I’ve quoted Tim DeChristopher already, and perhaps it’s appropriate to share here why I think his perspective is so important and useful. I wrote the following words in early 2013, for a Deep Transition workshop at the College of Holy Names, in Oakland, CA, so it’s a bit dated, but it represents the intersection of the lives and stories of evolutionary catalysts who have had a profound impact on our understanding.
In mid-February 2013, a provocative essay by Wen Stephenson appeared in the Phoenix in Boston, under the banner “Global Warming Is the Great Moral Crisis of Our Time: Why the Climate-Justice Movement Must Embrace Its Radicalism to Fight It.” What Stephenson writes about is very relevant to us here, and very timely.117
Stephenson reveals one of the most interesting evolutionary catalysts we have learned about in the last couple of years: Tim DeChristopher, who in 2008 disrupted a Bureau of Land Management auction of oil and gas leases by managing to win bids worth $1.8 million for some twenty-two thousand acres of public land near Canyonlands National Park—bids he had no intention of paying for (and no means). Stephenson writes, “He had acted spontaneously, on his conscience, engaging in nonviolent resistance to the heedless new extraction of fossil fuels that are catastrophically heating the planet and threatening innumerable innocent lives.”
It took a long time, but DeChristopher was finally sentenced to two years in prison, plus a $10,000 fine. At his sentencing, he stood quietly defiant before the judge and said, “This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.”
His long and eloquent statement at his sentencing helped to galvanize a growing climate-justice movement. About a month after DeChristopher spoke those words, one of the largest civil-disobedience actions in a generation began as fifteen thousand people surrounded the White House, and 1,253 climate activists were arrested, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, the project that is slated to tap the second-largest carbon deposit on earth. President Obama apparently listened and temporarily delayed the tar-sands pipeline.
But the story continues. Last Sunday, February 17, some forty to fifty thousand people converged on Washington to demand that Barack Obama reject the pipeline once and for all. Bill McKibben was, of course, one of those arrested in front of the White House. Again.
I remember when he came to Boulder last year, a very tired McKibben reported that he had just gotten a call from his wife, who had said, “Do you realize that in the last year you have spent more nights in jail than you have at home?” I was deeply touched by this, and it made me question my willingness to put my own body on the line the way that Bill has.
The climate crisis has a particularly unforgiving time limit, poignantly summarized in McKibben’s statement: “If we don’t solve it very quickly, we won’t solve it.”118 That’s why McKibben has been flying all over the planet in search of a way to slow the juggernaut. He says about all this travel, “I have the worst carbon footprint on the planet. So wherever I go, I need to make what I do there really count.” Clearly, Bill McKibben is an evolutionary catalyst, and he is about as radical as they come.
What Stephenson points to in his essay is that those who are fighting against global warming, if they are to have any significant impact, are going to have to significantly ramp up their radicalism. They must become as radical, he suggests, as those heroic abolitionists who brought slavery to an end in the nineteenth century. It’s a powerful thought, and it’s not something that Stephenson came to lightly.
In the many months between DeChristopher’s conviction and his sentencing, he was interviewed by the British socialist magazine Red Pepper. “We are at a time in our movement,” he said, “where we need to be honest”—that it’s “too late to stop a climate crisis,” and that averting unthinkable catastrophe will now require deep, urgent, transformative changes. “We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change, of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society.”119
Stephenson was personally very disturbed by this. He thought, “No! What are you doing? You can’t say that stuff. This sort of talk, if it goes too far, has consequences. People are listening to you now. If the movement radicalizes, we’ll alienate people, we’ll be marginalized, we’ll never get anything from Congress—we’ll sacrifice genuine, if incremental, progress for the sake of some kind of moral, or ideological, purity. And we don’t have time for that. We have to take whatever progress we can get.”
By his own admission, Stephenson was still trying to fit his ideas of what needed to be done inside the suffocatingly cramped quarters of the “politically possible” at that moment. He had yet to fully face the facts of the situation in front of us. He wasn’t as far along as DeChristopher.
And then, toward the end of 2012, came the flood of new perspective on global warming, essentially what I shared with you last night, and it was heartbreaking. The impact on Stephenson was profound, and by late December, he hit bottom—in despair for the planet and his children’s future. I think a lot of other people hit bottom around the same time—people who were paying attention. That period of time was a very difficult moment for many of us.
At about that same time, in the darkness of the winter solstice, Stephenson read an interview with DeChristopher in Orion magazine, by Terry Tempest Williams. As Stephenson tells it, “What happened, quite simply, is this: DeChristopher, a convict, convicted me.”
In that interview, DeChristopher tells of the “shattering” moment in March 2008 when he met climate scientist Terry Root, a lead IPCC scientist, at a symposium at the University of Utah.
She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterward and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the 1980s, there are some things we could have done in the 1990s—but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.”
That was shattering to me. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.”
And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth.
But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future—of a career and a retirement and all that stuff—I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.
For evolutionary catalysts like ourselves, these are very important words to hear and to take in.
Actually, DeChristopher does allow some hope, as we saw in chapter three. He says, “I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one.” In response to these stirring words, Stephenson writes, “DeChristopher expresses here what I had been repressing. He knows that building the sort of movement that can ‘fight back’—and create the conditions in which we can build that better world—will require something of us beyond the ordinary conduct of politics. The climate crisis, he says, justifies ‘the strongest possible tactics in response,’ by which DeChristopher means ‘nonviolent resistance.’ That doesn’t mean everyone has to go to jail, he says, but ‘the willingness for that is what’s necessary. That willingness to not hold back, to not be safe.’”
The willingness to not be safe.
Let me just read from the conclusion of Stephenson’s powerful essay, where he really puts it on the line. This is Stephenson awakening as an evolutionary catalyst.
Tim DeChristopher is an abolitionist.
I know that DeChristopher can be a little scary. He scared the shit out of me.
But here’s the rub: today, in our present crisis, one can easily argue that those who will have the “blood” on their hands, will not only be the denialists and the obstructionists on the right, but the moderates, the cautious pragmatists—the reasonable, serious, center-left types—who fail to acknowledge the true scale, urgency, and gravity of the climate crisis, and so fail to address it in any meaningful way.
People like that (and I was one of them) will say that people like DeChristopher have no “plan,” no “workable solutions.” But as any number of seasoned activists will tell you, it’s not Tim DeChristopher’s or the climate movement’s job to offer detailed policy prescriptions that fit within the confines of our current politics. The movement’s job is to tell the truth, however extreme—and to force those in power to recognize that even the outer limit of what our current politics will allow (a modest carbon tax, for example) is utterly inadequate to the crisis. Its job is to force that reckoning. To confront—and be prepared to sacrifice.
Yes, radicalism still carries risks, as it always has. But today those risks are mainly political, in the near-term. And at a moment when political possibility is closed off, we have to ask, are we actually risking anything meaningful at all? You might say I’m understating the risks of radicalization, that there may be other real consequences, from the personal to the social: that friendships, marriages, families may be torn apart; jobs lost, careers ruined, life options foreclosed; that there will be economic hardship, that social unrest, even violence, could erupt (just ask anyone over 55). Yes, I understand.
Meanwhile, the risks of moderation, of accepting and working within our current political constraints, are infinitely more grave. The risks of moderation are a matter of life, death, and suffering for untold millions of human beings, alive today and yet to be born. If we can’t radically alter our politics—radically expand the limits of what’s politically thinkable, as the abolitionists did in Lincoln’s day—then we might as well not even talk about “climate action.”
We might as well change the channel, and drift back to sleep.
Just to bring this back to our own calling as evolutionary catalysts here, I’d like to read the conclusion of DeChristopher’s interview in Orion.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: How has this experience—these past two years—changed you?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER, sighing: It’s made me worry less.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Why?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: It’s somewhat comforting knowing that things are going to fall apart, because it does give us that opportunity to drastically change things.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I’ve watched you, you know, from afar. And when we were at the Glen Canyon Institute’s David Brower celebration in 2010, I looked at you, and I was so happy because it was like there was a lightness about you. Before, I felt like you were carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders—and you have broad shoulders—but there was something in your eyes, there was a light in your eyes I had not seen before. And I remember saying, “Something’s different.” And you were saying that rather than being the one who was inspiring, you were being inspired. And rather than being the one who was carrying this cause, it was carrying you. Can you talk about that? Because I think that’s instructive for all of us.
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I think letting go of that burden had a lot to do with embracing how good this whole thing has felt. It’s been so liberating and empowering.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: To you, personally?
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. I went into this thinking, It’s worth sacrificing my freedom for this.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: And you did it alone. It’s not like you had a movement behind you, or the support group that you have now.
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Right. But I feel like I did the opposite. I thought I was sacrificing my freedom, but instead I was grabbing onto my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time, you know? Finally accepting that I wasn’t this helpless victim of society, and couldn’t do anything to shape my own future, you know, that I didn’t have that freedom to steer the course of my life. Finally I said, “I have the freedom to change this situation. I’m that powerful.” And that’s been a wonderful feeling that I’ve held onto since then.
And so it often is for an evolutionary catalyst. We, too, are that powerful, if we allow ourselves to be. That is, we can allow the power of the forces of evolution to move in us and through us.
There’s a postscript to all this, and it comes from Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, who is now working on a book and a film about global warming120 and who actually has been working closely with Bill McKibben and 350.org. Wen Stephenson also interviewed and wrote about her in the Phoenix.121
According to Stephenson, the message that McKibben and Klein are carrying to the environmental and Occupy movements goes like this: “Look, this is it: science tells us that time is running out, and everything you’ve ever fought for is on the line. Climate change has the ability to undo your historic victories and crush your present struggles. So it’s time to come together, for real, and fight to preserve and extend what you care most about—which means engaging in the climate fight, really engaging, as if your life and your life’s work, even life itself, depended on it. Because they do.”
Klein told Stephenson of her challenge in persuading the leftists of the Occupy movement in New York to take on global warming. “For a really long time,” Klein told him, “lefties thought climate was the one issue they didn’t have to worry about, because big, rich green groups had it covered. And now it’s like, actually, they really don’t. That was a dangerous assumption to make.”
She related her encounters with Yotam Marom, one of the key leaders of Occupy Wall Street, who had been quite resistant to integrating climate into his worldview. But Hurricane Sandy had changed him, as it did so many others. “He said something so insightful,” said Klein. “When he thinks about why he was resistant, he realized that if he accepted the reality of climate change, truly accepted it into his body, his soul, then he would have to drop everything he was doing. And he doesn’t want to drop everything he’s doing.”
But what Klein is trying to say to those like Marom is that they don’t have to drop everything. “In fact,” she says, “you need to do it even more.”
And here’s the point, as Naomi Klein puts it: “Climate change lends urgency to our fights for social justice, like nothing else before. We have to win these battles against free trade, we have to win these battles to re-localize our economies. This isn’t just some little hobby. So it’s not about abandoning all of those fights, it’s actually about supercharging those fights and weaving them all into a common narrative. That’s the story we need to tell.”
Naomi Klein is, of course, an evolutionary catalyst.
And so are all of us here.