XRDC Strategy
Why We Need Nonviolent, Disruptive Civil Resistance in the Climate Movement
We are speeding towards catastrophic runaway global heating, which is guaranteed to bring about societal collapse and the deaths of billions of people and trillions of other life forms, and we are rapidly running out of time to stop it. The United Nations estimates that we need to cut emissions by about 7.6% every year for the next 10 years if we want to have a chance to stay below 1.5°C [1]. Even though 1.5°C of heating will be disastrous, causing unbelievable mass suffering, even reaching that goal is an extremely daunting task, requiring an unprecedented reorganization of human society at emergency speed. To make matters worse, our political institutions are crumbling, with global fascism on the rise and international cooperation nonexistent. The corporations destroying the earth’s life support systems are more powerful than ever and are doing everything they can to block or delay climate action.
In the face of this calamitous situation, what options do we have available to us? There is too much at stake for us to simply give up. Future generations would never forgive us for our complicity in the looming mass murder of billions of people and trillions of other life forms. The traditional means of influence over our government, such as petitions, permitted demonstrations, lobbying, and voting, have failed us miserably. The environmental movement has been employing these tactics for 30 years; 50% of all human emissions happened during those same three decades [2]. Given the incredible scale of what’s required – a total overhaul of every aspect of society – those tactics seem woefully inadequate, like trying to stop a raging forest fire inferno with one-gallon buckets of water.
There is only one viable option left: a massive uprising that uses nonviolent disruptive civil resistance to force the masses to wake up to their impending doom and to force the government to take radical climate action.
How Change Happens
As Americans, we are raised with a false narrative of change. We are taught in school to venerate our leaders as the great influencers of history. We are told by the media that our politicians steer the course of our nation, that their initiatives and ideas are the primary driver of change. In essence, we are socialized to believe that change happens from the top down. Obama passed Obamacare. The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. FDR was responsible for the New Deal.
In reality, the president’s signature on a piece of legislation is not the impetus for a change to society, but rather the last step of a long and lengthy process that almost inevitably begins at the level of the people. Our leaders are not steering the course of the nation, they are only responding to pressure from the masses. One need not look too hard at our politicians to realize that they are not primarily driven by morality or idealism. Instead, they are constantly trying to act in whatever ways they think will make them the most popular with their constituents and most likely to be re-elected [3].
History shows us over and over again that change is a bottom-up process. The New Deal was only made possible by millions of protestors in the streets demanding expanded labor protections. The legalization of gay marriage by the supreme court only became possible after decades of organizing by gay rights activists, who rapidly and fundamentally altered the common perception of gay marriage.
Importantly, in many of these cases, change seems incredibly unlikely right up until the moment that it happened. And when major change does happen, it happens indirectly, without a clear causal link between any one action and the final outcome. Take the Civil Rights movement, for example. Starting with the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955, organizers spent years planning campaigns of civil resistance. For almost a decade, despite numerous campaigns, thousands of arrests, and unbelievably harsh backlash from the police and segregationists, the Civil Rights movement saw very little progress toward eliminating discriminatory Jim Crow laws. Segregation remained deeply entrenched, and full desegregation seemed like a pipe dream.
In 1963, several groups, including Martin Luther King Jr’s SCLC, came together to launch a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. They organized lunch counter sit-ins, public marches, and boycotts. Their actions triggered an intense backlash from the police, with men, women, and children alike being sprayed with high-pressure hoses and attacked by police dogs. When they called off the campaign after a month of action, they managed to secure only modest victories: desegregation of lunch counters and public restrooms, a new job initiative for black citizens, and release of protestors from jail [4]. For organizers on the ground, the campaign seemed like a major loss. And after the protests, many parts of the local government apparatus reneged on their commitments to desegregation [5].
Although the campaign had failed to secure instrumental victories on the ground, it had radically altered public perception of segregation, which proved to be an even more powerful victory. Images of police brutalizing protesters had been broadcast internationally, causing widespread outrage. Most people did not truly understand the injustice of segregation in the south; seeing it play out in such a visceral way caused a deep emotional response [6]. That shift in public perception was buoyed by hundreds of additional civil rights protests. Eventually, widespread public pressure culminated with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which prohibited discrimination in employment across the entire country. This major federal victory was not the culmination of a series of increasingly powerful local victories. Instead, it was a sudden and sweeping change, only made possible by persistent, diffuse, and sustained actions across the country.
These lessons from history must inform our strategy in fighting back against the climate crisis. If we want something like a Green New Deal to be passed by the federal government, we must make climate action a political necessity for all of our elected leaders, such that to reject a policy like the Green New Deal is political suicide. In order for that to become a reality, we need a massive and widespread cultural shift in the way we engage with the climate crisis. And we need a source of power that can overcome the pernicious influence of fossil fuel corporations over politics. A success on both fronts carries with it a real possibility for the transformative victory we desperately need.
Nonviolent Civil Resistance
Nonviolent civil resistance is a strategy of strategic noncooperation and disruption of the state intended to secure political goals. It has been used successfully throughout history, in numerous contexts. Time and time again, civil resistance has sparked major cultural shifts when utilized effectively. It has also shown itself to be an incredibly powerful tool that can be wielded by ordinary people to resist oppression. Nonviolent civil resistance will be absolutely critical in our efforts to stop the climate crisis and ensure a livable future.
Civil resistance has the power to rapidly raise the profile of an issue. If you want someone to step outside of their regular routine and think about the big picture, the best way to do it is to disrupt their regular routine and interrupt their normal train of thought. If a person on their daily commute gets snarled in a massive traffic jam caused by protestors, they have no choice but to think about the protesters’ cause. With the climate crisis, the more you think about it, the more freaked out you become – there’s just too much overwhelming evidence to ignore. Bringing someone face to face with that reality is a crucial first step in the process of them waking up to the issue.
Beyond forcing the issue into people’s consciousness, civil resistance can also radically alter the way people engage with an issue. For many Americans, the climate crisis has yet to manifest in their lives in a disruptive way. Most people are not behaving like the world around them is coming apart at the seams and their entire existence is in jeopardy. Most people are just keeping calm and carrying on like nothing is wrong. This creates an extremely dangerous herd mentality – if everyone is running in the same direction, there can’t be a cliff, right?
People participating in civil resistance present the exact opposite behavior: acting as if the truth about the climate crisis is real, freaking out, and fighting for their lives and the lives of future generations. Seeing this behavior can have a profound impact on the way someone engages with an issue. It’s one thing to ponder the climate crisis in a disconnected, intellectual way. It’s quite another to see someone who looks like you and comes from the same background as you sacrificing their safety and their liberty to break the law, demanding radical climate action. It has the effect of normalizing this action as a rational response. Scaled up en masse, civil resistance can fundamentally reshape public perception of an issue.
Extinction Rebellion has already seen this tactic succeed around the globe. During our September 23 Shutdown DC Action, we had about 1,000 protestors in the street blocking roads. Over 250 news articles were written about the protest [7]. We became the #3 trending hashtag on US Twitter. Anecdotally, almost anyone you ask in DC heard about the action. Disruptive civil resistance is far and away the most effective way to bring the issue to the consciousness of an extremely large audience. In our case, it worked for the whole city.
Using Our Collective Power
Beyond raising the profile of an issue and ushering in profound shifts in public awareness, nonviolent civil resistance is also the most effective way for us to use the power of the people to put pressure on our leaders. Right now, the climate crisis is not a technological problem – we have already developed almost all of the solutions necessary for full decarbonization. If we converted all of the land currently being used for fossil fuel extraction into solar farms, we could power the entire country several times over [6]. Right now, the climate crisis is a political problem. The elite class, which has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, is the primary obstacle to passing something like a Green New Deal. Unless they are forced to change course, they will continue to facilitate fossil fuel extraction and continue to make obscene amounts of profits.
Ultimately, the battle for a livable future is a power struggle between the elites and the environmental movement, and the elites have been winning for the last 40 years. The environmental movement is very robust in the United States, with a legion of well-funded NGOs and policy think tanks, innumerable community-focused climate groups, and a strong history of frontline activist struggles. But as a whole, the environmental movement has lacked sufficient strength to overpower corporate interests and force the government to take real climate action. That power is the crucial missing piece of the environmental movement; without it, we will never be able to secure a livable future.
The only way we could ever hope to amass that much power is by activating the power of everyday people through nonviolent civil resistance. Our society depends on the participation of hundreds of millions of people in order to function. If we can convince enough people to withdraw their participation from our broken society, it will no longer be able to function at all. When that happens, the political class will have no choice but to accede to our demands. Without vast sums of money or political capital, disruptive nonviolent civil resistance is the most effective way for groups of people to exert power.
We don’t need to convince every American to stop going to work and get into the streets in order to secure sufficient climate policy. Research in social science suggests that 3.5% of a population engaged in active resistance to the state, targeting its seats of power (financial and political centers), along with a majority of the population in passive support of the resisters, is sufficient to topple oppressive, dictatorial regimes [8]. In a quasi-democracy like the United States, which is ostensibly more responsive to the will of the people, it is possible that even fewer people would be required to secure a Green New Deal.
Nonviolence is a crucial component of civil resistance. If we use violence against the state, we are entering a struggle that, sadly, the state knows extremely well. There is no way our movement could ever match the firepower of the US military. On the other hand, the state has no way to respond effectively to a massive nonviolent movement – we put the government into a lose-lose situation. If the authorities allow us to protest uninterrupted, we continually expand our disruption, causing economic harm to the system and eroding the state’s legitimacy. When the state responds to us with repression, if we have maintained nonviolence and the moral high ground, people will be outraged by what they perceive as an unfair reaction to our attempts to preserve a livable future. No matter what course of action the state chooses, we can use their response to boost our movement.
We need a powerful movement using widespread civil disobedience right now
Stopping the climate crisis will require a rapid, all-encompassing transformation to all aspects of our society. And that transformation will directly harm the most powerful members of our society. Simply asking our government to initiate that transformation hasn’t worked for decades, and it won’t work in the future. The only way that transformation will happen is if we force the government to do it. And to do that, we need power.
Nonviolent civil resistance takes the only source of power we have available to us, the power of the people, and uses it in the most effective way possible. It is capable of inflicting massive economic costs on society through noncooperation and disruption, creating tangible consequences if the government refuses to listen to our demands. It is also capable of catalyzing rapid shifts in public consciousness, which can put further pressure on the government to make change. Both of these functions – exerting power and changing public opinion – are absolutely critical in the fight for climate action.
Each person has a moral obligation to do everything in their power to avert the climate catastrophe. For many people, doing everything in their power to avert the climate catastrophe necessitates involvement in a mass movement. This is not to say that other efforts are meaningless. But without disruptive civil resistance, there can be no radical climate policy. Given that reality, every person who wants to make an impact on the climate crisis must consider taking part in nonviolent direct action. It may seem like a long shot, but it’s the best chance we have.
If you want to take part in the nonviolent, disruptive movement that will preserve a livable future for all humans, sign up for our email list, check out our upcoming events, or consider donating to support the cause. In the end, it’s going to take all of us working together to stop the climate crisis - they don’t call it a mass movement for nothing!
References:
[1] https://www.unenvironment.org/interactive/emissions-gap-report/2019/
[2] https://blog.ucsusa.org/peter-frumhoff/global-warming-fact-co2-emissions-since-1988-764
[3] See “This Is An Uprising” by Mark Engler and Paul Engler, especially chapter 4
[4] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/birmingham-campaign
[5] Fairclough, Adam (1987). “To Redeem the Soul of America: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr.” University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-8203-0898-6, p129-132
[6] http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1358
[8] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world