“Put the polluters on trial, not the planet!”

[The following was co-written by Naomi Klein, author of #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and author of The End Of Nature, and Dr. James Hansen, author of Storms of my Grandchildren, and who is regarded as the world's leading climatologist. All recognize the trial of Tim DeChristopher to be a turning point in the climate movement. Included are links to resources for travel to Utah]

Naomi Klein

Bill McKibben

Terry Tempest Williams

James Hansen

The biggest thing in "Hopenhagen" was a flimsy billboard

[Original post by Juliana Williams in It's Getting Hot In Here]

“How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?”

These are the words of contempt Sarah Palin aimed at the Obama Administration two weeks ago, but she may as well have taken shot at the climate movement.

The Copenhagen negotiations were largely a flop.  Climate legislation has stalled out in Congress.  Red States and Fossil Fuel Corporations are suing the EPA to revoke their authority to regulate emissions.

In 2008, millions of Americans were inspired by the message of Hope: hope that government can change, hope that yes, we can change the direction of this country.  Many of those people have now become disappointed, jaded, disengaged.  They hoped for change and they didn’t get it.  But as Mrs. Palin so eloquently reminded us, that hopey, changey stuff isn’t working so well right now.

Why isn’t it working?

You could make the argument that governing is more difficult than campaigning.  You could make lament the obstructionist tactics of the far-right.  You could point out that Palin was just trying to rile up the troops.

You could say all that, but you would be missing the deeper reason.

Hope is passive.  Hope is what you have when you have exhausted all other options.  As Derreck Jensen writes, “To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it.”

By placing our Hope in Obama, in Congress, in the UN, we tacitly resign ourselves to the idea that the outcomes are out of our hands.

During the United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen, which the climate movement had been focusing on for years as the pivotal moment to make progress, the Hopenhagen campaign there inspired a fellow activist to jot down these thoughts:

“I have had a deep unease about “Hopenhagen” since before I left for the summit, but I didn’t know what exactly was bothering me until tonight. As I passed through the vacated Hopenhagen square, looking up at the billboards depicting grainy photos of healthy big-eyed children with “Hopenhagen” spelled out across their hearts, after days on end of being practically blinded by the saturation of bus stop ads, Coca Cola’s “bottle of Hope” ads, and glossy pamphlets blowing around on the ground, it dawned on me: Hope is all we have? Hoping is…begging! This is supposed to be the big moment. I came across the planet to make change myself, and this, this stupid, cheesy, hokey corporate campaign is the best humanity can muster in the face of annihilation?
I stood alone, tonight, in the empty square, and stared ahead, and saw that real human suffering, on a scale we have never seen, was on the way, was on the horizon, and nothing but an abandoned city square was in the way. The cold wind blew through my hair. I shivered.  And despite myself, I cried.”

The climate will not suddenly stabilize by hoping.
Obama will not magically secure bold climate legislation because we hope for it.
The climate movement will not become powerful enough to overcome fossil interests by latching onto hope.

We must let go of the hope that we will win.  Who knows if we will or not?  But we will only win by taking action with our own hands, feet, bodies, and voices.

“And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.” -Derreck Jensen

By Derreck Jensen. Originally published in Orion magazine.

THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect just one tree.

Here’s how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: “As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they’re gone in twenty, they’ll be gone forever.”

But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care.

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse. Rapidly.

But it isn’t only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?

We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe—or maybe you would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.

I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated—and who could blame them?—I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.

Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.

Another question people sometimes ask me is, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just party?” Well, the first answer is that I don’t really like to party. The second is that I’m already having a great deal of fun. I love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.

I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I’ve learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction—the use of any excuse to justify inaction—reveals nothing more nor less than an incapacity to love.

At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q and A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn’t matter, he said, and it’s egotistical to think it does.

I told him I disagreed.

Doesn’t activism make you feel good? he asked.

Of course, I said, but that’s not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.

Why?

Because I’m in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.

A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase—not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

When you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?

But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing.

Whose side are you on?

When a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

Do you believe that the United States government takes better care of corporations, or human beings?

I don’t know anyone who believes the United States government takes better care of human beings than it does corporations.

Do you believe that your vote counts as much as the votes of owners of transnational oil and gas corporations? Do you believe your vote counts as much as the money of owners of transnational oil and gas corporations?

The United States government is not a democracy. It is a plutocracy: government by, for, and of the wealthy.

It is a kleptocracy: government by, for, and of thieves. These thieves, these extremely wealthy thieves, these thieves who own corporations and the thieves who serve them in the U.S. government, steal communities, and they destroy the land. When they destroy the land, they steal not only the present but the future.

The purpose of a corporation is to amass wealth. That is its function. The function is not to protect communities, not to promote democracy, not to promote the health of the land. Corporations have no morals, and those who run them do not scruple at destroying life on this planet. Indeed, that is precisely what they are doing.

If aliens from outer space came to this planet and did the harm that oil and gas corporations are doing, we would stop them using any means necessary. If aliens from outer space were making it so there were carcinogens in every mother’s breast milk, we would stop them. If they were putting in oil and gas wells all over the planet, we would stop them. If they were changing the climate, we would stop them. If they were destroying landbase after landbase, we would stop them. And if they set up governments to “legalize” their sociopathological behavior, we would stop them.

When a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

When a government and corporations work together to destroy life on earth, it is the responsibility of the people to stop this using any means necessary.

In a sane culture, Tim DeChristopher would not be facing trial. He would be seen as the hero that he is. And the corporate executives who destroy landbases as surely as they destroy democracy would be on trial. And the federal land managers who put out illegal oil and gas leases, leases which violate law after law after law, would be on trial. And the police who arrest those who protest against these illegal gas leases would be on trial (do these individual police officers realize they are lending their talents to the destruction of the land and of democracy? They are to protect and to serve, but do they realize they are protecting and serving not the people, not their communities, but instead sociopathological corporations and the politicians who serve those corporations?).

Never forget that the atrocities committed by the Nazis were under their own laws legal. The Nazi government passed laws allowing them to legally commit atrocities. And they arrested those who opposed those laws. Never forget that the atrocities committed in apartheid South Africa were under their own laws legal. The South African government passed laws allowing them to legally commit atrocities. And they arrested those who opposed those laws. Never forget that the atrocities committed in Stalinist Soviet Union were legal. The Soviets put on show trials for many of those condemned under these laws. And the police arrested those who opposed these laws.

In all of these cases, including the current one, the question becomes, whose side are you on?

In the current case, Tim DeChristopher is on the side of communities, on the side of the land, on the side of democratic decision-making processes. He is standing against atrocities, and against a sociopathological kleptocracy.

Whose side are you on?

I’m on Tim DeChristopher’s side.

Never forget, when a government becomes destructive of life, community, and democracy, it is the responsibility of the people to alter or abolish it. If you do not, that government will destroy life, community, and democracy. As we see.

It is time we fulfilled our responsibility. The corporations would like us to believe that we can’t fight them. Timothy DeChristopher has single-handedly proved them wrong. Whether he is successful now depends on the broader environmental movement. Will we let Timothy’s act stand alone, as a symbolic protest that got a moment of press and then faded? Or will we join him in protecting the last scraps of wilderness, the final, fragile shreds of our planet? Will we let corporate power turn mountains into rubble and deserts into sludge? Or will we do what it takes to stop them? We have weapons, from protests and lawsuits to the time-honored American tradition of civil disobedience to the serious tactics that resistance movements have always used. Whatever weapons you choose, use them wisely and use them well, but use them.

With permission from the authors:

- Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith ❧

Who: Author, editor, organizer, & puppeteer David Solnit

When: Friday, February 26th at 7:00 PM

Where: Ken Sanders Rare Books — 268 S. 200 E. Salt Lake City, UT

Art, culture and theater are essential to tell our stories, win public support, keep us hopeful, have fun, and powerfully communicate from our heart. Using strategy in our organizing is key to make our movements more effective in winning positive social change in our communities and for a better world. Join David Solnit for an evening of art and theater from frontline struggles, stories from successful mass mobilizations, and reflections on how we can be strategic in stopping climate change and shifting the system behind it to build a better world.

Sign up at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=313633894069

Download the flyer for the event:

The Utah Citizens’ Candidate initiative started after a posting on Craigslist seeking applicants for the position of “Courageous Congressperson” to represent District Two in the upcoming Democratic election. Criteria for the job included “commitment to transparency” and to “defending fundamental human rights over corporate profits.” After withstanding an early setback when the initially chosen candidate, Dr. John Weis, unexpectedly withdrew, the Citizens’ Candidate Initiative has continued to move forward with its efforts to offer a congressional representative chosen by and for the people of  Salt Lake’s District Two.

Claudia Wright at the Public Interviews

Claudia Wright, the new Citizens’ Candidate, was bested by Weis by less than five votes in the initial runoff voting process. Now that she has been asked to take his place as the Citizens’ Candidate, Wright says she is delighted to take the reins. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to discuss issues that have been absent from the public dialogue for too long. This campaign is about the big picture, and I am ready to move forward into this role,” Wright explained. Weis offered Wright and the initiative his continued support through the duration of the Citizens’ Candidate campaign.

Wright is a career educator who has spent much of her life teaching History, Humanities, Women’s Studies and Gender Studies to high school and then to college students. She currently teaches at the Universities of Phoenix and Utah, and has received myriad awards as an exceptional educator, including the Excellence in Teaching Award from Brigham Young University, and Teacher of the Year from the Excel Foundation. Wright is a founding member of the Utah Chapter of the Human rights Coalition. She has hiked and camped all over Utah’s deserts and mountains, and is passionate about environmental and sustainability issues. She is a vocal advocate for universal health care, having suffered great personal loss in her family circle as a result of inadequate access to health care. She is a member of the LGBT community, and a vocal advocate for equal rights for Utah’s LGBT citizens.

The final candidate was selected at a public interview and runoff vote open to citizens of District Two, held at the SLC Library on January 30th. After a panel of seven representatives from local progressive groups that support the Citizens’ Candidate initiative interviewed the four final candidates and the audience of about 110 locals asked them questions, all present District Two voters offered their ranked choices for their preferred candidates. The instant runoff voting process reflected that preferential differences between John Weis and Claudia Wright were marginal in the first round of voting, and that majority support clearly favored Wright after Weis’ votes were redistributed.

Visit the Citizens’ Candidate website to learn more and find out how you can support this bold new step in grassroots democracy.