Media

Five (More) Things You Can do Now to Address Climate Change

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Recycle. Eat less meat. Buy electric cars. Have fewer kids. Reduce consumption. Install solar panels on your home.

These are just a few of the (primarily middle-class oriented) ideas that the media have offered over the last year to help you figure out “what you can do now” to address climate change and to avoid its most devastating impacts.

Yet, in view of the 24th Annual Conference of the Parties (COP24) in Katowice, Poland–a fiasco that produced no binding commitments by nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid catastrophic climate change–these actions are clearly not enough.

They never were enough.

So, that being said, here are a few more things you can do:

1) Join the Extinction Rebellion.

Started this year in the UK, the Extinction Rebellion–which has spread to at least 35 countries–is a movement dedicated to taking radical, nonviolent direct action in rebellion against government inaction on climate change.

If the Extinction Rebellion is not your cup of tea, however, then find or start a rebellion that is, because by now it should be incandescently clear that radical, massive, strategic nonviolent civil disobedience, disruption and noncooperation are precisely what are called for in the face of governmental elites’ intransigence regarding climate change. We must disrupt, disrupt, disrupt until they surrender their allegiances to fossil fuel interests and neoliberalism, go back to the negotiating table, and then in good faith hammer out a robust, binding, enforceable and equitable global climate agreement.

2) Organize where you are.

An existential crisis demands more than signing petitions and climate marches.

So, take responsibility for canvassing at least 25 homes and apartment complexes where you live. Recruit concerned neighbors to help with canvassing and to organize neighborhood events and climate resistance. Leave literature! (In other words, be like the Jehovah Witnesses who, without fail, knock on doors every Saturday morning. Except talk about climate change, of course.) Converse with and organize members of your family, your faith community, and others with whom you socialize as well as work.

3) Support and demand, by every nonviolent means necessary, a Green New Deal.

Not a neoliberal/neocolonial Green New Deal, but an ecosocialist, global justice, labor-oriented, equitable, bottom-up Green New Deal, one that presumes not only that we need a “command and control” economy to effectively address the climate crisis; but also that we need to end further military spending and, ultimately, war itself.

That Green New Deal.

4) Join, expand, and/or create radical, self-determined, non-hierarchical, decentralized, and intentionally diverse (class, race, sexuality, gender, species) transcommunity networks, co-ops, coalitions, and other forms of organizing designed to meet people’s everyday needs as well as to respond–with food, work, medical care, housing, and other means of support–to climate catastrophes as they arise.

Why?

Because not only must we be ready should our governments fail us (or increasingly turn against us–in proper COINTELPRO fashion–in order to secure the interests of corporations and economic elites in the midst of growing unrest); but we must also prefigure the kind of world we want.

Moreover, if dystopia is our future, then at least we can make it a just one.

5) As you recycle, eat less (or no) meat, use public transportation rather than drive, cut down on how often you fly, purchase local produce, and vote during every election cycle–as you do all of these things, desegregate and decolonize your personal life. Question and transform your commitment, at the level of everyday acts and habits, to private property, national identity, militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, speciesism, and other global hierarchies of power.

In other words, if what you hold dear keeps you tethered to systems that will kill us all off, then you need to forget about it anyway. After all, it is extraordinarily difficult to change what you personally support.

 

This article was originally published in Counterpunch.

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Nonviolence media black-out

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Over the course of the recent Baltimore protests concerning Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of police, I received (as did many people I know) several Facebook posts and tweets of pictures that captured what the mass media failed or flat-out refused to cover: the nonviolent protests that took place throughout the city. Those who shared these posts and tweets lamented not only the media black-out of nonviolent protests, but also the media’s absolute focus on violence and violent protests – the looting, the torching of police vehicles, the hurling of bottles and bricks.

As those who shared their posts and tweets noted, the media used the images of violence to narrate the protests not as a story about the brutality that Freddy Gray suffered or about the decades of police repression under which Baltimore’s poor African American citizens have lived or about the grinding poverty that is the lived experience of the community where Freddy Gray grew up (“Baltimore City,” the New York Times recently reported, “is extremely bad for income mobility for children in poor families. It is among the worst counties in the U.S.”). Instead, the media used the images of violence to present Baltimore’s hurt and outraged African Americans as criminals or thugs, as a people so irrational that they would burn down “their own” community – as a people, in fact, who predictably produced a stressed and beleaguered Baltimore police force that has “understandably” resorted to excessive force.

Into this narrative of African American violence the media weaved government officials’ calls for nonviolence – which, as I have argued elsewhere, are nothing less than an appropriation of nonviolence to forward state interests, an appropriation through which officials render nonviolence the language of empire. When the media, then, marginalized the nonviolence on the streets and yet featured officials’ calls for nonviolence, it in essence blacked-out the expression of nonviolence as a radical call for justice and for systemic change. Moreover, it disconnected the violence that it spotlighted from the broader demand and movement for an end to state-sponsored violence (whether in the form of police brutality or economic policies) and, ultimately, from the government’s own unchecked acts of violence.

And yet, we do have those pictures posted on Facebook and Twitter. Clearly, our camera phones will be just as crucial to reframing nonviolence and disrupting both the government’s and media’s narrative of it as they are to capturing police agression and brutality.

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