More than anything else, this is a piece about hope: about the power of each of us to have impact in our own lives, in the lives of those around us, in our communities, and to our ecosystem and the entire planet.
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook by Shel Horowitz, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Two case studies from my own life:
How a Single Demonstration Redirected US Energy Away from a Super-Toxic and Dangerous Future to a Much Saner Alternative
At age 20, I was one of 1414 protestors arrested as we occupied the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear power plant. At that time, the US government was envisioning 1000 nuclear power plants around the country. They never got past about a tenth of that, and I’m convinced that the ripples from that demonstration have a lot to do with why. On the 40th anniversary, I wrote a five-part blog series about what happened and my take on why. That link will take you to part one, with jumps to each succeeding part at the bottom. It’s really important reading for activists, authors, business innovators, educators, and others who want to change the world.
How Changing What I Eat Led Me to a Writing and Marketing Career I don’t know the exact date, but I think some time last week marked 50 years since I stopped eating meat. I know that I threw a party to mark my conversion and planned to stop eating meat as of that late August date, but I’d actually stopped several days earlier. I’m grateful for several things about that transition:
1) that after almost four years as an activist it was the first major step I consciously took toward living lighter on the earth, changing my lifestyle to match by beliefs;
2) that it was the first time I was really thinking long-term and strategically: I came home from a fishing trip at age 12 and announced I was turning vegetarian. My mom immediately responded that vegetarianism would stunt my growth. I was already a runty kid, small and weak for my age, and we didn’t have the Internet to check easily—so I promised her that I’d wait—and promised myself that I would remember and honor my promise to go off meat once I’d reached that milestone);
3) that I actually was capable of remembering and fulfilling a promise made four years earlier
4) that the whole world of food alternatives began to open up to me with this transition. Although Yoshi had been part of my life for about five years and thus I had some exposure to Japanese food, we had very little money and seldom ate out, and my mom’s cooking was tilted heavily toward kid-pleasing macaroni casseroles and meat loaves. She was into whole wheat and brown rice, so we were a step ahead. But I knew nothing about the flavor and nutrition and cooking techniques of Indian, Thai, Turkish, Mexican, Ethiopian, Vegamerican, Szechuan, Arabic… I’d never made bread, or yogurt, or sprouts, or pretty much anything from scratch other than salad dressing. The deeper my explorations, the more exciting eating became.
5) that I would arrive two months later for my first term at Antioch College with a new identity and lifestyle, and would not have to remake myself later in the eyes of my peers: something that deepened once I did arrive on campus and (with 600 miles between me and the stairwell where I was raped by a stranger several years earlier) almost immediately got in touch with my bisexuality and became active in the school’s flourishing LGBT community—which in turn led me to be involved in campus theater, campus radio, my first public speaking, my first time running an organization, an extended and public dialogue with the town’s mostly-progressive but homophobic newspaper that gave me a window into the power of the press (and thus my career as a writer and marketer), and more.
Lessons for Organizers, Change Agents, and Business Visionaries
In other words, there’s truth in the parable about a single butterfly’s wings changing the climate on a different continent. Our actions ripple out and ripple out and ripple out again, and we never know the full consequences of those actions when we undertake them. I had no idea when I stopped eating meat how far that would reverberate and how much it would shape me. I had no idea when I took the training ahead of the Seabrook occupation that we would leave a national movement in our wake whose effects are still felt almost 50 years later. Did Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Mary Kay, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Edison, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandela know at the beginning of their careers what impact they’d have? I very much doubt it.
We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like
“You can’t fight City Hall”
“We’ve always done it this other way”
“That’s impossible”
“You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.
Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.
An article called “Build Back Better,” offered eight ways we can mitigate the climate crisis as we reopen. It’s on the Singapore-based Eco-Business site (often a wealth of fresh thinking to my American eyes)
I’d only read a couple of paragraphs when I got the idea to start a community on the theme of building back better—but not just for climate change. I envision a portal with resources and ideas to create better futures in criminal justice/policing, nonviolent defense, immigration, equitable housing, transportation, community food self-sufficiency, education, the work world, democracy… There’s a ton of great stuff out there, but I’m not aware of a one-stop resource that crosses silos, and disciplines, reaches people with a wide range of passions, interests, skills, and demographics, and has the power to create change.
While it certainly builds on the work I’ve been doing for several years at Going Beyond Sustainability, I see it as a community project that would seek ideas both from thought leaders/subject experts and from “ordinary” people (none of us is actually ordinary; all of us are unique).
And use social media, press outreach, and other tools to get it in front of leaders in government, business, academia, nonprofit, etc. After all, every major site started small, even Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. Using the power of the Internet, this could evolve rapidly to a place that journalists and politicians turn to for sources and advice.
I got so juiced that I stopped reading, ran off to GoDaddy, and scooped up build-back-better dot net (not using the domain syntax because there’s no site up yet so I don’t want it clickable). Most of the more obvious variations were already taken, which tells me there could be some traction in the concept. Only after I secured the domain did I go back and finish reading the article. UPDATE, JULY 9: I’m now thinking it might be better to come up with a cool, brandable single-word name (and I have a few possibilities in mind)–rather than a three-word name whose meaning isn’t all that obvious.
So…who wants to play? If it’s going to fly, it’s going to need volunteers:
Thinkers and doers: researchers, authors, activists, business and community leaders, students, etc., who could post ideas-in-progress and let the community help those ideas evolve into workable solutions
Web designers who can handle complex threading and submission forms that allow people to submit and subscribe by specific idea, by topic heading, and overall—and who have a deep understanding of Internet security and SEO
Topic leaders who are experts in their subject and can moderate submissions so the spammers, trolls, and nut-jobs have to play someplace else—but who will put up actual ideas that are submitted in their area, even if they personally don’t see them as workable. (That would be an ideal opportunity to help them think their idea through. Post the submission and immediately post a comment that doesn’t put down the idea but grounds them in reality, with questions like “have you thought about what could happen if…?” “Do you think this could also be useful in (a different discipline)?” “What resources would this
Residents of Wadajir, Somalia attend a meeting on community policing. Photo by David Mutui, courtesy Wikipedia Commons
require and how would you go after them?”
Influencers (including journalists, bloggers, marketers, people operating successful online communities, people with a big fan base or lots of social media connections) who can bring the site to the attention of their networks
Revenue generators who would work on commission to raise money for hack-proof site operation, and eventually raise enough to start paying volunteers
Obviously, this is only a preliminary sketch. If you’d like to be part of this, use my contact form (on my sister site, Going Beyond Sustainability) to get in touch.
Yesterday and today, I’ve listened to a bunch of the EarthDayLive2020 conference. It’s exciting to see this intergenerational, intercultural, and very smart group of activists and performers attracting thousands of viewers over Zoom.
One speaker, Erica Chenowith, tossed off a remark that changed everything I think about the 2020 US presidential election. She said—and this is so clear after all the progressives exited the race—that we get involved with this election not to choose our ally but to choose our adversary (she used the term “enemy,” but I think my term gets her meaning more accurately).
This, to me, might be the secret sauce for getting progressives to come out and vote. In this scenario, Biden migrates from lesser evil to far, far better adversary. With a moderate and relatively honest Democrat in the White House, progressives will have a much easier time moving our agenda forward. Biden will be more pliable on economic issues, on the social safety net, and on the environment. He is no Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but he is someone who does listen, and who occasionally changes his mind—as he did on same-sex marriage. In the Bill Clinton era, he supported the horrid DOMA, but he pushed Obama well to the left when marriage equality came to the tipping point.
He is already likely to reinstate the US into the Paris Climate Accord. Once he understands how the Green New Deal will create jobs, put discretionary spending into people’s pockets, and reduce our vulnerability both to foreign oil oligarchs and to runaway multinational corporations—thus reducing the risk of war—I think he would support it or at least not interfere with it.
In other words, a Biden administration would be a much more welcome adversary. It would be more humane, more willing to work with other countries, interested in preserving rather than destroying the environment—and far more predictable. And it would be a complete rejection of the apparent main goal of the current occupant: to make himself even richer and everyone else be damned. In other words, Biden will be someone who will respond as we would like him to, at least some of the time—and who is unlikely to ever engage in the viciously destructive hate-based politics we see every day.
There’s ample precedent. LBJ, the long-time Southern politician, not JFK, the liberal icon, was the one who signed several pieces of civil rights legislation and declared war on poverty. Richard Nixon, a Republican and anticommunist extremist, was probably the president who did the most to protect the environment other than perhaps Obama–not because he believed in the cause, but because public outcry left him no other choice. (Of course, the good work Johnson and Nixon did on these issues in no way gives them a pass around the Vietnam war, domestic repression, etc.)
I’d love to hear from progressives who take electoral politics seriously—is this the way we attract young disillusioned progressives who are ready to sit out the election because we are once again stuck with a centrist candidate who doesn’t really represent us? Please weigh in
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.
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.
There are only three types of potential clients you will ever experience: responsive, neutral and unresponsive.
Responsive people will come across your work and light up. They’ll get excited and want to sign up and hire you after learning a little bit about you. They’ll be curious, want to know more and ask you a lot of questions. These people are a ‘yes’ to what you’re up to in your business.
Neutral people will listen to what you have to say but they won’t react much. They’ll sit there in your workshop politely and take it in. But they won’t sign up for much. They may be cordial and listen respectfully but they for sure won’t seem ‘into it’ like the responsive people do. These people are a ‘maybe’ to what you’re up to in your business.
Unresponsive people will actively pull away, show disinterest, might even be rude. These people are a ‘no’ to what you’re up to in your business.
I think there’s a big difference between those who are unresponsive and those who respond with hostility. So I posted this comment:
Let me “bend the magnet” a bit more and take your analogy to its logical fourth category: those who are actively opposed to what you’re doing. You and I as marketers in the green/socially conscious/cool and groovy/progressive activist space will not only attract the cool and groovy people–we’ll repel the Hummer-driving, cigar-smoking, GMO-loving executive at Monsanto or the local nuclear power plant to the point where they might actually speak out against us–just as WE have spoken out against THEIR actions.
And I’m fine with that. Quite frankly, they are a way to gain the attention of those people in in the uninvolved category, who may be within their orbit but have never thought about these issues. They’re a doorway into media coverage, and give us legitimacy in the eyes of reporters (and their readers) because these big important corporations are actually acknowledging and discussing out issues. And every once in a while, lightning actually strikes and some of them start examining the issues and taking action on our side of the fence (as Walmart has—for its own profit-driven reasons—on sustainability, for instance).
I think of my experience as one of 1414 Clamshell Alliance members arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant, trying to keep the plant from being built, back in 1977. New Hampshire’s governor at the time, Meldrim Thomson, and William Loeb, publisher of the largest newspaper in the state, the Manchester Union-Leader, called us “the Clamshell terrorists.”
Yet not only had we all pledged nonviolence, we had all actually undergone training in nonviolent protest and joined small, accountable, affinity groups (which continued to function after our arrest); it was a precondition for participation.
Governor Thomson kept the Clamshell prisoners incarcerated in National Guard armories around the state for about two weeks. When we emerged, we found we’d:
Birthed a national safe-energy movement based in nonviolent civil disobedience
Rapidly and throughly raised consciousness about nuclear power plant safety (and the lack thereof)
Created a climate where, unlike previous accidents that had gotten little or no coverage, the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 (and later catastrophic failures at Chernobyl and Fukushima) became front-page news.
Seabrook did go online, so we failed in our immediate goal. BUT in an era where former President Richard Nixon had called for 1000 nuclear power plants in the US, Seabrook was the last nuclear power plant to go on line in the US other than Shoreham, NY, which was shut down after preliminary low-power testing and never supplied the electrical grid. I believe the opposition of Thomson and Loeb to our movement helped make it a mass movement, just as the overreaction against civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protestors helped those movements gain strength.
What do you think—do we need our enemies as much as our friends? Can we “ju-jitsu” their hostility into a benefit for our cause? Do you have a great example, either form your own work or something you’ve heard about somewhere? Please leave your comment below.
This is great news—but I have to question why the district switched to compostable disposable trays. It’s certainly more ecological, and probably cheaper, to buy a commercial dishwasher and switch to not only reusable trays, but reusable dishes as well. I would think the materials savings would cover the costs of the machine and the employees to run it, as well as create some needed employment.
