation got muddy at times.) I saw The Capitol Steps during the Clinton administration and this was much funnier. All four of us felt it was actually more consistently funny than Saturday Night Live.

This group of five writer/actors has an uncanny ability to get deep into our angst, to express all the fear and worry we face, and to be side-splittingly funny. It’s not really a musical but it has several hilarious song parodies. Remember these names: Lauren Anderson, Denzel Belin, Ryan Nelson, Tom Reed, Taj Ruler (the five writer/actors) and their gifted improvisational accompanist Jon Pumper. One day some of them may be as familiar as BNW alumnus Senator Al Franken.

Cast of "Guardians of Fallacy." Photo by Dani Werner, courtesy of Brave New Workshop. Used with permission.
Cast of “Guardians of Fallacy.” Photo by Dani Werner, courtesy of Brave New Workshop. Used with permission.

Although a large majority of the show takes on DT and his cohorts, two of the funniest skits—a woman still grieving in July over Hillary’s loss, and an interracial gay couple encountering a patronizing liberal manager at Trader Joe’s—skewer liberals, and one with no political content involves two Minnesota fishermen. But you also won’t soon forget Sean Spicer and an a enthusiastic Alabaman taking us a few decades into the future to lead a tour of the DT “Presidential Lie-berry,” whose only book is a copy of the McConnell healthcare bill…the pre-existing conditions song…a perfectly captured 20-second cameo by Jeff Sessions…and Hillary chomping down on WHAT? (no spoiler here, you’ll have to go and see it).

I don’t happen to live in Minneapolis, but was glad to visit while this show was running. Which it does through October 28. I hope they release a video or go on tour. People in my own area of Western Massachusetts would love it.

And by the way, if you’d like to get out of that despair, sign up for action alerts from groups like 3NoTrump, the organization my wife, daughter, and son-in-law started after the election. Each week, they post three easy and EFFECTIVE action alerts. 3NoTrump is also on Facebook and Twitter.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Copywriting, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , ,

There’s one Democratic Party candidate for Congress whose annoying emails just pushed me over the edge. But the Democratic Party is routinely guilty of this, and I’ve gotten off many of the lists of their various front groups. And probably, so are the Republicans (I’m not on their lists).

As I moved a full 100 emails received in the past month from this candidate’s organization or the Democratic Party on behalf of this candidate, I noted once again the in-your-face headlines. Here are just some of the examples from just the past week, in the order I received them (spacing, emoticons, and capitalization in the originals):

  • Special Election RUINED
  • TERRIFYING prediction
  • this just got WORSE (Paul Ryan)
  • ? Paul Ryan = FURIOUS ?
  • please, please, PLEASE
  • HUGE mistake
  • No!!!!!!!
  • R U I N E D

I’m a copywriter. I know what this candidate’s team is doing, and why. I know which hot buttons they are trying to push. But just as too much of the finest food still gives you a bellyache, too much hot-button-pushing makes the mechanism seize up. I’ve received 14 separate messages since Sunday morning (I’m writing this on Tuesday morning). It feels like marketing by assault rifle.

My response mechanism seized up. I put them on the not-giving-any-more-money list and unsubscribed. The form asked for a reason, and here’s what I wrote:

I don’t like your constant-crisis approach. I just deleted 100 emails from you all screaming at me, most unopened. I’m really sick of “the Republicans are out to get us, send us money again.” And also sick of “we’re on the verge of victory, send us more money.” I wish [Candidate name] well and hope he wins, but I want the Dems and especially [Candidate name] to market to me via intelligence and not fear. I am a marketer and have run successful campaigns.

Can’ we be better than this? I want candidates who will tell me what they will do FOR their district and their country, and not just that a powerful opponent hates them.

A citizen votes. Photo by Kristen Price.
A citizen votes. Photo by Kristen Price.

Remember: you are in someone’s email box because of the recipient’s good graces. Don’t abuse the relationship or overstay your welcome. If you annoy, you don’t get read, and eventually, you lose a subscriber. You could even find yourself blacklisted for spam.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Greenwashing, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,
If you missed Part 1, read it here, and then follow the links to Parts 2, 3, and 4.

Chernobyl and Fukushima

Chernobyl rendered a big swath of Ukraine uninhabitable. While a few more travelers are gaining permission to enter the dead zone, nobody lives there, and nothing you’d want to eat grows there.

After that disaster, the nuclear industry experienced a long series of accidents that could have been very serious, but were contained.

Then came Fukushima.

While it wasn’t nearly as destructive as Chernobyl, it still contaminated a 11,500-square-mile area and required the permanent evacuation of 230 square miles (evicting—and causing massive economic loss to—159,128 people). Much agricultural land had to be abandoned. Japan shut of most of its nukes for several years, causing great economic stress and forcing more intensive use of carbon fuels to replace the lost energy in a hurry.

And the world discovered that nuclear power plants, which are usually located next to water for cooling purposes, are not designed to withstand a significant flood.

I had written my first book about why nuclear power makes no sense, published all the way back in 1980. Following Fukushima, a Japanese publisher tracked me down and asked about bringing it back into print. I researched and wrote ten-page update that convinced me that nuclear power is still an absolutely terrible technology. If you’d like a copy, please download at https://greenandprofitable.com/why-nuclear-still-makes-no-sense/

 

Zombie Nukes are Back from the Dead

The safe energy movement made nuclear energy too expensive economically and politically for many years. But all of a sudden, the zombie power plants are back from the dead.

The two-reactor Watts-Bar plant in Tennessee was permitted back in 1973, but even more than most nukes, it was plagued by delays. Unit 1 took 23 years, going on-grid in 1996. Unit 2 took another 20 years, going online in late 2016. No US nuclear plants went online between those two dates. And meanwhile, these plants use obsolete, unsafe, 1970s design—a frightening specter.

A newer design, the Westinghouse AP1000, was selected for the two double reactors permitted during the George W. Bush years in Georgia and South Carolina. The idea was to prefabricate much of the reactor and thus shave time and costs. Instead, however, the plants have faced delays of many years, massive cost overruns, safety crises, and the resulting bankruptcy of Westinghouse (and near-collapse of parent company Toshiba).

The crazy thing is this: never mind the safety issues, the citizen opposition, or all the other stuff—why would anyone want to tie up billions of dollars for a decade or more constructing an n-plant that will never be economically competitive, uses unproven technology, and generates enormous opposition? There are very good market-based reasons why the US nuclear industry shriveled up after Three Mile Island. It’s hard to imagine any sane company or investors going there.

 

The Carbon-Friendly Magic Bullet Myth

The last several years, some environmentalists have embraced nuclear because they think it’s a big step forward on the path to a low-carbon planetary diet.

But they’re wearing blinders:

  1. Why do we want to reduce our carbon footprint? To protect the earth! Ask people who used to live near Chernobyl or Fukushima and were forced to evacuate if they think nuclear protects the earth.
  2. It takes over a decade to get a nuclear plant built and generating power—and that’s when everything goes smoothly (which is almost never, as we’ve seen). Climate change is an emergency and we can’t wait decades to solve it.
  3. We can lower that carbon a lot faster by investing in true green solutions. Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins notes that dollars invested in conservation and renewables will reduce carbon up to 10 times as effectively and 40 times faster than dollars invested in nuclear. I quote his figures in some depth on Page 10 of the Fukushima update.
  4. Nuclear has quite a bit more carbon impact than most people realize. Every step in the process other than actually running the fuel through the reactor—and there at least eight other steps—adds to the carbon footprint (and consumes fuel, too): mining, milling, transportation, processing, building the reactor and the massive concrete containment vessel, removing the spent fuel, storing it for 250,000 years, etc. (It’s still less than fossil fuel, but it’s far from zero.)

 

The “Gen 4 Will Be Safe” Myth

The thorium and pebble-bed technologies do look better than the old boiling-water or pressurized-water designs, from my non-scientist/informed layperson’s perspective. BUT they are untested. And they will also take at best more than 20 years to come online, if all goes well (and history indicates that I probably won’t).

We know this: the Generation II nukes were supposed to be much safer than the Generation I plants, even though they were rated to generate up to 10 times as much electricity, and thus were built much more massively, with more things to go wrong. Gen II plants failed at Fukushima. A Gen II plant came close to failing several times at Vermont Yankee. Even when that plant was new, its safety report to the federal government was extremely disturbing, going on to document incidents for many pages within the first year.

Cooling tower failure, Vermont Yankee
Vermont Yankee cooling tower fails, 2008. Photo by ISC ALC, Creative Commons license

The European Commission claimed at the time I wrote the update that Generation IV are the first nukes to be built with public safety integrated from the beginning. That creates yet another reason to shut down all the Gen I, II, and III plants (which are aging, going brittle, and increasing the danger to us)—and second, makes me wonder if in 20 years, after some of these plants have gone online and experienced catastrophic failures, if some scientists won’t be spouting similar rhetoric about Generation VI or VIII plants being the first to really be safe. The needle keeps moving on nuclear safety, as each previous reactor technology starts to fail.

Interestingly, the link I used in my post-Fukushima update now redirects to a page that does not make this claim, and in May, 2017, I couldn’t find anything about safety being built in to the new reactor designs anywhere on the organization’s website.

 

Lessons for Today’s Movements

We’d need a whole book to cover all the lessons today’s activists can bring back from the Clamshell experience. Here are a few of my favorites:

  • Don’t just be against things; propose and organize for positive alternatives—and incorporate this in the framing you offer the media, the public, and to your opponents
  • Remember not just your short-term goals but also the ultimate goals. Clam had a short-term goal of stopping the plant and a medium-term goal of stopping nuclear power nationally and globally. But Clamshell also had positive long-term goals. On energy, the goal was not simply to build a non-nuclear power plant but to power society through a variety of clean and renewable technologies—and on process, to move the whole society in a more democratic inclusive direction
  • Organizing works best when you find ways of bringing the issues to the unconvinced—while not neglecting the deeply committed
  • You can find allies where you weren’t expecting to
  • When organizing people through active nonviolence, it will be much easier to win people over to your side; if you switch to violence, you’ll lose much of your natural constituency and your work will be harder
  • Enforcing a rule that participants must be trained for actions with personal risk (such as arrests or physical harm) is a very good idea
  • Agree on a governance structure, and stick to it (unless you get the whole group’s agreement to change it)
  • Perhaps most important of all—understand that whether most of your movement believe you can win or believe you will fail, you’re probably right. Come in with the attitude that you WILL succeed, and the chances of succeeding become much higher. Stress this in all your outreach. Phrase things positively but realistically; don’t promise overnight results you can’t achieve. Emphasize that your fight is a long-term struggle, and publicly celebrate every small victory along the way.
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By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Part 4 of a series of reminiscences of the April 30/May 1, 1977 occupation at the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant construction site, and its aftermath. If you missed Part 1, read it here, and then follow the links to Parts 2 and 3.

How Clamshell Changed the Consensus on Nuclear Safety

Remember the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in March 1979? How about Chernobyl in the Ukraine, 1986, or Fukushima, Japan, 2011?

Of course you know about these three accidents. They received extensive news coverage at the time, and now they’re part of our history.

But unless you’re actively involved in the safe energy movement, you probably never heard of the near disasters at the Enrico Fermi breeder reactor in Michigan in 1966, or the one at Brown’s Ferry, Alabama, in 1975. These were at least as serious as TMI. In fact, there have been at least 100 potentially devastating nuclear accidents since humans began harnessing “the peaceful atom” to generate electricity.

But one important thing had changed between 1975 and 1979. By the time of TMI, nuclear power safety questions had become newsworthy. Why were they suddenly newsworthy? We can’t know the answer for certain, but I’d say the odds are very good that it was because of Clamshell and the national citizen action movement it sparked. Those efforts caused a lot more people to learn about nuclear power, and to become scared, and to take action, which inspired more people, etc.

In other words, the 1414 of us who got arrested, and the roughly 600 involved supporters who kept the lines of communication open between those of us inside and the wider world, made a difference not just in the immediate struggle but in the national consciousness. We uncorked the bottle with our questioning and our very public action, and once that bottle was uncorked, the magic spread. As a country, we learned to question the authority of nuclear utilities and of the regulators who granted them permission. We learned that the system was not protecting us. We made the issue of nuclear safety important enough to the media that they reported immediately on what was happening at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits this. Tom Wellock, a historian there, told the Boston Globe,

What happened with the Clamshell Alliance at Seabrook is that it really nationalized consciousness about nuclear power and inspired similar groups around the country. Their influence on policy-makers certainly mattered.

Rebecca Solnit notes, “Sixty-six nuclear power plants were cancelled in the wake of Clamshell.”

And Harvey Wasserman, one of the safe energy movement’s early activists and chroniclers, noted in 2007 that the protests led to an important secondary impact:

Inspired in part by the protests, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas’s China Syndrome, happened to open in theaters just as TMI went to the brink. The industry took the double body blow of a terrifying disaster and a Hollywood blockbuster.

What Clamshell Changed About Later Activism (Occupy, DT resistance, Sugar Shack Alliance, etc.)

Organizationally, Clamshell Alliance provided many lessons to later social change struggles. Nonviolent resistance in the US—the iconic strategy of the Civil Rights movement—had been fairly dormant since the US military pulled out of Vietnam in 1975. Clam revived it, and our spiritual younger siblings around the country like the Abalone Alliance in California and the Sunflower Alliance in Kansas spread it far and wide.

Interestingly, a group of disillusioned protestors, impatient with the slowness of nonviolent struggle, formed the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook in 1979—a group willing to use property destruction and to physically battle with law enforcement. CDAS’s actions were failures, serving mostly to discredit the protestors in the eyes of some locals—a failure that would be repeated in “The Battle in Seattle,” a protest against the World Trade Organization in 1999 where the small number of violent protestors dominated the media coverage and alienated many people.

Later struggles, such as Tiananmen Square and Arab Spring, returned to committed, principled nonviolence. This was also much in evidence in the South African struggle against its apartheid government in the 1980s (though not all elements were nonviolent).

Many movements in this current decade of the 2010s built directly on Clamshell’s process and tactics: Occupy, the stop-fossil-fuel-pipelines struggle (including Standing Rock), and the intersectional movement of resistance against the Trump administration.

Occupy’s ultra-democratic process no-leader, with innovations such as using a human chorus as a microphone to repeat a statement so others could hear, would probably never have evolved if it weren’t for the process innovations of Clam.

From that article by Rebecca Solnit linked above:

Their spirit and their creative new approach inspired activists around the country and helped generate a movement…Clamshell Alliance and many of the antinuclear groups that followed developed non-hierarchical, direct-democracy methods of organizing since used by activists and movements throughout the U.S. and beyond, including Occupy Wall Street, whose consensus-based general assemblies owed a lot to a bunch of hippies no one remembers.

Pipeline opponents took many leaves from Clamshell’s playbook, including naming their resistance groups. For example, the name of the Sugar Shack Alliance near me, contesting pipelines across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, reminds us that gas and oil pipelines threaten the maple sugaring industry—as does the severe climate change that fossil fuel infrastructure enables. Members pledge to train in nonviolent resistance and its code of conduct (click Nonviolence Training on the group’s home page) is almost identical to Clamshell’s 40 years earlier. In fact, just this week, 18 people were arrested at a Sugar Shack Alliance sit-in to protect trees in Otis (MA) State Forest that the pipeline company had gotten federal permission to cut down (in violation of state law). Meanwhile, in North Dakota, Water Protectors at Standing Rock opposed to a different pipeline waged a months-long occupation combining Native American spirituality and deep nonviolence in the face of serious repression.

And the post-election resistance understands the power of multiple sustained actions and on addressing multiple issues and constituencies while focusing on a more targeted immediate goal. It’s exciting to see these movements (and to participate in some).

Activists for a Lifetime

Clam not only changed the landscape in terms of resistance to nuclear power, but also changed the lives of many (perhaps all) who were involved. Over the years, I’ve constantly discovered that many people who were doing some of the best organizing work in sector after sector turn out to be Clamshell alumni. And as I prepare to attend a Clamshell reunion this weekend, I look at the list of attenders (and their email signatures) and I see that lots of them are still deeply involved in social change (as I am). I was one of the younger Clams, so many of these folks are well into their 60s and beyond.

My own life was impacted in lots of ways. One of those was my decision to live in an intentional community populated heavily with Clam veterans steeped in nonviolence theory and practice—the group that had developed the small-to-large consensus process, in fact. I lived at the Philadelphia Life Center in 1980-81, and learned much about meeting process, social change theory, and how personal growth can integrate with organizing.

A second was Save the Mountain, the movement I founded in 1999 (and devoted more than a year of volunteer time to) that saved our local mountain. I used many tools I’d learned at Seabrook and in that later nonviolent activist community.

Climate marchers in front of Trump Hotel, Washington DC 4-29-17 (Clamshell Alliance's spiritual heirs)
Climate marchers in front of Trump Hotel, Washington DC 4-29-17 (Clamshell Alliance’s spiritual heirs)

More recently, starting in 2013, I’ve focused my career on combining both marketing and community organizing to achieve social change and environmental justice: leveraging the business community to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—not through guilt and shame, but harnessing enlightened self-interest. Among other things, this involves helping businesses develop and market profitable products and services that directly address these goals.

Nuclear’s Deep Sleep (only 1/10 of Nixon’s goal)

The final impact I want to discuss (there were others) was the end of the industry’s dream. Richard Nixon called for 1000 nuclear plants in the US; it topped out at 112 and is now at 99 or 100. And nuclear power plant construction ground to a nearly complete halt for decades. After 1996, the next new commercial reactor in the US only went online in 2016. Four are under construction in Georgia and South Carolina, but these have been plagued by cost overruns, delays, manufacturing issues, and horrible economics including a bankruptcy by the reactor designer, Westinghouse, directly related to these projects; experts predict that they will never go online. Meanwhile, several plants including Vermont Yankee won a license extension from the NRC only to close just a few years later.

This series will wrap up with Part 5, on the current state of nuclear power and how the safe energy movement can organize to block a “zombie nuclear return from the dead.” Stay tuned!

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Part 3: Inside the Armories

Part 3 of a series of reminiscences of the April 30/May 1, 1977 occupation at the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant construction site, and its aftermath. If you missed Part 1, read it here. At the bottom of that page, you’ll find a link to Part 2, and at the bottom of Part 2, a link back here.

In Manchester at least, we were all held in one big room. Each affinity group had an area, and we kept our own areas clean. All the poles that held up the ceiling were numbered, so we had an easy system to identify our locations within the large floor.

Small-to-Large-Group Consensus Decisions

Have you ever tried to get even 70 people to agree on anything? Even with 700 people in the Manchester Armory, we maintained a commitment to consensus; we did not move forward organizationally until everyone was OK with the decision. That didn’t mean everyone was in total agreement, but it did mean that the people who preferred another choice were OK with going forward after their concerns were heard. We had numerous decision-making meetings about strategy, about the roles of our support people on the outside, and about how we were being presented to the world. And consistently, we were able to reach rapid consensus.

How? By using hubs and spokes on top of the affinity group structure: Each affinity group selected a spokesperson to represent our views to a circle of spokespeople. The representative was not empowered to make decisions on our behalf, but to express our views and bring the views of other groups back to the affinity hubs to discuss whatever issues those other groups’ spokespeople had brought up.

Over and over, this structure, which sounds cumbersome and slow from a distance, proved to work well and work quickly. We settled even the most complex decisions through consensus, and that consensus was always achieved within two hours or less—sometimes just a few minutes. And because every issue or concern was explored, and we only implemented after no one was blocking, the decisions we reached carried weight and took root smoothly and rapidly; no one was trying to sabotage them, because we all felt ownership of the process.

Creating a Learning Community

Another exciting piece was the way we took advantage of our time together in a confined empty space to teach and learn from each other. You could call it “University Within Walls.”

Detainees offered a myriad of workshops around energy issues, green living/self-sufficiency, creating inclusive and active communities, environmental justice, and social change. All of us had expertise in something, and many were willing to share their knowledge. Some of the offerings, as I remember them:

  • Nonviolence theory and practice
  • Understanding the mechanics of—and problems with—nuclear power
  • Building quick, cheap and easy do-it-yourself alternative energy projects
  • Organic food production and preparation
  • Organizing and fundraising skills
  • How to get media coverage
  • Strategy of social change
  • Meeting facilitation that works

Workshop leaders would put up notices or announce sessions at meetings, including the nearest pole number.

From what I could see, it looked like nearly all the detainees were taking advantage of this opportunity, so almost all of us emerged from our incarceration with more knowledge and better skills. And from what I heard afterward, similar education was happening in the other armories. This is probably one reason why so many Clamshell Alliance folks have remained involved in social change all these decades later.

Reaching Past the Choir

A few days into our incarceration, some of us started realizing that we had a captive audience for our message: the young National Guard reservists called up to ensure security and order. Since we were all trained in nonviolence and a pretty orderly group—other than two detainees who sneaked out, made a run to the nearest Haagen Dazs, and were re-arrested bringing back ice cream to share—they didn’t have a lot to do.

Unlike these National guardsmen of 1852, our primitive accommodations inside the armories included indoor plumbing. Picture credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections
Unlike these National Guardsmen of 1852, our primitive accommodations inside the armories included indoor plumbing. Picture credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections

So a lot of us started hanging out with the Guardsmen (I don’t remember any women in uniform) and chatting them up. We asked some questions about what being in the Guard was like, what they liked to do in their spare time—and what they knew and felt about nuclear power and our protest.

Clamshell was deep in the counterculture, with new ways to make decisions, a willingness to challenge any authority, and the scruffy hippie look of 1970s activism. Yet, among this very non-counterculture audience, we found most of them open to talking, and some of them open to changing their positions. As Rolling Stone described it back then, “But the prisoners hung on, politicizing their jailers, the guardsmen, whom they treated as friends.”

For me, that was the only the second time I’d reached across to people I saw as “on the other side.” The first was at a peace demonstration at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, a couple of years earlier. It had felt like a revolutionary act, humanizing each other and finding places of commonality while defusing tension. Since then, it’s been a part of my social change toolkit.

Part 4 will look at what Clamshell and the Seabrook Occupation accomplished in the wider world, the ripples of impact we had that continue to this day.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Part 2 of a series of reminiscences of the April 30/May 1, 1977 occupation at the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant construction site, and its aftermath. If you missed Part 1, read it here.

The Nuclear Controversy Makes the News

In 1977, the vast majority of Americans had never looked into the arcane technical issues around nuclear power. The government told us this technology was safe, and most of us believed them. Three years earlier, I had taken on a research project for a college class on the pros and cons of nuclear power—and I discovered as I read several obscure books on the subject that there were a lot of cons, and no pros. But I was a tiny minority. What few news stories there were mostly pretty rah-rah. I’d never seen any media coverage about nuclear’s serious problems, accident history, or economic house of cards.

All that changed while we were in the armories. We got tons of coverage of the movement, and some reporters decided to look into our claims. As they saw that our resistance had merit, the culture shifted, and the media began to help us prove our case.

Impact on New Hampshire

New Hampshire was a very quiet place in 1977. Its population was much more rural and it didn’t have a lot of criminal justice infrastructure. The reason we were kept in National Guard armories rather than jailed was because 1414 arrestees far outstripped the capacity of New Hampshire’s jails and corrections officers; the state normally had about one third as many prisoners. Governed by Republicans who favored a libertarian ideology when it was convenient, the state had (and still has) no sales tax and a very lean budget. When they arrested us, they clearly expected us to make bail and go back where we came from until we came back for our court dates and patronized local hotels and restaurants in the process.

But in those strategy circles I described yesterday in Part 1, we decided as a group to do “bail solidarity”—to not post the modest bails and to stay as unwanted guests of the state. For several days, nearly all 1414 of us refused to post bail, leaving the state with a lot of extra mouths to feed, as well as a lot of staffing costs to pay the National Guard reservists who had to be called up to monitor us—costing the state $50,000 per day, according to Rolling Stone’s account of July 1977 (probably at least $150,000 per day in 2017 dollars). This created enormous pressure on the state to come to terms with us. People stayed as long as they could, and bailed out in small numbers as they were needed on the home front. (I bailed out after a week because I was running an event back in Providence; Nancy stayed the entire two weeks).

In other words, the Occupation continued after our removal from the site. It simply shifted to the multiple venues where we were held. And this became so expensive that the New Hampshire government capitulated on May 13, 1977 and released all remaining detainees without bail.

Until this occupation, opposition to the construction plans at Seabrook was mostly localized. While very strong in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and the immediately adjacent communities in neighboring Massachusetts—opposition was not strong enough to block the plant through mainstream methods such as regulatory appeals and lobbying. Clamshell Alliance, formed in July 1976 and inspired by a nuclear plant occupation in Germany, turned to nonviolent direct action. Clam waged two small nonviolent occupations in August 1976, with 18 and then 180 arrests, and began organizing across New England for the April 1977 occupation. And the more people learned about nuclear power and its dangers, the more the resistance gained strength. Safe energy became mainstream.

Fake News, 1977 Style

Despite our incarceration, we had access to newspapers, delivered daily (presumably by the outside support system of people who had chosen not to be arrested to they could provide us what we needed.

One of those papers was the Manchester Union Leader. Despite its progressive-sounding title, this was a right-wing rag, owned by the notorious William Loeb, who would have been right at home in a Steve Bannon world. I believe it was Loeb, but it may have been his protégé, then-Governor Meldrim Thomson, who called us “The Clamshell Terrorists” (I can’t find the quote on Google).

Pretty much alone in its denunciation of us, the Union Leader lumbered through its daily attacks on us.

Meanwhile, we were getting very sympathetic and much more accurate coverage on a slew of both mainstream and progressive publications and broadcast media. And we had a lot of media-savvy people, both inside the armories and outside, that helped us tell the story our way. In the armory I was in, there was even a “graybeard caucus” that pressed the news media for acknowledgement of our age diversity every time a story said the protestors were “mostly in their 20s.”

The Idea of Alternatives Takes Root

One reason why nuclear had not been much questioned was that the alternatives were hard to see. Even though the 19th-century industrialization had been largely powered by water, and agriculture in the early 20th century used wind power extensively, as a society we hadn’t been trained to look past fossil and nuclear. But Clamshell made an important strategic breakthrough: being against nuclear was far more effective if we were for something else. Energy that falls from the sun, is pulled by the wind, or harnesses the current of a river is infinitely renewable. Once the infrastructure is in place, it doesn’t cost more to harvest and harness those sources—unlike fossil and nuclear that keep demanding more.

And we had this understanding well before the consciousness about global climate change and carbon footprint penetrated the general consciousness.

Admittedly, these systems aren’t always can be designed to be in harmony with their microenvironment and with the planet as a whole (especially at industrial scale, where they can be quite destructive). But they can be designed for true sustainability, while fossil and nuclear can’t.

Replicators: Dawn of a National Movement

As we emerged from the armories, we began to understand more of our true impact. We discovered that other dozens of Alliances named after their own local flora and fauna were springing up around the country, turning their sights on existing or planned nukes in their own areas. And this national movement successfully reversed the drive toward nuclear. Seabrook did go on line, so we lost that battle (although the power company only built one of the two permitted plants, and that was a significant victory for us). As far as I know, Seabrook was the last plant permitted in the 1970s or 1980s that went online as part of the electric grid. The terribly positioned Shoreham plant on Long Island, New York, was completed and turned on for testing, but then rapidly shut down and was never used to generate power. And for more than 30 years, no new nukes in the US moved forward. Those in the planning stages were scrapped, and many existing plants, facing the wrath of these citizen groups, eventually shut down.

We’ll revisit the deeper implications of that movement in Part 4 of this series. Meanwhile, stay tuned for Part 3.

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