(from Michael’s welcome home gathering)
There are no two groups dearer to my heart than 350 Seattle and Shut it Down. They share not just me and Michael and Ben and Nicky and Alice and Val and others, but also a DNA of devotion to honesty about the climate crisis, deep commitment to doing everything we can to fight for this beautiful world, and support for one another.
Those who organize and participate in mass protest, and those who engage in high-legal-risk direct action are sometimes skeptical of one another — but the two approaches are deeply symbiotic. Without actions like #ShutDownChase or #ShellNo, it’s hard for us to engage people whose lives don’t allow them to risk prison time — and let’s face it, that’s the great majority of people, people we need actively involved, not just signing petitions and sending money. And without the disrupt-and-inspire tactics of higher-risk civil disobedience, we have little chance of waking the system up.
We’re trying to throw life on earth a rope, and it seems to me that there are three strands to what’s needed now, of which two are reasonably obvious, and one seems both somewhat obscured — by language, I think — and liminal.
Given the potential paralysis around a problem so overwhelming, the first strand is inspiration — making people understand that we can withdraw consent from the catastrophic path we’re on, and make a meaningful difference. That’s the work of both small-group, high-legal-risk civil disobedience and big, beautiful mass protest, because both can be such breathtaking visions of people power.
Then there’s the actual work of organizing and engaging people once they’re inspired — making sure we know who they are, and having clear, consistent, and well-communicated ways for them plug in so that they can do something meaningful (that in turn might inspire others, so these two are symbiotic). Building power in movements is hard and long-term work involving endless meetings, navigating around a lot of personalities, and fundraising and other unsexy work…and without it, it’s almost guaranteed that nothing will change.
One of the most beautiful things about the people in this room is that so many of us, like Michael and Ken, have helped to spin both of those strands of the rope.
But given the existential nature of the threats of climate change, it seems to me that there’s a third strand, much less obvious, which involves making space for the future by never looking away, and doing our best to embody hope — not by believing in any particular hopeful future or other, at least not always (the plain truth is that most of us don’t believe in a very hopeful future, most of the time), but instead by understanding deeply that this work is not about hope of saving the world in any way that we’ll ever get to see — it’s about using our love and energies in the service of life. If the work we all do across the world can save communities in South Seattle — or on a South Pacific island — that are at thirty feet of elevation, even as we lose communities at 10 feet of elevation, then that’s work to treasure. If millions of people get to avoid profound suffering and stay in their homes for an additional ten or twenty years — or if they get to live an additional ten or twenty years, because we’ve slowed down the destruction of their ecosystems, that’s work to treasure.
And in the direst worst-case scenario, if it’s possible for us to save five or ten or fifty percent of the biodiversity on this beautiful planet by what we do now — that is absolutely work to treasure. We can be sure bacteria and bugs will survive — if we can be the ones who help ensure that birds do, too, then isn’t that worth laying down the illusion of a “normal life” in this moment, and doing what we can to integrate this fight into the other necessities of our lives?
The astonishing beauty is, the work we do might do all of these things; it might even let humans survive for millennia yet to come. In this threshold moment, we are powerful beyond measure — but it’s a strange and perhaps egoless sort of power, because we’ll never know what we accomplished. We’re like blind builders who, working side by side, can build the most beautiful sanctuary in the world by crafting one wall at a time with the utmost care, joining those walls by touch and deep cooperation, and then are led away, never to see the whole or even to know that it holds together.
We have to help people reimagine hope: this is the word that I think obscures the heart of what I’m talking about, since it’s so often equated with a positivity that has little place in this moment. The hope I mean is Rebecca Solnit’s “embrace of the unknown” — the one that keeps us spinning these three strands, and building these careful walls, and planting forests that we will never see to shelter humans and creatures that we do not know. We can’t help people understand that kind of hope except by embodying it in all that we do. Given how little immediate hope we can expect in this fight, this may be the most important strand of the rope that will pull us into a possible future — we have to learn a new way to live, and to love each other.
And that embodying, of course, is something Michael does every day. It’s a thing that makes many people uncomfortable, because it throws their inaction into sharp contrast. It’s also a thing that can make him a pain in the ass sometimes, as he’d be the first to admit. But we can’t shy from making each other uncomfortable now. While also being forgiving of our failures — for they will be many, as they always are — we have to expect the world of ourselves and one another, because the world is at stake.
I don’t know what Michael will do next. I think we should mostly refrain from asking him, because what’s been stewing for months is probably still not quite done, and as he readjusts to life outside of prison after the long strange journey of these last two years, it may take him some time to find his place in the building of the sanctuary. But I do know I’m not alone in wanting to tell him how deeply we appreciate all he’s done, how glad we are that he’s home, and how much we love him.
(Adapted from my remarks at Michael Foster’s welcome home from prison gathering, which was also a fundraiser for 350 Seattle and Shut it Down, and the Seattle premiere of The Reluctant Radical, a terrific documentary film about our friend Ken Ward.)
