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The Nation - 5/27/13 issue re: environment
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Thoreau's Radicalism and the Fight Against the Fossil-Fuel Industry (PART 1)Wen Stephenson | May 27, 2013
On a clear and seasonably cold Sunday morning in March, I made my way through the streets of an old neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, and entered a large, converted brick building from some other century. Inside, in a cavernous room with worn floors and south-facing windows lit by the sun, a group of seventy or more young climate activists—mostly college students and recent graduates from the Boston area, along with a few veterans of the Occupy and global justice movements—were gathering for a full day and night of final preparations before carrying out a dramatic peaceful protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. The company building the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, has its US Northeast office down the road in Westborough, and there, the next morning, twenty-five of these activists—accompanied by more than eighty others, young and old—would be arrested for conscientious, nonviolent civil disobedience.
These people, and those like me who support them, might with some fairness be called “radical”—not just because of their willingness to go to jail to express their principles, but because what they demand lies well outside the limits of mainstream partisan politics and conventional media wisdom.
How radical are they? They insist that those in power take seriously the international scientific consensus that says global greenhouse emissions must be cut at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and that two-thirds to three-fifths of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, if today’s young people and future generations are to have any reasonable hope of a livable climate. They insist, given this reality, that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry heed what leading scientists are telling them: that massive new long-term investments in fossil fuel infrastructure like the Keystone XL—which will only accelerate and prolong the extraction of carbon-heavy crude from the Alberta tar sands, one of the largest carbon pools on the planet—are unconscionable.
Those activists in Worcester and Westborough weren’t alone. As the battle over Keystone moves toward a climax this summer or fall, when Obama is expected to make a final decision, it has become the central rallying point for a broad and diverse climate movement at what looks like a pivotal, and “radicalizing,” moment. More and more, what Bill McKibben recently dubbed the “Fossil Fuel Resistance” is turning to nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to make its demands seen and heard.
The resistance has spread across the country. The fights are intensifying against mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia, coal exports from the West Coast and shale-gas fracking in the Northeast, with waves of civil disobedience actions. Most dramatically, along the Keystone’s southern leg from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast in Texas (greenlighted by Obama last year during his re-election campaign), members of the Tar Sands Blockade—including climate activists, property owners, indigenous groups and people from frontline communities—have put their bodies in the way of the pipeline’s construction, often at great risk, both physical and legal. In early March, CREDO Action issued a call to activists to resist the pipeline, and more than 59,000 people have now pledged to engage in peaceful civil disobedience if Obama approves it. Even the Sierra Club officially decided in February to participate in civil disobedience for the first time in its 120-year history. Its executive director, Michael Brune, was among forty-eight protesters arrested at the White House on February 13, three days before some 50,000 people rallied and marched in Washington to oppose Keystone and call for serious action on climate change—the kind of action that science, and conscience, demand.
* * *
When Brune announced the Sierra Club’s decision in January, in a short, eloquent piece titled “From Walden to the White House,” he explicitly invoked the legacy of Henry David Thoreau and, of course, Thoreau’s most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience.” For Brune, as for many other activists, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience is a sacred American tradition. “We’ll be following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau,” he wrote, “who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.”
And yet, as the climate movement embraces the legacy of “Civil Disobedience,” perhaps it’s worth taking a step back and remembering just how radical Thoreau really was—and why. We should remember what it was, exactly, that made him so. Not his night in the Concord jail—that was the easy part—but something else: a readiness to speak the truth, forcefully and without compromise, no matter how fanciful or extreme it may have sounded to jaded ears or what risks it might have entailed. What’s more, if we’re going to invoke Thoreau, we should remember that he was less an environmentalist (a term that would have made no sense to him) than a radical abolitionist—and that the logic of “Civil Disobedience” led directly, a decade later, to “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”
If that thought doesn’t make you pause, it should. We might want to ask ourselves if we’re really ready to walk in Thoreau’s footsteps, and what it might mean, at this radical moment, if we did.
Despite its global reputation for greatness, I have to admit that I’ve never much liked “Civil Disobedience,” the essay Thoreau began drafting in his cabin at Walden Pond in the fall of 1846. The tone is a little too arch, his performance somewhat preening. “I was not born to be forced,” he writes. “I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” Regardless of such posturing (or perhaps because of it?), you can’t help feeling that there’s not a whole lot at stake for him personally—that he was, in a way, slumming it there in jail for a night—so that it takes on the air of a privileged intellectual exercise, a kind of abstract thought experiment to be conducted, after a good dinner, in Mr. Emerson’s parlor.
Still, for all the mannered poses, there’s a reason the essay has lasted, that its influence extends across continents and centuries. So it’s worth reminding ourselves what Thoreau is really saying in “Civil Disobedience.” From a relatively minor incident, now wrapped in legend, in the last week of July 1846—he was stopped on his way into town to get a shoe repaired and asked to pay his poll tax, which he refused to do, though it meant jail—Thoreau gets down to first principles. The country was engulfed in controversy over the Mexican War, a flagrant act of aggression to expand slave territory to the west, and there was even secession talk in the North. But why, Thoreau wants to know, should he wait for a vote in the State House? “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?”
The moral equation, Thoreau is saying, isn’t terribly complicated. There are expedient reasons to recognize the authority of a government, as he admits. But he insists that we recognize those situations “in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.” He goes on, in the very next lines, to offer a stark analogy: “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself…. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”
From this straight-up, no-nonsense formulation, Thoreau lays down a marker, a point from which he’ll navigate. “Action from principle,” he tells us, “the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
This is strong stuff—and prophetic, in more ways than one. What we have here is a kind of working definition of Thoreau’s radicalism: call it the willingness to face the “essential facts” (as he put it in Walden), and then to act as both facts and conscience require. Doing so, he assures us, “is essentially revolutionary”—the only real way to change the world.
* * *
Thoreau’s image as a kind of misanthropic recluse, an apolitical hermit, has always been a caricature; what we know about his active involvement in the Underground Railroad, and his resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, puts the lie to it. Whether or not, as he hinted in Walden, Thoreau sheltered a runaway slave in his cabin at the pond—which seems unlikely, based on the evidence—we know that he helped multiple fugitives on their way to Canada, guarding over them in his family’s house (the Thoreaus were committed abolitionists, especially his mother and sisters), even escorting them onto the trains, not without personal risk.
In May of 1854, a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston. Radical abolitionists made a dramatic attempt to free him from the courthouse by force, and only with the intervention of state and federal troops on the streets of Boston was Burns sent back into slavery. On July 4, Thoreau took an unprecedented personal step into activism and mounted a platform at Harmony Grove in Framingham—alongside William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth and other prominent abolitionists—to address a boisterous anti-slavery rally. The speech, known as “Slavery in Massachusetts,” is merciless in its contempt for the Commonwealth. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” he told his audience. “Nature,” he proclaimed, “has been partner to no Missouri Compromise.” The plight of Anthony Burns, and so many other fugitives, had reminded him of his own uncompromising principle. Five years later, in the fall of 1859, it would be put to the test.
Henry Thoreau met John Brown in March 1857. Already famous, or infamous, for his bloody exploits in Kansas—today we would call them war crimes—Brown came through Concord on a speaking and fundraising tour of the Northeast. Thoreau and Emerson spent hours talking with him, sizing him up, and came away greatly impressed.
But not everyone in Concord was so taken with Brown—far from it—and when the news arrived in October 1859 of Brown’s deadly raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, reactions were sharply divided. The whole country was in an uproar. Even Brown’s erstwhile supporters quickly distanced themselves. Most of his co-conspirators—many with close ties to Concord—went into hiding, several fleeing to Canada. The atmosphere was tense, even dangerous, for those voicing solidarity with Brown.
Into this picture steps 42-year-old Henry Thoreau, now a leading intellectual. Incensed by the timid and hypocritical reactions of his neighbors, and of the press, Thoreau let it be known that he would speak in support of Brown at Concord’s First Church on October 30. The address he gave was “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”
That fall of 1859 was Thoreau’s most radical moment. He was the first in Concord, and among the first and most prominent in the country, to come to Brown’s defense. Within days he would repeat the speech to large audiences in Boston—where he stood in at the last moment for Frederick Douglass, who had been chased into Canada by federal marshals despite having played no part in the Harper’s Ferry raid—and in Worcester.
Thoreau's Radicalism and the Fight Against the Fossil-Fuel Industry (PART 2)The speech itself is stunning. What Thoreau was saying in his “Plea” for Brown was the same thing he’d said a decade earlier in “Civil Disobedience”—“action from principle…is essentially revolutionary”—only in far stronger terms, and with real skin in the game. What was once a kind of philosophical exercise was now in deadly earnest: Brown’s raid and certain execution—not to mention the risk of publicly aligning oneself with him—made Thoreau’s night in jail look like child’s play. (The day after Brown’s hanging in early December, Thoreau became an accomplice in the escape of a desperate Harper’s Ferry conspirator, spiriting him out of Concord to a train for Canada.)
But what I find most striking about Thoreau’s “Plea” isn’t the fact that he championed the violent and fanatical Brown; it’s the rhetorical strategy he chose. Thoreau explicitly sets out to defend him not in the court of conventional opinion, nor of any state or constitution, but in the court of conscience. “I plead not for his life,” Thoreau tells his audience, “but for his character—his immortal life.” Most of all, and most profoundly, it becomes clear, this means pleading for Brown’s sanity.
Nothing offends Thoreau more than the knee-jerk reaction among his neighbors, and even many abolitionists, to write Brown off as a madman. “Even the Liberator called it ‘a misguided, wild, and apparently insane…effort,’” he writes. “Republican editors…express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men ‘deluded fanatics’—‘mistaken men’—‘insane,’ or ‘crazed.’” This pushes Thoreau over the edge: “Insane!… while the sane tyrant holds with a firmer gripe [sic] than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon!… Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane.” Far from insane, Thoreau argues, Brown was the “superior man,” even Christ-like—an explicit, if rather strained, comparison throughout the speech.
In defending not only Brown’s actions but his sanity against the moderate opinion of what we might call the “center” and “center-left,” Thoreau was pushing hard on the boundaries of acceptable discourse. He was, as the saying goes, moving the center. He forced his listeners to consider what was truly “sane” and “insane” in the face of slavery. For Thoreau, Brown’s was a “saner sanity,” recognizing the fact that slavery, intolerable on every level, would never be abolished in the United States without bloodshed. This is what it meant, Thoreau was saying, to be sane in America in 1859.
“In my walks, I would fain return to my senses,” Thoreau wrote (with characteristic wordplay) in the great essay “Walking”—first delivered as a lecture in April 1851, in the midst of the uproar over another escaped slave, Thomas Simms, who had been seized in Boston and returned to the South. It’s the same essay in which Thoreau wrote the line most quoted by conservationists: “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” In John Brown, Thoreau would encounter a human force of nature, a kind of wildness, that he hoped would bring the country to its senses, its sanity, on the question of slavery—the kind of sanity Thoreau had expressed in “Civil Disobedience”: “This people must cease to hold slaves…though it cost them their existence as a people.”
* * *
Fortunately, Thoreau—with his explicit endorsement of violence—didn’t get the last word on civil disobedience. Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others (including some environmentalists) transformed resistance to intolerable injustice in ways Thoreau never imagined—demonstrating the power of a steadfast, principled, radical nonviolence. Gandhi and King were the best kind of radicals. So was Jesus (whose nonviolence Thoreau conveniently omits from his “Plea”).
And yet today we face a human crisis as extreme in its way as the one faced by Thoreau. What is the “sane”—and appropriately radical—response to the urgent human crisis of global warming? Is anyone willing to say, “This people must cease to extract fossil fuels, and to unjustly rob today’s children and future generations of a livable planet, whatever the cost”?
It sounds crazy. But just as Thoreau and other radical abolitionists were willing to push the boundaries, so climate activists must be willing to say and do “crazy” and “radical” things—like put their bodies in the way of coal shipments, or demand that universities divest from fossil fuel companies—not because it’s politically expedient, but because it’s morally imperative. When the truly sane courses of action—putting a heavy price on carbon, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, massively scaling up clean energy, urgently seeking the necessary global commitments—lie outside the limits of political “realism” and “reasonable” debate, it’s time to ask who has the firmer grip on reality and reason.
And it’s time to take the strongest nonviolent action. As climate radicals, we need to be true to our understanding of the facts, and to our principles, our perception of right, even as conscience compels us to act—to be, crazy as it may sound, revolutionaries.
Mod
By the way, for others not real familiar with The Nation, it also has very good book reviews on occasion.
Another "by the way" ... Transition is by no means a "left-wing" movement, or at least shouldn't be. Unfortunately those on the other side of the political spectrum seem to be much less concerned by climate change, as a gropp. Of course many individuals in that group are very concerned, and should certainly feel welcome in this Goodreads Group.
And actually, even if an individual is unconvinced about climate change (or peak oil), Transition is about developing local-based living emphasizing sustainability and resilience. Many people can be enthusiastic about these goals regardless of their beliefs about anything else.
Note: I don't agree with Hansen's comments about "making government bigger" being bad - I think that phrase has been abused by the right and turned into something that it doesn't mean, but the rest of the speech seems valid.The Courage to Fight Climate Change {ARTICLE]
James Hansen and Joseph Romm | May 27, 2013
The annual Ridenhour Prizes, which memorialize the spirit of whistleblower and investigative journalist Ron Ridenhour, recognize acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society. (For more on the prizes, which are awarded annually by the Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, go to ridenhour.org [1].) This year’s Courage Prize went to James Hansen, who as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies bravely told the truth about climate change even when the Bush administration tried to silence and penalize him. Introducing Hansen at the awards ceremony in Washington, DC, was Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and founding editor of ClimateProgress.org [2]. Their speeches are printed below.
Introduction by Joseph Romm
Dr. James Hansen is being honored today in part because he told Congress: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.”
The courageous part isn’t what he said, it’s when he said it—twenty-five years ago, during the sweltering summer of 1988. It was the first high-profile public statement by a US government scientist alerting the country to this grave threat.
Jim embodies the Ridenhour Courage Prize. When he was still NASA’s top climate scientist, he blew the whistle on government efforts to silence him—and others—on climate change. Jim is a modern-day Paul Revere…if Paul Revere’s midnight ride had taken place in 1750 and the message was, “The British are coming, the British are coming—in twenty-five years.”
Yes, climate change is a challenging story to tell. And Jim has actually been telling it publicly since 1981, when he published his first warning that led to a major New York Times story, headlined “Study Finds Warming Trend That Could Raise Sea Levels.”
And yet carbon pollution has kept rising. We live in a spineless world, where being scientifically right for over thirty years gives you no more credit with the national media than being a professional disinformer funded by the fossil fuel industry.
How spineless is this world? If a doctor used the best science to diagnose a smoker as having early-stage emphysema and the doctor did not urge the patient to quit cigarettes, he’d be charged with malpractice. But if a climatologist uses the best science to diagnose an entire planet as having early-stage climate change, and he urges the world to start quitting fossil fuels, well, then he is labeled an alarmist by industry-backed groups.
The truth is that we should all be alarmed by this great moral crisis of our time. By destroying a livable climate, we are stealing the future from our children and grandchildren and countless future generations.
To save this spineless world from itself, supplying the truth isn’t enough. You need to supply the spine, too. You need to be courageous. And so Jim has been forced by the times—and by his moral convictions—to become an activist.
There is a saying that applies to Jim: “One man with courage makes a majority.” How many scientists have spawned an entire movement?
Five years ago, Jim explained that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” we need to return carbon dioxide levels back to 350 parts per million. That led to Bill McKibben founding the group 350.org.
Then Jim said that burning the tar sands would be “game over for the climate”—and that led to the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the biggest protests and civil disobedience the climate movement had ever seen.
And because Jim has the courage of his convictions, he has had the courage to be convicted himself—he’s been arrested five times at peaceful protests.
Fifty years ago, another great moral crusader was arrested for protesting—and he wrote a letter from his jail cell in Birmingham explaining why. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. on April 16, 1963. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Now more than ever, we are tied in a single garment of destiny, cloaked as a species in a protective climate that we are in the process of unraveling. And so the need for activism, the need for courage, the need to speak out, is as great as ever. As King put it, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
It is my singular honor to give you a man who will not have to repent, a man for all seasons, literally—the winner of the 2013 Ridenhour Courage Prize, Dr. James Hansen.
* * *
Acceptance Speech by James Hansen
Thanks, Joe, for your kind words and especially for the huge amount of important and effective work that you have done in informing the public about climate change. And thanks to the Ridenhour organization for their persistence in offering me this prestigious award.
I would like to use my several minutes here to summarize the truth about our current predicament with human-made climate change and the opportunity that this presents for dealing with fundamental problems faced by people in the United States and the rest of the world.
I must emphasize the threat posed by our current energy pathway and the fact that we are rapidly running out of time for changing our course. Yet I should emphasize equally that a sensible course toward abundant clean energy is not only possible, but could yield stronger economies with more equitable opportunities for all. Such a course is needed if we are to preserve and enjoy the remarkable life on our planet.
The carbon dioxide, CO2, that we put in the air by burning fossil fuels will stay in the climate system for millennia. We have only felt part of the climate response from the CO2 already in the air—the climate responding only slowly because of the great inertia of the massive global ocean and ice sheets.
The irrefutable scientific conclusion is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without handing our children, grandchildren and future generations a situation that is out of their control, with enormous consequences for their well-being and for the very existence of many of the other species on our planet. We must leave most of the remaining coal in the ground, as well as the carbon-intensive, highly polluting unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands and tar shale.
The task of leaving these dirty fuels in the ground and moving on to a bright future for today’s young people cannot be accomplished by trickery and gimmicks, such as carbon cap-and-trade and offsets, with their inevitable horse-trading and lobbying.
We must have a simple, honest, across-the-board carbon fee collected from the fossil fuel companies at the small number of domestic mines and ports of entry. All of that money should be distributed to the public—100 percent of it—with equal amounts going to all legal residents. The fee must continue to rise gradually, so the public, businesses and entrepreneurs have the incentive to make choices and develop products that reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use.
This will stimulate the economy as we develop more carbon-efficient products and energy sources. About 60 percent of the people will get more money in their monthly dividend than they pay in increased prices, but to stay on the positive side, they must make wise choices. Yes, this implies some wealth redistribution. Low-income people, if they try, can gain somewhat. Rich people who have multiple houses and fly around the world will pay more than they receive in their dividend, but they can afford it.
This approach can be made international via an agreement between the United States and China. China has many reasons to join, as climate disruption will hit the Chinese hard, and they need to solve their severe pollution problems. Other nations will then join in order to avoid border duties on their products and in order to gain the clean energy benefits.
The United States must exercise leadership. This is the last chance for the liberal left and the conservative right to cooperate for the good of the nation and the world, for the good of young people, future generations and nature.
What I have described is a progressive conservative approach. It puts an honest price on fossil fuels, making them pay their costs to society. It allows all alternatives to compete on a level playing field.
We must demand that the liberal left keep their hands off of our wallets. Not one dime of the carbon fee should be used to make the government bigger. One hundred percent of the money must go to the public. Nor should any of this money be used for subsidizing research on specific government-selected industries. The government is not competent to choose the best technologies—let them all compete. There are existing government resources and departments for research, development and demonstration, which can assist early development of candidate technologies.
The public is fed up with self-indulgent partisanship. If today’s parties cannot cooperate on such a simple, honest approach that would stimulate our economy, provide millions of good jobs, a clean environment and a stable climate, then in 2016 there should be a new party—not a fringe party on the left or right, but a centrist party, an American Party, a party that will take Washington back from the lobbyists and give it to the American people.
Sure, Ted! I thought these articles were quite apropos. How radical...what is required to induce change...these are essential questions. How to wake the world up to the desperate need for change?
Here's the issue: