The People’s Climate March and Flooding of Wall Street were incredibly powerful reflections of popular frustration and vision. The reflections I have found on both rage a great deal, from absolute celebration, without a whisper of critique, to those who argue that the march did worse than nothing, and all of those participating were duped. Obviously I do not agree with the latter, and witnessed thousands of people on the streets at the People’s Climate March who clearly were self-organized and not about “corporate green” environmentalism. And while not a cynic, I also see the need for a critique of the structures and forms of organization that helped bring these actions into being, especially the People’s Climate March. So as to reflect at least a small sampling of the wide range of participants and organizers in the March, I spoke with four women who reflect upon the meaning and power of the March and Flooding of Wall Street. These women range from two who have dedicated their lives to changing the world, one, Rebecca Solnit, with her writing as well as her actions, and the other, Lisa Fithian, as an organizer, facilitator and trainer of activists. The second two women are more recent activists, with Sandra Nurse becoming most active recently with Occupy Wall Street in New York, and then being a part of the team that organized Flood Wall Street, and Amanda Rouse, a writer and mother, having always cared about the world, but it is now with the environment and the March in particular that she has become active.
Each begin by responding to the question as to their overall impressions of the March and Flooding, and then I asked them to speak a little to their personal and political background related to the issue of the environment and the defense of the earth.
Rebecca Solnit
It was exciting watching estimates for who would come rise and rise, though I worried the estimates of 200,000 were high. You never want less than your estimate, so it’s best to lowball it. But they were saying 250,000 just before, then 310,000 the day of, and 400,000 after. The mainstream media is no longer disparaging us by unrealistic underestimates.
As for the march itself, there’s two ways to talk about it. It was a truly beautiful thing in itself and a sign of how the movement has changed. Indigenous and frontline communities led the march, people were in high spirits, and conducted themselves festively and graciously, and the diversity was spectacular (and of course it represented New York City’s own diversity–there was, for example, a lovely little group calling themselves Sikhs for Climate Justice, just a handful of turbaned guys in shorts marching along and smiling). The section banners–We Have the Solutions; We Know Who’s Responsible–reflected that both technology and politics have evolved rapidly and the major climate-action groups are really on top of this. Increasingly over the past few years, it feels like people have come to terms with the reality that not only is this real, but it’s urgent and more important than everything else put together.
That’s what it was in itself. The other way to analyze it will become clear over time: was this a watershed, a turning point, a moment at which far more people became engaged and committed? We can only wait and see and do our best to make it happen.
I grew up in a progressive Bay Area context, so the environment was always a concern. I have known since I was doing rainforest activism in the 1980s that the environment is the bottom line. The earth is our physical reality, our precondition for all else: you want to have rights and freedoms, but if your body is poisoned to death, those don’t matter. You may win a political battle in another generation, but you can’t postpone the destruction of a species or place. Gone is gone forever, while voting rights that the suffragists of 1848 demanded were won by the feminists in 1920. It’s not okay to wait, but possible, on these other things. I have known about and taken climate seriously since 1989, but like nearly everyone else have been ineffectual on it. I really committed the week before the march to do more (and I have been donating, writing, marching, demonstrating and educating myself on this pretty substantially since about 2008 or so, but I could do and hope and intend to do more). It’s interesting going from the 1980s, when the armageddon of nuclear war was a pressing reality, to this pressing reality of climate apocalypse, if we go down the road the powers that be have us on currently.
Lisa Fithian
All major mobilizations of massive numbers of people have power and potential power. It is always good to be around 400,000 people who care about something. They can be effective in coalescing and consolidating what already exists and launching what more is to come.
The People’s Climate March (PCM) was space that reflected a vast diversity of people, across ethnicities, nationalities, ages, genders, occupations and beliefs.
It was a visual extravaganza harnessing the creativity of some of the best political street artists of our day into a pageant and story. It was a structure that allowed for decentralized participation through the creation of hub platforms to facilitate organizing within constituencies.
A multitude of organizing spaces including PCM, CJA, Climate Convergence, FLOOD that serve to complement each other, were all supported in one way or another by the massive PCM that came resource laden and a with a plan that will ultimately generate even more resources in the days to come. To what degree any of these other organizing forces had any decision-making role is unclear to me.
In the new world of social media, internet platforms, on-line organizing and click-ta-vist activism which is often organized by small groups of people setting pretty big agendas.
In this world emails and phone numbers are like currency and like most mainstream initiative the collective wealth that is amassed is ultimately supporting those who already have enormous privilege. Sure some trickles down or to the side and but is often not transparent and clear.
Funding often depoliticizes the work and we can see that affect on this moment – the work that was elevated was the mobilization/turn-out via social media, advertising and paid canvassers not training our movement or taking action.
I am an ordinary person who at a young age became aware of oppression and injustice, who then committed my life to working against it. My political work is rooted in practice more than ideology. My practice has been building collective power on the foundations of anti-oppression work, nonviolence, direct democracy, direct action and horizontal structures – each re-enforcing the other.
I have always found myself connected to the natural world, and have organized on a variety of environmental struggles. The climate collapse has the same roots of racism, militarism and consumerism. The unquenchable greed intentionally created by the capitalist who have no respect for the planet or life itself. Understanding these connections and the reality of climate crisis is what drove me into the streets on Sunday but even more on Monday in the peoples action to Flood Wall Street.
Sandra Nurse
My impressions of the PCM are: its was a nice, family friendly march with a lot of creativity shown. It was great to see many indigenous, youth and frontline community groups at the front and prioritized.
Flood wall street went better than I expected. As an organizer of it, I felt successful in disrupting business as usual in the financial district of Manhattan. I felt we achieved our goal of a strong unified action that showed our numbers, showed our strength and allowed many people to step into a direct action space.
In the days/weeks leading up most of us, including myself, were at complete capacity just trying to finalize all the last details. It feels like a blur. However, I feel like the week leading up provided a lot of energy and sudden capacity and many groups from out of town came in to help organizing trainings and the like.
I grew up as a military child overseas living in Asia, the Caribbean and then later going on to live in East Africa. I’ve had the privilege of seeing many places around the world and very early on I had a grasp on inequality. I understood how entire nations were being economically oriented around the extraction of their finite natural resource. I studied war economies and natural resource wars throughout my education because I was fascinated by the social psychological processes of heading into armed civil conflict over limited resources.
I also worked in Haiti for the World Food Programme and remember seeing the deforested mountains and the start of desertification in the north.
Amanda Rouse
I was moved to tears when I stepped off the subway with my daughter, thinking of how to explain what’s happening to the earth and what needs to be done: to show we care enough to change the momentum of overuse that humans have been increasing; to bring so many people from all over together, all wanting this care to shift with our hearts and minds; to create change. Having the opportunity to express the rage, anguish, and love with such a mass of others, even if one could hardly fathom the number until seeing pictures after, was inspiring and humbling.
During the march we kept getting slowed and stopped (I assume by police and traffic crossings and turns meant to slow our swelling numbers), and I wished that people could be left free to our own organic movement. It would have been more uniting and more powerful.
I remember being young and starting to learn about environmental exploitation and injustice. I had strong feelings for living beings, and this has continued. I have written essays at times, but no one movement has felt like the right one for me to join. I am inspired to write by this march and the multitudes of people involved. I understand there were at least 1500 different organized groups participating, along with many like my family who stepped out to join the effort, to be involved.
Each woman spoke to where they see and/or dream the movement going from here.
Rebecca Solnit
I want it to stop being a movement and become a new reality. I want us to implement all the clean-energy technologies now available–last week the NYT reported that we are now at a point where we could change to clean technology without sacrifice. I want us to recognize and live the reality that the changes required of us enrich rather than impoverish our lives. I want to see a world that abandons the expansionist profit-minded metaphors and methods of capitalism for stability and sustainability. I want us to have confidence in and love for the future–the future of babies like yours and my nephews and great-niece, but of all living things for a thousand years and more. I want us to give up thinking that we own the earth so thoroughly, we can destroy the water table that could serve for tens of thousands of years for some short-term fossil-fuel extraction (aka fracking). I want us to have agency in local economies, to eat food, wear clothes, sit on furniture in houses that are all the fruit of honest, decent modes of production that exploited or degraded neither human beings nor the earth. I want us to realize that less consumption means less production, that we in the first world can abandon disposable goods for dance parties and long walks and feasts and playing with kids and reading books or any other form of leisure and meaningful engagement.
Lisa Fithian
I believe we need to have a more serious conversation about where all of our movements are going. Are the strategies and practices leading us to the world we want or to the ongoing normalization and continuation of a broken and sick system.
The solutions for me are always rooted in organizing and people accessing their power to take collective action and build community. Our relationships and infrastructure that can keep us going particularly in the those movement ebbs or other difficult times.
I am dreaming of the day where people work accountably, honestly and respectfully. Where are movement are not exclusive siphoning off our wealth benefiting a few.
This mobilization prioritized the power of the media over the power of the people and worked to control it all. These are not the ingredient we need to stop this crisis and save what is left.
Perhaps the impending death that lies ahead will wake up even more to embrace the power of life and the compassion we need to survive.
And the willingness to do the hard work of organizing and building infrastructure to support us no matter what lies ahead.
Sandy Nurse
It’s not hard to see the urgency of our crisis, but it is harder to feel hopeful about it. I say that because I feel there is so much to overcome and I’m not sold on our abilities to change course at the speed we need to. I see a strong ripple was made during this mobilization and I do see many folks have stepped into the movement that were not here before. I’m just not sure moments like this are enough. I dream of the same millions that were poured into the march get directed to those stopping pipelines, shutting down natural gas wells, sleeping in trees, defending gardens, blocking tar sands, fighting against oil trains and more. Those groups need as many resources that went into the march to be brought to their fights.
Amanda Rouse
I heard a panel on public radio with Bill Mckibben and other scientists leading up, and I was glad for the discussion being brought into people’s homes. I support people putting themselves on the line in terms of civil disobedience, although I’m not in a place to participate right now. I think we have to create some real disruption to the status quo in order to wake up and create change.
We have to continue to push forward–into discomfort, into visions of what can be. There were several people I saw holding signs showing dire consequences if we fail to shift the momentum–and I believe this is true. Our species is as delicate as any of our dear ones. If we believe the illusion of our comforts and allow them to hold us hypnotized, we will lose.
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1 Comment
Hi there,
I’ve been a Z sustainer for many years; one of the reasons I’ve stuck with it is that I appreciate the emphasis on serious thinking about activism. In that vein, I agree with you about the need for “a critique of the structures and form of organization that helped bring these actions into being.”
I read through your article but didn’t see much of a contribution toward this goal in the answers these four people provided you.
Neither Nurse, Rouse or Solnit appear to address the question of strategy and democracy within social movements.
Fithian talked about these problems in general terms, and pointed out rather diplomatically that PCM is rich and controlled by a small number of people with their own agenda. She proposed organizing, compassion, building community, people accessing their power as solutions, without going into any sort of detail about what that means.
Again, I am really glad to see you are asking these questions. It’s a bit disheartening to me that only one of four people even seemed to understand the questions you were asking.
I have a question for you– do you think they didn’t understand your question? Or maybe I guess I’d just like to know if you were satisfied with their answers.
Thanks,
Ira Woodward
Seattle