YES!! We must all help! — Molly
Courage and conviction may not be enough – that’s something
I learned from other movements’ failures
This one has to succeed. It is not just that the youth climate strike, now building worldwide with tremendous speed, is our best (and possibly our last) hope of avoiding catastrophe. It is also that the impacts on the young people themselves, if their mobilisation and hopes collapse so early in their lives, could be devastating.
To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for instance, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact. We should wonder why the global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, despite the numbers involved, their courage and determination, has not changed the world. We should consider why Podemos, the Spanish party that rose so high on the optimism of the indignados movement, now seems to be spiraling into recriminatory collapse.
Those of us who witnessed these disappointments have, I feel, a painful duty to be as honest about them as possible, to help ensure their failures are not repeated. Much of what I propose here is controversial, and I can’t promise I’ve got it right. So my first advice is this: don’t listen only to me.
A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go. Using the narrative structure common to almost all successful political and religious transformations, the restoration story, it might go something like this. “The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by fossil fuel companies, the billionaires who profit from them and the politicians they have bought. But we, the young heroes, will confront these oligarchs, using our moral authority to create a movement so big and politically dangerous that our governments are forced to shut down the fossil economy and restore the benign conditions in which humans and other species can thrive.”
This restoration narrative, I think, could be greatly strengthened by recent findings suggesting that ecological recovery – restoring forests, salt marshes, peat bogs, the seabed and other crucial ecosystems – could, by drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, make a massive contribution towards preventing climate breakdown. (I’ll write about that when I finish my research on the subject, in a few weeks). A successful movement should also define a clear and tangible objective, perhaps a date by which nations achieve a zero-carbon economy. It could recommend a pathway, such as a ramped-up version of the green new deal proposed by the most progressive Democrats. If so, it will need to set a series of waymarks, by which it can judge whether or not governments are on track. This ensures that the activists, rather than the government, keep setting the agenda.
This objective should be supported by a set of irreducible principles that can be explained and spread with pride and conviction. Here are a couple of possible examples. “Human life is not negotiable, it cannot be exchanged for money.” “Those generations that are yet to be born have the same rights as those already alive.”
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