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SALT LAKE CITY, UT (krcl) – Ashley welcomes left-leaning populist Tim DeChristopher and right-leaning blogger Frank Staheli to discuss ways to transcend the divisiveness of contemporary politics. The three discuss taxes, climate change, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, and find they actually have much in common. DeChristopher is the founder of the environmental group Peaceful Uprising and Staheli runs the blog Simple Utah Mormon Politics.

© Copyright 2010, krcl

[Originally posted on Daily Kos by RJMiller on March 19, 2010]

“At least there’s no tar sands mining in the United States.”  We’ve all heard the horror stories from Canada.  The Alberta tar sands project is among the most environmentally destructive projects in the world: strip mining and pulverizing rock, heating it to 700 degrees, gobbling up water, consuming far more energy than is created, manufacturing four times as much carbon emissions as conventional oil, and spewing poison into the earth, water, and sky.

However, a tar sands project, the first of its kind in the United States, is happening here in the eastern Utah desert, not far from Moab, Arches National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument.  It’s about to break ground…unless you speak up.

Peaceful Uprising at the Capitol Climate Action - Using Direct Action to Shut Down Congress's Coal-Fired Power Plant

We pulled some of the best excerpts from a fantastic interview of columnist Johann Hari on Democracy Now! Johann explains how corporate funding from some of the world’s largest polluters has corrupted many of the largest environmental organizations from the inside out, including Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and even the Sierra Club. This has manifested itself in a multitude of non-solutions being proposed as the only “politically feasible” ways of addressing the climate crisis. While the science clearly calls for a 40% cut in emissions from 1990 levels by 2040, many of these organizations are lobbying for woefully inadequate cuts of less than 10%.

Johann argues that instead of relying on corrupt governments and corporations to solve the climate crisis, the people must take the matter into their own hands and demand change through direct action. For example, he explains how the UK’s Climate Camp has united people to put themselves on the line and directly block the construction of new coal power plants and airports, and have successfully shown how the power of the people can drastically change the definition of what is “politically feasible.”

You can view the full interview on democracynow.org

Warning: This animation presents imagery of climate chaos that some may find disturbing. Nevertheless, the risks it presents are very real, and it is our responsibility as mature adults to understand those risks and take action to minimize the chances of worst-case scenarios occurring.

Wake Up, Freak Out is an essential step in developing a deeper understanding of climate change and the risks it presents to humanity. When managing risks, you have to consider both probability and severity. While there are many uncertainties regarding the probability of climate tipping points, the severity of reaching them could be catastrophic. It’s like buying fire insurance for your house–even though there may be a small chance of it happening, you still take action and buy insurance because the consequences are extremely severe. Therefore, even though we don’t know exactly how likely climate tipping points are, we know the consequences are severe, and should do everything we can to prevent it from happening.

The script of this video is accompanied by extensive peer-reviewed references and additional information and links. It’s a great resource for anyone wanting to take their awareness to the next level, and is available at wakeupfreakout.org.

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

KRCL, 90.9 FM is Utah’s source for progressive community radio. RadioActive is an interactive, multifaceted program designed to put Utahns in touch with the issues of our times, and inform and assist them on how to get involved in their local communities and at large. Peaceful Uprising is excited to announce that we will be designing and hosting weekly RadioActive programs, beginning in March! Our Friday Uprising shows will focus on the myriad, diverse issues surrounding climate change, and the immediate and long-term social and political repercussions of these issues. We will inform Utah citizens on how get involved now, in their communities and beyond. Stay tuned for details, and be sure to listen in and join the conversation!

Visit RadioActive’s website to listen in online.

Of all the “green” films at Sundance, the most important film for the climate movement was the one that exposed what the greens lack: “Freedom Riders.”

In my eyes, “Freedom Riders” represents everything that the climate movement is missing: commitment, sacrifice, boldness and confrontation.  The facts of this film blow away a lot of the conventional wisdom that is holding our movement back from realizing its true potential.  This is a film that the entire climate movement needs to see.  There were more lessons in this film than I could process in one sitting, but here are some thoughts.

Motivation. We are always told that people need to feel personally threatened by the climate crisis in order to act. Some of the key figures in “Freedom Riders” were white students in Tennessee who were not threatened in any way by the status quo; yet they made a bold commitment to ride into certain danger in the deep South.  They dropped out of school during finals, and literally signed their last wills and testaments before they left.

Nonviolence. The film clarified a difference between nonviolence and avoidance of violence.  The Freedom Riders, who were committed to nonviolence, were also clearly and intentionally inciting violence against themselves. This they saw as necessary in order to escalate the situation to a point where it could no longer be ignored.

Politics. There were a lot of unintentional correlations between Obama and the Kennedys, who really didn’t want to have to deal with civil rights.  The activists involved knew they had to create enough social upheaval that Kennedy had to pick sides, which was a huge political risk.  Nothing about the political situation favored the Freedom Riders.

Sacrifice. This really puts our movement in perspective.  There is not one of us in this movement who have committed anything close to the level of sacrifice that the Freedom Riders did.

Numbers. The Freedom Riders were vastly outnumbered everywhere they went, even when they rallied the whole movement in Birmingham.  At the peak there were a few hundred Riders, but they achieved major national legal changes that ended formal segregation against immense political opposition. Their strength was never in numbers, but in their willingness to sacrifice. We have more than enough people in our movement to force the change we seek. A small group willing to throw themselves into the gears of the machine really can stop the machine.

These lessons are invaluable to our movement right now.  The most common question among climate activists since Copenhagen has been, “Where do we go from here?”  We know that what we have been doing hasn’t worked.  I suggest we learn from the social movements of the past and try something new for us and old for America: sacrifice, confrontation, boldness.

Hello Peaceful Uprisers!  It is good to be stateside again.

You may know that I went to Copenhagen to attend/participate in/keep an eye on the UNFCCC 15th Council of the Parties — or COP15 –  climate summit. It was one of the most intense, whirlwind experiences of my life, and I was there for over 20 days, so I won’t even try to relate ALL of the things I did there in one post, but upon request, I will share some of the highlights, and hopefully provide some inspiration for your own activism.

As far as the political why and how of the failure of COP15 — well, that is a really long story that will be included in next month’s issue. In a nutshell, COP15 failed because of 3 main reasons: 1) There aren’t enough people “taking it to the streets” (particularly in the USA) and making it clear that survival is non-negotiable. This country never changes without a mass movement of citizens DEMANDING it, and the clean energy shift will be no exception. This apathy is partly due to the so-called “big green” groups like NRDC and WWF that are not telling the truth about how they are falling short of what is needed to create a survival future.  2) There is a lack of leadership, ownership, and foresight on this planet (consider the main debate: on one hand, we have the annihilation of 1000′s of species, entire SOCIETIES of people, and an uninhabitable planet for our children. On the other, we might have to pay 15 or 20 dollars more a month on our utilities. And its a nail-biter? Our priorities are wacked! And 3) Corporations and their profit equations own our political leaders and many of our minds. See, healthy planetary change is not as profitable as the status-quo, and politicians vote along donor lines more so than public opinion polls. Of the People and By the People has been hijacked by special interests.

Ah, that brings up a good story about corporate influence. Coca Cola was the main sponsor of “Hopenhagen“, which was the unscrupulous PR campaign commissioned by the UN to turn the main square of the city of Copenhagen into a concert space, media hub, and  all-around feel-good marketing opportunity venue.  Billboards lined the square with soft messages of hope (as in, we hope that our leaders will do what is needed, instead of making them do what is needed  [an admission of helplessness]), and all over town, Coca-Cola had saturated public space with “A Bottle of Hope” posters.

I spent most of my time with The Yes Men and their small crew, putting together elaborate shenanigans and being ready to participate should shenanigans find us. One day, I arrived at HQ (an art gallery downtown that we were using as a workshop) where people were talking about what we could do to expose Coke for their hypocrisy (Coke is the kind of corporation that executes labor organizers and destroys villages and uses more water that you could ever imagine, to name just a few things). So we hatched a plan, clapped our hands together, kicked it into overdrive, and 4 hours later we had written and sent out a press release to the major outlets covering “Hopenhagen”, compiled a list of talking points about Coke’s greatest crimes, and thrown together a fake commercial that was intended to project onto the gigantic globe in the middle of the square. Off to the corporate festival we went. Here’s what we did:

Mike (the Yes Man) and Laurel (a Yes Woman) took on the persona’s of Coke executives who were so fed up with their company’s outright lies that they were calling the media to announce that they had written and taken a pledge to never drink Coke again. With the cameras rolling, group after group of Hopenhagen-goers took the pledge (I went first of course, acting like a passer-by). While outside, on a globe the size of a medium-sized house, an old Coca-Cola commercial came on, with the fuzzy polar bears (do you remember them?) interlaced with footage of real polar bears drowning. In that special cursive font that Coke uses, instead of saying “Always Coca Cola” it read, “Never Coca Cola”.

That was just one afternoon/evening.  Things were happening every day! The point of that story is that a group like Peaceful Uprising and The Yes Men don’t wait around and wait for permission from a board of directors before we act. And when we act, we move to expose the truth creatively, nonviolently, and powerfully.

I’ll give you another example of how creative, intelligent protest can make a difference. Early in the trip, I managed to get a badge for access to the “Fresh Air Center“, which was a cavernous cafe in downtown Copenhagen that had been transformed into THE off-site media hub for journalists to use. A live feed was constantly streaming into the room from the plenary at the Bella Center (where the COP15 was actually being held), and computers lined all the walls. One evening, we heard that the assistant Secretary-General of the UN (second in command) was coming by to take a few questions and see the place. So we arranged to do an absurdist fashion show for him after he was done talking. As soon as he finished, we threw on some Survivaballs (funny inflatable, round suits that are meant to represent an option for the very wealthy to stay safe from climate change) and cat walked around the cafe. We were interrupted (planned) by the Climate Debt Agents (who were all over the place in Copenhagen, wearing bright red suits and sunglasses to symbolically collect the money owed to developing nations who are being affected the most by the pollution put out by developed nations) who took the stage and made their case. Apparently, the assistant Secretary General was so moved by this that he canceled his plans to meet Ban Ki-Moon (the Secretary-General himself) at the Bella Center so he could write about it in his personal blog.

One more story for this issue…this is my personal favorite.

As part of a super-elaborate hoax, (more on that next time) we rebuilt the press briefing room (watch first video) of the Bella Center in the basement of our workshop. My primary mission for going to Copenhagen was to provide some sort of contrast, some sort of message of hope that wasn’t this baloney about crossing our fingers. I knew that COP15 would fall short, but what would a good deal even look like? I was afraid that the majority of people would have no idea in their minds about what success in Copenhagen would entail, thus having no constructive place to direct their anger and disappointment. So, after the Great Canada Hoax was finished, we opened up the set for people to come down and record videos of themselves making announcements from “The Bella Center.” Since we were so close to the Fresh Air Center, I ran back and forth bringing leaders of the global climate movement and anyone who was interested into the basement to record a statement. I helped create the “Good COP” website, which looks exactly like the real COP15 website, but ours just has videos. We had Jessy Tolkan, fresh out af a meeting with Al Gore, Bill McKibben came, Daryl Hannah, and even George Monbiot from The Nation to name a few. It was a blast, I’m telling you. If you watch nothing else, see Mike’s introduction and the announcement by Jessy Tolkan (leader of the Energy Action Coalition.) Jessy had zero time to prepare, and I still get goosebumps when I think of her video. It is on the top of the column of videos on the left, in the middle of the three.

That’s it for this issue, my friends. I hope you don’t mind if I share some more stories in a couple of weeks. It’s my hope that you take away from my experience an enthusiasm for repairing the world creatively, and by taking chances, and putting yourself in the middle of the action. I would live to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to email me at peacefuluprising@gmail.com. Type “Attn. Ashley” in the subject line.

If you want in on the wealth of projects like these that we are currently working on, make sure you are on our Action Team!

Here’s to 2010 — the year we stopped asking for a livable future and started demanding it.

(And had a hell of a good time doing it.)

Ashley Anderson

In the essential film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard says, “Our primary identity has become that of consumer.” This is certainly a disturbing notion for those of us who are trying to steer our society toward sustainability.  Perhaps even more disturbing, though, is the way that environmentalists endorse and ultimately perpetuate this mutation of our humanity.

The vast majority of times green groups ask people to act, it centers on changing our consumption habits.  At first glance this makes sense.  If consumption is the problem, shouldn’t we try to change the way people consume?  The catch is that every time we focus on how individuals can change their consumption, we are sending the message that their real power to make a difference lies in how they shop.  This simply reinforces the cultural myth that the most important part of who we are as people is our role as a consumer.

That myth is a lie.  We are much more than consumers.  We are citizens of what was once the greatest democracy on the planet, citizens with the ability and responsibility to change our government.  We are human beings with the power to inspire others through our creativity, our sacrifice, and our courage.  These are the parts of humanity we must point to when we call others to action.

The focus on individual consumption habits comes from the notion that changes on any level start with personal transformation.  That is certainly true, but not all personal transformations are created equal.  Changing people from being obsessed with consumption to being obsessed with green consumption is not going to get us to real sustainability.  We need transformations away from consumer-centered identity into human-centered identity.  We need personal evolution into engaged and demanding citizens and into bold and creative activists.  We need the kind of transformations that awaken us to our own potential and remind us that we are not helpless.

Of course, those consumption habits do need to change if we’re going to have a livable future.  But to get that sustainable culture, who we are as consumers will have to become a small part of who we are as human beings.  When we start people on that road of personal transformation, we automatically attack that pathological overconsumption.  The spiritual void which begs for material consumption begins to be filled by a more human identity.  In order to truly be the change we want to see in the world, we environmental leaders might have to stop talking to people about their consumption so much.

When I ask people to take action against climate change, they often think what I’m asking them to do is impossible.  If someone only sees herself as a consumer, it makes sense that she cannot see her potential to be an agent of fundamental change in our society, economy or political system.  I suspect this is responsible for much of the helplessness many people feel when addressing huge issues like climate change.  Our job in Peaceful Uprising is to show people that they are not helpless.