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A New Strategy for Green Activism: An Open Letter from Charles Secrett
“Dear green activists,
What more can NGOs do to help humanity out of the mess we are in? Tried and tested campaign tactics, based on protest and outrage at the incompetence of governments and industry, are not working. It’s time to break free from a perpetually defensive mode, and go on the offensive. Spark the reasonable revolution.
We need something much more powerful than just direct action or lobbying to encourage politicians, companies and communities to change course and tread a development path where the needs of people and nature are jointly met. The necessary wealth, resources, technologies and ideas are out there. What is missing is the political will to implement.
As you constantly warn, we have about 10 years or so to turn around the juggernaut of industrialism, and our gobbling up of earth’s resources, before ecosystems start collapsing, species extinctions reach crisis point, and the fundamental stability and productivity of the biosphere (soils, oceans and atmosphere) enters a state of runaway change. That will be the point of no return for billions of people. Imagine the chaos.
First, appreciate how powerful you could be from pooling your efforts. In the UK, you employ thousands of staff, spend over £100m annually, and have millions of members. You speak for people from all walks of life, and all political persuasions. Globally, you can multiply those numbers by a factor of 10, and probably much more.
Second, stop working in parallel, and unite with other causes – development, human rights, poverty, public health, democracy, community well-being – under one banner: “For people, for the planet”.
The fundamental problems in these fields – authoritarian government, the dominance of selfish elites, rampant neo-liberal economics, and disdain for the workings of nature – are connected. So are the solutions, and therefore your agendas. By co-operating, you reach a critical mass to achieve your aims.
Third, every successful revolution has a compelling text at its heart – ideals, goals, words, images and examples that inspire the majority. Where is your equivalent of the Rights of Man, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, or Little Red Book?
You need to agree a joint manifesto for life. Mine the library of sustainable development strategies to spell out a route map that can take humanity from where we are to where most want to be.
Collate the best solutions from public, private and community sectors into a compelling narrative. Pepper it with case studies of what works from around the world. Use simple language and pictures, not the professional jargon of sustainability-speak, to convince the silent majority that the alternatives exist.
Then, crowd-source the draft. Iceland is drawing up a new constitution like this. NGOs have the reach to try the approach globally. Bridge the traditional divides between north and south, east and west, where national governments and multinationals have failed. Help the public create a new world order, and confirm the principles, objectives and means to deliver political economies that work for people and nature.
That can build ownership of the outcome, and commitment to change, across cultures. Where the intelligence of elites has failed to motivate the mainstream, the wisdom of crowds can succeed.
Fourth, build a cross-party political consensus in every nation. You have extensive international networks, and are embedded and respected in most countries.
Societal change is about power, and who wields it and why. Your regular interaction with government and companies is not the same as real influence. You must systematically generate significant pressure to change the failing business-as-usual provision of energy, food, housing, jobs, welfare and the other things that people require for a good life.
Power resides with voters, tax-payers and constituents. No government can rule without citizen consent.
Use the manifesto, and specific proposals for policies, regulations, tax-codes and spending priorities that make environmental, economic and social sense, to show how people’s lives will improve from their adoption. Natural allies include scientists, gardeners, fishers, farmers, foresters, sports-people, outdoor recreationalists – tens of millions of people who depend on a clean, healthy environment.
Organise locally in every constituency to build formidable alliances between your supporters, other community groups, unions and local businesses.
The imperative is to hold government and industry to account at elections and between elections, at AGMs and throughout the year. If they don’t respond, motivated electorates and shareholders can throw the bums out.
Fifth, do the same in markets. Business too needs a license to operate. Consumers, shareholders and investors are the kings and queens of commerce and industry. No company will invest in, make or sell services and products that people won’t buy, or shareholders reject. It’s another opportunity to organise and mobilise.
Business allies are in sectors like insurance and pension funds that depend on stability and continuity in economy and ecology. And, the entrepreneurs and innovative companies who deal in clean, green and smart technologies, vehicles, products and infrastructure that reconcile a steady-state economy with a steady-state biosphere.
Activists and executives can speak with one voice to help decision-makers break free of ideological chains for what works. Neither left nor right, but forward, as the German greens used to proclaim.
By taking these steps, you can create the opportunity for governments at global summits to find common cause and tackle climate change, deforestation, ocean depletion, destructive trade patterns, human rights abuses et al – and escape the groundhog day experience of always being bitterly disappointed at every meeting.
Finally, accept certain campaigns are not winnable, and simply drain resources. Absolutist positions do not hold up for the majority. Because of climate change, this probably includes total opposition to nuclear power and GM products globally. Focus instead on the conditions where these technologies become acceptable: safe, economic, free of patent control by a few companies, and effectively regulated.
This is how NGOs can help mobilise a majority to back changes that give the poor and downtrodden, let alone my son and your children, a fighting chance of enjoying as decent lives as you and I do.
Yours sincerely,
Charles”
Source: http
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People who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have one.
– Banksy -
It’s kind of a daft, self-congratulatory image produced to show the world how conscious the producer is … However, it has a very good point.
(via gemma-kristina)
Source: dbish
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This is not the kind of thing I’d usually blog. Having said this however it did overcome my gnarled cynical circuits and brought a chuckle to my morning.
(via bookshelfporn)
Source: scissorsandthread
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I want the world of blogging to be better than it is.
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– F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. (via gottaseethedopeness)And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Source: gottaseethedopeness
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We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
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I would say that the overview of American intervention in the Middle-East here is reductionist of course, but not inaccurate. The beauty of this quote lies not in the details but rather its coercion of the reader to see things from a different perspective.I was saddened by America’s reaction to the assassination of Bin Laden. Sometimes violence is necessary, but to celebrate it is to reduce to barbarism.
The celebrations for me were indicative of what is being said here. Terrorism is bad and it is born from anger. The West has committed itself, and rightly so, to the prevention of terrorism yet what many fail to do is ask ‘why are they angry?’ Until the roots of discontent are discovered and dealt with, terrorism will occur. Furthermore, terrorism is not something which can be stamped out with force. Force can be used against armies because armies run on tanks and fuel and bullets; resources. Destroy enough resources and the army will diminish and cease. Terrorism runs on fanaticism. Fanaticism is the product of warped ideology applied to anger and discontent. The more force you use, the more you oppress, the more you galvanise and appear to justify the warped ideology.
I saw an interview on the BBC with an insurgent in Iraq. The reporter asked him why he had chosen to take up arms against those who were coming to liberate him. He responded by telling of how he used to be a merchant with a family. He didn’t like the regime under Hussein, but he had other things to worry about, like where his next meal was coming from. When the US invaded, they opened their campaign with operation ‘shock and awe’ which was a very flamboyant bombing campaign. It claimed to only target places of military significance yet we all watched on the television images of explosions throughout the center of Baghdad. This campaign hit everything from military command centres to schools and hospitals. The insurgent in question had lost all his children and his wife to an American bomb.
My point is that the ‘war on terror’ will not be won with guns but with aid. Improve the quality of life of those in poverty-stricken regions and they will not be so susceptible to fanatics. Help build infrastructure, agriculture, education and healthcare and we will quickly find that people are less inclined to listen to those trying convince them to blow themselves up.
Chomsky has highlighted how alien it is to view things from a different perspective but until people do, we will all continue to suffer.
(via gemma-kristina)
Source: soupsoup
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When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
– Maya Angelou (via libraryland)Source: libraryland
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The ‘Slut Walk’ Protests: Progressive Movement or the Product of Misinterpretation?
From what little I have read regarding the US born ‘slut walk’ protests against miscalculated comments by a Toronto policeman (and it is very little; I am open to further enlightenment if I myself am guilty of misunderstanding) I can’t help but get the impression the whole thing is a big misunderstanding.
The policeman in question voiced his advice in a manner deeply insensitive to any women who may have suffered sexual assault and for that, he certainly needs a good telling off. But I somehow, I think it’s highly unlikely that his advice was a calculated move to place blame on the victims of such crime.
Was his bumbling gaff conceived to absolve rapists, or was it a very poorly judged attempt to persuade some women to consider the unacceptable yet lamentably inherent fact that the world is a dangerous place?
I think that as an officer of the law who has probably seen many victims of unspeakable crimes and may even have a family of his own, it was probably not the former.
I do not approve of his comments, though I think anger should be directed at his choice of words, rather than what he was trying to express.
Source: http
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(via bookshelfporn)
Source: weheartit.com
