The Next Eco-Warriors (38 page)

THE ACTION CONVERSATION STARTED in the summer of 2008 while walking down a dirt road. The road's brown dust arced around boundless fields and dense Virginia trees. It fed into an encampment of tents interspersed with banners and slogans like “Leave it in the ground!” hand-stitched in cloth. The ridge of trees sheltered makeshift clearings intended for workshops and strategy sessions and opened like a mouth into a wooded area with even more tents hiding in the underbrush. The Southeast Convergence for Climate Action brought together activists from across the region and was
coordinated by a grassroots network called Rising Tide. I went as part of a facilitation team to run trainings.

We spent our nights listening to panels of retired union coal miners, talking about their thirty-year struggle to protect their families from a reckless and parasitic industry. Their communities were impoverished. Their tap water was so contaminated with heavy metals that it ran orange. That's what happens when you blow tops off entire mountain ranges in order to feed America's fossil fuel addiction. And almost nobody paid attention to their struggle—they were poor after all.

Their families were on the frontline. I considered how when I flip on my light switch, it's like a trigger, blowing up a mountain thousands of miles away. My stomach still hurts when I think about how my convenience comes from the pain of communities like these. I will never have to cry over my child poisoned from resource extraction. But others will. We have a word to describe the act of flipping that light switch:
privilege
.

At that camp, we heard grandmothers tell of their lifetimes of activism. I found myself captivated by stories told by aging antinuclear activists. Wrinkled faces were lit up around a campfire as the shared tales of the historic occupation of the Seabrook nuclear facility, an action that helped shift and inspire a mass movement and resulted in a de facto moratorium on new nuclear power plants.

We all agreed: our generation needed our Seabrook.

Rising Tide had made arrangements for a Navajo activist named Enei Begaye to come from across the country to speak. I drove to pick her up from the airport. On our way back, we rolled across the Virginia hills and spent hours talking about our work. Enei told me about one of the biggest strip-mining companies in the country, Peabody Coal. “Our people have maintained a lifestyle that is in line with Mother Earth and the caretaking of all things, well
before 1492.” Peabody's operations were devastating Black Mesa in a Native reservation in Arizona. But her community was resisting. She chuckled, “Indigenous communities have been green way before it was hip.”

Black Mesa is a sacred mountain. Many families on the reservation do not have running water or electricity. Yet the company steals 3.3 millions of gallons of pristine fresh water to mix it into a coal slurry so it can be shipped to provide power to cities in my state of California. Enei's face hardened.

“The Indian wars are not over. We are still fighting to protect our lands and territories.” We talked about colonization most of the way home. I thought more about my light switch.

The next day, Enei sat before a hundred activists and declared,

She was right. The light-switch flippers are inextricably bound to those who live in places where resources are stolen. I was caught in that web, just like everyone else. But I have dedicated my life to transforming it.

That night, after facilitating back-to-back trainings, a few friends and I sat down to chat about the big picture. The mosquitoes were biting. I had spent the day talking myself hoarse to young activists about the organizing lessons of Ella Baker, an unsung civil rights heroine who helped build the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a black-led civil rights group helping register Southern black voters in the early 1960s. I had become obsessed with her methods of building mass movements.
Mass
, as I had learned from Ella, meant
millions
. Our task was daunting. I swatted a mosquito and scratched my skin till I bled. A friend named Matt mentioned an idea that had been on the backburner, something activist Bill McKibben had proposed to him a year earlier—a small civil disobedience at the Capitol coal plant. The idea was inspired by images of civil rights protestors half a century earlier, dressed in suits, prefiguring the world they wanted to see by sitting-in and integrating in the lunch counters.

One key piece of Ella Baker's organizing was moving beyond inspiring a committed core of righteous do-gooders, to a mass-action model. Unlike mass actions some of us had been a part of, we didn't want to mobilize just activists, but also lots of people who had never done activism before. We picked the Capitol Power Plant as our target. We called it a generational act of civil disobedience.

_________

BILL MCKIBBEN WAS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THE WAY the idea had evolved. With Bill as a key spokesperson who could connect to large groups of passive allies and light-switch flippers, we proceeded to build a coalition of national groups.

That's where the challenges started.

Three months later, we had about sixty groups endorsing the action. We tried to collaborate with another coalition called Energy Action. I had been on Energy Action's steering committee at the time, but we were mired from the start in coalition challenges. It was time for another conference call. The debate was the same: representative after representative voiced their support for the action. And then one or two people would “block” the proposal. I had a certain ritual for these calls by now. I sat on the floor in the corner of my office so that I could repeatedly bang my head into the wall. I tore my hair out, literally. We were running out of time. I thought about Ella Baker's slow work of building consensus among people with different perspectives. Despite coalition differences, we had gotten more than 120 groups to endorse, and we reached the point where we needed to launch. I emailed Bill. He wrote the call-out letter with poet Wendell Berry. It went public. They opened with this:

And then the floodgates burst.

Dr. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who first publicly articulated the phenomenon of global warming, endorsed our action and did a public service announcement. So did Susan Sarandon and other celebrities. Former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson called to say he wanted to get involved. Soon we had an ever-expanding list of scientists, celebrities, politicians, and other “legitimizers.”

The action was viral. Endorsements were flooding in from organizations across the political spectrum. There were calls between rabbis, pastors, and preachers about a faith-based march contingent. Will.I.Am, Goapele, Michael Franti, and other famous musicians endorsed. Racial and economic justice groups, public health organizations, and green businesses wanted to sign up to be part of our action. We trained more than two thousand people in nonviolence. Hundreds of first-time activists were getting trained daily. The action was showing up on Internet message boards, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and across the web. Guerilla wheat paste, graffiti, and stencils promoting the action began to appear in iconic places across the country. People were registering to participate on our website daily. None of this was magic—it was the result of slow work of dozens of people in our organizing core. Volunteers were phone banking, making hundreds of calls to recruit people. We held teleconference mass meetings where hundreds could call in and get updates. And I got to facilitate them.

There was no turning back now.

The action had become its own organic being. We struggled to keep it all together. The twice-weekly conference calls between convening organizations, various working groups, and action teams were barreling forward. We had lined up interviews with our major spokespeople, and they started to appear in national papers. Capitol Climate Action was a beautiful beast that we were racing to keep up with and shape.

_________

IT WAS A COUPLE WEEKS UNTIL THE BIG DAY. We were in Washington, DC. The slush sloshed. The ice cracked. We could see our breath in the cold. Gales
of wind cracked our faces as we emerged from the subway, across the lawn in front of the Capitol building. Five other organizers and I trudged down the tundra that had become downtown Washington, DC. The Capitol dome looked almost majestic as it offered itself to the rays of sun peeking through the clouds. It was short-lived. A haze of emissions pumping out of the smokestacks would soon obscure its view. That was the image we wanted plastered on newspapers across the country.

We looped around the coal plant and measured out each entrance. Come the day, we didn't want anyone to get in or out. We needed to clarify how many people were required to block each gate. Which march routes were the most visually compelling, so a camera can see the Capitol building, the marchers,
and
the smokestack. What would be the most fun; marching in circles is simply boring. And what would be tactically effective, so that each team could deploy at each gate while secure with a crowd of people around them.

This was our third time scouting the area. Everything needed to be perfect. There would be grandmothers and children at the action. All the organizers felt a responsibility on our shoulders to make sure it was a safe and well-coordinated event for all.

By the time we were back at the subway, there was a small huddle of beefy cops. They were there for us. Actually, we had planned a meeting with them. I wasn't our police negotiator. But one approached me, asking, “So you're going to have a few people down here to protest the plant, eh? You don't have a permit.”

“Actually, a few thousand are coming.”

“You're definitely going to need a permit.”

“We're not getting one.”

Meanwhile, another organizer was hanging out back at the coal plant. It was the shift change. We had met with the union who supported the workers at the plant, to clarify that we had no problems with them. We supported workers. The union was supportive of our action, but we needed to make sure that there wouldn't be a conflict on the day of. So we leafleted during the shift changes. Gone are the days when we'll allow the media to frame
our issues as “environment vs. jobs.” We wanted a
just transition
to good, sustainable jobs for all.

_________

ONE WEEK LEFT. I WOKE UP TO NELL GREENBERG'S frantic typing. Nell is a communications genius and had been conspiring about the Capitol Climate Action from the beginning. “Joshjoshjosh!” she called to me in a blur of fingers slamming on keys. “You'll never guess what just happened!” Nancy Pelosi had just made a proclamation on Capitol Hill. They were going to phase coal out of the power plant.

We were caught between moments of shock and the compulsion to react as fast as possible. Did we win? What did it mean?

We had been talking to Pelosi for a while, and she had not been pleased with our action. The Capitol plant had been a bit of a black eye for a well-intentioned set of eco-initiatives. She didn't want us to shine a light on the Democratic Congress's inaction.

We called up people like Bill. We called up our frontline allies and consulted with the community group that had been fighting that plant. “How could we march on a plant with a demand that had already been met?” we asked. “Let's turn the action into a victory party in the streets,” Bill suggested.

“Pelosi is trying to take the wind out of our sails ... ” Nell interjected. The Capitol plant was indeed switching away from coal ... to natural gas. We knew that this action was supposed to be a flash point for a larger commentary on coal—it wasn't about this specific plant as much as about an entire industry. And while natural gas is an improvement, climate justice activists across the country were opposing natural gas pipelines and the community devastation they cause. “A victory party would be premature,” I finished. By now, Nell and I were completing each other's sentences.

But Pelosi did give us the gift of validation. We put out a press release stating our intention to continue the protest—that this proves the efficacy of grassroots people power—and we're gonna keep pushing. The
New York Times
and a number of other national papers picked up the story. The announcement had put our action into the spotlight. It underscored the careful dance
between radical activists and the mainstream—how bold demands create more space for what is “politically possible” in Washington. It proved to those who would disparage civil disobedience that our tactics
work
.

We were rolling.

_________

TMINUS FOUR DAYS.

I navigated a labyrinth of several hundred flags being painted bright green, yellow, blue, and red. We had converted a warehouse space into an art factory. Art is beautiful, but ours was also functional. The different-colored flags were set up to designate different “blocs” in the march. Each set of colors would have a mass of people behind it, deployed at different times down the march route, and occupying a different entrance. It was just one way we were able to direct and organize mass action in a fluid and clear way.

The hum of sewing machines stitching fabric together competed with hip-hop and reggae. Butts were shaking in tune with spray cans shaking. Stencils with P
OWER,
C
OMMUNITY,
C
HANGE,
and J
USTICE
were churned out faster than we could hang them to dry. Young people with circular saws cut hundreds of bamboo shafts, while others strung cloth across them. Banners were painted. P
OWER
P
AST
C
OAL
placards were stained.