Conversation

@evan I say "you" a lot in this reply. I am referring to the climate movement, not you personally.

The #ClimateChange movement could learn a very great deal indeed from the #AntiFascist and #Anarchist movements, you know, the grassroots.

The green movement must abandon and systematically dismantle the notion that environmental issues and fighting them is a nice little club for nice middle class white people.

I used to be a core activist with one of the big global environmental action groups. I was the only working class person there and there were no black and brown people at all other than the cleaning staff and the security staff.
I came away, after loosing everything I had (because I was a full time volunteer, food, tools, work clothes etc all had to be bought out of my pocket, so I sold all my possessions to continue the work.)

I left with the conviction and a string of convictions, that it was a nice middle class club to make the countryside nicer for people exactly like them and exactly no one else at all.

When I wasn't travelling doing or prepping for actions I'd do, among many other things, street campaigning to raise awareness of issues with the general public.
My petition signature count was as good as or better than anyones. I'd only talk to ordinary working class people because I saw that all of the other campaigners were actively ignoring them.

This is why the movement has failed by all meaningful metrics and is why it will continue to fail.

You cannot expect people in a permanent, very high state of stress from just trying to survive to throw open their arms to the universe in blissful generosity.

People who are cold in their homes and are regularly missing meals, ever more angry and ever more powerless, unable to properly provide for their children, then add all the guilt and coping strategies, that people denied all of the tools that would help them cope better have to create themselves out of nothing. Those improvised coping strategies are very unhealthy and don't really work, all they do is bury it all deeper and ever deeper, building and growing, ready to explode and destroy them and everyone around them, and they know this.

People who's very skin makes them a target for violence and death at the hands of those who are supposed to protect everyone. Who are accused of all societies failings, when it is they who have been failed and marginalised in the most inhuman brutal and relentless ways imaginable, today, tomorrow and for hundreds of years backwards.

How can you stand above them, of us, in judgement and expect them to just snap to attention at your every whim, when you won't even speak to them or communicate with them in any way. You just sit there judging on forums they don't even know exist.

Climate action must be a mass movement or it will continue to fail.

You can't say you are trying to build a mass movement if you exclude most of the people on the planet.

Throw open your doors, go into the streets and ask them to build a mass movement that works for them and their lives, actually help and empower them.

They, we, are the people who make, move, store, build, clean and maintain absolutely EVERYTHING and you wonder in disbelief why you can't build anything substantial without us.

Politicians do not work for us.
Change only ever comes from us.

Public

Notices

Feeds