Category: Activism

Categories
Activism United States of America

October 11, 2016 – Five activists do a shutdown on a tar sands pipeline

ctober 11, 2016 – Five activists do a shutdown on a tar sands pipeline

Eight years ago, on this day, October 11th, 2016,

http://www.shutitdown.today/action_video_recap

7 minute video

On October 11, 2016, five brave climate activists, determined to act commensurately with the truth of unfolding climate cataclysm, closed safety valves on the 5 pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil into the United States. This is their story.

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2016/10/11/avert-climate-catastrophe-activists-shut-down-5-pipelines-bringing-tar-sands-oil

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 404ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was Canadian and US companies were extracting huge amounts of oil from tar sands; the filthiest kind of oil you can imagine. The getting of it is especially destructive. So what do we do? We try to take nonviolent direct action and throw ourselves on the mercy of the courts. But the beast, the machine, the Juggernaut continues and the emissions climb.

What do we learn that there’s a juggernaut, and it’s hungry.

What happened next? From Wikipedia

All five participants planned to use the necessity defence to draw attention to their cause and justify their actions,[6] though three were not permitted to do so.[7] The judge presiding over the Johnston & Klapstein trial, Robert Tiffany, initially ruled that they could mount the necessity defense.[8] However, he then reversed his decision, prohibiting expert testimony that would establish the argument for necessity,[9] before dismissing the case before the defendants could present its necessity defense.[10] Klapstein said she was happy the charges were dismissed, but “at the same time, we were indeed disappointed not to be able to present this to the jury. We were hoping to educate the jury and the classroom of greater public opinion on the dire issues of climate change”.[9] Foster, Higgins, and Ward were prohibited by the judges overseeing their cases from mounting the necessity defense.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Turners

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

References

https://www.streetroots.org/news/2016/12/01/how-5-activists-stopped-flow-alberta-tar-sands-oil-us

Also on this day: 

October 11, 1990 – Australian Federal Government makes climate promise, with fingers crossed

October 11, 2006 – “Climate Institute” begins tour of rural Victoria

Categories
Activism

Talofa. Manuia te aso fānau! 

I hope your 18th birthday is a day of happiness for you (1)  with your family, friends and wider community.

Birthdays are celebrations, time for reflection and thinking about the future. There was a time when that was mostly in the context of a person’s own circumstances, and that of their family.  Over the last generation – since before you were born – birthdays (and of course every day) happen with the dreadful knowledge of climate change.

I am not going to explain to someone living in the South Pacific what that means.  

For the people where I live, sea level rise is an abstract thing. They think – if they think of it at all – as lines on a graph. For people where I live, storms that flatten towns and islands are something they see in Hollywood disaster movies or, lately, on television news programs.

Nor  am I not going to whitesplain colonialism, extractivism or the ways your life is hemmed in by rich people and their corporations who want to get richer.  


I am not going to lecture you about white people who claim to have your best interests at heart, Through The Power Of The Free Markets or under some other banners.  You know all about these types of people, their words and the value of those words from your own life, from the hard-won wisdom of your parents and your elders.

All I have got for you is the following.

The day you were born, Monday October 9th, 2006, Australian charities and scientists were trying to get Australian politicians to give a damn about the problems climate change was already causing for your parents, and the ever-greater threat it would pose to you as you grew from child to adult.  

They released a report called “Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change.”

Australian politicians either ignored this report, or used it as a step up for their own hollow ambition.

If I could see you, I suspect I would see a raised eyebrow and a quiet smile.  “You expect surprise? Shock?”

When I was turning 18, the newspapers and television (this was before the Internet, long before social media) were full of “The Greenhouse Effect,” as we called climate change back then.  


So my first advice’ – let no-one tell you that somehow they didn’t know.

If you will allow a second, final piece of advice. It is natural for a young person on the cusp of adulthood to be deeply frustrated with the world they have inherited, that those older have not sorted out the big problems.  On climate, please  do not blame your parents. Or your grandparents.  The people of the South Pacific have been raising their voices for decades, pleading with the rich countries to act, explaining that the peril facing the South Pacific would grow and grow, and devour everything.

That they were basically ignored is not the fault of the speakers, but those too greedy, arrogant and stupid to listen.  The problem is not to be found in Kiribati, or Tuvalu or anywhere near you.  The problem is in New York, Manchester, Canberra, Adelaide, Auckland, Berlin.  And elsewhere. But I am not here, in this letter, for geopolitics. 

For my part, I will continue my inadequate efforts. I will try to be an ally.  I will fail repeatedly, of course.  But people like me – with privilege, education, water coming out of my tap and food in my belly – have far more to do than we have been doing, if we want to be able to look you – and any children you have – in the eye.

Finally, I hope, despite the knowledge of what is coming (some of it is already here, but so much more is to come), that your celebrations are full of joy. And at some point, of course, thanks to the November 2023 agreement, welcome to Australia.

Footnote

  1. By the way, you are both a tired rhetorical device, but at the same time, you are  flesh and blood; dozens and dozens of real human beings, with names, hopes, families, endangered homes, becoming an “adult” (or turning 18 – perhaps that does not have the same cultural or legal weight where you live) across the South Pacific.
Categories
Activism Unsolicited advice

How do we honour the soup-throwers?

“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”

Anon

How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?

That’s it. That’s the blog.

This is mostly bullet points, scattered “rhetoric” (doggerel)  and my usual “robustness” (1), because, for reasons (2) I am continuing to not deliver (but still gestate) that promised poetic palaver about what the JSO action “means”.  You can see my 11 theses (sank without trace  more on that below) here.

How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?

We will come back to the How. Let’s skip for now to we. Who is “we”?  Probably you. It’s people who “get” climate change (not as many as there should be, 35 years into the public phase of the crisis).  Even if you think the soup throwers were worse than useless (and I sympathise with that view!), please read on, because by honour I do not mean celebrate.

Principally I am aiming these challenges (3) at people who want to see a better (i.e. less “being killed at ever-higher velocity and ferocity”) world.

“We” is those who try to take action, spread the word about the overlapping crises, including climate, and who think that the soup-throwers are at worst misguided or at best brave, clear Examples To Us All. If you are on that spectrum, then great (4). 

Honour?  

I do not mean celebrate.

I do. NOT. mean. Celebrate. 

I do not mean “turn into plaster saints and martyrs.”  (though that might be part of how we support them).  

I mean, how do we take what they did seriously?  Not the action, necessarily, but the willingness to face consequences.

And what do I mean by “soup-throwers”?

Synecdoche. There’s these non-violent symbolic actions (NVSA) and then there’s also the NVDA undertaken by people blocking oil refineries etc. And getting into arms factories.  And let’s remember that in many many parts of the world environmental activists are lucky if they end up in jail.  A more permanent punishment (bullet in the neck, body in a ditch, or … disappeared) is common and getting commoner.

So.  Pause a second.  You’ve read this far.  Have you asked yourself that question before now?   If yes, think on your answer. Happy? If not, go on. Jot something else down.

Never thought about it before? Jot something down.

I do not care about my answers (some are below, and more will follow but sfw).  You should not care about my answers (sfw, right?). 

Please care about YOUR answers. And about how you arrive at them. In discussion with who? And what you then DO about those answers.  If you take anything from the rest of this rant (and it is a rant), that is it. 

YOUR answers to that question – answers you do not have to arrive at on your own, alone in a box right now – are what matters. Well, to be precise, the actions you take after you come to provisional answers  are what matters.

If you think you have no answers and will never have any and therefore can stop reading. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GAIA I IMPLORE YOU TO RESIST THAT UNDERSTANDABLE IMPULSE, THAT REACHING FOR THE COMFORT OF OBLIVION.  

Because

  1. You DO have answers. You are just scared of them and their implications
  2. Even before you have answers that satisfy you (and they may never satisfy you. Mine never have and I am an old fucker), you can help other people find their answers.  That, already, is a contribution.

Still here? Well, okay, so I lied. There are four questions.  I lie a lot about this sort of stuff. Bait and switch..  It doesn’t matter

How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?

  1. As individuals? Here, now, next week.
  2. As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?
  3. As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?
  4. How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?

I am going to set out in the rest of this rant (and it is  still a rant) what MY answer the first question is, sorta. And have a light pass at the fourth, and beg your help.

I am going to make a commitment (it won’t last, but then again, maybe it will).  That’s gonna be called MAB – Marc’s Andon Board. No, don’t click on the link. It’s repeated below.

I am going to ask you to begin to answer these four questions, and to encourage other people to answer those questions.  Especially any prominent people you know, people who spend their time telling everyone about how fucked the world is and how awful the State-Corporate response to climate change has been, is being, but who rarely if ever ponder our 35 years of failure to force the State-Corporate beast to behave itself.

How do we honour the soup throwers as individuals?

The standard answer is let’s “Redouble our efforts”  As per Boxer in Animal Farm, whenever confronted with failure, his answer was always  – “I will work harder.

Yes, but if we’re doing the wrong things (and sometimes we are), doing them twice as much and twice as fast isn’t the win you think it is.

The promise feels good (until you don’t keep it, but hey, nobody’s holding your feet to the fire), but the reality after, not so much?

If we really want to honour the soup-throwers, we have to think hard about failure. Which is hard.

To quote Hudson’s  7th thesis on Futility

  1. The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz).  Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.

Because until we admit that the soup-throwing is a sign of desperation, a sign of the lack of a huge mass movement that refuses to be cowed, bought off, confused, then we are stuck. 

And all the way back in 2018, that was the promise, wasn’t it? Fill the jails, force the government to declare a climate emergency, force the creation of citizen assemblies that would short-circuit the power of the vested interests/institutional inertia.  The Truth, told, would set us free. Yeah, nah.

But it’s too easy to blame the 2018 “crop” of activists. This isn’t about “blame” (morality tales and other ourobososes).  This is about systems (more on that another post) and about courage.

Courage on its own is not enough 

The soup throwers, especially the post-sentencing-of-the-first-batch-batch have enormous courage. Nobody can dispute it.

But courage is not enough.

The sound of a splat of soup versus thick glass, is the same sound as the noise of tactics without strategy. Thatt’s the noise before defeat.  Well, alongside defeat

But while we are on courage, this.  The soupthrowers have it.  They are willing to face severe consequences: physical, financial, mental. Deprivation of liberty for prolonged periods.


Surely “we” should honour THEIR courage by matching it with some of the other forms of courage out there that don’t get talked about.  Courage to face our pasts. Courage to face confronting emotions. Courage to face beliefs we have about ourselves, our tribes and our societies that maybe were never true, or maybe are no longer true: cognitive courage.

So, how do we honour them?
We honour them by being brave enough to have courage.

And courageous enough to be honest enough to know that our courage, on our own, is dreadfully and pitifully finite.  

We honour them by accepting, both emotionally and intellectually, that without networks of support – networks of friends, families, neighbours, members of congregations, groups, friends we’ve had on the Internet for years whose voices we may never  even have heard – we will fail. The courage will be boiled away by the firestorms of daily horror.

Without networks that we build, extend, nurture, we will be left in not just the same state we were before we decided to try to honour the soupthrowers, but WORSE, because we will have known what we needed to do, what we promised ourselves to do, and yet failed to do it.

So.  Here is the unsolicited advice (come on, you always knew it was going to come).

Have a conversation with two or three different people about what honouring the soup throwers looks like FOR YOU.  Is it to engage in local activism? To re-engage? To learn a new skill? To challenge, with courage and commitment, something that is not going well in a campaigning group you are in.  Or something else.

  • Start with your dilemma, your goal,  and how you really want their help, their en-courage-ment.  
  • If you can be concrete, specific, then maybe that. If not, trust they will listen (but be ready, of course, if they don’t)
  • Be open to their nos, to their doubts. 
  • Start where you are, with something small. A commitment that you will do x or y or z, and that to do that you need their support (mentorship, advice, feedback. Whatever).

And here’s the second plea.  We have to be public about this.  We have to try to start a conversation about “how do we honour the soupthrowers?”

It’s a lousy title, because it centres a divisive (and frankly not very clever) tactic. Soupthrowing gets people’s backs up.  I’ve been using it so far as a place-holder. If I were making a Hashtag of it all I wouldn’t seriously consider any o fthese

#BlessedAreTheSoupThrowers [As per Life of Brian “It refers to any manufacturer of vegan products” ]

#SupportYourLocalSoupThrower  (James Garner vibe)

#SoupThrowersOfTheWorldUnite

Canning the whole “soup-thrower” thing I tried this

#ItsNotTooLateToDieMoreClassily

#LetsFaceExtinctionWithHonour

#BetterClimateAction

#DownWithTheSmugosphere

Perhaps we just need

#CollectiveCourage 

Any other suggestions?

Here’s my plea, in specifics.

Please try to get OTHER people, especially high profile people doing this. Here’s a draft letter. Modify as you see fit.

Dear X,
I like and respect your work. I’ve read your books/Twitter threads. I’ve watched your documentaries/TikToks. 

I know you know we’re in deep shit.

I am writing to bring to your attention a proposal from Marc Hudson, a UK-based activist of dubious morals and pleasantness. 

He is trying to get a conversation going about “how do we  really honour and support the soup throwers” [the activists who threw the soup at the Van Gogh sunflowers painitng (and in fact all people struggling for freedom, dignity, sanity and survival everywhere, often under conditions far far more dangerous [deadly] than them.]

He doesn’t mean a solidarity campaign for the release of those people (though of course that’s part of the support.

He is trying to get people answering four questions.  I think the questions are okay, and I am posting them here.  Then again maybe you have other questions).

How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?

1, As individuals? Here, now, next week.

2, As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?

3, As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?

4, How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?

He’s suggesting the hashtag #CollectiveCourage

I am going to have a go at having conversations with people whose opinion I trust. But I only have a very small platform. It would be great if YOU would try to get wider conversations going.

Yours in parasocial bliss,

[insert name here]

Send this to folks? See if anyone does anything.

Okay, so I know all this is  hubristic (not for the first time). I know it won’t “work.”  But to allow that knowledge to paralyse me is to dishonour people who are facing (or indeed doing) serious time. Not to mention those corpses in the ditches and those bodies under the bombs.

Finally

What happens if we don’t do this?

We continue to fail.  James Baldwin said “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  Well, if we don’t face past failure, and the likelihood that any courage we try to muster will vanish instantly, we will continue to fail.

We are probably going to fail anyway. It is probably too late to salvage anything from the ruins.  We’ve been warned for over 50 years about trouble ahead at a planetary level. Some of us believed, acted, but not enough of us, not enough, not with enough power.  And here we are.

Why won’t we do this?

Because it’s scary. It involves us getting out of our normal roles, and talking about things we don’t feel qualified to talk about.  It’s safe to stay talking about the science we were trained in, or the policy systems we know intimately. 

Other people will tell us they are unhappy, threatened. They will tell us we are risking ridicule, harming our reputations.

We will worry that we have nothing to say. We will wonder if it’s because we are somehow “not smart enough”, rather merely not brave enough. And for those of us who pride ourselves on our “intelligence”, that is soul-threatening. 

It involves us failing at things that really matter.

How won’t we do this?

This is easy .Three ways

  1.  Ignore the call – click through, bookmark, but never come back.
  1. Smear the call(er).  “What a fuckwit. What a narcissist, telling people what they should be discussing, just to cope with his irrelevance, his unwillingness to do high-risk activism. Loser.”

“What a waste of time. He wants a pity party, he wants to see us all tearing each other down. It’s probably some sort of psyop from 77th Brigade.”

3,  Do it half-assed (for reasons; a)  we don’t really believe in it  but feel obliged to pretend we do to look brave/responsible. . b) We believe in it but are threatened by it and are going to allow our fears and uncertainties to run the show

How will we WILL do it

This is what I will do.

I will put up my Andon Board post tonight. See here.
Once I put an Andon Board up itself,  I will write more over the coming days about these other questions.

I will send this post and a personal cover letter to people I know, people I respect, people I haven’t spoken to for years, people I fell out with, people I didn’t.

Ultimately, personal example doesn’t actually get anything very far.  George Monbiot tried to get public figures to talk honestly about their money and where it came from. People applauded him and did not follow his lead.

If we are going to honour the soupthrowers courage – have courage, build courage, replenish courage, it will be  a collective endevaour. 

(as per collective hope (see my long response to the essay by Tim Winton)

Collective does not mean national or nationalised, top-down or Leninist. It can’t work like that. It means granular, local, hybrid, support.

It won’t happen. I am not a child.


It must happen.

Over to you.

Footnotes

  1. A bit of bracing bluntness, parrhesia. It’s easier like that.
  2. Medical, mostly. Resolving? Thank god for the NHS and for all people doing their best within it.
  3. barbs, snarks, snarbs, barks and bites and bile
  4. come be on my spectrum
Categories
Activism Australia Carbon Pricing Uncategorized

October 2, 1994 – twenty years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within (Phillip Toyne becomes civil servant)

Thirty years ago, on this day, October 2nd, 1994, as the battle for a carbon tax heats up…

THE FRIENDS and enemies of Phillip Toyne, acquired during years of very public struggle over Aboriginal land rights and the environment, were in a stunned state at the ALP’s national conference in Hobart this week.

The news that one of the hardest nosed and most controversial among Australian activists had joined, of all things, the Commonwealth’s environment bureaucracy (at deputy secretary, level, no less), delighted and appalled in equal measure.. …..

Brough, J. 1994. What kind of pudding will Toyne make? Canberra Times, 2 October, p.9.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Phillip Toyne had been a thorn in the side of the Hawke government. He, as the chair of the Australian Conservation Foundation, had also done really useful work on Aboriginal land rights. And now he was tempted to try to change the system from within by becoming a senior bureaucrat for John Faulkner, the Federal Environment Minister, who was publicly toying with the idea of introducing a carbon tax. 

What we learn is that people who try to change the system from within get sentenced to 20 months or years of boredom. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. 

What happened next. Toyne was unsuccessful. I don’t know when he quit, but it was pretty clear after February 10 1995, that no meaningful action was going to happen on climate change in Australia, at least not at the federal level. Toyne died in 2015. Having fought the good fight. 

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs

Also on this day: 

 October 2, 1927/64 – Svante Arrhenius and Guy Callendar die.

October 2, 1942 – Spaceflight!!

October 2, 2014 – Low emission technologies on their way, says Minerals Council of Australia

Categories
Academia Activism Unsolicited advice

11 theses on our impasse(s). With inkblots and memes.

There’s a longer poetic piece I want to write, that properly honours the courage of the Just Stop Oil soup-throwers (among others), while ALSO lamenting the state of the climate “movement” for its lack of capacity, its lack of strategy, its substitution of moral calls and acts for any form of politics.

I am busy, unwell, bewildered, groggy on steroids. This is what you get instead.  I hope to come back to it.

Short version, pretty much laid out as some Theses. Let’s say 11 of the blighters, to pick a number at random

  1.  As a species we are in extremely deep trouble, though most of us seem not to know it.  The juggernaut we created is crashing through various “planetary boundaries”. We’re running every red light.    

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

  1. Those of us who do know it are stuck in various “praxis traps” and cognitive traps of our own making.  We write excellent essays about our lassitude, our fatigue, and/or we throw paint at works of art in the hope of shocking “The Powers That Be” (state? Civil society?) into action – a version of what I have called elsewhere the “Scraped Knee” theory of activism.
Cartoon – The Scraped Knee Theory of Climate Activism
  1. When the soup-throwing (etc) happens, it acts as a kind of Rorschach test (the inkblots where you see what you want/need to see.”Immature alarmist narcissists blocking ambulances!”  “Brave truth-tellers”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

  1. Others use the events to have side-battles about the evils/idiocy of the State/Capitalism and its ecocidal trajectory. Arguing tossers arguing the toss. Everyone is confirmed in their own righteousness.
  1. These events act not just as inkblot tests, but also “affordances” – they allow and disallow certain responses. The responses are along established, comforting lines. They DISALLOW/render harder OTHER responses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

  1. The key thing they prevent (to most everyone’s relief) is a discussion of the failure of Western societies to take ecological limits seriously. 35 (well, 50) years of warnings, ignored. Fantasies of market or technological salvation instead. Failure.
  1. The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz).  Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.
  1. The impossible failure humiliates us. We can’t face it, so we pick villains (and villains DO exist). This politician. That oil company. That craven professor. That astroturf group.  ANYONE but OUR tribe. Hooray for our side. We are pure. We are good. We are the victim.
  1. We are trapped tight in webs of complicity, futility, hate, anger, despair, self-loathing, narcissism (much of this encouraged, of course, by the machine, the juggernaut).

10 Conversations abt what to do differently –  to have a vibrant rigorous, vigorous “civil society” response – would require us to already HAVE a vibrant rigorous vigorous civil society. If we had had that over the last 35 years (plus), we would possibly not be in such a god awful mess.

11. Final thesis – Activists have always tried to interpret and  “win” (status, policy footholds, social changes) within the rules of the game. The point is to change it.

How? Who? Which herds of cats get belled by which mice doing what differently? FIIK.

See also – My response to Tim Winton’s really useful essay

Categories
Activism United States of America

October 1, 1964 – The Free Speech Movement kicks off in Berkeley

Sixty years ago, on this day, October 1st, 1964, the Free Speech Movement is launched on the campus of University of California, Berkeley.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2024 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the black civil rights movement was underway. The upsurge had been going on, especially since sort of ‘57, didn’t pause: the sit ins and SNCC. And white people had gone (in relatively small numbers) to the Deep South, to help with voter registration, and education, and so forth. And then these people had come back and wanted to continue campaigning on university campuses. And those in control of university campuses, especially University of California Berkeley, weren’t having any of it. And this confronted the activists with a dilemma. They were battle-hardened. They had been arrested and brutalised in the South. So what campus cops and so forth could dish out was not as big a deal as it had been. They’ve also been battle-hardened by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and its roadshow, which by the way, had not come to California since 1960 because they’d been basically beaten out of town with their tail between their legs. But I’m digressing.

What we learn is that the histories and I think they’re right, suggest that the Free Speech Movement on Berkeley campus is that kind of bridge incident and bridge organisation between the black civil rights movement and what would come next. Of course, people involved didn’t know what would come next, but it would be anti-war, feminism, gay rights. And yes, also the environment, not to mention Indian rights, Puerto Rican rights, etc. And these bridge moments, you don’t know that you’re in them, probably.

What happened next, Mario Savio gave his “throw your body on the gears of the machine” speech. 

The issue became not just free speech on campus, and black civil rights, but also the war in Vietnam, which in a few months would pick up serious momentum with Operation Rolling Thunder. 

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

October 1, 1957 – US Oil company ponders carbon dioxide build-up…

October 1, 1997 – Global greens gather in Melbourne, diss Australian #climate policy

Categories
Activism

Winton, Fanon and what is to be done: On climate, capture, Cesaire…

The Australian author Tim Winton has written an essential, bound-to-be-controversial essay (1) about climate change and why the kids are so upset.  And why all of us are, except we can’t really name it or see it.  Winton borrows some language and ideas to help us see the world differently. It’s bold, and uses an analogy – with colonialism – that might get him in a lot of trouble (we shall see).

In this essay (blog post, article – someone please PAY ME to think) I want to explain what Winton says, why it matters, where he might be wrong or misconstrued, why that matters, what is missing from his essay (not much – it’s really good. But one crucial piece…). Finally, crucially, I try to suggest what “we” are supposed to do differently now.

I can’t match Winton’s eloquence, so I won’t even try. (2) What follows may come across as bland, boring, hectoring, irritating. It is probably all of these things and more.  But this isn’t an aesthetic argument he is making, nor me. It’s an existential one.  Please attack the content not the form.

What Winton says

You should read it. It’s not long, but it may take you a while.  The title is clickbait (presumably not chosen by Winton – headlines rarely are) 

“Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread”

Calling people kapos tends to get their backs up (even if – especially if – they are, in fact, kapos) and lead to tedious Godwin’s Law invocations etc etc.  Get past that.

In a nutshell Winton says 

  • There are tedious attacks on young people for being “out of sorts”
  • It’s not an “it was ever thus” situation – the kids ARE NOT alright (mood, despair)
  • They are out of sorts because they know their parents and grandparents have utterly fucked the planet and that all that is left to an impossible hellscape that makes Mad Max look like the Alps in Sound of Music before the Nazis rock up  (I paraphrase, but not by much)
  • To understand all this, says Winton – why everyone feels gutpunched, sucker-punched and helpless, we could turn to the experience of colonised people, for example in Algeria (North Africa) in the mid-20th century.  Winton then uses a French-Algerian thinker, psychiatrist and resistance figure called Frantz Fanon, who wrote a famous book called “The Wretched of the Earth” and was a crucial figure in helping colonised people figure out what was being done not just to their bodies, but their heads 
  • There’s a lot of work to be done.  Hoping for technomiracles or kvetching about Labor politicians being no better (worse, in fact) than the Liberals won’t help anyone or anything.
  • Winton then closes out with some suggestions, but since I am going to expand on them, “problematise” (4) them etc, I will save that for later.

Why it matters

Winton is onto something (a lot, imo).  The “debates” about climate change – and who is supposed to do what – are sterile, repetitive and have allowed us to DO LESS THAN NOTHING FOR THIRTY SIX YEARS. We were warned, very very clearly, by scientists. From 1988 we’ve been allowing politicians and business (and civil society figures) to blow smoke up our asses. It was easier than taking actual action, and we liked the ticklish sensation, I guess.

Other people (not white, not male, not Western) have been pointing out the horrific colonial nature of climate inaction (who is causing the problem is not who has been on the pointy end) and the implications of the “solutions” being proposed (white comfort continues, black death escalates) for all that time, louder and louder.

What Winton is doing is actually using good tools developed by people of colour to analyse (to an extent, to an extent) our impasse.  It matters. 

“Where Winton might be wrong,” or at least, how he will probably be misconstrued, attacked.

Winton is sticking his shaggy head above the parapet (not for the first time. The man has a track record). He won’t just be shot at from one direction. 

If he’s not ignored, he will be attacked from the “right” (Australians can fill in a long roll-call of mouths–if-not-actual-brains-for-hire media commentators here) for being a woke snowflake fruitloop Luddite hysterical alarmist who wants us living in caves gnawing on bones of our neighbours [continues in this vein for several paragraphs at least] who is making excuses for slacker kids “we’ve always had it tough. Interest rates were 17% thanks to Paul Keating” etc etc

More significantly, I think he may be attacked from the position of some people of colour and their allies. (5)  To paraphrase, something like this – 

“FFS. Another white guy who is trying to colonise “decolonisation.” Another white guy who can’t even just keep his hands off other people’s ideas about other people’s struggles/oppression/identity.  White People ALWAYS gotta play the victim card, even when they are the ones with the goddam boot on everyone else’s neck, even when they are the overseer of the Plantation(ocene), the whips, the slave ships. They will not be happy until they have eaten and destroyed everything, forever.”

This is a grotesque caricature of a solid argument that could be made against Winton’s use of Fanon. I am not saying anyone will make it. I am putting it up as the polar opposite of the right attack.  The actual responses (such as they are) to Winton will probably have more hand-wringing. Sorry “nuance”.  (but also, Fuck Nuance).

Why that matters if Winton is misheard, smeared

It’s an important thing Winton is grappling with – the fog, the miasma, the sense of futility and helplessness that most of the people reading his article and mine live in.  Most of the time this fog is personalised and then therapised out of its political importance.  Winton is, in my opinion, really on to something here.  

“We” (people of good faith actually wanting to advance both action and strategy) can’t afford for voices and messages like this to be defeated. It deadens thought, and makes future efforts at drawing analogies, expanding the floor of the mental cage more difficult.


What I think is missing from what Winton is saying.

Here’s where I think Winton missed a trick, and could have forestalled the (as-yet-hypothetical) attack. 

The way to do it is… drum roll please… to deploy the insights of ANOTHER black French intellectual, Aime Cesaire.  To quote Wikipedia

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (/ɛmeɪ seɪˈzɛər/; French: [ɛme fɛʁnɑ̃ david sezɛʁ]; 26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician.[2] He was “one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature”[3] and coined the word négritude in French.[4] He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He was also the Mayor of Fort au France for 56 years, from 1945 – 2001.

The key insight that Winton could have added is that what is done in the colonies, to the colonised ends up ALSO being done to the colonisers back home in the “metropole”.

Techniques of surveillance and repression are tested out among people who can’t resist as easily. They are honed, perfected and… then used on domestic populations.

It’s the same for the psycho-sociological impacts of colonisation. You start brutalising others, well, you’re stepping on rakes like Sideshow Bob.

That’s it. That’s my “insight” (well, my theft of Cesaire’s). That’s all that Winton missed. Perhaps he already was way across it and the Guardian sub blue-pencilled it for reasons of space/tidiness. Tim, if you’re reading, is that what happened?

What is to be done? (by who, when)

So, as mentioned earlier, Winton had some specific suggestions. I’m going to mention those, and then close out with two of my own exhortations. 

Here (spoilers) are some of the last lines of Winton’s jeremiad in italics.  My comments in [square caps]

So, while we continue to scoff at each other’s generational follies and insecurities, we remain harmless colonial subjects, not potent, patriotic actors. Bitching about snowflakes and hating on old folks prevents us from becoming a united force of potent citizens.

[MH – The very idea that we will ever become a ‘united force’ of potent citizens seems misplaced.  The striving for ‘unity’ (which people will assume is harmony, consensus, agreement, shared situational awareness) will be a tar pit. This is not an advocacy of ‘vanguard parties’ with an alleged privileged position’, it’s simply to say that using words ‘united force’ ignores the inevitable messiness, confusion, hybridity, whatever, and sets up impossible expectations, and allows the worst among us to have a veto role.]

What we need is the courage to liberate ourselves from these merchants of desolation. 

[MH – yes, but courage comes in many flavours and needs more adjectives. Courage is also a COLLECTIVE VERB, not a personal noun.  We as individuals don’t “have” more or less courage which we then sort of maybe hoard or share.  It’s far more fluid, interactive than that.  Situational, contingent etc..  We need to think in terms of collective emotions, collective intelligence, all that mushy mystic “emergent properties” stuff, all that “dissipative systems” metaphors and models.  Anything else, sticking with courage as an object we “have”,  brings us back to a Hobbesian, neoliberal failurepath.]

It’s a battle being fought on many fronts. 

[MH – It’s not “a battle.” It’s  war. Actually, it’s worse than that. Because it is not just any old World War. Or even a Forever War. Not even a civilisational war. It’s beyond all that – civilisations have risen and fallen, fine. Ozymandias blah blah. This, this is about at least the Sixth Extinction and whether we can haul anything back. This is  possibly about going Full Venus (though, right now, who can know?) And it is not “many fronts” – EVERYTHING is a front.  From the most trivial purchase to the genocides being perpetrated in far off countries and abattoirs nearby, and everything in between.  There’s a scene near the end (spoilers) of the novel “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card where the screen isn’t just discrete dots of the enemy, it’s just a glow. They are everywhere, they are everything.  But that’s the end of me carping about Winton’s choices of words, because a) it’s boring and petulant b) generally Winton’s has all the excellent words in all the excellent order.]

But in joining it, and to sustain it, we must foster new alliances, more creativity and deeper empathy. That means decolonising ourselves, resetting our outlook, so we can adapt to new conditions, and hold each other up in the struggle.

[MH – Joining – you’re already in it, you just don’t know it.
Sustaining – YES.  Everything has been spasms.  With my academic hat on I could bore for Gaia about Multiple Streams Approach/Policy Windows, or “Movement Cycles” or “Hype Cycles”. Happy to do that (too happy), but for now, this – XR says we quit – why radical environmental movements have a short shelf-life (Conversation, 2022)

Foster new alliances 

[MH – yes, but watch out because  to me it’s almost always the people on the pointy end who are asked to bite their tongues and get along with unashamed bigots, assholes and criminals for the sake of “unity”. Am not advocating endless stagings of the Oppression Olympics (obvs – I would keep losing), but when we talk about new alliances, rich white privileged people really need to do better. Thicker skins, and more self-education.  People of colour have enough going on without doing the emotional and intellectual labour at a granular level. White people gotta be better at calling each other out/in/hokey-cokey-shake-it-all–about, while also not just rolling over in cowardice when absolute hustlers (who do exist) guilt them into silence. None of this is easy. See above hybrid/emergent blah blah_

More creativity 

[MH – yep. And that doesn’t mean more colourful creche puppets for the next demo. It means making mistakes, being embarrassed, wrong, outlandish. More tolerance for failure (as long as there are plausible mechanisms for learning from it), more tolerance for ambiguity.  All at, of course, exactly the time our amygdalas are shutting that down.   Oh my the rest of the 21st century – however far we get – is going to be so fun. So fun.]

we can adapt to new conditions, 

[MH – yes, but there will be no new stable normal. There will be a new ‘normal’ that shifts again. And then again. It will be profoundly unsettling.  The systems are “flickering” and they are going to flicker more.

and hold each other up in the struggle.

[MH – yes, of course. But sometimes when you are held up it feels like you are being held back, and vice versa. And people whose amygdalas are getting the better of them (all of us most of the time, some of us all of the time) are good at claiming that any criticism, no matter how praise-sandiwched, no matter how constructive, how Vytosky-and-his-bloody-zone-of-proximal-bloody-development is an imposition. It’s the easiest thing in the world to refuse to accept feedback/support under the banner of “my feelings.”  I say this with a solid half a century and counting of that.

Exhortation the First

Learn from people of colour. There is nothing “magical negro” here.  It’s not that – in my opinion – African people are inherently superior/stronger/smarter. It’s Darwinism, in the sense of natural selection – thanks to what they’ve been on the receiving end of, their intellectuals have had to be that much smarter, that much tougher.  Audre Lorde, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire, Fanon, lots and lots and LOTS. For the most part, white people ignore them, or “at best” use them as a prop to signal their own virtue (6).

Exhortation the Second

Be brave.  That means getting out of the rut of laughing/shouting at deniers, at criticising the state for being a plaything of the corporate death machine.  All that is necessary but insufficient. The key thing now is what “we” – civil society (neighbourhoods, professional bodies, education groups, unions, religious outfits, social movement organisations etc) DO.  We can fall back onto the scraped knee theory, that someone else is going to come save us.

We can ignore the fact that for thirty five years we have failed to build the pressure on states and corporations for non-blowing-smoke-up-our-asses action.

We can ignore the fact that social movement activism has come and gone in spasms (or waves, if you’re being super-generous) because we SUCK at holding meetings, recruiting people for more than marches and into sustained activism that is incapable of being ignored, co-opted, repressed.

If we were good at those things, we would not be in quite the funk that Winton so brilliantly describes.

We. Have. Failed. Lots of reasons for that. This stuff is really difficult. We were having kids, careers, breakdowns, breakups.  Fine.  We were forced to work horror jobs by kapos with whips, that left no time for anything but momentary escapes and pangs of hope for a less fucked world and now the bills are due.

Fine.  All good reasons.  But right now, if we don’t discuss why we failed, propose some ways to try things differently, and then DO those things, then we absolutely 

  1. Waste our own time
  2. Destroy the last shreds of credibility in our own and anyone else’s eyes
  3. Really nail down the extinction not just of our own species but the so-many other species on this planet.

Links below to a small fraction of the stuff I have proposed and done over the years. It’s so pathetically inadequate that I cry about it.  But if we all cry and post, maybe we can float our boats, our arks, on salt tears, and something can be salvaged.

We have to take a look at civil society. We have to find, name and combat the ways it has been failing. Everything else is a waste of the few breaths (Cheynes-Stokes ones at that) that we have left.

So, finally, what do you think? What did Winton get wrong? What do I get wrong? What do “we” actually need to do

Footnotes

  1. This essay was kindly brought to my attention by a new Twitter follower of my All Our Yesterdays twitter feed. It is a pale horrible shadow of its best, but Twitter 
  1. Further excuses – I’ve had both medical and computer ailments, neither fully resolved. And I am trying to get this up and circulated before Australia properly wakes up.
  2.  Fanon deserves a far better gloss than this, but a) time b) my various limitations, both temporary and permanent).
  3. I know, I know. You have my permission to cyber-slap me for that. Hard as you like. Ideally you’ll provide post-slap balm and also alternative words for same.
  4.  And if/when I see it,  I will have much more sympathy for this position while still, for reasons stated above not thinking it is a fatal impact on what Winton is trying to do)
  5. Not me, obviously. Noooo, not at aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalll.

Those promised suggestions etc.

I have road-tested some of these. They “work” in the moment. But long-term? The incentive structures are all wrong. Check out the Cher blog post.

On meetings not sucking

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this”

Meet is murder: “Where do we meet?” is not the only question #oldfartclimateadvice #potemkinclusivity #shoddyneologisms

Our unwillingness to see the cycles

SMOTE – (social movement organisation transcience and emptiness.) Why “we” refuse to see it, say it. #ClimateTwitter

XR says we quit – why radical environmental movements have a short shelf-life (Conversation, 2022)

Specifically on XR and JSO

Has XR got the right tactics – a debate

Debate: XR has done more harm than good

Just Stop Oil – anthropologically fascinating, politically terrifying

Cher, incentive structures and our inevitable doom

2019: How we blew it again (written in 2017 and published in Peace News

Dear New Climate Activist – unsolicited advice  (2018) – Hashtag was #OldFartClimateAdvice

How to hold a rally (from a 2011 marriage equality rally)

How to hold a film showing and discussion

How to hold a REALLY big climate meeting full of people who don’t know anyone and may not come back: Global warming, local swarming; or “Does this clown EVER shut up?” #oldfartclimateadvice

The need for accountability and commitment mechanisms and what those might be.

Will you marram me? Of “grassroots” and the need for commitment mechanisms.

See also

The Smugosphere

The Emotacycle

Ego-fodder

Categories
Activism

Attack of the killer pro-bots! Asinine, anodyne bandwidth bandits. Here’s my actions – what are yours?

Post topic: a new (?) social media tactic from denialists/predatory delayers seems to be underway. I call it the “killer pro-bot” technique. Here I explain it, speculate on who is behind it, talk about the consequences of responding/not responding and then lay out what my response will be from now, asking you what your experiences and perspectives are. Five minute read? Ish.

Over the last weeks/months I’ve noticed, especially on the Twitter feed for this site (@our_yesterdays) various new followers or regular commenters who have very little personal info available, a bland photo/bio with an “inoffensive” “positive” strap line. Examples below. What is interesting is they all seem to have been set up in mid-2022, have very few followers and seem to have humans (chained up in a botfarm somewhere, given food in exchange for a certain number of responses per day) doing the responding. The responses are too specific for the current generation of AI, I think.

Here are some examples.

What might be going on?

If I were running “predatory delay” campaigns for an oil major or whoever, I’d be moving away from outright denial. It’s too crude and alienating to the “middle-ground” folks you’re trying to influence. Funders of the predatory denial campaigns eventually wise up to the fact that what they are paying for is not working. If you don’t offer a new strategy, your contract for shit-fuckery doesn’t get renewed. Adapt or die etc.

So I think the new pitch is something like this.

Pitcher: “We are going to continue to try to confuse and demoralise the activists online, obviously. But instead of just abuse, we are going to try to distract them. They’re desperate for affirmation, so we can set up loads of low-maintenance accounts that just churn out bland stuff.

  • Some activists will ignore it.
  • Some will suspect something but shrug their shoulders
  • Others, so desperate for any engagement, especially if it SEEMS positive, or neutral, will engage in long attempts to “educate” our bots. This will take up their time and energy that they might otherwise spend more usefully, and ALSO make them seem condescending and patronising to third parties. If they eventually lose their shit, even better, they look bitter and unhinged.”

Funder: we keep up with the hater stuff, but add this to?

Pitcher: Yup. We’ve been flood the zone with denial, bullshit and hate. For ages. It has worked to keep the haters riled up. But they are ageing, and as the real-world evidence of climate change piles up, it’s becoming harder, even for them, to deny reality. And doing that alienates those who are not quite as indoctrinated. If you want to distract/confuse, you need a more emollient ‘reasonable’ set of stooges/avatars.)

Funder: go ahead. Let me know how you get on.

What happens if we ignore?

Eventually, these accounts might start to gain more followers, albeit semi-passively. Then they can be deployed with more ‘credibility’ as voices of “moderation” at critical junctures (though frankly, everything is a critical juncture these days, has been for decades. Oh well).

Crucially, if your opponents are testing out a new strategy (as I suspect they are), it’s usually a good idea to name that strategy and discuss how to respond, before things get out of hand.

So, what I am going to do.

  • Screengrab the account bio
  • Add it to this post
  • Block these pro-bots until Twitter removes the block function.

Once Twitter removes the block and mute functions (apparently scheduled for December?) reduce Twitter engagement to absolute bare minimum.

What experiences to you have?

What actions have you taken?
What do you think of my analysis, actions? What else would you say?

Categories
Activism Australia

July 31, 2014 Ark hits rocks with forestry tie-in

Ten years ago, on this day, July 31st, 2014, an Australian eco-group got its reputation burned.

2014 Planet Ark on the receiving end of criticism about its tie-in with forestry outfit –

The founders of environment group Planet Ark are speaking out about the charity they say has lost its way.

Environmentalist Jon Dee and tennis great Pat Cash founded Planet Ark 20 years ago.

It soon forged a high profile, thanks in part to the backing of celebrities like Olivia Newton John, Kylie Minogue and Pierce Brosnan.

But times have been tough for Planet Ark lately.

It has made substantial losses for three years running, sold some major assets and offered redundancies to staff.

After National Tree Day at the weekend, Mr Dee and Mr Cash have told 7.30 they are particularly upset about Planet Ark’s links with the timber industry.

Planet Ark has allowed its logo to be used on advertisements for timber, paid for by Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA).

It is part of a sponsorship deal in which Planet Ark gets $700,000 from the timber industry [continues]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-31/planet-ark-founders-cut-ties-with-lost-organisation/4167146

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 399ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the Australian outfit Planet Ark had been going since 1992 (and set up its website in 1996). And they, like any NGO, needed money, and the people with the money said they didn’t want anything in return, but there’s always strings attached. 

What we learn. It suits the needs of organisations with environmental reputations that need a bit of polishing to partner with outfits that have some sort of credibility And so it comes to pass. This tension plays out again and again. Because it’s a market for reputation. There are buyers and sellers. 

What happened next? Planet Ark is still around.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

July 31, 1981 – US politicians hold “carbon dioxide and climate” hearings.

July 31, 2008 – another day, another “Strategic Review”

Categories
Activism Australia

July 13, 2008 – Activists blockade coal port

Sixteen years ago, on this day, July 13th, 2008 some nice direct action (albeit symbolic) took place.

July 13 & 14, 2008: Newcastle, NSW, Australia Climate Camp stops coal trains at worlds’ largest coal export port

On July 13, 2008 approximately 1000 activists stopped three trains bound for export at the Carrington Coal Terminal for almost six hours. Dozens of protesters were able to board and chain themselves to the trains while others lay across the tracks. Hundreds were held back by mounted police. Police arrested 57.[19] Sunday 13th July 2008: 1000 people gathered at Islington Park in Newcastle for a rally and march to the Carrington Coal Terminal. It was a colourful and eclectic crowd of local residents, parents and children, percussionists, clowns, students, and concerned citizens from every state in Australia. Their message was simple and clear: let’s see renewables instead of more new coal.

http://www.greenpeace.org.au/blog/community-protest-stops-coal-trains-all-day 2008 Climate Camp Australia demo

Climate Camp Australia 2008

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 386ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context is that Newcastle is the biggest export terminal for Australian coal mined in the Hunter Valley. It had been growing and growing all through the 90s and noughties because Australia was selling more and more coal and screw the planet who cares. And I remember seeing just how long those cold frames were, filled to the brim. Anyway, this was the first Australian climate camp inspired by English Climate Camp in summer of 2006. Some people got arrested, some people got injured. The issue got flagged, some code was delayed. 

What we learn is that putting your bodies in the gears of the machine is very painful. And really fruit to work. You’d need a bigger boat load of people.As per Chief Brody, “we’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

What happened next? It’s a repertoire that the Australian coal protesters have returned to again, because it gets news coverage because it reminds them of their own power because it’s the right thing to do. But I refer you to yesterday’s rant about how doomed we are…

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

July 13, 1971 – Stephen Schneider “predicts” an ice age (so the myth goes)

July 13, 2013 – future Australian PM ridiculed for #climate idiocy