[Even more important than the decisions of the UN climate talks
are the next steps of a youth-led movement strengthened by two decades
of transformative action ]
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HOW YOUNG CLIMATE ACTIVISTS BUILT A MASS MOVEMENT TO BE RECKONED WITH
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Nick Engelfried
November 15, 2022
Waging Nonviolence
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_ Even more important than the decisions of the UN climate talks are
the next steps of a youth-led movement strengthened by two decades of
transformative action _
Sunrise Movement outside Chase Bank, by Joe in DC (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
When I became a climate organizer in college in the early 2000s, the
words “youth climate movement” referred more to something
activists hoped to bring into existence than a real-world phenomenon.
Growing numbers of young people were concerned about the climate
crisis and had begun organizing in small groups on college campuses
and in communities throughout the U.S. But as much as we talked about
building a mass movement, it was mainly just a dream at that point.
Almost 20 years later it’s impossible to deny a very real, vibrant
youth climate movement has become an important force in national
politics. With the rise of campaigns like the Fridays for Future
school strikes a few years ago, it burst into the public spotlight in
an unprecedented way. This year the United States passed its first
major piece of national climate legislation. Much work remains to be
done, but the rise of a youth-led mass movement for a livable future
has to be considered one of the most important positive developments
in 21st-century politics.
I have a unique perspective on how this movement came into being,
because for the last two and a half years I’ve been researching and
writing a book on the growth of youth climate activism in the U.S.
[[link removed]] I interviewed over 100
past and current movement leaders for this project, with a majority of
interviews occurring in 2020 soon after the largest, most
transformative climate protests in our country’s history.
“Movement Makers: How Young Activists Upended the Politics of
Climate Change [[link removed]]” was
released earlier this month.
Working on this book taught me valuable lessons about how social
movements rise and create change, which are more relevant now than
ever. This week, all eyes are on world leaders meeting in Sharm
el-Sheikh, Egypt for the latest round of international climate talks
— but whatever agreements come out of that gathering will ultimately
be less important than how activists respond. This makes now a
particularly good time to share some lessons from the last two decades
of climate organizing.
1. WELL-DESIGNED ACTIONS CAN HAVE HUGE RIPPLE EFFECTS. I began
writing “Movement Makers” after working on a series of stories
at _Waging Nonviolence_ on the climate strikes
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strands
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modern youth climate activism
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I was intrigued to discover that while Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg
famously founded the strike movement, its origins were tied to
developments in the United States — specifically a day of marches
organized by the teen-led organization Zero Hour in July 2018.
The Zero Hour marches, which included a flagship action in Washington,
D.C., represented one of the first national days of climate action
coordinated almost entirely by Generation Z. Despite heavy rain on the
day of the march, Zero Hour drew hundreds of teenagers to the National
Mall to get involved in politics — no small feat. Yet, some of the
organizers I interviewed mentioned they had hoped for even larger
crowds.
“As 16 and 17-year-olds, we wanted thousands or millions of people
to show up,” said Sohayla Eldeeb, who was Zero Hour’s global
outreach director when I spoke with her in early 2020. “Maybe that
wasn’t realistic—and then it literally rained on our parade. But
it felt powerful to go through with our march anyway.”
Zero Hour’s day of action was certainly not a failure; in fact, it
generated national media headlines. Still, compared to other mass
protests like the 2017 Women’s March, it was relatively small. A
reasonable assessment at the time might have been that the action
would help temporarily increase public attention to the climate crisis
and get some policymakers’ attention, but that the long-term effect
on national politics would be minimal. This couldn’t have been more
wrong.
Zero Hour’s leaders put forward a vision for a youth-led mass
movement around climate change that resonated with Generation Z, and
which they skillfully spread on social media. Their efforts got the
attention of Greta Thunberg and — along with other movements like
the March for Our Lives — helped inspire her to launch Fridays for
Future later that year. In 2019, Zero Hour was a key player in
organizing strike events for what became the largest global day of
climate protests in history. The takeaway: Actions with a
well-articulated, inspiring message can have ripple effects that are
hard to predict and may extend far beyond the day of protest itself.
2. ASK FOR THE WHOLE THING. In another illuminating interview I
conducted, Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence told me, “The
only credible approach to climate policy is to actually ask for the
whole thing.” We were discussing Sunrise’s 2018 sit-ins at the
offices of Nancy Pelosi and other Congressional leaders, which
catapulted the idea of a Green New Deal
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the national spotlight.
For years prior to Sunrise’s sit-ins, conventional climate movement
wisdom held that campaigning for national legislation was pretty much
pointless, with failure all but assured. Yet, Sunrise took the
position that addressing the climate crisis requires big, bold ideas
equal to the scale of the challenge. It will take “dozens of pieces
of legislation over the course of years,” Lawrence said. “We have
to completely overhaul the electricity, agriculture and transportation
systems. We’re talking about reinventing society.”
Even with climate change-denying Republicans controlling the Senate
and presidency, Sunrise pushed climate forward on the political agenda
to the point where talks about federal legislation began soon after
President Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress took office last
year. This eventually led to the passage of far-reaching climate
legislation in the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA is far from
perfect, but represents the first major climate law in U.S. history.
This victory might never have happened had groups like Sunrise not
changed the terms of political debate about climate.
3. MOVEMENTS SUCCEED BY BUILDING ON ONE ANOTHER. While writing about
the climate strikes, Sunrise Movement, and other recent climate
campaigns, I noticed a problem with how media narratives frequently
talked about the movement. Too often, the surge in youth activism was
portrayed as a new phenomenon that seemingly arose from nowhere. When
older climate groups came up in news articles, the focus tended to be
on how young organizers were abandoning them. For example, an
otherwise insightful early _New Republic_ story
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Sunrise described its founders as “refugees from more mainstream
climate organizations,” implying a process by which activists flee
old, “unsuccessful” movements and join or start new
“successful” ones.
In reality, I am convinced the wave of youth climate activism from the
last few years would never have been as successful had it not been
preceded by an older generation of climate organizations. These groups
— including 350.org, Energy Action Coalition (now Power Shift
Network) and the Sierra Student Coalition — sometimes made serious
mistakes, and activists of Generation Z have rightly tried to learn
from where they went wrong. But without them, the new generation of
climate organizations could not have spread so fast and effectively.
Existing organizations like the Pacific Northwest-based Cascade
Climate Network helped Sunrise Movement take root in places far from
the East Coast population centers where it had its origins. And when
Zero Hour needed a fiscal sponsor to help process tax-deductible
donations for its day of marches, it found one in Power Shift Network.
Rather than a succession of groups that arise, succeed or fail, and
replace one another, successful social movements are communities of
intertwined organizations engaged in learning from each other,
improving on old practices, and fostering the growth of new members.
It’s a messy process, and occasionally groups compete for space or
interact in other nonproductive ways. But Generation Z skillfully
built on the work of activists who came before them. Similarly, the
next wave of climate organizing will almost certainly learn from and
be inspired by groups now at the movement’s vanguard.
4. CENTER JUSTICE. Probably the single biggest mistake made by
mainstream organizations that dominated the national youth climate
scene when I joined the movement was a failure to prioritize diversity
and justice. “There was a sense from some groups that we needed to
cut carbon emissions before anything else, and a reluctance to look at
issues of justice or race,” said Arab American activist Shadia Fayne
Wood, one of a relatively few organizers of color who participated in
early Energy Action Coalition, or EAC, meetings.
This reluctance alienated the very people who are most impacted by
fossil fuel extraction and disrupted weather patterns. It was an
untenable situation, and in 2015 EAC hired Lydia Avila, its first
executive director of color, who charted a new path forward. Avila
shepherded EAC — which originally served as a steering committee for
a large coalition of climate groups—through a transition to become
the more decentralized, justice-focused Power Shift Network. According
to PSN’s current executive director, Dany Sigwalt, 60 percent of
participants at the organization’s 2020 annual meeting for member
organizations were young people of color.
Despite real progress in some cases, the fight for an inclusive
climate movement has not been a linear march forward. To the contrary:
dynamics Wood observed in the movement’s early days continue to play
out in many climate groups today, at both the national and local
levels. History shows the solution is to actively center the needs of
frontline communities of color and prioritize anti-oppression work
within the movement itself. Today, groups like PSN are set up to help
other organizations make this transition, and activists should take
advantage of this resource.
5. THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE FOR DIRECT ACTION. Almost every major
successful social movement has used a spectrum of tactics — from
lobbying to nonviolent direct action. Yet, for years the youth climate
movement and U.S. climate groups more broadly were reluctant to
embrace disruptive protest on a large scale.
“The movement’s strategy was one of appeasement, appealing to
people in power and trying to convince them we could have a world
that’s cleaner and greener but leaves existing social structures in
place,” said Tim DeChristopher, who was arrested for derailing an
oil and gas auction as a University of Utah student in 2008. “It
wasn’t working. Successful movements have always had a big, radical
vision that threatens the top of the power structure.”
Nonviolently breaking the law to interfere with fossil fuel extraction
or combustion brings home the moral urgency of the climate crisis
while causing disruption to systems that make it possible to destroy
the planet for profit. DeChristopher took this kind of action when he
walked into a Bureau of Land Management auction and outbid every oil
company in the room, “winning” rights to $1.7 million worth of
land he couldn’t pay for. His actions violated the federal Oil and
Gas Leasing Reform Act, and he was sentenced to two years in prison
after bringing his case to trial.
Today, direct action is much more widespread in the climate movement
— from Sunrise’s Capitol Hill sit-ins, to divestment campaigns
that disrupt university board of trustee meetings. But the road to a
bolder movement willing to take such risks wasn’t easy. The failure
of a key U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 made the radical
message of people like DeChristopher begin to resonate with more
activists. And over a decade later, there’s still plenty of room for
experimentation when it comes to strategically applying direct action
to an intransigent political landscape.
6. CONFRONT THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY. During the soul-searching
period after the collapse of the Copenhagen talks, youth-led climate
groups began realizing they had underestimated the fossil fuel
industry’s political power. If national climate legislation were
ever to cross the finish line in the U.S., the movement needed to
weaken the control coal, oil and gas companies exerted over political
institutions. Frontline communities had been challenging these
industries for decades, but one of the first fossil fuel projects the
national youth climate movement as a whole took on was the Canadian
tar sands and its network of associated oil pipelines.
The anti-Keystone XL pipeline struggle — the most iconic tar sands
campaign — involved thousands of people and included national groups
like 350.org as well as Indigenous communities in the pipeline’s
path. In 2013, a series of Indigenous-led trainings called Moccasins
on the Ground taught direct action skills to pipeline fighters and
allies. “It was great seeing Indigenous people empowering Indigenous
people,” said Joseph White Eyes, a young organizer from Cheyenne
River Sioux territory along Keystone XL’s proposed path. “There
was no outside white influence telling us what to do. It was just us,
creating our own plan to stop the pipeline.”
Had Keystone XL broken ground in a major way, it likely would have
faced one of the largest direct action resistance campaigns in climate
movement history, similar in scale to the 2016 protests against the
Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. As it turned out,
smaller-scale direct action combined with more conventional tactics
were enough to stop Keystone XL — and the pipeline’s rejection by
two Democratic presidents showed how the fossil fuel industry’s
fortunes had fallen. Meanwhile, organizing against Keystone XL helped
catalyze a national movement made up of people fighting fossil fuel
infrastructure in their communities.
By the late 2010s, the national youth climate movement had grown to
the point where a once seemingly invincible fossil fuel industry was
losing its grip on control of events in Washington, D.C. The stage was
set to make actual progress on proactive climate legislation that
encouraged a mass shift to renewables — if the movement could
mobilize supporters in large enough numbers.
7. MASS STREET MOBILIZATIONS WORK. The huge climate strikes of a few
years ago subsided in 2020, largely due to COVID restrictions on large
gatherings. Still, the memory of these mobilizations remained fresh
enough in the public consciousness to influence events as Congress
debated climate policy in 2021 and 2022, and climate remained a
priority for leaders in Congress in a way that had never happened
before. If the very real concessions to polluters in the Inflation
Reduction Act are a reminder that the fossil fuel industry is still
powerful, the fact that far-reaching climate legislation passed at all
is a testament to how youth activists have reshaped political
discourse in the last few years.
Compare this and last year’s political events with 2009-2010, the
last time federal lawmakers debated major climate legislation. Despite
holding much larger majorities in Congress, Democratic leaders failed
to get a climate bill over the finish line, largely because of
opposition from senators in their own caucus who represented fossil
fuel-dependent states. In contrast, this year every Senate Democrat
eventually supported climate legislation, even if begrudgingly and in
a watered-down form. This almost certainly would not have happened
without years of organizing that left the fossil fuel industry
weakened and climate activists in a stronger position than ever
before.
It took nearly two decades to build a youth climate movement powerful
enough to pass a federal climate bill. However, despite the ups and
downs, young activists never stopped organizing. “Movements have
arcs,” said Will Bates of 350.org. “They have highs and lows.
They’re going to have perceived failures and need to build something
new from there. At those moments you don’t stop, you double down.”
Today the movement faces new challenges, from the possibility of new
COVID waves to a more hostile U.S. House of Representatives. However,
the pieces are in place for it to go on building power and experience
future resurgences. That’s essential — because there is still
plenty of work for climate activists to do.
THE MOVEMENT OF THE FUTURE
Of course, passage of the IRA does not mean the youth climate
movement’s work is over. Rather, now is the time to build on recent
successes and continue pushing for the kind of transformative change
Sunrise’s Lawrence spoke of. However, going forward, U.S. climate
activists’ work will look more like that of their European
colleagues, who are trying to convince leaders to follow through and
build on existing climate commitments rather than commit to doing
something in the first place. By taking to heart lessons from the
past, we can ensure the climate movement has a vibrant, powerful
future. That is why I decided to write “Movement Makers.”
The last few years of researching and writing about the youth climate
movement have left me more inspired than ever by a phenomenon that
really has upended politics as usual. The insights and quotes in this
piece represent just a tiny sampling of the wisdom shared with me by
activist leaders while I worked on the book, which is designed to
serve as a valuable resource for today’s organizers. However, my
hope is not that activists will simply try to replicate actions and
campaigns from the past — but that lessons like those summarized
above help inform new approaches to organizing that may be different
from anything seen so far.
What’s clear is that, armed with wisdom from the past and a
willingness to experiment that has long been a hallmark of youth
climate activism, the movement of the future has potential to further
re-shape politics in ways most of us can’t even imagine.
_Nick Engelfried
[[link removed]] is an
environmental writer, educator, and activist living in the Pacific
Northwest. He is the author of Movement Makers: How Young Activists
Upended the Politics of Climate Change._
_Waging Nonviolence is a nonprofit media organization dedicated to
providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements
around the world. With a commitment to accuracy, transparency and
editorial independence, we examine today’s most crucial issues by
shining a light on those who are organizing for just and peaceful
solutions._
* Sunrise Movement
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* Climate Activists
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* Climate Change
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* Green New Deal
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