Organizing for the climate in a time of terror: Paris, COP 21, and our priorities

On November 7, I arrived in Paris to spend the next 6 weeks helping with organizing connected to the COP 21 climate summit. On November 13, the city was attacked by groups of armed gunman, who stalked through the night and took the lives of over 100 people, and threw all of the rest of our plans into chaos.

My role in the organizing decisions that followed was neither central, nor marginal. I had a window into the English-speaking networks of international NGOs working on mobilization, primarily 350.org where I work, and benefitted from the insight of my French colleagues who participated directly with other networks of organizations, primarily those connected to Coalition Climat 21, the French umbrella organization coordinating movement action in Paris.

I don’t want to re-hash or defend every decision that was made in the weeks that followed November 13, but I do want to share some of the struggles that I saw friends and colleagues confront, because I think the challenges can help inform others who — and I do not wish this upon anyone — face similar crises in their work. Some of the reflections will be about the things others shared with me, all of them will be informed by my own personal experience with the attacks and organizing prior.

Humility

I want to start by sharing my biggest lesson, which was one of humility. For the first 10 days or so after the attacks, I felt quite useless, unable to play the role I am accustomed to playing in my work, because I didn’t know the language, and couldn’t fully tap into the national conversation about the attacks and response. I don’t know French, I don’t know France, and all of the major issues of strategy and process with regards to mobilization required understanding both.

This put me in a bad position of both knowing more than most of my friends back home in the United States — some of whom were, and still are, saying mean and unhelpful things about how to proceed — but far from enough about the situation to actually help make decisions. That tension tested me, but it also pushed me to listen harder and trust deeper with my French and European colleagues, which both revealed how little I really knew, and how much experience and skill we have in our movement that I could rely on and support.

I don’t know if together we made all of the right decisions. Some we regretted immediately, and struggled with continuously, others we doubted at the start, but blossomed into truly beautiful moments.

I also can’t overstate the stress of working in a suddenly repressive environment, with enormous stakes, in a movement dialog that would slip from collaborative to openly, unaccountably confrontational and back again in the course of hours. I think it’s probably impossible to get everything right in such circumstances.

But at the center of all these decisions, I saw people wrestling with three core priorities, which they were forced to try to strike a balance between: our strategy, our hearts, and our principles. These are all things I hear people say should be our top priorities, but in the aftermath of the attacks, I saw them in constant tension. I think that the inability to account for all of them at once left people feeling vulnerable and defensive at a time when many people were relying on the movement to lift them up.

I want to lay them all out in more detail, because I think it’s this balancing act between them that is central to confronting the work that needs to be done in a moment like the one we faced in Paris.

Strategy

The first question that I saw people struggle with was strategy: what do we want, and how do we get it? We had gathered in Paris with a purpose in mind: to fight for climate justice, and we had to figure out how to continue towards realizing it. Everything about the political and social context of the work we were doing changed after the attacks, and so our tactics needed to respond. But deciding what to do next was incredibly difficult.

Public opinion was still in rapid flux for the first few days afterwards, and it was hard to know the appetite for work on climate change in this context, or the interest in gathering in large groups. The planned marches were to begin in Republique Square, in the heart of the neighborhood that was attacked, where there was a stampede mass panic shortly after the shootings. It was quite difficult to know what was actually possible, and whether proceeding would turn public opinion against the movement.

At the same time, I saw people struggle with the strategic question of how to not let the agenda of anti-terrorism take over the work that needed to be done, as the War on Terror did for the global justice movement after September 11th. But even this is not a clear directive: the story can be overtaken if the movement became invisible in the wake of the attacks, forgoing mobilization — but at the same time, continuing with the original plans risked open confrontation with the security state, which would allow those stories to displace the stories we want to tell just as easily.

Hearts

The second struggle was with our hearts — the heartbreaks, fears and traumas in the movement. Basically, everyone had to decide for themselves what they were capable of, and willing to do after an act of extreme violence. People were hurt, some personally, some via collective trauma, some by the response of the security state. The impact of the attacks and aftermath was personal and varied, and could affect capacity in unexpected ways.

I saw my Parisian colleagues in particular struggle with this. The attacks were in the places you expect young, progressive minded people to hang out. Some of us were very close to the thing personally, others knew people who were hurt, some of the attacks were in places they know and love. Others were on the front lines of the new wave of police crackdowns in the poorer neighborhoods surrounding Paris, facing restrictions on their personal and political freedom of movement.

But it was also a collective problem. The march that was planned for November 29th was supposed to go right by the Bataclan Theater. We hand to ask what our people in the movement who would do the work of turning people out and filling the streets were up for, in their hearts. This is not an idle question too: putting tens of thousands of scared people together in a public place could lead to the kind of panic that happened in Republique after the attacks, which could lead to more people being hurt.

Principle

The third thing was principle. Everyone I know in this work believes deeply in the right of protest, and is ready to fight to defend it. Entering into a state of emergency that limited the right to assemble and cracked down in particular on the most marginal people in France, brought out pained, visceral reactions. There are certain things we will not accept because we believe them to be wrong.

I saw people contend with this directly when discussing or negotiating mass mobilization plans. The State of Emergency changes all laws into one simple, yet capricious rule: the government decides what is legal and what isn’t. Trying to maximize your freedom of activity and minimize repression in this dynamic while holding onto our principles is almost heart-rendingly difficult.

Every decision that was made by the movement after the attacks had to balance these priorities. What makes that so hard is that they all feel urgent, and all operate according to such different logics, while also being interdependent. How do you defend your principles without being strategic? How do you make a plan for next steps if your heart is broken? Can you mend your heart without standing strong with what you believe in?

What I saw emerge as a result was a tense and exhausting organizing environment, at a moment when everyone would have benefited from rest and reflection. Every decision was fraught, and left some part of these priorities compromised, leaving in people feeling vulnerable. I saw many decisions be close and reopen several times as people struggled with both rapidly changing developments, and the things we hold dear.

Why the criticisms hurt, and where they came from

For someone like myself with one foot strongly back in the US, some of the things I heard from back home only deepened this exhaustion for me. Criticisms were launched on the basis of half-understood context, without the care and consideration that people closest to the work in Paris had no choice but to give. The most vocal strain of ‘keep going, don’t back down’ arguments cut the deepest, because it forced people to repeat and defend the fact that it was no longer possible to do the very things some spent years of their life hoping to do.

It took me many weeks of reflection to understand where these critiques were coming from. In the moment they felt heartless, and part of me is still disgusted by them.

People come into organizing because of trauma, to defend the things they’ve lost.

What happened during the attacks was traumatic: lives were lost, and a certain political moment that we had deeply hoped for was lost too. And one of the ways people respond to trauma is by locking down, and holding on to what is familiar. In these moments, our old plans for action and the simple answer of ‘just keep going’ act like a security blanket that can cover up the hurt by telling us that nothing has really changed — an intensely intoxicating notion in such times.

It also responds to a real fear. There are things we’ve lost in moments like this before. Many of the conversations I participated in after the attacks involved discussions of September 11th and the global justice movement, and all the institutions and hopes that were lost in the fight to stop the ensuing wars and attacks on liberty. I think remembering those losses led people to hold on even tighter to simple plans and the connected hope that nothing was going to change for us.

The effectiveness of the tactic of terror is linked to its uncertainty, of what it forebodes for the future. What was truly difficult about the Paris moment was trying to understand with some certainty what had changed, and what was then possible. That required nuance and focus, and understanding what was similar about this moment, and what was different.

I don’t know if we got everything right. I do want to say that confronting the challenges did bring people together in a profound way: I feel closer to my colleagues and other people who went through this with me than I ever have.

But the moment also drove wedges in the movement in the way that only certain kinds of stress can. I wanted to share more about how I saw the struggle unfolding, because I think it might help mend some of those rifts, which I think are the result of trauma and distance, and which we don’t need in times like these.