Historic Climate Trials Begin Today in Skagit County

Activists who “shook the North American energy industry”, not cowed In new political era

Over the years that I’ve been giving speeches, workshops, and interviews, I have frequently said that the climate movement is going to have to get a lot tougher.  I usually say this in the context of acknowledging the hard truths of the catastrophic levels of climate change that are now inevitable, based on my assumption that it would take some time to toughen up enough to be ready to deal with difficult situations when they arrive.  My experience in DC last week protesting the inauguration of the Trump regime has caused me to question and deepen some of those assumptions about how to approach these challenging times.

On Friday, January 20th, I was part of the climate movement contingent that was blocking the Red Gate checkpoint for people entering the inauguration ceremonies.  The inauguration had a massive security barrier around the National Mall with several large, airport style screening areas that funneled people into the secured area.  As other social justice movements blocked other gates, our crew of about 400 climate activists blockaded the checkpoint marked Red Gate at 3rd St. and D St. NW.  Around 8am, we stretched across the street with several lines of people with linked arms and unfurled banners about climate justice.

It was immediately a chaotic scene.  Several Trump supporters who happened to be mixed up in our large group took a while to figure out what was going on.  Some turned around or tried to go around us. The police started escorting some Trump supporters over a small wall to our right and through the grass behind us, but this was a slow, single-file trickle compared to the wide flow of people for which the checkpoint was designed. 

Climate Disobedience Center Co-Founder, Ken Ward, heads to trial January 30th

Ken Ward is headed to trial on January 30th for shutting down a tar sands pipeline. We'll be tweeting from @ClimateDisobey and posting at the action Facebook page. You can learn more about the action and trial support at ShutItDown.Today. Please consider a donation to help us support Ken and the other Valve Turners throughout the trial process.

The day before he took the action, Ken talked about his thoughts the day before he took action in October 2016. 

On October 11th, 5 activists shut down all five pipelines carrying Canadian tar sands into the US. This is their story.

Friends,

Despite the obvious threats we face as activists and as a civilization, I feel deeply grateful for where my life is at right now. In addition to my personal fulfillment, I’m grateful for the ability to do meaningful work as an activist struggling for a better world. Nearly everything that defines my life today can be traced back to that fateful act of civil disobedience I took in 2008. And the main reason that this has been such a positive and joyful path was the resolute support I received from thousands of people across the country.

When I stuck my neck out, countless people stepped up to lend their support physically, morally, and financially. They gave me the courage to make the most of the opportunity I had, and they generously donated to make sure I had the resources to sustain the struggle. Many of you who are receiving this email were among the folks who gave your time, money, and emotional energy. 

In this post, Climate Disobedience Center Founders engage one another in conversation about our individual initial thoughts on post-election strategy. We have decided to have this conversation publicly and openly. We are not running our ideas or words by one another before we post them because we know that our best strategies emerge through conversation. We hope you will engage this conversation in the comments sections of the blog posts associated with this discussion. The original Thoughts on Post-Election Strategy post will serve as the table of contents for all posts related to this discussion. You can use it as a reference point to help you find other threads of the conversation.

These are my first thoughts, and I hope you will share your ideas. For links to post-election thoughts from my fellow Climate Disobedience Center Founders and updates on the conversation, click here.

With the election of Donald Trump, we are entering a different chapter for the climate movement in this country, one in which we will be fighting against a substantially different kind of power structure than previous administrations.  Many of the lessons and principles developed in previous struggles will still be applicable, and some will be more important than ever.  But some of our strategies, tactics and even organizing structures may have to be completely rethought.  We’ve got some ideas about moving forward, but we still have a lot of unanswered questions as well.  Answering some of these might take imagination and creativity, and others might take an agonizing wait to find out just how despotic a Trump regime will be.

These are my first thoughts, and I hope you will share your ideas. For links to post-election thoughts from my fellow Climate Disobedience Center Founders and updates on the conversation, click here.

When we launched the Climate Disobedience Center, I argued that we should define “disobedience” more broadly than “civil disobedience” because we need to build a culture of resistance to business-as-usual in our communities. Post-election, I think it’s important to return to this idea – that building principled communities founded on love and the commitment to support one another to disrupt business-as-usual is disobedience. We need to prioritize working with people to develop loving and resilient communities of resistance in order to foster the courage and support that will be required to hold on to the gains we’ve made to date and perhaps even to carve out a few wins against an emboldened fossil fuel industry along the way.

These are my first thoughts, and I hope you will share your ideas. For links to post-election thoughts from my fellow Climate Disobedience Center Founders and updates on the conversation, click here.

Before jumping into post-election analysis a short reality-grounding. I want to start with a bit of context of where we are with the climate - the life support system for all of humanity which in it’s unraveling is bringing and will bring devastation and death in epic proportions to the most vulnerable populations around the globe first. Consider this week’s news that we’ve broken the North Pole: it’s running 36°F hotter than normal right now. It is clear we need dramatic action NOW - not four years from now. But how do we get there?

Like pretty much everyone else in the climate movement, the election of Donald Trump has caused us at the Climate Disobedience Center to think long and hard about our strategy for moving forward.  We are not all on the same page yet, and we're not comfortable pretending that we've got things figured out.  We offer our thoughts and conversation via our posts (linked below), and our conversation will continue as updates (we'll add the links here). Please feel free to offer your own thoughts about anything we said, or anything we missed, in the comments sections for each post. 

Tim DeChristopher's Thoughts on Post-Election Strategy

Marla Marcum's Thoughts on Post-Election Strategy

Jay O'Hara's Thoughts on Post-Election Strategy

Stay tuned for thoughts from Ken Ward

Follow the discussion: In Post-Election Strategy Conversation (Round 2), we engage in some back-and-forth conversation about the ideas each of us shared in the posts linked above.