by Alaska Rising Tide

If the climate movement is to succeed, we must take control of the narrative surrounding climate change. We must not only wrest it from the many tentacles of the fossil fuel industry, but we must also expand it beyond the realm of science. Facts alone do not motivate people to action.

Humans are motivated by stories. Our identities, our cultures, and the alterations that we make to the physical world all result from stories. The monumental challenges that we currently face tell us that we have been led astray. If we are to avert the worst, we must question the stories that undergird the atrocities of everyday life. We must articulate something other than what is on offer from those in power.

Control Mythology

image by the beehive design collective

Maintaining power requires control over the stories that motivate the masses. These stories can be thought of as control myths. “JOBS” for example is a one-word control myth. Try substituting the word PROFIT every time you hear JOBS, and see how the story changes.

Control  mythology often benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of everything else. Climate denial is one of the all-time most destructive control myths. There are many reasons the fossil fuel industry has invested billions in right wing think tanks, media outlets, and compliant politicians to maintain the climate denial narrative. It is essential not only to their wealth, privilege, and power; but also to the ideology of limitless growth. To limit carbon emissions, we must limit fossil fuel use. This is unacceptable in the current Zeitgeist.

The political debate about climate change is dominated by denial and silence, but does denial actually hold sway over the majority of Americans? Not according to Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the  Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. The project has identified six different segments of the American population based on beliefs about climate change: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. 45% of the population falls into the first two categories, only 21 % falls into the last two. Research also indicates that 2012 saw a rapid increase in belief in the reality of climate change.

So the majority of people are not in denial. What then is preventing action? Believing the prevailing story of democracy, the environmental movement, like many others, has pinned its hopes on the Democratic Party. What it has failed to recognize is that Democrats are the other party of limitless growth. While denial is a central pillar of the Republican platform, the Democrats’ policy of climate silence has been no better. The Climate movement must not, and it will not, wait around for climate change to become an election issue. We are remembering that winning an election and creating profound social change are two entirely different things. The good news is that to succeed at the latter, we actually need to mobilize fewer people than we would to win a presidential election. And better news; we already have the numbers on our side.

To succeed we must take control of the narrative surrounding climate change. We must break the silence and end the denial. We must also move beyond merely citing facts to creating a new narrative grounded in moral principles.

Climate Change is a Moral Issue

As Oregon State University philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore says, “it is wrong to wreck the world.” We must generate a moral and ethical debate equivalent to the scientific one. The moral syllogism is that if wrecking the world is wrong, and climate change is an existential threat to our world, then people will take action to slow climate change. Morality is what elicits emotional response and sparks political engagement with an issue. So far the climate movement has been relying heavily on the scientific premise, while neglecting the moral one.

It is conventional wisdom that environmental issues resonate with people on the left more so than those on the right. UC Berkeley Sociologist Rob Willer suggests that this may be due to the way these issues are framed, and to a difference in moral priorities. Researchers have identified five domains of morality; harm/care, fairness/reciprocity,  in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Lefties are grounded in the harm/care end of morality, while those on the right are moved by purity and sanctity. Environmental issues tend to be framed as issues of harm and care, and therefore resonate more with the Left. Willer found that by using purity and sanctity to frame the same issues, the partisan divide was nearly eliminated.

As we engage in the project of getting people emotionally invested in climate change, it is worth noting that there is one oft-appealed-to emotion that may be counterproductive: fear. Rob Willer has studied how dire warnings about climate change can lead to disengagement and increased levels of denial. Others have written about how well fear works as an organizing tool- for the Right.

If we put our minds to it, we can craft moral arguments that will move every one of the six segments of the American public identified by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. This will be a big step toward articulating the narrative of a just and enduring future that our hearts tell us is possible.

by Kirby Spangler

“Today we stand together as representatives of a desperate generation who have been forced into this position by the reckless and immoral behavior of fossil fuel corporations.” Thus begins a communique issued by a group of eight college students who used chains and superglue to lock themselves together in protest at the Boston offices of Trancanada Corporation. What would cause a group of privileged young students from prestigious universities to say and do such things?

To put this in context, I will describe the contours of a new era of environmentalism. The emergent movement already has form and people around the globe have been organizing for years to bring it into being. Many refer to it as the Climate Justice Movement. It is a movement aimed squarely at the immoral and reckless behavior of the fossil fuel industry. 

Idle No More is a profound manifestation of this movement. Idle No More began as a response to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s renewed assault on Canadian First Nations. The base of Harper’s power lies with the industrial devastation of the people and land of Northern Alberta. Dismantling treaty rights is essential to the corporations that stand to profit from the extraction of Alberta Tar Sand.

The same story plays out in Alaska. Big oil vs. everybody and everything else. Movements for indigenous sovereignty and subsistence rights are movements against the tyranny of corporations that profit from fossil fuel and other extractive industry. The principles of Climate Justice are built into the DNA of these movements.

Another example of this movement can be found in Texas. The Tar Sands Blockade is an ongoing campaign using direct action to disrupt the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Transcanada Corporation is building this pipeline to move Alberta Tar to Gulf Coast refineries. On January 7, the Tar Sands Blockade launched a 100 person strong occupation of Transcanada’s Corporate offices in Houston, Texas. There were solidarity actions across the country. The action described in the beginning of this essay was one of them.

A particularly interesting manifestation of this emergent movement is the ongoing relief effort in New York City for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, a storm supercharged by a changing climate. In underprivileged areas, relief efforts are being led by Occupy Sandy; a coalition made up of veterans of Occupy Wall Street, and Climate Justice organizations like 350.org and Greenpeace. There is a recognition within this effort that it must do more than provide assistance to the victims, it must also confront the perpetrators. There are lessons to be learned in New York City for coastal communities in Western Alaska that are slipping into the sea as temperatures and sea levels rise.

Indigenous people, Texas landowners, today’s youth, and  New Yorkers impacted by Hurricane Sandy; this diverse coalition of front line communities are articulating the possibility of a just and enduring future. As a whole, what this movement understands is that politicians, and the corporations that they serve, are no place to look for justice or humanity in the face of realities like climate change. To foster this movement,  we must continue to find unity among diverse  communities, and we must find the courage and moral clarity to defy unjust and immoral systems of power.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

Naomi Klein, Author -The Shock Doctrine, No Logo

READ THE WHOLE ESSAY HERE