Climate change is an impossibly hard problem. To fully understand it would require many distinct ways of knowing, almost certainly more than one person could ever master. Continued changes and unpredictability are guaranteed by the chemistry of the atmosphere and the inertia of industrial human civilization. The effects of these changes are unjust, suffered by those with the least power to prevent them—poor and marginalized human beings and nonhuman creatures.
So, what can we do? This is a dangerous question. Too often, we ask what to do in the face of a complex problem but are only open to easy solutions. We look for a way to feel as if we have done something—donated money, bought a more efficient appliance, or wagged a finger at someone doing more harm than ourselves—in hopes that it will be enough. Or we look for the promise of an easy answer through technology or politics, hoping we can feel righteous or optimistic while trusting others to solve the problem. If “what can we do” means seeking an easy solution to climate change, there is no answer. Climate change is a wicked problem; we will not solve it.
But of course that does not mean there is nothing to do. To the contrary, this book has argued that there is a great deal that privileged people in the industrialized world can and should do if we learn from five witnesses who demonstrate resistance against structural violence.
There is danger in valorizing such witnesses. It is easy to think that these impressive women and men are different from you and me, that they are a special class of person with whom we have little or nothing in common. The theologian Brian Mahan captures this well, writing about the danger of “round[ing] up ‘the usual suspects’—Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr.”—to teach about living a meaningful life. It is easy to respond dismissively, saying, “Yes, they lived lives like that. And we really all love them. They even make us cry sometimes. But after all, there’s only three of them.”1 We could add a few more names to Mahan’s list but must recognize the impulse to which he points—celebrating the wisdom and action of amazing people can make the rest of us feel distant and ineffectual rather than empowered. The witnesses cited in this book are impressive, but after all there are only five of them. Surely the rest of us cannot be expected to do what they did?
No, we cannot. Of course not. We live in a different time, in a different world. We should not seek to be Chavez or King or Day or Addams or Woolman. We should be ourselves, in our time. But this does not let us off the hook. We cannot be them, but we can be like them insofar as that means devoting our lives to resisting violence without resorting to violence; I have argued throughout this book that we should do so. In order to make this more possible, I now seek to humanize these five witnesses slightly, to show the ways in which they are enough like us, and different enough from one another, that it is reasonable to use them as guides as we seek new paths forward. These witnesses teach us that resistance can be part of a fulfilled and joyful life, that there are diverse paths of resistance, and that resistance is never a finished project.
Having spent years with the words and stories of these five witnesses, there is one characteristic I fear I have not captured well in the preceding chapters. I have worked to represent the ways they committed themselves to nonviolent resistance against the dehumanizing and destructive forces around them and how they creatively and nobly sacrificed and struggled to make the world better. But I worry that the preceding chapters do not convey the fact that each one also took genuine pleasure in that work, enjoying life and the world even as they resisted violence.
Cesar Chavez named his German shepherds “Boycott” and “Huelga” (the Spanish word for “strike”), which reflects his down-to-earth sense of humor about his work. He frequently made gentle jokes at his own expense or against his political opponents. During the United Farm Workers’ first strike, he humbly told his biographer that he and the members of his union were still learning to nonviolently love grape growers and noted that “I think we’ve learned how not to hate them, and maybe love comes in stages.” He then wryly added, “Of course, we can learn how to love the growers more easily after they sign contracts.”2 In public speeches during that strike, while telling audiences to boycott grapes and wine produced by the Gallo corporation, he joked about a way to find out if wine was made by that company: “Drink the stuff, and if you get sick, that’s also Gallo wine.”3
Dorothy Day had a wickedly ironic sense of humor that she used to disarm overly serious and self-important people. When a deeply concerned wealthy woman asked Day what could be done about the rampant poverty in New York City, Day dryly replied, “Let’s blow it all up!”4 At the age of eighty-one years, she reported on a meal at the Catholic Worker House in her column, writing of “hard, baked potatoes for supper, and cabbage overspiced,” and adding this commentary: “I’m in favor of becoming a vegetarian only if the vegetables are cooked right.”5
Martin Luther King Jr. also loved good food, and he frequently enjoyed the company of family and friends around a table piled with southern delicacies. The last hour of his life was spent preparing for such a meal with close friends. A Memphis pastor’s wife had gathered the best cooks from her church to prepare roast beef, potatoes, macaroni and cheese, greens, sweet potatoes, pies, and ice cream. One of King’s final conversations was with the hotel owner who had served him lunch, and he promised her that if his dinner was not good “like that catfish we had, I’m going to come back and eat here.” Soon afterward, a friend was teasing that King was putting on weight and his clothes did not fit, and King laughingly agreed.6 The horrible tragedy of King’s assassination came next, but his last moments were filled with camaraderie and joyful anticipation of a good meal. This is a sign of the life he lived, appreciating the world even as he sought to make it more just.7
John Woolman has left a more serious record of his thought and life, and I do not know any stories of jokes or laughter from him. But his seriousness of purpose came from a desire to live happily. He believed that the most joyful people are those who truly and humbly listen to the voice of light and wisdom inside themselves. In his journal, he wrote, “Some glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true meekness. There is . . . right order in their temper and conduct whose passions are fully regulated.”8 In other words, Woolman sought to avoid greed, frivolity, and injustice because he believed they would ultimately be unsatisfying. His quest for a humble, peaceful life was a quest to find joyful balance.
Jane Addams also had a serious public presence, but in private she was a cheerful woman who enjoyed life. This is clearest in her deep friendships, which shaped and sustained her work while bringing her joy. She and the other women of Hull House frequently referred to themselves as “sisters,” and they depended utterly on each other. Addams’s closest relationship was with Mary Rozet Smith, with whom she spent most of her vacations and of whom Addams carried a painting when she traveled. In a letter to Smith, Addams wrote of her gratitude for their connection: “I feel as if we had come into a healing domesticity which we never had before, as if it were the best affection offered me.”9 Addams depended upon her friends and her companion, drawing strength and joy from her relationships.
Concerned people who are struggling for climate justice need friends and companions like Addams’s. We need to seek balanced and sustainable joy, as Woolman did. We need to enjoy good food and good jokes, as King, Day, and Chavez did. The challenges we face are real, the injustices are grim, and the future is uncertain. This makes it all the more important that we learn to enjoy our lives, here and now.
The five witnesses considered in this book enjoyed life in different ways, which is appropriate because they also did everything else in different ways. Each blazed a particular path in response to particular circumstances. In the lives recounted here, there was no single style of resistance against structural violence but instead a series of very different choices, some of which are in significant tension with one other.
John Woolman’s witness against slavery involved profound personal transformation; he sought to cleanse his life as much as possible from the trappings and privilege that a slave-holding society offered to white men. He stopped wearing dyed clothes and stopped expecting free labor as a witness against the violence of his society. Jane Addams was faced with an argument that she should live a similarly austere life when she visited Leo Tolstoy, who told her that she could only truly help the poor if she became poor herself. She considered his suggestion but ultimately rejected it as impractical. Addams continued to live as a wealthy woman who educated and empowered others while working toward a society where no one would be poor.
Addams’s success came largely from her pragmatism and her willingness to compromise. She was a strict pacifist but was willing to sign on to a political party’s platform that included war expenditures because she sought the best outcome possible in any given situation. By contrast, Dorothy Day was a woman of unshaking principle who drew moral authority from the consistency of her witness. So she refused to cooperate with a government that used violence, she abstained from paying taxes and voting, and she vocally opposed all preparations for war throughout her life, without compromise.
Day’s movement was effective because it was so specifically located. She established a residential community at the Catholic Worker house in New York City, from which she fought hunger by feeding people, spoke out for justice by writing about their plight, and formed a movement that still considers the New York house its heart. By contrast, Martin Luther King Jr. ran a movement that regularly changed location as circumstances changed and was defined not by where he lived but by where he found injustice. He made homes in Montgomery, Atlanta, and, briefly, Chicago, but his protests took place wherever he believed he could draw national attention to the evils of segregation—Albany, Birmingham, Saint Augustine, Selma, Chicago, and Memphis. King could have established a single community that modeled justice and peace, but instead he chose to take his protest to the streets of whatever city could advance his cause.
King’s protests were defined by his speeches, and he remains known today for his powerful voice, the passion of his words, and the soaring imagery he conjured. He was a preacher from a family and a culture of powerful preaching. By contrast, Cesar Chavez was a quiet speaker who made straightforward arguments in a monotone, with few flourishes. Audiences tended to listen closely because of Chavez’s personal virtue and experience rather than his delivery. Like King, Chavez was charismatic and intelligent. But Chavez expressed himself in a much quieter, less oratorically dynamic way.
One could describe many more distinctions between these five witnesses. Some were devout, some were lax; some were Catholic, some were Protestant; some were rich, some were poor; two were women, three were men; three were white, one was African American, and one was Mexican American. The important point is that there is no single witness here. In these five lives, one finds myriad options for how to resist structural violence. We can learn from this that there is much we could do to work toward climate justice, and so there will be multiple options as we discern what we should do.
One final commonality is worth stressing. All five witnesses left behind unfinished struggles. John Woolman opposed legalized slavery and economic inequality, both of which expanded during his lifetime. Jane Addams and Dorothy Day devoted their lives to feeding the hungry and opposing war, and yet people were still hungry and wars were still fought as they died. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez both stood up against racism and the systemic injustices that came with it, and yet racism persists. None of these witnesses defeated structural violence.
This would not have surprised them. Day cautioned her readers against a sense of responsibility for solving the world’s problems or seeking affirmation from any form of success. She asked, “And why must we see results? Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest.”10 King preached his last sermon with a profound hope for “the promised land” of a just future but also noted that “I may not get there with you.”11 They knew that the struggle would be unfinished, and they continued to struggle.
These witnesses were also incomplete because they were not aware of all the structural violence amid which they lived. Woolman, King, and Chavez paid too little attention to the oppression of women in their societies, in their movements, and in their own lives. Day was uninterested in criticisms of the Catholic Church’s intolerance toward diverse expressions of sexuality. Despite her pragmatism, many people during Addams’s life found her too politically extreme, while many who have written after her death have found her insufficiently radical. By twenty-first-century standards, Woolman was paternalistic, working to help slaves and Native Americans without first seeking to understand or empower them on their own terms. All five witnesses were imperfect, fallible people.
This would not have surprised them. Woolman, for example, has never had a critic harsher than himself. He writes in his journal that he committed to giving up dyed clothing only after being overwhelmed by “sadness” at his moral failings, “a sense of my own wretchedness” that drove him to “mourning.”12 Addams, similarly, devoted much ink to her mistakes. Her most famous book, Twenty Years at Hull House, intentionally included “the stress and storm” of her work, and she criticized herself for her naive ideas about her neighbors, her rude treatment of visitors, and the moral dilemmas she could not solve.13 All these witnesses knew that they had limits.
Chavez, King, Day, Addams, and Woolman were imperfect, and their work was unfinished. These facts would be discouraging—if one believed that they should have led blameless lives that achieved absolute victories. But these facts can, instead, be encouraging if one takes them as a sign that these five witnesses were human beings called to do their best in the world they found with the tools they had available. All of them succeeded admirably at that task. All of them finished that work.
To see these witnesses in this way also helps us to understand our own task in the twenty-first century. Concerned people should not hope to end the injustice, inequalities, and destruction of climate change. Climate change—like war, racism, and inequality—is a wicked problem. It will not end in our lifetimes. We can make progress against structural violence and seek to alleviate the suffering it causes, but we will not finish these projects. We can work to plant seeds, but we should not expect to reap a complete harvest. We can hope to glimpse the mountaintop, but we should not expect to live in the promised land.
We must also accept that we will make mistakes. Indeed, we are making mistakes right now. We are limited and imperfect, just as these five witnesses were. Even as we work toward climate justice, we are surely making assumptions that future generations will look upon harshly. As we consider what more we can do, we are surely ignoring voices that we should be hearing. When we struggle with our moral finitude, we are surely missing things we could be doing to make the world more just. But this need not make us hopeless, if we enjoy the good company in which it puts us. We are flawed—just like Woolman, Addams, Day, King, and Chavez. Like them, we should strive to do our best. And like them, we should accept that our best will never be perfect.
Climate change causes real pain and injustice in the world. This book has mentioned the plights of people who suffer from rising seas in Bangladesh, droughts in Sudan, encroaching homelessness Kivalina, and food shortages in Bolivia. As climate activists, we have the power to help these people, to alleviate some of this suffering. We can make the world more just. We can also continue to expand awareness of suffering in the nonhuman world, helping people learn to care about dwindling polar bear habitats, expanding kudzu, dying forests, and shrinking glaciers. We can do a great deal. But we cannot end all suffering and injustice. Realizing this will free us to do what we can. Our task is not to save the world but to resist structural violence as we encounter it, doing our best with the tools we have in the world as we find it.
So, as concerned people, what can we do about the injustice of climate change in the twenty-first century? We can work to enjoy a life of resistance; we can choose a path forward secure in the knowledge that there is no single, correct choice; and we can accept that our efforts will be limited and imperfect.
We can learn to see climate change as a form of structural violence linked to other forms of structural violence—like patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism. We can take up the legacy of nonviolent resistance against such structural violence in order to make the world more just.
We can attend to the witnesses of five US Christians who made their world better through their commitments to nonviolence. Like John Woolman, we can seek to purify ourselves from the trappings of violence as much as we are able. Like Jane Addams, we can work for changes in our neighborhoods, our nation, and the global community. Like Dorothy Day, we can find faith enough to love the world and our neighbors who suffer from economic injustice. Like Martin Luther King Jr., we can learn what it means to have a realistic and radical hope for the future. And like Cesar Chavez, we can make sacrifices for those less fortunate than ourselves and ask other privileged people to do the same. Finally, we can continue to look for more witnesses from throughout history and from our own time who inspire and instruct us.
So what can we do? We can work against the violence of climate change. We can work to become witnesses, leaving a legacy of resistance from which future generations can learn.
1.Mahan, Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose, 11.
2.Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez, 196.
3.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 80.
4.Quoted by Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker, 72.
5.Quoted by Roberts, Day and the Catholic Worker, 75.
6.Burns, To the Mountaintop, 447–49.
7.In his book on the common legacy of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, James Cone notes that they shared a willingness to link anger at injustice with humor at the ironies of an unjust world. He notes: “To fight for life is to experience the joy of life. To laugh, to have fun, is to bear witness to life against death. Freedom fighters are fun-loving people. Therefore, let us laugh, let us shout for joy, not as an indication that we are no longer angry but rather as a sign that we have just begun to fight.” Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, 309.
8.Woolman, Journal and Major Essays, 29.
9.Quoted by Joslin, Jane Addams.
10.Day, By Little and By Little, 92.
11.King, Testament of Hope, 263.
12.Woolman, Journal and Major Essays, 119.
13.Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, 42.