Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Above all then, we seek to connect people with offers to participate and take action; channelling the undercurrent of citizen energy we believe is already forming tomorrow’s climate majority.
Perhaps in the AI age, we humans will serve as a check and balance to computer programs capable of fooling us into thinking they speak only truth to power.
This fall’s elections are more important than anything that’s happening here at Sharm el Sheikh, I think—the one in Brazil last month, and the ones across America last week, and the one that could come in Georgia early next month.
Do you really want to know the truth; are you really willing to let it in, to be changed by it? My hope is to demonstrate that the answer must, simply must, be: Yes.
Whether it’s carried out by a local movement such as the L.A. Bus Riders Union or continent-spanning drives like the Native campaigns against Big Oil and Gas, no single effort can snuff out fossil fuel extraction and consumption on its own. The mulitplication of such efforts is therefore essential.
I’d argue, too, that there’s no particular virtue in boycotting existing climate protest movements from the conviction that you personally have access to some higher-level political consciousness, though there may be good reasons for boycotting them in practice.
We shouldn’t be trying to bring on board the people who’re not already on board. Instead we should be trying to activate the vast majority of people who’re already concerned or even alarmed about the climate crisis but haven’t yet started exerting political pressure on their workplaces or on their government.
There are going to be people denying the existence of climate change or saying that we should redress it with next-generation nuclear energy or working-class revolutionary struggle until the waves close over their heads.
Maybe the most important lesson the present catastrophes can teach us is this: we are not powerless, and we must work together to save the Earth, our only home.
The threat of climate change is too grave for us to continue thinking that we can work our way around it without major (revolutionary) changes that will radically alter the very social fabric beyond capitalism and statecraft.
It does not much matter if you devote yourself to deep adaptation or to slowing the collapse—both are essential and both are part of our bigger collective struggle. The only thing we cannot afford is no corrective action at all.
Tzeporah Berman has been designing environmental campaigns and working on environmental policy in Canada and beyond for over twenty years. Tzeporah shares her thoughts on What Could Possibly Go Right?
