By Stan Cox, City Lights Books
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.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
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.
By Tara Lohan, The Revelator
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.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
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.
By Adina Merelender, Brendan Buhler, University of Californa Press
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.
By Yavor Tarinski, Resilience.org
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.
By Erik Assadourian, Gaianism
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.
By Vicki Robin, Tzeporah Berman, Resilience.org
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?
By Zachary King, Resilience.org
I call these framing strategies “unconventional optimism” - forms of optimism that are not grounded in a firm belief that victory is nigh or even highly likely, but that emphasize aspects of the future or the present that are nonetheless motivating.
By Mark Heley, Iván Sawyer García, Esperanza Project
Obviously, successfully preserving the remaining Amazon will take multiple solutions, both small scale and local and large scale and international. But if you are feeling hopeless about what’s happening, consider joining up to Amazon Uprising and protect some trees, while getting informed about what’s going on in the bigger picture.
By Amy Goodman, Bill McKibben, Democracy Now!
Thirty years ago, in 1989, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a general audience. He has just published a new book; it’s titled Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
By Samuel Miller McDonald, The Trouble
The fact is, there is no “best thing” and there are no easy little tweaks that will amount to mitigating climate change. We each have to do a lot.